Six Women of Salem (30 page)

But Goodwife Parker denies the charge, denies bragging about murder victims, denies saying anything to Mary, much less threats. “I never spake a word to her in my life.”

“You told her also you bewitched her sister, because her father would not mow your grass,” says the magistrate.

“I never saw her.” After all, Goody Parker’s dealings had been with Mary’s father.

Does the woman even remember the young girl present somewhere during her dispute with Goodman Warren? Mary is older now, but Mary has not forgotten. She has relived the scene again and again in her mind. Now she raises her hand to strike Parker’s lying mouth, but when she tries to step forward she cannot proceed but instead jerks backward, pushed down by something invisible.

While Mary struggles to recover herself, Margaret Jacobs accuses Parker of sending her spirit to Northfields, where old Jacobs’s farm is.

Marshall George Herrick reports that when he arrested the prisoner she had said, “[T]hat there were threescore Witches of the Company.”

John Louder, who also suspected Bridget Bishop, was there too and says the same.

Goody Parker says she does not remember what number she had said or who had told her about it. But no one believes her, least of all Mary.

All through Goody Parker’s examination convulsions thrash Mary, her words are choked off and strangled. She persists and gradually is able to tell her tale—of the sorrows that have eaten into her heart ever since her father’s encounter with Parker, of the grief that has become rage. She tells the magistrates how her father had promised to mow Parker’s grass crop “if he had time.” But he had
not
had time, so that woman came to his house and threatened him, saying “he had better he had done it.” Soon after that, Mary’s sister, Elizabeth, fell ill, then Mary’s mother. Her mother died, and the sister was left deaf and dumb, imprisoned by silence.

Goodwife Parker stands there, looking astonished and shaking her head as though she knows nothing about this.

But even that was not enough for Parker, Mary continues, speaking now to the prisoner as well as to the magistrates. For Parker’s specter pursued Mary still, bringing poppets and a needle, weapons with which to torment the other girls. When Mary refused to torment them, refused to join Parker in the Devil’s work, the specter threatened to run the needle through Mary’s own heart.

Mary now stares the accused directly in the eye—or tries to—but she cannot meet the witch’s gaze but instead falls as though struck. She hears her enemy speaking, calling on God to prove her innocence. “I wish God would open the Earth and swallow me up presently, if one word of this is true.”

But although the earth does not open, the magistrates and other onlookers see Mary’s reaction as the result of Parker’s evil magic being cast then and there, right before them in the court, “dreadfully tormenting” Mary, punishing the girl for standing up to her.

Along with some thirty other witches, Parker took part in the Devil’s bloody sacrament at Reverend Parris’s pasture, Mary says when she can continue. The woman had boasted of that and of chasing John Louder along Salem Common. And all during this questioning Parker kept sending her own specter directly out of her body to afflict Mary.

Reverend Noyes speaks up to remind the defendant of an earlier time when Goody Parker was ill, when he visited her to inquire about then-current rumors of witchcraft. He had asked “whether she were not guilty,” and Goody Parker had answered that “If she was as free from other sins as from witchcrafts she would not ask the Lord mercy.” That reply is now taken to be an evasion rather than a reference to sins she did
not
commit.

At this Mary convulses in a “dreadful fit,” during which her tongue pulls from her mouth, straining until it turns dark.

This is too much for the defendant, who snaps, “Warrens tongue would be blacker before she died”—black with lies, that is.

The magistrates ask Goody Parker
why
she afflicts and torments Mary.

“If I do,” she answers, “the Lord forgive me.”

But the court does not believe Goody Parker’s claim of innocence and holds her for trial. Mary Warren can rest assured the witch who destroyed her family will get her just desserts.

(
8
)

The little nagging doubts have receded further back in Mary Warren’s mind, smothered like embers in ash. As she tries to sleep the night after her encounter with the Parker woman, she feels triumphant and terrified at the same time.
Now
what will happen? Mary has confessed after all, and she is not sure what the law allows for penitent felons, remorseful witches. If she ever gets out of here—the rancid cell, the small barred window, the jail’s confinement—then what? No one at the Procter farm will have her back. No one there is about to welcome
her.
Not now.

She must find somewhere else to work. The magistrates and the other men of authority—did any of their households need a maid? Would any of the women who testified against their neighbors hire her? And if they did, what then? She can see herself aging as she supports other people’s families until she is too old and infirm to be worth hiring. She thinks of the older women servants she sees about Salem—a few widows, others unmarried but no longer young, like that odd Soames woman over on the road to Boston. She is never in the meeting house, but then again, she’s also a Quaker. People say she comes out only at night. Is that Mary’s future? Will her own life stretch out as bleak as that—if she is ever freed?

The alternative is too terrible to face. She moans at the crowding thoughts.

____________________

T
he new prisoners may have spent the night in Salem jail, but right after Alice Parker’s May 12 hearing Hathorne wrote a
mittimus
, the order to transfer Parker and Ann Pudeator to Boston along with Giles Corey, George Jacobs Sr., William Hobbs (who, unlike his wife and daughter, had not confessed), Bridget Bishop, Mary English, Sarah Bishop, with her husband, Edward Jr., Sarah Wildes, and the slave woman Mary Black. (By a slip of the pen Hathorne wrote
Ann Putnam
’s name among the prisoners, noticed his mistake, and wrote “Pudeatter” over Putnam.)

Having testified so thoroughly against the woman she blamed for her mother’s death, Mary Warren was in even less of a position to draw back from her confession. On May 13, while Mistress English, Goodwife Bishop, and the others made the long journey south to Boston, Hathorne wrote an arrest warrant for one Abigail Soames, charging her with afflicting Mary Warren. Constable Peter Osgood brought the woman before the magistrates at Thomas Beadle’s tavern directly.

Mary, escorted to Beadle’s, continued to experience symptoms and, as she passed through the tavern gate, something seemed to bite her. Recent confessor Margaret Jacobs was also present but let Mary take the lead in making accusations.

Once the constable brought in the prisoner, Mary fell “into a dreadful fit,” feeling stabbed and “continually Crying out that it was this very Woman tho she knew her not before, only affirmed that she herself in apparition had told her that her name was Soams, and also did affirm that this was the very woman that had afflicted her all this day, and that she met her as she was comeing in att the gate, and bit her Exceedingly.”

The guards, searching the prisoner for possible magical weaponry, found concealed in her apron “a great Botching Needle” (a mending needle), which they removed gingerly. Although it was a logical tool of housewifery, Soames nevertheless denied knowing anything about it.

Mary, no longer reacting as if stabbed or pinched, continued to talk, telling them that the woman’s apparition had revealed that her name was Abigail Soames, that her brother was cooper John Soames, “that she Lived att Gaskins, and that she had lain Bedrid a year.”

The magistrates asked the defendant if John Soames
was
her brother, and Abigail refused to answer—“peremptorily,” the scribe noted—“for all was false that Warren said.” (Abigail, still single at thirty-seven, did have a brother John who was a cooper. The family were Quakers from Gloucester and had had no end of trouble some fifteen years earlier for flouting public worship, under laws that were now no longer in effect.

Quakers’ avoidance of “Orthodox” (i.e., Congregational) religious services, their rejection of a college-educated ministry in favor of personal inspiration from the “Light within,” their insistence on a greater equality (male Quakers refused to doff their hats to those in authority, even when indoors), and their cutting criticisms of the status quo had seemed a threat to public peace and community solidarity in uncertain times. The “Light within” was supposed to be God’s light, but just how, non-Quakers wondered, could anyone be so sure of the
source
of these spiritual messages? It seemed more like an invitation to communication with lying, devilish spirits, especially if the recipient fell to trembling in his enthusiasm, which gave the Society of Friends the nickname “Quakers,” or acting out shocking metaphors, as when Rebecca Nurse’s kinswoman appeared naked in public. The authorities had set fines for this behavior, exiled the more outspoken repeaters, and sometimes applied the death penalty to those who returned. (Anglican Virginia, in contrast, whipped and expelled Quakers and continued to do the same again to any who returned.) Massachusetts’s draconian policy was not only ineffective but also caught England’s attention, which helped lead to the loss of the charter. Ironically, the crown required that Massachusetts grant more civil rights to the local Friends than England then allowed to Friends in England. This happened after one Samuel Shattuck had sailed to England to petition the king for help and had had the satisfaction of bringing the order back to the Massachusetts authorities who had once persecuted him. His son, Salem dyer Samuel Shattuck, was convinced that Bridget Bishop had bewitched his son, revealing that Quakers shared the same views about witchcraft as their Congregational neighbors did.

Back then Abigail and her brother Nathaniel were reprimanded, but John was arrested twice and even whipped. Abigail now worked for Samuel and Provided Gaskill (or Gaskin), a Quaker couple in Salem. Why Mary accused Abigail is not clear. The road from the Procter’s farm to Salem Harbor did run past the Gaskill’s door, but probably, as with the other defendants, gossip had whispered about Abigail for years, the suspicions common knowledge. Perhaps Mary saw herself in Abigail’s situation—alone, unwell, working as hired help in another woman’s home, and with precious little to show for it—a fearsome future.

Soames, said Mary, had caused the death of one Southwick, a local man recently dead, as other afflicted girls had likewise reported his ghost. When Abigail heard this accusation she looked directly at Mary, who fell again, racked by convulsions, apparently bitten by an unseen entity. Her reactions were so severe “that the Like was never seen on any of the afflicted,” the scribe observed. Soames did it, said Mary when she could speak. And the Soames specter had told her that very day that “she would be the death of her,” then stuck two pins into Mary’s side for good measure, drawing blood.

The magistrates asked Goodwife Gaskill if Soames really
had
been bedridden as Mary had claimed. Goody Gaskill admitted that, yes, Abigail “had kept her Bed for most parts these thirteen months.”

And she went out only at night, Mary continued.

Yes, said Goodwife Gaskill, “that was the Usual time off her goeing abroad.”

For three nights, Mary continued, Soames had tormented her, trying to bargain, promising to stop hurting Mary if the girl would in turn promise not to tell anyone how sickly she was—for who would hire a maid too weak to work?—haggling for Mary’s silence
and
for a promise to join her among the witches.

But, Mary told the court, she had replied that “she would not keep the Devils Councel.”

To that Soames’s specter said, “she was not a Devil but she was her God.” And the specter appeared three more times with the same claim or to say that “she was as good as a God.”

The magistrates were shocked by such a blasphemous notion. “Mary Warren is this true?”

“It is nothing but the truth.”

They then asked the defendant
who
was hurting Mary in her fits if not her.

“[I]t was the Enemy hurt her,” said Abigail—the Devil hurt her. She tried to explain what she believed was happening, for she herself had once seen apparitions. “I have been . . . myself distracted many a time, and my senses have gone from mee, and I thought I have seen many a Body hurt mee, and might have accused many as wel as she doth. I Really thought I had seen many persons att my Mothers house at Glocester, and they greatly afflicted mee as I thought.”

When Abigail had not attended the approved public worship back in 1681, the court record noted, “She hath been in a distracted condition about this two months, and her brother Nathaniel hath been forced to make it his whole employment to look after her.”

And now it was Mary who was distracted and now fell in another “dreadful ffit.” The magistrates ordered the touch test, in which the defendant must touch her supposed victim to break the spell causing the convulsions. The theory behind the test was that the “the venemous and malignant particles, that were ejected from the eye” of the witch into the victim would flow back into the witch through the touch.

However, the afflicted, at the beginning of the troubles, had been able to interrupt and thereby stop
each other’s
convulsions by a touch. “They did in the Assembly mutually Cure each other, even with a Touch of their Hand,” Deodat Lawson had noted. But the magistrates appeared to have forgotten this.