Six Women of Salem (47 page)

The news from Salem was not encouraging, and their status seemed less and less likely a protection against the court’s methods. News from Boston, however, offered some small hope: three Frenchmen cut through the window bars of the cell they shared during the night of July 25
–
26 and successfully vanished.

So it was possible.

____________________

With Candy now in the Salem jail, Tituba has someone in a similar situation with whom to talk. As the New England summer swelters, they reminisce of Barbados—the long hot months, the abundance of flowers, the prevalent fevers.

There is a fever here in Massachusetts as well, and people die of it.

Candy asks about winters in this northern place. It is hard to imagine now, but Tituba does her best to describe the bone-chilling winds, the strangeness of snow, how it can pile up against the houses and persist into the spring in melting drifts. And the cold—the master complains all the time about the need for firewood.

The two women walk the prison yard, pacing the fence line, hearing snatches of conversation in the street outside, catching fugitive glimpses of seabirds gliding above the nearby North River, seldom catching a cooler breeze that makes its way over the high board fence.

They make small talk together and also listen to what news they can glean from the conversations of guards and visitors.

Near the end of July they begin to hear of prisoners escaping—not from this jail, but three from Boston and another from Cambridge.

Tituba remembers Boston’s stone prison, remembers the little rooms along the outside wall of the central common area. Some men—not witch suspects, she hears, but rather a suspected pirate and some Canadian captives—had removed the bars from a small window and disappeared into the night. The law had not caught them yet. And in Cambridge Mistress Cary—she who John Indian had accused in Salem Village—had vanished as well. Her husband had something to do with it—money changing hands most likely. He was arrested for that, but once released on bail, he too vanished.

So it could be done,
Tituba thinks, if
you had the money,
if
you had someone to help.

Tituba doubts that will happen for her. Would John Indian even
try
something like that, even if he could? And where could she go and not be immediately suspected—if not recognized?

Still, knowing it could happen is satisfying.

For now, she will have to wait and see.

So Tituba waits.

(
13
)

Mary Warren faces John and Elizabeth Procter once again across the courtroom, one after the other, as she had back at the end of June before the grand jury and now again before the trial jury and the panel of judges.

As the clerk reads the indictment, Mary hears only snatches of the now-familiar form.

John Procter of Salem . . . husbandman . . . certaine Detestable Arts called witchcrafts and Sorceries wickedly and ffelloniously hath Used, Practised and Excercised Upon and against one Mary Warren of Salem . . . Singlewoman by which said wicked arts the said Mary Warren . . . was and is Tortured, Afflicted, Pined Consumed wasted and Tormented . . .

She hears her name and her master’s name, and she remembers signing the paper as a witness to the acts—she and the Walcott girl.

Now the court presents depositions, and each time the clerk reads one, Mary and the other afflicted witnesses are shaken and twisted, gripped by something invisible.

Goodman Procter glares at her. Other people testify—she is not the only one—but he fixes her with an expression of utter disgust. Months ago he beat her to her senses, and she can tell he longs to do so again, to clout her beside her head and take a switch to her back. But he cannot reach her and can only clench his fists at his side and clench his jaw to shut in words that will not help his case. Mary feels the force of his stare. That thought alone grips her, and she moans and twists in her seat. The other afflicted pick up on her motions, and the court has to wait once again for the turmoil to subside. Then Procter looks even more contemptuous. Mary turns away.

Once, she had wondered what it would be like to be married to him, to receive kind glances from him at least. Now he regards her as he would something on the bottom of his boot.

The clerk reads her depositions. Yes, she said that. Yes, yes, it is all true. That is what he said. That is what he did. Yes, she swears to it. She has thought of those incidents often, mulled them over during the long nights in her cell. They must be true. Clearly, Procter does not believe it. He scorns her stories—fancies, lies. But the magistrates, the judges—they believe her. The other afflicted witnesses believe her. So it must be true. She can see in her mind’s eye what she has described. That must have been the way it happened—it
had
to be. Therefore, it is not that Procter fails to believe the reality of her torments but that he is angered that his misdeeds are revealed. That
must
be it.

Mary does not desire Goodman Procter now, but his wife, when it is her turn to face the court, stares at Mary with fierce hatred. Goody Procter is visibly with child. How many months have passed since the Procters’ arrest? Sometimes it seems as if life has been like this forever.

Darkness closes in again as Mary’s body twitches and then flails helplessly. She tastes blood in the back of her throat and tries not to think of what Sarah Good shouted at Reverend Noyes—of blood in the mouth of the unmerciful, of liars.

She is not a liar.

Surely she is not.

____________________

J
oh
n Procter, in the Salem jail preparing for his trial, had made out a will on August 2, leaving his land and goods to his several children, even though he had deeded all of it to them and to Elizabeth in 1689.

Styling himself as a yeoman, he left the land to his two eldest sons, Benjamin, who was in jail, and John Jr., who, as executors, were to distribute the remaining goods equally among the rest of his children. Elizabeth was nowhere mentioned. Either he despaired of her chances with the court or they had quarreled. In the usual manner of wills he bequeathed his soul to God and desired that his executors deliver “My Body unto Decent Buriale at the Discretion of my Executor[s].”

After someone read the text aloud Procter signed and sealed the document. Three men witnessed the reading and signing and then added their own names to the will: John’s brother Joseph, Philip Fowler, and Thomas Chote.

A few days later Procter added a paragraph. He now desired “If any of my children be taken away that their assigns be divided amongst [the remaining children]”—taken away under arrest, that is, and condemned to death as he was.

Only the day before, the grand jury had finished considering evidence against Elizabeth Procter, Mary Esty, and George Jacobs Sr. Mary Warren affirmed that Jacobs’s specter had beaten her with his staff and beaten Annie Putnam and Mary Walcott as well. She was not asked to sign as witness on the other indictments, however, and the grand jury actually rejected as
ignoramus
the indictment against old Jacobs for tormenting the Putnam maid Mercy Lewis.

Jacobs went before the trial jury the same day. Sarah Churchill, no longer trying to deny the truth of her recantation, testified against her old master. His granddaughter Margaret held to her recantation and did not testify against her grandfather.

Jacobs’s neighbor John DeRich, Elizabeth Procter’s sixteen-year-old nephew, testified that the old man’s specter had tormented him along with specters of the Englishes, the Procters, and the Procter children. This very day, he went on, the shining angel appeared to him, bringing the ghost of Mary Warren’s mother, who “told him that goodwife Parker & Oliver did Kill her”—Alice Parker and her crony Bridget Bishop.

John Willard was tried the same day. The grand jury had already rejected the indictment against him for tormenting Susanna Sheldon but returned six more
billa vera,
including those for Annie Putnam and—presumably, as two are lost—Mistress Ann Putnam.

The court found both George Jacobs and John Willard guilty of witchcraft.

When John Procter came to trial on August 5 other afflicted girls reported his specter, but Mary Warren’s testimony and, even more so, her fits and convulsions seemed to count most against her former master.

Yet not all the testimony was entirely negative. James Holton of Salem Village verified that although some of the afflicted had said that Procter caused certain pains he had suffered and that his pain stopped when the girls said the specter turned on them, he did not claim to have seen the man’s specter himself. Less ambiguous and more positive, Holton’s name was also among the twenty Salem-area neighbors who signed a petition vouching for both John and Elizabeth Procter:

We whose names ar under written havinge several yeares knowne John Procter and his wife do testefy. that we never heard or understood that they were ever suspected to be guilty of the crime now charged upon them and several of us being their neare neighbours do testefy that to our aprehension they lived christian life in their famely and were ever ready to helpe such as stood in need of their helpe.

In addition, thirty-two people of Ipswich, where John had grown up and still had family, signed another petition for him. Referring to the Old Testament story of the witch of Endor, who supposedly summoned the ghost of the prophet Samuel, they pointed out—as others had done that year, to no avail—“the Abuse [the Devil] Does the famous Samuell, In Disquieting his Silent Dust, by Shaddowing his venerable Person in Answer to the Charmes of witch Craft.” But yet again, this caution against the acceptance of spectral evidence at face value went unheeded.

The court found John Procter guilty as charged.

Elizabeth Procter had argued in the past with the local physician. John Indian and a few hired men reported her specter, sometimes in company with Rebecca Nurse’s. Besides Mary Warren, Annie Putnam and the rest of the afflicted females claimed that her specter had hurt them.

Countering this, along with the petition for her and John, was Daniel Eliot’s account of some of the girls’ jests. “[T]hey must have some sport,” one of them had said. But Arthur Abbott testified about something alarming—the paperwork is gone—that he claimed to have seen in the Procter household.

Elizabeth Procter was found guilty of witchcraft. Because she was with child, however, and the child was presumably not yet corrupted by its
parents’
devilish lessons, the mother’s execution was postponed until after she could give birth.

As the trials proceeded, Salem filled with even more spectators, “a Vast Concourse,” as Cotton Mather put it, arriving from Boston to attend Reverend George Burroughs’s trial on August 5. They would have brought word of the recent apocalyptic earthquake that had swamped the harbor town of Port Royal in Jamaica, drowning seventeen hundred people on both land and ships in port. Many New England merchants had trading contacts there. Their world seemed besieged from all sides.

Mrs. Ann Putnam, more and more encumbered by the child to come, had much to do at home during Thomas’s frequent absences on court business that hot dry summer—dealing with the younger children and a new hired girl and keeping an eye on the hired men left to care for the crops. Regardless, she was evidently a witness the day before against John Willard, the murderer of her baby Sarah, whipped to death by spectral means. And now here was Burroughs brought to justice, the Putnams’ enemy. She had never liked the man and would hardly have missed George Burroughs’s trial for the world.

Reverend Burroughs’s trial promised to be the most sensational thus far. That a minister, even one not yet ordained to any particular church, would join the Devil’s troop, would turn against all he presumably stood for—that was terrifying to imagine.

As usual the afflicted—from Mercy Lewis, who had worked for the Burroughs’s family in Maine, to confessing witches like Abigail Hobbs, who had been a neighbor in Maine, and Ann Foster, who feared his specter might kill her in revenge for her accusations—testified against Burroughs. The afflicted appear to have been brought into the courtroom one at a time, for only one was present when she paused, “cast into Horror,” she said, by the sight of ghosts: Burroughs’s two dead wives “crying for Vengeance” against their murderous husband, accusing him to his face.

Assuming the others knew nothing of this turn of events, the court brought the other afflicted witnesses into the room one by one, but each reported the same fearsome apparitions.

Burroughs was appalled but insisted he could see nothing of the sort.

The afflicted’s testimony took tedious time as the girls and women convulsed, unable in their fits to say anything. During one such pause Chief Justice Stoughton asked Burroughs who he thought prevented these witnesses from speaking.

Burroughs answered that he thought it was the Devil who caused their fits.

“How comes the Devil so loathe to have any testimony born against
you
?” asked Stoughton.

Burroughs had no answer to such a question.