Six Women of Salem (57 page)

Unlike Mistress Ann Putnam, Elizabeth Procter lacked the traditional groaning cakes and groaning beer to treat her helpers. She lacked the childbed linens and the family cradle to receive this child. Instead, she struggled on an earth floor covered with (not necessarily clean) straw. Perhaps the other women prisoners clustered round to help, if their chains did not prevent such movement. Perhaps one of them was a midwife, or perhaps the law sent for a midwife to attend her. In any case Elizabeth survived and named the child John after his father, even though he had a half-brother already named John—little help, though, that one had been. Nothing now prevented Elizabeth’s death sentence from being carried out. Goodwife Faulkner had not yet given birth, but Elizabeth could now be included with the next group of prisoners destined to die.

Mary Warren, probably kept apart with the other confessors, would have heard the commotion attending the birth and the news that Elizabeth had survived her travail. Mary’s reaction—whether satisfaction at Goody Procter’s impending peril or remorse for her own part in it—is, like so much of history, lost.

Prisoners from Middlesex County towns found themselves removed from Salem’s jail and carted away to stand eventual trial in Charlestown. The condemned prisoners left behind could only pray and try to settle their souls to face death and God’s own more merciful judgment. Outside, a driving snow fell the week of January 22, and the next week it melted in a thaw.

Then, on the day they were to be hauled to the gallows, or the day before, the condemned learned that Governor Phips had countermanded Stoughton’s orders and reprieved them; they would
not
hang—or at least they would not hang that day or anytime soon. Their futures were still uncertain, but their relief must have been profound.

More surprising news arrived later when they learned that the reprieves had stunned Chief Justice Stoughton. News that he had lost his temper in court and stormed off the bench to confront the governor in a blazing row would have spread as swiftly as gossip could gallop. Mary Warren and Ann Putnam would have found this development alarming—what did it mean for them? The Nurse family and other Towne relatives would have been not only relieved but most likely gleeful as well—at last justified, though admittedly after so much innocent blood had been spilled.

In Stoughton’s absence this court found
no one
guilty of witchcraft.

On Monday, February 7, Rebecca’s son Samuel Nurse received a visit from a church committee: Reverend Samuel Parris, deacons Nathaniel Ingersoll and Edward Putnam, Nathaniel Putnam, John Putnam Sr., and old Bray Wilkins. For months now, the committee explained, Goodman Nurse, along with three others, had been absent from public worship in the Village Church. He was a member, after all, a fully communing member, and yet he had been absent even from the Lord’s Supper. The brethren had chosen the committee to speak privately with him and the other absentees. (Allowing a person speak their side of a question before taking an infraction to the rest of the membership was general church policy.) Samuel Nurse made no explanation but agreed to a meeting the following afternoon at the parsonage.

The committee left to take their message to Samuel’s brother-in-law, John Tarbell and to Thomas Wilkins, Bray’s son. The fourth absent church member was Peter Cloyce, but he and his wife, Sarah, were now living in Boston. Someone, probably the Nurse kin, must have sent word to him about the committee’s visit, and the three local dissenters presumably discussed this new development. The more they thought about it, the angrier they became.

They had been absent from the weekly services in the Village Church—for the most part, that is, as Tarbell had had his son baptized in October. They
had
avoided even the Sacrament of communion, but their intent was not to slight the meaning of the ceremony, much less disregard the great sacrifice that Christ had made for them, as epitomized by the service. No, their quarrel was with their neighbors and, especially, with the minister—as the committee ought to have known. Ever since people had begun accusing Rebecca—their mother, mother-in-law, neighbor—and the minister not only did nothing to stop it but actually believed and encouraged the accusations, they had been too apprehensive of being accused themselves to attend services in the Village. They ceased taking communion in the Village Church in order to avoid sharing the bread and wine with neighbors intent on sending innocent women—their mother and aunts—to their deaths. They would not accept the bread and wine from the person who ought to have calmed the panic and exposed such error but instead, for his own reasons, chose to inflame the conflagration.

Tarbell, Nurse, and Wilkins arrived at Parris’s home the next day two hours early for the appointment. The minister agreed to speak with them anyway, if they wished, one at a time, in his study before the rest of the committee arrived. Tarbell went first, following Parris up the stairs while the others waited below. If Parris thought he could offer advice to a troubled soul or divide and conquer the opposition piecemeal, he found himself mistaken. Tarbell pounced and would not let his minister get a word in edgewise. The wait downstairs must have been uncomfortable for Parris’s family, as Tarbell’s angry voice would have pervaded the parsonage.

After an hour the two men—neither could have looked happy—descended the stairs, and Samuel Nurse headed for Parris’s study for his say. He had the same complaints as his brother-in-law. (All three of them did, according to Parris’s account of the meetings.) Anger stoked by a summer of fear and frustration boiled over as Nurse unburdened himself of what he had been too cautious to say for so many months. He accused Parris of idolatry for asking the afflicted what they saw, for believing wholeheartedly in what they said, for believing those dubious messages from the Invisible World. And then for giving his oath in court,
swearing
that the invisible specters of specific people knocked down the girls and claiming that the defendants’ touch then healed them—all actions that contradicted the precepts of the faith and Biblical scholarship he himself professed. If it had not been for Parris, he said, getting to the heart of the matter, his mother might never have been hanged, might still be alive. But she had been—thanks to Parris’s unfounded and unjustified persecution. And because Parris had yet to admit his grave error, when wiser men than he had done so, then Nurse could not—
would
not—join him in worship.

The most Parris had opportunity to reply was that he did not yet see any reason to change his views, which, as he saw it, were confirmed by “known and ancient experience frequent in such cases.” If they were going to quarrel, then they must allow him to present his side of the matter.

Before Wilkins could have a turn, the rest of the church committee arrived. At that the three fell silent, and when Parris formally asked them to state why they had withdrawn from “religious communication,” giving them the chance to air their complaints before their fellows, they would not say and, despite prodding from Parris, asked only for another meeting and time to consider the committee’s demands.

The next day Peter Cloyce showed up at the parsonage to make the same complaints and received the same answers as the others. All four appeared unannounced a short while later, this time bringing William Way, a member of the congregation but not a fully communing church member. If the four were bringing a witness to a formal grievance, then they needed two or three
full
church members. Parris informed them that he intended to follow the letter of the procedure for such problems, and this was
not
the procedure.

Cloyce did not stay in the Village for the February 16 meeting, but the other three did attend. On that occasion Samuel Nurse read a paper wherein they claimed to have proceeded in an orderly manner to protest “the burden of great grievances by reason of some unwarrantable actings of Mr. Parris,” but they felt that they were being prevented from stating their complaints, and if that continued, then they would have to air the problem to the whole church, not just this committee. Reluctantly, they allowed Parris to copy their statement and pleaded ignorance of the procedure, but they did not publicly state the grievances they had poured forth in Parris’s study. (Parris did not present these damning complaints to the committee either, though he recorded them in his church record.)

Whether Parris’s niece Abigail Williams was still ill, still afflicted, when these tense meetings occurred in the parsonage is unclear. She may have been the unnamed girl who, after seeing a coffin when attempting forbidden fortune-telling, died young. Presumably Betty Parris and her younger sister Susanna and brother Thomas were well. Was John Indian still a member of the household, and did the family have another servant, free or enslaved, to replace Tituba? If physical illness still besieged Abigail, then Parris would have been understandably less inclined to alter his view of witchcraft and his role in the recent purge—reasons besides pride as well as the terrible admission of being as mistaken as he had been and at such cost to the community that he was charged to shepherd. After all, at least three supposedly afflicted people had died recently in Andover: old Ralph Farnum on January 8; young Timothy Swan, so often tormented by Mary Bradbury’s specter, on February 2; and fourteen-year-old Rose Foster on February 25.

The meetings would drag on into the spring, while at the same time the rates committee refused, as they had for two years so far, to collect Parris’s salary. Francis Nurse no longer served on that committee, but his son-in-law John Tarbell did and defiantly paid the fine the Quarterly Court imposed on the committee for neglecting its duties. Nurse, Tarbell, and Wilkins kept changing the terms for the meetings they asked for and also consulted with sympathetic neighbors, witnesses who were not full members of the church. This in effect omitted the interchurch stage of their complaints and treated the matter as one concerning the death of Rebecca as well as her sister and the other dead and all the misery the trials had created. If their absence from the Sacrament was broached, they explained the neglect as being due to the inappropriateness of accepting so important a symbol from the blood-tainted hands of one they blamed for their mother’s death by hanging. Perhaps their reluctance to speak their minds before the church committee indicated a lack of preparedness, an awareness that their explosions of temper in Parris’s study were spontaneous, releases of pent-up rage that their confounding predicament fueled. They aimed their resentment at Parris, an outsider to the Village who had been precariously placed in the community from the onset, rather than at the neighbors who had accused and testified against Rebecca, people with whom they still had to live. A minister could move away (despite the ordination that was intended to make the association with a congregation permanent), but the likes of Thomas Putnam’s family they could not get rid of. In the case of Parris they could argue for his removal.

And they did—vigorously.

Philip English probably returned to Salem in January to face the grand jury, though this is not entirely clear. On March 2, 1693, he penned a letter to Governor Phips (his “great enemy”), demanding his confiscated goods be returned. Phips ordered Sheriff Corwin to make an inventory of all that was taken, but by April 26 this task had not yet been done, so Phips sent another strongly worded letter.

If Mary English returned with her husband, she could at least visit her daughters in Boston: Susanna staying with the Aldens, Mary with the Hollard family, who had concealed her father before his arrest. The mansion, by family tradition, would hardly have been ready for them right away, for the law and covetous locals had stripped the place. Some neighbors may have salvaged items to keep safe and then return; others were merely light-fingered. According to family lore even the family portraits were gone.

Philip’s warehouses were empty, his livestock driven away to be sold or consumed, and his ships impounded unless they had been at sea and the crew warned to steer clear from home port. “My Estate was Seised & Squandred away to a great Value & much of my provision used to Subsist the numerous Company of prisoners.” He was sure the bobtailed cow in Sheriff Corwin’s yard was
his
bobtailed cow. He set about seeing to repairs and itemizing his losses: lumber and hardware, textiles and molasses, cod and cordage from the warehouses, even the three gross of thimbles from the shop in the house. In addition, he had spent a good £50 for proper room and board in Boston and put up a bond of £1,400 to be allowed some freedom of movement there. That bond was forfeit upon his escape, but he wanted it back along with all of his property—
all of it!

Meanwhile, Edward Bishop, widowed by Bridget’s execution and evidently still living in the house he had built on the Oliver property, remarried March 9, 1693, to widow Elizabeth Cash of Beverly.

The Superior Court convened in Boston on April 25 for Suffolk County. Stoughton presided once again with Justices Thomas Danforth, Samuel Sewall, and John Richards. The court considered the infanticide cases of Grace, the slave who had given birth alone years earlier and then thrust her newborn down her master’s privy, and Elizabeth Emerson, whose twin bastards were found buried in her parents’ garden two years past. Both had been found guilty during the interim government; now Stoughton pronounced the death sentence against them, and their years of waiting in prison ended June 8, 1693, when they were hanged in Boston.

John Arnold, the Boston jailer, who had attested to the good conduct of Sarah Cloyce and Mary Esty, successfully contested an earlier ruling against him for “allowing” certain prisoners to escape the summer before—suspected burglars and pirates. (The awkwardness of the escaped witch suspects was not mentioned.)

John Alden, freed on bail, made his appearance for the witchcraft charge. This time no one appeared to speak against him, so the court cleared his case by proclamation. Again, the court chose to ignore the jail break and his fugitive months out of the province. (In contrast, a September Essex County court had fined John Shepard of Rowley a stiff £30 plus costs, the total reduced to £5, for twice helping his sister-in-law Mary Green escape from the Ipswich jail, where she was being held on a witchcraft charge.)