Six Women of Salem (61 page)

The next rates committee was no help either, as it included Rebecca Nurse’s sons-in-law Thomas Preston and John Tarbell and Nurse in-law James Smith. When the Village sued this committee for dereliction of duty, Tarbell and Preston each defiantly paid the forty shilling fine plus twelve shillings six pence court costs. And
still
the rates remained uncollected.

Ann, meanwhile, was with child again and gave birth to a daughter on December 26, 1693. They named her Sarah, the same as the child who had died painfully some years before, whose death Ann had blamed on the malice of witches.

Thomas served throughout 1694 on the committee trying to get a written deed and bills of sale for the parsonage house and land—that Parris thought he already owned—from their donors Hutchinson, Holton, and Ingersoll. In addition, the Village remained nervously alert upon news of Indian attacks at Groton in Massachusetts, then further off in Maine and New Hampshire, then suddenly as close as Haverhill. On the day before an assault on Spruce Creek in August, eight-month-old Sarah died—another sorrow. Ann could not blame Rebecca now. If Goody Nurse truly
had
been a witch, then she could not reach them from Hell. If she had never been a witch after all, then that fact may have opened a distressing line of thought.

The following winter Thomas’s widowed stepmother, Mrs. Mary Putnam, who shared her husband’s last homestead with Thomas’s half-brother Joseph and his family, began to fail in health. “I thought she was not a woman long for this world,” Dr. William Griggs would testify, “by the disease that was upon her.” He did not specify what disease, but he was not so quick to diagnose “an evil hand.” In fact, reputable doctors no longer diagnosed the Invisible World as a cause for illness. As time passed, Mary Putnam suffered fits of unconsciousness that “stupified her understanding and memory.” She was sometimes lucid and sometimes unable to recognize even the familiar people around her.

Mary Putnam signed and dated her will on January 28, 1695, then died on March 17, after suffering days and nights of reoccurring fits. With Widow Putnam dead, the estate of Thomas Putnam Sr. could now be settled.

Thomas Jr., meanwhile, continued to be plagued by the dissenters’ commotions, the stubborn rates committee, the petitions to remove Parris, and the counterpetitions from those who wanted Parris to remain. In May 1695 Thomas and 105 other Villagers—many of them his relatives—petitioned to retain Parris. Fifty-one women signed, but Ann’s name was absent. She gave birth to a son, Seth, the day before and would have been recovering from the effort, though her husband could have signed for her. Although Parris would baptize Seth, the omission suggests a possible change of mind. Did Ann regret her former adherence to the minister’s views in 1692? Without Rebecca Nurse to blame and fear, might she now doubt her own actions and, by extension, the true state of her soul?

Spring also brought details of Mary Putnam’s will, including the disturbing news that Israel Porter had steadied—or controlled—her hand while she signed it. “To my husband Putnam’s children” she left small amounts: five shillings to Thomas Putnam, five to Edward, five to Deliverance Walcott, and ten each to Elizabeth Bailey and Prudence Wayman. “Unto all which I have done something already according to my ability and might, and would have done more but that some of my husband’s children and relations have brought upon me inconvenient and unnecessary charges and disbursements at several times.”

Everything else she gave to her son Joseph.

Furious, Thomas and Edward and brother-in-law Jonathan Walcott petitioned the probate court in June not to accept the will before they could contest it and to require the executor—half-brother Joseph—to take an inventory of their late father’s estate. The widow had had
no
right to dispose of Putnam property beyond what her husband—their father—had specified in
his
will.

A week later, on June 10 (the anniversary of Bridget Bishop’s death), Thomas Putnam journeyed to Salem town, where he “accidentally”—as he claimed—found Joseph preparing to have his mother’s will probated that very day. Thomas immediately dashed off another petition to Probate Judge Bartholomew Gedney, protesting Joseph’s move and asking for time to clarify the state of Mary Putnam’s mind when she signed: “For it seemith very hard for flesh and blood to bear, for those who know not what an oath means in a word to swear away three or four hundred pounds from the right owners thereof, when the law also requires credible witnesses in so weighty [an] affair.” He signed his name and that of his kinsmen.

Gedney evidently complied, for several depositions survive from people who visited Mrs. Putnam during her last illness and found her state of mind varying from ordinary to dazed. The evidence that scuttled the stepson Thomas’s claim may have been that of Rebecca Nurse’s son-in-law Thomas Preston: Thomas Putnam himself had commented in February that Mrs. Putnam was a very sick woman, unlikely to recover due to the many fits but that he thought she was then as clear minded as she ever was.

So Thomas and Ann were further impoverished, left with five shillings when they expected to have £300 to £400, whereas half-brother Joseph inherited the bulk of their father’s estate.

In April 1696 the male church members met in Thomas and Ann’s home. There Parris announced his intent to leave, and no one persuaded him to stay.

The year stumbled on while Indians attacked nearby towns and Thomas’s prospects faded. He sold “about eight acres of upland, swamp and meadowland” bordering the Ipswich River in Topsfield to a group of Boxford and Topsfield men, joint owners of a new mill. Both he and Ann signed the document on June 4, 1696, and so let that land pass to outsiders, some of them Rebecca Nurse’s kinsmen.

In January of the following winter Massachusetts held the public fast largely to apologize for the witch trials. Unfortunately, how that service proceeded in Salem Village—with Ann and Annie and the other once-afflicted folk present in the congregation, Thomas who had been so busy writing the testimony, and Parris sitting among the rest as a private inhabitant while someone else substituted in the ­pulpit
—
passed unrecorded.

Thomas, meanwhile, taking stock of his finances, collected a quantity of old lumber and reused it to build a smaller house in the north part of his farm on a road leading to his brother Edward’s place. He sold their fine home on the Andover road to the weaver Samuel Braybrook in June 1697 along with the land immediately about the house, but he retained 160 acres of his farm. Ann now had to pack her possessions and move her children to this smaller, lesser home and make the best of it.

Throughout the remainder of the summer the mediators, including Samuel Sewall and Wait Winthrop, considered the Village quarrel with Parris. Finally acting on their advice, the Village paid Parris, who returned the parsonage deed. Once he moved away with the remains of his family—his wife having died in July 1696
—
the Village voted to ask young Joseph Green to be their minister.

Green was ordained nearly a year later, on November 10, 1698, and ten days later performed his first baptisms: four children, all Putnam kin. Thomas Putnam presented the first two, daughters Experience and Susanna. Thomas apparently made no protest over Green’s obliging him and Ann to share benches with Samuel and Mary Nurse.

In the spring, not long after the Nurse kin made the last payment on the family farm, illness crept into Thomas and Ann Putnam’s family. The children—or most of them—seem to have survived, but whatever malady seized Thomas overcame him, carrying him off at last on April 25, 1699.

Ann herself was also struck, becoming weaker from whatever the illness was. She must have been aware at some point that she was dying, yet she was unable to blame the misfortune on Rebecca Nurse. In her last days she had time to wonder again about the state of her soul, whether she was really elect or not, whether she had despoiled her hopes of Heaven with her accusations of Rebecca Nurse and the others, whether she had, however unwittingly, furthered the Devil’s work. Two weeks after her husband’s death, on June 8, Ann also died, age thirty-seven.

The sparse inventory of Thomas’s estate amounted to £437:9:0, not counting the debts. It took little space to record the livestock and less to list the furniture. Yet for all his losses, Thomas had retained his “cane with a silver head and ferule,” a gentleman’s walking stick appraised at £1:15:0.

Annie, the eldest, was nineteen and, by family tradition, assumed care of her siblings. In time the minors chose various uncles as guardians, and the farm seems to have been rented out to others, at least until the sons were old enough to work it.

Eight years later Annie, now twenty-seven, conferred with Reverend Green about joining the church. By this time the requirements for full admission had relaxed to being a strong heartfelt desire for the sacraments and a generally good Christian life rather than a conviction that one was elect. The assumption was that mortals could not really know such a thing. But she and the Village—and God—knew of the chaos and deaths to which Annie had contributed in 1692, how she had furthered the Devil’s work.

Reverend Green counseled her, drafted her confession, and consulted with Samuel Nurse, who was still trying clear his mother’s name. And Samuel, to Annie’s relief, did not object. Green wrote the text of her confession in the church record book, and to this Annie signed, one evening at the parsonage, her whole name—Ann Putnam—not just the mark she had scrawled on some of the witch trial documents.

The next day, August 25, 1706, young Ann rose to stand at her place in the meeting house while Reverend Green read her confession aloud to the seated congregation:

I desire to be humbled before god for that sad and humbling providence that befell my father’s family in the year about ’
92
: that I, then being in my childhood, should, by such a providence of God, be made an instrument for the accusing of several persons of a grievous crime, whereby their lives were taken away from them, whom I now have just grounds and good reason to believe they were innocent persons: and that it was a great delusion of Satan that deceived me in that sad time, whereby I Justly fear, I have been instrumental, with others, though ignorantly and unwittingly, to bring upon myself and this land the guilt of innocent blood: though what was said or done by me against any person I can truly and uprightly say, before god and man, I did it not out of any anger, malice, or ill-will to any person, for I had no such thing against one of them; but what I did was ignorantly, being deluded by Satan. And particularly, as I was a chief instrument of accusing Goodwife Nurse and her two sisters, I desire to lie in the dust, and to be humbled for it, in that I was a cause, with others, of so sad a calamity to them and their families; for which cause I desire to lie in the dust, and earnestly beg forgiveness of God, and from all those unto whom I have given just cause of sorrow and offence, whose relations were taken away or accused.

“She acknowledged it,” Green wrote, the members accepted her into communion, and Green read the statement of faith to which Ann had pledged.

She lived nine more years, making her will on May 20, 1715, when she was in uncertain health, and dying aged about thirty-six sometime before her will was probated in June 1716. By tradition she was the last to be buried in the family plot, a raised mound in the family burying ground on land held by her Uncle Joseph. No individual stones seem to have marked the site, and the mound sank over the centuries, obliterating the memorial—but not the history in which the family had played such a dangerous and deadly role.

I
n May 1693
TITUBA
found her case dismissed by the grand jury sitting at Ipswich for lack of evidence. “Ignoramus,” foreman Robert Payne wrote on the indictment, but her jail bills still needed to be paid, and Reverend Parris refused to do this. So she was taken back to the Salem jail, her relative freedom still elusive, though without the threat of hanging.

If she had admitted to being a witch, thus justifying his actions throughout 1692, Parris might have paid the bill, according to what Tituba later said. But having an admitted witch in his household—even a supposedly repentant witch—would hardly be safe for his reputation. In any case he would likely have sold her to someone else. As it was, she would now be sold to whoever paid the bill, and that sum increased the longer she stayed.

At some point during 1693 Salem jailor William Dounton submitted to the county court a list of unpaid fees for several prisoners’ diet and a reminder that his own salary had been only partially paid for the last nine years. Several entries were crossed out, apparently bills no longer outstanding, and the court refused reimbursement of this messy account. Dounton submitted a neater copy dated December 1693 that omitted the crossed-out entries.

Heading the list in the first copy was the following:

for tetabe Indan A whole year and
1
month.

The sum is illegible. In 1692 she was in Salem jail from March 1 through 7, then removed to Boston jail, where she was held until June 1, when she was moved back to Salem. Boston jailer John Arnold listed her bill, covering both room and board, as

Tituba an Indian Woman from the

7
th of March
1691/2
to the
1
st of June