“Here, here. Where do you suppose you live? Were you raised in a cellar to behave so badly?” Mother’s hair had come uncoiling out of her cap and her color was high around her cheekbones.
“Go on now. All of you.”
The girls had started to leave until they saw Mercy fold her arms and stand with one hip jutting out, her upper lip curled. Then they all stood and watched as Mother helped me to my feet and held my hand, the mud making a glue between our two palms. Father had been sitting all along in the wagon, and I had two thoughts as I crawled into the straw. The first was that Mother had come to my aid. And the second was that Father had not. The ride home was quiet as we huddled under the oilskin, but I could feel my brothers watching me. I started to shake with the wet and cold and from a lagging fear. Tom put his arm around me and wiped the dirt from my hands with his scarf.
When the wagon bogged down in the road, Father gave the reins to Mother and he and Richard pushed the wagon from behind. Father looked at me once and asked, “All right, then?” I nodded my head but I was bitterly taken down that he had not flung himself from the wagon as well, scattering the girls like a flock of ground hens. I turned my back so he would not see the tears but Andrew saw and he patted me on the shoulder and said, “All gone. All gone.” And the whole way back he sat close to me, his moon face beaming, saying, “All gone, Sarah. All gone.”
O
N THE 18TH
day of May, Uncle was arrested in the early morning and taken to Boston Prison. When the Salem constable, Joseph Neall, arrested him at his home in Billerica, Uncle was so much in his cups that he was halfway to the jail before he became aware that he was going not as a physician to practice medicine upon one of his neighbors but as an accused practitioner of the black arts. There were by this date thirty-eight men, women, and children in the jails of Salem and Boston in common cells that were meant for half that number. On the
24
th day of the month the new governor of Massachusetts, Sir William Phips, ordered that the Court of Oyer and Terminer be formed to hear and determine the outcome of the witchcraft trials. Nine judges were appointed to stand as guardians between the sanctified world and the damned.
Goodwife Easty, the sister of the sainted Rebecca Nurse of Salem, was arrested, released, and arrested yet again when the tormented children of Salem Village cried out with renewed vigor that she was sending out her specter to pinch and bite and choke them. On the
28
th day, there were more warrants from Salem Village, and, as such things go, even secret things, word was spread of the impending approach of the constables. The news went from neighbor to neighbor to neighbor until Robert Russell appeared at our door and told us on the evening of May
30
th that Mother was to be arrested at first light on the morrow and taken to appear in front of the magistrates in Salem Village.
We all stood about the common room, the remnants of supper strewn on the table, stricken blind and deaf as one would be after a thunderclap. Mother looked up at Robert as if he had just told her our ox was nesting on our roof, but when he begged her to consider fleeing as others had done, she shook her head and continued clearing the bowls and cups from the table. He turned to Father and said, “Thomas, speak to her. Make her see.” But Father said, “She does see. It is her choice to stay or go.” My anger jumped over my terror, pounding it harshly down, to hear Father speak so weakly on her behalf. Did he care so little for her, did he care so little for us, that he would not urge her, as Robert had done, to hide herself away until she could be safe again?
Richard, his face dark, his lips pressed tightly together, walked from the room and made his way to the barn, where he would stay until the constable came. Andrew walked round and round in ever tighter circles like a piece of wood caught up in some fearful eddy, until Tom took his arm and seated him at the hearth. Tom’s ragged breathing filled the room as he tried to keep from crying out and he finally sank to the floorboards as his knees buckled. I stood and looked from Father to Robert, unable to understand the cessation of blunt action, wanting to shriek into the silence or throw myself against something hard and unrelenting to keep my mother from the prison cart.
Some movement at the table made me turn to see her staring back at me, not in fear or in condemnation or even in sadness, but in a kind of furied understanding. She looked at me so long and with such complete recognition that it was as if we were alone in the room, shrouded together in silent speaking. Or in an enveloping cocoon made of mother’s milk and kettle iron. But it lasted only until Hannah started her crying. Robert told us that Aunt Mary and Margaret were also to be arrested, and then he left us with promises that should Mother change her mind and flee, or if she was detained overly long in Salem, he and his wife would do their best to care for the rest of us.
Mother stayed at the hearth long after my brothers and I had gone to bed. I turned and thrashed and shook Hannah’s arms from around my neck but could not sleep. Finally, I crept from my room and saw that Father had joined her at the fire and they sat facing each other, speaking in whispers.
“They are like dogs sniffing their own asses,” Father said. “There’s no’ so sweet a smell as the corruption you put forth yourself.” Mother exhaled a laugh and moved her head closer to his, and I knew they had been speaking on Mother’s warrant.
“I will speak reason to them. They must listen,” she said. “Then these girls and their stories will crumble and fall like so many cards on a tilted table. They’ve had so many shambling, half-witted women in front of them that the magistrates are starting to harken to this nonsense. Well, I am not confused and I am not afraid of them. They are lawyers and judges and must rule by law.”
He reached out and took her hands in his, resting his forearms on her lap. His thumbs worked the inside of her palms and he said, “Martha, they will not listen to reason. How can they, when all they have built here is to keep themselves propped up on the backs of others? You do yourself credit to believe in your own strength and courage. But they will not hear you. They cannot.”
She took one hand from his and stroked his head where the hair hung long and ragged and said, “If I do not do this thing, then it may go on and on. ‘Nothing of the greater good comes without struggle and sacrifice in equal measure, be you man or woman, and in this way are we freed from tyranny.’ Those are your words.”
He made an impatient gesture and said, “They are not my words but words of those who gained from them by being murdered and put to rot in unmarked graves.”
She laid a finger to her lips and said, “Would you give me this light and then put it out again? Would you have me run away? And then what am I? I am only a servant with a boot on my back. And what am I to my children or to you? Can you love me as you have when I abandon what I know to be true? I am not afraid, Thomas.”
And Father answered, “Aye. That’s why I am afraid.”
The floorboards beneath my feet shifted and Mother saw me hiding in the shadows. She rose and told me to get dressed quickly. I threw on my skirt without its apron and shoved my feet into shoes without their stockings, thinking all the while that she had changed her mind and would leave, taking me with her. But my hopes were ended when she said to Father, “I’ll return in two or three hours’ time. There is something I must give Sarah.”
The night was very dark as the moon had waned to nothing, but the weather was close and warm and soon the shift under my arms was damp with sweat. She walked so swiftly that I ran to keep pace with her, a canvas sack she carried bouncing heavily against her thigh. We walked along the pathways leading to Robert’s house but soon cut south into the forest of oak and elm and I knew we were going to Gibbet Plain. I thought of the mushrooms and flowers, the bloodroot and violets, that must be growing in every corner of the field, but I could see very little of it through the dark. About a hundred paces into the meadow, Mother led me to a small hillock where a lone elm grew, and then she stopped and turned to me.
She spoke with such intensity that I blinked against her breath. “You know where I go tomorrow?” I nodded. “Do you know why?” I nodded again, but she said, “Say it, then.” I opened my mouth and said in a small voice, “Because they say you are a witch.”
“And do you know why Mary and Margaret are arrested?” she asked. And I responded, “Because they are believed to be witches also.”
And here she put her hands on my shoulders so that I could look nowhere but into her eyes and she said, “No. They are arrested to make Uncle confess and in the hopes that they will in turn cry out against others for practicing witchcraft. They will come for me tomorrow, but I will not confess and I will not cry out on anyone. Do you know what that means?”
I started to shake my head no, but a terrible idea was forming in the back of my mind and my eyes must have widened, so that Mother nodded her head grimly and said, “When they cannot make me confess they will come to my family and it will not matter that you are a child. There are children in Salem Town jail even now.” She saw the look in my eyes and knelt in front of me, holding me tight in her arms.
“If they come for you, you must tell them anything they want to hear to save yourself. And you must tell Richard and Andrew and Tom to do the same.”
“But why can you not do the same. . .” My voice had started to rise plaintively but she shook me and choked it off.
“Because someone must speak for the truth of things.”
“But why must it be you?” She ignored my question and pulled out of the sack the red book I had seen her write in so many weeks before.
“This book. . .” She paused for a moment, fingering the worn leather. “This book has in it the history of your father in England before he came to the new colonies.”
“That is all?” I asked, disappointed.
“Sarah, there are men who would walk over your breathing body to possess it, and it could mean the destruction of every one of us. You must promise me two things. On the heads of your family. First you will guard this book. We will hide it tonight but you must take it back again when the time is right if I should not be able to. And the second promise is that you will not try to read it until you have come of age.” I looked at her, confounded. How was I to make such a promise when I didn’t know what I was promising to keep?
“Give me your hand.” And as I held it out she took it and placed it over the book as one would take an oath on the Bible. She said forcefully, “Promise me, Sarah.”
“But I don’t understand,” I cried. I didn’t care if she shook me until my teeth rattled in my head. I didn’t care if my voice traveled south over the swamps and woke every sleeping farmer beyond the border in Reading. But she didn’t shake or strike me, she held on tightly and let me cry until the saltwater soaked her dress down to her skin. Then she pulled away and, taking off her cap, wiped the tears from my face, saying, “Sarah, time is very short. Someday it will all be made clear to you. But tonight I must have your promise. When they come for you, tell them what they wish to hear and they will be satisfied and let you go. Even if you have to say you fly to Bald Hill on a pole and dance a jig every night. Even if they ask if I am a witch, say aye and let it go.”
I started to shake my head again but she said, “My fiercesome, fuming Sarah. This is a heavy burden but you are the only one who can carry it. Richard can hardly bear the weight of his own brooding nature and would collapse with the knowledge of it. And Andrew, poor witless Andrew. He cannot find the door for looking through the window. Tom is good-natured but he cares too deeply for the feelings of others and would make the wrong turn through wishing to please. This book is our history and a family’s history lasts only so long as there is someone left to tell it. And so in you will we be carried forth, and even if I should die, we will not be forgotten.”
“And Father. Why can he not keep the book?”
I heard the slow intake of breath and a pause before she answered. “He does not know of it.”
I stood in disbelief that such a secret could be kept, wife from husband, and that she had shared this secret with me. She moved away, the darkness hiding her expression, the sound of her voice muffled as though speaking through her hands. “I have never told him of the book because in telling his life to me he hoped to put it behind him, to be forgotten and never again relived. But I could not let it stand. There are recorded within the sacrifices of many lives. Much blood has been shed to bring the story to these frail sheets, and it will all be for naught if it is forgotten.”
She took my hand and kissed it and placed it over the book, saying, “No more questions now, Sarah. All will be answered in time.” I gave her my promise then and we buried the book in an oilskin at the foot of the elm, using our hands to pull up the damp earth. She made me mark it well so I could find it again and we walked back with no more words between us.
In the early morning hours of May
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st a cart approached the house and we heard the lurcher strain against his chain and bark viciously as John Ballard walked to our door. I knew that Father had just lengthened the links, and the dog was caught up only a hair’s breadth from the constable’s boot heels, startling him and making him curse. He walked into our house and read the warrant and Mother stared him hard in the face as he tied her hands with a rope. She did not cry out for consideration or beg for more time; she only looked at each of us in turn and called me to her side. She tapped a finger to her breast and then brought it to mine, creating the invisible thread of understanding and complicity. Of secrets well kept. Hannah cried and struggled at Mother’s leaving and I held and rocked her as best I could, the sound of the cartwheels grinding ever more softly on the road to Salem Village.
M
ANY YEARS AFTER
I was married and my children grown, my own dear husband, John, paid a costly sum to have a clerk sent from Connecticut to Salem Village to transcribe the documents recorded at the time of my mother’s trial. A great portion of the documents had been destroyed over time, some by the judges themselves and some by the families of the judges who had grown to fear the turning tide of sentiment against them. The remaining documents had been sealed against scrutiny for the passing of decades, until they lay near forgotten in the back of a wooden press that housed the birth and death registries of Salem Village.