We pulled back from the lip of the well and stood angrily facing each other. I was furious with him for his arrogance and roughness, but more than being angry I was frightened. Richard’s face in the lantern’s half-light, the ragged stones of the well behind his head, made him appear to be walled in by a prison and I reached out to him, grabbing hold of his arm. He shook off my hand and said, “They have hanged Bridget Bishop.” I looked at him without understanding and he said, bending close to me, “They have hanged Bridget Bishop as a witch. She was condemned at Salem court and taken by cart to Gallows Hill and hanged with three fathoms of rope.”
“When?” I asked, my mind filling with questions I did not want to ask.
“Last Friday past. On the tenth of June.”
“But if they hanged her —”
“You mean if they hanged her, she must have been a witch. She was a spiteful, razor-tongued tavern keeper who kept poppets in her cellar. But she was cried out against because they said she was a witch. She was brought to trial and convicted because they said she was a witch. And she was hanged because they said she was a witch.” Richard had grabbed both of my arms and was shaking me with every word as one would rattle a gourd. Suddenly he let go of me and sank down against the stones of the well, putting his hands over his head.
“You don’t know what it’s like. They are but . . . girls. But they cry and carry on and point their fingers at this one and that one. They’re listened to and believed and another man or woman is thrown into Salem jail. And anyone who stands against them is cried upon as a witch. Sarah, I’ve been to the trials. I saw Bridget Bishop condemned, and it was like being full-blown mad to stand in that meetinghouse and see every eye turn savage.”
“And what about Mother? She is no witch. She must be believed,” I said, my body shaking.
“Goody Bishop protested her innocence even as they were putting the noose around her neck.” He must have taken pity then, for he said, “There is a sort of quiet in Salem now. There are no new arrests. And every mind is turned toward the Indian raid at the fort in Wells. We must hope that one or all of the judges will come to good sense before the next session.”
A soft dousing rain came at that moment, soaking us through, and I said, “They will come for us next. Mother said it would happen. She said we should tell them everything they wish to hear even if it means we are to say we are all witches. If we do, she says they will let us go.”
A small movement over my right shoulder snapped my head around and I saw Tom hunched in the rain, his face pale, his lips a bluish tint, as he struggled to breathe. I don’t know how long he had been listening but it must have been a good while, for he could not have been more panicked had my own fingers pressed hard about his throat. He wheeled around and lurched off into the fields, disappearing into the growing stalks of corn made soft and insubstantial by the warm and rising mists.
T
HE INCIDENT AT
the well moved my two brothers in opposing directions. For Richard, his outburst had loosened some hard wall within his breast and he seemed, if not at peace, not as troubled as he had been. He was reluctant at first to tell me of the conditions in the jail because Mother had made him promise to keep what he had seen to himself. But I pestered him until he described the day-to-day life, the crowding, the filth, and the fear, and he soon took to Salem little scraps of notes I wrote to her. I spent most of a day torturing out the letters for a message that read, “Deare Mother. Wee are all missing you. Wee are all clean, but for Hanah, and are fed well as theire is meete for the pot.” I received back a message from Mother written on the bottom of my parchment with some bit of charcoal. “Dearest Sarah. Practice your letters more. Yours, and ever faithful.”
I pored over the note, disappointed in its brevity, searching for deeper meanings of sentiment within the message. Never once did I think of the cost to my mother, searching through the dark of her cell for the blacking to carefully inscribe the letters she could barely see. There were smudges where her hand marked the paper, and there would be many times I wished I had kept that note. The delicate swirls and ridges of her fingers imprinted in the paper with the filth of her captivity had been her truer message to me.
For Tom, the knowledge he received at the well shriveled and weighed down on him like a cider press until he looked as spent and knobby as a dried pear. His eyes were the worst, and when they lit on you, it was with the pleadings of a drowning boy. He daily struggled to work, but one day out in the fields, his shoulders harnessed to a leather strap wrapped around a stump, he threw off his harness and without a word walked away, climbing the stairs to the attic and lying down on his pallet. He did not answer Father’s calls, he did not come down for supper, and when I climbed the stairs later to feel his head and threaten him with a physic, he would not look at me or talk to me. The next morning after breakfast Father climbed the stairs and was with Tom for a long time before they came down together. And though Tom continued to walk in the shadows, he ate his meals and worked and talked when spoken to and so remained among the living.
On Thursday, the
16
th of June, Uncle was found dead in his Boston cell. His death was ruled suspicious, and so an inquest was called by the King’s Coroner of Suffolk County. The findings from the fifteen men who viewed the body and who signed the Coroner’s Return were that Uncle had died of natural causes. We received the news from Robert Russell the following Sunday evening while sitting at Sabbath supper.
Though we had stopped going to the meetinghouse after Mother’s arrest, I had tried following her custom of roasting meat saved for that day. I had scorched the shank, and the bread was coarse and gritty, but no one complained as we sat quietly together in the common room, the early evening breezes sifting through the open doors, lifting the day’s sweat from our arms and necks. Watching Robert cross the yard, his face long and solemn, I grabbed my head in my hands for fear it was to do with Mother. But when he told us Uncle was gone, it seemed to come as no surprise to Father, who only looked at Richard and nodded as though some private pact between them had been settled. Robert walked with Father to the yard, where they spoke together for some time. Richard sat with his head turned sharply to the door, marking the men in the yard as closely as one would mark an elk in a clearing. His breathing was shallow and rapid and when he turned back to his plate his gaze met mine.
My eyes had filled with tears and Richard said savagely, “Don’t you cry. Don’t you cry for that man.”
I shook away the tears and went to my bed, pulling the coverlet over my head. It was no secret that Uncle had been weaving false stories against Mother from his prison cell, no doubt in the hopes of saving himself. Or with the hope of being recompensed with Grandmother’s farm if he should be set free and the Carriers all arrested. He had even said that Mother’s spirit came to Aunt Mary and tortured her with terrible dreams that the Indians would kill her unless Aunt signed her name in the Devil’s book. We all knew of Aunt’s great fear of raids and it was cruel and unjust to advance her longstanding terrors as the result of witchcraft. He put about that Aunt would freely testify to these spectral visitations if given the chance. I had thought I had little love left for Uncle, pitying more Aunt and Margaret brought to prison through his scheming. But I cried for him then, my pain made all the greater knowing that Father had only just been to Boston to visit him in his cell.
In the early morning hours of Wednesday, the
15
th of June, the day before Uncle died, a stranger had come to the door and told Father that Uncle wished to see him as soon as was humanly possible. The man was a physician returning to Haverhill from Boston and had, as an act of charity, attended to those who were imprisoned there. He told Father that Uncle was well enough in body but that he was heartsick and desired for Father to come to Boston. He gave Father a sealed bit of parchment to read and left us before we had even thought to offer him food or drink. Father read the note and then threw it into the fire. Before it had been reduced to ashes, he had taken up his coat and hat and was on his way to Robert’s farm to borrow his horse.
When he rode past the house going north towards Boston, Richard ran after him, following insistently until Father dismounted and spoke to my brother at length. Soon Richard trudged back to the house, but when I questioned him he would say only that Father had gone to visit Uncle. And though he would speak no more on it, his eyes were hard and glittering, almost triumphant. Father was gone the whole of that day and the next, returning to us on Thursday evening, the
16
th day of June. The day that Uncle would have died.
I thought, as I lay suffocating under the covers to hide my tears, of something Mother had once said. “Happy accidents come to those who have the mettle to hatch them.” I thought of the resolute knowingness that had settled around Father’s eyes at Robert’s news and I was overcome with a terrible feeling that death had come to Roger Toothaker most unnatural.
I
T HAS BEEN
said that the days of a child pass very slowly, as they are at the beginning of things and old age and death are a distant dream. But the days following my mother’s arrest passed by at such a pace that I sometimes imagined I could feel the winds from the sun and the moon as they hurtled themselves across the sky. And every day I watched the world with two pairs of eyes and ears. One pair on my work and another watching and listening for the approach of the constable’s cart.
On the
28
th day of June the Salem Court of Oyer and Terminer began its second session. Rebecca Nurse was found not guilty by the court’s jurors, but there was such a hideous outcry from the accusers and the judges that the jurors were sent back to reconsider, and when they returned she was convicted as charged. Over the five days of that second session there were twelve men and women brought to the court, my mother being one of them. On July
1
st Father went to Salem to attend her trial. He woke me up before dawn on that morning to make his breakfast and fill a sack with food and he left, saying only, “If I’m going to a dogfight I want to be there to hear the first growl.”
At the trial, my mother was indicted for two spectral attacks by young women she had never seen before coming to Salem. It seemed that Uncle’s death did not stop the accusations or the crushing slide towards a final justice. When Father returned to us that night, he told us that Mother was taken back to jail and that her sentencing would not come until sometime in August. What he did not tell us then was that five other women, including Rebecca Nurse, had been convicted and were to be hanged before the month had ended.
The month of July flew on and grew unbearably hot as Mother had predicted it would be. We rose each day to put on steaming, dirty clothes, we chewed our flattened bread and moistened it with water so that it would not catch in our gullets, we wiped the sweat and chased the flies, and ate our soup at noontide, and pounded our fraying implements against post and stump, shredded our meat for supper, and laid ourselves down again at evening-tide to wrestle against our dreams and our fetid sheets. I had made myself my father’s shadow and the house could have burned down for all the care I gave it in order to be at his side in the barn and in the fields on the days he did not go into Salem.
My dress was torn under both arms from lifting and hauling heavy loads, and the skin on my knees was torn and scabbed over from the scratches I received on my bare legs, but I gave no thought to stockings or sewing, preferring the safety and comfort of standing close to the towering figure of my father. Hannah had grown so dirty and her clothes so threadbare that had I the strength for shame, I would have hung my head to see her trailing flies like a yearling stoat. She never seemed to mind, and as long as I was within her sight, she played happily in the dirt of the fields or the hay of the barn. Her playthings were whatever came to hand: a stick, a bottle, a spoon, for we had no time or desire to make her the simplest of toys.
On the
14
th of the month, Father and I were working to right the murmet that had fallen over in the cornfield. The stalks were by then over the crown of my head but Father’s head was so far above the silk that, had he been a hundred yards away, I could have found my way back to his side. I held the lug pole while he wrapped birch whips around a sturdy branch that would make the murmet’s arms. We mostly worked in silence but for the chattering of Hannah as she braided some corn leaves together to make a wreath for her head. I felt cocooned within the wall of corn and the comfort of it loosened my tongue and I asked, “Father, did you have such a murmet when you were a boy?”
“Aye,” he said and I thought he would leave it at that but he continued, “But that’s your mother’s word. We people from Wales called him a boogan.”
I stumbled over the word a few times, the Welsh harsh in my mouth. I knew that Father had grown up speaking a language that was not like the English we spoke but he rarely used it around us. He turned the murmet around to face the east and molded my hands over the pole to make it stand firm while he planted it again in the ground. “Some of the north folk call him a scarecrow,” he said. “But the English have better ways to make scarce the crows.” He said “English” in such a way that sounded scornful, and, though his face was placid enough, his mouth was frowning and troubled.
“And what is that, Father?” I asked, coaxing him to talk more.
“They put pikes all round the perimeter of a field. The pikes are sharpened to a razor’s point. And on every pike, pierced through the breast, is a blackbird. Some yet live and flapping. The crows don’t like it. And as long as any part of the blackbirds cling to the poles the corn stays whole. That’s the English way.”
As Father knelt down to tamp new earth at the base of the pole, I looked to the outer edges of our little field and imagined it ringed with sharpened sticks all tipped with wilted, quivering bodies. His voice came close to my ear. “It’s how the English run their courts. They sacrifice innocents, thinking to keep evil at bay, and call it a kind of justice. But they are no more just than this pole is a man.” When I looked back at him he was still kneeling, his eyes close to mine, and the strength of his gaze made my throat tighten. He said with a sudden passion, “I would move the earth to save your mother. D’ye hear me, Sarah? I would tear down the walls of her jail and carry her to the wilds of Maine, but it is not what she wants. She will throw herself at her judges because she believes that her innocence will show through all the lies and deceptions.”