Once I woke from a dream and found I was speaking with someone sitting next to me. There was a slight, but not unpleasant, ringing in my ears, and my sight was so clear that it seemed as if black lines had been drawn around every object, putting each thing in sharp contrast to everything else. A tight band was clenched around my chest and the passage for breath had been squeezed into one slender cord. I heard myself say, “But why must I stay?”
I felt some pressure on my fingers and when I turned my head I saw Tom sitting next to me, holding my hand. His face was glistening and wet and when I looked into his eyes, I saw that he had been crying. I tried to comfort him but my tongue felt swollen and lazy, and so I could only lie very still and listen to the low and broken sound of his voice. He said, “Do you remember last June, Sarah, after they had taken Mother and it was just us and Father in the fields?”
I lowered my chin slightly to nod, even though movement seemed beyond my abilities, and he continued, “We were plowing the fields for planting. And something happened. I . . . I looked behind me down the rows that had been furrowed the day before and the day before that and then I looked ahead of me and all I saw were stones and stumps to be taken out. For the rest of my life and for always, there would be a strap round my shoulders and rough earth waiting to be cleared. I couldn’t see for the blackness of it. And so I shrugged off the harness and went to my bed.
“Later Father came and sat with me. He didn’t say anything at first. He just sat until it came full-on dark. And then he started to talk. He told me I was his namesake because I was most like him. It started me up, Sarah, for I had always thought Richard most alike to Father. He said that some people can live from birth to death and have no more thoughts in their heads about the reasons for living than a beetle. But that we were different, he and I. We needed more than a clod of dirt to make our rising up and lying down worth something.
“I told him I would rather die than wind my days out only plowing and dusting clay off my shoes. Then he said if I were to die, a piece of him would die, too. He said I had to find one thing living that was greater than myself to cleave to, and in that would be my strength for walking upright like a man. A long time ago he was in despair and had sunk so low as to die from it. But he found Mother, and it was her that brought a quickening back to his living. I thought long on what he had said. And d’ye know what I told him, Sarah?”
He squeezed my hand painfully in his and paused, his voice choking into silence. He struggled for several moments to speak again and I waited for him to pour out his grief for Mother. But when he spoke, he said, “I told him it was you. It’s you who are my strength. You mustn’t die, Sarah, and leave me in this dark place.”
A drowsiness had come over me and my eyes started to close. I could hear Tom’s voice and I wanted to answer him, to reassure him that I would not leave but I could not find the breath to form the words. It seemed such a simple thing to sink beneath the weight within my chest, and in that moment I thought of Miles Corey beneath his blanket of stones. Breathing a little less and a little less each time until each rib was still and fixed. I pressed Tom’s fingers in mine and slept.
I
LAY SOMETIMES
in flames, the straw glowing and then catching fire. The fire driving legions of rats and armies of lice before it across the floor to disappear like smoke under the door. Other times I lay locked in the cold-cellar, turning to ice, turning to stone, turning to bone and frozen ash. And always were the churning wet sounds of the bellows within my ribs struggling to work against a slow drowning. Once I opened my eyes and saw Margaret sitting next to me, her long black hair loose and wild about her shoulders. I shook my head, squeezing my eyes shut to drive this apparition away, but when I opened my eyes again, she was there. I felt a pressure on my arm and she said, “They have taken my poppet, Sarah. The one you gave me.”
Like an ancient crone I croaked out, “They have taken mine as well.” I looked for Tom to place me back into the hard world again but I could not see him.
She leaned in closer and whispered, “You mustn’t blame Father. He means well and he loves us all. He is but a little distracted these few days past. But look, see what I have found for you.” She reached into her sleeve and pulled out a short length of thread.
“You see, I have a bit of ribbon for you. I have learned how to do it from Father. But once it has appeared, I cannot make it disappear again as Father would do.” She placed it gently on my chest. She smiled sweetly, her eyes drifting into the unfocused and slanting gaze of one who would follow the footsteps of fairies off a canted cliff. She lay down beside me, wrapping her arms around my shoulders, and kissed me. Her lips were cold and smooth as riverbed stones but her breath was warm and she sang to me, “We shall always be sisters.” I fell back into sleep and dreamt of swimming in a great dark ocean.
T
HERE WAS NEVER
a time that Tom or Margaret would leave my side for very long. I do not know what Aunt made of Margaret’s attentions to me, for she never again spoke to me, but she also never called for Margaret to return to the far side of the cell. I gave to Margaret the ancient piece of pottery that I had carried in the bodice of my dress for so many weeks and told her that if I should die, she would have something from me to keep with her always. The hard clay had for so long pressed against my breastbone that its absence felt as though I had given her a part of my rib. She delighted in it, looking at it, turning it over and over in her palm. When I showed her the cross-stitch piece that I had worn close to my heart, she wept and, drying her tears with it, tucked it back into its place.
When I had the strength to ask questions, Tom revealed to me what I had only imagined in my sickness and what had truly taken place. Some of the women in the cell had indeed taken turns caring for me, although most of them had given me up after a few days of raging fever. The only one who continued to watch vigil while Tom and Margaret slept was Lydia Dustin, the old woman with the sharp tongue. Two dogs had been hanged, one in Salem and one in Andover, for being familiars to the Devil. One of the prisoners, a young woman seven months into the family way, gave birth in silent agony to her first child. With a sudden understanding I knew that the meowing of the cat I had heard must have been the cries of the infant. The babe had quickly died and there would be no more for the girl, who all but poured her own life’s blood into the straw.
In dismay I reminded Tom of the message I was to give Father from Dr. Ames but had lost again in my ravings. But Tom assured me he had passed it along word for word as it was given to me. When I asked Tom what it meant he said Father had told him that Dr. Ames and his fellows were New Levellers. When Tom asked Father what it meant, he responded only that they were men who believed that all men were to be protected equally under the common law. And that each man was to be free to follow his own conscience in practices of religion. I remembered the Quaker man in Uncle’s barn, the man Margaret had called a heretic for believing such, and wondered if Dr. Ames was secretly a Quaker.
My fever rose again even as the cold of autumn dug in, and we all pressed together tighter for warmth. In a few weeks the groundwater would start to freeze and the first snows would drift through the high westward portals, dusting white our hair and lacing and stiffening our thin shawls to parchment. Margaret would lie next to me by the hour, rambling in her speech about the trial or her home in Billerica. At times she defended herself to invisible judges, which left her melancholy and spiritless, as though she had caught my fever and was jaded because of it. But she was always tender to me. Washing my face or urging me to drink broth when it could be had, or using the sordid light to pick from my scalp the lice that tormented me so.
It is often at sunset that the vital protective channels of the body are at their lowest. A fever will rise, a woman with child will ready herself for labor, the spirit will darken with the shadows and weaken. It was at such a time that I felt overcome by my guilt and I poured out my confession to Margaret.
“I have killed my own mother,” I cried miserably into my hands. She held my head and rocked me, smoothing my hair back from my face. She smiled and bent to whisper something in my ear.
She said, “Shall I tell you a secret?” I nodded, for I remembered well the secrets we shared together when I lived with her family, and I expected her to tell me something pleasantly distracting.
“Hush, now. Don’t cry. I have seen her only yesterday and she is well.” She nodded and looked off to a far corner of the cell.
The well of my mouth dried to dust and I whispered, “Who?”
She seemed not to hear me and continued on as she deftly plaited strands of my hair. “If I gather your hair so, it will not pull and we will not have to fever-cut it to the scalp. But you have knots that will never come out. That’s the thing about knots. They are easier tied than untied.”
I grabbed her hand and asked again, “Margaret, who did you see yesterday?”
“Why, I saw Aunt Martha. She came into the cell while you were sleeping. She was quite sorry you have been ill and will be all the more sad if you do not mend. I asked her to stay but she would not. D’ye know what she told me to tell you?”
I shook my head, my eyes huge and staring, my bowels turning to water. She cocked her head and her gaze became suddenly clear and reflective.
“She said, ‘Hold fast the stone. . .’ ”
I shut my eyes and remembered the touch of my mother’s hand as she closed my fingers around the stone I had carried from Preston’s farm. How Margaret could have known about it I cannot say. I could have, in the tossing of my fevered brain, spoken of it to her. Or perhaps the thread of knowingness had been passed to her as well and her tangled mind had caught some bit of message from the shaded world like a moth caught in a net. Margaret had resumed plaiting my hair and she sang a little song I had heard Aunt sing as she moved about the hearth. It was one that my own mother had hummed when she was unguarded and thought herself to be alone, and I wept again, not from the press of my guilt but from the easing of it. And from that moment on I began to get better.
O
N A DAY
close to the end of September, the door was opened by the sheriff and a tall, stately man in a flowing cape and large-brimmed hat walked into the cells and stood looking over us. He entered with a prim disdain, bringing the edge of his cloak up to cover his mouth and nose from the stench. He resisted the movement of his legs backwards and planted his feet as though enduring gale winds. The play of emotions upon his face, though, was remarkable and would stay with me through all my life. It was as though he held up to us the mirrored image of our slide from decent modesty, grace, and dignity to the degeneracy of fear and self-recrimination and sickness. His features, which were large, quivered and melted like wax held too close to the heat. His eyes, at first narrowed in righteous condemnation to view so many accused witches, widened and brimmed over with tears, which he dashed away as though they scalded his skin. His lips, pressed tightly together, a cage against speaking idly of profane things, opened to a sharp intake of breath. He put his fist up and covered the quivering mouth that muttered over and over again “My God, my God, my God. . .” There were no entreaties or pleas of mercy from the women. There were no moans of distress or even tears. They sat or lay mute, letting their bodies be the book of revelation.
Increase Mather, famed clergyman, friend to the King and the Governor alike, would work from that moment to cast doubt upon the accusers, and though he would never find fault outright with the judges or his son, Cotton Mather, this doubt would be a mighty blow to the Court of Oyer and Terminer. He would return again to the prison on October
19
th to take statements from women who said they had been pressed into giving false witness against themselves, but I would not be in Salem to see him.
On Saturday, the first day of October, Dr. Ames came into our cell and told us that our bail had been collected and that within a very short time many of the youngest prisoners would be released. Coins had been raised from the towns of Andover and Boston and even faraway Gloucester. It gave proof, he said, that people’s minds were changing in their belief in the Salem Court. Early on the morning of the
6
th of October, the sheriff opened the door to let in the blacksmith. He stood in the corridor while our chains were removed to give us time to say our farewells and to walk from our cell as best we could. I was released with my three brothers, along with fourteen other children. Abigail Dane Faulkner’s two daughters were freed, along with Moses Tyler’s nieces. Mary Lacey, Mercy Williams’ friend, who had been one of the first to cry out against my mother, was so weak from her confinement that she had to be carried from her place in the straw. Mercy Wardwell, whose father, Samuel, had been hanged on September
22
nd, had turned nineteen just three days before and so was no longer a child. She hid her face in her hands and would not say good-bye to us as we left her under the cold autumn drafts from the high western wall. Behind us we left sisters and mothers and grandmothers who had no promise or even hope of release.
Lydia Dustin pressed my face in her hands and blessed me, saying, “This be but a dark dream. Now you can waken and stay with the living.” Both she and her granddaughter would spend the whole of the winter in chains. The court would find them not guilty on the
1
st day of February, but because they could not pay the prison fees, they would be returned to prison. On March
2
nd Elizabeth Colson would be released and returned to Reading. On March
10
th,
1693
, Lydia Dustin would die, one of the few remaining women left in the “good” cell of Salem prison.
I rejoiced at our freedom until it was made known to me that only the children of Andover were to be released. The children of Salem and Beverly and Billerica were to remain. Margaret was returned to her mother’s side, and as Richard carried me from the cell, she stretched her arm out to me, her fingers grasping the little piece of pottery I had given her. She held it out to me like a talisman against loss or as a promise that there would always be a connection between us that would hold tight beyond the crossing of dark and dangerous days. And as I was carried up the stairs I heard her voice calling to me, distant and metaled, as though calling from the bottom of a covered well, “Sarah, Sarah, Sarah. . .” I could hear her calling to me even after the door to the stairwell had been bolted fast again.