by Tanya Chris
He nodded his agreement.
“The trials have nothing to do with witches anyway. There might have been some sick children to begin with, but now it’s Corwin trying to get rid of people who are inconvenient to him—the poor, the sick, the elderly.” I explained what I’d overheard that first day about caring for the town’s poor.
“Martha Corey is neither poor nor sick nor old,” he observed.
“Anyone who tries to stop Corwin is going to end up like she did.” Fuck. I shouldn’t have told Ezekiel what was going on. People were going to die, but he didn’t have to be one of them. “I don’t want you to get hurt.”
“There were no Cheevers on the list of the accused,” he said, referring to the Wikipedia page we’d just read together.
“Maybe you get added to it.”
“If the list can grow, then also can it shrink. I’ll not stand idly by, Luther. You cannot ask it of me.”
Fuck, fuck, fuck. What had I been thinking? The crusading hero in me had wanted to rescue Rebecca Nurse because she was a little old lady who didn’t deserve to hang, but the crusading hero hadn’t thought this through.
“It’s predestination, Ezekiel. God’s will. Whatever. He’s chosen people to die.” I hated that explanation, but I was desperate.
He stood up. He pulled his cloak from our bed of straw and swirled it around himself with a flair that would have done the musketeers proud.
“I’ll not accept that anymore,” he said. “You tell me right that God does not choose only some of his children to love. No more shall I. We must fight. So you told Tom, and so I do believe.”
I was such an idiot. And this man I loved was such a miracle. And we were both going to die.
Chapter 13
Ezekiel wasted no time once we were home. Mr. Cheever was parked in his usual pre-dinner spot reading the paper from Boston. He hadn’t heard the news about Rebecca Nurse yet. He hadn’t stopped in to see Hathorne that morning either, not that I was surprised. I knew from my own experience that it was easier to keep your head down.
Had I ever been to a Black Lives Matter protest? No, because I’d had loftier goals—so I’d told myself—than not getting shot down on a street corner. I had a college education and a spot in the leadership development program at a Fortune 500 company. My life was going pretty well.
Meantime, Black people kept getting shot and witches kept getting hanged.
“You recall as Luther is from Connecticut?” Ezekiel said as soon as his father had absorbed the news about Mrs. Nurse. “They had a spot of trouble with witchcraft down that way.”
OK, that was a good way to represent me as an expert. “We found it was contagious,” I put in.
“Indeed,” Mr. Cheever said, tenting his fingers like the authority he always needed to be. “Evil spirits do seduce good men to the service of darkness, which is why this must be rooted out.”
“The accusations were contagious,” I clarified. “They became convenient—a way for people to get rid of pesky neighbors or business rivals.”
“It seems the accusations had more to do with ill will than evil spirits,” Ezekiel said.
“Be that as it may have been in Connecticut, I do not see as animosity has played a role here. You do not suggest children might harbor such ill will, do you?”
“Children are susceptible to suggestion,” I said. “I’ve noticed that the children are never the first to bring up a name. The name is always mentioned in some other context first—perhaps innocently, but in their hearing.”
Ezekiel and I had agreed that pointing our fingers directly at Corwin would only result in having fingers pointed back at us. A more subtle approach was called for, something that put Corwin on warning without putting him on the defensive. If we could get enough people like Mr. Cheever asking questions, maybe Corwin would drop his attempts at manipulation and the hysteria would die out of its own accord.
“I do believe from what Luther has told me that the children do mistakenly associate whatever name they might hear in their affliction with the cause of their affliction.”
“Yes, yes,” Mr. Cheever said, his fingers still tented in that artificial thinking position and his bushy brows drawn together in exaggerated concentration above his reading glasses. “I can see how that might happen. Still, ’twill all come out at trial, we can be assured. I think Corwin does right to take preemptive steps. This is not a matter that can be allowed to dwell unchecked.”
“Yes, Father,” Ezekiel said. “I know you to be right, only that Connecticut did end up regretful of what happened there.”
“Deeply, deeply regretful,” I emphasized
“Especially as some accused did die before their trials and were wrongfully buried in unhallowed ground.”
“A newborn baby died. In Connecticut, I mean.” Really, I had no idea what might have happened in Connecticut, but I knew from Wikipedia that Sarah Good’s baby would die. “The jail conditions are horrible. There’s no way Mrs. Nurse can survive in there.”
“We think it might be well if Salem were to err on the side of caution, Father. There be no reason Goody Nurse might not stay in her home until the trial is come. We know she is no witch.”
“True, true,” Mr. Cheever mused. “At any rate, iron bars cannot keep back an evil spirit were it wont to roam.”
“And if she is found not to be a witch, will we not regret that we kept her from home in her waning days?”
Mr. Cheever nodded and I felt a surge of hope. We’d convinced one town elder. I doubted we could count on him to take action—his promises hadn’t borne fruit yet—but we’d demonstrated that our arguments worked. Giles Corey was on our side, for obvious reasons, and Ezekiel had some ideas about other townspeople we could hit up—people who didn’t appear on Wikipedia’s lists of either the accused or the accusers.
“I thought as I’d talk to Mr. Hathorne,” Ezekiel said. “The town council could—“
“Now, now,” Mr. Cheever interrupted. “I don’t like your being involved, Ezekiel.” He shot me a hard look, as if he knew where Ezekiel’s sudden activism sprang from. “Witches are a delicate business and so are town politics. You’d best leave this to me. I said I’d handle it and I will.” He picked up his paper and shook it out so that it blocked his face from us entirely.
“But Father—”
“Ezekiel,” Mrs. Cheever called out from her spot at the stove. “You and Mr. Johnson had best wash up for dinner now. And take Tom with you, please.”
In other words, leave your father alone. The optimistic surge of hope that had taken flight a few moments ago crashed hard. We couldn’t change fate. I’d been stupid to think we could.
But Ezekiel wasn’t so easily daunted.
Over Tom’s head, as we supervised his splashings in the basin in the lean-to, Ezekiel said, “We’ll go see Giles Corey tomorrow. He’ll understand the urgency.”
“Father said no,” Tom said.
“Father said children shouldn’t speak unless spoken to,” Ezekiel countered. “I expect Luther and I can offer a friend our sympathies.”
“I shall call him Luther also,” Tom said. He wiped his clean hands on his filthy pants, rendering them filthy again.
“You shan’t,” Ezekiel said as he redirected Tom’s hands back under the water. “He’s a grown man and you are not.”
“I don’t mind.” All the formality kind of got to me. I missed hearing my name. “You call me Luther and I’ll call you Tom.”
“You already call me Tom.”
“Then it’s a fair trade. Deal?” I stuck out my hand to shake on it, but Tom looked to Ezekiel for approval first. They were so alike with their sandy hair and pointy noses and their matching cheekbones brushed rosy by the fading light.
“As Mr. Johnson lives here, it is like we are brothers,” Tom argued. “And brothers do say Christian names.”
If Ezekiel and I were married, Tom and I would be brothers-in-law. True kin.
Ezekiel gave Tom a nod of
approval and Tom put his wet hand in my dry one and shook it with obvious pride and a grip of steel.
“Deal,” he said solemnly.
He hopped back into the house proper, leaving me and Ezekiel to do our own washing. The lean-to wasn’t really private, not with the curtain open, but I could let my gaze wander. Now that I’d had my hands on the flesh beneath his clothes, I couldn’t wait to have him in nothing but a nightdress in our bed tonight.
Our bed. Mmm. I wondered what he’d let me get away with in it. I wondered what he’d let me get away with in general. What we’d done that afternoon was no more depraved than masturbation, swapping one hand for another.
Did he even have the concept of oral sex? Anal had to be a no. It wasn’t something he’d have caught the barnyard animals doing, and I doubted they had a lot of kinky pornography floating around Salem in 1692. The very idea of anal would freak him the fuck out, and yet there were images of our joining together in that most intimate of ways I couldn’t shake from my mind.
Sometimes I imagined covering him—the way he’d fall apart beneath me, like he had in my hands that afternoon, but just as often I imagined him fucking me, imagined the wonder and awe that would brighten his eyes as he sank inside another person for the first time.
I’d never been anyone’s first. I could barely remember who’d been my first. There were no firsts in 2017, just like there were no lasts. There were only nexts.
I wanted to be Ezekiel’s first, and I wanted him to be my last. The actual sex acts didn’t matter. I’d take whatever he felt comfortable giving. Right then, I took a kiss—quickly, and with a glance over my shoulder before I did it, but the irony of living in a world in which homosexuality didn’t exist was that we were so inconceivable as to be invisible.
There were no unexpected drop-ins at dinner that night, and Mr. Cheever was in no mood to talk, so the children carried the conversation. Tom bragged about passing an examination at school by singing his way through his letters, impressing both his teacher and the other children. I expected future Wikipedia entries to credit the alphabet song to me. I’d pre-invented it now.
Abigail was excited about starting work on my stockings, full of chatter about purling and ribbing and other words I knew nothing about but vowed to learn. I’d felt guilty running off with Mrs. Nurse’s yarn, but I needed new socks too much to be shy about it. Mentally, I promised her I’d do more than read a few pages from the Bible in repayment. I’d get her out of jail.
After dinner, Abigail showed off the progress she’d already made on my first sock. I had to admit it looked very like a sock, or at least it looked like the start of a tube which could certainly turn into a sock. I watched her fingers fly through the stitches until my eyesight blurred. When she handed me the needles and tried to talk me through it, I made enough of a mess that she had to rip it all out, but she had the patience of her brother, and over the course of the evening I managed to knit a few stitches she deemed good enough to grace my legs.
Tom sat on Ezekiel’s knee, playing with a stuffed dog. The dog had been knitted too, and had seen better days, probably three children ago, but now that I knew even a hank of wool had to be bartered for, I could appreciate its value. It had floppy ears, which Tom flapped as though the dog were Dumbo, and a long nose not unlike his own.
Ezekiel and I pretended not to be looking at each other until Mr. Cheever took up the lantern and the whole household made its processional way upstairs. The tension between us rose as we climbed, like the air grew too thin to breath. We closed the door to our room, our sanctuary, and turned to look at each other in the warm wash of the candlelight.
We usually faced away from each other to change into our night clothes, Ezekiel out of modesty and me out of a fear of exposing him to Snoop Dogg, but today we performed a clunky mutual strip-tease. When Ezekiel went to pull his nightshirt on over the top of his long underwear, I stopped him and removed that final layer myself. If we couldn’t be naked, and I supposed we couldn’t, we could at least be naked beneath our nightgowns, which permitted quick, unfettered access to all the skin I needed to touch.
Touch it, I did. His hands remained shyly on my shoulders, but mine went everywhere beneath the covers. Our dicks were hard but we didn’t pay them much mind as we cuddled and talked. I told him about the wonders of the twenty-first century, about cars and planes and movies, about the internet he’d seen one whole page of.
Ezekiel was a farm geek. He wanted to know about advances in agriculture, so I told him how crops could be genetically modified to have more nutritional value or to be drought resistant. Thoughts of saving water led me to the subject of irrigation systems and talk of automation led me to milking machines.
“Do not the cows miss the touch?” Ezekiel asked. “For I do think they’re glad to see me of a morning.”
I found his dick and milked it with a few long pulls. “Nothing like the human touch.”
He giggled and I thought we might make the jump from talking to sexing each other up, but he pulled back after a moment and said, “It must be like paradise. Enough food for everyone and the leisure to spend more time in contemplation of God.”
“Um.” How did I break it to him? “That’s not exactly how it came out. Yeah, there’s enough food to go around, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t people going hungry.”
And as for leisure? I knew Ezekiel and his family worked hard. Everyone had their chores to do, even little Tom, and Ezekiel’s labor was often dirty and physical, but their daily grind included breaks and ended with downtime. They worked for themselves and enjoyed the fruits of their labor. I’d take this life over juggling shifts at a fast food place with a second job at Wal-Mart, surviving on the whim of an impersonal employer, any day.
“But why ought anyone be hungry?” Ezekiel asked.
“People haven’t changed much since 1692, or not for the better. You know how Corwin would rather hang Sarah Good than feed her? We still have people like that in 2017. Too many of them.”
Ezekiel gave a sorrowful sigh. “The world has not been enlightened then.”
“Afraid not, depending what you mean by enlightened.”
“Christianity hasn’t spread.”
“No, it has. The United States, which is what we’re going to end up calling this country, is predominantly Christian. But being Christian doesn’t mean being enlightened. Far from it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Corwin, remember? By 2017 there are a lot of people like him, people who say they’re Christians but don’t practice Christian values. Or worse, they use their faith as a reason to avoid practicing Christian values. In my time, Christian means cruel and judgmental as often as it means charitable and forgiving.”
“But how can that be so? The Bible cannot be misinterpreted on such subjects.”
“Yeah, well.” How to explain what I didn’t really understand myself? “There’s this concept we have, a term we use. Othering.”
“Othering?”
“It means when you identify another person as different from you, as other than you, for whatever reason—skin color, country of origin, socio-economic class, religion. Then, because they’re other, it’s easier to believe them worthy of less—less respect, less food, less freedom.”
“Othering,” he repeated.
“Right. Like Sarah Good, who’s poor, or Tituba who’s from another country and has darker skin.”
“Like you.”
“Like me. I have darker skin and I’m gay.”
“Like me.”
“Like you,” I confirmed. “Like Abigail.”
“Abigail?”
“Because she’s disabled. Any way they can separate us, they do. Look at what your church believes—that they’re more Godly than everyone else—and this is only the beginning. It gets worse. There are still good Christians. My grandmother is one of them. She represents Christian values as well as anyone living in Salem today. But as a whole, in 2017, the name of God is invo
ked more often to oppress than to save.”
At some point, our dicks had deflated, the seriousness of our conversation taking the edge off our passion. My hand was still under his nightdress but only to stroke soothing circles across his back. I’d been living with this dichotomy my whole life. It wasn’t strange to me that a religion based on love could also be used to propagate hate. That was the truth I’d grown up with, the battle my grandmother fought daily through her example.
But to Ezekiel, what I was saying was new and horrible. He slumped onto his pillow and his hand fell from my shoulder. He was quiet a long time, but just when I thought he’d fallen asleep, he spoke.
“I won’t allow Christianity to become this,” he said, as though he alone could change the course of the next three hundred years.
And damned if I didn’t believe he could.
Chapter 14
We formed a resistance—me and Ezekiel and Giles and what town folk we could corral. Rebecca Nurse’s arrest stepped over a line. Martha talked too much and the Sarahs and Tituba were others, but the town folk had a hard time believing Rebecca Nurse could be a witch. Our first priority was getting her out of jail.
When John Miller, Isabel’s fiancé, proposed at the next town council that fully-confirmed church members be allowed to await trial at home, he focused on Mrs. Nurse’s plight. The resolution passed and that brought both Mrs. Nurse and Martha home, but it didn’t do any good for the Sarahs or Tituba or most of the newly accused, the number of whom grew daily.
Corwin had gotten smarter. He’d seen where he’d gone wrong with Martha and Mrs. Nurse and he limited his ongoing suggestions to people firmly in the other category. The jail grew ever more crowded, but springing even a few prisoners felt like victory. There was nothing in the Wikipedia entry about accused witches being released on their own recognizance. Maybe we really could change history.
Ezekiel’s chores around the farm suffered as he spent more and more time campaigning. His father grumbled, but Tom and Abigail stepped up more than anyone in 2017 would believe possible and I did what I could in between my stenographer duties and visits to Tituba.