The Witches: Salem, 1692

by Stacy Schiff

  They arrived at the spacious Nurse home to find seventy-one-year-old Rebecca sick in bed. She had not ventured out for over a week but assured her visitors that she only felt closer to God in her infirmity. She asked immediately after the convulsing girls, in particular about the Parrises, among her closest neighbors. She had not called at the parsonage. She felt remiss but had her reasons: she had suffered fits when younger. She feared their return, she explained, offering a little, lost nod to contagion. She did grieve and pray for her neighbors, the more so as she knew of the severity of the symptoms; she had heard they were shattering to observe. She worried too as she understood that villagers as innocent as herself had been accused of witchcraft. As gently as they could at high volume—Nurse had lost much of her hearing—her visitors broke the news that she had in fact been named. The old woman sat dumbfounded for some time. Finally she allowed that she was “as innocent as the child unborn.” Her callers left satisfied that she had had no inkling of their mission until they revealed it.

  If the delegation intended to clear Nurse’s name, they ran into trouble soon enough. Probably the next day Reverend Lawson called on Ann Putnam Sr. He found her lying in bed, surrounded by visitors. Wednesday was baking day in New England; the yeasty smell of fresh bread replaced the spiked, acidic scent of wet ash. Ann was particularly pleased to see her former minister, of whom she was fond. Husband and wife requested that Lawson pray with them while Ann could manage to do so. She followed Lawson for a short while before she began to seize. At prayer’s end her husband attempted to lift her from her bed to his lap; her limbs were so stiff she could not be coaxed into a sitting position. She went on to twitch violently, arms and legs flailing, while she disputed, eyes closed tight, with a Rebecca Nurse whom she alone could see. “Be gone! Be gone!” she instructed Nurse. “What hurt did I ever do you in my life?” she pleaded. She knew what Nurse wanted. She would not have it, Ann informed the wraith, with whom, in a trance, she debated a description of Judgment Day. Nurse insisted that the biblical passage did not exist. Ann struggled to name it, her mouth twisting grotesquely, her breath jagged, her limbs contorted. Finally, she succeeded. She had in mind the popular third chapter of Revelation, the reading of which she defied Nurse to endure, appealing to the minister at her side. Lawson hesitated. He felt out of his depth, alarmed by the forces at play in the room and apprehensive of unleashing more; he stood at the edge of bibliomancy. Having now watched an anguished, intelligent friend struggle for a full half hour however, he decided to risk one small experiment. Before he reached the end of the first verse, Ann Putnam’s eyes fluttered open. She was perfectly well. It had been the case before, those around the bed informed him, that the texts she named in her fits—there seemed no rhyme or reason to her choices—brought immediate relief. From Salem town, warrants went out for Rebecca Nurse and five-year-old Dorothy Good.

  At ten the following morning, elderly Rebecca Nurse stood before Hathorne and Corwin. Hathorne turned first to Parris’s niece and Ann Putnam Jr. Would the eleven-and twelve-year-old repeat their charges? Abigail contended that Nurse had beaten her that very morning. Ann howled. Hathorne invited others to register their complaints. Two girls stepped forward, as did a former constable. “Are you an innocent person relating to this witchcraft?” Hathorne asked Nurse, posing the question for the first time in an open-ended manner. Before she could reply, Ann Putnam Sr. cried out: Nurse had brought the black man to her and tempted her to defy God! “O Lord, help me!” cried Nurse, spreading her arms heavenward. As she did so the girls hurled themselves about, choking, ribs heaving. Did she not see how much agony she caused when her hands were loose? Hathorne asked.

  For the most part Hathorne inclined that Thursday toward generosity. Before him stood the unlikeliest of suspects. His sister may have vouched for Nurse. It remained possible that she did not yet know she was a witch and had been led astray; he allowed that he was himself uncertain as to what to make of the wispy apparitions. The evidence before him was, however, irrefutable. Tituba—who continued to run the show from the Boston prison—had professed her love for Betty Parris while simultaneously torturing her, Hathorne reasoned. Had Nurse no familiarity with spirits? Like Corey, she could see neither the black man whispering at her side nor the birds in the rafters to which the girls pointed. Hathorne invoked shame: What a sad thing it was that upstanding church members should be charged with witchcraft! “A sad thing sure enough,” echoed the shoe-hurling Bathshua Pope, launching into convulsions. They set off an unbridled chain reaction. Hathorne attempted to extract an answer as to whether Nurse thought the afflictions voluntary or involuntary. She hesitated to opine. Hathorne turned the puzzle around. If Rebecca Nurse thought the girls counterfeited, then she “must look upon them as murderers.” It was a weighty remark; already he had thought his way past the judicial leniency of the previous years. They were dealing in death sentences.

  In fatigue or despair, Nurse at one point dropped her head to her chest. Elizabeth Hubbard’s neck seemed automatically to snap. Abigail Williams warned that if Nurse’s neck were not righted, Elizabeth’s would break; several villagers stepped forward to correct the older woman’s posture. The sixteen-year-old instantly recovered. Shrieking, Mary Walcott, the Putnam cousin, displayed a fresh set of teeth marks. Biting and pinching disrupted the room. Ann Putnam Sr. went stiff as a plank in the course of the hearing, from which her husband carried her. She left chaos in her wake. Lawson did not see her go as he had excused himself after two hours, to prepare his sermon. Screeches and roars reached him some distance from the meetinghouse. Even at close quarters Hathorne and his half-deaf suspect could barely hear each other, for which others offered an alternate explanation: Nurse missed Hathorne’s questions because the black man whispered in her ear.

  While many in the room wept with fear, Nurse remained dry-eyed. Hathorne found this curious and incriminating, especially as it was understood that a witch could not cry. (More exactly, she could shed only three tears, only from the left eye.) The villagers too professed themselves appalled by her indifference. Hathorne continued to poke around, less than constructively. Why had she not visited the Parrises? And what ailed her exactly? “Do you believe these afflicted persons are bewitched?” he asked at last. “I do think they are,” she agreed, surveying the bedlam. Lawson was himself stupefied by the disjointed limbs and distracted minds, as awed as the villagers, who whispered “they were afraid that those that sat next to them were under the influence of witchcraft.” He could nearly make out the hammering hearts, the raised hairs on the backs of necks, the tickle of fear in the throats. Whatever they were in the presence of appeared contagious, as he allowed in his Thursday-afternoon sermon. Rebecca Nurse was not among those who reconvened for it. Several saw her riding by the meetinghouse with the unidentified black man. She perceived things differently, en route as she was to the Salem town jail.

  The crisis thus far had been met with more action than analysis. Lawson attempted to redress the balance. The villagers hungered for solace and elucidation; over the course of several hours, in the overflowing, unpainted meetinghouse, he delivered on both counts. He had prepared carefully, well aware that he was sitting in a tinderbox, addressing the justices and Salem ministers, families of the afflicted and of the accused. Picking up on Parris’s tropes and texts, Lawson permitted that the devil ranged and raged among them. He delivered a short biography of Satan, one that allowed him to display his knowledge of Hebrew and Greek. The flourish of erudition aside, the hybrid creature he summoned—it boasted “the subtlety of the serpent, the malice of the dragon, and strength of the lion”—sounded like a cousin of the furry, fiery beast Tituba had met in the Parris parlor. That that beast was especially eager to “distress, delude, devour” should come as no surprise: the more pious a people, the more vigorously did Satan persecute them. Lawson registered a special plea for his beleaguered colleague. Reverend Parris deserved their spiritual sympathy at all times but especially now, when he and his
family labored under such dreadful circumstances.

  Lawson ventured a few additional reasons for Satan’s particular grudge against Salem. The villagers might consider whether the Lord had singled out their address for this diabolical rendezvous as a sign of “holy displeasure, to put out some fires of contention that have been amongst you.” Three signatories of the 1687 Salem town letter advising the villagers to take their animosities elsewhere sat in the pews that afternoon in the felted gray light. They could not have disagreed. Lawson inveighed too against charms and superstitions; he knew all about the witch cake. He understood that the villagers needed answers, but such experiments merely gratified the devil. He added a pestilential note: Satan “spread the contagious atoms of epidemical diseases” in order to destroy more effectively. Lawson warned against false accusations and premature conclusions. There was but one antidote to the old serpent’s venomous operation: prayer!

  Everyone was guilty in this provocation, lectured Lawson. And everyone should apply himself to solemn self-examination. All the villagers—not only those jolted awake in the electrifying presence of the bewitched—were to search their hearts and embrace their faith. A legion of devils should be met with a multitude of prayers. Lawson’s lyrics were soothing but his melody martial: Satan had descended, armed, among them. As he mustered his troops, the villagers were to prepare for spiritual warfare. They should assume every piece of godly armor; this was a trial greater than any they had faced. They must and should be afraid. At the same time, Lawson begged the justices to do all in their power to “check and rebuke Satan.” They should prove “the terror to and punishment of evil-doers.” Glancing off the question of whether Satan might borrow the shape of an innocent, he called for a vigorous investigation and a firm prosecution.

  Solemn self-examining may have transpired over the next days but so did plenty of biting and devouring. That Thursday Martha Corey’s husband admitted to a town minister that he suspected his wife of witchcraft. Corey was the third husband to suggest the woman to whom he was married was a witch. Rebecca Nurse—whose husband alone did not step forward—continued to torture Ann Putnam Jr., flaying her for thirty minutes with an invisible chain. Tender, ringed welts rose across the twelve-year-old’s skin. Little was discussed in and around the village that week besides the Nurse testimony, the Lawson sermon, and the arrest of Dorothy, Sarah Good’s daughter. Both Lawson and the senior town minister, John Higginson, accompanied Hathorne and Corwin to prison to examine the child. She had demonstrated a remarkable ability to cripple with a glance, a feat she managed even while several men held her head in place. Dorothy confessed that she too had a familiar, a little snake that nursed at the lowest joint of her index finger. Holding out her hand, she displayed a red spot about the size of a fleabite. Had the black man given her the snake? the justices asked. Not at all, replied the five-year-old, who was to spend the next nine months dragging herself about in heavy irons. Her mother had.

  Amid the “terror, amazement, and astonishment,” Lawson entreated all to sympathy and compassion on March 24. While the two ministers conferred closely, while they invoked similar imagery, Parris delivered a different message in the meetinghouse three days later. That Sunday he tangled with a definition of who precisely the devil was. He could be a wicked angel or spirit, the prince of evil spirits, or simply “vile and wicked persons, the worst of such, who for their villainy and impiety do most resemble devils and wicked spirits.” Where Lawson invoked Job, Parris favored Judas. He took as his text John 6:70; as there had been a devil among the disciples, so, too, were there devils “here in Christ’s little church.” He was vehement to the point of accusatory. “One of you is a devil,” Parris lectured his tense congregants, making a singular leap and arriving at an exclusionary, door-closing extreme. It provoked an immediate echo. “We are either saints or devils; the Scripture gives us no medium,” Parris preached. He dispelled any doubts that had begun to crystallize around another question too. Hathorne remained perplexed as to whether the devil could assume an innocent’s form, but the minister was certain: he could not. Parris drew no distinction between those who covenanted with Satan and those whose bodies he appropriated.

  The remarks were pointed, transparently so to some. No sooner had Parris announced his text—“Jesus answered them, ‘Have not I chosen you twelve, and one of you is a devil?’”—than forty-four-year-old Sarah Cloyce rose and stormed out of the meetinghouse. To the amazement of the congregation, she either slammed the outer door behind her or left the wind to do so. The heavy door banged shut, its metal latch grating. She would miss Mary Sibley’s tearful confession that afternoon but had already heard enough; Cloyce was Rebecca Nurse’s much younger sister. Her husband had joined the Nurse delegation. All eyes followed her, although it would be three weeks before anyone connected the conspiratorial hints in Parris’s sermon with her exit. And while many villagers understood her to have stomped off in rage, only one sharp-eyed eleven-year-old saw Cloyce curtsy to the devil just outside the meetinghouse entry.

  A few misgivings surfaced before Lawson left the village. Probably on the morning of March 25, John Procter, a sixty-year-old tavern owner and farmer, fell into conversation with Mary Sibley’s husband. Procter stopped for a drink on his way into town to pick up his maid, Mary Warren, who would become one of the more unusual witnesses for the prosecution. A straight shooter, earnest and forthright, Procter had no patience for either the inquest or the afflictions. He would rather have paid Mary, he roared, than allow her to attend a hearing. Why did he rail so? Sibley asked. Mary had suffered fits too, Procter explained, but he had handily dispensed with them. He had kept her at her spinning wheel and threatened to beat her if she misbehaved again. Only in his absence had she started all over with her nonsense. He intended now to “thresh the devil out of her.” (He partly succeeded. Mary soon suggested that the girls were acting.) Were the malingerers to continue, Procter informed his startled friend, they would all wind up charged with witchcraft. The girls should hang! Dutifully Sibley reported every word of that rant to their minister.

  The morning after Sarah Cloyce’s resounding exit, Rebecca Nurse’s son-in-law Jonathan Tarbell headed to the Thomas Putnams. He had a number of questions for the women of the house. By this point, interrogations and accounts of interrogations were so frequent in Salem village it is difficult to believe dinner appeared regularly on the table. In a household crowded with well-wishers and small children, Tarbell asked the Putnams: Had Ann Jr. been the first to name his mother-in-law? The girl had after all initially noted only that her tormentor was the pallid woman in her grandmother’s pew. She could not identify her. Mercy Lewis, the maid who had struck the specter on Ann Jr.’s behalf, confirmed that Ann Sr. had first named Rebecca Nurse. Ann Sr. claimed Mercy had done so. No one seemed willing to assume responsibility, thirty-eight-year-old Tarbell reported. The same day a group of young men discussed new allegations over drinks at Ingersoll’s. Several afflicted girls were on hand. Suddenly one cried out that Procter’s wife, Elizabeth, was in the room. She was a witch. She deserved to hang! Objecting that he could see nothing, a man accused the youngster of lying. Ingersoll’s wife reprimanded her as well; this was no laughing matter. The teenager conceded she had misspoken, with a heavy admission: she did it for “sport, they must have some sport.” The same day two young men helping to care for the bewitched Putnams claimed they overheard the family putting words in nineteen-year-old Mercy Lewis’s mouth.

  Lawson returned to Boston soon thereafter to write up his notes on the diabolical descent. He missed the fast of March 31, a Thursday the farmers spent in prayer for the afflicted. Over the next month accusations flew throughout and beyond the village, their tempo accelerating wildly. Five witches were accused in March. Twenty-five would be accused in April. The next hearing would be conducted by a Boston magistrate before a larger crowd in Salem town’s more comfortable meetinghouse. Among the first of the new arrests were Sarah Cloyce and Elizabeth Procter.
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  LAWSON’S ACCOUNT OF the Salem witches was published nearly as soon as he finished it, on April 5. The rush to narrative was not solely the work of an enterprising bookseller, although Benjamin Harris was very much that. (He billed the ten-page pamphlet as an account of “the mysterious assaults from hell.”) The rush to narrative was a Puritan proclivity, the reflex of a logic-loving, literal-minded people, questing and causation-obsessed. Scripture provided the bedrock of New England law and served as its fundamental text; all answers could be found there. You fortified yourself, restored and refreshed yourself with those passages, familiar to all; at a moral or practical crossroads, you might turn to a page at random. At the same time, God was silent and maddeningly inscrutable. To discern his will, to decode his purpose, was the lifework of a Puritan, who grappled with the terrible, impenetrable riddle at the heart of his faith: One was selected before birth for salvation or damnation; to which camp did one belong? That puzzle left the Puritan on edge, inwardly focused, worrying his way through the world. Long before Lawson’s March instructions, he was an ardent, unsparing observer, a compulsive self-examiner.

  Watching stood at the heart of the enterprise, whether that meant scanning the heavens, scouring the self, or scrutinizing the neighbors. The word figured in all church covenants. The minister was himself a seer and watchman. Together parishioners joined in “holy watchfulness” over one another. Very little went unnoticed, as the couple who had a child five months after their marriage inevitably discovered. There was every reason the villagers should have scoffed at the assertion that a ship could dock undetected in Salem town. All was supervised; in addition to fence viewers and wheat surveyors, every community supported a surveillance team in its tithing men. The tithing man monitored families and taverns, where he intervened if liquor ran too freely. (He risked attack by chair and andiron.) He served as tax collector and moral guardian, enforcer and informer. He was to examine anyone out after ten p.m. He encouraged catechism at home and confiscated flying walnuts at meetings. He watched for Indians and, on Sundays, for delinquent parishioners. The town watch was itself watched, twice a week. One could never be too sure, as an insecure people perched on the uncomfortable edge of an unpredictable wilderness—squinting into the murk of their parlors, through the woods, into their uncooperative souls—well knew.