The Witches: Salem, 1692

by Stacy Schiff

  Those visions—and the Bishops’ quarrels—were well enough remembered that her accusers referred to her still as Bridget Oliver, her previous husband’s name. “They say you bewitched your first husband to death,” Hathorne observed, reaching back into the swirl of rumor. “If it please your worship, I know nothing of it,” she answered, shaking her head. Parris implied that she did so respectfully. Cheever felt she did so angrily. Given that she had fielded the same questions before, she sounds uncommonly patient. In both men’s accounts, the girls jerked with each turn of her head. When she looked to the heavens for help, their eyes floated up in their sockets. Bishop contended that she knew neither the devil nor her accusers. In fact, she knew no man, woman, or child in the room, having never lived in the village. Her accusers disagreed. Putnam cousin Mary Walcott had more compelling evidence yet. When Bishop’s specter descended on her, she had cried out; her brother had thrust his sword at Bishop’s coat. Mary heard the fabric tear. Was there a hole in her coat? Hathorne inquired of the suspect. There was not, Bishop assured him. Hathorne ordered a search. Two corresponding rents turned up. Constable Herrick, an upholsterer when he was not apprehending witch suspects, interposed a question of his own: How had Bishop managed to slip into his bedroom one morning? (Massachusetts witchcraft again proved itself unlike any other: she appeared there, Herrick claimed, to ask if he had any curtains to sell.)

  Bishop could be arch if not provocative; unwisely, she sounded a few skeptical notes. She could not say what ailed the girls, nor had she given consent for any evil spirit to parade about in her likeness. She was not a witch. She could not even say what one was. She had the bad luck to be appearing before a fine logician. “How do you know, then,” countered Hathorne, “that you are not a witch?” She failed to grasp his meaning. “How can you know that you are no witch, and yet not know what a witch is?” persisted Hathorne. Bishop bristled. Were she a witch Hathorne would know of her powers, she replied. Hathorne heard the remark as a threat. He would not forget it. Did she not know that others had confessed that very day? She did not. Two men stepped forward, sputtering. They had specifically told Bishop as much! “Why look, you are taken now in a flat lie!” Hathorne berated her.

  By the time Hathorne examined Bishop that Tuesday, he had struck gold with his previous two suspects. One was pretty Mary Warren, whose initial fits Procter had thrashed out of her. Hathorne attempted to do the same with the truth. Since Procter had beaten her, the two had been engaged in a steely battle. For relief from her distemper she had posted a note of gratitude on the meetinghouse post, a common practice. That post functioned as a community bulletin board; it was where you learned who the new fence viewer was or who had not properly educated his children, now offered in service. The Procters were furious at the advertisement of the disorder in their home. An impulsive twenty-year-old given to outbursts of emotion, Mary also defected from her peers. She passed in her recovery from victim to suspect, possibly accusing her friends of fraud on the way. Soon enough she would confess to witchcraft, then submit to afflictions all over again. She seemed to want all the roles to herself.

  As Mary approached the bar the bewitched choked; they could not speak when Hathorne asked if Warren hurt them. Dr. Griggs’s maid managed to compose herself only long enough to confirm that the older girl did so. She was joined by John Indian and Bathshua Pope, the muff thrower. “You were a little while ago an afflicted person, now you are an afflicter: How comes this to pass?” demanded Hathorne. Mary choked and spun. She seemed uncertain herself as to which side she was on. For some time she stood entranced, then launched into a tearful, hand-wringing apology. She promised to tell all, though it remained unclear to which party she was apologizing and what she meant to tell. Each time she attempted to speak she contorted. Hathorne several times dismissed her from the room to recover; the ministers and justices finally deposed her in private.

  The twenty-year-old was more forthcoming after a night in prison. The evening after she had posted her note, Elizabeth Procter had forced her from bed. She informed Mary that she was a witch—Salem witches tended to supply formal introductions and helpful exposition, presenting their credentials up front*—something that, on reflection, Mary might have surmised, given that her mistress read so much. Elizabeth owned a number of books, traveling always with one in her pocket. Mary implicated Giles Corey, whose attire she astonished her examiners by describing in detail. Corey abused her for a very earthly reason: Mary had advised her master to raise the price of a meadow Corey had hoped to buy. She described an equally vexed spiritual transaction on April 21. While resisting various prompts, she admitted that she had signed some sort of portentous tome urged on her by her employers while she drank cider at their table. Her finger had left a strange black blot on the volume. It took three days to extract those details from her; Mary cried she would be “torn in pieces” if she divulged them. Procter had indeed bullied her privately, although if he had threatened to burn her out of her fit, drown her, or run her through the hedges, as she claimed, he may have done so for non-sorcerous reasons. He had clearly banked on her discretion. He had confided in Mary that his wife exasperated him. His confidences, or that intimacy, proved a burden. Mary carried about another fear too. She had yielded to Procter’s demand that she sign the book because he warned that if she did not, he would not save her in her next fit, when she tumbled into fire or water. She used precisely the terms Parris had used in describing parents dangling children before dangers only to rescue them, educating by way of false alarms.

  Hathorne’s second suspect that Tuesday delivered the richest rewards. The bad girl of neighboring Topsfield, fourteen-year-old Abigail Hobbs lived just over the village line. For some time she had bragged of a most un-Puritan childhood. She cavorted in the woods at night. She mocked her stepmother, who despaired of her. Several weeks earlier a friend had chided the visiting Abigail for her rudeness. Had she no shame? Hobbs directed her to hold her tongue or she would raise a ruckus. She boasted of her invincibility; she feared nothing, having sold her soul to Satan. In a Tituba-inflected testimony, she edged as close to a unified theory of Salem as was to emerge. She also set off an avalanche. You knew you were making progress when the afflicted girls sat stock-still; none flinched while lusty Abigail testified. “I will speak the truth,” she began. “I have been very wicked.” She had spoken with the devil. In exchange for finery, she had agreed to pinch the girls. Dogs, cats, and semi-human creatures had urged her on. She had signed several pacts, the first of them in the woods, in broad daylight—but not in Topsfield. Abigail led Hathorne to an essential address: she entered into that compact in Casco Bay, eighty miles north, in the province of Maine, where she had survived an Indian raid three years earlier. She added a few names, including the mother of the Topsfield constable who had wrung the pig from the tax-withholding farmer. She lacked Tituba’s flair for detail but with her cat-proffered book she would do. The girls evidently thought so; only when Abigail had exhausted herself and seemed no longer able to hear did they cry out for the first time. Her eyes wide open, Abigail went blind, although she did eke out a final explanation: the beggar woman Sarah Good had silenced her.

  Hathorne could only have been relieved. His hearings moved ploddingly, in a claustrophobic space, amid trying interruptions and tedious repetitions. Accounts emerged in bits and pieces. He had a family and a business of his own; witchcraft threatened to consume his life. Abigail illuminated a number of matters, as she would continue to do from prison. The next day she described how she managed the spectral pricks: the devil provided her with thorns that she drove into wooden images. Had she by chance stuck a thorn in a victim’s midsection? Why, yes, she had! Though at her hearing she had known nothing of meetings, by the following day, in prison, she did. She had attended a great witches’ assembly, where she had eaten red bread and drunk red wine. There had been nine celebrants in all, she announced, confirming Tituba’s tally by introducing a celebration Tituba had not mentioned.
They met in Parris’s ill-tended pasture.

  The next evening, a new and especially bold apparition taunted Ann Putnam Jr. He materialized again the following day. On the morning of April 21, before her uncle’s lecture, Abigail Williams accosted Benjamin Hutchinson, Ingersoll’s adopted son, about a decade her senior, outside the inn. He carried a pitchfork. Abigail pointed out a sinister little man by the side of the path. She marveled over his uncommon strength and his various feats: he had killed three women and recruited nine Salem witches! He could fire the heaviest musket with one hand! Where was he? Hutchinson valiantly inquired. Abigail motioned; Hutchinson launched his pitchfork. She convulsed but recovered in time to assure the young man that he had hit his mark. She had heard the intruder’s coat tear. At the inn about an hour later the eleven-year-old sought Hutchinson out again, in the main room; she was neither shy about enlisting older men to defend her nor slow to secure their attention. “There he stands,” she informed Hutchinson, who, peering all about him, brandished his rapier, in an odd variation on blindman’s bluff. By this time, the apparition had dissolved into a gray cat; Hutchinson struck all the same. Abigail assured him that he had prevailed. She watched spectral Sarah Good, the beggar woman, carry away the animal.

  It was now noon; the two headed off for Parris’s lecture. Shortly before four o’clock, Abigail again sought out Hutchinson at the tavern, this time arriving with his cousin, Mary Walcott. They were just able to report that a Topsfield woman had bitten Mary before both girls began to shudder. As they calmed, they pointed to a table: the witch’s husband stood upon it! Hutchinson plunged his rapier into what he understood to be their tormentor’s side. He withdrew it to learn that the room swarmed with spirits, an Indian and a “great black woman” among them. Wildly Hutchinson and a friend struck left and right, directed by the bewitched, who described the carnage for their defenders; they now lived in a world where when a girl pointed to a notional figure, you assumed she was right and you were blind. The sanded floor was slick with blood. On the hill outside, the girls spotted a coven of witches, three of them dead.

  Warrants went out on April 21 for nine witch suspects, the majority of them in Topsfield; accusations spread across town lines as a local affair bloomed into a provincial crisis. Among those to be apprehended before the weekend were the wife of Salem town’s richest merchant, Rebecca Nurse’s second sister, Abigail Hobbs’s parents, and a black slave. The Topsfield constable dutifully arrested his own mother. So quickly did the allegations pile up that it proved difficult to keep suspects straight. Even to meticulous Reverend Hale, Salem town’s Bridget Bishop and Topsfield’s Sarah Wilds became one person. Over the next seven weeks, fifty-four witches would be named.

  Thomas Putnam’s name figured first on the mid-April complaints. On the twenty-first, he felt the need to weigh in personally with the Salem justices as well. Expressing his gratitude for their “great care and pains,” he begged the magistrates to continue “a terror to evil-doers.” The villagers would assist them in any way possible. He offered support and benediction but something else too. Events were evolving quickly; he knew of alarming, late-breaking news that had yet to make its way to the magistrates’ attention. There was, Putnam warned, a plot afoot, “a wheel within a wheel, at which our ears do tingle.” He had biblical prophets Ezekiel and Jeremiah to thank for his phrasing, as he did Reverend Lawson, who had incorporated the tingling ears and the terror to evil-doers into his late-March sermon.*

  Putnam’s was a pay-attention-to-the-man-behind-the-curtain letter, a timely bit of stage management. He had a flair for the sensational; in his hands, witchcraft victims were never less than “grievously afflicted” or “dreadfully tormented.” He would make over a hundred and twenty accusations in all, nearly a third of the total number. He would testify against seventeen suspects. For whatever reason, he felt it necessary that Thursday to add a drumroll to the proceedings. The technique was one he might have learned from the Mathers; when you predicted an apocalypse, you needed sooner or later to produce one. Putnam made no mention of his ailing wife or daughter or his own run of bad luck: His sheep had escaped. A cow had died, as had his favorite horse. He had recently lost a contested inheritance to a much younger half brother. He spoke instead for the community, or at least insinuated that others soon would. Confining himself to dark hints—Jeremiah heralded imminent disaster—he stopped short of the sensational details. He left it to the visionary girls to deliver the “high and dreadful” news: there was an ingenious mastermind at work.

  V

  THE WIZARD

  In the terror of seeing the figure, and in the terror of being certain that it had not been there a moment before, I at first ran from it, and then ran towards it. And my terror was greatest of all when I found no figure there.

  —CHARLES DICKENS

  IF PUTNAM’S HINTS struck the justices as cryptic, the suspense lasted all of two days. Already Hathorne was receptive to their tenor, having ordered the additional arrests. Any number of discrepancies had presented themselves over the previous six weeks; he barreled past each and every one. When an unlikely charge surfaced—at one point someone accused Dr. Griggs’s wife—it evaporated. Tituba’s tall man from Boston too disappeared in the shuffle. He would return as a short man from Maine.

  Hathorne never asked saucy Abigail Hobbs to produce the finery the devil had promised. Nor did he quarantine the girls or interview them separately, as every legal manual advised. He made no attempt to match teeth marks to dentistry, which would have yielded some surprising results, one of the accused having, noted a contemporary, “not a tooth in his head wherewith to bite.” Hathorne does not appear to have questioned how—despite all the grievous pinching, choking, biting, punching—the bewitched remained in the pink of health. He trusted their spectral sight even when he himself could not make out a middle-aged parishioner perched, in her skirts, on an open beam. He viewed the descent of witchcraft as did Cotton Mather: the business was “managed in imagination yet may not be called imaginary.”* When the girls contradicted themselves, when they fumbled with an inconsistency, he turned a blind eye, discarding the facts that failed to fit his extraordinary case. Neither the fists in the mouth nor the timely trances nor Mary Warren’s charge that the girls dissembled gave him pause. All signs indicate a prosecutor single-mindedly pursuing a preordained end.

  At Hathorne’s elbow, throughout hearings and in prison interrogations, sat Reverend Nicholas Noyes, a plump, uncompromising poet.† A Salem fixture for a decade, Noyes was good company, vivacious and witty, the owner of the best local library, a Massachusetts mark of distinction. The son of an Essex County justice, the forty-five-year-old minister was comfortable in a courtroom. Noyes was friendly with the Putnams; the Sewall brothers considered him an intimate. He assumed a vocal role, challenging suspects before their testimonies, validating bits of evidence, offering his expert opinion, and making it impossible for suspects to get a word in edgewise. At one point he performed a courtroom experiment with burning poppets. He tackled any suspect who attempted to invoke Scripture in his or her defense. Neither Noyes nor Hathorne seems to have wondered why, when Bishop pressed herself upon her victim in bed, nearly stopping his breath, the wife at his side did not see her, or why children carted away by the devil never went missing from their households. Some things were illogical. Others made less sense. Why, for example, had Tituba flown on a stick to a meeting that took place in her own backyard?

  Hathorne interrogated ruthlessly and incarcerated reflexively. If there was a crime in your past, he would unearth it, with the “cross and swift questions” recommended under the circumstances. Through April 22 every suspect who appeared before him wound up in prison to await trial, whether he pleaded innocent or confessed to witchcraft. On the one hand, Hathorne was taking no chances. Salem homes echoed “with the doleful shrieks of their children and servants,” as Mather would put it. Their symptoms were nerve-rackingly, bloodcurdlingly authentic; the raving disrupted all aff
airs. The ground had thawed. The busiest season of the year was upon the villagers. It was time to plow and plant, to sink peg holes into the earth for seeds of Indian corn, to shear sheep and wash wool. On the other hand, Hathorne had reason to proceed with caution. Witchcraft constituted the gravest of crimes. Its facts were simple; its forensics difficult. Three possibilities presented themselves: the girls were bewitched; the girls dissembled; some kind of conspiracy was afoot. The situation was baffling. And like all baffling matters, this one seemed at once inexplicable and obvious. Hathorne opted for witchcraft and fixed on rooting it out. Not everyone shared his conviction. Under blistering interrogation, several of the first suspects agreed that something ailed the girls but would not concede it to be sorcery. Hathorne proceeded as if he knew better. What else, after all, was a witch likely to say on the stand? Moreover he had in hand—had had in hand for seven weeks—incontestable evidence, the sole certain proof of witchcraft. “It is no rare thing for witches to confess,” observed the British legal expert most regularly consulted at Salem. Tituba had made Hathorne’s case. Tiny Dorothy Good and wild Abigail Hobbs buttressed it.

  Hathorne all the same entertained some small, discomfiting kernel of doubt. In receipt of Putnam’s enigmatic letter, he designed an experiment for April 22. That Friday two extraordinary gatherings took place in Salem. Hathorne’s hearing was the less sensational, which was saying a great deal. The largest crowd yet piled into the dark pews and galleries of the village meetinghouse; they obscured the windows and Parris’s view. Amid the crush of bodies, accusers squinted and craned their necks to make out faces. With a full docket of suspects, Hathorne arranged for the marshal to lead in the first defendant without introduction. “Mercy Lewis,” Hathorne challenged the nineteen-year-old at the front of the room, “do you know her that stands at the bar?” The mounting number of witches may have alarmed Hathorne. Or the irregularities among testimonies had begun to tug at him; he may have singled out the Putnams’ maid because of her earlier foot-dragging. Among the eldest of the girls, Mercy seemed the likely ringleader. She could not name the suspect.* Hathorne appealed to the next accuser, almost certainly young Abigail, Parris’s niece. She was struck dumb.