Just as the examinations don’t merely assess previous crimes but provide a forum in which new ones occur, so Parris’s paper is not just a report of previous hauntings by John Proctor but an account of new ones taking place while it was actually coming into existence. It’s as though both yesterday’s examination and Mr. Parris’s paper have succeeded in parcelling up the witchcraft and delivering it still living to the judges, as an animal in a cage might be presented to a collector, snarling and baring its teeth.
In this respect the examination and the account fulfil the same function, which is perhaps why Mr. Danforth now gives Sewall a solemn nod, the sort that’s designed to make the recipient nod in turn, which Sewall does.
Parris then reads out John Proctor’s mittimus, which takes the same form as those for the women. As he listens Sewall takes note of the temporal words that are part of the required formula: on 11th of April and divers other times, as well before as after. . . . Evil has no beginning and no end, just like goodness. Its truth is also tenseless.
The marshall takes John Proctor out to join the two women in the cart, and it soon creaks off towards Boston. They will be benighted long before they arrive, and Sewall wonders where they will stay. The Proctors’ inn is conveniently situated for travellers on that road, but its doors are probably closed for now.
CHAPTER 12
Daughter Hannah is to go to stay in the town of Rowley with her mother’s cousin William Dummer and his wife, a couple without any children of their own. They decide to break the news to her privately in Sewall’s study, and ask Susan to go and fetch her. Timid servant leads in timid daughter. The two girls stand with heads lowered as if waiting to be told off.
‘Thank you, Susan,’ Sewall says brightly. He and his wife are sitting in chairs on either side of the fire, but the girls have positioned themselves beside his desk, like schoolchildren summoned by the teacher. Susan looks up, bemused, unaware that he is telling her she can go. Young Hannah’s hand sneaks over to grasp hers, though whether to give or receive comfort isn’t quite clear. Sewall hasn’t realised that the two girls have become such friends, but of course Susan is closer to Hannah in temperament than Betty is, being gentle and not tempestuous. ‘Susan,’ he says softly, hoping not to embarrass her, ‘you can leave us now.’
Young Hannah immediately turns towards Susan as if beseeching her to remain. ‘But you don’t need to,’ her mother says quickly, seeing this. ‘It’s nothing bad or secret. We just wanted to tell Hannah that it’s time for her to go away for a while. She will live with her Uncle William and Aunt Abigail up in Rowley, so she can get some experience of the world, just like you are doing here, Susan. It’s lovely up in Rowley. It’s right by Newbury, where Hannah’s father comes from.’
Hannah stares at her mother, white-faced with horror.
‘You like being with us, don’t you, Susan?’ wife Hannah asks.
‘Yes, madam.’ Susan’s face has gone white in sympathy with her friend’s. She and Hannah are still holding hands.
There’s a pause, then young Hannah whispers: ‘I like being with us too. That’s what I like.’ She swallows, and the plunge of her Adam’s apple hurts Sewall’s heart.
‘You will learn all sorts of new things when you’re there,’ her mother continues. ‘You’ve learned lots of new things since you’ve been with us, haven’t you, Susan?’ Susan solemnly nods but at the same time squeezes Hannah’s hand harder as if to ask forgiveness for this tiny betrayal.
‘But I don’t want to learn lots of new things,’ Hannah protests. ‘I can learn lots of new things if I stay here.’ She gives a little gasp, as if suddenly becoming aware of having contradicted herself. Then a tear rolls down each of her cheeks.
‘Dear child,’ Sewall says. ‘You’re thirteen now. It’s time you saw more of the world. You can’t stay with us for ever and ever.’
‘I want to stay with you for ever and ever,’ she says. ‘I don’t want to see more of the world. I don’t want to get married. I just want to live here, with you and Betty and Joseph and Mary, and with Sam if he was at home.’
‘You don’t have to get married, dearest,’ wife Hannah says. ‘Just stay with the Dummers for a while and then come back. That’s all you have to do.’’
‘You know I visited Uncle Stephen and Aunt Margaret over in Salem the other day,’ Sewall reminds her. ‘Well, they have a girl living with them called Betty Parris. She’s much younger than you, and she’s having a lovely time. She embroidered a cushion with a house on it.’
‘She’s a witch, that’s why she’s staying with them. I’m not a witch. I’ve never done any witch magic in my whole life. And I’m hopeless at sewing. If I wanted to learn sewing properly I could learn it here.’’
‘Betty Parris isn’t a witch,’ Sewall tells her. They have avoided mentioning her within earshot of the children. It’s amazing how stories get around. ‘None of those girls are witches. They are afflicted children. They have been fighting the Devil, not signing his book.’
‘I’ve never even seen the Devil and I never want to. I don’t want to sign his book and I don’t want to fight him either. I just want to stay THE—WAY—I—AM.’ She says this last not loudly but certainly in capital letters, with a pause between each word. Wife Hannah goes over to her daughter and embraces her. Immediately, young Hannah begins to sob loudly. Sewall realises how tall she has become—almost the same height as her mother—so that the raw childlike sounds seem incongruous.
Susan, standing to one side, suddenly looks very alone. She’s crying too. It occurs to him that she must find it hard living away from her own family, as she has done for several years. Of course, she has a living to earn while Hannah is only going off in order to be improved (indeed Sewall will pay a small monthly amount to cousin Dummer to cover her keep). There’s no way back to her family for Susan, though he can hardly remind his daughter of her own advantage in this respect within the servant girl’s hearing.
Eventually Hannah quietens down. She’s essentially an obedient child. ‘You must not forget your prayers while you’re away,’ Sewall reminds her.
‘No, father.’ She is in fact punctilious in her devotions, but seems content to leave complex matters for others (like her sister Betty) to wrestle with. She’s never expressed any concern about the question of election. Is that a sign of saintly innocence or spiritual complacency? Certainly in general she is innocent rather than complacent, so Sewall hopes for the best.
‘And we won’t forget to pray for you,’ he tells her. This is a mistake because she immediately begins crying once more at the thought of those faraway prayers.
A few days later a letter arrives. It’s from Thomas Putnam, father of one of the afflicted children. Or rather it’s a copy by Mr. Parris, acting in his capacity of court clerk, of a letter Putnam addressed generally to the judges. Sewall stares at it in bafflement. He has spent many years pondering Revelation but this is prophecy close at hand, in the here and now. ‘We, beholding continually the tremendous works of Divine Providence, not only every day but every hour,’ declaims Putnam, ‘ thought it our duty to inform your Honours of what we conceive you have not heard, which is high and dreadful. A wheel within a wheel, which makes our scalps tingle.’
Strangely, Goodman Putnam doesn’t go on to explain what it is that the justices have not yet heard, this wheel within a wheel. The letter leaves off abruptly with that tingling of scalps.
Next day Sewall is summoned to Dorchester to speak with Mr. Stoughton. He takes the letter along to show him. It’s a miserable ride, in pouring rain. ‘Ah,’ says Stoughton, by way of greeting. He’s sitting in his study behind a desk that’s empty save for a quill, a sand box, a sheet of paper. The room is cool, no fire lit. Sewall tries to express in his gaze a readiness, if not a need, even a yearning, for some refreshment after his miry journey, but Mr. Stoughton is impervious, not being himself a man prone to yearnings.
Mr. Stoughton glances down at it and then looks up at Sewall with grey unsurprised eyes. ‘I’ve seen a copy of this already,’ he says.
‘Do you know what the news is, then? This wheel within a wheel?’ Mr. Stoughton will be privy to wheels within wheels if anyone can be, having wheels within wheels of his own.
‘Have you ever seen a man with a performing monkey?’ Stoughton asks.
‘Yes,’ Sewall answers cautiously.
‘Well, this nobody, this Putnam, is one of those fathers who thinks his child is a performing monkey. He’s just a bankrupt farmer who believes his day in the sun has finally arrived.’
‘I see,’ says Sewall, somewhat bewildered.
‘His child, Ann Putnam, has seen George Burroughs.’
‘What? But he’s in Maine.’
‘He visited her in spectral form, I mean.’
Sewall stares speechlessly at Mr. Stoughton as the implications of this sink in.
‘Exactly,’ says Stoughton. ‘Mr. Burroughs. The minister. That’s why we don’t need the distraction of Ann Putnam’s father tooting his trumpet and banging his drum. The evidence is telling enough without a fanfare.’
Sewall was at Harvard with George Burroughs, though the two of them were never close. Burroughs is a dark-complexioned, stocky, saturnine man, short of stature, who kept himself to himself. Sewall was surprised he ended up in the ministry since he seemed too worldly for that calling, not in the sense of being acquisitive for the world’s goods but because he seemed so densely composed of material substance as to leave no nook or cranny for a spirit to flourish. He went to Salem Village as its second minister, following in the steps of Sewall’s old friend James Bayley. Like his predecessor and indeed his successors, Burroughs found it hard to manage on the wretched stipend that came with the appointment. His wife died and he had to borrow money to pay for her funeral. He then tried to leave his post without repaying the loan and was imprisoned overnight in the Salem lockup before going back to another ministry in Maine.
Sewall knows all this because Burroughs and his new wife visited Boston for a few days in 1685 and came to dinner, where he recounted the whole sorry story with considerable bitterness. Sewall got the impression that Burroughs lives in a state of bitterness just as a codfish inhabits a state of brine. Hannah didn’t take to him either, and thought his wife looked put upon.
‘What did he say? Or do?’ Sewall asks Stoughton.
‘Ann says a man dressed as a minister came to her in the night of April twentieth, the day before her doting father penned his letter. Choked her. Racked her. Told her he had given up endeavouring to bring children to God, and had engaged himself to bring them to the Devil instead. Wanted her to sign the book.’ Stoughton recounts all this in a curiously dry tone. ‘She didn’t recognise him, of course, since she would hardly have been born when he served in Salem Village.’
‘How did she know who he was in that case?’
‘She asked him and he told her. That’s what makes it so compelling. She had no previous knowledge of the man’s existence and only discovered who he was during the haunting itself. He boasted to her that he had murdered his first two wives.
‘Two wives? I knew his first wife had died, and I met the second. I had no idea she had died too.’
‘He’s now on his third, God preserve her. But that proves the point. You are acquainted with the man and yet you haven’t been able to keep count of all his wives up there in Maine. This child knew nothing of him, or of them, yet has the tally.’
A minister. This is the most serious subversion of religion that can be imagined. From the very beginning of the witch infestation, the Devil has been prowling about the Salem Village manse in hopes of suborning the minister and thereby regularising, even legitimizing, his observances, if such a term can be used for diabolical practices. Mr. Parris must have resisted successfully, probably because he was deep in prayer at the times in question. Moreover, any possibility of a soft entrance, to use Mr. Mather’s term, via his daughter Betty has been abruptly blocked by the intervention of Stephen and Margaret, so the Devil had to cast about for an alternative.
Mr. Stoughton now explains his purpose in summoning Sewall. Once again it’s necessary to give an examination more gravitas than Mr. Hathorne and Mr. Corwin can provide alone. At the same time it’s important that Mr. Burroughs’s hearing, which will take place in the Salem Town meeting house, doesn’t become a vulgar spectacle, so it will be held in camera and there will only be two extra judges, men who can be relied on to conduct proceedings with discretion and propriety: Mr. Stoughton himself, and Mr. Sewall.
This is a pivotal moment. Religion is being undermined. Perhaps the whole colonial adventure of New England is in the balance. And Mr. Stoughton has entrusted him, Sewall, with the responsibility of making a judgement on matters of such overwhelming importance. The business of the pirates seems securely past. Mr. Stoughton respects his integrity. Mr. Stoughton trusts him as a man of independent mind, one able to stand on his own two feet. Still hungry and thirsty, but exuberant nonetheless, Sewall puts on his still wet coat, mounts his still damp horse, and trots out into the still raining day.
He’s almost at the Dorchester town line when doubt suddenly strikes him. Perhaps Mr. Stoughton has once more chosen him for precisely the opposite reason from what he assumed, has chosen him as a colleague because he was not independent, and didn’t stand on his own two feet?
George Burroughs’s examination is scheduled for May 9th. Sewall decides to take his daughter Hannah up to Rowley on the seventh, stay the night there, and then make his way to Salem Town next day. He rents a little carriage so Hannah can feel pampered, and Bastian trots along beside them on another horse so that tomorrow he can take the carriage back to Boston while Sewall takes over the horse to ride to Salem.
The Dummers are decent, hardworking people. They lack the capacity for merriment that Stephen and Margaret possess, and in his heart of hearts Sewall would like an admixture of jollity to leaven his daughter’s reserved nature. Still, if she won’t learn to laugh in Rowley, she might at least discover how to be sensible, even practical.
William Dummer greets them at the front door. He’s a short man with a large bulging forehead (even though not given to scholarly pursuits). He is wearing rough farming clothes and is covered in fine golden dust. He explains he has been cleaning the scrag-end of last year’s hay from his barn. His wife hasn’t come out to greet them because she has a sore throat.
‘Ha!’ cries Sewall, ‘we know a remedy for that. Don’t we, my dear?’
‘Do we?’ asks Hannah.
‘Of course we do. Mr. Hobart gave us the recipe when your throat was sore.’
‘I made Abigail drink a porringer of sage tea this morning,’ Dummer explains.
‘Sage tea is excellent for easing the soreness. And it can bring on a kindly sweat. But the cure, Mr. Hobart informed me, is best brought about by taking the inside of a swallow’s nest, stamping it flat, and wrapping it round the throat.’
Dummer looks taken aback at the radicalness of this solution. ‘And did that cure you?’ he asks Hannah.
‘No,’ she replies.
‘We couldn’t find a swallow’s nest conveniently to hand,’ Sewall explains.
‘I don’t think I will be able to either,’ Dummer says.
‘Hannah can help nurse her back to health. Can’t you, Hannah?’
‘I wouldn’t want to give her a sore throat as soon as she arrives in Rowley,’ says Dummer, noting Hannah’s recoil at this suggestion.
Sewall rises early the next day but cousin William, keeping farmer’s time, is up and out already. And Bastian is seated in the carriage outside t
he front door, all set to take his leave. Just as he is about to crack the whip Hannah hurries out, her clothes on higgledy-piggledy and her eyes small and blind-looking without their glasses. She clutches the carriage wheel as if to prevent it moving off.
Sewall unpicks her fingers then holds her hand as if his only motive was affection (which in a sense is true). ‘Goodbye, Bastian,’ she says forlornly.
‘Goodbye, miss. I’ll come and fetch you back home, when it’s time. If the master permits.’
‘We’ll come together, won’t we, Bastian?’ Sewall replies heartily. ‘To bring my maid home when she’s ready.’
‘I’m ready now,’ Hannah says.
‘We will bring her home sure enough,’ says Bastian.
This assurance is rewarded by a little animal noise from Hannah, a combined sob and sigh. As the carriage departs, she says, ‘It’s not fair. Bastian’s going home and I have to stay here.’
‘Shush,’ Sewall warns as Abigail Dummer comes out of the door. Her throat is somewhat better, she explains, but Hannah should not give her a kiss in case of infection. Hannah doesn’t seem minded to offer a kiss in any case.
Cousin Abigail is short and stocky like her husband. She’s wearing an apron over her skirts, and carrying a small bell. ‘This can be one of your tasks, Hannah,’ she says. ‘Ringing this bell every morning.’ She hands it to the child, who shakes it so unenthusiastically the clapper fails to move.
‘What’s it for?’ she asks, sounding mulish. It’s amazing to see how unhappiness and fear can sour a sweet disposition.
‘To call my William in for breakfast. Ring it, Hannah,’ she says. ‘Ring it.’
The four of them sit down at table together. Cousin Abigail has prepared yokeheg, an Indian dish made from parched corn ground into a powder and mixed with sugar, then served with milk. Coupled with the smell of soil cousin William has brought in with him, the porridge brings back Sewall’s childhood days in nearby Newbury and he feels a pang at the scattering of his own family: first Sam, now Hannah. At the end of the meal he says that he must be off to Salem.
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