Moreover he suspects that one of the reasons for his hesitation is a fear of Acting Governor Stoughton’s reaction to the suggestion of a fast. But fear of authority, or at least the desire to placate those in power, is the very failing he has been trying to combat for years. So Sewall finally proposes to Council that a fast bill is needed. He already has a form of words in mind and is prepared to promise Mr. Stoughton a draft for Council’s approval by tomorrow morning.
Acting Governor Stoughton looks around the council chamber with that grey hard gaze of his, his mouth a tad ajar as if in readiness to give vent to the opposing argument. But what he sees is a group of men who are deeply disturbed by the hardships that have overtaken their community and willing to clutch at any straw (this is how Sewall construes Mr. Stoughton’s contemptuous expression) in hopes of alleviating them. Mr. Stoughton’s mouth closes while his response is revised. Then opens again. ‘Mr. Sewall.’
‘Yes, your honour.’
‘It seems to me that Mr. Cotton Mather would be the most appropriate person to draft such a bill. He has a thorough understanding of the Salem trials and has written learned commentaries on them. Since you have introduced the subject to Council perhaps you could deliver this request to him.’
‘Yes, your honour,’ Sewall says weakly. He sits down again. The shock of this unexpected twist makes him feel almost tearful. The fact that in every confrontation he has with Mr. Stoughton the latter always gets the upper hand only adds to his woe.
Cotton Mather is delighted to receive the commission, and paces up and down in his study while he digests the task. Sewall has caught him wigless at his desk, scratching away with his quill on a sermon for Thursday lecture. ‘It’s a challenge, Mr. Sewall,’ he says. ‘What is needed is, how to describe it?, a diplomatic form of words.’
‘Diplomatic? Surely it needs to be heartfelt rather than diplomatic?’
‘Ah ha! That’s a common mistake, I’m afraid, old friend. People construe the word as meaning evasive or even mendacious. But diplomacy is far from obfuscation. Indeed it’s a kind of precision. It weaves in and out of the complexities of a situation,’ (he weaves a hand in and out of these hypothetical complexities) ‘making a judicious claim here and an appropriate admission there’ (plucking a claim and an admission in turn like imaginary apples from a tree).
A snow-encrusted Cotton Mather, now bewigged, knocks on Sewall’s front door first thing next morning with his fast-day proposal. Sewall doesn’t have time to appraise it before setting out himself to read it to Council.
Cotton Mather has produced a long list of reasons why the province is facing its present adversity: backsliding from the faith, loss of family discipline, discouragement of the guardians of the law, failure to bring piracy under control (reading this one makes Sewall blench), vanity in dress (this one should make Mr. Mather himself blench), selling strong liquor to the Indians, uncleanness, failure to thank God in times of good harvest (times that now, alas, seem remote), and so on. In the middle of this melancholy itemization is a fleeting reference to the hardship meted out to innocent persons as a result of certain errors. The Salem witchcraft trials are to be buried beneath a great weight of assorted wrong-doing.
Mr. Stoughton is delighted with the document and eager to pass a proposal for a day of fasting on such general grounds. Sewall, though, is deeply disappointed. This is just the sort of thing he feared. As far as he is concerned, the proposal represents diplomacy in exactly the bad sense that Cotton Mather repudiated. Yet again he prepares himself to make a case against authority (both Mr. Stoughton’s and Cotton Mather’s).
To his surprise it turns out not to be necessary. Member after member stands up to complain that Massachusetts is not as riddled with faults as Mr. Mather’s ingenious stocktaking suggests, that the issue is solely the matter of the witchcraft aberration. Sewall offers to revise the proposal’s wording. His suggestion is greeted with such enthusiasm that even Mr. Stoughton, staring over the excited chamber with those dark-rimmed eyes of his, cannot gainsay it.
That evening Sewall goes into his study and reflects.
First he kneels on the floor and prays for guidance. Then he sits down at his desk and thinks back on the events of that summer four years before.
If there were no witches at work in this land, then what there was was a fear of witches, a fear that must have been implanted by Satan himself. And Satan was able to do so because the colony had lost confidence in its original endeavour. It had cleared a space for itself in a heathen land and planted a Christian community there. Then a lifetime had gone by. The founding fathers began to pass away, and their plantation had to find a way of maintaining itself, not simply as the spiritual enterprise of a holy generation but as a land like other lands, persisting through history.
Doubts inevitably crept in. People began to assume that the colony would be choked by the wilderness it had kept at bay, that the heathen forces that lay beyond its bounds would slip into it and reclaim their territory. The Indians were Simia Dei; their allies in Satan’s army, the witches, also parodied and mocked Christian sacraments from their vantage point in the very heart of the community. That was the fear.
Which, it turns out, was entirely unfounded. For one thing, the witches were not witches at all. Cotton Mather was quite right to criticise spectre evidence in his Return, as Sewall realised some time ago. One day he had suddenly recalled Mr. Putnam’s claim that the spectre of Jacob Goodale, the farmworker murdered many years ago by Giles Corey, had appeared to his daughter Ann to inform her of the condemned man’s wickedness. Goodale was a spectre and at the same time innocent (certainly in the sense of not being a witch), yet the whole basis of the trials was that it was impossible for anyone other than a witch to be a spectre! The child also claimed to have been visited by the spectres of George Burroughs’s dead wives—two more spectres who were manifestly not witches.
The whole edifice of the trials had been built on false foundations. Those suffering children were not being afflicted by their fellow villagers. They were playing games, or hallucinating, or being manipulated by their parents—or the Devil. Perhaps all of those things.
And far from being Simia Dei, the Indians are actually the key to the fulfilment of the colony’s Christian destiny, as Sewall has always believed; they are the lost tribes of Israel, and their conversion will usher in the millennium.
Sewall puts pen to paper and drafts his Fast Day proposal.
God has shown his anger by cutting short the harvest, and following a bad summer by a severe winter. A fast day will be appointed for 14 January 1697 so that whatever mistakes were fallen into during the recent tragedy that was brought about by Satan and his instruments would be subject to God’s awful judgement; that He will humble us and pardon the errors of all those who desire to love His name and will visit atonement on this land. Also that God will bring the American heathen into the Christian fellowship, and cause them to hear His voice, so reviving that joyful proverb in the world: one flock, one shepherd.
Next day in Council there’s an uneasy silence after Sewall has read out his proposal.
‘This paper seems more concerned with Indians than with witchcraft,’ Mr. Winthrop eventually complains.
Nathaniel Saltonstall rises to his feet. He gives Sewall that characteristic warm smile of his. ‘I think, Mr. Winthrop,’ he says, maintaining his gaze towards Sewall, ‘the reason is that in our province we have Indians aplenty but no witchcraft at all.’
Saltonstall knows of what he speaks. He denied the existence of witches even in the middle of the frenzy but has encountered his share of Indians. Only last year his town of Haverhill was attacked by a band of eighty but under his leadership drove them away, a feat that earned him promotion to Colonel of the North Essex Regiment. It seems a long time since he suffered that fear of losing his commission.
‘It is precisely because we have an abundance of Indians that I
am cautious about this talk of fellowship,’ says Mr. Stoughton.
Sewall’s heart sinks. The word ‘fellowship’ seems to him the key for exorcising the long shadow of the witchcraft injustice and walking once again in the light.
In the end the last sentence of the proposal is truncated, joy is eradicated, and hearing the word becomes obedience to it, so that it reads: Also that God will bring the American heathen into the Christian fellowship, and cause them to obey His voice.
But the word ‘fellowship’ has survived, despite Mr. Stoughton’s immediate objection to it, and it is a word that can bring other good things in its wake.
Susan opens the front door when he finally reaches home. ‘Look, I’m a snowman,’ he tells her.
‘Nurse Cowell is here, master.’
‘Nurse Cowell?’
‘Nurse Hurd is here too. She is attending Madam Sewall. Madam has got her sickness again.’ Hannah is prone to terrible prostrating headaches from time to time, coupled with stomach upsets.
‘So who is—?’
‘Nurse Cowell is with baby Sarah.’ Susan suddenly breaks into tears. ‘She has her fits again,’ she gets out at last.
Nurse Cowell is a plump matronly figure. She puts a finger against her lips as Sewall bursts into the room. ‘Quiet, please,’ she whispers fiercely. ‘Sarah is sleeping.’
Sewall stops in his tracks. The snowy lid on his bonnet is thawing already and water trickles down his neck. His little daughter is pale as snow herself as she lies on her bed. Her closed eyelids have a faint blue sheen as if the eyes beneath are peering through them. Her tiny lips are almost white. As he looks down at her a shudder runs through her whole body. He turns to look enquiringly at Nurse Cowell.
‘I gave her some milk and marigold jam but she vomited it up,’ she tells him. ‘The fits are still upon her, but much reduced while she sleeps. Leave her in peace.’
Sewall goes to his wife’s chamber. She is also asleep or at least lying peacefully in her bed. Goody Hurd is by the dresser mixing medicine for her, dictating the measurements to herself out loud so as not to make a mistake. She has become an old lady now, Sewall realises. He undoes the bow beneath his chin, removes his bonnet and places it to dry in the hearth of the little fire. He does the same with his cloak, then takes up the poker and stirs the logs. At this sound Goody Hurd turns to face him with her hand over her heart.
I’m sorry,’ he mouths to her across the room, then makes his way over to Hannah’s bedside and sits down on a chair. She mutters a greeting from far away. He takes her hand which is lying on top of the coverlet. The room is cosy after his arduous journey through the cold, and very soon he has fallen into a doze.
From which he is rudely awakened by tuggings at his sleeve, little Susan pulling at him the way a child pulls at a grown-up to persuade him to go in a wanted direction. Across the room Nurse Hurd turns from her potions and looks aghast.
‘I am so, so sorry, sir,’ says Nurse Cowell as they enter the child’s room. ‘I would have called you if I’d known. I thought she was all right for the time being. Just sleeping.’ Her face is white with shock and sorrow and fear.
Sewall pats her shoulder. ‘My child has dreamed her way to heaven,’ he tells her.
‘I must not have been paying her enough attention.’
‘You mustn’t blame yourself. The neglect is mine, not yours. I am her father.’
That evening Sewall and the children sit mournfully around the fire in the hall. Wife Hannah remains upstairs in her bed (after the news of Sarah’s death was broken to her, Nurse Hurd administered a sleeping potion). The children have all cried plentifully and are now mainly confining themselves to the occasional wavering sigh or sob.
‘I think we should have a reading from the Bible,’ Sewall tells them after a while. ‘It is always a comfort in times of sorrow.’ He nearly asks Betty to do it since she is still the best reader of them all, but he fears that she will be overcome by grief which, at the present moment, will be more than he can bear, so instead he invites Sam to read chapter twelve of Matthew’s gospel.
Sam begins in a monotonous voice: At that time Jesus went on the Sabbath day through the corn; and his disciples were an hungred, and began to pluck the ears of corn, and to eat . . .
But when he gets to the seventh verse, an extraordinary thing happens.
Sam, at eighteen, has a husky retreating voice for much of the time (except when larking with his friend Josiah) but now it seems to have become strangely forceful and commanding (like Goody Good’s did, when she addressed Mr. Noyes from the foot of the gallows), so that the words of the seventh verse of Matthew 12 echo and re-echo in Sewall’s head: But if ye had known what this meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice, ye would not have condemned the guiltless.
Sam continues to read but Sewall can no longer follow. His mind is wholly concerned with this one verse which, he realises, directly relates to the Salem tragedy. Ye would not have condemned the guiltless.
He remembers what he said to comfort Nurse Cowell: the neglect is mine, not yours, I am her father. Only now its true significance strikes him.
Yesterday he objected to Cotton Mather’s fast day proposal on the grounds that it buried the witchcraft injustices in a heap of other lapses, sins and errors, some big and some small. Then just this morning he himself put forward a proposal in which his own responsibility for those outrages was buried in a generalised confession on the part of the community as a whole. That too was an evasion.
Sewall was a judge at that court. He condemned the guiltless. He failed to show mercy. In the years since the ending of the trials he has comforted himself with a collective view of the whole tragedy, concentrating on the notion of fellowship, a fellowship that disappeared when the community divided against itself, then formed again.
But that was simply a convenient way of getting lost in the crowd. He has to recognise that it is not just society as a whole that has to atone, but he himself also. He imagined spectres on a roof-beam and was fooled by supernatural trickery and fraud even while condemning magicians’ tricks. He was the father of that miscarriage of justice in Salem just as he was the father of little Sarah. And to remind him of that connection, God has taken away his daughter as He took away his little stillborn son in the summer. These children were indeed the victims of Sewall’s neglect, his neglect of the sins he committed in 1692.
Suddenly the lost boy claims his father’s attention in his own right. There he is at this moment, out in that dark night, buried in the garden under a heap of soil and a drift of snow, all alone.
Next morning Sewall speaks to Bastian. ‘I have a hard task for you,’ he tells him.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I want you to dig up my little son.’
‘Your son?’
‘My little son who is buried in the garden.’
‘The stillborn one?’
For a moment Sewall is tempted to ask Bastian how many sons does he think are buried in the garden, but holds his tongue. The man is remembering Mr. Willard’s assertion that the infant wasn’t a son at all, wasn’t anything. ‘The stillborn one,’ he agrees instead.
‘But, master—’
‘I know it’s a difficult task, the snow being so deep. It won’t be easy to find the correct spot. And underneath the snow the ground will be hard.’ The thought of his boy in that hard ground suddenly catches in his throat. ‘But tomorrow we place little Sarah in the family vault, and I wish to put her brother in there with her, so they can be together and with all the rest.’
Bastian gives him a long sympathetic look with those large brown eyes of his, then nods his head. ‘I will do it, sir,’ he says quietly. ‘I know where he is.’
Mr. Willard strides into Sewall’s study. ‘May I ask what you think you are doing?’ he demands.
‘I am sitting in my study, thinking—’
‘Sitting in my study, thinking about the interment of my two children tomorrow morning,’ Sewall continues mildly. ‘I have prayed for them and shortly I will pray again. Perhaps you will pray with me, Mr. Willard? As my minister. And my friend.’
‘I don’t know how often I must tell you this. The stillborn one was never baptized. He cannot be placed alongside members of the family.’
‘Mr. Willard, it is my family.’
‘I am using the word family in the larger congregational sense.’ Mr. Willard stands over Sewall and says in a loud voice, poking him in the chest with his finger after each word: ‘The–family–of–the–elect.’ Then he steps back, takes out a handkerchief and blows his large nose (somewhat blue from the cold) with a parsonical trumpeting. ‘The stillborn is not part of the Christian family because he never drew breath,’ he continues with great stress and emphasis, folding the handkerchief and tucking it into his sleeve meanwhile. ‘He wasn’t baptized. If you insist on trying to include him, you will only succeed in excluding yourself.’
Once more Sewall recalls the promise he made to Betty, that if she should go to hell, he would join her there. It applies to his son also, to all his children.
‘Mr. Willard!’ says a loud voice from the doorway, making both men start. It’s the housekeeper, Sarah, standing there in cap and apron, her large and floury arms sternly folded across her bosom. ‘I could hear the rumpus you was making right down in the kitchen. I shouldn’t have to remind you that my poor little namesake died yesterday.’ (Sarah was extraordinarily proud to share her given name with the little girl, and—Sewall suspected—assumed the child had been named in her honour rather than after Abraham’s wife.) ‘This is a house in mourning and I can’t have you upsetting the master like this, minister or no minister.’
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