Parris stuck out his index finger and curled it in the gesture that said for Jeremy to enter.
Jeremy felt a surge of excitement and a bit of pride that held tight rein on. After all, in the space of hours, he’d won the confidence of the minister and had gotten past a deacon’s threshold. He recalled having told Mather how wrong he was for this assignment, but perhaps the Mathers and old Higginson had been right after all—that in fact, he’d do well in Salem Village…after all.
Jeremy soon met Mercy Lewis who was called and told to come down from the loft room overhead. Little Anne Putnam Junior followed Mercy down, quaking on quill pen legs. Parris made a lecture of it, a sermon directed at Mercy, insisting the girl follow Mrs. Putnam’s teachings and orders without complaint or backtalk. He then blessed both girls and the household, making a rather quick affair of it all. In fact, Jeremy hardly got a look at Mercy or Little Anne, as she was called, save for Anne’s eyes—like two large seedless grapes; no light seemed able to reflect from those eyes.
Chapter Six
They saw other parishioners about the village during the day as well, and Parris took Jeremy to the meetinghouse to show him the place, and by day’s end, they’d returned home to a meal of mostly hot vegetables and rabbit stew. The household remained peaceable all evening, and once again Tituba slept in the barn, despite Mrs. Parris’ offering a corner of her bedroom, but Mr. Parris would not hear of “such an arrangement”, while Mrs. Parris countered with “and you think her sleeping in a cold barn with the livestock is a proper arrangement?”
Again Jeremy offered to take the stall in the barn, but Parris stood adamant about the sleeping arrangements.
The following day felt like an absolute déjà vu sequence for Jeremy, as at breakfast, once again, there came a clamor at the door, yet another message sent by Mrs. Putnam for Parris to come to her aide—again citing Mercy as the cause of her distress.
And so together, Jeremy and Parris again traversed the common for the Putnam home. Along the way, this time, Jeremy decided he must confess something to Parris and he used the term confess.
“Confess? What are you talking about, man?”
“I’m sorry, sir, if it displease you, but you should know something about me, Mr. Parris, about my past.”
This stopped their progress, as Parris, looking perplexed, asked, “Your past?”
“In reference to how I know the history of the parish? You thought me so studious the other day and I confessed not. . . as it will become general knowledge once certain parties recognize my return to Salem—”
Parris right hand shot up to silence Jeremy, and white-faced, he near whispered, “Recognize you, Mr. Wakely?”
“I was previously a citizen here, sir, years ago. It’s why—”
“Citizen? Here?”
“Yes, you see my father’s shop on North Ipswich Road—”
“You have family here?”
“Family, no. History, yes.”
“Riddles I can’t abide, Mr. Wakely. Speak plainly, as plainly as that witch who confronted us t’other day.”
Jeremy planted his feet, causing Parris to halt and meet the younger man’s flame blue eyes as Jeremy spoke firmly, enunciating each word: “I am striving toward clarity, sir, if you will but—”
“Clarity indeed? So you have a history with this parish, and you are just telling the this now?”
“I do. I mean, yes. That is, I did.” Jeremy’s jaw quivered as he bared down on his teeth.
“And from your tone and grimace, it would seem a foul history?”
“Not not unlike your own, sir.”
As if by providence, they wound up at the old chestnut tree again, and both men wondered at the appearance of what appeared the very same raven as before. It seemed either coincidence or sign. “Go on, Jeremy,” urged Parris.
“Reverend Deodat Lawson oversaw my father’s excommunication.”
“My God.”
“And by extension my own, so far as I was concerned.”
“The son is not necessarily heir to the sins of the father,” said Parris thoughtfully.
“He is if he’s in Salem, sir.”
“But you must’ve been a mere boy at the time.”
“Yes, sir . . . a runner for Mr. Ingersoll’s Inn, and I did sit watch a number of times up yonder at—”
“Sit watch?”
“Yonder on Watch Hill with Mr. Ingersoll nights.”
“Aye, I see. The same Ingersoll as is now one of my deacons.”
“Not so at the time, but had he been, I’m sure he’d have opposed what they did to my father and stepmother.”
Parris now stared into Jeremiah’s hard-set eyes, searching the gray orbs. “Your parents then moved off? To the settlements along the Connecticut? Or rather Maine, I suppose.”
“My natural mother died giving me life. My stepmother contracted the fever and died here, but being not of the faith, she was refused burial in the parish cemetery—as was my father for having dared married out of the faith.”
“She was of what faith then?” he asked.
“Catholic…of French decent. Father met her in Salem seaport, saved her from the jailer.”
“Save her, indeed? How romantic.”
“She’d been a stowaway on a Portuguese freighter. They turned her over to the courts. My father, hearing of it, paid her jail fines and took her in as an indentured servant but they fell I love soon after.”
“Married a Catholic. Indeed reason for concern, Jeremy,” Parris paused, patting Jeremy on the shoulder, “but to refuse hollowed ground? To excommunicate a man?”
“Deodat Lawson saw it that way, and so did the congregation, almost every man, woman, and child. I was there. Saw them fired up.”
“I am not a scholarly theologian, Jeremy, and I may not know all the tenets of Puritanism and am perhaps wrong in my condemnation of the wrongs done you, but my God…and in this place…” he waved a sweeping hand to take in the village… “in this hovel, any manner of indignity is possible, Jeremy, and while I might myself balk at having a man in my parish marry a Catholic and presuppose he might sit in my church, I would stop short of excommunication and thereby withhold proper burial to one of my parishioners.”
Jeremiah realized two things on hearing this speech come from Parris. One, the man could convince the bark on a tree to peal itself off, and two, in the single emphasized word ‘hovel’ Parris had given himself away. In that single word, he had revealed his utter contempt for Salem—again calling into question why he’d come here from Barbados if not to, as any business-minded man might, strike a better and more lucrative deal. There had to be a larger motive for his moving his family to Salem than to simply preach here, larger still than his having cut so generous a deal with the parish for lands that were not theirs to deed over to him.
More softly now, Parris said, “Then your birth mother alone is buried in our cemetery?”
“Yes and no.”
“More with the riddles. State it, man! You speak like a poet. Say what you mean outright, please.”
“Both my mothers and my father are buried here but two were outside the churchyard fence originally, but from what I’ve seen, the church yard had to expand the boundaries after ten years. It does appear that now all three of my parents are in your cemetery—sinners or no.”
Parris threw his head back and laughed at this, sending the raven flying from its perch, and for a moment, Jeremy glimpsed the man as he must once have been, a hearty hellion bent on drink and life.
“I see,” Parris coughed out a few words between belly laughs. “I begin to see.”
“She being of the Papal faith, and he being an outcast,” continued Jeremy, knowing that if he weren’t forthcoming that Parris would get the story from another source. “Excommunicated on the heels of burying his wife, my mother.”
“Which makes you what?” Parris did not mean this as any sort of barb, but spoke out of confusion.
“I am my own man, sir.”
“Wakely…Wakely…yes, I’d heard it as Walker or Warfield, but yes, I’ve heard tell of this man, your father. Was he not a dish-turner by trade? Married a Frenchy, yes.”
“And we all know what that portends.”
He gave Jeremy a searching look, trying to determine if his last remark was jest or anger. But Parris said no more on the subject, allowing his dark brown eyes to speak for him. Then he suddenly exploded with more laughter, which drew almost as much curiosity from passers-by as had their run-in with Goode the day before.
“What do you find humorous, sir?”
“Now I understand why you’re here. You in particular, that is.”
“I have no vengeance motive, sir.”
“Sure.” He nodded exaggeratedly. “I am sure.”
# # # # #
With great energy, as if the revelation of Wakely’s having been an ill-treated villager had filled his blood with some strange elixir that fueled this complicated man named Parris, Jeremy watched him march on for the Putnams, to do battle there once again with a little girl causing havoc in his parish—his orphaned niece, Mercy.
Jeremy had to truly rush to keep up, and as he did so, a good fire burned within him as well. Increase Mather had proved a genius, somehow knowing this moment between Jeremy and Parris would occur. For having shared his infuriating past and his anger at the parish with Samuel Parris, Jeremy had forged an instant bond with the maligned minister. Mather had predicted it. While Parris remained suspicious and aloof, he now trusted to a notion that Jeremy’s basest instincts had brought him back to this hovel to minister to these people in the form of some sort of retribution. Something Jeremy imagined that pleased the Reverend Samuel Parris, as if he’d discovered yet another kinsman to stand on his side—Jeremiah Wakely.
And thanks to that false sense of kinship, the man might let his renowned guard down just long enough for me to collect the evidence needed. Evidence that’d perhaps bring Parris to the day of his excommunication from Salem Village. A righteous one, and not the farce that’d devastated the Wakely family.
Again they heard of the abuses Mrs. Putnam had taken from Mercy, and that Little Anne, too, was misbehaving and getting into bad habits, all due to Mercy’s having more and more influence over Anne Junior. Again Parris preached and prayed over the heads of the two little girls who lived beneath the Putnam roof. This time, he called on Jeremy to add his prayer, and having prepared for such moments, Jeremy did not hesitate, asking the children to say the Lord’s Prayer with him. Finally, once more Parris convinced the Putnams to give Mercy more time to adjust to her new master and mistress, and to her new duties and surroundings.
Chapter Seven
The following midnight at the Putnam home
“Your mother is strange, Anne,” said Mercy Lewis from where she lay bundled beneath her woolen blanket atop her straw-tick mattress. Like the younger Anne, she wore a thin and plain linen nightshirt—a feed bag, she called it. Mercy was propped on one elbow where she’d awakened to the noises filtering up to them from below. She felt restless in the small trundle bed here across the attic loft from frail, gaunt Anne Putnam Junior. “I said your ma’s weird, making all those noises in the night.”
“She is not strange nor weird!” Anne replied and sat up, her lips puckering in anger, her own feedbag too large for her tiny frame.
“Then what’s all those nasty sounds coming from her room all night? Gracious! Sounds as much a ruckus as Goody Goode put on my uncle the other day.”
“Don’t call my ma a witch!”
“I didn’t never call her a witch, but I know some who have.”
“Mother . . . she only talks to herself is all.”
“Talks? That’s talk? She screams like. . . like as if your father’s beatin’er!”
“My father don’t beat nobody! You shut up, Mercy! Just shut up!”
“Your father ever come for me, I’ll stab him with this,” replied Mercy, holding up a huge knitting needle.
“Wherever’d you get that?”
“Goody Goode give it to me for protection. Said it had magical powers.”
“That old witch? You’d best steer clear of that hag ‘lest you turn into one.”
“Ah, She’s not so bad as people make her out.”
“Make ’er angry then! See if she don’t put a hex on ya, Mercy.”
“She says your ma’s a witch.”
“She’s a liar. Goode’s a lying witch!”
“Says your ma traffics with the Devil.”
“My ma’s had a horrible life is all, and she’s . . . “
Mercy came to Anne’s bed and sat with her. “She’s what?”
“She’s haunted; that’s what she is. No different than me.”
“You, Anne, haunted? Anne, talk to me.”
“She cries every night for the dead children she brought into this world before me, and—and so do I.”
“All them sisters and brothers, ten, I heard.” Mercy shook here head. “All born dead.”
“Nine, me being number ten, but they didn’t all go at birth. Not all. Some lived for a time.”
“How long?” Thirteen-year-old Mercy Lewis, elder cousin to Betty Parris, had recently discovered her flesh, and her breasts gave her more pleasure than all the sermons her uncle could spew from pulpit and dinner table, but she was always quick to pick up on any gossip and there was plenty at the Parris’ home. “How long did the longest one live?”
“That’d be Thomas the Third. He lived almost six months.”
“I hear you almost died, too.” Mercy studied the younger girl.
“I’m here, ain’t I? I turn’t eleven back in January.”
“And you ain’t dead yet?” Mercy giggled. “So that makes you the longest to live, not Thomas the Third. You beat out your brothers.”
“No, I ain’t, Mercy Lewis! I’m not one of them.”
“Not one of them?”
“The dead brothers and sisters; they’re together. Me . . . I’m alone.”
“Not no more.”
“Whataya mean?”
“You got me. I’ll be your big sister.”
Anne smiled at the notion. “Y-You mean it?”
“My but you look whiter than death. I got to find ways to get you outside in the sun. What little we get here in this dingy place is awful.”
“How? Mother doesn’t let us out of her sight. Work all day in the house.”
Mercy bounced on her knees on Anne’s bed. “That’s what I mean when I say she’s a witch!”
“Shut your mouth!” Anne’s voice traveled through the house.
“Shhh, you want them coming up and yelling again?”
“Then you shush that talk, and quit thinking bad of us!”
“Just saying what I was told.” Mercy sulked while playing with Anne’s hair.
“Then you was told wrong by a mean-spirited old bitch.”
Mercy laughed and covered her mouth with both hands.
“What’s so funny?”
“Your little white face goes all red when you curse.”
Thin, frail, small-boned Anne Putnam Junior dropped her head and wiped away a tear. “My mother and me, we’re both haunted is all. That’s all. You’d be haunted too by your dead fam’ly if . . . ”
“If what? Go on, say it. I hear it behind my back all the time. Say it, Anne!” She squeezed the younger girl’s arm hard.
“If you truly had any heart—Mercy Lewis—but you haven’t any.”
“I got no memory of how my parents died,” Mercy countered, letting Anne go, her eyes flashing anger.
“None? How can that be?”
“Only know what people’ve told me is all.” Mercy pretended sniffles. “So, so it might seem I don’t have no feelings ’bout it, but I do. I surely do.” Mercy worked to imagine it; how horrible her parents had died when hostile Indians had attacked their farmstead eleven years ago, but she might just as well attempt to dredge up ancient Roman soldiers hoisting Ch
rist on the cross for all the good it’d do—as she did not have any feeling for either event, largely due to her having heard these two stories so often and from so many directions for so many years now that she’d become stonily cold to both fairy tales as she considered each.
Mercy had been found below the burned out home, below the floor, and below the bodies. Or so she’d been told so often that it had no meaning any longer. “Your father and mother loved you ’til the end,” Uncle Wilkins, Uncle Revelation, and Uncle Parris had all repeatedly reminded her. “They protected you with the last measure of their blood. They protected you with their very bodies.”
In truth, she had no feelings about her unremembered parents or the incident that they had earned a kind of ‘sainthood’ for in a community that disdained saints. Mercy’s not caring and not remembering, and her disdain for the oft repeated tale had grown into a cancerous guilt within her—one that manifested itself in hurting others in the most devious ways she could manage. And if she should fail in deviousness, she’d make it up in outright theft and lies. She had once told Uncle Samuel that she dared Satan to come near her.
His response was to again tell her how her parents had died so that she might live. All the same, whenever someone reminded her of the defining incident, she could not grasp it. Perhaps I don’t want to, she secretly told herself. Either way, it only nurtured the guilt until she’d become angry toward everyone, because everyone in the village looked at her with curious or pitying eyes. How had she survived?
“Soooo,” Mercy cooed at nine-year-old Anne, “you two—mother and daughter—are-are just haunted, eh?”
“Haunted, yes, Miss Mercy.”
“You mean bewitched, don’t you?”
Anne hesitated. My ma sees ghosts like I do. That’s all.”
Below them in the house, adults continued, voices raised, making a row.
“What’s going on down there?” asked Mercy, standing and going to the trap door, inching it open to eavesdrop on the adults. She started, seeing that her Uncle Samuel was in the house yet again, and again he’d brought the stranger they called Wakely.
Mercy disliked Parris immeasurably. It’d been cruel of her uncle to ceremonially excommunicate Sarah Goode from the church, but doubly cruel then to’ve taken old Goode’s only child, Dorcas, away from her mother. Goode had been hanging about the parsonage too much; in fact, she and Uncle Samuel’s black servant, Tituba, had been exchanging ideas and recipes and incantations.
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