Children of Salem

by Robert W. Walker

  “There was more to it than simple nonpayment of debt, although that was the charge that placed him in lockup.”

  “There were other charges brought against him?” Jeremy had perfected wide-eyed wonder with Parris, who responded well to any facial cues Jeremy sent.

  “Not any that could be proven, but the baser people here began rumors to do with Burroughs’ athletic prowess. Or so Thom Putnam tells me.”

  “Ah! His reputed superhuman strength, yes! I’ve heard, but the man was a gymnast at Harvard where he studied Divinity and he ran track. I understand you did most of your studies at Harvard? Were you, too, an athlete? Did you know James Burroughs?” Jeremy hoped to hear more about Parris’ time at Harvard and perhaps why the college had no record of his ever having been ordained.

  “His name is George, not James. James was Bailey—James Bailey—before him, and no . . . I must’ve been at the college different years.”

  “But you were on an athletic team?”

  “No, no! I was in the study of Business Practices, but I changed to Divinity a bit later. Look here, worse yet is this business of rumors that this Burroughs fellow . . . that he had some dealings in the dark arts.”

  “Witchcraft? Charges brought or was it talk of witchcraft?” Jeremy’s face gave way to horror.

  “Some say there was no confusion of his being a necromancer or wizard. In league with the Wizard over all wizards.”

  “Satan? Really?” Jeremy had heard such charges leveled at any man others despised or disliked for any number of reasons. In fact, the charge was so common as to be foolish, yet the lower church assize courts collected heavy revenues on trying such cases, and so it went.

  “You know as well as I, Jeremy, that any time that a congregation, or half that population wants to rid itself of a man or woman . . . to ban or worse, to excommunicate as in your father’s case, the foul slander of being in league with Satan and his invisible minions is leveled.”

  To excommunicate as you did with Sarah Goode, Jeremy thought but said, “You speak the truth, Reverend Parris.”

  “In private moments, please, call me Samuel or Goodfriend,” he reiterated.

  “Well then, Samuel, as I mentioned, the charge of heresy was leveled at both my parents when it was expedient to dredge up invisible evidence, so I am not convinced of your predecessor’s having used his pulpit badly.”

  “Expedient invisible evidence . . . using his pulpit badly,” Parris repeated and laughed. “How politic your are, Jeremy.” Parris continued mulling over Jeremy’s words like a chant. “And now I, Jeremy, I am in line for their poisonous gossip, innuendo, half-truths, rumor and slander—for which they will pay if the courts in these colonies are fair and impartial! God, how I miss London. Even in Barbados a man of my stature could count on speedy redress of slander from the courts.”

  “I am sure that’s true, Samuel.”

  “They’d love to prove me a heretic and a Satan worshipper, the dissenting ones here!”

  They might settle for liar and thief, Jeremy thought. “Some say you’ve slandered them in your sermons.”

  Parris’ most dangerous stare drilled into Jeremy.

  “I mean . . . this is what I have heard bandied about.”

  “Bandied about by whom?”

  “No one I know; just overheard bits and pieces, sir—ah Samuel.”

  Parris dropped his angry gaze, nodding. “Too true.”

  Jeremy was angry with himself, thinking: Should’ve held my tongue. First rule of subterfuge. Allow your target to talk. But then my disguise is a naïve apprentice. “Sir, I am not so naïve as you may take me. I am well acquainted with slander from a young age—”

  “As you’ve harped, I know. Don’t give it another thought.”

  “It is easy enough to condemn publicly, but not so simple a matter to turn libel into evidence in a courtroom.”

  “Too damnably easy in our church assize courts, I can tell you, especially when the wrong element has the ear of the judges.”

  “Agreed. Fortunately, the secular courts take a dimmer view of hearsay.”

  “And testimony from the addle-brained people who bring such suits,” added Parris, who then laughed. It was the first time Jeremy had heard him utter a mirthful sound in days except, again, while playing with his daughter. While his mirth here and now began lightly enough, it ended dismally, like something dead at the bottom of an ale barrel. Then Parris added, “It’s good that you know something of the law, Goodfriend. I may have need of your counsel soon.”

  “My counsel? Soon?” Jeremy tried to get more from the man.

  “I didn’t know Burroughs.” Parris sounded thoughtful yet again harping on his predecessor. Parris stood at the window, staring out over the village he meant to set straight. “However, I’ve succeeded him, and now am faced with the bitterness of his supporters, people who allowed his disgrace then, and are bent on my disgrace now.”

  The man one moment is repeating awful rumors about Burroughs, and now he is aligning himself with the man? Distance yourself if Burroughs is found guilty of such nonsense, stand beside him if he is found innocent? Jeremy realized he must choose his words with great care. “I have traveled to many of our settlements. Salem is like all others in one respect.”

  “And that is?”

  “All hamlets have the ill-minded who haven’t the least respect for Christian rule, or for our calling, or for the law.”

  Parris smiled. “You’ve certainly a clear eye on the situation here. “

  Jeremy translated this in his head as meaning: You understand my side, and that it is a terrible cross to carry. Tiptoeing now, Jeremy said, “I believe it’s come to a war of words and wills.”

  Parris stepped away from the window and crossed the small room with a single stride. He snatched up his bible and pulled some loose notes from it. The pages he held at Jeremy’s eyes. “Here . . . read my sermon for the Sabbath.”

  Jeremy’s mouth dropped open.

  Parris added, “I want your counsel on it. I believe every condemnation I make here is only the truth.”

  Jeremy took hold of the papers, Parris hesitating only a moment before completely releasing them. “What do you wish in the way of commentary, Samuel?” Jeremy found it difficult to call him Samuel.

  “I want an intelligent man of the cloth to remark on the details, the point, the facts and supporting words from the Bible itself. Afterward, we’ll again talk.”

  Parris replaced the chair he’d earlier straddled, and next he shook Jeremy’s hand like a co-conspirator. “We will drive a righteous nail into every black heart in the Meetinghouse this coming meeting day.”

  We, Jeremy silently thought, when did Parris and I become we?

  # # # # #

  Alone with Parris’ absolutely loathsome and dreadful sermon, Jeremy found it threatening and repugnant. The gist of the sermon set Parris up as a modern day Christ on the cross, with his parishioners role as so many Judases and Pilates. Jeremy also gave more thought to the Reverend George Burroughs—a minister whose rate was withheld from him for months by one faction of the parish, and when his family died while in this very house, the debts Burroughs incurred were burial debts. Penniless, he’d left Salem to reemerge as a successful minister in Casco Bay, Maine.

  Parris definitely had something in common with Burroughs—as each man had managed to raise the ire of half the congregation against himself. However, each man had the opposing side as it were; those for Parris now had been against Burroughs then, and those for Burroughs then were against Parris now. Curious how the numbers changed and told a tale in and of themselves, that Burroughs’ detractors were Parris’ champions. That a long-standing feud existed among the parishioners was plainly evident. All fodder for his next report that he meant to post to Cotton Mather. Thus far, he’d only had the opportunity to forward his first preliminary findings but this…this next would be a meaty document indeed.

  Jeremy had in fact jotted all of the facts he’d gathe
red thus far into his notes for Mather. As always, when he wrote, he heard his own voice in the words. He worked diligently to be as clear and transparent as India glass. But at the same time, he acknowledged the complexity of both the situation in Salem and the difficulty in conveying that complexity. To put it in a summary for Mather, in the proverbial nutshell, Jeremy’d written:

  It amounts to neighbor here being set against neighbor, no matter the parson or the business about the parsonage. However, Mr. Parris has done nothing to quell the furor or tenor of the argument, but rather has fanned the flames—a condemnation leveled at him from Mr. Higginson if memory serves me. Still, with these parochial types, even as one issue is resolved, another is discovered. The frightening aspect of it all is the level of acrimony and poison already set loose among villagers of every stripe. It is a poison in the hearts of men here poured into cups provided by their minister.

  However, the villagers are no innocents in this either. Their days and nights have an underlying scaffolding of suspicion, rumor, and doubt that in the end sets neighbor against neighbor. You might ask for what? Why? Barring further discovery, for want of another set of facts coming to light, it would seem a need in people to find and feed on discord and dissolution. I cannot overstate this fact. The grip that rumor and common gossip holds on this place. The poison I speak of is like belladonna, on the surface alluring, yet ready to spew forth if one incident should open the floodgate of this blood-root feud—and that could cone from either side.

  Yours in good faith,

  Jeremiah Wakely,

  Officer of the court

  Jeremy put aside his pen and book with far more ease than he did a sense of growing alarm and fear for the people of this troubled place. He was unable to shake off an eerie sensation that somehow he and everyone in Salem were being sucked into a malefic storm. A maelstrom that had made up its own mind, one that wanted to consume them all—and all sides be damned.

  It wasn’t a storm easily foretold or prophesied, and Jeremiah Wakely felt no more capable of predicting it or seeing the parameters, front, back, sides than the least self-aware resident here, or those in authority at the various levels: church fathers in Salem Town and Village, the church courts, the true courts, and the Boston hexarchy who ruled by virtue of the Hexateuch—experts on the first six books of the Old Testament. Was there any man among them who might see the full measure of the impending tempest? Increase Mather, perhaps. Cotton, no.

  Jeremy recalled sitting at Watch Hill as a child in the employ of Mr. Ingersoll, there to keep an eye out for anything smacking of an Indian incursion into the village. But what he saw that one day on the horizon, he could only see the outer edges of—a massive black cluster of storm clouds, lightning, and wind bearing down on the village. That long ago storm had torn through Salem and lasted an entire night. No one, not Mr. Ingersoll, not the minister, not the judges—none of them could tell the beginning or end of that storm borne of nature. Now here he was, back in Salem as a man with needs of his own, yet fearful of the un-seeable deluge that could well swamp them all, and he feared for the truly innocent ones here—children like Betty Parris and Mary Wolcott, Anne Putnam and even Mercy Lewis, who seemed not at all innocent, and he feared for whole families, among them the Nurse Family, Serena, her mother and father, brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles.

  Jeremy hesitated naming any individuals other than Parris as instigators, yet he knew the poison existing between the Putnam-Porter clan and the Nurse-Towne clan. He decided to say nothing of their feud dating well before his own birth—as it was well documented in court records for decades now.

  Chapter Ten

  The following day, Jeremy again worked in the dim light below the stairwell at Tituba’s bed. He feared he’d not have time enough with Parris’ sermon to copy it word for word, so he’d only copied the sections he felt displayed Parris’ most venomous side.

  Jeremy had precious small space to work in here below the damnable stairs behind the musty curtain, which could be pulled back at any moment by anyone in the house. But he’d heard Parris leave, taking his wife, daughter, and Mary Wolcott with him, a Thursday ritual walkabout as he’d overheard. Parris made much of trusting Jeremy to be alone in the parsonage, to take care of anyone who might come calling, anyone in spiritual need or in need of paying Parris’ late fees. In order to find time alone, Jeremy had assured Parris, “I love a challenge, and I can take care of any eventuality.”

  “Have you had time to read the sermon?” Parris’d asked before leaving.

  “I’m sorry, no, but I intend to now.”

  “Good, good,” were his last words, taking the pale children and his equally pasty-faced wife off with him.

  So Jeremy had furiously copied what he could of the sermon. Jeremy was thinking that Parris was blind to the effect of his own rhetoric when suddenly the curtain tore open with a shocking energy, and Jeremy found himself face to face with Tituba Indian.

  Her coral black eyes lit with a strange fire; they bored into him and his journal. “You are the black man with the book?”

  “It is my journal.”

  “You write the names in it?”

  “Just my daily meditations, I assure you.”

  “Do you come to harm my master?”

  Damn but the ignorant have instincts, he thought. “I only come to help.”

  “Yes, young reverend,” she nodded successively. “Young master.”

  “You may call me Mr. Wakely.”

  Her cold stare spoke volumes. “Yes, Massa Wakely.”

  How much do you know, Barbados woman?

  Her eyes said, I know everything. Jeremy believed her the keeper of the family secrets.

  “If you are not the black man,” Tituba finally said, “then are you a man of the White God, the all-powerful One?”

  “Good, yes, now you understand.”

  She dropped to her knees and lowered her head nearly into his lap. “I pray to you.”

  “No, no,” he pulled her to a standing position. “You pray to God not to any man.”

  “I pray to my god and to the White One.”

  Pagan, Jeremy thought, but what Barbados black wasn’t a pagan? Jeremiah went to the rug near the hearth, and he suddenly lifted it, and found what he expected. The telltale sign of blood—sacrificial blood?—staining the boards of the parsonage.

  “Is only de chicken blood; in winter, I work by de fire. You got blood if you butcher anim-mals.”

  Jeremiah nodded but his eyes told her that he knew the truth. Whatever animals were butchered before the parsonage hearth had been sacrificed to the flames and to her lesser gods—the gods of the superstitious voodooists in the name of that ancient religion the Crown appeared unable to eliminate. “Oh, and I suppose, Titutba, that if I search the ashbin outside, I should find no bones?”

  “No bones.”

  Jeremy watched her eyes as she spoke; they proved as firmly set as they were black. To determine just how much witchery she’d been up to in this house, Jeremy decided to bait Tituba. “I saw a strange woman on the night I arrived here. Almost ran her below my horse’s hooves! Happened near Watch Hill, and I saw you with her.” It was a lie, but he wanted to see her reaction.

  Her face blanched. “I only went to help Betty.”

  “Betty’s been ill, I know. How did you ah . . . help her?”

  “She be more than sick.”

  “More than sick?”

  “She has curse on.”

  “A curse?”

  “Goode put curse on dat child.”

  “But why?”

  “She angry! You know de reason why!”

  “Amgry at Betty? A helpless child?”

  “Angry at massa.”

  “The reverend?”

  “Yes.”

  Jeremy recalled the awful curses Goode had heaped on Parris in the street that day outside the Putnam home. “So she curses his daughter? What sense does—”

  “To get at de fadder through de child.�
��

  Jeremy took in a deep breath. “So how did you ah . . . help the situation?”

  “A witch pie.”

  “No, really?” Jeremy was familiar with the ridiculous notion and recipe to combat a curse—a pie made from the urine of the innocent and virginal.

  “I pay for it.”

  “I see.”

  “Urine of newborn child.”

  Whether it had curative powers or not depended, Jeremy felt, on the faith of its user. It was the height of superstition, but Jeremy had seen superstition solve problems for some, create problems for others. “Powerful medicine, eh?” he asked with a wink.

  “Most powerful, yes.”

  Jeremy stared at the characterless walls of the parsonage. Over the fireplace, Sam Parris had hung a sword. Earlier, as they’d made the village rounds, Parris had confided that for an entire week that sword had vanished only to return in its rightful place as if by magic. “Or human hands,” he’d added. “I am at an impasse with my black servant, and am busily looking to sell her to the highest bidder. Might you, Jeremy, be interested?”

  “I’m sure I could not afford her, sir.”

  “Not even in payments?”

  “Ah but, well! Selling her to me, wouldn’t rid her from your home.”

  “Aye, but it’d rid me of the responsibility.” He had laughed at this.

  Jeremy now asked Tituba point-blank, “Do you know, Tituba, why the minister’s sword disappeared from that wall?” He pointed to the long, shining blade.

  “Don’t-know-nothing ‘bout dat.” Her black eyes lit with fear at the question. “And if you don’t say nothin’ ‘bout dat witch pie, I give you something special.” She began unbuttoning her linen blouse, preparing to show her ample breasts.

  Jeremy raised both hands to her. “That’s not necessary.” At the same time, he heard Betty coughing and her father’s voice just outside. “They’re back,” Jeremy warned her and Tituba rushed into the kitchen, buttoning up and pretending busyness with pots and pans.