Good cuts off whatever he might say next. “You are a liar!” she shouts. “I am no more a witch than you are a wizard.”
The onlookers gasp. Someone titters at such futile boldness. “And if you take away my life, God will give you blood to drink!” She speaks loud enough that even Rebecca hears. The afflicted who are present hear it too and raise a commotion.
Ann Putnam is aghast at Sarah’s impudence. She recognizes the Scriptural reference of God’s vengeance from the Book of Revelation: “For they shed the blood of the saints, and prophets, and therefore hast thou given them blood to drink.” She knows Reverend Noyes also recognizes the verse, for he makes Revelation the subject of much scholarly study and many sermons. Saints and prophets, indeed!
But the defiance of the damned changes nothing.
The executions proceed: Good and Martin are proud and resisting, Nurse, Wildes, and How submit with humble dignity. The relatives witness it all as if memorizing the deed, storing the details like ammunition for future confrontations. The afflicted utter cries of relief as, one after another, each hooded body swings free from the ladder and the crowd mutters their reaction.
The Putnam kin present feel relief at each death—one less threat, one less rival. And they note, with satisfaction, that the Devil did not arrive to save any of Satan’s handmaids. Bitch-witches, old George Jacobs had called his accusers, but now see who triumphs.
Finally—it is over.
The edge of the crowd frays and scatters.
The relatives linger. By custom the bodies must dangle where they are for a certain time as warnings, but the day is hot, and the now-empty mortal shells will need to be buried soon.
Mrs. Ann Putnam breathes deeply, but despite the heat, she leans against Thomas and wraps her shawl closer, a thin protection for herself and the child inside her.
Now Nurse’s soul is safely locked in Hell, Ann thinks. At least she can’t harm this child. Ann has counted back the months and estimated that this baby was conceived when all this trouble began. Nor has it ended—five witches this time, the prisons full, yet more still free to pursue their wicked plans.
What will become of my child?
Annie, who has been standing with the other afflicted, comes over to her parents. It is time to go home.
Francis and his family do not leave. They wait for the workmen to bring the bodies down from the gallows and bury them in the shallow grave dug earlier. Determined to give Rebecca a proper burial at least, they wait in stony silence to claim her body.
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A strong family tradition would relate that Rebecca’s family collected her body by night, disinterred it in some accounts, and brought it home. When historian and former Salem mayor Charles Upham recreated the scene in 1867, he speculated that they brought her body “tenderly in their arms along the silent roads and by-ways” to the Nurse farm. Other tellers have them carry the body to a small boat on the stream leading to the North River, row downstream under cover of darkness into the estuary and north to the mouth of Crane Brook, then work their way upstream to their own land. In both versions they buried Rebecca’s body, but it would need to be washed first and then wrapped in a winding sheet. The farm, over the generations, maintained a small family burial ground across the fields to the west of the house and barn, not far from Crane Brook.
But would they need to do all this in secrecy?
Supposed witches and other felons were not barred from burial in consecrated ground, for Puritan burial grounds were not consecrated in the first place. Burying a felon by the place of execution was traditional in England and New England, but if families removed a body, then that was one less task for the county to pay for. The land route would have been the simpler, more direct method of bringing her broken body home.
Another part of the family lore was that Caleb Buffum helped remove the body. Buffum lived across the Town Bridge from the ledges, within sight of the hangings and was, moreover, related through marriage to Rebecca’s aunts. In some versions he helped secret the body to a waiting boat or helped dig the body from the shallow common grave or even provided a coffin, for he was a carpenter as well as a farmer.
On the same day as the executions of the five women, Constable Joseph Ballard entered his formal complaint against Mary Lacey of Andover and her daughter Mary Jr. (daughter and granddaughter of confessor Goody Foster). They had tormented his wife Elizabeth Ballard, who had been “this Severall monthes Sorely aflicted & visited wth Strange pains and pressures & remains So to this day which I verily beleive is Occasioned by Witchcraft.” He presented this in Salem to magistrates Bartholomew Gedney, John Hathorne, Jonathan Corwin, and John Higginson Jr., and this time he posted a bond of £100 to prove his intention to prosecute. (Such a bond was required by law, yet only one other witch complaint this year, entered before local Ipswich authorities, had so far included this detail. Either Ballard, as a constable, expected to post bond, or Higginson, as a new member of the magistrates, reminded the others of the requirement. The magistrates thereafter would apply this part of the law’s requirements.) Hathorne signed for all.
The law arrested Goodwife Mary Lacey of Andover—old Goody Foster’s daughter—for tormenting Goodwife Ballard and brought her, but not her daughter, to Salem for questioning by Gedney, Hathorne, Corwin, and Higginson. Mercy Lewis and Elizabeth Hubbard were especially tormented during this hearing, and soon enough Mary Lacey too confessed to attending the great witch meeting in the Village. However, she said that although her mother, who had already confessed, also attended, she was not a part of it. Her mother only “stood at a distance off and did not partake at that meeting” of the Devil’s sacrament.
Hathorne then issued the arrest warrant for Mary Lacey Jr. for tormenting Goodwife Ballard, again signing for the other three. He added a note to the arresting officer: “You are likewise required to Search diligently in the house & aboute it for popetts &c.”
Abundant, if disordered, notes for the daughter’s questioning, which began the following day, survive. Mary Warren was definitely among the afflicted witnesses on July 21, when all three generations faced the magistrates. Ann Foster had already confessed to placing her mark in the Devil’s book and, perhaps unaware of her daughter’s earlier assertion, today described the great witch meeting in Salem Village while trying not to implicate her daughter, much like the way Mary Lacey had tried to direct the court’s attention away from her mother Goody Foster. However, both had separately confessed.
“Oh, Mother! We have forsaken Jesus Christ,” Goody Lacey wailed. “And the devil hath got hold of us. How shall we get cleare of this evil one?”
When Goody Foster murmured something to herself, the afflicted said she was talking with the Devil.
“I was praying to the Lord,” she protested.
“What Lord?” asked a magistrate.
“To God.”
“What God do witches pray to?”
“I cannot tell, the Lord help me.”
The two older women were taken from the room, and the granddaughter was brought in. As far as the four magistrates could see, Mary Lacey Jr.’s presence alone was enough to trigger violent seizures in Mary Warren.
“How dare you come in here, and bring the Devil with you, to afflict these poor creatures?” one of them scolded.
“I know nothing of it,” the girl protested. But when her touch revived Mary Warren, Mary Lacey exclaimed, “Where is my mother that made me a witch and I knew it not?”
In the past her mother, exasperated with her wayward daughter, had frequently exclaimed “devil take you” in their arguments. Now perhaps this expression had come terrifyingly true.
The magistrates told her to look upon Warren “in a friendly way” so as not to hurt her. Mary Lacey tried, but Mary Warren fell at her glance anyway, so Lacey began to confess. The words tumbled out in a torrent.
The Devil had appeared to her as a horse and as “a round Gray thing” a week ago or a year ago. He promised
her “happy days” and “better times” and (blasphemously) that “I should want nothing in this world & tht I should obtain glory wth him.” However, “He bid me not to be afraid of any thing, and he would not bring me out; but he has proved a liar from the beginning.”
The Devil was hurting Warren now, but she herself could squeeze things to hurt folk: Warren, Timothy Swan, Mrs. Ballard, the child of James Fry. Sometime the sons of Martha Carrier helped her. The Carrier boys’ specters were in the room now, having received the power to hurt from their mother. (Martha Carrier had been the first arrested in Andover, even before Annie Putnam and Mercy Lewis were called in.) Mary Warren fought off all the specters in her seizures.
At one point, Higginson noted, Mary Warren saw the specter of “a Young man” on the table “& was Just then herself afflicted And this Mary Lacey said she saw Young Carrier Sitt upon Warrens Stomack.” Mary Lacey Jr. had much to say about the spectral depredations of Richard and Andrew Carrier and how their mother, Martha, had threatened her own family into joining Satan’s side—Martha whom the Devil had promised would be “Queen of Hell.” Once Mary Lacey Jr. confessed enough, she could take Mary Warren’s hand safely, both girls weeping, with Lacey begging forgiveness for hurting the other.
The magistrates brought back Goodwives Foster and Lacey so they could question all three generations together, and the session descended into a turmoil of accusations, admission, and confessions—both daughters now blaming their mothers, all three accusing others of being in the Devil’s snare. “Here is a Poor Miserable Child,” one of the magistrates observed, “a Wretched Mothr & Granmother.”
“[O] Mothr,” the granddaughter wailed, “Why did You give Me to the Divell. . . . [you] Have often wished that the Divel Would ffetch Me away alive O My hart will break within me . . . O lord Comfort Me and bring out all that are witches.” And to her grandmother: “O Granmother why did you Give Me to the Divel . . . doe not You deny it you have bin a verry bad Woeman in Your time I must Needs Say.”
Even in her fits Mary Warren would have heard the Lacey girl berate her mother and grandmother, this girl so at odds with her family that she had even run away from home the year before to hide out with neighbors. Mary Warren, however, had lost her own mother to a fever that had been brought on, she was sure, by the malice of a witch. What did she think when faced with a young woman about her own age, a confessed witch with no apparent loyalty to her own mother? Mary Warren is described as suffering severe seizures during the questioning, convulsing until the blood ran from her mouth. What might have the Lacey clashes triggered? How much was self-punishment for her own persistent accusations? If Mary Warren had known before that she had experienced spells of distraction, how much had she managed to convince herself was real since then? So many respected and educated gentlemen were convinced that the Devil was behind the current troubles. Who was she to counter that?
As the three suspects described how they signed the Devil’s membership list, “Mary Warren then had a fitt and Cried out Upon Richd Carrier.”
With the brothers repeatedly implicated for this torture, the four magistrates issued an arrest warrant for Richard and Andrew Carrier, “Sons of Thomas Carier of Andivor Husbandman.”
The Foster and Lacey women were committed to the Salem jail, and the court was left with a strong suspicion that here was a whole family in thrall to the Devil.
The following day, Friday, July 22, eighteen-year-old Richard and sixteen-year-old Andrew Carrier were in the custody of Andover constable Joseph Ballard, whose wife still pined in her fevers. Ballard brought them to Thomas Beadle’s tavern in Salem for questioning by the same four magistrates.
At first the Carrier brothers “returned Negative Answers to all” the magistrates’ questions, while Mary Lacey Jr. spun elaborate tales of how she and they went about torturing people at the Devil’s behest and while the afflicted said they saw the Devil and Martha Carrier among other specters, all of whom were preventing the boys’ confessions.
As the details accumulated, all of the afflicted “were Grevously tormented,” especially “Mary Warrin in a bad ffitt & blood Runing out of her Mouth.” Andrew Carrier caused that, said Mary Lacey Jr. Andrew uncharacteristically “Stammered & Stuttered Excedinly in Speaking,” but nonetheless, he denied it all.
Consequently, as the court’s notes have it, “Richd and Andrew were Carried out to another Chambber—And there feet & hands bound a Little while.” As John Procter would soon write, the court “tyed them Neck and Heels till the Blood was ready to come out of their Noses,” a rare form of punishment for civilians. Returned to the court, the brothers confessed. With Mary Lacey Jr., they described the witch meetings in detail, their means of inflicting pain, their many victims, and their Devilish baptisms. The magistrates noted that Andrew no longer stammered, speaking plainly as he ordinarily did. At one point Mary Warren spoke up to say his specter told her that “the Divel baptized him wthin this Month at Shawshin Riuer, the Divel put his head into the Wattr.”
The five new confessors implicated other suspects, Burroughs especially, plus Rebecca Nurse and the four other women recently hanged. Those five had all declared themselves to be innocent, but the dead cannot defend themselves. Now, as far as the court was concerned, the confessions of these Andover suspects annulled the earlier claims.
They also implicated Goodwife Martha Emerson (Martha Carrier’s niece and Roger Toothaker’s daughter), who was arrested on the same day and examined on the next.
On Saturday, July 23, John Procter, speaking for other prisoners as well, addressed a letter to several Boston ministers:
[Due to] the Enmity of our Accusers and our Judges, and Jury, whom nothing but our Innocent Blood will serve their turn, having Condemned us already before our Tryals, being so much incensed and enraged against us by the Devil . . . [they humbly asked the] Reverend Gentlemen [to present] this our Humble Petition to his Excellency [the governor], That if it be possible our Innocent Blood may be spared, which undoubtedly otherwise will be shed, if the Lord doth not mercifully step in. The Magistrates, Ministers, Jewries [i.e., juries] and all the People in general, being so much inraged and incensed against us by the Delusions of the Devil, which we can term no other, by reason we know in our own Consciences, we are all Innocent Persons.
He referred to the five recent confessors from Andover and their accusations, “which we know to be Lies,” and to some of the petitioners as attending the Devil’s Sacrament when they were in fact locked in “close Prison.” Two of those five were Carrier’s sons who “confessed” only after enduring the torture of being tied neck and heels. Procter’s own son William had been so bound, released not by a false confession but by a jailer’s mercy.
“They have already undone us in our Estates, [and now they want] our Innocent bloods.”
Therefore, the petitioners begged that their trials be moved from Salem to Boston or, if not, that other magistrates be put in charge of their cases or at least that some of the ministers attend their trials and do what they can to save them.
Whatever the Boston ministers may have done in response, if anything at all, did nothing to change the venue or the court’s methods. Governor Phips was frequently absent, overseeing frontier defenses Eastward in Maine, leaving the lieutenant governor in charge: William Stoughton, chief justice of the Court of Oyer and Terminer.
Meanwhile, on the same day, July 23, Richard Carrier and Mary Lacey Jr. joined Mary Warren to testify against Goodwife Martha Emerson. Again, Mary Warren’s convulsions seemed the most severe among the afflicted. She fell into “a long dumb fitt” but was able to communicate by raising her hand to second a neighbor’s tale of his being hag-ridden by Emerson’s specter—forced by the witch to serve as her steed in the night.
After denying the charge, Goody Emerson reluctantly confessed, hoping to save her own life, for she was not only Roger Toothaker’s daughter but, like Goody Sibley, had also actually attempted countermagic in the past and the court knew it.
Confession and becoming a cooperating witness could at least earn a reprieve. Her hesitation, she said, was due to the threats from her aunt Carrier and Goody Green of Haverhill, who “took her by the throat & . . . would not lett her confess.”
But despite the accusations from Mary Warren, Mary Lacey Sr. and Jr., and Richard Carrier, Goody Emerson had second thoughts about the spiritual consequences of her lie. “[A]fter ward,” said the court’s notes, “she denyed all & sd what she had sd was in hopes to have favour & now she could not deny god that had keept her from that sin.”
“[T]hough he slay me,” she told the court later, “I will trust in him.”
Though what good the recantation might do before the earthly courts was another matter.
But the Lacey and Carrier confessions did not save Elizabeth Ballard, for the woman died of her fever on July 27.
So witches were still about and still dangerous. Annie and Mercy tirelessly continued their sessions in Andover, identifying the nest of witches there. The suspects initially denied their guilt and involvement, but neither the girls nor the public were fooled. From the stories Annie brought home, even some of the women’s husbands believed their wives had joined the Devil. And in the face of such certainty, most of the women confessed.
Yet, Ann knew, others persisted in their claims of innocence. Mary Bradbury, for all that the Carrs and the Putnams could say about her and despite the Lacey woman’s witnessing Bradbury’s baptism by the Devil at the falls, refused to confess.
The day after Goody Ballard’s death, Thomas Bradbury addressed a petition to the court:
July the 28: 1692
Concerning my beloved wife Mary Bradbury . . . wee have been maried fifty five yeare and shee hath bin a loveing & faithfull wife to mee, unto this day . . . wonderfull laborious dilligent & industryous in her place & imployment, about the bringing up o[u]r family . . . eleven childeren of o[u]r owne & fower grand-children . . . Shee being now very aged & weake, & greived under her affliction may not bee able to speake much for her selfe, not being so free of Speach as some others may bee I hope her life and conversation hath been such amongst her neighbours, as gives a better & more reall Testimoney of her, then can bee exprest by words
Six Women of Salem Page 33