Susannah Morrow

by Megan Chance

  I gave Mary a little nod, and then her mouth tightened and her gaze swept past me and up. When I turned to follow it, I saw my aunt standing behind me, her cloak put aside now that the tavern was warm and stinking from so many bodies; the clothes she wore were startling among the muddied greens and browns and blues of my neighbors—a bodice made of scarlet paragon and heavy skirts green as the richest pine tree. Even in the dimness of the ordinary, those colors were so vibrant and bright they were almost blinding.

  “Your father’s sent me for you,” she said, but when I glanced past her to where my father still talked ardently with Francis Nurse, I knew she lied.

  “I haven’t heard the drum,” I told her. ’Twas insolent of me to speak to her in such a way; even Mercy Lewis looked surprised by it. Mary did not take her gaze from Susannah. She stared at those beautiful colors as if fascinated by them.

  My aunt laid her hand on my shoulder, a gentle pressure that was insistent just the same. “You’d best come, Charity.”

  ’Twas a mother’s touch, a mother’s quiet scold, and I resented it. I jerked my shoulder away, but not violently, just enough so she would feel it and know I did not want her there. She let her hand fall softly back to her skirt, seemingly undisturbed, and smiled at my friends, and I saw how that smile took them, how they were captured by it—so beautiful it was, on that face Satan had smiled upon.

  It snared even Mary, though she recovered sooner than the others and gave me a satisfied look that reminded me of the rumors I knew now were true. I bade my friends farewell.

  My father looked up as my aunt and I approached the table. “Your mother wished you away from those girls,” he told me. “You will follow her desires in this.”

  Francis Nurse said in his low, gruff voice, “Insolent wenches. Tom Putnam deserves those two he has.”

  I was saved by the sound of the drum summoning us back to the meetinghouse.

  I could think of little else during the afternoon service. Master Parris continued his sermon, and I tried to listen, but my mind kept turning back to Mary. I knew my father was right. I should stay away from my old friends, but today I realized how much I’d missed them, how lonely I’d been.

  The light outside was fading when the sermon wrapped to a close, and the list of my neighbors’ sins was read, their punishments decided on. The list was a short one this week, only two: an overly gossipy Hannah Dow was suffered to be put in the stocks for an hour for telling tales about her neighbors, and the miller’s apprentice sentenced to three hours in pillory for overcharging a buyer and lying to his master about it. Once the prayers over their souls were said, Goody Penney handed baby Faith to my father, and he went up to the front of the church to have the pastor baptize her.

  I could not remember how or even if my father had held Jude when she was a baby. My mother loved babies, and she held them close, and so I suppose he never had to. The way he held Faith now showed how unpracticed he was. The babe squirmed in his arms, and his hold was awkward and loose, as if she were a feral cat ready to bite and scratch and he was wary but trying to be gentle.

  Father had no sooner reached the front of the church than Faith began to cry. By the time Master Parris began to speak, she was wailing with all the strength of Heaven, so loudly that it was hard to hear the parson’s words as he entered her into God’s kingdom and welcomed her in Christ’s name. The minister raised his voice, and she cried louder, until he was red-faced and stumbling. The water he sprinkled her with only made her howl. In the back gallery, children who had already been squirming began to cry and whimper as well. Father looked confounded. Nothing he did seemed to soothe her; Faith only jumped and wriggled in his arms, and her howls grew into high-pitched screeches.

  Goody Penney hurried up the aisle, and my father looked shamefacedly relieved as he handed the babe into her arms. The goodwife pulled Faith closer and bounced her gently, but my baby sister was not to be comforted this day. Not even when Goody Penney undid her bodice and tried to latch the babe to a breast. Faith only turned her little head away and beat her tiny, mottled fists against the air.

  I saw Goody Penney mouth the words: Come now, child, come now. She jounced and bounced, and Faith screamed, and the minister fumbled with the Bible and tried to find his place.

  Had my father done so much as look helplessly at me in that moment, I would have rushed to his aid and held my sister close and hummed to her my mother’s lullaby. I know she would have quieted for me. But he did not look at me, and so I sat hot and red-faced on the pew as those around began to look at Jude and me as if we were somehow to blame for our sister’s ill behavior.

  It was Susannah my father looked to.

  When she went hurrying forward, I was stunned. When she took Faith from Goody Penney without a word and held her close, I wanted my sister to scream her protest with all the strength she held in her tiny chest. I imagined how Susannah would be unable to calm her. I imagined my father having no recourse but to turn to me. I would go up there and she would go silent in my arms, and my father would look at me with gratitude and love.

  “Scream, Faith,” I told my sister in a whisper too soft for anyone to hear. “Keep screaming.”

  Instead, she quieted. The moment Susannah touched her, Faith went still. Her cries dissolved into soft hiccups, and my aunt bounced her gently against her shoulder, patting her back in soft rhythm as though Faith were just one in a long line of babies that Susannah had comforted. I heard sighs around me, and the tension in the meetinghouse eased into relief. One or two women laughed and whispered together as if to say, Ah, yes, I remember how it was, and the men grumbled among themselves and shifted in their seats.

  My father’s face was soft with gratitude and relief. I was so cold I could not feel my skin. I turned to glance through the congregation, and met a pair of hazel cat eyes, and a thin smile. I knew then that I had a safe place to go, someone to turn to, someone who understood.

  Mary was not fooled by my aunt Susannah.

  The next day, my father left early in the morning to deliver a spinning wheel. ’Twas almost too easy to make the excuse to my aunt to go to the parsonage. Mama would never have let me go without a hundred questions, and even then she would no doubt have taken the bread to Mistress Parris herself and left me to watch Jude. But Susannah did not question me; she only bade me take a pie to Mistress Parris as well.

  The wind itself seemed to lend speed to my feet as I left the house. It was cold, with the sure touch of winter, the clouds leaden and low and the smell of snow and ice in the air. I drew my hood closer about my face and pulled my basket up against my chest to ward off the wind as I cut across the fallow cornfields. ’Twas a little over a mile to the parsonage, which was just beyond Ingersoll’s, hidden in the trees. The short path from the road was rocky and closed in by darkness. It gave way after only a few yards to a clearing with the ministry house in the center, and orchards and garden and barn beyond.

  The house was a large one, with its four rooms and its lean-to, and I knew many villagers who resented that only eight lived within a house large enough to hold many more. There were those—my father among them—who resented that the deed to the land and house had been given over to Master Parris in spite of the fact that there had been a resolution that it should be forever held by the village. It was one of the reasons I had not been to the parsonage for a very long time, why I would not have been here now had my father been at home.

  I went to the heavy front door and took a deep breath before I knocked. I heard no sound from within, and there was no one about, and for a moment I thought perhaps I had the wrong day, or that this meeting had been a lie, an unkind joke. But then I heard a shuffling behind the door, and it opened to reveal the dark face of the Parrises’ West Indian slave woman, Tituba.

  She was dressed in somber gray, with a stained apron, and the brown skin of her hands was dusted with flour. She did not seem surprised to see me. Her dark eyes flicked over me; there was an impatience there that shoo
k me. “I-I heard the mistress was poorly,” I said, stuttering and nervous as if she were Queen Mary instead of just a slave. “I’ve brought bread, and my aunt sent a pie—”

  “They just in there, girl,” she said, her voice heavy with an accent that spoke of Barbados.

  She stepped back and motioned me inside. Though I felt her eyes on me again, and I didn’t like it, I did as she said. Even as gray as the day was, it was brighter outside than in the house. I had to stop for a moment and blink until I could see. Inside the heavy front door were the steps to the cellar. Beyond them was the hall. I could just glimpse the huge hearth within, the fire burning hot and orange, though it was as cold where I stood as outside. The ceiling was low, the big summer beam that ran the length of the house was dark and smoke-stained.

  “Go on now,” Tituba said. “You letting the heat out.”

  When I stepped into the hall, I saw them sitting at the long tableboard before the fire: Mary Walcott and Mary Warren, Mercy Lewis and Betty Hubbard, and beside them the Parrises’ youngest daughter Betsey, who was just nine, and her cousin Abigail Williams, who was eleven. I’d never had much to do with her. She had the coldest gray eyes I’d ever seen. In the corner, the older Parris girl swept. I didn’t see the little Parris boy anywhere.

  They were bent over the table, and not one of them said a word. They were staring into something: a bowl, with a lit candle flickering just beside it. The room smelled of smoke and dampness. I hesitated, and the slave smiled. “Go on. Go join them,” she said. “They need only one more to find the Devil himself.”

  “The Devil?” Betsey Parris started then, and looked up with a frown on her peaked little face. She looked worriedly at the slave woman standing beside me. “’Tis not so, Titibee, is it? You said—”

  “There be many spirits, child,” the woman said. Her voice went soft and warm. “You need fear nothing today.”

  Tituba crossed the room toward the fire, holding the basket I had not even felt her take from me, and the walls seemed to close in until the room was nothing but darkness and fire with a light glowing in the center, flickering across the faces of my friends.

  Mary sat back with a sigh. “The spell’s broken now anyway, Betsey. You must learn to be quiet.”

  “Aye, hush up.” Abigail raised her hand as if to strike the child, and Betsey drew back hard. Abigail let her hand fall with a nasty smile. “We’ve so little time as it is. You cannot go on ruining everything.”

  “You let that child be,” Tituba said from the fire. She had not even turned around. “You got time enough for these spells.”

  I found my voice again. “Spells? You’re casting spells? In the preacher’s house?”

  “’Tis as safe a place to hide from the Devil as any,” Mercy said with a small laugh.

  Mary frowned at her. “Quiet, Mercy.” She looked at me. “Oh, Charity, ’tis nothing as bad as all that. Betty wanted to find what her future husband would look like. We’re only fortune-telling.”

  “Spells are for witches,” I said slowly. “’Tis a sin—”

  “If you’ve come to preach at us, you can just go away,” Betty said irritably. “I’m sorry you told her to come, Mary. She’s spoiling everything.”

  “No, no, I’m not spoiling it. But I—”

  “Come over, Charity,” Mary urged. “Don’t tell me you don’t want to see the future. Why, I’ll warrant there are things even you want to know.”

  It was still day outside, yet I thought I heard the hooting of a screech owl, the high, mournful sound rising and falling in the trees beyond the windows. From the corner of my eye, I saw a movement in the shadows—a trick of the light. Goose bumps skimmed over my skin, and I pulled my cloak tighter about me, reminded suddenly of times long since past, when Mary and I and some of these others had gone berrying in the woods at the far side of the village and after filling our pails, spent the rest of the afternoon in the humid shade of the forest, playing blindman’s buff in the shadows. Even in the summer, the woods were dark as twilight—’twas easy to see an Indian in a shadow and run screaming back to the others in excited fear, the hairs on the back of your neck prickling, the blood running hot and tingly into your hands and feet.

  The fear I felt now was like that. Prickly and exciting, but there was a danger to it that was different. The Indian had been only make-believe; this was something different, something real. Yet it was…compelling.

  Mary moved over on the bench, and Betty moved too, though I thought reluctantly. “Last week, Abigail swore she saw a man fashioning a spinning wheel. We think her husband’s going to be a carpenter. Come and join us.”

  Slowly I went over. When I sat on the bench between them, I saw that bowl of water on the table, the candlelight reflecting upon the surface so it looked like a bowl of molten gold. The fire was blazing in the hearth, not far away, and though I felt its warmth against my back, I was cold.

  Mercy Lewis leaned forward and closed her eyes, so her bony face went almost soft, and the girls around the table went still and quiet.

  “Show me my husband,” she said in a hushed voice. “Show me my love.”

  That was how it all began.

  Chapter 7

  AFTER THAT DAY AT THE PARSONAGE, THE WORLD FELT DIFFERENT, as if everything had shivered and gone still, waiting for something. It was turning colder day by day; winter had decided to settle in. The hoarfrost in the mornings was thick and hard; in the lee were spots that often stood frozen the whole day through. Trees were bare and black against skies the color of lead. Even when the sun dared to break the clouds away, there was no warmth in its rays, and people were beginning to talk in soft dread about long winters and signs of cold—heavy stripes on caterpillars, beaver dams walled thick.

  I reassured myself that was all it was, though there was a part of me that knew the day at the parsonage had changed things. But it wasn’t until Pope’s Night that I understood. It wasn’t until then that I knew to be afraid.

  When we came home from the Thursday lecture, the cannon booms from Salem Town echoed like faraway thunder, the faint glow of the bonfires lit the horizon in a soft golden sunset. We did not attend the celebration in town; we never had, though I’d heard tales of the revelries. Most of the villagers agreed with my father that Pope’s Night was frivolous; there was too much work to be done. ’Twas in the bigger towns like Boston, and now Salem Town, that sailors and strangers gathered to burn the effigies of Guy Fawkes and the pope and the Devil on the shores near the wharves, and fired the cannons that echoed into the night.

  I would have liked to go. Betty had once attended with her uncle when he went to pay a call in town, and she’d told us all about it. But I had to be content with watching the bonfires’ distant glow. When Father sent me to fetch the cow from her foraging in the clearing behind the house, I went eagerly, anxious for the chance to spend a few minutes on my own, imagining that I would somehow be able to see something more of the celebration if I stared long enough at the horizon.

  I hurried around the corner of the house, already straining to see past the clearing. Our land was on a small rise, and I knew if I stood on a stump at the crest of the hill and leaned out a little, I could just see the expanse of the Crane River stretching nearly to the North-fields of Salem Town. The river was quiet now, with a gray glow like buffed pewter. I could not see much beyond its banks; even as barren as the trees were, the woods were too dense for that. But my imagination leaped to the muddy streets of Salem Town lit by bonfires and torches, the smell of fire and burning straw, the dodging shadows of dancers. Things a godly girl should not be dreaming of. I remembered last year, how I had watched from my bedroom window as Sammy streaked across the darkness, sneaking out to dance at the bonfires, and how I had longed to go with him.

  Behind me, Buttercup snapped a twig, and I turned to see her disappearing already in shadow—the colors had faded, and the world was blue and black and gray. I heard the early hoot of a screech owl—not the barred owl that lived
in our oak, but another bird, one I did not know, and the air changed the way it had that day at the parsonage, as if it were gathering in force, too heavy to bear, swirling with expectation.

  There was someone behind me. I felt the presence as surely as if I’d been on a street in the middle of town. It was Father, I thought, come to fetch me back, but I knew even before I turned around that it was not. I knew it before I raised my eyes.

  She was there again, my mother’s specter, trailing her winding sheets, pale as mist. She held out her hands to me imploringly, and I froze, alarmed at the pure agony in her face. I did not see her speak, but her voice was loud in my head. I cannot go. I cannot go. Beware.…

  I had never heard my mother so anguished, and it frightened me. I stared at her in horror, unable to look away or to move. ’Twas as if she held me fast. “I-I don’t understand,” I managed. “Mama, I don’t understand.”

  Beware, she said again, so loud I put my hands to my ears, though I could not mute the sound. Then, before my eyes, she vanished into the trees, into shadow. But I felt her all around me, touching me; I heard her crying in my head. With an overwhelming grief, I longed for her to come back. I had wanted so badly to see her again, to know her, to hear her advice, and now here she was. But she was in a pain that was unbearable, a pain I knew instinctively I could ease if she would only explain to me, tell me.…I heard a moan—my own sound. “Mama, come back. Come back.…”

  Then I heard Buttercup lowing, and suddenly the safe twilight sounds were back: the scatter of a squirrel across a tree branch, the pound of my father’s hammer from behind the barn, the gurgle of the creek just beyond.

  The pasture was empty, the specter gone. There was nothing to remind me of it, yet the terrible anguish or my mother’s specter lingered, her warning. Suddenly I understood. ’Twas as if a veil had been lifted from my eyes, and I knew what she was trying to tell me. My mother’s spirit would not rest until Susannah was gone—and I must be the one to banish her.