Martha Corey, Alice Parker, Mary Easty, Ann Pudeator, Wilmot Reed, Mary Parker, Margaret Scott, and Samuel Wardwell went to their deaths claiming their innocence. But when the executioner’s cart became mired in a rut on the pathway up to Gallows Hill, the onlookers cried, “Look, the Devil hinders the cart.”
The day following the executions, Sheriff Corwin went with his deputies and seized property and goods belonging to the Parkers and the Wardwells. They were claimed for the Crown but the Corwins got the best of it. Mary Parker’s sons were able to buy back their property, but Sarah Wardwell would return to her farm to find that every animal, every stalk of corn, every movable bit of furniture, including her husband’s carpentry tools, had been taken and sold for coin. On that Friday, the 23rd, the sheriff’s daughter died and when his wife did not appear to make her rounds, I knew with a certainty that there would be no more gifts of food from her.
HYSSOP FOR COUGH. Rosemary for fever. A sprig of mint to cleanse ill humors from the mouth. Slippery elm for the midwife. Horse chestnut for stiffness of limb. Golden bough for palsy. But what is the cure for rage? Chamomile can calm. Perhaps with enough of that and a strong physic of black powder and salts it can be purged from the body. What of a restless mind that will not sleep at its appointed hour? A pillow of lavender or a sleeping draught made of equal parts of rum and water with sweet balm will suffice.
And what finally of the tortures of a guilty soul? What concoction is there that can be chewed and swallowed and downed in the belly to force the poison of self-recrimination back through the pores in the skin? In what organ of the body does it reside? A seeping wound can be bound. Salve can be dabbed to a burn or a swelling bubo. Poison can be drawn with a leech, or a lance. But guilt is a ghost that takes the shape of the body it inhabits and consumes all that is tender within its shell: brain, bowels, and heart. I cannot pluck it out like a splinter of glass or treat it with herbal brews.
I hear a keening sound start up close by. The old woman with the rotted tooth does not, cannot, stop moaning. The doctor has come, entreating her to let him pull it out. Her sisters in captivity have pleaded and begged and hounded her to tie to it some bit of string so that its rotten stump can be yanked from her swollen jaw. But she will not. She clamps her hand over her mouth and moans and moans and moans until I think I shall start screaming and never stop.
It is full-on night. I watch her rocking back and forth, her bare feet stuck out in front of her, the toes curling and uncurling in pain. There is something about the way in which her thin white legs are revealed from the bottom of her shift that is poignant and awful in their nakedness. Something uncoils from my memory and suddenly I see a bare leg come rising up out of a shallow grave. I try to push the thought away, for I know it is not a real memory. Only one that has been conjured into my mind from overhearing the other women in the cell. They have been talking and passing stories from one to the other. Stories that have come from their families. About the hangings. And the burials afterward. The dead. They are cut down and dragged by the remnants of their ragged clothes or by the ends of the hangman’s ropes to shallow graves close by. Into which they are rolled. Thin dirt shoveled over them. So thin that parts of the bodies show through. George Burroughs, his shirt and breeches pulled as loot from his body, laid in some rocky place. Covered over but for his chin and one of his hands, which uncurls from the soil as if beckoning. Lying next to him is Goodman Willard. And, hush, hush, quietly now, the girl is near to hearing, listen to what has come of Goody Carrier. She lies next to him. With one leg propped out of the rocks. As though waiting to step out of her grave.
The moaning woman has reached her fingers into her mouth and I pray as I have never prayed before that we could exchange our torments. That I could have the agony of her festering jaw if she could carry the agony of what I have done. She starts to work her hand frantically and I begin to see a thin trickle of blood running down the back of her hand through her fingers. She brings her other hand to her lip to pull it out of the way as she works and works at her tooth. She wrenches the tooth as she claws with her nails the flesh around it until she has torn it out of her mouth. She gazes stunned for a few moments at the black kernel in her hand and then a look of complete and swooning relief comes over her face as she holds out to me her demon, her lips bloody and smiling. I lie down in the straw, facing away from her, as close to Tom as I can get, my demon still writhing within me.
WHEN DR. AMES came the next day, I would not sit up to greet him or even look at him. He asked Tom if I had been eating and placed his ear against my chest to hear the beating of my heart. When he was satisfied he sat back and, taking my hand, said, “Sarah, you must keep faith that your innocence will be shown to the court. There are even now petitions being sent to the governor from many important people. Ministers from Boston, and your own Reverend Dane, are appealing directly to the Reverend Increase Mather, Cotton Mather’s father, to try to redirect some reason into these trials.”
He lowered his head closer to mine to better catch my eye and continued, “Many of us are taking up a collection to offer bail for your release. And the release of the other children.”
I thought of returning to the ruined shell that had been my home. The rooms cluttered from lack of care. The cooking hearth cindered and tarred from no brush to the flue. The fields overgrown and untamed from the attentions of only one man. Five separate souls circling about the empty place in each room. Looking but finding no grave in which to put an end to their despairing.
“Sarah, I know you mourn for your mother, but she is in that place in which we all hope to be.”
“She is in a shallow pit,” I said, my voice hollow and flat.
He looked narrowly at the women around him, shaking his head and furrowing his brow as though he would shame them all with his eyes, and said softly so that only Tom and I could hear him, “Your father did not leave her in that terrible place. He has buried her properly, that I can promise you. He and a good many of the other families have returned under the cover of night and have taken their loved ones away to secret places.”
I thought of Father returning to Gallows Hill to lift Mother’s stiffening body from its narrow trench and I shuddered. Dr. Ames pulled my shawl tighter around my shoulders and sat with me silently for a while, clasping and unclasping his fingers in mine. I felt my eyes grow heavy against the touch of his fingers and I longed for sleep. A sleep that would go on and on, undisturbed and peaceful. When Mother used to wake Father on a Sabbath, his deep voice would rumble from beneath the blankets in Welsh, “I am asleep and don’t waken me.” But the sleep he summoned was from a fairy tale and meant a deeper sleep, an enchanted sleep. A misted, reveried decline that would outlast time. I felt my mind floating free with my drowsiness but I heard the doctor begin to speak, and there was an edge to his voice that made my ears twitch to listen.
“I do not know how much you know about your father, Sarah. About his past, before coming here from England. It may be that you know very little of him, and it is not for me to tell you of past deeds that would be . . . ,” he said, and he paused, carefully selecting his words. “Your father was a soldier and fought long and hard for Cromwell. Many men here fought proudly for Cromwell and his Parliament but it is a pride quietly kept. But before your father fought for Parliament he was a soldier for the Crown and supported the King as did all his kinsmen. Over time he came to believe, as did many great men of that time, that the suffering of the people came mainly from that King. The tyranny of the King’s unfair laws of taxation and religious intolerance. . .”
I had opened my eyes, and he paused and smiled at the look of childish incomprehension on my face.
He squeezed my hand and said, “You don’t know what I’m speaking of, do you?” I shook my head and he continued. “Then I will only say that your father is the bravest of men. He carries on his shoulders the terrible weight of his convictions and his losses. Losses that would have planted a lesser man into the ground. Do you
think he would have let a group of deluded girls keep him from doing his duty to his wife?”
I said softly, “I cannot say what he will do. He did not save my mother.”
He bowed his head for a moment and said, “It is easier to kill a tyrant with a sword than disassemble whole counties in the grip of superstitious dread. He could not save her, Sarah, without putting you and your brothers at terrible risk.”
When I did not answer him he started gathering up his tools and vials into his bag and said as he rose to go, “He will not rest until he can carry you from here to home.”
With dismay I remembered the message I was to give Father and I grabbed for the sleeve of his black coat and said, “I have forgotten to give him your message.”
He patted my grasping hand and uncurled it from his sleeve, saying, “Then you will tell him when next you see him. It is important for him to know he has our fellowship. Sleep now and I will visit again soon.” He parted with Tom, asking him to watch over me, making certain that I ate my share of the bread he had left us.
I slept deeply for the remainder of the day, and when I woke at dusk, I felt a tightening and a rawness like the tickling of a moth in my throat. I slept again for several hours and woke with flames in my head and bone-shaking chills. A first dry cough was quickly followed by a rattling one that came from somewhere deep in my chest. Tom put his hand to my neck and then quickly pulled it away as though the palm had been scorched. He beckoned for Goody Faulkner to come closer, but when she saw I was not well, she pulled back, saying only, “You must keep her well wrapped. And ask your father to bring soup or soak her bread for she must not eat anything solid. Keep her head bathed. There is nothing more that can be done.” She pulled her daughters closer to her and three pairs of eyes regarded me with more fear than sympathy.
FOR THE SECOND time in Salem jail Tom sat sick watch, covering me with his coat through the cold nights, trading his own bread and meat for any bit of mash or soup or small beer that could be passed down my burning throat. And within a few days I entered into that fevered state where awakenings are indistinct and fragmented and dreams are etched clear and bright upon the memory. It is a realm close to madness where what is heard and seen during the fever can never be trusted to be substantial once the sickness has been burned free.
Once, I saw the cell door open wide of its own accord and a dark man, long of limb and impossibly lean, swung back and forth on it like a walking stick on a swaying branch. He had sharp-angled features and he placed a finger to his pursed and smiling lips as though we shared a wicked secret. When I looked to Tom to show him the man and looked back again, he had disappeared. The prison door was closed fast and not another person had raised their head to give any sign they had seen the taunting man. I heard the disembodied voice of Father or Dr. Ames calling me and telling me to get up and begin breakfast or to sit up and start the treadle on the spinner. When I answered them, my voice sounded deafening and petulant in my own ears.
At times I felt hands turning me over onto my back, though I struggled to stay buried in the straw, shielding my eyes from the blinding pinpricks of light that were held close to my eyes. Damp cloths were pressed onto my forehead, but I brushed them off as quickly as they were applied, for they felt like the hands of the dead being laid across my skin. I wanted only to sleep and yet in the depths of night when the cold shuddering of my limbs would start and the racking coughs threatened to crack all my ribs, the time between midnight and dawn seemed to last forever.
I could hear the rustling of vermin close by and once I saw two rats regarding me with a keen and somewhat sympathetic intelligence in their red eyes. They sat upright on their haunches and began to speak together, their voices high and wavering like the voices of old women. One said to the other, “It seems that they have hung a dog in Salem a few days past.” And the other responded, “Aye, and I hear another is to be hanged in Andover at this very hour.” They laughed confidingly together over this as would old friends over a good jest, but when they looked back at me their teeth were pointed sharp and yellow. I heard the sound of a small cat meowing, pitiful and puny, as though from the inside of a drowning sack. The rats shook their heads sorrowfully at me and the biggest one said, “It is very small and not like to live. And there is so much blood. . .” They fell back down into the furtive crouching attitude that all rats have taken since the days of Adam and soon vanished within the dark and crawling rushes on the floor.
Once I woke from a dream and found I was speaking with someone sitting next to me. There was a slight, but not unpleasant, ringing in my ears, and my sight was so clear that it seemed as if black lines had been drawn around every object, putting each thing in sharp contrast to everything else. A tight band was clenched around my chest and the passage for breath had been squeezed into one slender cord. I heard myself say, “But why must I stay?”
I felt some pressure on my fingers and when I turned my head I saw Tom sitting next to me, holding my hand. His face was glistening and wet and when I looked into his eyes, I saw that he had been crying. I tried to comfort him but my tongue felt swollen and lazy, and so I could only lie very still and listen to the low and broken sound of his voice. He said, “Do you remember last June, Sarah, after they had taken Mother and it was just us and Father in the fields?”
I lowered my chin slightly to nod, even though movement seemed beyond my abilities, and he continued, “We were plowing the fields for planting. And something happened. I . . . I looked behind me down the rows that had been furrowed the day before and the day before that and then I looked ahead of me and all I saw were stones and stumps to be taken out. For the rest of my life and for always, there would be a strap round my shoulders and rough earth waiting to be cleared. I couldn’t see for the blackness of it. And so I shrugged off the harness and went to my bed.
“Later Father came and sat with me. He didn’t say anything at first. He just sat until it came full-on dark. And then he started to talk. He told me I was his namesake because I was most like him. It started me up, Sarah, for I had always thought Richard most alike to Father. He said that some people can live from birth to death and have no more thoughts in their heads about the reasons for living than a beetle. But that we were different, he and I. We needed more than a clod of dirt to make our rising up and lying down worth something.
“I told him I would rather die than wind my days out only plowing and dusting clay off my shoes. Then he said if I were to die, a piece of him would die, too. He said I had to find one thing living that was greater than myself to cleave to, and in that would be my strength for walking upright like a man. A long time ago he was in despair and had sunk so low as to die from it. But he found Mother, and it was her that brought a quickening back to his living. I thought long on what he had said. And d’ye know what I told him, Sarah?”
He squeezed my hand painfully in his and paused, his voice choking into silence. He struggled for several moments to speak again and I waited for him to pour out his grief for Mother. But when he spoke, he said, “I told him it was you. It’s you who are my strength. You mustn’t die, Sarah, and leave me in this dark place.”
A drowsiness had come over me and my eyes started to close. I could hear Tom’s voice and I wanted to answer him, to reassure him that I would not leave but I could not find the breath to form the words. It seemed such a simple thing to sink beneath the weight within my chest, and in that moment I thought of Miles Corey beneath his blanket of stones. Breathing a little less and a little less each time until each rib was still and fixed. I pressed Tom’s fingers in mine and slept.
I LAY SOMETIMES in flames, the straw glowing and then catching fire. The fire driving legions of rats and armies of lice before it across the floor to disappear like smoke under the door. Other times I lay locked in the cold-cellar, turning to ice, turning to stone, turning to bone and frozen ash. And always were the churning wet sounds of the bellows within my ribs struggling to work against a slow drowning. Once I opened m
y eyes and saw Margaret sitting next to me, her long black hair loose and wild about her shoulders. I shook my head, squeezing my eyes shut to drive this apparition away, but when I opened my eyes again, she was there. I felt a pressure on my arm and she said, “They have taken my poppet, Sarah. The one you gave me.”
Like an ancient crone I croaked out, “They have taken mine as well.” I looked for Tom to place me back into the hard world again but I could not see him.
She leaned in closer and whispered, “You mustn’t blame Father. He means well and he loves us all. He is but a little distracted these few days past. But look, see what I have found for you.” She reached into her sleeve and pulled out a short length of thread.
“You see, I have a bit of ribbon for you. I have learned how to do it from Father. But once it has appeared, I cannot make it disappear again as Father would do.” She placed it gently on my chest. She smiled sweetly, her eyes drifting into the unfocused and slanting gaze of one who would follow the footsteps of fairies off a canted cliff. She lay down beside me, wrapping her arms around my shoulders, and kissed me. Her lips were cold and smooth as riverbed stones but her breath was warm and she sang to me, “We shall always be sisters.” I fell back into sleep and dreamt of swimming in a great dark ocean.
THERE WAS NEVER a time that Tom or Margaret would leave my side for very long. I do not know what Aunt made of Margaret’s attentions to me, for she never again spoke to me, but she also never called for Margaret to return to the far side of the cell. I gave to Margaret the ancient piece of pottery that I had carried in the bodice of my dress for so many weeks and told her that if I should die, she would have something from me to keep with her always. The hard clay had for so long pressed against my breastbone that its absence felt as though I had given her a part of my rib. She delighted in it, looking at it, turning it over and over in her palm. When I showed her the cross-stitch piece that I had worn close to my heart, she wept and, drying her tears with it, tucked it back into its place.
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