Centuries of June (16 page)

Elizabeth Hubbard, aged about seventeen years, testifieth

Alice Bonham has entreated me to come to her home and to lie with her husband so that another child might be born and saith
this child is owed the Devil. She also flies through the window in the shape of a yellow bird and bids me do the same to join the witches who do coven in the woods outside Salem Farms. Alice Bonham also makes claims upon me to follow the custom of the Papist and go to Mary-land and to abandon my masters here.

D
EPOSITION OF
A
NN
P
UTNAM
S
ENIOR

v. A
LICE
B
ONHAM

Ann Putnam, nee Carr, about age thirty-eight, saith

I woke one evening in May to see the shape of Alice Bonham covering my husband Thomas, baying as if a hound, and when I reached out to strike and drive her from the bed was met with form insubstantial, though he, too, cried out her name and beat the air with his fists. When I confronted her and Mr. Bonham outside Salem Village Church, she denied all and claimed she was a true Christian, though I know she once was a Papist. I later saw her shape in the shed, suckling a hogget, and the ewe bleat in the corner at the unnatural act, and Alice Bonham sung to the lamb as if it were her own child.

N
OTES AND
S
UNDRY
,
continued

Part, the ninth

Near three weeks ago, on the 29th of June, six were put to trial at Court of Oyer and Terminer: Sarah Good, Rebecca Nurse, Susannah Martin, Alice Bonham, Elizabeth Howe, and Sarah Wildes. We were encouraged by Increase and Cotton Mather, in their letter to the Village, to be cautious but proceed with speed and vigour to try these accused. The day was long in going, for these women must be examined separately, though all proved guilty. At every trial, the afflicted behaved exactly: when in the presence of a witch, they blanched and fell to
terrible fits and protests, but when the witch was made to cover her eyes with a cloth and led to lay hands upon the afflicted person, the fit stopped at once: thus proving the causation. Rebecca Nurse, heretofore judged most holy, was acquitted by the jury, though the afflicted out-cried at the verdict. When I expressed myself dissatisfied, the chief judge said we would not impose again upon the jury. When another prisoner, who has confessed to being a witch, was brought into court to witness against her, Goody Nurse said, “What, do you bring her? She is one of us.” When asked to explain her remarks, she said nothing, and the verdict was later changed to guilty, though she later claimed she meant merely that the witness was a prisoner like her, and that she had not understood the charge. So say all. Each failed at their catechism, and we were most sure the jury was right.

In the docket, Alice Bonham protested that the girls and other witnesses were deceiving and in collusion, that they did prick their own skin, or bite one another, that they did hide tokens and talismans in the accused persons’ homes. When confronted with the Devil’s poppet she had made to conjure her own dead child, Goody Bonham wept so as to break stout hearts, but the jury found she was dissembling. She even cried to me, asking if I recalled the trial of Martha Corey and the pin found in the child’s cap, but I could not remember at the moment such an occasion and only now, in reading over what I have wrote, realize that Alice had made such claims of perfidy against the afflicted long before she stood accused.

But why would the children tell untruths, or neighbors bear false witness against neighbors? Are we not all good English men and women, under the same King and Queen, and guided by the Lord? It is the guilty who doth protest loudest, and wrong to accuse the poor Innocents who have no reason
but to rid this place of Evil. Did not the Lord himself say, Suffer the children. I cannot believe her, and moreover, did think she tried to seduce even me with her greenish eyes and the hair escaping her bonnet. Did not Judas Iscariot have a red beard? Perhaps there is something to be said about the old admonition against the Red-Haired.

On 16th of July, the six were taken from Salem Prison to Gallows Hill, and the folk along the way treated the spectacle with more disdain than called upon. Old Sarah Good called out to the houses as we passed for a small beer, and at one such, the neighbor, taking pity, handed her a mug, which she drank along the way and did feel much better. Emboldened, perhaps, by the drink, she cursed me as I said the final prayers. “Thou art a witch,” I told her, hoping she would confess and save her life, “You know you are.” She spat out, “You are a liar, and if you take my life, God will give you blood to drink.” Such a wicked spell I cannot forget, and Alice Bonham, too, had turned into a most wretched soul. She saith upon the gallows, “And I am an innocent woman, no witch, and God will punish you and all for your wickedness and falsehoods. I hope Goody Good is right, and more, and your head swell in pain as mine is about to do.”

It took no more than seventeen minutes for the last to kick once and then pass from this world. Some had their necks broken, and others strangled to death. I turned to Mr. Hathorne and Mr. Putnam in attendance and commented upon the woeful sight of those six bodies hanging in the summer sun. God have mercy upon those who sought forgiveness, and may the families and friends of those who insisted wrongly on their Innocence find some solace in the church and in knowing the will of the Lord be done.

•   •   •

W
e fell into a measured silence, stunned by the finality of her story and the image of the six hanged women and the mob of witnesses. I could not look at anyone and did not notice how Alice had caused the doll to materialize. Strung on a single thread, the simple puppet was fashioned from a washcloth—with an elementary head and limbs, no features on its face, yet strangely lifelike. Through some manipulation of the string, Alice caused the doll to toddle across the tiles, and then give a little curtsy, and quite extraordinarily, to jump up on the sink and straddle my toothbrush like a miniature witch upon a broom. With a flick of her wrist to snap the noose, the puppet collapsed into plain terrycloth. She then reached into the archival box and handed one more document to the old man.

Boston, Massachusetts
20 September 1706

Dearest Sarah
,

God’s blessing on you and your children, and forgive me for not writing in so many years, but I have heard some news today that I share with you, though I know not how to say it. Word has come from Salem that Ann Putnam, one of the girls who accused our darling Alice, has confessed to her sin. She recanted all and said before the congregation that it was a “great delusion of Satan” and that it was not done “out of any anger, malice or ill-will,” but done ignorantly, and she begs forgiveness of God and from the relations of those she condemned. We have some consolation, at last, that Alice was both truthful and right in reasoning that some base motive caused those girls to tell such dreadfull Stories and send twenty to the Gallows, not to mention poor Goodman Corey, who was pressed to death with stoneweights on the chest, and to stir the people of Essex county into a frenzy of witch hunting. I now believe that there is no Witches, and I am comforted to know she is truly with the Lord. I hope this finds you well. My new wife, not so new any more, is with child, and I feel like Abram, I am so old, and if it be a girl, I shall ask to call her Sarah, after you
.

Sincerely,
Nathan Bonham

No further records existed, and her story ended. She filed the last document in the box and shut the lid. A pause, pregnant with sentiment, interceded as we each contemplated this sad chapter from history. I expected her to lift the broom in attack against me as the other two women had done with their weapons, but she merely slumped against the wall and slid to a seated position, her red gown rustling like a sigh. The old man, some thought wrinkling his forehead, sat on the toilet and rested his chin in the cup of his hand. Dolly and Jane exchanged whispers in the bathtub, and I alone strove to make sense of it all. “At least, in the end, the girl apologized. It was not out of anger, but ignorance.”

“Ignorance?” Alice spoke. Her high thin voice colored echoes of New England. “She was a clueless pawn in a far more dangerous game. The wrath of righteous neighbor against neighbor, the old against the new, the status quo versus change. The anger of values upended, the petty grievances of the true believer meeting the unknown threat of the Other. Red, boiling anger. Not from the children, but out of their parents. The girls themselves may not have even known what tipped their game into madness, but they surely felt it in the long-simmering wrath of their parents and their ministers. A kind of institutionalized, socially acceptable political anger that struck out against the old and
powerless, ripe targets for the venting mob. The worst kind of ignorant, misplaced anger. I am surprised that it took you so long to understand, being an educated and religious man.”

I did not understand the meaning of her last remark, since I do not consider myself particularly religious, but my confusion was superseded by the surprise of her gift of speech. We were all shocked.

“You can talk!” Jane and Dolly said together, and then to each other, “Jinx!”

“I told you she was a magical woman,” the old man said. “What concerns me most, however, is: whatever happened to the minister Noyes?”

Her green eyes flared like a wild animal’s as she spoke, and had I not known better, I would have thought Alice was casting a spell. “Justice delayed is sometimes the sweeter. Nicholas Noyes lived for twenty-five more years after the Salem trials, enjoying a good reputation and coming to regret and apologize for his role in condemning the innocent, but in the end, Sarah Good’s gallows prophecy came true. One morning he woke, coughed once into his pillow, and saw the first red drops. An aneurysm in the brain, a hemorrhage that sent the blood gushing out of his nose and mouth, and he lived just long enough to comprehend the meaning of the red stain spreading on his gown and bedclothes.”

As if thunderstruck, my head pounded again with the ferocity of a migraine, and the room began to spin, so I had to go lie down.

S
ometimes there is no place I would rather be than under the covers in my own bed in my own house. In
The Poetics of Space
, Bachelard says, “If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.” By extension, then, the bedroom and, more particularly, the bed in which we spend a third of our lives function as a kind of protective haven for the true self, the subconscious refugee from the assault of the external world. The bed, in situ, becomes the restorative womb, where the imagination is nurtured while our resting bodies are safe. Eyes closed, one drifts in warmth, the blankets pressing gently against the body, one’s own breath as regular as a mother’s heart, and one becomes free of all care. The familiar bed—I can never truly sleep in a strange hotel—is a comfort unlike any other. She—and I cannot help but feminize her—is the house inside the house, the locus of all that renews, and when I am tired or sick, as with a violent headache, into her tender arms I fall. Of course, a bed is many other things, and, as Bachelard also says, “Sleep opens within us an inn for
phantoms. In the morning we must sweep out the shadows.” But for its restorative power, I sought my dear bed when I stumbled from the bathroom, my poor skull squeaking with pain.

Unfortunately, I had forgotten about the women slumbering there. Light from the hallway spilled across their recumbent forms when I opened the door to my bedroom. The remaining five had scarcely moved since last I saw them jumbled in a crazy quilt of bare limbs and quiet faces, with one of the women turned away to face the wall, her bare body curved like a cello. Not daring to wake them, I closed the door in a swift, silent motion, the soft click of the lock against the plate sending a rail of pain to my sinuses. A nap in my own bed was impossible under the circumstances, and the only sensible alternative was the living room sofa.

Now a couch is no equal to a bed, but I can attest to its soothing power, for many a Sunday afternoon have I fallen asleep stretched out in front of the television, some sporting event going on without me, and an occasional all-nighter with a black-and-white movie long since over or a book tented on my chest or dropped to the floor. I could picture the seductive cushions, the warm afghan folded over the arm, and the throw pillows casually, yet artfully, positioned, and I entered the darkened living room with a lover’s anticipation. From his customary perch atop the VCR, the cat mewed once and pointed his tail to the LED clock. I was glad to see some things had not changed and was grateful for the reassuring presence of another living being. Arranging myself on the sofa, I closed my eyes and waited for sleep and some relief from the hot poker pressing behind my eyeballs.