The Heretic's Daughter (22 page)

Mother crossed her arms over her chest but continued to ignore the writhing girls, and the chief judge asked yet again, “What black man did you see?”

And here Mother answered coolly, “I saw no black man but your own presence.” Out of the momentary quiet came a soft, sniggering laugh from the back of the room. The chief judge blinked his eyes a few times as though peering into a bright light and frowned as he pointed to the girls. “Can you look upon these and not knock them down?”

“They will dissemble if I look upon them,” she answered, but the judge stabbed his finger again at the girls, and when Mother turned her head to them, they fell to the ground, shrieking and clawing at themselves and moaning as though they were being drawn and quartered. Now the judges had caught a chill from the winds of hysteria, and the third judge, who had all this time been silent, stood up and said, “You see you look upon them and they fall down.”

Mother stepped closer to the judges and said loudly to be heard over the din, “It is false. The Devil is a liar. I looked upon none since I came into the room but you.”

Then the girl named Susannah seemed to go into a trance, her body rigid and trembling from some soul sickness and she pointed to the rafters and cried, “I wonder that you could murder thirteen persons.” The other girls looked to the rafters and pointed and began crawling over one another to hide themselves under the pews and called out, “Look, there are the thirteen ghosts. . . . See how they point at Goody Carrier. . . . She has killed thirteen at Andover . . . .” The men and women who had gathered inside the meetinghouse all looked to the rafters and swayed as one body outward towards the doors. Richard heard one woman standing close to him turn to another and say, “It’s true. She killed thirteen people with the smallpox last winter. I have heard she brought it with her from Billerica. It is much talked about.”

Mother walked a few forceful steps towards the girls and so stunned were they by her advances that they for a moment fell silent. She turned and faced the judges, saying, “It is a shameful thing that you should mind these young girls that are out of their wits.”

The girls howled with renewed vigor, saying, “Do you not see them? The ghosts.” The judges shifted anxiously in their seats and moved their chairs about as people will do sitting under a tree, avoiding the droppings of birds. Some of the men pushed their way out of the meetinghouse in terror for their lives, and women grew weak and had to be held up in the pews. Hands pointed upwards to the shadows that lingered in the crossbeams, and heads swiveled about on necks made stiff with fear, and even Richard was moved to search the rafters for ghostly traces. The short judge asked Mother, almost pleadingly, “Do you not see them?”

“If I do speak, you will not believe me,” said Mother, and it was then that Richard knew there would be only one ending.

The girls shouted at her with one voice, “You do see them. . . . You do. . .”

Mother pointed at them forcefully as any judge and said, “You lie. I am wronged.” The fits grew and bubbled over and became so violent that the chief judge called forward the Salem sheriff for the touch test.

The sheriff held out Mother’s arm, and the girl named Mercy Lewis came forward and was immediately made calm by touching it. Then the judges ordered that Mother be tied hand and foot, and as she was being bound with a stout rope, the girl named Mary told the judges that Goody Carrier had revealed to her in dreams she had been a witch these forty years. At these last words Mother cried out as she was being dragged away, “A neat trick that, as I would have been only two years old upon becoming a witch. Do you suppose I rode then upon my rattle?”

Once she was removed from the court, the girls became calm and peaceful until the next man or woman was brought forward for examination. Richard saw the sheriff put Mother in another cart and turn south for the Salem Town jail. She lay on the rough boards, as there was no straw beneath her, but when Richard tried following the cart, she shook her head and there was nothing left for him to do but walk back to Andover. He returned to the house before supper and after telling us of what he’d seen, we sat without speaking through the slanting light of dusk. Before the light had left the sky completely, I walked out of the house, and though Father called to me, I did not answer but ran as fast as I could to Chandler’s Inn. I had thought to scorch their smokehouse, or cut off all of Phoebe Chandler’s hair as she lay sleeping, but I had no burning taper and nothing sharp to cut with. But as I approached the yard, I saw three men finishing their work on a small outbuilding, and in the distance walking towards them, carrying buckets of food and beer, was Phoebe Chandler.

I quickly crossed the road and, hidden in full by the evening shadows, slipped into a stand of stunted pines that circled behind the inn on three sides. I waited for the men to finish their supper and, after packing away their tools, they parted company, leaving Phoebe to gather up the remnants of food and drink. I believe I could have walked up and tread on her toes and she would never have seen me because of her weak sight and because the moon was still empty in the night sky. But I stayed concealed in the trees and called out to her, making my voice low and threatening, “Girl, what are you doing there?” So startled was she that she shrieked and did not so much drop the buckets as fling them away. She stood twisting and turning about, looking for a body to put to the voice. And when she finally bent to pick up the scattered plates and bowls, I called out again. “Girl, whither go you?” She screamed again and, gathering what she could, ran for the inn.

Chasing her through the shadows, I made my breath harsh and ragged as though some desperate and hungering wolf were at her heels, and stopped only when she threw herself against the kitchen door. I watched her struggle mindlessly to push the door open, forgetting in her frenzy that the door was hinged to swing outward. I stood and laughed silently as she pounded and screamed and begged to be let in. Finally her mother, standing on the inside and fearing impending murder, flung wide the door and in so doing knocked Phoebe, with no little force, to the ground. She screamed and cried into her mother’s bulky breast, gibbering that some ghoulish force had hunted her through the yard. In the beginning, the walk home brought feelings of satisfied vengeance. But, like a frightened mule treading over my heels, my dark, disheartened feelings soon overwhelmed me. Throwing Phoebe Chandler down a well would not have brought Mother back from prison and no childish pranks would change the opinion of the courts.

It was full-on night before I returned home, but no one had gone to bed, and though Father looked long at me, he did not ask questions. There were some dried bits of bread and meat still on the table but I had no strength left to clear it properly and so let it lie. I picked up Hannah and took her to bed with me, grateful for once to have her arms wrapped tightly and possessively about my neck. I lay for hours without sleeping, the images of Mother’s inquest growing more grotesque and threatening as the hours passed. I thought of all she had said to me the night before and wondered how soon it would be before they came for the rest of us. I thought of Mother’s book and the bloody deeds recorded within and the testimony of the girls saying Mother had told them to sign the Devil’s book. All through the night I fell in and out of sleep and burned as if with a fever and wondered if the red book buried under the elm was filling the air with the scent of burning hemp and sulfur.

A
ND SO WE
passed into June, and as the seed was in the ground, it was decided that Richard and Father would by turns make the daily walk to Salem to bring food to Mother while she awaited her trial. We could not risk further injury to the horse on such a journey and it was just as well for, truth be told, Father with his bounding stride could walk faster than any horse at a walk. In the space of a day, it was twelve miles there and back again, taking the shorter, southerly route through Falls Woods. On occasion Robert Russell lent us his horse and we could carry by cart enough food to feed Mother as well as those prisoners who had no family to provide for them. Once a week Father brought Mother a clean shift for the soiled one she had worn for seven days, and salve for her skin, swelling and chafing under her irons. The first week when Father brought back the dirty linen, it was crawling with lice and crusted at the edge with her own, or someone else’s, waste. She had had her monthly courses and there was a large rust-brown shadow where she had bled onto her shift. I boiled it twice in lye to kill all the vermin and cried enough salt into the pot to bleach it white, but it would not come clean again. I folded it in such a way as to hide the stain and tucked lavender into the folds so that she would have the scent of something wholesome within the walls of her prison.

Father had to bring coins those first few days to pay back the Salem sheriff for the cost of Mother’s manacles. Everyone held in chains had to recompense George Corwin for this and for any food brought into the jail by his wife. We had heard that when John Proctor and his wife were arrested, they had no coins, and so the sheriff had taken everything from their home that could be carried out, draining beer from a barrel to cart away the wooden stays and even spilling food from the cook pot left for the Proctors’ children, made orphans with their parents’ imprisonment.

Our days settled into a steady, predictable rhythm, and we each moved forward in our tasks as best we could. Much like a dog that has lost a forelimb but can still hobble to hunt, to eat, to move about from here to there. In spirit it was more like a starfish stabbed through its middle, its disparate parts moving and writhing but in opposite directions, as though its only reason for unity was destroyed when its center was pierced.

We did our share of work, made twofold because of Mother’s absence, but we finished every task as though we were completely alone in our endeavors. Both Father and Richard remained mute on what they had seen and heard in the Salem jail, and the rest of us were left to thread together the shape of things from those few left in Andover who would come near us: Reverend Dane’s family and the Russells. Their reticence soon infected all of us, and all bantering talk ceased, all teasing, all play with words. Even complaints came fewer and farther between, until silence seemed to settle over our house and fields like a steady, drizzling rain. Richard’s quiet reserve darkened and settled harshly into a bitter, implacable wordlessness, and any attempts to plead with him or pester him into revelations would be met with a shove or a backhanded swipe.

Andrew, confused and distressed over Mother’s absence, began to moan for hours at a time, until his turbid thoughts made a connection between his keening and Richard’s knuckles upon his head. He perhaps worked the hardest, as his time was spent running from the field and barn to the kitchen to help me move the lug pole for the cooking pot or pull Hannah from under my feet. Hannah, though she had never fully settled into my mother’s care again, became ever more brittle and fragile in her mind after Mother’s arrest. The littlest disruption would send her into a frenzied crying and she would cling to my legs like ivy to brick. My own worry and exhaustion had made me short-tempered and mean, and more than once I pinched her arm hard enough to bruise. At those times, when her howling pricked my conscience, I would give her my poppet and after a time she would be silent and watchful again. Or I would give her a handful of June strawberries, little and sweet, and watch as she wiped her soiled hands on her skirt, the red jellied pulp smeared like blood on the cloth.

Many times at night, when I was awake long enough to form any thoughts at all, I would make a silent promise to talk to my brothers and warn them that the sheriff could come at any time to arrest us and take us to prison. Night after night I formed a resolve to make them promise on the morrow what I had promised Mother: to tell the judges whatever they wished to hear and in so doing save ourselves. But the days peeled away and I could not bring myself to speak of those things, as though by my being silent, our confinement would not come to pass. I came to believe that Mother, by remaining steadfast in her innocence, would soon be made free.

One day, a few weeks after Mother was arrested, I said as much to Richard as we worked at the well, trying to retrieve the bucket that had fallen into the water. The rope was old and had finally split and, as Richard worked with an iron hook and a length of rope, I leaned over the lip, holding a lantern. The well had been dug in my grandfather’s day and the stones were slick with green and black lichen, punctured with vining tree roots. The level of water was low, for Blanchard’s Pond, which fed the well underground, had shrunk from the heat of the season.

The day was dark from low-riding clouds and we worked to fish out the bucket before the rain came. It was quiet as the world often gets before a storm, the air close and oppressive, the lantern lighting our faces from below as we leaned into the mossy cavern, giving our skin a gnomish green hue. His hands moved my arms impatiently here and there, turning the lantern about to better see the bucket floating in the black water. His face was close to mine and I saw that he had not shaved with Father’s razor that morning and his chin was peppered with dark whiskers.

I said, “I think Mother will be coming home soon.” He looked at me oddly but did not answer. After a while I prompted, “There is no one as determined as Mother when she sets her mind on a thing. She will wear them down with her talking.”

Richard had been retrieving and throwing down the hook in a lackluster fashion but with my words his throws became more forceful. He said quietly, as though to himself, “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I had been looking for some reassurance, some encouragement, but his careless remark cut me and I said, “Richard, you don’t know everything. I know a thing or two. Mother told me. . .”

“You don’t know anything,” he said, raising his voice to me as though I were standing across the field and not shoulder to shoulder with him, his breath hot in my face.