The Heretic's Daughter (28 page)
My pleasant things in ashes lie,
And them behold no more shall I.
Under thy roof no guest shall sit,
Nor at thy table eat a bit.
No pleasant tale shall e’er be told,
Nor things recounted done of old.
No candle e’er shall shine in thee,
Nor bridegroom’s voice e’er heard shall be.
In silence ever shall thou lie . . .
When we are babes newly born and the midwife pulls us through the passage from our mother’s womb into the world, it is the sense of smell that awakens us first to our new realm of living. Babes are near blind and without strength to govern their limbs, but one not five minutes old can turn its head towards the waiting breast that is filled with milk, its nostrils twitching and wrinkling all the while. When Sheriff Corwin walked Tom and me down the stairs towards the waiting cells below, it was the smell of the place that first welcomed us to our new home.
It was like crawling headfirst into a midden that had been rained upon and then sealed with a tight canvas under a baking sun. The smell of rot was so sharp and so far-reaching that my eyes ran over and the furthest recesses of my nose and throat felt as if they had caught fire. But it was not just the rot of human waste that was so powerful, it was the sweetly sour rot of badly turned food, and perhaps something still living that was only partially dead: musty and coppery and bog-laden. The smell of decaying cattails and rushes being pressed into peat moss.
The stones of the stairwell were cold to the touch, and my feet slid treacherously from side to side as I felt my way down the steps, holding to the guide rope with one hand as I held my apron to my nose with the other. I heard Tom retch and pause behind me, but the sheriff pushed his shoulder and told him to move on. It was dark as we descended the last steps, and quiet. So quiet that I at first believed we were the only three to be in the cellar. Soon I could see little pinpricks of light through iron bars, where the few ends of candles sputtered weakly. I heard the rasping sound of a man coughing and then another answering sound of a woman clearing her throat. There was then the sound of rustling, bodies shifting in the straw, moving closer to us.
When my eyes had widened to the feeble light, I saw that we were standing in a narrow corridor with one long cell banded with bars to my right and, to my left, two smaller cells. Between the bars appeared the gripped knuckles of many hands. The sheriff’s lantern light illuminated the hands in sharp relief while the darkness from the cells within severed the arms at the wrist, making the hands look unattached to any living body. He took out a ring of keys from his coat and unlocked the wooden door to the longer cell, swinging it outward, and pointed for us to go inside.
He said to Tom, “Boy, you’ll be in the women’s cell. The men’s cell is full now. But if you pester the women, you’ll be taken to the stocks. D’ye hear me, boy?”
The foul odor coming from inside the cell was even stronger than it had been on the stairs and the air was cold and dank. I took a few steps backwards, treading on the sheriff’s toes, but before he could push me in, Tom took my hand and led me into our cell. The door was quickly closed and locked and we could hear the retreating footsteps of Sheriff Corwin as he climbed the steps to the room above. We stood together, clutching each other’s arms, not speaking, afraid to move until the light coming from the small open slits in the far walls gave us the height and breadth of our new home. The floor was covered in straw and we could hear the continual rustling of people moving about. Slowly we saw them. First the feet and then the legs and then the bodies and faces of women, dozens and dozens of women, lying or sitting or standing throughout the cell, staring at us, their eyes looking nowhere but at our faces. I searched the shadows for a familiar face, any familiar face, and then I opened my mouth and called out hoarsely, “Mother?” At the sound of my voice several women groaned or shook their heads and one, a young woman at my feet, started crying. But there was no answering voice to say “Here I am.”
I took a few steps towards the back wall and called out again, “Mother?” But there was no answer, and as I moved again I stepped on an old woman I had thought was a pile of rags at my feet. She shrieked and pulled herself up, holding her hands in front of her face as if to ward off blows. I moved my head back and forth, looking, looking for my mother, hugging my arms around my chest, trembling and shivering against the cold and the fear. Every eye was on me and yet no one had spoken, and the silence became more unbearable than the stench. I backed up the few steps to stand again next to Tom and then I heard my name being called. It was faint, as though it came to me through a blanket or from a great distance, and I called out again, “Mother?” I heard the voice again from the direction of the corridor and I ran the few feet back to the bars. There were outraged yelps and rude protests as I climbed over the women resting against the short stone wall into which the bars had been set. But I did not care. I would have walked over a hundred bodies to find the source of the voice. I clung to the bars and brought my face as close to them as I could and called out, “Mother, where are you?”
“Here, Sarah, I am here.” And I saw from the far cell across the corridor an arm reach out. The hand was strong and beckoning, the palm turned up as if to catch rain or the sound of my voice. The wrist was strong and supple like the neck of a powerful mare, and on it were a manacle and chain.
“Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother . . . ,” I must have said a hundred times and she, answering me. And so we called back and forth to each other until the sheriff shouted out from the top of the stairwell, “I’ll have quiet or you’ll know why.” We lowered our voices to whispers and then I heard the sound of Richard’s voice coming to me from directly across the corridor. He was with Andrew in the nearer small cell, the men’s cell, and the three of us talked in whispers of small things: that Tom was with me, that we were for the time being safe. Richard told us of the wounds on Andrew’s wrists, received during the torture ten days before. But he did not say that Andrew had begun to fever from the poison festering in the torn flesh. We did not speak of the trials or the sentencing or what was to come, but when Mother asked about Hannah I had no answer to give her. I had not given my sister a thought from the time I approached the Salem meetinghouse. Soon the women against the wall reclaimed their places and I was forced back towards the center of the cell, where Tom sat in wretched silence waiting for me.
A woman crept her way slowly towards Tom and me, her dress dirty and worn and rust-stained from the chains that rested against her apron, and said softly, “Children, come sit with me. You are in the good cell. Not the other one. Come and find a place with me and rest easy.” Her face was very kind and her hands gentle as they found my resisting fingers. I looked around at the women, unbathed, unfed, and all of them manacled, even the youngest of them, and wondered what she could mean by the “good” cell. I did not know that most of the women in the far cell were condemned to die and that my mother had found fellowship with fifteen other martyrs in a cell made to hold six or seven.
We sat with the kind woman for a few hours, until the blacksmith came and fitted us with manacles, manacles that Father would have to repay the sheriff for. The man was curt and brusque but he knew his craft and did not miss his mark when the hammer came down for the final closure. Many an arm or ankle could be shattered with a careless blow. Some of the women, the women who had been longest in the prison, had their chains passed through a ring bolt attached to the floor or the wall, but because we were so young, our chains were left free. Soon after came the time for the sheriff to let into the corridor, one by one, the families of the imprisoned to pass food or clothing through the bars. The time spent in the corridor was only as long as the number of coins or barter that could be slipped into the hands of the jailer. Most everyone had no coins and so were given only a few moments for comfort or prayers or for saying good-bye.
The doors to the cells were rarely opened for visitors, except for a minister or the few attending doctors who came out of charity. Or to remove the body of someone who had died during the night. It was late afternoon before Tom and I saw the corridor darken from the shadow of our father’s crouching figure appearing at the bars to our cell. The ceiling was no more than six feet high, three feet down into the rocky ground, making a half cellar, and three feet built up with a stone foundation for the house resting above the cells.
He wrapped his hands around the bars and called to us. When he saw we were manacled he bowed his head and said, “Dear God . . . ,” but there was no time to linger, for he had to deliver food to Richard, Andrew, and Mother before he was forced to leave. He handed me a small loaf of bread, a leather water skin, a shawl for me, and a coat for Tom, and said hurriedly, “Sarah, listen to what I say. Drink what’s in the skin first and only from the open barrel when you must. This bread must last awhile. If you chew it long it will seem to be more. I will try to bring meat when next I come, but it may not be for days yet. So you must harken to me.” He reached through the bars and pulled me closer to him and said, “Do not share this bread with anyone but Tom. There are women here who are starving and who will beg from you, but you will sicken and die if you do not do as I say. D’ye hear me, Sarah?”
I nodded, tucking the bread into my apron, and he said to Tom, “Tom, remember what I told you that day? After you threw down the harness in the field. Remember?” When Tom nodded, Father said, “It’s to you now. I will return when I can.”
He started up to leave, but, remembering my sister, I called out to him, “Where’s Hannah?” He ducked his head for a moment and answered, “She is with the Reverend Dane’s family. They will take good care of her.” The Reverend’s wife was a kind woman, but austere, and I wondered what she would make of Hannah, only three years old, wild, unclean, with an endless need for attention. For many months I had been mother to her and now she was torn away from yet another family. For all the times I had been unkind to her or impatient or cruel, I wept.
Father crossed the corridor to give Richard, Andrew, and finally Mother some small bit of food. When Mother’s hands came through the bars, he pressed her knuckles to his eyes and said some soft words to her. Then the sheriff called down, and when Father left us, the afternoon had dimmed towards dusk. Our cell, our “good” cell, faced west, and the light of the setting sun flashed briefly through the high slits in the walls, turning our skin red and yellow, as though the straw had been set aflame and was burning us all alive in our prison.
I
T TOOK ONLY
a few hours for the vermin to find their way into my hair, and I woke in the night with my scalp on fire. I started scratching and tearing at it with my nails, feeling the tickling on my skin as the lice danced around my fingers. A woman somewhere on the opposite wall had started an agonized moaning, and with every breath she said, “Oh my God, my tooth. Oh my God, my tooth. . .” She continued her wailing even when she was accosted with pleas for silence, and some violent curses as well. The night had turned cold and I wrapped the shawl more tightly around me. I turned to look at Tom but the rhythms of his breathing told me he was yet deep in sleep. The haggard crying continued for an hour or so until another woman tipped a flask of some liquid into the moaning woman’s mouth. Soon her noises quieted into whimpering and she drifted off into oblivion.
I could hear tiny rustlings all through the straw and once saw the shine of a pair of dark, liquid eyes set narrowly over a pointed snout. He watched me, sniffing at the loaf of bread hidden in my apron. I kicked out at him and he crept deeper into the straw but did not move away. I kicked at him more forcefully and he melted into the darker rushes below the straw. I dozed fitfully until the murky light from the morning filled the cell enough to see more clearly the features of the women surrounding me on all sides. One by one they opened their eyes, some to pain, some to desperation, some to prayers for deliverance or acceptance, but all of them to the renewed horror of their confinement. And in common to all of these wives and mothers and sisters who had worked and prayed and midwifed in good faith with their neighbors was the searching, confused gaze that they should be accused and imprisoned and seemingly forgotten by those same neighbors.
There were some so slatternly that they rolled over to the slop buckets, scratching and rubbing themselves without any attention to their dress, or their modesty, and took no time in straightening their aprons, lacing their bodices, or turning their stockings. But most tried to clean themselves, wiping their faces with their sleeves, or polishing their teeth with the edge of their aprons, in a way that was in equal parts noble and sad. And they shared whatever they had. A shattered comb was passed around as delicately and as solemnly as a holy relic. Some bit of ointment was given to whoever had wounds beneath her manacles. Many an undershift had been torn into pieces to bind open wounds. There was no lamb’s wool or soft leather strips for the women of childbearing years who had their monthly courses, and many of the girls walked in shame with their skirts pleated together, held in folds at their backs, hiding the brackish stains.
And then there came the time when one woman went around asking for some share of food to be given to those women who had no family or had family too poor to come every day, or every few days, to pass through the bars even the smallest measure of bread. The woman’s name was Dorcas Hoar and she had been arrested in Beverly and brought to the prison in April. She was old and walked with a rolling limp but carried herself with dignity, and when she came to Tom and me, her eyes were filled with compassion. But when she held out her hand, I dropped my eyes and said that we had nothing to give. I felt her eyes on me, and the blood rushed to my face with the lie. She reached down and placed her hand on my head and said, “God bless you and keep you, child.” And then she moved to the next woman and the next and the next until she had a few crumbs to share.