The Heretic's Daughter (33 page)

Upon hearing the end of Mother’s footsteps upon the stairwell, I had pulled wildly at the bars, the rising shrillness of my voice cutting like a knife through the thick air of the corridor. I felt strong arms enveloping me, pulling me back, and heard a voice say sharply in my ear, “Hush, now. You cannot let your mother hear your cries. It will only distress her more. Hush. Hush and be brave for her sake.” But I could not stop the wailing, the thrashing, and the grinding of my teeth as I fought the women who held me in their arms. I was a mad thing. No longer child. No longer reasoned. No longer restrained. I hit and kicked and bit until my jaw was forced open and a bitter, choking liquid was poured into my mouth and I was forced to swallow or be drowned. The liquid was poured a second and then a third time, and within a few minutes the beast retreated from the door and a spreading warmth spilled from my belly into my legs and then into my chest, my arms, and my head. My mind retreated from itself, and my tormented thoughts became like a twisted sheet beneath a thickly padded blanket. The restraining arms that held me loosened their grip, and someone, perhaps Goody Faulkner, whose belly was swollen with child, cradled my head in her lap and sang to me with a whispering, tuneless breath.

“Lulay, my little tiny child, bye-bye lulee-lou-lay,

Lulay, my little tiny child, sleep now until the day.”

I stared at a low beam above my head and watched the rough knots and channels in the wood become the grimacing faces of men and women, some wearing half-masks and hats piled like giant gourds on their heads. A splintered crevice became a horse racing against the grain and a sworling crevice became a merchant’s ship that threatened to sail from the edge of that narrow and rustic terrain. The beam was a world unto itself, fantastical and somehow set apart from the surrounding indistinct haze of my cell. Suddenly I had a clear and piercing thought that supplanted every imagining. Someday, after many, many tomorrows, the beam that straddled my sight would be the only part of the cell left whole when all the stones had been carted away and the rest burned to ash. The jail that seemed so impenetrable and everlasting would fall like any cellar. The mortar would soften. The beams would crack and sag. The rock would collapse. And the rubble would fill the gaping spaces so that no passerby could stop and say, “Here and here was my great grandfather or grandmother or distant aunt kept in darkness and in wasting despair.” Before another hour had passed, and before I closed my eyes to fall into the chasm of sleep, the figures on the beam had begun to move.

T
HE RITUALS OF
the days became as always. The slops to go up, new straw to throw down. Visits from families with food. Fridays brought the sheriff’s wife. Saturdays the surgeons. Sabbath days, prayers all round. Mondays came the ministers to pray, to beg for a confession, or to harry with condemnation and excommunication. On the
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th day of September the fourth trial of the Court of Oyer and Terminer was held and six more women were condemned: Martha Corey, Mary Easty, sister to Rebecca Nurse, who had been hanged on the July past, Alice Parker, Ann Pudeator, Dorcas Hoar, and Mary Bradbury. They were placed in the condemned women’s cell, and so I did not see these women well until they were taken out to be hanged. But often we could hear the coarse and winded voice of Martha Corey haranguing the ministers come to extract a confession from her. “I am no more a witch t’an you. I never have been, nor am I one t’day. You can close your book on me. But my deeds is already writ in God’s book. And you and the Devil can take the hindest part o’ me and be pleased wit’ yoursels.” The ministers would often leave the prison as quickly and as furtively as dogs from a dousing.

The early days of September also became a war waged against children. There were Abigail and Dorothy Faulkner, who were nine and twelve, the daughters of Goody Faulkner. Both shy and frightened, they never moved from the sheltering arms of their mother and clung to her desperately even when she rose awkwardly to use the midden. There were the nieces of Moses Tyler, Hannah, Joanna, and Martha, wild and uncouth-looking. The two youngest were twins, and though they were only eleven, they bullied the other larger girls into giving up what little food they possessed. When they entered the cells, we saw that these three girls wore the marks of old welts and bruises about their mouths and eyes. When they were asked with horrified concern if the bruises were from their judges, they only laughed and said they were a parting gift from their father.

In the beginning, many of the young Andover girls found their way to me in the cell, thinking no doubt that my long period underground had given me some kind of canny strength to survive the hardships of prison. But I had entered a place that shut out the world, and my apathy soon drove them away. The only person who could have stirred my spirit to rise never looked for me or sought me out and lay in Aunt’s arms insensible to her surroundings. The days passed for me like the evenings, in a dull twilight between sleeping and waking. The voice of Tom or Father or Dr. Ames or the Reverend Dane had no deeper meaning apart from the rhythm and cadence of supplication. “Please eat, Sarah.” “Please rise, Sarah.” “Please speak to me, Sarah.” “Please, please, please. . .” until I covered my ears and ground my head into the straw and forced the speaker to abandon his post. Hannah Tyler, thinking that my balling-up was a weakness, tried to work her hand into my apron to take a bit of corn bread hidden there. I pushed her hand away but she persisted and bent back my fingers to ease her theft.

I looked up and saw the pallid, avaricious face before me, the teeth protruding sharply from a meanly placed tongue, and I thought of Phoebe Chandler’s ferretlike face chanting, “witch, witch, witch. . .” I sat up so abruptly that it unbalanced her, sending her back on her haunches. She squinted her eyes at me and looked set to try again, and it was that look that threw the final heated stones into the soup. Tom had crept up ready to put himself between me and Hannah, but I ignored him and said to her, “Touch me again and your fingers will rot off the bone.”

Her jaw shifted from one side to the other with malicious intent, but she paused.

“You don’t want to touch me again,” I said, my teeth sharp against the words. “You’re in here because you’re low and ugly. I’m here because I’m my mother’s daughter.”

She drew back and from the edges of my vision I saw uneasy glances exchanged from woman to woman. I looked around the cell and saw that my warning had brought to life deep suspicions that even a child could harbor maleficence. Goody Faulkner, and the other women of Andover, gathered around her, lowering their eyes against my stare, but I heard a cautioning voice close by say, “Resist the Devil in all his works.” The speaker had directed those words to me, but I, with a flash of anger, thought, I am not the one with my hands in someone else’s pocket.

A dark shadow rose up against the wall opposite and crept towards us. The shadow was figured like a woman and layered over with the thick, steaming remnants of many different cloaks stitched together. I had seen her resting motionless against the wall week after week, her glistening black face passive and indifferent to minister and prisoner alike. Her mouth opening only to eat the meager shares of bread and gruel she had been given by her master. She had been one of the first of Salem to be tried and imprisoned and had remained in chains since the bitter winds of February. The Reverend Parris, the parson of Salem, who had taken her as a slave from her home in the West Indies, had beaten her into a confession, and she walked ever after with a crooked back. Her sorcery was as frail as the body she inhabited. As frail as the Venus glass she had used to help the village girls see their fortunes.

She stepped over the prostrate bodies of the women, as though crossing a shallow stream, and came to stop at the retreating legs and arms of Hannah as she crawled backwards to escape this first, dark witch. The black eyes swept around the room and she raised her manacled wrists like an offering and said, “You want to see the Devil’s hand? The Devil’s hands is wrapped around my wrist.”

She stepped and turned and stepped and turned so that every eye could see the iron links beginning and ending the same, one to the other in a closed circle, encompassing birth and life and death. Then she dropped her hands and fixed her great, liquid eyes on me. She drew in a ragged breath and said haltingly, as though in great pain, “I am my mother’s daughter, too.” She moved away into the deep silence her words had carved and returned to her place at the wall. I never heard her say a word more. Her name was Tituba, and upon her release she would be sold again to another owner and disappear from the written deeds of men like a stone into a well.

From that moment on I was left unmolested. Apart from Tom, who tried his best to feed and protect me, there were few others in the cell who would approach me again. Save for Dr. Ames. And the sheriff’s wife.

I
T IS HARD
to reckon the days underground. The only remarkable change of light came at sunset when for a brief time the sun worked its way through the high slits. It had rained steadily until mid-September, and for several weeks there was no sun to differ morning from night. Then the rain dried and the nights of a sudden turned bitingly cold. When the sheriff’s wife came into our cell one morning, I knew it must have been a Friday. The evening before, a young woman of fifteen, Elizabeth Colson, had been captured and returned to jail following her indictment in May. She had fled from her home in Reading to relatives in New Hampshire but had been found by the local constables and dragged from her haven under the cover of dark. She was wearing good homespun wool, and Goody Corwin was keen to barter for the goods.

I was surprised to find that Elizabeth, hearty and well fed, was granddaughter to the old woman who had mocked the doctor from Salem, the doctor who had tried to hack off Andrew’s arm. Lydia Dustin, so the grandmother was called, was so old and so decrepit that she seemed wholly cast from a children’s tale of hags born from the bones and feathers of a crane. She put herself in front of Goodwife Corwin and said, swaying her spotted skirt back and forth, “Lay away, missus. You’ll get naught off her. But I have a fine gown you can have for a small bit of bread.” The sheriff’s wife wrinkled her nose in disgust and picked her way across the straw, followed by the old woman’s rattling laugh.

She stopped a short distance away and regarded me, her head cocked to one side as if reflecting on something many-sided. She tapped with the tip of her shoe an opening place between me and the woman sitting next to me and then squatted down, carefully pulling up her skirt from the muck. She dropped something onto my lap and said quietly, “Remember it was me who gave you this.”

She got up and left the cell, and when I looked down again I saw it was a crust of pocket bread. Hard though it was, it looked to be stuffed with meat. I quickly tucked it under my apron but not before the woman next to me saw what I had done and gave me a look that was both envious and distrusting.

Several days passed with her coming into the cell and always dropping into my lap some bit of food. I tried to share the gifts with Tom but after that first day, he refused every morsel that came from the sheriff’s table. I did not refuse. My hunger pains, which had been merely dull and aching before, came roaring viciously to life like a ratter that has tasted first blood. Tom did not begrudge me but many others did. The daily visits from the sheriff’s wife were much remarked upon and gossiped over. I could see the same looks of displeasure and condemnation that had followed me in the meetinghouse. Quietly and relentlessly I was being shunned and I welcomed it, for it was the foil against which I could pit my growing anger. The anger that was the breastplate and armor against the deep and soul-shredding guilt grinding in my chest that I had, in good part, sent my own mother to be hanged.

On Saturday, the
17
th of September, the judges tried and condemned another eight women. One of the women was Abigail Dane Faulkner, and she was returned to the cell before noon with her two daughters, who had been forced to testify against her. She walked, staggering, to her place on the wall, holding her daughters against her swollen skirts, and a new terror settled in upon us, hearing that a woman so far gone with child would be committed to the hangman.

The one man who had been tried on that day, Miles Corey, refused to speak, either to give confession or to deny his guilt. He was husband to Martha Corey and was eighty years of age. When asked repeatedly to respond to the judges’ questions, he crossed his arms and, setting his jaw, looked only at the floorboards in front of him. Because he would not speak, he was tortured to induce his tongue to be loosened. On the
19
th of September, a gently wind-tossed autumn day, Goodman Corey was taken from his cell out to the prison yard, where he was laid prone in the dirt. His hands and feet were staked out and heavy stones were placed on a plank laid over his body until he could no longer raise his ribs to draw in a breath. He never spoke a word to his torturers except for the two words at the very end, when he said, “More weight.”

His tongue was finally loosened in death. The crushing weight of the stones had forced it through his lifeless, protruding lips until the sheriff forced it back in again with the tip of his probing cane. The death of Miles Corey seemed to shift the winds over Salem, for Dorcas Hoar, already condemned to die on the
22
nd, changed her mind and confessed that she was and had been a witch for many years. Also reprieved, in compassion for her belly, was Abigail Dane Faulkner.

I
T WAS ON
the fifth or sixth day of passing food to me that Goody Corwin told me the price she would exact. The morning she came in she looked distracted and out of sorts, wringing her hands upon her apron and then smoothing it down again. She approached me as usual, dropping the food into my apron, and said in a hushed tone so that no one else could hear, “My good husband tells me you may have the power of healing.”