Tituba of Salem Village (7 page)

A heavy fetid odor hung in the air. Even the master must have smelled it, insensitive as he was or appeared to be to smells and sounds. He sniffed twice and looked towards the woods and said, “What is that dreadful smell?”

Nobody answered him. Abigail said curiously, “Tituba, why don’t you think the eggs are fresh?”

Before Tituba could reply, the front door opened, A rosy-cheeked, smiling woman, brisk in speech and in manner, stood in the doorway.

“Well, now, ye must be the Reverend Samuel Parris,” she said. “Welcome to the Village and to the parsonage. I’m Sister Mary Sibley—I live across the way, not too far from the meetinghouse. I’ve got fires going in all the fireplaces. It’s nice and warm inside. This time of year it don’t take much of a fire to take the chill off.”

Tituba could tell that the master wasn’t pleased to find that the first and only parishioner to greet him was a woman, especially one who talked so easily and so fast.

He said stiffly, “This is my wife, and this is Elizabeth, my daughter, and Abigail, my orphan niece. This is Tituba and this is John—my servants.”

She wondered why he didn’t say “My slaves”—perhaps farmers didn’t have many slaves, and he thought it might not be a good idea to say that he owned two slaves.

Mary Sibley said, “Oh, the poor dear,” looking at Mrs. Parris. “We’ll put her right to bed and we’ll get her something hot to drink and then something to eat. I’ve got hot fish stew in the big iron pot. It’s a good thing there are bedframes and feather ticks in the parsonage.” She started out the door toward Mrs. Parris, glanced down at the step, and saw the eggs. She was silent for a moment. Then she looked around uneasily, “Wherever did they come from—”

The master said, “I never knew fresh eggs to cause so much comment, Goodwife Sibley—”

Mary Sibley said, “Fresh eggs, indeed!” and pushed them off the steps into the path. She took a stick and broke them. The master said, “What are you doing?”

“You still think they’re fresh?” she said. The smell was rank and foul, “Old and rotten,” she said sharply, “and may the Lord preserve us from such evil.”

“Yes,” Tituba said softly, under her breath.

Chapter 5

Goodwife Sibley helped Tituba get the mistress settled in bed in an upstairs room. It was a low-ceilinged room, almost as long as it was wide. There were three small windows, but the room was dark inside because the small-paned windows didn’t let in much light. It was partly furnished. At least there was a bedframe with a feather tick on it. The bedframe was supported by sturdy posts that reached almost to the ceiling. And there were two stools, one on each side of the fireplace.

Before they left the room, Goody Sibley stood back away from the bed and examined the mistress as carefully as though she were a doctor, studying and appraising the thin body, barely discernible under the quilt, staring at the gauntness of the face—the cheekbones showing, the skin so deathly white that the long lashes looked black as fireplace soot against that whiteness.

She said disapprovingly, “Most folks use the downstairs parlor to sleep in. All the other pastors slept downstairs.”

The mistress said, “Mr. Parris has to have a room to himself to work in and write his sermons in.” Her eyes stayed closed, and Mary Sibley had to bend forward in order to understand what the soft whispering voice was saying.

Tituba and Mary Sibley left the room together. As Tituba followed her down the narrow staircase she thought, Steep stairs, narrow treads, abrupt turn near the top of the stairs. If you went up or down them too fast, you could stumble and break your neck. It was like going down a ship’s ladder.

Mary Sibley kept talking, even on the way downstairs. “Folks have already sent ye in food. There’s apples and onions and carrots. Ye’ve got salt fish and salt beef and turnips and dried apples. Some’s in the keeping room and some’s in the lean-to in the back.”

The keeping room was a big, low-ceilinged room with smoke-darkened rafters. A huge summer beam ran the whole length of the room, and because the ceiling was low, Tituba felt as though the great beam was pressing down on top of her head. The fireplace was big enough to roast a whole ox in. There were settles on each side of the fireplace, long enough so that she could stretch out full length though John was so tall he’d have to bend his legs when he was bedded down there.

Mary Sibley said, “Folks will send ye eggs and butter. This be farm country, and ye’ll always have corn meal and salt pork and the fisherfolk will send ye fresh fish.”

Tituba nodded, and kept looking around. Goody Sibley knew how to build fires. This one was burning steadily and quietly. There was a big backlog and smaller, long-lasting logs on top of it. The room smelled like all the houses she’d been in in the Colony—smell of smoke and smell of dampness. The floor and the hearth had been swept.

She was surprised to see that there was a loom, a big one, in one corner of the room. There was a flax wheel, a carding wheel, and a winding wheel.

Mary Sibley said, “I see ye looking at the loom. It don’t work, but the wheels for making thread still work. They belonged to Mistress Burroughs, the wife of one of our pastors. When she died, the Reverend Burroughs left the Village in a hurry and left all this behind him.”

Abigail ran into the room, shouting, “The cart’s come. The cart’s come.”

“Hush!” Tituba said. “Quiet yourself, and then go and help unload the cart.”

Abigail and Betsey set to work to help the driver unload the cart. They brought in small cooking pots and two stools.

Mary Sibley took advantage of their absence from the room to question Tituba.

“What is wrong with Mistress Parris?” she asked.

“She has a weakness in her chest. The cold and the dampness make it worse.”

“Is she always in bed?”

“No. When the weather is cold she coughs a great deal and this weakens her. Then she has to stay in bed.” During the past winter the mistress had never once left that little room off the keeping room in the house in Boston. During the summer she was able to sit outdoors. But the first bit of cold weather had set her to shivering and coughing.

“It makes a lot of work to have a sick woman upstairs. Ye’ll be carrying food, carrying wood.” Goody Sibley shook her head. “Where did ye come from?”

“Boston.”

“Lived there long—did ye?”

“Almost a year.”

“Ah,” she said, and her breath came out in a sigh, and her eyes glistened with excitement. She ignored the presence of the children. They had just come into the kitchen, lugging a small chest. They set it down with a thud because it was heavy and slipped out of their grasp.

Sister Sibley said, “They hanged the Witch Glover in Boston. Did ye see it?”

Tituba shook her head. John had seen it. When he had finally got so he could talk about it, he said it looked as though everyone in Boston, everyone in Massachusetts, everyone in the whole Colony had seen the hanging. There were so many people crowded together that you couldn’t move, could hardly breathe. If you’d taken a deep breath, your ribs would have pushed against somebody else’s ribs. All of them come for miles and miles through woods and forests, down small streams in boats, to see an old woman hang—a wild-looking, snarling creature. Tituba said none of this to Mary Sibley; she simply shook her head to indicate that she wasn’t there.

Abigail said primly, “The witch had overlooked the Goodwin children with her evil eyes. The Goodwin children screamed, and cried out, and said she was freezing them and boiling them and sticking pins in them. Their tongues were pulled way out. Way out like this,” said Abigail, sticking her tongue out so far that Tituba scowled at her, angered at all this sudden talk of witch-craft and witches. Mary Sibley, a grown woman who should know better, was excited, her face flushed. Abigail’s bright blue eyes were gleaming with excitement, just like Mary Sibley’s.

Goodwife Sibley nodded, “Indeed, yes. And before they hanged her she told them that hanging her wouldn’t cure the children. And it didn’t. She’d put a spell on them and nobody could take it off. They said she bartered her soul to the black man. That’s how she got her power over the Goodwin children.”

Then she said softly, thoughtfully, “We’ve got some here might be witches, too. Right here in the Village. Everywhere ye go, ye find them. The folks’ cows sicken and die or they won’t give milk or the pigs go mad or the butter won’t come—usually a witch has overlooked them. Some of the witches have cats as familiars. The devil gives them the cats to serve them and do their bidding.”

Her glance slid around Tituba, and Tituba remembered the neighbor woman in Boston who had taught her to spin, and who ran her finger along the thread, and spoke of how strong it was and how smooth and how quickly made, “Just like magic.” Something in her glance had warned Tituba not to spin thread like that any more, at least not where Goodwife Trumbull would see it. Mary Sibley’s sliding-around glance reminded her of the eggs on the doorstep, rotten eggs, on the parson’s doorstep. Everyone knows what that means, she thought, somebody trying to bewitch them, to cast a spell on them. On the minister? On Tituba? If it was Tituba—why Tituba?

Mary Sibley said, “Where’d ye come from before ye was in Boston?”

“Bridgetown, Barbados. It’s an island in the West Indies.”

“Ye be the minister’s servants? Ye and John?”

“We be his slaves,” she said simply. “He bought us in Barbados before he came to Boston.”

“Slaves,” Mary Sibley said. “The parson has two slaves and a sickly wife. Did the committee that hired him know he had a sickly wife?”

The conversation was interrupted by the master. He entered the keeping room from a back door, opening it with an abruptness that startled the women and the children—he seemed to burst into the room.

“There is no wood,” he said and his voice was harsh and loud. “I was promised my firewood. Where is it?”

Mary Sibley shook her head, “There must be a mistake, Mr. Parris. The minister supplies his own wood.”

“It’s written down,” he said, growing more and more excited. “It’s in the agreement. I’ll unpack my papers and find it. The congregation is to provide me with firewood.”

“No matter,” she said calmly. “Ye’ll need wood and ye’d better get started cutting some right away. Then ye can settle it with the committee that hired ye.”

“It’s written down,” the master repeated.

“Perhaps it is. Meantime ye’d better cut wood. It will take plenty of wood to keep that upstairs fire going all the time.” Then she said very deliberately, “With sickness in the family it’s easier if the sick person is downstairs.”

The master’s thin face flushed. Tituba left them there to argue about it and went outside, found John, told him there was no wood and he would have to cut wood right away before it got dark.

She paused to look at the house and see whether her first impression of it had been right. Sometimes if she stood still, used all her senses, sight and sound and touch and smell would make a place speak to her. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She decided it was not an evil house. It was sad and gloomy. Nothing about it suggested happiness in the future. It had been a long time since anyone had been happy in this house. People leave something of themselves in a house, and the spirit of this house was frighteningly sad.

She could hear the rustle of leaves, a murmuring sound from the wind in the trees, and faintly the sound of the horses, a snorting, snuffling sound, and the jingle of harness as they moved, shifting position slightly. Something seemed to be moving about in the woods at the far side of the land; there was a rustling in the leaves, and it sounded as though twigs were being broken with a sharp, cracking sound. As she stood there she was certain that she smelled the same unpleasant odor that even the master had smelled when they were about to enter the house.

She walked all around the house. The wood had weathered to a deep dark brown. The windows were small with small panes of glass. They gave the house a sly look, as though the windows were half-closed eyes stealing glances at her, not wanting to be caught in the act of looking directly at her. All the windows needed washing. The chimneys were darkened by streaks of soot from the top all the way down to the roof, indicating the chimneys had been on fire more than once.

The paths from the house to the barn and from the house to the well were overgrown with tall weeds. She bent over the well to look down into it—someone had thrown a dead animal in it, she could tell by the smell. Someone obviously didn’t want them living here; she glanced at the house again—and shivered. Dark house, dark sky, winter coming on—she would have the care of two little girls and a sick woman. They would be living in this farm country, deep in the woods, far away from other families, and for all his cold harsh voice and his quick temper, the master was as helpless as a child—he would soon find work for John to do, work away from the house. This would bring him in a little income, but it would leave her with everything to do—fires to tend, and cooking to do, gardening, washing.

There was a place behind the house where someone must once have had a garden; she poked down into the ground with a stick. The soil was soft and pliable—it had been worked in—she would grow vegetables in it, and right near the door she could have flowers. There was a big barn so they could have one or two cows, and a mare so the master could call on the people on the farms a long way off.

She would look at the barn and then go back to the house. The back door of the house opened, and Betsey Parris came running out. “Wait, Tituba,” she said, “wait for me.”

They walked hand in hand towards the barn. Tituba said, “We’ll have a cow and a horse in here, and when we come in the barn it will always seem warm because of the animals. It will be filled with the sound of their breathing and their talk sounds. We’ll get hens and we’ll get a strutty cock-rooster to keep the hens happy and order them around and to crow early in the morning.”

They were about to go in the barn when she paused and said, “Close your eyes and I’ll close mine and we’ll pretend that the animals are already here—”