Centuries of June (13 page)

C
rumpled in a heap on the floor, she did not move. Her bare feet were backward in relationship to her head, and her arms had come unglued. The woman who had flown through the mirror seemed irredeemably dead. The speed of her flight and the impact with the wall had most likely broken her neck. Covered in silver shards, she made for a poignant picture: a cracked ornament beneath the Christmas tree. Fortunately, the blast had left the rest of us unscathed. We brushed bits of glass from our clothes, and the old man picked up the discarded broom. I thought he would sweep up a bit, but instead, keeping his distance, he poked the body with the tapered end of the stick.

She sputtered and gasped, a trail of drool bubbling from her lips. Blinking to life, she stirred and placed her hands on the sides of her head and twisted her neck with a crackle of vertebrae. A sigh escaped from her chest, and then she sat upright and pushed the long red hair from her face. Bright green eyes emerged from the mass of curls, and along her alabaster skin, a congregation of faint freckles dotted her cheekbones and the bridge of her nose. Her whole aspect was vaguely reminiscent of the
first Elizabeth before the virgin queen had been ravaged by smallpox. She was stunning. She smoothed her gown and rose to her feet, a short woman of her late twenties or early thirties, and once composed, she possessed a regal bearing, proud, almost haughty. I expected her to sound just like Bette Davis, but she spoke not a word and merely glowered at me as if I had done her some wrong. So I bowed slightly at the waist, out of some habit, and she, by habit, too, extended her right hand decorated with rings. It was soft and white and when I bent to take and kiss her hand, my lips brushed against a chalky dust. Covering every inch of exposed skin, this powder left a residue upon contact with the windowsill, the blue tiles on the wall, and my own fingers. The grains felt like irregular bits of paper, the kind found in old, brittle books or documents that crumble at the touch. A faint rustling of turning pages accompanied her movements as she glided with sureness of purpose to the commode. Clutching the broomstick to his chest, the old man cowered in the corner while Dolly and Jane huddled in the safety of the bathtub.

With the confidence of a safecracker, she lifted the lid to the water tank and set it on the floor next to the toilet. Straightening her hands into two spatulas, she reached into the tank and lifted out a bone-dry gray rectangular box, about ten inches by twelve and a half inches and five inches deep, braced at the corners, with a hinged flap about six inches from the top. Glued to the narrow end, a small label read “The Trial of Alice Bonham.” She set the box on the toilet seat and replaced the lid to the tank, and then rubbed her hands on the skirt of her dress. Red paper rust, as if from leather bindings, floated in the air and fell to the floor.

“Are we to call you Alice?” the old man asked.

“She don’t talk,” said Jane.

“Don’t or won’t,” Dolly added. “You’ll not get a word from her.”

The old man cleared his throat. “Well, then, I shall call you Alice since you seem to be the scriniary, or the keeper of that archive.”

Alice nodded to her comrades across the room, and with delicate
gravity, she donned a pair of short white gloves that had been hidden in the fabric near her décolletage. The box itself was crammed from front to back with documents and papers. Taking a small brown book from the front, Alice handed it to me. A water stain in the shape of Cape Cod or a bent arm marked the cover, and antique typefaces belied the design conventions of the seventeenth century: a mix of fonts for emphasis and that strange custom of substituting an
f
for an
s
. I had to correct the text as I read it aloud to my companions:

T
HE
D
ISPLAYING OF
S
UPPOSED
W
ITCHCRAFT
. Wherein is affirmed that there are many sorts of Deceivers and Impostors, And Divers persons under a passive Delusion of Melancholy and Fancy. But that there is a Corporeal League made betwixt the Devil and the Witch, Or that he sucks on the Witches Body, has Carnal Copulation, or that Witches are turned into Cats, Dogs, raise Tempests, or the like, is utterly denied and disproved. Wherein also is handled, The Existence of Angels and Spirits, the truth of Apparitions, the Nature of Astral and Sydereal Spirits, the force of Charms, and Philters; with other abstruse matters. By John Webster, Practitioner in Physick. London

Printed by J. M. and are to be sold by the Booksellers in London, 1677
.

“That’s rich,” said Jane. “The part about raising tempests.”

Dolly smacked her on the meaty part of her arm. “And how witches can turn themselves into cats or dogs. I had a little dog once, what was his name?”

Peering over my shoulder, the old man read the title page for himself; the whispering movements of his lips reverberated like a flight of hummingbirds. “Ah, but you miss the point, ladies, by concentrating upon the sensational. That book is a treatise on how the whole matter of witchcraft is but a deception, and how witches are really just hysterics,
and our belief in such matters a case of melancholy and fancy, is that not so, Miss Bonham?”

I had never believed in all that hocus-pocus, ghost stories, fairy tales, and had long ago prided myself on being entirely rational and having an orderly mind, so I was pleased to hear the old man refute such claims and to discover long-ago works, like Mr. John Webster’s, devoted to drawing attention to, and exposing, the fraudulent and irrational. As if she could read my mind, Miss Alice Bonham stood in the center of the room and began to spin, slowly at first, but soon pirouetting like a ballerina, then dizzy as a dervish, her dress flashing like a siren, her hair whipping across and hiding her face. And as she spun, she attracted the shattered glass on the floor like metal filings to a magnet, or a reverse centrifuge. The jagged splinters did not skewer her, but clung to the fabric of her skirt till it glistened and was festooned with reflected light. As she slowed her revolutions, the pieces leapt from her body and back into place on the medicine cabinet until at last the mirror was restored, the shards coming together in an elaborate jigsaw puzzle, the seams fused as if nothing had ever disturbed the perfect surface. Steadying herself, Alice sighed deeply, steam escaping from her heels like an old-fashioned locomotive come to rest, and we were dumbfounded by the trick.

The old man took me aside. “Perhaps,” he whispered, “I spoke in haste.”

With the room restored to its former state, a hush descended as we waited and watched for Alice’s next move. She stepped to the gray box and produced a single sheet of paper covered with writing in a fine hand, and giving it to Jane, she encouraged her with a nod to read it aloud.

Salem Village
6 June 1691

Loving Sister
,

I wear your knitted favours about my neck and shoulders as cold Winter sets in, which lets me forget you not, though this is but meager remembrance and in no way makes up for your painful absence. Dear Sarah, I received thy tender lines long since I lay in. Several things prevented me from answering thee sooner, which I hope thou will pass by. I was very weak a long time and it hath pleased the Lord to take away my little one when it was but two weeks old. It was near dead when it was born and ne’er recovered. Then came over me a sore melancholy with a fit of black tears and much sadness, though it pleased the Lord to take me up again, and though I am not wholly come to strength yet
.

Mr. Bonham hast not took the loss of our child so well as I, and he is an old man, near enough the hour of his own return to the Lord, so it may be so accounted. My own neighbors, the minister Mr. Parris and his wife, abiding next door have been especially generous, sending their own Maid, an Indian woman named Tituba to be my care for the household during my laying in. I have not before been in such close quarters with such a woman, and she speaks with the music of the Spanish islands whence she was brought with her man, John Indian. They do amuse and deflect all care with their fancies and songs and stories, though I suspect them not true Christians, but heathen beneath all else. Perhaps God has some especial place for the innocent and ignorant, though I vouchsafe I know not where or what that may be. The Parrises’ Maid is a Godsend to me, not only in the care and feeding of Mr. Bonham, but for the two children she oft brings with her, Betty Parris who is the daughter and all of eight years and her kinswoman Abigail who is but ten, for they fill the empty house with their childish games and laughter, a merrymaking that remedies the loss of mine own infant girl, which I had named for thee. Write to me and tell me of thine son, and I shall take thy example unto my breast and rely upon the Lord to one day bless me again with what thou now enjoy. I keep thee and thy family in my prayers
.

Your loving sister,
Alice

At the conclusion of her recitation, Jane clasped Dolly’s hand and together they stepped over the lip of the bathtub and then threw their arms around Alice. They huddled in the middle of the room, sharing empathy over the sad loss of the Bonham child, and I was struck by their gesture of solidarity. Three sisters under the skin, they excluded from their bonds both me and the old man. We were interlopers on this scene, a couple of Peeping Toms, and could only stand by, hands in our pockets, till the moment passed. The women enjoyed a kind of natural affinity and felicity for emotional solace that men rarely express, as we are put off from public demonstrations of our inner feelings and must endure sorrows on our own private islands. I felt bad about the child stolen so soon from her, but could not bring myself to say anything, and when I looked to the old man for some sign of fellow feeling, he merely waggled his eyebrows and shrugged his shoulders as if this, too, was beyond understanding.

They broke from their huddle like a football team, and I wondered immediately what play had been called. Alice took from the box a small, hand-sewn book marked with red tape flags. Handing it to the old man, she indicated that he, too, had a role in relating her story. He opened the cover and read the words penned on the flyleaf: “The Journall of Nathan Bonham, being an Account of the Troubles and Tryal of His Wife.” Quickly scanning the first few pages, he flipped to the first marked passage:

13 Nov. 1691

I am beginning to wonder if I have done dear Alice harm, for she is, these long months after loss, still in mourning for it,
though we know God’s will and trust in His judgment and mercies. I have not pressed her on another Child, for her spirit is still sour and mean on it. Perhaps, however, the fault goes deeper that I have took her from her family and brought a convert unto the Faith. They are much addicted to Popery and to Papistical fancies, and she often speaks of feeling unlucky and other strange unheard-of superstitions. Oft I question whether she truly believes or only says so out of duty to me and to commodious marriage. That is to ask, would she be happier still had she not said yes when I pressed the case? I worry that she will ne’er be well again.

He flipped to the next red bookmark and continued:

4 Dec. 1691

Came home this even and espied thru the window, the Servant Tituba and four more besides, the Parris girl, her cousin, and two older girls, near my wife’s age, gathered round the table. One had brought a round green glass and layd it down upon a letter and rubbed the glass upon it, and held it up against the firelight and bid Alice come see, apparent some magick by which to divine the future. When I announced my presence, they quick hid their fortune-telling charms. Retired in sore distress. Alice was late in comming to the bed.

25 Dec. 1691

The heathen’s Christmas day. Methinks she pines for home in Casco Bay and such Papist celebration as a-wassailing, though begging at our neighbors is sure the mark of the Devill. At the lesson with Teacher Noyes, Alice wept that the birth of our Lord was not read in verse, and some struggle goes on in her
soul. I am much displeased by the constant presence of the girls in our home or to find Alice about at the Parris house. Something wicked in the air.

With a frantic guttural grunt, Alice waved her arms and signaled the old man to stop. Though tempted by the other red flags taped in the journal, he respected her wishes and closed the book, keeping his finger embedded to mark his place. Fishing two more papers from the archives, Alice handed one each to the other women. They knew at once their parts, and Jane began, giving voice to the Salem girl.

Salem Village
14 Feb. 1692

Loving Sister
,

Much has happened since last I wrote thee at Christmas day. The Indian woman Tituba has shewn me what has become of my dear child. She took a green-colored glass and covered a lock of hair that I had saved from it and peering through she could divine that the babe is in heaven with our father and two brothers, despite that I have not baptized it. My sorrow lifted at this sign, and I do not care what Arts were invoked, for she has comforted the grieving and is known to heal the sick of those possessed by sadness
.

Young Betty Parris, whom I have written thee, has most recently been struck afflicted with a strange malady that spread to her cousin Abigail who stays with her in the minister’s home. The girls have been beset with aches of no cause nor cure, disturbances that visit in the night, and frights that come in the day. The physician has come and says that they are under an evil hand, and some say B
EWITCHED
. Tituba had them take some of their urine and mix it with rye meal and a hen’s egg, and baked it over a fire to make a witch cake to see if the poison in the girls could be so evinced in their little dog, Nick, and it did gobble the cake in two bites and was watched for signs of the devil’s plague. But, Sister, it did not dye or so much as howl in pain and shewed nothing as though every morning it broke the fast with such a witches’ cake. When the Elders of the village learned of this, they made first to accuse the Indian woman who many have long spoken of amongst themselves as being an odd sort of chick, and the girls, too, began to complain that Tituba did visit them in spirit when she was not there. In the night, her apparition does afflict them and pinch their arms and legs, that she did prick them with iron needles and torment them by twisting and biting their arms and necks and legs. Little Betty Parris was struck dumb, her throat seized and mouth stopped, and Abigail her cousin was wracked with mysterious pains, much like in all things that John Goodwin’s children sufferen in Boston three year ago, which we all have heard of, and the torture they endured at the hands of Satan. Some others in the village were called to give their advice, and they, too, conclude the girls struck by devils
.