Crane Pond (37 page)

‘Didn't Bastian come round to tell you of the death of our little boy?'

Mr. Willard's confusion deepens. ‘Oh, yes,' he says finally. ‘He was stillborn, I understand.' Sewall nods, not trusting himself to reply to this somewhat businesslike phrasing. ‘Please accept my condolences. And pass them on to Madam Sewall when she's ready to receive them. Mrs. Willard and I hope she will be up and about very soon.'

‘I thought you had come to pray with us.'

Mr. Willard has dark, furry eyebrows, most susceptible to cocking. He cocks one of them now. ‘Of course I'm always willing to pray with you,' he says finally. ‘But what I
came
for was to ask your opinion on the cause of this terrible harvest.'

Under the pressure of his emotions, Sewall feels himself beginning to lose his temper. ‘Mr. Willard, I lost my new son today.'

‘Ah,' says Willard. ‘Let me explain. Perhaps this will be of comfort to you. Your son did not live (as I understand it). Therefore you haven't lost him. Indeed, you didn't
have
a new son at all.'

It's Sewall's turn to succumb to astonishment. He thinks of that little pink body lying in its cot upstairs. ‘Whose son is he, if not mine?' he asks. As he speaks, he realises how arrogant and possessive he must sound. ‘And Hannah's,' he adds. Then thinks a little more. ‘And God's, of course.'

‘Dear friend, the little corpse belongs to none of you, not even God. He cannot be part of the human family because he was never alive.'

‘He is not just part of the human family, he is part of
this
family. With his brothers and sisters. The day after tomorrow we shall inter him in the family tomb where his grandparents lie, and other dead babies and children. I was going to ask you to accompany us there.' Funerals are not sacraments, any more than weddings are, but relatives and friends usually attend an interment.

‘He cannot be buried in the family vault.'

‘Why ever not?'

‘Because those within are awaiting the resurrection,' Willard says with a sort of laboured and impatient patience. ‘The stillborn one can't await the resurrection because it was never alive in the first place.'

I am the resurrection and the life
, Jesus said. Well, life is exactly what his dead son requires. (And it is
he
, not
it
: the child may never have had the chance to live a boy's life, but there he is in his cot in the upstairs study, all complete, waiting his time to
be
a boy.) ‘Whether you come or not, we will inter the child in our family tomb,' he assures Mr. Willard.

‘Dear friend—'

‘No friend of mine, if you reject one of my own!'

‘Mr. Sewall, you're overwrought. Tomorrow you will see this in a different light. But in the meantime I must speak to you as your minister. The body must not be consigned to a tomb with people in it. There must be no confusion on the Day of Judgement between the dead and those who haven't lived or received baptism.'

Sewall remembers Cotton Mather explaining that God gave us all different faces, unlike chickens who have to share the same one, so that He could tell us apart on Judgement Day. Even his dead baby has a face of his own, though unused.

‘You must accept my word on this matter,' Mr. Willard continues. ‘On my way here, I went to Goody Weeden's, to confirm the stillbirth. Then as I entered your garden I saw Bastian and your Sam at work, along with young Joseph, so I asked them to dig a grave in some convenient spot in your garden. I suggest we place the body in it at once.'

Sewall stares at him open-mouthed. The thought that Sam—well-meaning, hopeless Sam—and innocent little Joseph have been cajoled into putting their own brother into the anonymous dirt hurts him more than any of the other distressing things that Mr. Willard has said. He feels utterly betrayed.

‘Come, Samuel,' says Willard (he has never used Sewall's given name before). ‘Let's do it now, and get it over with.'

‘No.
No
!'

‘If you wish, you can consult Mr. Cotton Mather on the theological—'

‘No,' says Sewall, ‘Not today. Not while his mother is still sleeping.'

Willard opens his mouth to argue yet again. Sewall understands exactly what he is going to say. Madam Sewall is
not
the mother because there is nobody to be the mother
of
. Before he can do so, Sewall continues. ‘In any case I want to ask Bastian to make a coffin.'

‘A coffin?'

‘A coffin. Surely you wouldn't want wild animals to dig him up again?' Sewall asks with a bitterness he has never felt in his life before.

The baby is buried in the garden two days later, enclosed in a tiny coffin constructed by Bastian. Only the family (including Bastian, Sarah and Susan) are in attendance. Boy or not a boy, human being or not a human being, the baby is wept for. And Sewall prays that though he has been denied life temporal he will be granted life eternal.

I
t is mid-December, 1696. The failed harvest has been followed by an early winter and snow is already piled deep except in the busiest streets. Frozen boats groan at the wharves. New England is clothed in forest but the prematurely cold weather has drastically reduced the cutting and transporting of logs so the price is high, as it is for bread and flour following the failure of the crops last summer. The only abundant harvest is that of dead people from cold and malnutrition, in particular (as usual) the old and the young.

For weeks Mr. Willard has been importuning Sewall to propose a bill to Council nominating a fast day in expiation of the errors and injustices committed during the witchcraft crisis and in hopes that God will once more look kindly on the doings of his poor New Englanders. Sewall resisted for a time. He is still angry with his minister over the matter of the garden burial of his stillborn child. But finally reason prevails. He fears his son may have died because of his own guilt in the matter of the witch trials; Mr. Willard wishes the community to expiate that same guilt; therefore it is quite illogical to oppose Mr. Willard.

Moreover he suspects that one of the reasons for his hesitation is a fear of Acting Governor Stoughton's reaction to the suggestion of a fast. But fear of authority, or at least the desire to placate those in power, is the very failing he has been trying to combat for years. So Sewall finally proposes to Council that a fast bill is needed. He already has a form of words in mind and is prepared to promise Mr. Stoughton a draft for Council's approval by tomorrow morning.

Acting Governor Stoughton looks around the council chamber with that grey hard gaze of his, his mouth a tad ajar as if in readiness to give vent to the opposing argument. But what he sees is a group of men who are deeply disturbed by the hardships that have overtaken their community and willing to clutch at any straw (this is how Sewall construes Mr. Stoughton's contemptuous expression) in hopes of alleviating them. Mr. Stoughton's mouth closes while his response is revised. Then opens again. ‘Mr. Sewall.'

‘Yes, your honour.'

‘It seems to me that Mr. Cotton Mather would be the most appropriate person to draft such a bill. He has a thorough understanding of the Salem trials and has written learned commentaries on them. Since you have introduced the subject to Council perhaps you could deliver this request to him.'

‘Yes, your honour,' Sewall says weakly. He sits down again. The shock of this unexpected twist makes him feel almost tearful. The fact that in every confrontation he has with Mr. Stoughton the latter always gets the upper hand only adds to his woe.

 

Cotton Mather is delighted to receive the commission, and paces up and down in his study while he digests the task. Sewall has caught him wigless at his desk, scratching away with his quill on a sermon for Thursday lecture. ‘It's a challenge, Mr. Sewall,' he says. ‘What is needed is, how to describe it?, a diplomatic form of words.'

‘Diplomatic? Surely it needs to be heartfelt rather than diplomatic?'

‘Ah ha! That's a common mistake, I'm afraid, old friend. People construe the word as meaning evasive or even mendacious. But diplomacy is far from obfuscation. Indeed it's a kind of precision. It weaves in and out of the complexities of a situation,' (he weaves a hand in and out of these hypothetical complexities) ‘making a judicious claim here and an appropriate admission there' (plucking a claim and an admission in turn like imaginary apples from a tree).

A snow-encrusted Cotton Mather, now bewigged, knocks on Sewall's front door first thing next morning with his fast-day proposal. Sewall doesn't have time to appraise it before setting out himself to read it to Council.

Cotton Mather has produced a long list of reasons why the province is facing its present adversity: backsliding from the faith, loss of family discipline, discouragement of the guardians of the law, failure to bring piracy under control (reading this one makes Sewall blench), vanity in dress (this one should make Mr. Mather himself blench), selling strong liquor to the Indians, uncleanness, failure to thank God in times of good harvest (times that now, alas, seem remote), and so on. In the middle of this melancholy itemization is a fleeting reference to the hardship meted out to innocent persons as a result of certain errors. The Salem witchcraft trials are to be buried beneath a great weight of assorted wrong-doing.

Mr. Stoughton is delighted with the document and eager to pass a proposal for a day of fasting on such general grounds. Sewall, though, is deeply disappointed. This is just the sort of thing he feared. As far as he is concerned, the proposal represents diplomacy in exactly the bad sense that Cotton Mather repudiated. Yet again he prepares himself to make a case against authority (both Mr. Stoughton's and Cotton Mather's).

To his surprise it turns out not to be necessary. Member after member stands up to complain that Massachusetts is not as riddled with faults as Mr. Mather's ingenious stocktaking suggests, that the issue is solely the matter of the witchcraft aberration. Sewall offers to revise the proposal's wording. His suggestion is greeted with such enthusiasm that even Mr. Stoughton, staring over the excited chamber with those dark-rimmed eyes of his, cannot gainsay it.

 

That evening Sewall goes into his study and reflects.

First he kneels on the floor and prays for guidance. Then he sits down at his desk and thinks back on the events of that summer four years before.

If there were no witches at work in this land, then what there was was a
fear
of witches, a fear that must have been implanted by Satan himself. And Satan was able to do so because the colony had lost confidence in its original endeavour. It had cleared a space for itself in a heathen land and planted a Christian community there. Then a lifetime had gone by. The founding fathers began to pass away, and their plantation had to find a way of maintaining itself, not simply as the spiritual enterprise of a holy generation but as a land like other lands, persisting through history.

Doubts inevitably crept in. People began to assume that the colony would be choked by the wilderness it had kept at bay, that the heathen forces that lay beyond its bounds would slip into it and reclaim their territory. The Indians were
Simia Dei
; their allies in Satan's army, the witches, also parodied and mocked Christian sacraments from their vantage point in the very heart of the community. That was the fear.

Which, it turns out, was entirely unfounded. For one thing, the witches were not witches at all. Cotton Mather was quite right to criticise spectre evidence in his
Return
, as Sewall realised some time ago. One day he had suddenly recalled Mr. Putnam's claim that the spectre of Jacob Goodale, the farmworker murdered many years ago by Giles Corey, had appeared to his daughter Ann to inform her of the condemned man's wickedness. Goodale was a spectre and at the same time innocent (certainly in the sense of not being a witch), yet the whole basis of the trials was that it was impossible for anyone other than a witch to be a spectre! The child also claimed to have been visited by the spectres of George Burroughs's dead wives—two more spectres who were manifestly not witches.

The whole edifice of the trials had been built on false foundations. Those suffering children were not being afflicted by their fellow villagers. They were playing games, or hallucinating, or being manipulated by their parents—or the Devil. Perhaps all of those things.

And far from being
Simia Dei
, the Indians are actually the key to the fulfilment of the colony's Christian destiny, as Sewall has always believed; they are the lost tribes of Israel, and their conversion will usher in the millennium.

Sewall puts pen to paper and drafts his Fast Day proposal.

 

God has shown his anger by cutting short the harvest, and following a bad summer by a severe winter. A fast day will be appointed for 14 January 1697 so that whatever mistakes were fallen into during the recent tragedy that was brought about by Satan and his instruments would be subject to God's awful judgement; that He will humble us and pardon the errors of all those who desire to love His name and will visit atonement on this land. Also that God will bring the American heathen into the Christian fellowship, and cause them to hear His voice, so reviving that joyful proverb in the world: one flock, one shepherd.
 

 

Next day in Council there's an uneasy silence after Sewall has read out his proposal.

‘This paper seems more concerned with Indians than with witchcraft,' Mr. Winthrop eventually complains.

Nathaniel Saltonstall rises to his feet. He gives Sewall that characteristic warm smile of his. ‘I think, Mr. Winthrop,' he says, maintaining his gaze towards Sewall, ‘the reason is that in our province we have Indians aplenty but no witchcraft at all.'