Crane Pond (38 page)

Saltonstall knows of what he speaks. He denied the existence of witches even in the middle of the frenzy but has encountered his share of Indians. Only last year his town of Haverhill was attacked by a band of eighty but under his leadership drove them away, a feat that earned him promotion to Colonel of the North Essex Regiment. It seems a long time since he suffered that fear of losing his commission.

‘It is precisely because we have an abundance of Indians that I am cautious about this talk of fellowship,' says Mr. Stoughton.

Sewall's heart sinks. The word ‘fellowship' seems to him the key for exorcising the long shadow of the witchcraft injustice and walking once again in the light.

In the end the last sentence of the proposal is truncated, joy is eradicated, and hearing the word becomes obedience to it, so that it reads:
Also that God will bring the American heathen into the Christian fellowship, and cause them to obey His voice.
 

But the word ‘fellowship' has survived, despite Mr. Stoughton's immediate objection to it, and it is a word that can bring other good things in its wake.

 

Susan opens the front door when he finally reaches home. ‘Look, I'm a snowman,' he tells her.

‘Nurse Cowell is here, master.'

‘Nurse Cowell?'

‘Nurse Hurd is here too. She is attending Madam Sewall. Madam has got her sickness again.' Hannah is prone to terrible prostrating headaches from time to time, coupled with stomach upsets.

‘So who is—?'

‘Nurse Cowell is with baby Sarah.' Susan suddenly breaks into tears. ‘She has her fits again,' she gets out at last.

Nurse Cowell is a plump matronly figure. She puts a finger against her lips as Sewall bursts into the room. ‘Quiet, please,' she whispers fiercely. ‘Sarah is sleeping.'

Sewall stops in his tracks. The snowy lid on his bonnet is thawing already and water trickles down his neck. His little daughter is pale as snow herself as she lies on her bed. Her closed eyelids have a faint blue sheen as if the eyes beneath are peering through them. Her tiny lips are almost white. As he looks down at her a shudder runs through her whole body. He turns to look enquiringly at Nurse Cowell.

‘I gave her some milk and marigold jam but she vomited it up,' she tells him. ‘The fits are still upon her, but much reduced while she sleeps. Leave her in peace.'

Sewall goes to his wife's chamber. She is also asleep or at least lying peacefully in her bed. Goody Hurd is by the dresser mixing medicine for her, dictating the measurements to herself out loud so as not to make a mistake. She has become an old lady now, Sewall realises. He undoes the bow beneath his chin, removes his bonnet and places it to dry in the hearth of the little fire. He does the same with his cloak, then takes up the poker and stirs the logs. At this sound Goody Hurd turns to face him with her hand over her heart.

I'm sorry,' he mouths to her across the room, then makes his way over to Hannah's bedside and sits down on a chair. She mutters a greeting from far away. He takes her hand which is lying on top of the coverlet. The room is cosy after his arduous journey through the cold, and very soon he has fallen into a doze.

From which he is rudely awakened by tuggings at his sleeve, little Susan pulling at him the way a child pulls at a grown-up to persuade him to go in a wanted direction. Across the room Nurse Hurd turns from her potions and looks aghast.

‘I am so, so sorry, sir,' says Nurse Cowell as they enter the child's room. ‘I would have called you if I'd known. I thought she was all right for the time being. Just sleeping.' Her face is white with shock and sorrow and fear.

Sewall pats her shoulder. ‘My child has dreamed her way to heaven,' he tells her.

‘I must not have been paying her enough attention.'

‘You mustn't blame yourself. The neglect is mine, not yours. I am her father.'

 

That evening Sewall and the children sit mournfully around the fire in the hall. Wife Hannah remains upstairs in her bed (after the news of Sarah's death was broken to her, Nurse Hurd administered a sleeping potion). The children have all cried plentifully and are now mainly confining themselves to the occasional wavering sigh or sob.

‘I think we should have a reading from the Bible,' Sewall tells them after a while. ‘It is always a comfort in times of sorrow.' He nearly asks Betty to do it since she is still the best reader of them all, but he fears that she will be overcome by grief which, at the present moment, will be more than he can bear, so instead he invites Sam to read chapter twelve of Matthew's gospel.

Sam begins in a monotonous voice:
At that time Jesus went on the Sabbath day through the corn; and his disciples were an hungred, and began to pluck the ears of corn, and to eat . . .

But when he gets to the seventh verse, an extraordinary thing happens.

Sam, at eighteen, has a husky retreating voice for much of the time (except when larking with his friend Josiah) but now it seems to have become strangely forceful and commanding (like Goody Good's did, when she addressed Mr. Noyes from the foot of the gallows), so that the words of the seventh verse of Matthew 12 echo and re-echo in Sewall's head:
But if ye had known what this meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice, ye would not have condemned the guiltless.

Sam continues to read but Sewall can no longer follow. His mind is wholly concerned with this one verse which, he realises, directly relates to the Salem tragedy.
Ye would not have condemned the guiltless
.

He remembers what he said to comfort Nurse Cowell: the neglect is mine, not yours, I am her father. Only now its true significance strikes him.

Yesterday he objected to Cotton Mather's fast day proposal on the grounds that it buried the witchcraft injustices in a heap of other lapses, sins and errors, some big and some small. Then just this morning he himself put forward a proposal in which his own responsibility for those outrages was buried in a generalised confession on the part of the community as a whole. That too was an evasion.

Sewall was a judge at that court. He condemned the guiltless. He failed to show mercy. In the years since the ending of the trials he has comforted himself with a collective view of the whole tragedy, concentrating on the notion of fellowship, a fellowship that disappeared when the community divided against itself, then formed again.

But that was simply a convenient way of getting lost in the crowd. He has to recognise that it is not just society as a whole that has to atone, but he himself also. He imagined spectres on a roof-beam and was fooled by supernatural trickery and fraud even while condemning magicians' tricks. He was the father of that miscarriage of justice in Salem just as he was the father of little Sarah. And to remind him of that connection, God has taken away his daughter as He took away his little stillborn son in the summer. These children were indeed the victims of Sewall's neglect, his neglect of the sins he committed in 1692.

Suddenly the lost boy claims his father's attention in his own right. There he is at this moment, out in that dark night, buried in the garden under a heap of soil and a drift of snow, all alone.

 

Next morning Sewall speaks to Bastian. ‘I have a hard task for you,' he tells him.

‘Yes, sir.'

‘I want you to dig up my little son.'

‘Your son?'

‘My little son who is buried in the garden.'

‘The stillborn one?'

For a moment Sewall is tempted to ask Bastian how many sons does he think are buried in the garden, but holds his tongue. The man is remembering Mr. Willard's assertion that the infant wasn't a son at all, wasn't anything. ‘The stillborn one,' he agrees instead.

‘But, master—'

‘I know it's a difficult task, the snow being so deep. It won't be easy to find the correct spot. And underneath the snow the ground will be hard.' The thought of his boy in that hard ground suddenly catches in his throat. ‘But tomorrow we place little Sarah in the family vault, and I wish to put her brother in there with her, so they can be together and with all the rest.'

Bastian gives him a long sympathetic look with those large brown eyes of his, then nods his head. ‘I will do it, sir,' he says quietly. ‘I know where he is.'

 

Mr. Willard strides into Sewall's study. ‘May I ask what you think you are doing?' he demands.

‘I am sitting in my study, thinking—'

‘Don't pretend ignorance to me, Mr. Sewall. I have just come across Bastian digging in the garden.'

‘Sitting in my study, thinking about the interment of my two children tomorrow morning,' Sewall continues mildly. ‘I have prayed for them and shortly I will pray again. Perhaps you will pray with me, Mr. Willard? As my minister. And my friend.'

‘I don't know how often I must tell you this. The stillborn one was never baptized. He cannot be placed alongside members of the family.'

‘Mr. Willard, it is
my
family.'

‘I am using the word family in the larger congregational sense.' Mr. Willard stands over Sewall and says in a loud voice, poking him in the chest with his finger after each word: ‘The–family–of–the–elect.' Then he steps back, takes out a handkerchief and blows his large nose (somewhat blue from the cold) with a parsonical trumpeting. ‘The stillborn is not part of the Christian family because he never drew breath,' he continues with great stress and emphasis, folding the handkerchief and tucking it into his sleeve meanwhile. ‘He wasn't
baptized
. If you insist on trying to include him, you will only succeed in
ex
cluding yourself.'

Once more Sewall recalls the promise he made to Betty, that if she should go to hell, he would join her there. It applies to his son also, to all his children.

‘Mr. Willard!' says a loud voice from the doorway, making both men start. It's the housekeeper, Sarah, standing there in cap and apron, her large and floury arms sternly folded across her bosom. ‘I could hear the rumpus you was making right down in the kitchen. I shouldn't have to remind you that my poor little namesake died yesterday.' (Sarah was extraordinarily proud to share her given name with the little girl, and—Sewall suspected—assumed the child had been named in her honour rather than after Abraham's wife.) ‘This is a house in mourning and I can't have you upsetting the master like this, minister or no minister.'

Mr. Willard gives Sarah a long look. She gives him a long look back. Surely, Sewall thinks,
this
is what a family is: wife Hannah, his children (living and dead, the old dead and the new, including that stillborn boy), servant Bastian who is even now digging on his behalf in the freezing garden, Sarah standing over in the doorway and boldly defying the minister, Susan going red-eyed about her business downstairs, brother Stephen on his way from Salem for the funeral, sister Margaret, their children, and so on and so forth. Family. Fellowship. Walking in the light.

Mr. Willard breaks off his exchange of looks with Sarah, and turns back towards Sewall. ‘I will leave you now,' he says. Sarah gives a harrumph of satisfaction and stumps off down the stairs. ‘But think on these matters. If you defy your minister, and step outside your congregation, where will you be?'

 

An hour later, in comes Cotton Mather, just as Mr. Willard did before him, striding forward in a rage. ‘I have been waiting, Mr. Sewall,' he says when he is in front of the desk, ‘for a visit from you.'

‘I am afraid I have not been in a state to make social calls. My—'

‘Social calls! I'm not talking about social calls. I am a minister of religion, Mr. Sewall, and I deserve an explanation. I deserve an apology.'

‘Mr. Mather, yesterday my daughter Sarah died and—'

‘I have heard that news and I'm sorry about it. But we mustn't let bereavement conflict with matters of religion. I lost a son one morning, and gave a sermon that very afternoon. Our duty to God overrides personal considerations.'

At this moment there's a knock at the study door, and Bastian pokes his head round. He's about to speak but then sees Cotton Mather standing there and pauses.

‘Yes, Bastian?' Sewall asks him.

‘Sir, I just wanted to say—I have done that thing you asked.'

‘Thank you, Bastian. That is good of you. I will see you in a minute.'

‘Yes, master.' The door closes.

‘I'm not sure what I have to apologise for, Mr. Mather,' Sewall continues in a firm voice.

Cotton Mather turns back from looking at the interruption. ‘Instead of respecting my authority as a minister you treated me worse than a . . . than a
negro
. You brushed aside my fast day proposal and took the opportunity to substitute one of your own.'

‘Mr. Mather, it was felt—' Sewall immediately realises that this form of words constitutes the very error that characterises his own fast day proposal, by concealing his individual responsibility in that of the community as a whole. ‘
I
felt that your proposal did not sufficiently address the issue of the witchcraft.'

‘If there is hunger you do not offer an apple but a full meal, Mr. Sewall. Our fast day
hungers
for a comprehensive synopsis of our sins. Are you acquainted with Nathaniel Wardell?'

‘The chairmaker?' asks Sewall, perplexed at this sudden turn.

‘The same.'

‘Yes. He repaired—'

‘He is a member of my congregation. Yesterday he discovered that some evil-minded persons had stolen the house of office from his garden. Carried the whole thing away. He stood and stared at the place where it was, he told me, unable to believe his eyes. He has offered a ten pounds reward for its return.'

‘Mr. Mather, I don't see—'

‘Our province has become a place where even a necessary house is no longer a safe refuge. The list of our backslidings has to be comprehensive.'