Six Women of Salem (52 page)

Also on September 9 Giles Corey, the litigious and cantankerous farmer whose testimony helped condemn his wife and who now stood accused of the same crime, refused to cooperate with the court. He pleaded not guilty but would not consent to the trial, to speak the phrase that would allow it, partly from principle and partly, it is assumed, in an attempt to prevent property seizures. Even if he feared his land would be lost—and, in fact, no one’s land would be confiscated—everyone knew what had happened at the Procter farm and the English mansion. For now his stubbornness postponed his trial.

Considering the expense of jail bills and the Procter family’s losses, William Procter probably never left jail after the grand jury dismissed his case. Now, facing John Hathorne and other local magistrates on September 17, he endured a second hearing for tormenting the usual afflicted victims, but Mary Warren and Elizabeth Hubbard especially.

He denied the charge, but when he looked at Mary Warren, his family’s former servant, she collapsed as if struck. His touch restored her, allowing her to say, “that Wm Proctor had almost murdered her to death this day by pains in all her bones and Inwards also.” His specter, she added, also afflicted the others.

All of the afflicted fell at his glance and revived at his reluctant touch: Mary Warren, Annie Putnam and Mary Walcott (“in dreadfull fitts”), Elizabeth Hubbard, sisters Elizabeth and Alice Booth, Sarah Churchill, and a new girl, Mary Pickworth. “Elizabeth Booth said she saw him twist and pinch poppets this very day,” whereas Hubbard and Walcott claimed that he made them promise not to tell the court what he was up to.

Yet again William Procter was held for future trial.

Giles Corey, even with friends trying to convince him that refusing to cooperate could be suicidal, continued to stand mute. After three refusals over as many days the court turned to a technique newly available to them from English law—pressing. He would be placed on his back under boards with heavy weights stacked on top until he either relented or was crushed. Giles still would not agree, and the torture was scheduled for September 19. If Massachusetts law had to conform to English law, then they would threaten the man with pressing to force him to plea.

Mrs. Ann Putnam, who was growing close to her time, may have depended even more on Thomas and Annie for news from the courts. It would not do to risk the babe, now that it was so truly quickened, by such proximity to the evil of the Devil’s witches. Such baleful proximity could mark an infant even before birth. Day after day the courts questioned defendants, heard witnesses relate their testimony, marshaled evidence—much of
that
observed right before their eyes in the convulsions and pain of the bewitched. And day after day the defendants were found guilty, thus removing, in Ann’s mind, another enemy, another source of harm.

Mary Esty, sister to Rebecca Nurse, had been found guilty, which was no surprise to Ann, who knew the authorities had located witch-marks on the woman, and was sentenced to hang. Goody Esty submitted a second petition to the court after the guilty verdict was pronounced:

[B]eing condemned to die . . . [the woman had written, or had someone write for her, and] knowing my own Innocencye Blised be the lord for it and seeing plainly the wiles and subtility of my accusers by my selfe can not but Judg charitably of others that are going the same way of my selfe if the Lord stepps not mightily in . . . I Petition to your honours not for my own life for I know I must die and my apointed time is sett but the Lord he knowes it is that if it be possible no more Innocentt blood may be shed which undoubtidly cannot be Avoydd In the way and course you goe in I Question not but your honours does to the uttmost of your Powers in the discovery and detecting of witchcraft and witches and would not be gulty of Innocent blood for the world but by my own Innocencye I know you are in the wrong way . . . I would humbly begg of you that your honours would be plesed to examine theis Aflicted Persons strictly and keepe them apart some time and likewise to try some of these confesing wichis I being confident there is severall of them has belyed themselve[s] and others as will appeare if not in this wo[l]rd I am sure in the world to come whither I am now agoing. [T]he Lord above who is the searcher of all heart[s] knowes that as I shall answer it att the Tribunall seat that I know not the least thinge of witchcraft therfore I cannot I dare not belye my own soule

But neither the court—nor the Putnams—changed their minds.

Mistress Mary Bradbury, a thorn to so many of the Carr family, was likewise found guilty and condemned September 9, the same day as Esty. “I am wholly inocent of any such wickedness,” she had declared. Over one hundred of her neighbors had signed a petition attesting to her good behavior, including Ann Putnam’s kin William and Elizabeth Carr, a circumstance that could only make Ann wonder how some people could be so deceived. But, as Ann saw it, the magistrates’ perception had weighed all that against the obvious evidence unfolding before their eyes in the sufferings of the afflicted, and the woman was condemned with the rest. Even more disconcerting to Ann would be the appalling news soon after that Mrs. Bradbury had disappeared from the jail.

Where was she? Was she heading for distant parts to hide in another jurisdiction? Or was she lurking nearby, unseen, waiting to take revenge on those who opposed her?

She was gone, simply gone, spirited out of the jail by . . . what? Spirits? The Devil?

By bribery, more likely. Gold could buy anything, it seemed. Ann, counting herself a reasonable woman, could understand the venality of men. So the Putnams could not let down their guard in this righteous, necessary cause. Ann could not relax yet.

Other prisoners escaped as well. By mid-September John Alden managed to flee the Boston jail, first to his family in Plymouth County, so descendants would say, then further to the province of New York, following Mrs. Cary and the Englishes.

____________________

With Giles Corey still stubbornly uncooperative, the Putnams learn, the court has ordered him subjected to
peine forte et dure
to make him agree to be tried—to be pressed to death if he would not answer
how
he would be tried. The evening before this happens witch-specters yet again assail Annie Putnam.

At the end of the torture Annie seems to be listening to some other entity. It is the ghost of a man in a winding sheet, the girl says. Corey killed him—“
Pressing
him to Death with his Feet”—and then the old man sold his soul to the Devil to escape the murder charge.

Ann and Thomas remember the death and the ensuing trial. It is quite true that Corey was tried for the murder of his hired man Jacob Goodall, a neighbor’s slow-witted son (“almost a Natural Fool” in Thomas’s opinion, for the man had been born that way), and it was true that Corey had beaten the man severely. Yet no one had mentioned
this
during the trials, and it happened well before Annie’s birth.

Annie relays the ghost’s message: It must be done to him as he has done to me.

This is indeed significant. Thomas composes a letter to Judge Samuel Sewall relating the vision and what he remembers of the old court case. “[I]t cost him a great deal of Mony to get off,” in addition to collaborating with the Devil, Thomas writes. He forgets—or prefers to forget—that Corey beat Jacob with a stout staff rather than his feet and that as other impatient people had struck the man as well from time to time, the coroner’s jury’s opinion was inconclusive. Joining with the Devil makes more sense. This way the Putnams need not feel sorrow for Corey or guilt for themselves when he faces the morrow’s torture.

Rebecca Nurse’s family, meanwhile, continued their lives, journeying to Topsfield for Sabbath services, avoiding the neighbors. Francis, a widower now, had begun to lose her months before in March, when she was first taken away. The house may have seemed empty then, but since her death a profound absence pervaded it—the silence when a voice should answer and cannot, her familiar footsteps gone along with the little disregarded sounds of everyday life as she went about her tasks—all ended, leaving a hollowness in life itself. Absence filled the house, the farm, the world—but not his heart, for all its wounds, or his resolve.

Her sisters still needed help, and her good name
must
be cleared. The Lord knew her true worth, of that Francis was certain, but the world and her neighbors who inhabited it must be made to understand the truth of what had happened, the travesty of justice and the treachery of men and young girls who cared not whether the blood they shed was guilty or innocent.

With Giles Corey still stubbornly uncooperative, the court ordered the
peine forte et dure
. He remained silent and died under the torture on September 19. Because Giles still owed jail fees, Sheriff Corwin and his men went to the Corey farm to seize goods in payment. Giles’s daughter Elizabeth Moulton and her husband, John, who had already gone to months of trouble and expense providing for both Giles and Martha in prison, scraped together £11:6:0 to prevent this. In the rush, the “personal Estate” Martha had been caring for as inheritance for her son Thomas Rich was lost as well.

Yet again the procession formed on September 22, yet again a crowd of spectators gathered near the prison’s gate to see the condemned led out. Mary Warren joined the little knot of afflicted witnesses. Behind them two more of the recently condemned remained, their deaths postponed. Dorcas Hoar confessed at last, after so many protestations of innocence,
after
she was found guilty and pleaded for time to settle her soul before she died and faced God’s judgment. Unlike John Procter’s plea for time, however, hers was granted—the confession seeming, to the court, like honesty. Abigail Faulkner also stayed behind until her next child was born—she and Elizabeth Procter having at least that in common. Old Mrs. Bradbury was absent from the procession as well; the sheriff and deputies kept an embarrassed silence about that.

Even so, the cart held eight today: Martha Corey, Mary Esty, Alice Parker, Mary Parker, Ann Pudeator, Wilmot Read, Margaret Scott, and Samuel Wardwell, who, after confessing at his hearing and accusing others in court, had, at his own trial, repudiated his confession when he saw that it would not save him. Of the ten more condemned prisoners, nine waited behind for another session of executions.

The weather was cooler now, with the fall colors in the leaves hastened by a dry summer as the drought continued.

Down the road they passed, kicking up dust that gritted the eyes and dried the breath as it coated yellowing roadside weeds and scarlet vines, ghost-like, beneath a skin of dust. The crowd turned downhill to the causeway in the marsh, bunching up as the way narrowed at the bridge over the stream. The prisoners and officers preceded the rest, and as the loaded cart turned up the further hill, its wheels became stuck in the soft earth. Some of the afflicted and others took up the cry that the Devil was trying to hold back the cart. Mary Warren joined in, but for all of Satan’s boasted power, the delay was only temporary. The deputies heaved against the cart, the wheels soon lurched free, and the procession continued on up to the gallows.

The condemned, given their chance to speak last words, remained calm and solemn. Two in particular impressed Robert Calef. As he later reported the incidents:

Mary Esty, Sister also to Rebecca Nurse, when she took her last farewell of her Husband, Children and Friends, was, as is reported by them present, as Serious, Religious, Distinct, and Affectionate as could well be exprest, drawing Tears from the Eyes of almost all present.

Martha Corey, Gospel woman to the last, “concluded her Life with an Eminent Prayer upon the Ladder.”

Samuel Wardwell, who had had so much to say about his own fortune-telling abilities in the past and even more when he blamed other suspects of committing witchcraft, was, according to Calef, less successful.

At Execution while he was speaking to the People, protesting his Innocency, the Executioner being at the same time smoaking Tobacco, the smoake coming in his Face, interrupted his Discourse, those Accusers said, the Devil hindered him with the smoake.

But if he were the only one silenced, then even Alice Parker, Mary Warren’s enemy, made an appropriate statement.

Hands and feet tied, one by one they were turned off the ladder, and one by one they died with the usual painful messy contortions. Then there was nothing left but to let the workmen bury the dead, with the corpses hanging there long enough to warn and deter other evildoers.

As Mary and the rest began to turn back toward town and relatives of some of the dead waited at the edges to claim their kin home for burial, Reverend Noyes regarded the eight bodies swaying at rope’s end from the gallows and commented, “What a sad thing it is to see Eight Firebrands of Hell hanging there.”

Before the afternoon was out, clouds gathered and began to rain on the parched dry land. Then it rained harder. People could hope that the long summer’s drought had ended, but there was still the next court sitting to contemplate. What the courts might do was even more uncertain than New England’s weather.

____________________

Tituba thinks she hears a light rain pattering outside on dust too dry to absorb it yet. She is preoccupied, however, with the knowledge that eight more are dead, hanged like the rest. But not Giles Corey, who refused to cooperate and was pressed to death. Tituba shudders at the thought. The jail had been quieter that day, after old Corey was taken out and not brought back. Some of the deputies working that detail returned ashen and haggard, as though they had been sick. Tituba had overheard some of what they said.