Six Women of Salem (8 page)

But life on Carr’s Island had its hazards. When one Evan Morris of Ipswich sued George Carr over disputed wages in June 1646, George countered with the charge that the workman had threatened to kill him. Because Morris at some point not only tried to run from the constable but was also found to have committed “an action of a high nature done in England,” the court fined him twenty shillings. Despite the seriousness of whatever he had done abroad, Morris remained in Essex County and continued to get into trouble. (He was sued for slander in 1656 for declaring that if there were “noe members of Churches there would be noe need of gallows” and charged in 1660 “for drunkenness, quarreling, and railing speeches” after a brawl that left his Topsfield employer fined for selling liquor without a license.)

Then in 1657 John Lewis’s hired man, Henry Horrell, drowned near Carr’s Island, and the body was not recovered for a month. Horrell and fellow workman Robert Quimby had gotten drunk in a skiff before dawn one Sabbath, lost an oar, and fetched up on Ram Island, where Horrell either fell or was thrown from the island’s steep bank into the strong current. George Carr, his Indian, and a hired man rescued Quimby but strongly suspected foul play. When John Lewis arrived at Carr’s house to collect Quimby, he noted that “Mrs. Carr was crying and wringing her hands and Mr. Carr very solitary.” The case, being capital, went all the way to the Court of Assistants, which did not find Quimby guilty despite “some suspition thereof.”

Elizabeth, meanwhile, gave birth to William in 1647 or ’48. Her second son, Richard, died in 1649, at most just four years old. But she gave birth, in relentless and exhausting succession, the following spring to son James, in February 1652 to daughter Mary, and then the following December to daughter Sarah. After a three-year respite Elizabeth produced the next child, John, in November 1656. Three years later Elizabeth bore yet another son named Richard (like his dead sibling—not an uncommon practice). Sometime in 1660 eight-year-old Sarah was sent to live with her Uncle and Aunt Oliver in Boston, where she, like her eldest sister, stayed until she married. Finally Elizabeth gave birth to her tenth and last child—Ann—on June 15, 1661.

Less than a year later, in Boston, the eldest daughter, Elizabeth, married John Woodmancy, who stated that he thought of her as the Oliver’s daughter rather than the Carrs’. Her uncle, James Oliver, evidently thought likewise, as he provided Elizabeth with a generous dowry of about £500. A short three years later, in December 1665, Elizabeth gave birth to a son, John, and subsequently died. Childbearing was not always a joyous event to welcome a new soul from God, for the risk of death for mother or child—or both—was very real.

When Ann was ten her twenty-one-year-old brother, James, met the widow Rebecca Maverick, who, since the death of her husband, Samuel Maverick Jr., had moved from Boston to the Salisbury home of her father, Reverend John Wheelwright. James was smitten with her, and when she suggested that he visit more often and not be such a stranger (at least as he later recalled it), he was sure she felt similarly toward him. When he returned a few evenings later, William Bradbury was there before him, evidently upset with young Mrs. Maverick, who treated William “coarsely” (again, according to James’s view). William soon left, looking angry. He had, in fact, been courting the widow, and James interpreted the stormy exit to mean that Rebecca preferred himself. However, James soon fell strangely and alarmingly ill, with sensations running about his body as if some “living creature” were scampering invisibly throughout, “ready to tear me to pieces.”

This ailment continued off and on for nine months, no matter what Dr. Anthony Crosby (the first physician in nearby Rowley) prescribed; not even a posset of steeped tobacco seemed to help. William Bradbury, meanwhile, mended his quarrel with the widow Maverick. He signed a renunciation to any claim against her late husband’s estate on March 5, 1672, and married her a week later on March 12
—
discouraging news for James, whose condition failed to improve.

At last Dr. Crosby admitted that he believed James was “behagged” and urged his patient to tell who might have done it. James (as he later claimed he said) hesitated to accuse anyone “counted honest,” but he suggested his romantic rival’s mother, Mrs. Bradbury. Dr. Crosby declared that “he believed that Mrs. Bradbury was a great deal worse than Goody Martin” (referring to Susannah Martin of neighboring Amesbury, an assertive woman who more than one resident in the area suspected of being a witch).

Mistress Mary Bradbury, however, was a respectable matron married to Thomas Bradbury, town clerk, schoolmaster, and frequent magistrate. One night soon after James had named Mrs. Bradbury aloud, he felt a cat—or something else—hop onto his bed. He was certain he was “broad awake,” yet he could not move to strike it off. If the thing was not Mrs. Bradbury in the form of some creature, surely it was an imp or familiar that she had sent to plague him further. When the thing came again another night, James
did
manage to move and, he thought, hit it. From then on Dr. Crosby’s medicine finally worked, and James no longer doubted that Mrs. Bradbury was the witch who had caused his ills on behalf of her son. (That both William and Rebecca died in 1678, a mere six years after their union, did not change his mind.) James never married and continued working for his father at his various enterprises.

Possibly around the same time Ann’s brother John fell in love with Mrs. Bradbury’s granddaughter Jemima True. Despite his brother James’s experiences with the Bradburys, John convinced himself that his father would approve of the match and would give him a marriage ­portion—he lacked enough to start married life—but George Sr. most certainly did
not
approve. Furthermore, “some in the family” persuaded John’s father that the boy was too young. The girl was a year younger as it was, and the match evaporated. Soon afterward John became uncharacteristically melancholy, “by degrees much crazed,” and so he ­remained.

In 1672, some months after William and Rebecca Bradbury’s wedding, when Ann was eleven, her third brother, William, married Elizabeth Pike (a daughter of Robert Pike, who had often opposed Reverend Wheelwright’s imperious tactics), and her sister Mary married James Bailey of Newbury. Bailey was a young man not long out of Harvard (or “the college,” as it was called). Two months after the wedding a committee of men from Salem Village offered him £40 a year to serve as their minister.

Salem Village—also called Salem Farms—was a rural neighborhood of Salem itself, a long walk inland northwest of the harbor. The men there had petitioned the selectmen for years to have charge of their own security—rather than leave their families unprotected while they trudged into town to stand watch—and to establish their own church with their own minister. The same problem of distance had already whittled away Salem’s outlying areas, and the town fathers were unwilling to lose any more. But the farmers were determined, so they took the matter all the way to the General Court, at last winning permission on October 8, 1672, to establish their own parish. Their victory meant that now they were responsible for building and maintaining a meeting house as well as paying a minister.

In the spring of 1673 the Village men, with a hired carpenter, raised a meeting house thirty-four feet long and twenty-eight feet broad on an acre donated by Joseph Hutchinson at a crossroad in the Village center. Like the courthouses and market houses in East Anglia, from where many of the settlers had started out, the plain, one-room structure looked more like a barn than a traditional ecclesiastical architecture and would serve as a space for civil as well as religious gatherings. (“Church” was used to indicate the people in full communing membership and did not refer to the building.) The Village decided on “plain” windows with no glass—shutters could keep out weather—and accepted a secondhand pulpit and deacon’s bench that Salem’s church donated.

Bailey’s status as minister was not yet permanent, but in June the Village asked him to continue with them for another year. (And in July, back in Newbury, Mary Bailey gave birth to the couple’s first child, whom they also named Mary, but the infant died in August.) The next winter the Village increased Bailey’s pay by £7 worth of firewood and began to think of building a ministry house (otherwise known as a parsonage) for the young couple. In November the Village voted to build a house twenty-eight feet long by twenty feet deep with an eleven-foot lean-to at one end. Working together under a housewright’s direction (probably the next spring), the men raised the ­timbers on the southern slope of Thorndike’s Hill, some distance east of the meeting house and uphill from the road. It is possible that young Ann joined the Baileys here to help her sister; woman’s work running a household usually needed more than one pair of hands.

In February 1674, in gratitude for his “coming amongst us to the ministry,” brothers Thomas, Nathaniel, and John Putnam as well as Joseph Hutchinson and Joshua Rea deeded Bailey a parcel of thirty acres of upland on the slopes of Misty and Hadlock’s Hills along with ten acres of lower-lying Cromwell’s Meadow. However, not all the parishioners were as pleased or grateful; the Village had to sue fourteen taxpayers for not paying the ministerial rates. The Village already had its factions, for not everyone agreed with the Putnam family’s choices. The disagreement over the choice of permanent minister simmered in the background as Bailey continued to preach and offer pastoral care. In the meantime his wife, Mary, gave birth to son John in 1675. Around that time her brother John Carr descended into melancholy and eventual madness. Also during this period the always-thorny relationship with the native peoples further deteriorated into King Philip’s War, which, though relatively brief, was exceedingly brutal, destroying a nearly ruinous 10 percent of the white population. Yet the price paid by the native peoples in southern New England, who by now most of the colonists feared as fiends incarnate, was far greater in numbers as well as autonomy. Salem Village escaped attack as did Salisbury, where the General Court established a seven-man garrison in 1676 at Carr’s Ferry. Ann’s father, still a local leader, commanded the modest force at this crossing place on the Merrimack.

In 1678 Ann’s sister Mary gave birth to another son, James Jr., and her sister Sarah, who had grown up in Boston, married blacksmith Thomas Baker. Ann herself, seventeen years old, was courted by Thomas Putnam Jr., the eldest son of Lieutenant Thomas Putnam, a prominent community leader and considerable landowner. Young Thomas had fought in a company of troopers in King Philip’s War and had been one of the attackers in the Narragansett Campaign. Then, in the deep December snows of 1675, combined colonial and Mohegan forces, with their provisions spent and the nearest garrison populated only by the newly dead, attacked the Narragansetts’ palisade fort on an island in a frozen swamp. The terrible hand-to-hand fighting in the burning fort left at least 80 colonists dead and 150 wounded, but they killed perhaps a thousand Narragansetts either directly or from exposure, as men, women, and children tried to flee the carnage.

Further, Thomas Sr. was not only prosperous but also generous. He built a new house east beyond Hathorne Hill for himself, his second wife, and the younger children (including eight-year-old Joseph, the only child from the second marriage) and then or soon after gave the use of the old homestead to Thomas Jr. The 150-acre farm included house, barns, orchards, uplands, pastures, and meadows. It stretched to the Ipswich River, its angles marked by a great rock and blazes on certain trees—white ash, white oak, red oak, and black oak, hornbeam, and maple.

Ann, aged seventeen, married twenty-six-year-old Thomas on November 25, 1678. If she had a hired girl to assist her in her new household, the servant could hardly have been much younger than her mistress. But she was
Mistress
Putnam now (Mrs. for short), not simply Ann (like a child, a servant, or a lower-class woman). Young as she was, as Mistress, she outranked even a Goodwife (Goody for short) like Rebecca Nurse. For both she and her husband were the children of wealthy men and began their married life with a fine material start. A prosperous future was a reasonable expectation. But expectations, either material or spiritual, however reassuring, are not inevitable in this mortal, earthly life.

Old controversies erupted the following winter when Nathaniel Putnam, whose support of Bailey had since soured, along with Bray Wilkins announced that Bailey was
not
qualified to be a minister. Their reasons—especially Nathaniel’s change of heart—are now cloudy, but the allegation sparked a spate of charges and countercharges. One side declared that only a few had invited Bailey to preach, that he sought to “carve out a considerable estate” in the Village when he was not their permanently ordained minister but there only “upon sufferance,” and that Bailey did not even conduct prayers and Scripture reading for his own family. Thomas’s father and several other men, including ten who lived outside the Village, defended Bailey’s religious life. The slander of religious negligence escalated until it went to court, where witnesses gave conflicting accounts as to whether Bailey conducted family prayers and Scripture readings. (Ann was not called to testify, though she had lived in Bailey’s household before her marriage.) With the Salem Church serving as mediator, Reverend John Higginson advised that the majority’s wishes would rule, that the Village pay Bailey the salary due him, and that they “follow the things that make for peace.” The last suggestion especially fell on deaf ears.

Thirty-eight men, including Thomas and his father, signed a letter supporting Bailey, but little changed. By July Salem Village’s first minister announced, “I see no further grounds of hope for my future comfortable living amongst you in that work of the ministry in this place, and therefore am seriously thinking of my removal from you.” In September a committee voted to raise Bailey’s salary to £55 for the next year, granted him the freedom to leave if he found another place, and reserved the option for the Village to hire another minister at year’s end.