The Witches: Salem, 1692 (37 page)

Salem’s whirlwind of a third act began now as—doubts and cavils nipping at the proceedings—the pace of arrests, confessions, and convictions accelerated wildly. There were to be no steely John Procters or dismissive Martha Carriers after August 19. When Carrier’s children were called in, they confessed. The avowals touched on a fundamental New England problem. When could you deem yourself sufficiently reformed? Once you began confessing, there was no end in sight. The Salem magistrates sat nearly daily from the end of August through September, to hear a litany of variations on a familiar, harrowing tale. If a common jail did not guarantee that the particulars would agree, the method of interrogation and the price of resistance did. It is unclear if Ann Foster volunteered that she had flown through the air or if she was first asked if she had. She embellished as she went. She did not mention that flight in her initial hearing. She predated her pact and described the crash in her second, adding the Sabbath in the third. An Andover woman denied any part of witchcraft until she did not. A farmer belatedly inserted a satanic baptism into his confession; the devil had dipped his head in water and announced that he “was his for ever and ever.” Somehow he had forgotten that detail earlier. It helped that no one knew precisely how a witch worked; Hale’s curiosity was understandable. A part-biblical, part-folkloric, vaguely Swedish and less vaguely Indian construct, a witch was someone who in July pinched and strangled but in August toppled kingdoms.

By September, only minor matters failed to align. Had the argument been over a barn or a scythe? Did witches need an ointment to fly? (In New England they did not.) Was John Willard an old man or a young man? Hathorne inquired of Richard Carrier, testing his witness. Eighteen-year-old Carrier did not want to disappoint: “He is not an old man,” he answered carefully. Asked how she had traveled to the Salem witches’ meeting, Reverend Dane’s daughter confessed she had done so on horseback.
“But afterwards,” notes the court reporter, she emended her answer, revealing that “she was carried thither on a pole.” The “afterwards” is left to our imaginations. Tituba’s hairy imp and flying monkey vanished, as did subversive plots against governors. Blue boars, bewitched oxen, dead cows, and even another ornery laundress turned up, but by September, satanic conspiracy took center stage. In court daily, with parents and guardians, the Salem girls assisted with the continuity. The star attraction, Mary Warren, fell into violent fits, on September 2 approaching the justices with “a pin run through her hand, and blood running out of her mouth.” Before the court, a red stain spread across her bonnet; the mere mention of a suspect’s name could level her. It was impossible to deny witchcraft in the girls’ presence, tantamount to a corpse in the courtroom. You might well refute your neighbor’s claim that he had seen your head on the body of a dog. But you could not discredit the bloodcurdling screams, the acrobatic postures, or counter the effect of Mary Warren crashing lifeless to the floor. Those displays sent even a self-assured twenty-nine-year-old man toward a confession. And the confessions agreed, with near-scientific accuracy, deeply reassuring to the hardworking Salem justices. It would be some time before their self-replicating nature would appear suspect rather than as proof that a deadly conspiracy had taken hold. Meanwhile, most of Essex County seemed to be flying through the air, on very crowded sticks.

WHILE THE AUTHORITIES
flushed out the demonic conspiracy in Andover, they exposed something else in the process: a swarm of superstitions nested under the plain Puritan floorboards. Dane’s daughter ultimately confessed to witchcraft but first squelched the rumor that she had practiced folk magic. She had decidedly not conjured with a sieve, a sort of seventeenth-century Ouija board. Weeks later a Dane in-law acknowledged that a bit of sieve-turning had indeed taken place in her household; she knew the incantation from Reverend Barnard’s maid. On August 11 Faulkner’s sister-in-law produced for the court a full collection
of poppets, two of rag, a third of birch bark, one with three pins still stuck in it. Andover turned out to be rife with not only sorcery but also folk magic, religion’s popular, wayward stepsister. It settled comfortably into parsonages. The Barnard and Dane households, like those of Higginson and Hale, were infested. Ironically, only the Parris household seemed immune.

If women were traditionally the wonder-workers—and excitable adolescent girls the fortune-teller’s bread and butter—Andover turned those conventions too on their heads. The town’s most gifted soothsayer proved to be a forty-nine-year-old Exeter-born carpenter, the feckless, free-spirited father of seven, something of a local celebrity. Samuel Wardwell peered into palms, casting his eyes meaningfully to the ground as he delivered his forecasts. He had predicted that the constable’s wife would bear five girls before she delivered a boy. He had announced that Elizabeth Ballard would succumb to witchcraft before she did. A fair amount of expiation rippled through the testimony against Wardwell. None of those whose futures he so eerily foretold had minded at the time, not the young man whom Wardwell warned would fall from his horse, nor the one whose underage love he had divined, nor the one who learned that his sweetheart would betray him. All had gathered closely around the silver-tongued carpenter. Even in the presence of their adolescent daughters, Andover farmers begged him to reveal their fates. The sixty-five-year-old blacksmith who testified that Wardwell was “much addicted” to soothsaying had himself eagerly pulled up a chair.

Wardwell reluctantly confessed to witchcraft on September 1. Perhaps he had too often invoked the devil. It was difficult not to when cursing the stray animals that wreaked havoc in his fields.
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He admitted he had met the prince of the air. Wardwell—whose affairs suffered while he pursued more frivolous interests—was the Andover man whom the
devil had assured of a militia captaincy. Soon enough the constable returned to the isolated Wardwell farm to arrest his wife of twenty years, their two eldest daughters, and an infant. The family disclosed that one brand of sorcery invited the other; Wardwell’s stepdaughter allowed that she had experimented with a sieve and scissors in the spring. The devil had appeared to her, with propositions. She had subsequently met him three times, including once at the village meeting, where she had seen a dozen people riding on poles. The dabbling in the occult further fueled the confessions; many admitted easily to folk magic, about which they already felt guilty and at which they had been caught red-handed.
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Protestantism reared from magic, but—especially when it came to witch-hunting—the two had a tendency to blur. Lawson had inveighed in March against most of the practices to which Andover residents would confess, warning against the temptation to “charm away witchcraft.” Mary Sibley’s experiment had earned her a very public rebuke. Martha Carrier’s niece had earlier attempted to kill a witch by bottling and baking an afflicted person’s urine. Mary Toothaker consulted a book of astrology. On September 6 Reverend Hale testified to Dorcas Hoar’s regular fortune-telling. Years earlier he had insisted she get rid of her book of palmistry, which his children had seen. Hoar had also taught herself to make predictions based on marks around the eye. At her trial the court measured her (four-foot-seven-inch-long) elf-lock. They ordered the matted tail cut off. Hoar quailed; if they did so, she protested, she would fall ill if not die. The court prevailed.

Mather acknowledged that in the presence of evil, many turned to illicit “burnings, and bottles and horseshoes and I know not what magical ceremonies” for relief. At the same time, the seventeenth-century minister distinguished more ably than do we between “Catholic nonsense” (horseshoes, urine cakes, touch tests) and proper Puritan theology. The line proved not so much unclear as perforated. Too late for George
Jacobs, Increase Mather denounced sticking witch suspects with pins. What if the pin was itself enchanted? He wrote off the swim test used to identify witches as idle superstition. (His son endorsed the practice.) Was it faith healing to call in the girls to ask what ailed someone, as Parris did in mid-June when he sent for Mercy Lewis, who, in a trance, diagnosed a bewitched Putnam? Did boiling a lock of an afflicted child’s hair in a skillet over the fire constitute medicine or superstition?
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What was the difference between Samuel Wardwell warning that Ballard’s wife would fall ill and Increase Mather growling—after Sewall’s altercation with his son—that harm would befall the Sewalls? In 1676, Increase Mather set aside a day of prayer on which to beg the Lord to smite the stalwart Indian leader, King Philip. It worked, like a charm and within the week. How to distinguish between a prayer and a spell—or between a spell and an alchemical balm that cured wounds from a distance? The Lord’s Prayer was understood to be a sort of “holy charm” before which ghosts and goblins fled.
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If the occult, religion, folklore, and medicine tended to overspill their bounds, they did so as profligately in wealthy households as anywhere. A December 1692 statute would deem locating hidden treasure a kind of witchcraft; the Massachusetts governor owed his career to that very pursuit. Phips had consulted a London fortune-teller who predicted a glorious future, a prediction not altogether different from the assurances Cotton Mather received from a glimmering, winged angel in his study. Several Salem judges owned volumes of astrology. Many dabbled in alchemy. All read almanacs. Wait Still Winthrop’s library was particularly rich in mystical literature, in tables of astrological houses and treatises on magic. He shared the ministerial addiction to portents and prodigies.

The message could moreover be mixed. Increase Mather railed against various countercharms while acknowledging that they worked. Samuel Sewall consulted a minister as to whether the timing was propitious for an addition to his home. The supernatural hovered always nearby, in and out of religious dress. On his sickbed, at age twelve, the future Marblehead minister had spoken with an ethereal figure who supplied three magical pills. They cured him; he thereafter assumed his visitor to have been an angel. When another young woman who had communed with an angel began to terrorize those around her with divine edicts, Mather declared the spirit a devil for the sake of neighborhood peace. The Massachusetts ministers conjured with the question still in 1694, when they settled on it for their September meeting: How to differentiate a diabolical from an angelic visitation? Witchcraft and divine providence could easily be confused, as could a scowl and the evil eye, a prophecy and an educated guess, sin and diabolical collusion.

When it came to writing up the trials, when it came to hawking his beloved Swedish blueprint for Salem, Cotton Mather gave the folkloric a free pass. He knew the hidden world was there somewhere; he would relinquish no tool to exhibit it. He performed scientific calculations with the Bible to determine the date of the end of the world. In 1705 he applied Mosaic history to a mastodon tooth unearthed in New York. The angelic visitations in the study and demonic ones in the parlor spoke to the same anxieties and served similar ends. Sarah Good seemed to put curses on her neighbors. Cotton Mather so wished an odious son-in-law ill that he prayed for his death for three days on end. The entreaties worked; Mather took full credit for having dispatched the wicked young man, previously in the pink of health. His demise was “a wondrous thing.”

AS SALEM PREPARED
to execute five additional witches, four of them men, one a minister, misgivings made their way to the authorities from likely and unlikely addresses. Seventy-six-year-old Robert Pike had missed Phips’s May swearing-in because he was busy taking testimony against Amesbury widow Susannah Martin. He lost part of his summer
to the case against the Salisbury minister’s mother-in-law, Mary Bradbury, who—transforming herself into a blue boar—scrabbled under a horse’s hooves, upsetting the rider. A popular Massachusetts council member, Pike was a longtime militia captain and Salisbury’s most eminent citizen. The previous spring he had traveled to Maine with Stoughton and Gedney to negotiate an Indian truce. He was acquainted with Burroughs, having quarreled with him years earlier. Pike’s son had been a Harvard classmate of Parris’s; he was married to Joshua Moody’s daughter. And his daughter had married a Putnam, which put him in a delicate position as far as the blue boar was concerned. Mary Bradbury’s accusers were family, as, briefly, she had been as well; a fellow selectman, her husband was among Pike’s closest friends. Pike was a devout man of wide reading and firm, fearless convictions. Decades earlier he had challenged a ruling on religious freedom. Found guilty of defaming the court, he was banned from public office.
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As mid-August crowds began to converge on Salem, Pike may have been the first public official to register qualms about the proceedings. In a long letter to Justice Corwin, he reviewed the logic of the case. He believed in witches, though observed that they were rare in the Old Testament. (As others had pointed out, most were also men.) Not for a minute did he doubt the devil’s powers. The Old Deluder had made off with the Lord himself, torturing him with “temptations of horrid blasphemy.” Surely any good man could suffer the same fate? For that matter, faulty character should not prove grounds for conviction. There were, Pike pointed out, plenty of “innocent persons that are not saints.” He had particular trouble with ghosts; people simply did not return from their graves. And how could a man be simultaneously at Salem and Cambridge? Pike hinted that some fraud might be afoot. Personally he did not believe so. He agreed that their case was exceptional.

Which brought him to the oracular girls. Pike had not seen them in
action but had heard plenty, as had everyone in Massachusetts. Here he stuttered a little. Whatever they were doing was either divine or diabolical. But for the record, communing with those who had been publicly and plainly buried happened to be unlawful. Leviticus warned specifically against consulting mediums or spirits. Why was it less likely that God racked and tormented the girls than that Satan did, “especially when some things that they tell are false and mistaken”? Pike wondered who might be abetting whom. The devil could work his art without human help; the opposite was not true. The visionary girls could know what they did only from the father of lies. How could they bear valid witness? The same went for the confessors, whom he was the first to skewer. Then there was that other logical pothole: it made no sense whatever that the accused should practice witchcraft in court while pleading innocent. “Self-interest,” noted Pike, “teaches every one better.” Whatever his perversities, the devil had no incentive to purge the world of witches. Pike worried that superstition played too great a role in the matter. He did not subscribe to witch marks. Hardly the first to do so, he wished Scripture were more clear. To his mind, it was better to allow a guilty man to live than execute an innocent, for two reasons: The heavens managed these matters better than did men. And a guilty person could be prosecuted later, on better evidence, while an innocent “cannot be brought again to life when once dead.”
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