Tituba of Salem Village (14 page)

Then she stopped talking, troubled because the cards did not say this. The cards said people would hang because of Mary Warren. Tituba felt ashamed to be falsifying the message of the cards. But unless Mary Warren left the minister’s house excited and happy by the thought of what the future held for her, she would surely tell her master that there were fortune-telling cards in use in the home of the pious Mr. Parris.

Tituba shuffled the cards again and laid them out on the table. She could tell that this was a new deck by the smooth slick feel of the cards.

She made no mention of hangings. She said, “You will lose something of value on the way home.”

“Ah,” Mary Warren said. “What will I lose? What is it?”

Tituba didn’t answer.

Abigail said, “You’ve broken the spell, you stupid thing. She told you not to talk. She can’t see any more now.”

“She can’t see what?”

“She can’t see the meaning. She and Betsey can sometimes tell what’s going to happen. They see it. They see the meaning of things.”

Mary Warren looked at Tituba in open-mouthed amazement. Tituba picked up the cards, stacked them in a neat pile, handed it towards Mercy Lewis.

Abigail plucked the cards out of Tituba’s hand. “I’ll keep them in a safe place,” she said.

“I’ve got to give them back,” Mercy protested.

“Not yet. I’ll keep them for you.”

Mary Warren said, “You said I’d marry a rich merchant. A rich Boston merchant.”

Her face was transformed, the expression softened, yearning. She wouldn’t live on a farm any more, wouldn’t freeze in the winter, wouldn’t be boxed on the ear and screamed at by a lazy, scolding mistress, whipped by an impatient master. She would think about her good fortune all the way home—plenty of candles, fine clothes from London, a house filled with silver and fine furniture.

She paused at the door, remembering. “Tituba, what will I lose? What will I lose on the way home?”

Tituba shook her head. “I don’t know. Next time, don’t talk.”

As she closed the door behind Mary Warren, she thought, there will be no next time. But she was wrong.

Chapter 11

The next morning Tituba was halfway up the steep stairs with an armload of wood when someone banged at the back door. She hurried up the stairs, put the wood in the woodbox in the mistress’ room. She glanced around the low-ceilinged bedroom. The mistress looked quite bright, shawl around her shoulders. She was sitting up in the middle of the bed, eating porridge. Abigail and Betsey were sitting on the edge of the bed, talking to her. Pale morning sunlight came through the two front windows.

There was another banging at the door. Tituba said, “I’ll bring you cider when I come back.”

Just as she reached the keeping room, the master came out of his study. “I’ll go to the door. I didn’t know you were upstairs. It’s probably Deacon Ingersoll.”

He opened the door wide, and then he drew back. Tituba recognized the smell and the ragged clothing. It was Goody Good. She walked right past the master into the keeping room. She said no word of greeting. She had a very small child by the hand.

The master backed away from her. A rush of cold air and a terribly sour smell pervaded the room. The master closed the door.

Abigail and Betsey came downstairs, saw Goody Good, and stood close together, watching her. From somewhere inside the rags she pulled out a pipe, leaned over the fire, and, seizing a thin shaving, set it ablaze and lit the pipe. She puffed a cloud of rank-smelling smoke in the master’s face and set him to coughing.

“We’ve come beggin’,” she said. “We need food, Minister.”

The child peered out at them, holding tight to its mother’s ragged dirty skirts, hardly daring to show all of its face, as though it thought harm could come to it from the direct glances of other people. It was snuffling like all these children in this cold damp climate. Tituba couldn’t remember whether it was a girl or a boy. Then she recalled the child’s name—Dorcas. A girl, of course.

“You’re Sarah Good, aren’t you?” the master said, frowning.

“If I must tell, I must tell. Yes, I am Goodwife Good.”

The master shook his head. “The folk complain of you. They say you set fire to their barns with your pipe. They say you carry the smallpox. They say you steal—chickens and turkeys. They—”

“They lie. They lie,” she said fiercely. “Who says this?” she peered at him, eyes gleaming under the matted gray hair. “We need food, Minister. ‘Do unto others as ye would have them do unto you.’ We need food. Dorcas and I are hungered.”

“Give her whatever you can spare, Tituba.”

“Little enough that’ll be, Minister. Little enough I’m sure.”

Tituba watched him, thinking, He moves away from the smell of her and the look of her. She’s like a wild animal. She has a liar’s gap in the front of her teeth. Or perhaps it’s just that her teeth are missing and there’s a space in the front. The rest of her teeth are black. Her hair is matted, and the smell of her chokes me.

Abigail said, “You don’t have any manners, do you? You should be grateful.”

Tituba thought, Why did she say that? There’s no need to anger the creature. Best feed her in silence and let her go quickly.

“I should be grateful, eh, miss? Well, I’m not. Minister’s fodder don’t cost him. I haven’t et for two days. Neither has this little child.” She thrust the child forward, “Dorcas, you sit down.”

“Sit at the table,” Tituba said. She put portions of stewed rabbit on trenchers, poured cider into mugs, and gave them each a big piece of johnnycake. They drank the cider noisily, making sucking noises. They smacked their lips as they ate, blew on the hot meat as though they were horses noisily exhaling their breath. The child made a humming sound and rocked back and forth as it ate.

The master left the keeping room and quietly closed the door of his study. Betsey had taken refuge on a settle, a good distance away from them, and sat watching them with a little frown between her eyes. Abigail, who could never mind her own affairs, sat down at the table across from them, watching them eat, staring at them.

Faintly from upstairs came the rap on the floor that meant the mistress needed something. Tituba told Abigail to find out what her Aunt Parris wanted.

Abigail scrambled up from the table hurriedly, impatience in each jerky movement. Good stared at her, black eyes slightly protruding, the expression malicious.

Tituba was pouring out more cider, and she stopped, pitcher lifted, forgetting what she was doing. For as Abigail stamped towards the door that led to the stairs—expressing her distaste for this command that would remove her from the keeping room, remove her for even a moment from the sight of these hungry tramps, shoulders jerking, switching her hips—the bound boy’s fortune-telling cards started to fall. She was doing exactly what Mercy Lewis had done; she was leaving a trail of cards behind her. Some of them lay on the floor face up; some of them face down. Tituba was certain that this dirty tramp of a woman with the protruding eyes, with the sharp tongue of a scold, would never believe that they were pretty pictures that the minister’s niece had had concealed about her person.

Even her reaction was indicative of the kind of problem she would pose. She laughed. It was a cackle, high in pitch, like the laughter of a crone, of a witch. Tituba thought, Why did I think that? Why that word? Because she looks the way John said the Witch Glover looked when she was hanged in Boston. Black eyes, malicious expression, matted hair.

Abigail turned when she heard Good laughing. She saw the cards on the floor, and her face reddened. She started to say something and stopped.

Good got up from the table, poked at the cards with a dirty finger, turned them over. “They be fortune-telling cards. Tee-hee-hee. And in the minister’s house. What be ye doing with a tarot pack, miss?”

Abigail, usually quick-witted, quick-talking, said nothing. She picked up the cards. Tituba helped her, thinking, If she hadn’t been trying to let me know how cross she was by the way she walked, those cards would have stayed where she put them. Abigail put all the cards together in a pile on the table.

Good said peremptorily, “Answer me. What be ye doing with these cards?”

“They’re not mine. I was keeping them for a friend.”

Good laughed again. “I’ll tell Minister. And, ah, but ye’ll be whipped, miss. I’ll stay and watch. Minister!” she said in a loud voice.

The door of the study is a thick one. She’ll have to knock on his door or call louder, really shout, Tituba thought. To her surprise, Abigail, who couldn’t abide messes, couldn’t empty slops, couldn’t stir the soap because the horrid mess might get on her hands, couldn’t pull weeds out of onions because her hands would get dirty, put her hand firmly across Good’s dirt-embedded face, covering her mouth, pressing the frowzy head with its matted hair against her own chest.

“No,” she whispered. “No! What do you want? What’ll you take? I have a little gold chain. I’ll give it to you, but you mustn’t tell—I won’t let you tell—”

Good pushed her away with a sudden violent thrust of arms and body. Abigail fell down with a thud. Tituba thought, This will bring the master out of his study. The sound of a body hitting the floor was unmistakable—nothing else sounded like that.

The master opened his study door, looked into the room. “What was that?” he asked.

Abigail got up hastily. “I fell over the cat.”

“It must have been a turn of the ankle. A twist of the heel,” Good said. “Because the cat is outside. More cider, Tituba,” she said agreeably. “And more of the rabbit. Did ye catch the rabbit, Minister, or is this some of the fodder that the farmers pitchfork into ye house?”

The master said, “Are you hurt, Abigail?”

“No, Uncle Parris. I must have—fallen over something. I don’t know what. I’m not hurt.”

Tituba thought, How quickly everything has changed. The cards are gone. Good must have snatched them up. Abigail doesn’t look frightened—her cheeks are rosy; her eyes are bright. But her breathing is just a little faster than usual.

Dorcas, Good’s child, had ignored everything and gone on eating hungrily and noisily, bent over the trencher as though she were a little pig at a trough. She took a drink of cider, and Tituba thought her hand was so thin and bony it was more like a bird’s claw than the hand of a human being. She supposed the child was so accustomed to the trouble that took place everywhere they went that she paid no attention to it but tried to eat as much as she could before they were told to leave.

The master frowned at Good, nodded to Tituba. She refilled Good’s trencher with rabbit, poured more cider into the mugs, divided the last of the johnnycake between them. The child’s dirty little hand clutched at the johnny-cake.

The master had barely closed the door of his study behind him when Abigail said, “Give me my cards!”

“Thought you said they was a friend’s cards.”

“What difference does it make? Give them back.”

Good began eating faster and faster. “Fetch your gold chain.” Abigail hesitated. “Fetch it, I said, or I’ll tell the minister. I’ll tell the minister about ye having them dreadful cards. I’ll throw them all over the floor again and tell him they fell out of your clothes, miss. And he’ll have to leave here. When I tell the folk what I seen right here in the ministry house, they’ll run him out of the Village.”

Abigail got the gold chain quickly. It was as though she’d flown up and down the stairs. She said, “You won’t get the chain until you give me the cards,” dangling a thin golden chain in front of Good.

Betsey said, “Oh, isn’t it beautiful?”

Good’s eyes followed the movement of the chain. She reached out for it, and Abigail moved it away from her. “I’ll have both,” she said. “I’ll have me the gold chain and the cards, too. Or I’ll tell—I’ll tell—”

Tituba intervened. “I’ll not let you come in here and upset us with your threats. Go ahead,” she said. “Throw the cards on the floor and call the master. I’ll say the cards are mine.”

“Ye think that sounds any better? The cards belong to the minister’s black slave? Ye think they’d let him stay in the Village with a fortune-telling slave? Ye think they’d believe he didn’t know that’s what ye did? Oh, I hear ’em. I hear ’em. The farmers say he wants what isn’t his. They say he’s got a greed for land—”

She stopped talking and laughed, “Tee-hee. Tee-hee. Minister!” she shouted, and banged on the table with her mug, “Minister! her voice carrying, rising in pitch.

The master appeared in the door, frowning, “Did someone call?” he asked.

“No,” Abigail said. “No. Goodwife Good was telling how when Mr. Burroughs was the minister, Goody Osburne would call him to come to see her first husband. The one that died. Mr. Prince was her first husband, and he sickened and died, and Goody Osburne would stand outside this house and call, ‘Minister! Minister!’” Abigail’s voice was an exact imitation of Good’s. “That was all. Nobody called you.”

Dorcas went on eating noisily. Good leered at Abigail. There was a thump at the door.

Tituba opened it, and the money cat came in, lifting his feet high, his tail straight up in the air. He rubbed against Tituba’s skirt, purring. Then he stood still and sniffed the air, and his tail swelled in size, and he hissed and ran towards the door. Tituba let him out, thinking, I don’t blame him, no clean-living cat would stay in the room with the terrible smell of this woman.

“I said ye didn’t fall over the cat, didn’t I? Didn’t I? And it’s a money cat, a good-luck cat. Must be Tituba’s cat. She would have a money cat—”

“Yes,” Abigail said quietly. She was quite pale. “Yes to everything you said”—then quickly, talking faster and faster—“You say everything twice, so, yes, you said I didn’t fall over the cat. That’s what you said. That’s what you said. So yes to everything.”

The master said, “Stop this chattering,” and went back in his study and closed the door.

Abigail sighed. She dropped the little gold chain into Good’s outstretched hand.

“That’s a pretty thing,” Good said, holding it up in front of her, turning it, dangling it. “Ye’ll be safe for quite a while, miss.” The chain disappeared somewhere in the flutter of rags that was her skirt. She fumbled through her rags and produced the cards. She put them on the table.