Tituba of Salem Village (18 page)

“Mercy Lewis threw it at the devil. After he cut her hair, she kept the devil away from her by throwing Indian meal at him.”

Tituba said, laughing, “John, do you believe that?”

“That’s what she said,” he answered. “She said she kept throwing that Indian meal at the demon by the handful and shouting, ‘The whole armor of God be between you and me!’”

Tituba shook her head. “I think she’s having sport with the Putnams. When did Deacon Ingersoll find out that Pim was gone?”

“First thing this morning. No fire in the kitchen. No wood brought in. No stock been fed. No cows been milked. They look in the lean-to. Not there. They look in the root cellar. Not there. Look everywhere. Not there. Deacon Ingersoll says, ‘Count everything.’ Spoons is gone. Gun is gone. New leather breeches is gone. Old leather breeches is gone. Redheaded boy is gone, too.”

Though John did not say so, Tituba knew he was quoting Cow John, the old man with the harelip who looked after the Putnam’s big herd of cows.

“I hope he gets away free and clear,” she said. “A young strong fellow like that should be his own master.”

John nodded in agreement. “Deacon Ingersoll says he had a bad influence on all the bound boys and girls for miles around. He was always singing that song about he didn’t give a fig for this and he didn’t give a fig for that. Deacon says he thought from the first time he saw him that only an imp of Satan would have had hair that color.”

“His hair was that color when Deacon Ingersoll got him in Boston. Why did he bring him here if he thought he belonged to Satan?”

“He didn’t have to pay much for him. Nobody would bid on him because of the color of his hair, and the captain of the
Blessing
wanted to get rid of him.”

John said he had to hurry back. More and more people would be coming into the taproom as the story about Mercy Lewis’ fight with a demon spread through the Village. They would come in hope they’d hear Mercy tell her story and catch a glimpse of her shorn head. He hoped he’d see it himself.

Late in the afternoon, Mercy Lewis came to see Tituba. She had a shawl over her head and refused to take it off. Tituba thought she looked older and very pale and tired.

When Abigail came downstairs and saw Mercy, she said, “Let me see what the demon did to you.”

Mercy shook her head and held the dark brown shawl tight around her throat. Abigail snatched it off, snatched off Mercy’s cap, and stared at the shorn head. Mercy’s hair was all short lengths and it had obviously been hacked off. No effort had been made to cut it evenly. It was a shocking sight.

Mercy put the shawl over her head, in silence, and left. Tituba followed her outside and put her hand on her arm, detaining her.

“It was Pim who cut your hair?”

Mercy nodded, head down, eyes on the ground, refusing to look at Tituba. She said that he wanted her to run away with him, dressed as a boy, and she might have gone but he threw her hair into the fire and the sight of her hair burning and the smell of it frightened her. Deacon Putnam was on his way into the room, and Pim told her to say a devil had cut off her hair.

“Was there an old woman with him?”

“No. I just said that so folk would wonder which woman in Salem Village had sold her soul to the devil. It would give them something else to talk about. You’d probably ’ve done the same. I heard a crackling noise, and it was my hair burning and flaming up. And my head felt hot. And there were places on my neck felt cold, where the scissor touched against the skin. It was like having your neck cut off from your head and your head burned up all at the same time. And next thing there was Master Putnam saying, ‘I heard voices. Who was here?’”

She looked down at the snow, and then she looked at Tituba. “I should have gone with Pim. He’s free to go where he wants, and I’m still bound even though the Putnams do let me sleep in the same bed with Anne, Jr.” Then she lowered her voice, “Did you give him back his pretty cards?”

“Yes.”

“He said you told his fortune. What was it like?”

“It was a fine fortune. He will go round the world. And some day he will be rich.”

Mercy began to cry. “I should have gone with him,” she sobbed, and fell down in the snow. Her shawl came off her head, and her cap came off, too. She lay there, motionless, tears streaming down her cheeks, the unevenly cut hair as yellow as buttercups against the snow. Finally she began to scream, and she had a screaming fit just like Abigail’s fits.

After that she had them quite often. So did Anne Putnam, Jr. Sometimes they thought they were dogs, and they barked and ran around on all fours. Sometimes they thought they were cats, and they mewed and hissed. Then again they thought they were geese, and they ran across the floor, their feet scarcely touching, and they flapped their arms as though they were wings.

John told Tituba that Mercy Lewis and Anne Putnam, Jr., were like a stage play in the taproom. Many farmers were coming from the outlying districts to watch them.

Tituba said, “The farmers come here, too. They bring provisions for the minister. Then they wait to see if Abigail will have a fit. Sometimes there are three or four of them sitting lined up on the settle.”

Abigail’s fits got so bad and occurred so often that the master sent for Dr. Griggs. He put his ear to her chest and to Betsey’s, looked in their eyes, peered down their throats. He shook his head.

Dr. Griggs came back every day for a week. He bled them. He gave them terrible-tasting medicines. The fits continued. Betsey’s fits were not like Abigail’s. She talked in a queer guttural voice and then slumped to the floor, unconscious. It wasn’t always possible to understand what she said.

Finally Dr. Griggs said, “I think they are under an evil hand.”

When he said this, the candle in the upstairs room flickered and went out, and a gust of smoke came down the chimney, setting them all to coughing. Puss, the money cat, ran under Tituba’s skirt and stayed there.

The master looked frightened. He said it would be necessary to fast and hold a day of prayer.

The next afternoon the keeping room was crowded with people. Even the mistress was brought down from her upstairs bedroom to sit on the settle, wrapped in quilts. Abigail and Betsey were there. So were Deacon Putnam and his wife and Mercy Lewis and Anne Putnam, Jr., Goody Sibley and her niece Mary Walcott, Dr. Griggs and Mrs. Dr. Griggs and their niece Elizabeth Hubbard. Horse-faced Mary Warren wasn’t there. Master Proctor sent word that he was going to keep her at her wheel and thrash her if she dared leave it.

Tituba thought the master would never have done with praying. She was kneeling next to Abigail and slowly became aware that Abigail was growing more and more restless. She twitched whenever the Lord’s name was mentioned. They said the Lord’s prayer in unison. When they reached “hallowed be Thy name,” Abigail screamed and screamed and fell down on the floor, crying and moaning and saying that she was being pinched and pricked with needles, that she was being choked. Tituba sponged off her face. She was surprised to find that Abigail had stiffened in a strange fashion. She gave her a spoonful of the medicine Dr. Griggs had left. Finally the girl was able to get up from the floor. She looked very well. Her cheeks were rosy. Her eyes sparkled.

But they had to stop praying. Abigail would not or could not kneel. She began running up and down the keeping room, weaving in and out between the benches and stools on which the people were seated. She ran to the fire, and before anyone could stop her, she reached in with the poker and poked out a burning log and started pushing it around the room.

People stood up, moved out of the way lest the sparks ignite their clothing. For a few moments they were too frightened to go near her—even Tituba was aghast.

Abigail shouted in a loud rude voice, “Way—way—make way. I am here now. I have come. I am here. Way—way—make way—”

The room was full of smoke. There was danger of fire, and still they stood and stared at her. Tituba thought, watching her, You could really believe she was bewitched. Abigail moved fast. When she was in the darkest parts of the big, low-ceilinged room you couldn’t really see her. Her clothing was dark, and all you could see was the fiery log as she pushed it around. The log looked as though it were going around and around by itself.

It took the master and Deacon Ingersoll, Deacon Putnam, and Dr. Griggs to hold Abigail. She fought with them and struggled, kicked them, pushed her elbows in their sides.

Tituba took the tongs and put the log back in the fireplace. Then she seized a birch broom and hastily swept up bits of charred wood that were still smouldering, thinking, If the floor hadn’t been heavily sanded, Abigail could have set the house on fire.

Mistress Parris was quietly weeping. Betsey had fallen on the floor, unconscious. Tituba picked Betsey up, cradled her in her arms, crooned to her, talked to her, and then laid her gently on the settle with her mother.

Deacon Ingersoll said, “They have been overlooked by a witch,” in his high-pitched voice. Tituba thought he looked at her out of the corner of his eyes.

“They are under an evil hand,” Dr. Griggs said.

Tituba noticed that Mercy Lewis looked startled and then covered her mouth with her hand, concealing her expression.

The master bowed his head and said harshly, “We must pray and fast and wait for a sign from the Lord.”

Then all their visitors left at once. The women put on their cloaks and wrapped their heads in shawls, and the men bundled themselves in their greatcoats, pushed their felt hats down on their heads, picked up their muskets, and hastened away. Tituba thought they hurried off the way people do when they are frightened.

She helped the mistress up the steep narrow flight of stairs, helped her to bed, covered her up. She freshened the fire in the mistress’ room. She made certain the girls were in bed. Abigail looked fresh and rosy as she always did after she had one of her fits. Betsey was already asleep, and she had the pinched, white look of a truly sick person.

Tituba went downstairs, shielding the candle against drafts with one hand. She looked at her hand in the candlelight. It was a work-worn hand, the dark brown skin grayed and roughened, the fingers just a little out of shape at the joints. Was this an evil hand, she wondered, a hand that wove and cooked and spun and cleaned and gardened, a hand that milked cows and nursed a sick woman and cared for two children?

Had Dr. Griggs, that short, bustling little man, who knew so little about medicinals that he often consulted her as to what was the best way to treat boils and to cure fevers and chills or a running-off of the bowels—had he meant her? Was hers the “evil hand”?

Tituba began to wonder if Abigail’s fits were contagious. Two days afterwards she learned that Elizabeth Hubbard now had fits like Abigail’s, and so did Mary Warren and Mary Walcott.

John said he thought that Mercy Lewis and Anne Putnam, Jr., came to Ingersoll’s ordinary just so people could see them taken in one of their fits. He said they crept under benches and stools, got under the settles. Sometimes they stayed there with their tongues hung way out. The Putnam girl screeched like an owl—only it was worse to listen to, higher and longer and louder. He began to feel that if he listened too long he’d go right out of his senses. Then he demonstrated what they did when they were having these terrible fits.

Tituba said she didn’t think their behavior in the ordinary was any more astounding than what went on in the master’s keeping room. Sometimes there would be five or six people who had brought onions or turnips or carrots to be entered in the rate book. Mercy Lewis and Anne Putnam, Jr., and Mary Walcott and Abigail would run around and around in the room. They shrieked that they were being pinched and bitten. Their heads were twisted around. Their eyes were rolled back. They said they were being frozen, and their faces whitened like corpses. Almost immediately they said they were being burned, and they turned a fiery red.

As in the ordinary, Abigail always supplied the most horrifying touch. She would run straight towards the fire, shouting, “I will burn! I will burn!” It took three or four strong men and one or two bound boys to hold her back.

Nothing like this had ever been seen in the Village. There was continual talk about witchcraft. There was fear mixed with the talk. People began to eye each other doubtfully. Nobody knew who the witch was. Nobody felt safe. Three more girls were now bewitched and having fits just like the others: Sarah Churchill, servant to George Jacobs, and Elizabeth Booth and Susanna Sheldon, bound girls held by families in the neighborhood of Ingersoll’s ordinary.

By the middle of February, John was so concerned that he came home from the ordinary every night in spite of storms and high drifted snow. He told Tituba he didn’t like all this talk of witches and witchcraft. He said that for all their long, slow prayers and their long, slow sermons, these were a cold, cruel people. Though they believed in angels, they also believed in devils. They believed witches obtained their power from the Devil, the result of having signed a covenant with the Devil, having signed his book.

He said, “At Ingersoll’s there is a constant cry, ‘Find out the witch, find out the witch.’ They quote from the Bible, ‘Do not suffer a witch to live.’ They will not be satisfied until they hang somebody. They talk of all the things that have gone wrong—and they go back for years—they tell of cows dying and horses refusing to move. They tell their dreams. They speak of huge cats that sit on their chests all night and will not let them move. They say these things happen because there’s a witch in the Village.”

“Why do you worry so?”

“Because in Boston I saw them hang the Witch Glover. She was nothing but an old crazy woman with matted hair and—”

He was silent, remembering. Then he said, “Our master lectures on witchcraft. He stands in the taproom, reads from a book by Cotton Mather: ‘If David thought it a sad thing to fall into the hands of men, what is it, to fall into the hands of Devils? The hands of Turks, of Spaniards, of Indians, are not so dreadful as those hands that Witches do their works of Darkness by. O what a direful thing is it, to be pricked with pins and stabbed with knives all over, and to be filled all over with Broken bones—’” John’s voice sounded exactly like the master’s voice.