Kathleen Kent - The Heretic's Daughter

I said, “I think Mother will be coming home soon.” He looked at me oddly but did not answer. After a while I prompted, “There is no one as determined as Mother when she sets her mind on a thing. She will wear them down with her talking.”

Richard had been retrieving and throwing down the hook in a lackluster fashion but with my words his throws became more forceful. He said quietly, as though to himself, “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I had been looking for some reassurance, some encouragement, but his careless remark cut me and I said, “Richard, you don’t know everything. I know a thing or two. Mother told me…”

“You don’t know anything,” he said, raising his voice to me as though I were standing across the field and not shoulder to shoulder with him, his breath hot in my face.

We pulled back from the lip of the well and stood angrily facing each other. I was furious with him for his arrogance and roughness, but more than being angry I was frightened. Richard’s face in the lantern’s half-light, the ragged stones of the well behind his head, made him appear to be walled in by a prison and I reached out to him, grabbing hold of his arm. He shook off my hand and said, “They have hanged Bridget Bishop.” I looked at him without understanding and he said, bending close to me, “They have hanged Bridget Bishop as a witch. She was condemned at Salem court and taken by cart to Gallows Hill and hanged with three fathoms of rope.”

“When?” I asked, my mind filling with questions I did not want to ask.

“Last Friday past. On the tenth of June.”

“But if they hanged her —”

“You mean if they hanged her, she must have been a witch. She was a spiteful, razor-tongued tavern keeper who kept poppets in her cellar. But she was cried out against because they said she was a witch. She was brought to trial and convicted because they said she was a witch. And she was hanged because they said she was a witch.” Richard had grabbed both of my arms and was shaking me with every word as one would rattle a gourd. Suddenly he let go of me and sank down against the stones of the well, putting his hands over his head.

“You don’t know what it’s like. They are but… girls. But they cry and carry on and point their fingers at this one and that one. They’re listened to and believed and another man or woman is thrown into Salem jail. And anyone who stands against them is cried upon as a witch. Sarah, I’ve been to the trials. I saw Bridget Bishop condemned, and it was like being full-blown mad to stand in that meetinghouse and see every eye turn savage.”

“And what about Mother? She is no witch. She must be believed,” I said, my body shaking.

“Goody Bishop protested her innocence even as they were putting the noose around her neck.” He must have taken pity then, for he said, “There is a sort of quiet in Salem now. There are no new arrests. And every mind is turned toward the Indian raid at the fort in Wells. We must hope that one or all of the judges will come to good sense before the next session.”

A soft dousing rain came at that moment, soaking us through, and I said, “They will come for us next. Mother said it would happen. She said we should tell them everything they wish to hear even if it means we are to say we are all witches. If we do, she says they will let us go.”

A small movement over my right shoulder snapped my head around and I saw Tom hunched in the rain, his face pale, his lips a bluish tint, as he struggled to breathe. I don’t know how long he had been listening but it must have been a good while, for he could not have been more panicked had my own fingers pressed hard about his throat. He wheeled around and lurched off into the fields, disappearing into the growing stalks of corn made soft and insubstantial by the warm and rising mists.

THE INCIDENT AT the well moved my two brothers in opposing directions. For Richard, his outburst had loosened some hard wall within his breast and he seemed, if not at peace, not as troubled as he had been. He was reluctant at first to tell me of the conditions in the jail because Mother had made him promise to keep what he had seen to himself. But I pestered him until he described the day-to-day life, the crowding, the filth, and the fear, and he soon took to Salem little scraps of notes I wrote to her. I spent most of a day torturing out the letters for a message that read, “Deare Mother. Wee are all missing you. Wee are all clean, but for Hanah, and are fed well as theire is meete for the pot.” I received back a message from Mother written on the bottom of my parchment with some bit of charcoal. “Dearest Sarah. Practice your letters more. Yours, and ever faithful.”

I pored over the note, disappointed in its brevity, searching for deeper meanings of sentiment within the message. Never once did I think of the cost to my mother, searching through the dark of her cell for the blacking to carefully inscribe the letters she could barely see. There were smudges where her hand marked the paper, and there would be many times I wished I had kept that note. The delicate swirls and ridges of her fingers imprinted in the paper with the filth of her captivity had been her truer message to me.

For Tom, the knowledge he received at the well shriveled and weighed down on him like a cider press until he looked as spent and knobby as a dried pear. His eyes were the worst, and when they lit on you, it was with the pleadings of a drowning boy. He daily struggled to work, but one day out in the fields, his shoulders harnessed to a leather strap wrapped around a stump, he threw off his harness and without a word walked away, climbing the stairs to the attic and lying down on his pallet. He did not answer Father’s calls, he did not come down for supper, and when I climbed the stairs later to feel his head and threaten him with a physic, he would not look at me or talk to me. The next morning after breakfast Father climbed the stairs and was with Tom for a long time before they came down together. And though Tom continued to walk in the shadows, he ate his meals and worked and talked when spoken to and so remained among the living.

On Thursday, the 16th of June, Uncle was found dead in his Boston cell. His death was ruled suspicious, and so an inquest was called by the King’s Coroner of Suffolk County. The findings from the fifteen men who viewed the body and who signed the Coroner’s Return were that Uncle had died of natural causes. We received the news from Robert Russell the following Sunday evening while sitting at Sabbath supper.

Though we had stopped going to the meetinghouse after Mother’s arrest, I had tried following her custom of roasting meat saved for that day. I had scorched the shank, and the bread was coarse and gritty, but no one complained as we sat quietly together in the common room, the early evening breezes sifting through the open doors, lifting the day’s sweat from our arms and necks. Watching Robert cross the yard, his face long and solemn, I grabbed my head in my hands for fear it was to do with Mother. But when he told us Uncle was gone, it seemed to come as no surprise to Father, who only looked at Richard and nodded as though some private pact between them had been settled. Robert walked with Father to the yard, where they spoke together for some time. Richard sat with his head turned sharply to the door, marking the men in the yard as closely as one would mark an elk in a clearing. His breathing was shallow and rapid and when he turned back to his plate his gaze met mine.

My eyes had filled with tears and Richard said savagely, “Don’t you cry. Don’t you cry for that man.”

I shook away the tears and went to my bed, pulling the coverlet over my head. It was no secret that Uncle had been weaving false stories against Mother from his prison cell, no doubt in the hopes of saving himself. Or with the hope of being recompensed with Grandmother’s farm if he should be set free and the Carriers all arrested. He had even said that Mother’s spirit came to Aunt Mary and tortured her with terrible dreams that the Indians would kill her unless Aunt signed her name in the Devil’s book. We all knew of Aunt’s great fear of raids and it was cruel and unjust to advance her longstanding terrors as the result of witchcraft. He put about that Aunt would freely testify to these spectral visitations if given the chance. I had thought I had little love left for Uncle, pitying more Aunt and Margaret brought to prison through his scheming. But I cried for him then, my pain made all the greater knowing that Father had only just been to Boston to visit him in his cell.