Kathleen Kent - The Heretic's Daughter

The poppet, worn and mangled by Hannah’s rough play, was handed from judge to judge to judge, and the solemnity with which they studied it seemed so out of place with their calling that a quivering smile started to form on my lips. I felt its mate, a nervous bubbling laugh, start to rise with my terror from my belly, and to keep it from spilling forth I clamped my palm to my mouth. The same unwanted laugh that had erupted over the antics of the black boy in the Andover meetinghouse threatened to make me a chittering monkey in the faces of the men who could with a word end my life. I heard a loud commotion to my right, and when I turned my head I saw a group of young women and girls standing in tortured agony, their hands clapped over their mouths as if they were nailed there, cawing and moaning and straining to speak through their fingers.

One of the girls managed to spit out, “She tries to silence us. To keep us from giving testimony. Oh, my tongue, my tongue burns…”

I looked back at the judges and the chief of them, John Hathorne, the very same judge who sentenced my mother to be hanged, said to me darkly, “How long hast thou been a witch?”

For a moment I could not answer or take my hand from my mouth and so he asked me again, lowering his head and speaking slowly and carefully as one would speak to an idiot child, “How long have you been a witch?”

I lowered my hand and said, “Ever since I was six years old.” There was a collective sigh from every bench, but all talking was shushed into silence so that no words would be missed.

“How old are you now?” John Hathorne asked.

“Near eleven years old.” I could feel Tom’s eyes on me and so, for his sake, tried to quiet the quivering of my face.

The judge paused some to let the clerk scratch my answers onto paper and then he asked suddenly, as if to befuddle my senses into revealing the truth, “Who made you a witch?”

I looked at him, my eyes wide with fright, my lips parted to suck in the air that seemed to elude my lungs, and I could not speak. I had been ready to give them any story they wanted about my own guilt. That I flew on a pole, my toes curled into the wind, that I baked bread for the witch’s altar, that I danced on the graves of their mothers. But here it was and so soon. I knew what answer I had to give them but I could not speak. I was like one who stands stranded on a cliff over the ocean, unable to climb the wall behind them and too afraid to jump for fear of landing in the swirling eddies below. The moments stretched out and I could hear the restless stirring of the girls next to me, who would be all too willing to throw out a name, or two, or three, if I didn’t give them one to write in jet ink on the waiting parchment. I felt Tom press something into my palm and felt the smooth hardness of a small river stone and my fist closed tight around it. And then I gave them the name they wanted. The name of the woman who was already imprisoned, waiting to die.

I took a step off the ledge and said, “My mother.”

There was a satisfied nodding all around and then one of the lesser judges asked John Hathorne in a forced whisper, “How was it done?” and the chief magistrate turned to me and repeated the question loudly, as though I were deaf.

“She made me set my hand to a book.” The outpouring of breath from the bench was as pleased and expectant as if I had pulled out of my apron a loaf of bread freshly baked. I looked across the faces of the men before me and saw in their eyes interest and enmity, curiosity and fearfulness, but to a person I saw nothing that could be called in good faith compassion or pity or even reserved judgment. I heard a small animal noise behind me and turned my head to see one of the bewitched girls make a mewling noise like a cat. She was dressed in dun homespun wool like me and wore a simple cap like me, and her hair was the same color of rust, so we could have been sisters. But in her eyes I saw only spite. I felt suddenly sick, a dark curtain drawing itself around the edges of my sight, and I reached out for Tom’s arm and held it tightly.

Then Judge Hathorne said to me, “Go on,” and his voice seemed swathed in bolts of rough batting and any meaning was severed from the sounds formed by his lips. My knees lost their hold and I felt Tom’s arms go around me, lifting me up, forcing me to stand. Then the chief judge motioned for the clerk to cease his writing and he said to me, folding his hands tightly together, “Do you know where you are?” I nodded my head and he said, “Do you know whom you address?” and I nodded again.

“Then you know that we will have the truth from you. You must answer every question put to you, completely and willingly, or it will go very badly for you. Do you understand what I am saying to you? We make no promises for leniency because of your tender years, and if you do not reveal to us your involvement fully in this witchcraft, you put at risk your immortal soul. The body can be sacrificed, but once the soul is lost it is lost forever.”

The words worked their way through the batting, and the silence after was like the silence between the laying down of the fowl and the descending axe upon the block. And when the axe finally falls, hindered by flesh and bone, it makes a dull, muffled sound like a weighted latch forever bolting a door, or a mountain of paper being moved from one magistrate’s table to another. Judge Hathorne motioned to the clerk to ready himself and asked me again, “How were you made a witch?”

“My mother made me set my hand to a book.” I knew they were thinking of the Devil’s book but in my mind’s eye I saw Mother’s red diary buried at the foot of a lone tree on Gibbet Plain. The diary I had sworn to hide and protect from men such as these.

“How did you set your hand to it?”

“I touched it with my fingers. The book was red. Red, the color of blood. And the pages were white. Very white like the color of…” My voice trailed off and I saw the clerk straining to hear me, but when I looked at him he lowered his gaze and reached for a clean sheet of parchment, as though my last words had rendered the first page untouchable.

One of the other judges asked me, “Have you ever seen the Black Man?”

“No,” I said, wanting to answer, “None but you,” as my mother had done.

A third judge asked me, “Where did you touch the book? Who was there with you?”

I gave them a near-truth by saying, “Andrew Foster’s pasture, next to Foster’s Pond. Hard by Gibbet Plain.” After a pause I continued, “My Aunt Mary was there. And my cousin Margaret.”

I had pulled Margaret down into the pit with me but only a little ways, as she was waiting even then for me in prison. The sharp edges of the pottery shard shifted beneath my bodice, and I pressed them deeper into my flesh in penance. I would finally have the chance to give it to her myself, as we would soon be sisters in confinement. So the questions went and I gave them the names of those who had already been arrested. With each answer my imaginings grew wilder, and the wilder my answers, the more in sympathy seemed the judges to my words. I danced with a black dog and sent my spirit out to pinch and torment others and talked to my mother’s spectral form that came to me as a cat. When they were finished with me, they asked Tom the same questions, and his answers were in sum the same as mine. Our mother was a witch and we were made Devil’s fodder through her. Our only salvation would be through equal amounts of contrition and imprisonment.

Once our testimony was recorded, witnesses were brought forward to give more evidence against us. Phoebe Chandler was called first and told the judges that I had cursed her and caused her to fall ill. Her fear was so great that she could hardly speak above a whisper and had to be asked repeatedly to talk so that the judges could hear. But it was not of the judges she was terrified, it was of the young women of Salem Village standing and whispering loudly at her back. Then came Mercy Williams, looking downcast and demure and fat as a partridge. She said that I had stuck pins into her, using the poppet, and she drew out from her apron one of the offending needles, the needle she had stolen from me. Judge Hathorne held out his hand, and to her dismay he kept it with the court. When she turned to go, she looked into my eyes for an instant and I knew with a certainty that she was in the family way with someone’s bastard. The rounded flesh of her cheeks, her dimpled hands, one still wearing the moon-shaped scar from my bite upon it, her pasty skin for once flushed and damp, told a story of a red underskirt lifted one too many times in the quiet of some dark space.