Kathleen Kent - The Heretic's Daughter

In my mind’s eye I saw Uncle, cold and pale, lying dead in the dirty straw of his cell, and I found the pity for him I had lost while taking a beating in the yard of Chandler’s Inn so many months ago. I looked down the length of the cell, trying to make out the forms of my aunt and cousin, but I could not see them through the murky light. I had no doubt that they yet believed what I had dared to believe: that my father poisoned his brother-in-law to save his own family.

“One of the doctors at your uncle’s inquest is well known to me,” he continued. “He saw the signs of poison and told me of it. I believe that once your uncle had seen your father, he took the only sure course to seal his own lips and in so doing protect the ones he loved.”

The door of the cell opened and the sheriff rattled his keys loudly against the door. The young doctor gathered up his things and said, “My name is Dr. Ames, and though I live now in Haverhill, my family home is in Boston. I want you to give a message to your father, and you must remember it word for word. Can you do that?”

When I nodded my head, he continued, “Tell him that I and a few others are friends to your father. And tell him that we will do our level best to help him. Did you hear me, Sarah? Tell him we will do our level best.”

I repeated the message, putting the emphasis on the word “level” as he had done, and he said in parting, “I will come as often as I can to look after you. You must know that this is not the world, and there are many who believe that this” — and he gestured about the cell — “all of this, is a shame to humanity.” He smiled reassuringly at us once again and then left to see after the prisoners across the corridor. He had offered help and for that I had greater hope for myself and for my brothers. But he had said nothing about saving my mother. Later, before dusk, the sheriff came for Andrew, and it was only after Tom and I had struggled to walk him to the corridor and he heard Richard’s voice calling to him that he stopped his crying and pleading to be left with us.

When Tom and I laid ourselves down that night, my last thoughts before falling to sleep were of Uncle. I thought of his quick and lively nature and remembered his ready laugh and the way the smoke from his pipe floated up beyond the prominent dome of his glistening forehead, curling up to the ceiling like a vagrant wish. And the way he delighted in calling Margaret and me his twins. I did not think much of the nights he came back to his home and family dizzy from drink, or of the late hours spent at an inn. Or of the tears Aunt had shed waiting for his return. I thought more of the stories he had told us by the light of the hearth. Tales of rampant Indians and wandering spirits and the deaths of pagan kings. I thought of him proudly astride Bucephalus, named after the war steed belonging to Alexander. The ancient king so beloved by his men until he led them off the face of their circumscribed maps into the lands of specters and strange men. The king who was given the cup of poison so that his men could return to the known world. But Uncle had taken up the cup of poison with his own hand in the hopes of returning those he loved safely back from the land of monsters, and for that I wept long and hard for him.

TUESDAY MORNING I woke with a start, a terrible panic seizing me by the throat. The wailing woman with the rotted tooth had continued her screeching throughout the night, giving me dreams of eagles falling headlong out of the sky to the earth. It was the 16th of August and I spent most of the morning pressed against the bars, speaking to Richard and Mother of the world outside our cells. We spoke only of the past. Of Mother’s garden or the plentiful harvest we had had the year before or the enormous turkey Richard had shot early last spring. Mother’s voice was weak and several times I asked her to speak out more clearly so that I could hear her words. The women at the short wall took pity on Tom and me and walked about the cell giving us more time to talk, but soon we were edged away from the wall and back into the middle of the cell.

I saw Mary Lacey come creeping past us to use the slops and my feeling of helplessness turned to rage. She was our neighbor from Andover and yet she had cried out falsely against my mother to try to save herself. She cut her eyes at me and I remembered sharply her face gawking at me over the village gravestones while Mercy Williams held me prisoner in her arms, telling me she would burn me alive in my own bed.

I rushed at her, pushing her hard enough to throw her to the ground. There were protesting words as Mary struggled over several of the seated women trying to rise to her feet again. But no one came to scold me, or to assist Mary. And there were more than one pair of eyes that glinted with satisfaction. She would not look me in the face but gathered up her skirt and stepped away deeper into the cell. I felt Tom’s hand on my shoulder but I shrugged him off, too close to anguished weeping to allow comfort. I held my breath to slow my heart but its rapid beating was felt in every part of my body. My head throbbed and my eyes danced in their sockets, keeping time with the swirling, particled air, illuminated like mayflies in stippled shafts of sunlight. I looked around at the women scattered about the cell, sitting or standing slack-jawed and loose-limbed, and it enraged me. Where was the will to rise up and protest? To plan escapes or at least make demands upon our captors? Where was the outrage, the anger, the fury?

When Father appeared at noontide, bringing food, I could barely hear his promises that he would come every day until Mother’s last day with us. In my panic I forgot all about the message I was to give him from Dr. Ames and would not remember it again for many days. I grabbed at his hands and pulled his ear close to my mouth and begged him again to try to save her. To take her, and us, away from this place. I told him I would from that day work day and night, that I would go without food, that I would go naked through the wilderness if only he would take action. When his eyes finally met mine, I imagined I heard the sound of an open book closing. A great book inscribed within with the resonant words of a lifetime. The forward binding arches up and over, the pages within whispering, “And then, and then, and then…” and then, just past the midpoint, the pages fall over, rippling and rustling towards the end binding, meeting a weighted closure and a last, unspoken “No.”

From that point, after he had left us, I stood motionless in the middle of my prison like the needle in a sundial fixed and rigid, unable to join in the shifting currents of the living. The afternoon light worked its way through the window slits and brightened the cell for a short while. I watched with horror my changing shadow as the light first grew brighter and then dimmed again as night filled up our hollowed spaces. I was standing there even after the moon had followed the course of the sun, falling and disappearing into the westernmost horizon.

WEDNESDAY PASSED THE same as Tuesday, with the slops being taken up, with Father coming and going, bringing us some little bit of something to fill a small corner of our bellies, as well as the news that Andrew continued to heal and grow stronger. But the Reverend Dane did not come, and nor did Dr. Ames. The sheriff’s wife did not come, as did very few of the families of the confined. On that day there were no new unfortunates to be tried and shackled and imprisoned within the jail. The voice from the Salem meetinghouse was stilled. It was as if time for us within the cells had shortened against the time that lay outside the cold and seeping walls of the prison. And like a smaller cog within a larger one, we were outpacing the outer world in our rush towards our endless sleep. And try as I might to hold back its passing, by closing my eyes or slowing the movement of my limbs or shaking away imminent sleep, the day waxed and waned into evening and within a breathless span turned itself into Thursday. I AWOKE CURLED against Tom’s back and lay for the longest time pressed up against his warmth, my hands cradled at my chest. I could hear the sounds of stirring and rising all around me and I closed my eyes to bring back sleep. But my mind, once brought to awareness, would not be blanketed. I heard a woman close to me saying the Lord’s Prayer and I followed the familiar words to the end. I wondered if this woman, who had spoken the passage without faltering and without hesitation, had tried to use this recitation as proof of her innocence, as it was said the Devil would confound the words in those he had sealed as his own. But even this device would be discounted, for when the former Salem Village Reverend, George Burroughs, recited the same prayer resolutely and without error as he stood at the hanging tree, a noose wrapped around his neck, Cotton Mather would say that the “Devil had often been transformed into an Angel of Light.” George Burroughs was to be hanged on the morrow with my mother.