Kathleen Kent - The Heretic's Daughter

I tried to bend my thoughts to prayer as well. I wanted to believe that what was waiting for my mother was what I had been told in the meetinghouse waited for all its saints after death. But of course my mother had been excommunicated from the church as a witch with no hope of salvation unless she admitted her guilt before she died. The church said there would be no heaven for her, only the fires of damnation. But she was not a witch, no more than I. What middling place would there be for her, caught between the lofty reward of heaven and the tortures of hell? Behind my closed lids, there was only blackness, with pale and indistinct images floating at random in a narrow field. Would death for her be like that? Would it be like falling into sleep, becoming aware of place and purpose only in the grips of fragmented dreams? I suddenly jerked my eyes open against these thoughts of a darkly fogged existence stretching out beyond days and years and centuries.

The sound of footsteps shuffling carelessly down the stairs disturbed the early morning quiet and soon someone at the short wall looked into the corridor and whispered to the rest of us, “It’s the sheriff’s wife come a day early.” We heard two pairs of footsteps walk to the end of the corridor to the condemned women’s cell and soon the same woman turned and said, “She’s gone inside the cell.”

I rose quickly and found a place at the bars and waited to see her come out again. I could see the sheriff standing with his lantern in the corridor, impatiently shifting from one foot to the other. In a few moments’ time Goodwife Corwin came back out again carrying something in her arms. She started back up the corridor and stopped when she saw my face pressed against the bars.

She said to me, “You’ll be having a bit more to eat today.” I looked down and saw she was holding the dress, now stained with the filth of the prison cell, that my mother had worn on the day she was arrested. I looked at her with dismay but she had started to climb the stairs again with her husband. Shortly before the noon hour the sheriff passed through the bars, first to Richard and then to me, a small loaf of bread and a lump of salt pork. It was all that my mother’s dress could buy. I held half of the loaf cradled in my hands and rocked back and forth and back and forth until my tears had softened it enough to eat.

THE CONDEMNED ARE hanged early, and even before dawn the sheriff must descend the stairs, carrying his shuttered lantern in front of him, to read aloud the death warrant and call the names of those who must on that day die. On Friday, August 19th, there were five names shouted out over the waiting ears of the sleepless cells: John Proctor, John Willard, George Jacobs, Reverend Burroughs, and Martha Carrier. They would be taken at seven of the clock from the prison and carried by cart to Gallows Hill.

The night before, several black-coated ministers from Salem and its surrounding villages had come into the cells to plead for full and honest confessions of guilt. Not a one of the condemned recanted their claims of innocence. Margaret Jacobs, George Jacobs’ granddaughter, stood next to me against the bars and begged the forgiveness of her grandfather, and of George Burroughs, whom she had also accused of wizardry during her trials. Reverend Burroughs, a man of unnatural strength who had outlived several wives, who could carry a seven-foot flintlock in one hand like a pistol, as well as whole barrels of cider, and who went against the tide of custom and preached to the soulless Indians, forgave Margaret with tender grace. His voice, coarsened and tempered to fill the enormous spaces of the wilderness, overtook the voices of his fellow ministers and he drowned out their insipid prayers of condemnation with the trumpeted prayers of forgiveness.

The rebuffed ministers left, saying that before noon there would be five new firebrands burning in hell, and I watched their shadowed forms ascending the staircase like acrid smoke twisting up a chimney flue. The one exception was the Reverend Dane, who prayed with his small and miserable flock and left us, covering his face with his kerchief so that he stumbled up the stairs like a child who cannot find his way in the dark.

Then Father had come. Some coins had been found for the sheriff, bartered and sacrificed for, so that he could say his final good-byes. His bent form treaded softly to the end of the corridor, the back of his head grazing the rough wooden beams, to where my mother’s hands came out to grasp his. He took off his hat and laid it aside and then, grabbing hold of the bars, knelt in the dirt and pressed his forehead against the pitted metal. Whatever words were exchanged were said quietly and went with her to her death. I saw her fingers cradle his face, her thumbs gently smoothing the channels under his eyes, wiping away the tears. He nodded a few times and once looked down the corridor in my direction, his eyes recessed and hollow. When the time came for him to leave, he spoke first to Richard and Andrew and then to Tom and me, saying that he would be there at the end. He would stand for all of us so that when she closed her eyes for the last time, there would be a counterweight of love against the overflowing presence of vengeance and fear. When he left, Tom and I sat together the whole of the night propped against the walls, dried into sand and bone.

Now it was morning and my heartbeat was the clock within my chest that counted out the minutes until the hour of execution. Tom and I stood at the short wall, our hands wrapped like summer ivy around the bars. Somewhere deep within my thoughts I became aware that the other women had moved away from us farther into the cells. Out of pity or fear I did not know. We heard the sound of the door at the top of the stairs being opened, and the sheriff came down, along with two men who were to assist him in his day’s work. They approached the men’s cell, and as soon as the door opened, the four condemned men walked into the corridor, the three strongest helping George Jacobs to stand, as he was the oldest, near to eighty years of age on that day.

They were taken up the stairs, and then the door at the top of the stairs was closed behind them. I saw Richard’s face dimly appear at the bars across the corridor, his eyes feverish and darting. The door at the top of the stairs was opened again and the sheriff came back down alone to take up his last prisoner. I opened my mouth to call out to her but I could not find my voice. The door was swung open with a murderous rattling of the keys, yet the dark mouth of the cell remained empty for a long time. When she walked through the doorway, blinking into the illumination of the lantern’s light, she was as insubstantial and weightless as the air she struggled to breathe through her cracked and bleeding lips. She was wearing only her shift and she hugged herself around her middle with arms that had been scraped away by manacles to raw flesh and sinew. Manacles that had been removed the night before by the blacksmith who had first hammered them closed.

She walked with great effort towards us down the corridor, and when she looked up into my eyes, she did not have to speak the words for me to know the feelings that she held for me and for my brothers. Her love was manifest within her starving body: the food that she had refused, perhaps for weeks, so that we could have the tiniest particle more of bread; the dress she had sold for a small pinch of meat; the cup she had passed over so that her children could quench their thirst, and live. She was not given the chance to linger, to touch or embrace her sons and daughter, but she sought out each of us with her eyes and lingered there in prideful silence. We had said all we could have said to her of love and sorrow on the evening before. Her last exhausted words to me, spoken as the cells quieted into the evening’s rest, were “There is no death in remembrance. Remember me, Sarah. Remember me, and a part of me will always be with you.”