Kathleen Kent - The Heretic's Daughter

As she passed closest to me, she raised a finger and tapped it to her breast and then extended it out to me, drawing the invisible connecting thread between us: the thread of hope, of continuity, of understanding. Her last act of will was to climb the stairs unaided, without stumbling and without crawling, and then the door above us was swung on its hinges and closed.

Cell-blinded and groping, she would have been placed in the cart with the four men, her hands tied perilously in front, so that she would have had to struggle to keep her balance when the cart turned sharply from Prison Lane to Main Street. The cart would have made its way past the houses of the judges, and of some of the jurors as well, and more than a few people would have lined the streets to watch the cart as it made its way west towards Gallows Hill. The cart would have crossed over the Town Bridge, which spans a finger of the North River with its sulfurous tidal pools, and then, where the road splits into the Boxford Road and the southerly Old Road, the cart would have struggled up the rutted path to the lower ledges of Gallows Hill. And there, gathered to watch, would have been dozens of men and women and children from Salem Town and Salem Village and other towns besides, their souls to be warned and chastened and at length profited by the lessons of the hangings. In the gathering would have been ministers and with them the greatest of his calling, the Reverend Cotton Mather.

Today there is only a stand of locust trees to mark the spot. But then there was one giant oak tree with sturdy branches that could have supported the weight of twenty, let alone a pitiful, strawlike few. A ladder was set up against the trunk of the tree and the sheriff, well known to all, would have donned his mask of office, not to hide his face but because it was the proper English custom to hood the executioner. To save his strength he would have taken the heaviest of the men first, leading John Proctor and then George Burroughs to stand on the ladder, slipping the noose around their necks and then pushing them out into the lessening air. John Willard would have been next and then George Jacobs.

Last would have been my mother, the frail body, already slackening into the embrace of a long-awaited release, carried, shoulder-borne, by the hangman to her place on the ladder. The splintering rope slip-tied around her neck. The push into the warm summer currents. The sky blue and cloudless as though God would watch with an open face and wide-awake eyes, no clouds to hinder the revealing rays of the sun. No rain like the shedding of tears, nor wind to punish the watchers in a tightening crescent of fearful expectation around the tree. The worn and cracked shoes, creased from years of treading the earth, now kicked free from struggling feet. The neck stretching, breaking; the gate to life closing and then collapsing. The eyes searching against the closing of the lids. Searching and finding the tall figure standing alone at a small rise behind the crowds. The giant of Cardiff standing for all of us as he promised he would do, bareheaded and still, etched against the disappearing light of the world, the needle to the true compass that pointed north beyond Salem towards Andover and, beyond that, to her final home.

IAM DREAMING and in this dream I am in Aunt’s root cellar. I know it is the cellar because it is cold and damp with the fusty smell of things that have grown hard and bulbous beneath the soil. Through the brown velvet darkness appear dimly the drying baskets Margaret and I used to fill in the autumn and then empty again through the long winter. I can hear footsteps above my head. Someone is pacing the length of Uncle’s common room and I hear the sound of voices in conversation, and laughter, too, soft and muzzy like carpenter’s dust through joists below the floorboards. There is life above me and light. But the cellar door is closed and I have in my hand but one end of a candle that has burned through most of its wick.

I cry out but no one hears me. I kick against the earthen walls but can find no release. My ears remain sharp to the surrounding darkness, and a rustling, like voices sighing, comes from every part of the cellar. It is not the skeltered scribbling of a mouse or rat. It is softer, more faint. Somehow, more patient. It is the crackling of a beetle’s wing, or the throbbing carapace of a locust on a shaft of wheat. Or the dry, whispering sound of root ends piercing through the earthen walls into the cellar. Slender, attenuated roots, some as fine as spider’s webs, groping their way to the center of the cave where I sit. Drawn by the warmth of my quickening breath, they wrap themselves about my feet and ankles, wrists and hands. Then, with a delicate embrace, the roots weave in long tendrils across my thighs, my waist, my chest. Tightening and clasping, holding me fast, reaching upwards to wrap around my face as the candle flame gutters and then goes out. And I am left in the last dimming light of the cellar, my mouth shuttered and mute, my ears plugged into silence, my blinded eyes wide and unseeing. And then I wake. It is the dream that will come again and again for many days after my mother’s death, and always when I wake I will be in a cell in Salem prison. And it will be raining.

The indigo summer skies had been swallowed up by roiling oppressive clouds, drowning the lightning before it could spark and smothering the attendant thunderclaps into hollow rumblings. The rain seeped through the crumbling mortar between the stones and ran in rivulets through the open slits in the walls. It stewed the rushes on the floor into a sour rotting mash and soaked through the leather of our shoes. The days were spent huddled together for warmth as far away from the leaking walls as could be managed. For all the many witches in Salem jail, more than sixty captured and manacled, the roof should have flown off its struts, allowing us to escape. But the nails lay rusting in their timbers, the bars at the windows stayed fixed, the locks remained bolted, and all, from the youngest to the oldest, still held the weight of eight pounds of chains in their laps.

Rain, wild and unpredictable, had swept in from the northeast, pounding its way down the coast from Falmouth to Wells to Kittery and then on to Salisbury like some black and nettle-fed mare. The battling currents off Cape Ann then pushed the storm clouds inland from Marblehead towards the Merrimack, and westward with the winds came the frenzied apparitions and malcontent of Salem Village. By September more than thirty women and thirteen men from Andover would be imprisoned, half of whom were in their minority. Young girls from Andover had begun to have strange fits, like their sisters in Salem Village, and the Reverend Barnard called for a touch test to be held during prayer meetings to find their tormentors. On the 7th of September many of Andover’s first citizens were called to the meetinghouse to stand before the pulpit and be touched by shrieking, shuddering girls — girls who would suddenly be freed from their sufferings once they had touched the witch who had cast the harmful spells. The prison doors opened and closed and opened and closed, and soon seven of the Reverend Dane’s family slept in the shadows within whispering distance of me. A grandson of the Reverend, only thirteen years of age, was placed in the men’s cell with Richard and Andrew.

But it was not only the Dane family that suffered. Andover woke to find that witches inhabited every possible corner of its house-holds and fields. A daughter drying herbs upon a corn crib was suspect. A niece marking a thumb print on an unbaked loaf was conjuring. The welcoming wife parting the sheets on the marriage bed was a succubus, draining the life’s blood from her husband’s body. A cross word, an unhealed argument, an oath or curse from half a generation ago was recalled, recounted, revealed. A man named Moses Tyler accused and had placed into prison his sister and five of her daughters, a mother-in-law of one brother, and the wife and three daughters of another brother. Such was the charity and generosity of spirit shown to women in Reverend Barnard’s meetinghouse on that dissolute and shameful Wednesday. And thus it was that Reverend Barnard became the undisputed leader of a besieged town over his elderly and harried fellow minister.