Kathleen Kent - The Heretic's Daughter

FEAR WAS BROUGHT into the cells with the newly imprisoned like welts from a beating, and no one knew for sure if there were indeed witches sitting hand to foot with the innocent. There was no walking about now in the “good” cell. There was only room for shifting about. And only by mutual consent. There was never a time when it was completely silent. Many of the women had caught a rumbling cough from the damp, and the nights were noisier than the days. Sarah Wardwell, a neighbor to the north of our house in Andover, was imprisoned with an older daughter and a baby not one year old. The baby, sickly and small, wailed long and fitfully in the hours before dawn. Samuel Wardwell, the baby’s father, lying in the men’s cell, would be condemned and hanged before the month had ended. The woman with the rotted tooth cried in agony through the night and most of the day, finding no relief from the liquor that was poured in greater and greater amounts down her throat. Liquor that had been given to me, too, to stop my own screams of terror and agony as my mother was taken from her cell for the last time.

Upon hearing the end of Mother’s footsteps upon the stairwell, I had pulled wildly at the bars, the rising shrillness of my voice cutting like a knife through the thick air of the corridor. I felt strong arms enveloping me, pulling me back, and heard a voice say sharply in my ear, “Hush, now. You cannot let your mother hear your cries. It will only distress her more. Hush. Hush and be brave for her sake.” But I could not stop the wailing, the thrashing, and the grinding of my teeth as I fought the women who held me in their arms. I was a mad thing. No longer child. No longer reasoned. No longer restrained. I hit and kicked and bit until my jaw was forced open and a bitter, choking liquid was poured into my mouth and I was forced to swallow or be drowned. The liquid was poured a second and then a third time, and within a few minutes the beast retreated from the door and a spreading warmth spilled from my belly into my legs and then into my chest, my arms, and my head. My mind retreated from itself, and my tormented thoughts became like a twisted sheet beneath a thickly padded blanket. The restraining arms that held me loosened their grip, and someone, perhaps Goody Faulkner, whose belly was swollen with child, cradled my head in her lap and sang to me with a whispering, tuneless breath.

“Lulay, my little tiny child, bye-bye lulee-lou-lay,

Lulay, my little tiny child, sleep now until the day.”

I stared at a low beam above my head and watched the rough knots and channels in the wood become the grimacing faces of men and women, some wearing half-masks and hats piled like giant gourds on their heads. A splintered crevice became a horse racing against the grain and a sworling crevice became a merchant’s ship that threatened to sail from the edge of that narrow and rustic terrain. The beam was a world unto itself, fantastical and somehow set apart from the surrounding indistinct haze of my cell. Suddenly I had a clear and piercing thought that supplanted every imagining. Someday, after many, many tomorrows, the beam that straddled my sight would be the only part of the cell left whole when all the stones had been carted away and the rest burned to ash. The jail that seemed so impenetrable and everlasting would fall like any cellar. The mortar would soften. The beams would crack and sag. The rock would collapse. And the rubble would fill the gaping spaces so that no passerby could stop and say, “Here and here was my great grandfather or grandmother or distant aunt kept in darkness and in wasting despair.” Before another hour had passed, and before I closed my eyes to fall into the chasm of sleep, the figures on the beam had begun to move.

THE RITUALS OF the days became as always. The slops to go up, new straw to throw down. Visits from families with food. Fridays brought the sheriff’s wife. Saturdays the surgeons. Sabbath days, prayers all round. Mondays came the ministers to pray, to beg for a confession, or to harry with condemnation and excommunication. On the 9th day of September the fourth trial of the Court of Oyer and Terminer was held and six more women were condemned: Martha Corey, Mary Easty, sister to Rebecca Nurse, who had been hanged on the July past, Alice Parker, Ann Pudeator, Dorcas Hoar, and Mary Bradbury. They were placed in the condemned women’s cell, and so I did not see these women well until they were taken out to be hanged. But often we could hear the coarse and winded voice of Martha Corey haranguing the ministers come to extract a confession from her. “I am no more a witch t’an you. I never have been, nor am I one t’day. You can close your book on me. But my deeds is already writ in God’s book. And you and the Devil can take the hindest part o’ me and be pleased wit’ yoursels.” The ministers would often leave the prison as quickly and as furtively as dogs from a dousing.

The early days of September also became a war waged against children. There were Abigail and Dorothy Faulkner, who were nine and twelve, the daughters of Goody Faulkner. Both shy and frightened, they never moved from the sheltering arms of their mother and clung to her desperately even when she rose awkwardly to use the midden. There were the nieces of Moses Tyler, Hannah, Joanna, and Martha, wild and uncouth-looking. The two youngest were twins, and though they were only eleven, they bullied the other larger girls into giving up what little food they possessed. When they entered the cells, we saw that these three girls wore the marks of old welts and bruises about their mouths and eyes. When they were asked with horrified concern if the bruises were from their judges, they only laughed and said they were a parting gift from their father.

In the beginning, many of the young Andover girls found their way to me in the cell, thinking no doubt that my long period underground had given me some kind of canny strength to survive the hardships of prison. But I had entered a place that shut out the world, and my apathy soon drove them away. The only person who could have stirred my spirit to rise never looked for me or sought me out and lay in Aunt’s arms insensible to her surroundings. The days passed for me like the evenings, in a dull twilight between sleeping and waking. The voice of Tom or Father or Dr. Ames or the Reverend Dane had no deeper meaning apart from the rhythm and cadence of supplication. “Please eat, Sarah.” “Please rise, Sarah.” “Please speak to me, Sarah.” “Please, please, please…” until I covered my ears and ground my head into the straw and forced the speaker to abandon his post. Hannah Tyler, thinking that my balling-up was a weakness, tried to work her hand into my apron to take a bit of corn bread hidden there. I pushed her hand away but she persisted and bent back my fingers to ease her theft.

I looked up and saw the pallid, avaricious face before me, the teeth protruding sharply from a meanly placed tongue, and I thought of Phoebe Chandler’s ferretlike face chanting, “witch, witch, witch…” I sat up so abruptly that it unbalanced her, sending her back on her haunches. She squinted her eyes at me and looked set to try again, and it was that look that threw the final heated stones into the soup. Tom had crept up ready to put himself between me and Hannah, but I ignored him and said to her, “Touch me again and your fingers will rot off the bone.”

Her jaw shifted from one side to the other with malicious intent, but she paused.

“You don’t want to touch me again,” I said, my teeth sharp against the words. “You’re in here because you’re low and ugly. I’m here because I’m my mother’s daughter.”

She drew back and from the edges of my vision I saw uneasy glances exchanged from woman to woman. I looked around the cell and saw that my warning had brought to life deep suspicions that even a child could harbor maleficence. Goody Faulkner, and the other women of Andover, gathered around her, lowering their eyes against my stare, but I heard a cautioning voice close by say, “Resist the Devil in all his works.” The speaker had directed those words to me, but I, with a flash of anger, thought, I am not the one with my hands in someone else’s pocket.