Robert Walker: Children of Salem

To be sure, George Burroughs proved a colorful character indeed for a man who earned his living from behind a pulpit. Jeremy thought him a minister who might fit in with that colony of misfits—Rhode Island.

By the time Jeremiah found his bed and undressed for sleep, as sleeping naked was his preference, it’d grown quite late. He lay on his rough mattress and pillow in the crowded Red Lion Inn, wakeful yet.

Again he was thinking far more of Serena Nurse than he was of riding off to Salem out of some sense of duty. He worried far more about his first confrontation with her than any eccentric minister or possible heretic, or of Mather’s cow-towing to Higginson, for that matter.

In fact, the image of Serena, ten years younger than today, swept out all other thought. He remembered her golden hair, often flowing loose, always luxurious and framing a heart-shaped, smiling face. He recalled how she smelled as fresh and wonderful as the new morning’s dew that once they rolled about in as foolish and young hearts. He recalled how creamy and smooth her skin was against his, and how sweet her lips to his taste. Her hands so tender and warm, her arms welcoming. All romantic memories that wanted so much to push away the awful reality of the situation.

Bittersweet memories of Serena afforded some comfort, despite his losing her, despite the ache in his heart. It was an image to lull and to anchor a man. Even a man without a home; to lull him into a desire for slumber over drink or gambling or worse vices still. Serena , he asked himself as he dozed off, do you remember or care to remember what we once had?

Chapter One

Swampscott, Essex County, Massachusetts, March 6, 1692 at the midnight hour

At two-score-ten and four , the woman in tattered clothes chewed tobacco, lit a candle, shakily stood alone in the abandoned McTeagh cabin, then waddled straight for her hidden magic needles and the doll.

The doll she’d paid dearly for was fashioned by Sam Wardwell, both blacksmith and cunning man, some openly called the Wizard of Andover. Sarah had made several trips to make payments, and each time Wardwell would display the doll in its progress from wood to realism. Sarah Goode believed the man a magician.

Further, Wardwell asked no questions beyond her specifications. He kept mum, too, and never knew that his creation was in the image of Betty Parris; that it was a doll that’d do harm to Reverend Samuel Parris’ eleven-year-old, little Elizabeth Junior, named for her mother.

The doll, once stuck full with pins— as Parris’s Barbados servant, Tituba Indian, had instructed —would thereby inflict pain on the minister’s daughter; thereby inflicting suffering on the minister himself. But only if Sarah used a lock of the child’s real hair, pinned to a swath of cloth belonging to the child made into a pouch harboring the child’s nail clippings. All items Sarah had bartered from the hands of Tituba, the Barbados witch and servant to the Reverend Samuel Parris. Aside from a few pretty shells and a green bottle, all that Tituba had wanted from the bargain was that Sarah Goode eventually destroy Reverend Parris.

The old woman was unsure if she believed everything that Tituba had told her about Reverend Parris—like the business of his having either stolen or killed Tituba’s infant at birth— and that it was his child—but Goode understood why the black servant hated her master. “Tit’shuba hates ’im ’cause what Parris done to her. Same as me—took her child same as my Dorcas.”

Goode’s candle flickered against a pinched, prune-dried face. The bowlegged Sarah must push and pull her weight on legs reluctant to take her the final step. It was, after all, a grave undertaking she had planned: to strike hard at a minister. A plan that would take her into the dark arts far deeper than ever she had practiced before— to commit witchcraft on a child .

This last reluctance held her; perhaps she ought not to do what her anger dictated. Perhaps she should show a measure of Christian forgiveness, mercy. But when she looked for such things as pardon and clemency, all she found were the vilest of Christian curses to hurl at the Reverend Mr. Parris.

In fact, none of the simple curses would do. Nothing as mundane as ‘may your dog ne’er hunt, may your pig ne’er grunt, may your cow ne’er milk, nor your worms e’er silk; may your lock ne’er latch, the wind take your thatch. Things had gone far beyond such humdrum incantation, and Goode had tried all the more tedious hexes on Parris, but the man’s protection proved strong against the commonplace. Besides, murderous thoughts had come of an old woman’s rage. So murderous and heinous that for days now, her incantations had continued nonstop. She’d gone without sleep.

She stopped in her machinations long enough to mutter another curse—this one the strongest yet directed at the minister’s heart: “ May the hot coals of your hearth, Mr. Parris, fall ‘pon your home and burn your heart! May your legs go lame, and your ugly soul perish in flame! May your wife shrivel and die as winter grass, and may your children’s catechism turn to the Devil’s class.”

She ended with an aged tear escaping her left eye.

“ No damming curse is ’nough,” the crone muttered. “A curse alone’ll not do. Not for the likes of you. Damn you for stealing wee Dorcas from me.”

She recalled how the minister had handed Dorcas over to a parish family to become a maidservant—used as a wee slave by strangers! “To learn a trade,” the minister had said.

Sarah knew better; it was outright theft of a child from her mother, and the minister had taken coin for placing Dorcas— as addled and sick a child as her . “Old Porter’ll use her badly, sure. But he’ll be cursed next!” She spat the names of villagers she hated. “Parris, Porter, Putnam—all three . . . the Devil take all of thee.”

She placed the candle on the floor at the northeast corner. There she had safely hidden the instruments of her witchcraft. She worked to loosen the board, and from below it, she snatched up the long knitting needles all wrapped in linen. Below these, she located her book of spells, and below the book, the doll exactly where she’d hidden it on her last trek to Swampscott. She stared now at the well-crafted doll, so lifelike…its blue eyes and corn silk hair reflecting in the weak candle glow. One strand the girl’s true hair.

Cackling in delight, Goode came away from her kneeling position with all of her necessities balanced in her arms. Duck-toeing to the center of the room, she placed each item onto a low-standing oaken table. Here the shining, winking needles acknowledged her like an old friend, and why not? She had used them many times before to make an enemy suffer.

But this was the first time she’d set out to harm a child, and a minister’s child at that. It gave her pause. Then Goode lifted her longest needle to her eyes, and it spoke to her, whispering the words: use me .

The gleaming long needle wanted using. The feel of it against her palm said so.

With leathery jowls roiling, Goode’s jaw worked in a habitual circle, her tongue rolling tobacco around her gums. A brown drool escaped from time to time, soup spatter about her chin. Tobacco held healing powers. This her sore gums attested to daily. She would trade her last table scrap for a wedge of ’bacca.

She now opened the tattered little book of spells, leafing through to find just the thing to harm Reverend Mr. Parris, the lying-thieving-bastard . She spied the right page and flattened the yellowed edges, creasing the pamphlet with aged thumbs. She scanned the ancient Latin words she’d memorized as a child from her mother before her, because Sarah could only read a handful of words.