Robert Walker: Children of Salem

The horse snorted as if in answer. Jeremy erupted with a guffaw. “Well we’re fools to sit here any longer,” he muttered and remounted. He then eased Dancer down the slope for the back road into the village, starting out for the home of Reverend Samuel Parris armed with very little information save the rough outline of a family tree that connected Parris’ house with that of the Porters and the Putnams.

Jeremiah had just gotten up to full gallop when suddenly Dancer reared, frightened. As Jeremiah fought to control his animal, he searched for the source of the animal’s fear. He scanned for a slithering snake, but there was none to be seen. He listened for the sound of a night bird— anything . Only the windswept snow reported back. But then out of the dimness and what seemed a reasonless fog, Jeremiah caught snatches of a walking flurry of rags and rattling bells and bottles tied about a woman’s neck; home-made charms to ward off evil. A crone of unspeakable ugliness with a face of pockmarks and welts, some looking to explode with pus so large and pulsating did the pustules appear under the shimmering moonlight.

Showing herself from behind a gnarled bush, the old crone turned and spat at the noisy, rearing horse, unafraid. But on seeing Jeremiah in black cloak astride the horse, she chanted a mantra to save herself. “It’s you! The black one himself! Gawd save me but master, I am yours.” She had gone to her knees, bowing and scraping at the earth.

On hearing the aged voice, Jeremiah recognized the toothless, tobacco-smoking oddity known hereabouts even when he was a child as Salem’s own witch—old Sarah Goode. As close to a living, walking, talking witch as Salem ever had; even as a boy, he’d been warned to steer clear of Goode. But now a grown man and all he’d seen of witch hangings along the Connecticut River Valley and up in Maine, he did not believe in witches. He believed in frightful old crones like this, disease-spreading, walking corpses, yes , but not witches who rode astride magical brooms about the wending clouds.

“Careful, me lady !” But his sarcasm was lost on her. Who travels afoot on a night like this, and at such an hour?

She cursed under her breath, mumbling and climbing up to her feet as if rolling a log. She then stared up at the horse and rider, and finally, raised a tightly balled fist to the horse’s snout. “You’re a horse! And you up there,” she called to Jeremy as if he were a mile distant, “you are only a man!”

“I am indeed!” Jeremy could not hold back a chuckle.

“ Arrrgh ! A pox on ye then, and ye cursed animal, too!” She’d decided he was human and not satanic after all. Her tone and rancor proved as much.

For a moment, Jeremiah thought he saw a small babe with blonde hair held tightly against Goode’s breast when in the next instant he recognized it as a stiff wooden doll. Next moment, Jeremiah wondered where Goode had gotten off to; she’d simply disappeared as quickly and as quietly as she’d appeared through the grim veil of night.

“From out of nowhere to into nowhere,” he muttered and patted Dancer, trying to soothe the still shaken animal. “Easy girl . . . easy. That Goode, she’s always been an addled one.” At least, he could comfort himself with one certainty: the first person of Salem Village he’d come across knew naught of his past ties to the village, but the old crone and everyone else would know soon enough.

Jeremy set his heels to his mount, and they were off again for the home of one Samuel Parris, the parsonage home that had remained in legal limbo now for three years.

Gratefully, he saw no more of Goode or any other living creature as the moon, like a galleon, slipped behind restless clouds the color of Jeremiah’s cloak just as the Salem Town clock down at the seaport rumbled and struck a single bell: 1AM.

He’d delayed an hour in wait for Higginson and for what? In order to run down a mad woman named Goode? “God works in mysterious ways,” he muttered to the wind.

He and Dancer now followed the north-south confluence of the river—one of several tributaries that spiked like fingers from Salem Harbor all the way to Bridget Bishop’s Inn. And very near the little shack that’d been the Wakely home, which doubled as a dish-turner shop so long ago. Various rivers here created a boggy backwash in winter and a backwater flood in spring and fall. Four tributaries in all ran into the wider, fast-flowing Woolston, which in turn ran past the First Church of Salem Harbor. Finally, the Woolston fed into the salt-water inlet to mingle with the ebb and flow of the Atlantic where lay an exquisite, perfect, natural jetty that made for an unequalled seaport in the New World.

In fact, every whaler and cargo ship arriving at the Crown Colonies stopped here before going on to Boston. Salem was the port-of-call in the Bay Colonies. Salem Harbor thrived. Commerce served in the seaport town inlet well, while God served the distant and dark, tree-ringed Salem Village, which looked surreal to Jeremy now as he entered this historically troubled place.

He walked Dancer now with the horses’ characteristic high step past a bevy of modest cabins and saltbox homes of clapboard siding, past Ingersoll’s Inn and Apothecary, and past the village common to halt before the meetinghouse and nearby parsonage home and outbuildings. What he stared at from horseback represented a plot of land hotly contested. A plot most recently carved out by Samuel Parris as his —a contested parish house and meeting hall, which had split the parish down the middle over what was right and what was wrong. A contest that had for too long tied up the courts and troubled the ecclesiastical authorities in Boston.

With the snow creating see-through ghostly dervishes before him, Jeremy searched for Samuel Parris’ doorstep.

Chapter Three

At the parsonage door in Salem Village, 1:20AM, March 7, 1692

A stocky, short man, nonetheless Reverend Samuel Parris felt the walls of the small parish home— his property by way of contractual agreement with his flock —closing in on him. The stairwell proved so tight that Parris could hardly make it up the narrow passage to his daughter’s room, where he looked in on little Betty, who’d been battling a fever—symptoms of an ague so often seen in little ones. Betty slept fitfully, as if assailed by nightmares, but at least she slept. Her cousin, the Reverend’s niece, slept too but in a separate bed in the corner.

Every inch of space was accounted for and filled.

Parris slammed a balled fist into his palm and muttered, “Damn my bloody dissenting brethren.” He referred to a faction within his flock. People who resented him and begrudged him this ordinary place with its modest yard and orchard, hardly large enough for his family, hardly more than a common Barbados army barracks. Yet many– too many–begrudged him. Nearly half the village parishioners in fact, and they’d taken to withholding tithes and fees and his rate. As a result, he’d had to find other means of support.

If his rage were given full vent it’d keep him pacing all night, so he attempted to calm himself. At least and at last, he’d found a place to finally settle his family—wife, child, niece, and his once exotic black servant, a Barbados acquisition , named Tituba, whose last name was unpronounceable in English, so he’d had her Christianized and given the last name of Indian. After all, she was Indian native to Barbados.

Parris gave some thought to how little he’d accumulated in life; how little he’d accomplished, and how often he’d failed. One venture after another gone bad. Now it was threatening to happen again. At my age, I simply can’t allow it!