Robert Walker: Children of Salem

His appointment three years earlier as minister in Salem, Massachusetts was to be his last adventure, and the parsonage his last home. He wanted it to work. Wanted it badly . . . worst than any desire he’d ever held. He’d struggled to become a community leader here, an influential voice, and the spiritual guide in Salem Village.

The Select Village Committee had given him the parsonage house and lands in perpetuity. And yet it was being questioned. Suits were being drawn up against him. The courts might soon be arbiter over his life, thanks in large part to a handful of litigious and arrogant landholders—men who had theirs who wished to deny him his! This scrubby little plot—a mere clump of relatively worthless earth.

Tonight he’d wandered the house from top to bottom and from cubicle to crevice, worried. He’d looked in on everyone, especially checking on Tituba who’d been sneaking out of late. But thankfully, everyone was abed, mother, daughter, niece, servant and his usually squawking bird. He felt a pang of relief at having gotten Mercy—his delinquent niece—out of his home, but she’d been replaced with yet another niece, Mary Wolcott, and he feared Mary might be just as useless as Mercy’d been. Still, he’d had no choice. This rotating of young women and boys among the parishioners was part of his duties, and as such, he collected a tithe on each child for his trouble.

Samuel wound up back in his small room, as he no longer slept in the same bed as his wife Elizabeth. He gritted his teeth at the thought of her snoring and sleeplessness. He gritted even harder at the thought of those in his parish who’d decided to do everything in their power to break what he judged a binding legal contract. True none of the other nearby municipalities—Andover, Ipswich, Wenham, Topsfield, Rowley, or Beverly—had ever relinquished their common parish lands to a minister.

True that ministers were viewed as itinerants who didn’t customarily hold title to their parish homes and lands, but this was after all part and parcel of a package of promises made to him. He meant to hold the people who had sent their emissaries to Barbados to recruit him for their troubled parish accountable. Promises were made. A list of them in fact, one he meant to make them adhere to at any cost.

“Those deacons and elders gave their word—Thomas Putnam, Revelation Porter, Bray Wilkins,” he muttered under his breath. “How was I to know they hadn’t the backing of that nuisance Francis Nurse or John Proctor, from whom they’d broken ranks?”

He suspected too that crotchety old Nehemiah Higginson at the First Church of Salem Town was behind the resurgence of interest in his holdings. The old miscreant was a mischief-maker to be sure. Higginson had, early on, fired up a number of his parishioners against the infamous contract, and now he wanted it settled in his favor before he should pass from this life.

He sat on the edge of his bed, muttering, “Perhaps he’ll die before the court acts. Damn him. A contract is a contract.” He stood and wandered the rooms again. Tight doorways and even the small hardwood furnishings made him feel awkward and obese.

He now pulled a chair to the hearth where embers threatened to leap out at him as they began falling all around, as if filled with a life of their own. A noise from the kitchen area where beneath the steps Tituba Indian slept made him snap to his feet. Going toward the steps, he reached and snatched back the mildewed curtain to expose the thin black woman, Parris half expected to catch her with that black servant of Porter’s, the one who’d been hanging about the house. But no, the male named Moses—also of Barbados—dared not come into this house. No, the noises emanated from a fitful sleep. Tituba rolling over and grumbling unintelligible chanting in her pagan language, but he caught a single English word, a name: Betty , his daughter.

The bony black woman looked to be made of hickory limbs. Nowadays their relationship was merely that of master and servant, and if honest with himself, his shame surrounding this woman had him hating her for what she had taken from him. As for any lingering feelings, he had more concern tonight for the bird and the goats in the barn. He’d atoned so far as he was concerned, and he certainly no longer felt tempted by Tituba. The only thing left between them was a mutual residual anger for what’d occurred years before in Barbados.

Little witch had put him into an untenable position, not simply with his wife but with God.

He returned to the hearth and pulled a book from the bookcase. He owned several books, an Old Testament, a New Testament, and a treatise written by Increase Mather on how the godly life must be led. Parris was, in effect, a man of one book, the Holy Bible. All else paled in his eyes. He strove to live by a strict interpretation of Jehovah’s Ten Commandments and the Pentateuch now as never before.

Parris now took a deep breath and opened his bible to Leviticus, about to read himself into weariness, when he heard a sudden rapping at the parsonage door.

What damned oaf comes at such an hour? Parris mentally shouted. He approached the door, shouted aloud, “Who needs what of me now?” They come to me for all their ills and every petty problem, but do they make my salary?

Each villager’s tithe to him had come slower and slower, until some had stopped altogether, while others paid in pumpkins, squash, oysters, and the occasional lobster. Worse than ordinary thieves , he thought, one hand on the doorknob, his ear against the wood.

Who could it be at such an ungodly hour? Another death in the parish? A sick child who’d wandered from the faith? These Salem people want courtesy and hard work from me, yet they fail me in miserable fashion.

Again three quick, strong raps on the door. From the sound of it, a strong man stood on the other side of the stout door.

“Who is it?” Parris shouted.

“Wakely, sir! My name is Jeremiah…”

“What?” The door still separating them.

“My name is Jermiah Wakely—”

“I know no Wakely!” came the muffled response.

Jeremiah wondered if the minister meant to come through the door with a blazing firearm or hot poker.

“I’ve come from Maine, sir.”

“Maine?”

“By way of Boston, sir!”

“Boston?”

“Have a letter of introduction, Mr. Parris, sir!”

“Letter? A post this time of night? Bah !”

“Can you hear me, sir? Through the door?”

“What letter?”

“From Mather, sir, Reverend Increase Mather.”

This brought on a chill silence. Finally, Parris replied, “Mather? Did you say Increase Mather?”

“I did, sir!” Jeremiah cursed the impenetrable door. He wondered if Parris meant for him to sleep on the porch tonight. “I’d like to settle my horse, sir, in your barn.”

But Parris’ breath had caught in his lungs. Can it be true , he wondered, that the greatest theological mind in the colonies has sent me a letter by midnight courier? Has Mather finally answered my repeated requests for intervention on my behalf? Ha, the delinquent parish members will be well fined now.

“Will you open the door, Reverend?” shouted Jeremiah. “Or shall Mr. Mather’s protégé sleep in your barn?”

What if it’s the Devil at my doorstep? Parris asked himself. This man calling himself Wakely could as well be some evil scratching to get in. The Devil would know that a letter from Mather would tempt him to make an invitation to cross his threshold. “Or has God sent this—what’d he call himself? Protégé?” he muttered aloud.

The pounding continued. So loud in the silent night that it sounded demonic.