Read Online The Witches: Salem, 1692 by Stacy Schiff - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Stacy Schiff
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to recite long passages by heart.
The ideal Puritan wife was self-effacing, and Elizabeth Parris obliged; little trace of her survives beyond her initial on a fragment of dark pewter plate. Of Parris as a father we have a few glimmers. As he warned his congregants: “Wise parents won’t suffer children to play with their food.” The sage mother engaged “rod and reproof.” He may have sounded more ferocious in the pulpit than he did at the dinner table but it is difficult to believe that his children ever won an argument with their standard-upholding, apology-rejecting father when his parishioners so rarely did. Parris could not ignore missteps; he pried open closed issues; he never made one point when he might make three. He deliveredanother hint of his paternal style with the abbreviated January sermon. As the Salem villagers curled and uncurled aching fingers and toes, as the shutters rattled in the wind, Parris illuminated a dim meetinghouse with the lessons of affliction. They made one more vigilant. They humbled and instructed. The Lord delivered afflictions, preached Parris, in the same spirit that parents, “seeing their young children over-bold with fire or water,” will bring them “near to the fire, or hold them over the water, as if they would burn them or drown them.” Naturally no parent intended to do anything of the sort. He endeavored merely, Parris explained, “to awe and fright them, that they may hereafter keep farther off.” *
The chilly parsonage was soon enough steeped both in awe and fear. In that it was not alone. Just before or just as the February witch cake introduced Abigail and Betty to their tormentors, twelve-year-old Ann Putnam, the daughter of Parris’s stalwart supporter Thomas Putnam, began to shudder and choke. Three miles down the road in the other direction, Elizabeth Hubbard, Dr. Griggs’s sixteen-year-old niece, convulsed as well. A creature had followed her home from an errand, through the February snow. She now realized it had not been a wolf at all. All four girls could say with certainty who pinched and pummeled them. For the remainder of 1692 Samuel Parris left no further mention of firewood.
THE WORKING OF WONDERS
I have seen too much not to know that the impression of a woman may be more valuable than the conclusion of an analytical reasoner.
—ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
OVER THE DAYS that followed Mary Sibley’s witch-cake experiment, rainstorms gusted through Essex County, swelling rivers with snowmelt. They overspilled their banks, inundating homes, sweeping away livestock, mills, and bridges, flooding freshly tilled fields. On every count the village was a seething, muddy morass. Having consulted with his minister, Thomas Putnam braved the tempests to ride to Salem town on February 29 with three friends. The girls now understood who tormented them; that Monday, the middle-aged farmers in mud-splattered cloaks appeared before two Salem justices to press formal witchcraft charges. Hours later, his black, brass-tipped staff in hand, the village constable knocked at a door just over a mile southwest of the parsonage. He carried a warrant for Sarah Good’s arrest. She was to appear before the authorities the following morning to account for having, over the previous two months, tortured two girls in the Parris household as well as Thomas Putnam’s daughter and Dr. Griggs’s maid. Sin and crime wereclose cousins in seventeenth-century Massachusetts, which drew its list of capital offenses from the Bible.
A semi-itinerant beggar, Sarah Good constituted something of a local menace. She would seem to have wandered into the village directly from the Brothers Grimm, were it not for the fact that they had not been born yet. And she came trailing a backstory of pitiless downward mobility. When she was eighteen, her French-born father, a wealthy innkeeper, committed suicide. His considerable estate passed in its entirety to her stepfather. When Sarah was in her twenties,
The ideal Puritan wife was self-effacing, and Elizabeth Parris obliged; little trace of her survives beyond her initial on a fragment of dark pewter plate. Of Parris as a father we have a few glimmers. As he warned his congregants: “Wise parents won’t suffer children to play with their food.” The sage mother engaged “rod and reproof.” He may have sounded more ferocious in the pulpit than he did at the dinner table but it is difficult to believe that his children ever won an argument with their standard-upholding, apology-rejecting father when his parishioners so rarely did. Parris could not ignore missteps; he pried open closed issues; he never made one point when he might make three. He deliveredanother hint of his paternal style with the abbreviated January sermon. As the Salem villagers curled and uncurled aching fingers and toes, as the shutters rattled in the wind, Parris illuminated a dim meetinghouse with the lessons of affliction. They made one more vigilant. They humbled and instructed. The Lord delivered afflictions, preached Parris, in the same spirit that parents, “seeing their young children over-bold with fire or water,” will bring them “near to the fire, or hold them over the water, as if they would burn them or drown them.” Naturally no parent intended to do anything of the sort. He endeavored merely, Parris explained, “to awe and fright them, that they may hereafter keep farther off.” *
The chilly parsonage was soon enough steeped both in awe and fear. In that it was not alone. Just before or just as the February witch cake introduced Abigail and Betty to their tormentors, twelve-year-old Ann Putnam, the daughter of Parris’s stalwart supporter Thomas Putnam, began to shudder and choke. Three miles down the road in the other direction, Elizabeth Hubbard, Dr. Griggs’s sixteen-year-old niece, convulsed as well. A creature had followed her home from an errand, through the February snow. She now realized it had not been a wolf at all. All four girls could say with certainty who pinched and pummeled them. For the remainder of 1692 Samuel Parris left no further mention of firewood.
THE WORKING OF WONDERS
I have seen too much not to know that the impression of a woman may be more valuable than the conclusion of an analytical reasoner.
—ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
OVER THE DAYS that followed Mary Sibley’s witch-cake experiment, rainstorms gusted through Essex County, swelling rivers with snowmelt. They overspilled their banks, inundating homes, sweeping away livestock, mills, and bridges, flooding freshly tilled fields. On every count the village was a seething, muddy morass. Having consulted with his minister, Thomas Putnam braved the tempests to ride to Salem town on February 29 with three friends. The girls now understood who tormented them; that Monday, the middle-aged farmers in mud-splattered cloaks appeared before two Salem justices to press formal witchcraft charges. Hours later, his black, brass-tipped staff in hand, the village constable knocked at a door just over a mile southwest of the parsonage. He carried a warrant for Sarah Good’s arrest. She was to appear before the authorities the following morning to account for having, over the previous two months, tortured two girls in the Parris household as well as Thomas Putnam’s daughter and Dr. Griggs’s maid. Sin and crime wereclose cousins in seventeenth-century Massachusetts, which drew its list of capital offenses from the Bible.
A semi-itinerant beggar, Sarah Good constituted something of a local menace. She would seem to have wandered into the village directly from the Brothers Grimm, were it not for the fact that they had not been born yet. And she came trailing a backstory of pitiless downward mobility. When she was eighteen, her French-born father, a wealthy innkeeper, committed suicide. His considerable estate passed in its entirety to her stepfather. When Sarah was in her twenties,
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