Читать книгу Peace, My Daughters - Shirley Barker - Страница 6

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Sharp autumn went over Salem with the wild geese over the salt meadows, and bitter, white cold settled in, whirling against the diamond-shaped panes and down the smoking chimneys. Industry moved indoors now; the fields had been put away for a season and the woods were too wild to hunt in, except on mild, gray days when the snow settled. Many farmers set about repairing tools and harnesses, or whittling out the extra shelf or trencher that had been so long demanded for the kitchen. Each family had its own special task to work at; they would all be plowmen again when the earth showed darkly in April, but now they turned coopers, tailors, dish-turners. Jonathan tensed his muscles at the heavy wooden flax-brake, later swingling and hackling the dried fibres. The girls spun. Remember wove, and her weaving was known from Plymouth to Piscataqua. All that their bodies needed lay under one tight roof--stored in the leanter, hanging dried from the rafters, pickled in brine in the cellar. They worked, and slept, and worked again, and seldom left the house except to go to Meeting on Sunday.

On clear nights Jonathan might put on his greatcoat and fur cap and trudge across the snow to Ingersoll's tavern, not so much for a drink, for he had rum and cider at home, but in order to talk with the other men he knew would be there. They would sit late around the fire, gesturing with a half-empty mug that the deacon was always quick to replenish, or a half-smoked pipe that went out sometimes in the middle of an argument. They talked about the unsavory land quarrels of their neighbors, of the threatening Indians who still burnt a house in Salmon Falls or scalped a goodwife at Cape Ann now and then, just to prove that they could do it. They mulled over the scant news that made port in Salem Town when world-wise ships beat in from the winter sea, and they fought and prayed over the future of the Colony that they had given body and soul to when they left their cradles.

Old king had been given to priests and harlots, sure enough, but at least he had let Salem Farms alone for the most of his reign, and in his rule they had prospered. But in his last year of life he had taken away their Charter, and his brother had sent them Governor Andros, who wore gold-lace ruffles and beggared the people. Just what Massachusetts could expect from the Dutchman new-come to the throne of England, Salem farmers did not know any more than did wiser men in the Colony, but they liked to conjecture. In the opinion of most of them, their country was in an evil way and its feet took hold on Hell. The fathers, the first generation, had all died out now, and their aging sons missed their wisdom. General Court still met, and Lt. Governor Danforth did what he could--arresting a witch now and then. Not that it wasn't necessary to make war on witches and their master, the everlasting Devil. For Deacon Ingersoll's patrons believed in a spirit of evil, black and tangible, and in witches, legions of human beings sworn to assist him, just as firmly as they believed in the bread they ate, or the pewter trays on the sacrament table in church, which Mr. Parris insisted should be replaced by a silver service.

Salem farmers talked about all these matters in Ingersoll's tavern during the evenings of early winter, 1691. They remarked also, chuckling into their mugs and pipes, that Mr. Parris was still finding his own firewood--if he had any--and for all of them he might continue to find it.

The evening of December 24 fell on a Thursday--a clear, cold Christmas Eve with bright stars in the sky and a hard crust on the snow, strong enough for a man to walk on. Christmas was a popish holiday that Salem Village paid little attention to. This night it was Remember who drew on her cloak after supper while Jonathan filled his pipe and settled close to the fire.

"I don't know it'll do Mistress Parris much good seeing ye," he looked up through a cloud of tobacco smoke to tell his wife. "If I had to live with that man o' hers, I'd be sick myself, I would."

"Hush, Jonathan! He's a man of God. Elizabeth Parris has a fever and chest pains, and I'll rub her well with this goose grease if she'll let me." Remember slipped a covered crock into the basket on her arm.

From the loom room came the merry laughter of Briony and the twins.

"Briony," called Remember, "do not try the loom while I'm gone. It is too heavy for you, and you might mar the pattern I've laid down. Stay with your spinning."

No answer came, but more laughter. Remember sighed.

"I know well that the moment I'm gone they'll be into the kitchen boiling down sugar for marchpane. And you'd not be likely to stop them, Jonathan?"

Jonathan drew on his pipe. "No, I'd not be likely to."

She laughed and fastened her fur-bordered hood.

"I won't be late."

"You better not be. There's wolves been seen by Haverhill, I heard at Nat Ingersoll's last night."

"You men at the tavern are worse gossips than a quilting of women. Can't a wolf run over the snow but you have word of it. If you spent your time--"

A smart rap beat on the door. Remember and Jonathan looked at each other. He rose, crossed the room, and opened it a little. She could not see around the scarlet shoulder of his waistcoat, but she could hear his greeting.

"Aye, come in, lad. Ye're here to look at the hides, and I've a good choosing of 'em for ye, sure."

John Horne, dark, bright, so handsome it made her heart ache, walked over Remember's threshold and she stood staring at him.

"Don't know, Remember, that ye've met Goodman Horne. New shoemaker, he is. Set up in old cabin Giles Corey built when he first cleared land. I told him last night at Nat's I'd some good hides he might want to look at."

"I've seen him in church," murmured Remember, looking down at her basket.

It was true. John Horne had been in church every Sunday since his coming to Salem Village. She had looked over from the women's side of the congregation and watched him secretly. He had repeated the Lord's prayer. He had sung from the Bay Psalm Book. He had taken the Sacrament. How could she have imagined that he was the Devil because of their meeting in the field on November Eve!

Jonathan went into the leanter to bring out the hides he wanted to sell the shoemaker. John Horne stood slim and straight in his buckskins.

"Are you ready to help me yet, Mrs. Remember? You'd be fair aid to a man, I warrant."

"And what can I help you at that is so pressing?"

"Ho! I am come unto you having great wrath because I have but a short time."

"I do not help the wrathy."

"Nevertheless, you shall help me with my work in Salem Village. You shall do me a service this night and before midnight."

"That I doubt, sir."

She flung out of the house and into the sharpness of the dark. Behind her a man's mocking laugh rang out from her own fireside. When she had met John Horne before there had been something of the court gentleman about him--as she had found court gentlemen described in the books in Anne Bradstreet's library. Tonight he seemed less like a man than like a drawn blade, sleek and sharp, the candlelight glittering along the length of him. Who was he and where had he come from? "From Boston," he had told Nat Ingersoll. Once in Rowley she had known a demented girl who swore herself bewitched, who said she knew the Devil and that he was a tall man from Boston. But Mr. Mather had said that Boston was so blessed it should last till the great burning of all, so it was not likely the Devil lived there. Still--perhaps in one of those crooking streets like a bent elbow; behind an overhanging gable, perhaps--No, in the forest with the red Indians was a more likely place for a fiend's dwelling. All the Bay Colony knew, having heard it in church from their first baptizing, that Satan had fled backward before the cross of Christ, out of the cathedraled continent, out of godly England, till there was no place left for him but these thick forest reaches of the new world. America was his last stronghold on earth, and in America he must wage his last battle with the Church of God. Church members of the Bay Colony must therefore expect him to rise against them on every hand, and they must fight him hard and strong whenever he appeared. She was not a fool, Remember decided, to fear the Devil, but she was foolish to see him in this young man, merely because he had a handsome face and his talk sounded strange. But what did he mean by saying she would do him a service before midnight? She would comfort good Mrs. Parris in her illness and then betake herself home to bed. That could serve neither an upstart shoemaker nor a malicious power.

The snow fields glistened around her in the pale starlight. A shadowy figure with streaming hair and vague eyes started up suddenly from a juniper bush and gabbled something inarticulate at her.

"Go home, Abbie," counseled Remember gently. "You'll freeze one of these nights, child, and there are wolves and Indians about."

"Heehee!" chortled Abigail Hobbs, half-witted daughter of a Topsfield farmer, who roamed the countryside nightly, causing much grief to her good parents thereby. "Heehee! I ain't afeerd. Old Boy'll take care o' me, he will."

She scuttled away, going across the crust toward John Putnam's pasture with long hops like a rabbit. Remember shuddered and hurried down through the parsonage orchard. There were no lights in the front of the house, which meant, most likely, that the minister was off on a parish errand. But pale glimmers from an upper window showed where Mrs. Elizabeth lay in her fever. It would be best, Remember thought, to go around to the little door at the rear that led directly into the kitchen. She slipped under the maples in the front yard to let herself in by it. She stumbled on the icy doorstone, lifted the latch, stepped into the hot, smoky room.

Full of people as the Parris kitchen certainly was that night, nobody noticed Remember's entrance or turned to watch her as she stood, appalled, back in the shadows under the slanting roof. Before her a group of girls and young women huddled on chairs and benches placed in a circle, their eyes fixed as one woman's eyes on the Negro servant, Tituba, who stood before them, her back to the fireplace. Tituba had wrapped a shawl of turkey red over her ordinary rough gray garment. The shawl was sewn with bluejay feathers and little ivory blobs, that Remember could see, when she stood closer, were the teeth of animals. Bits of broken glass chattered on a string around her neck. She held one shining black arm high, her face uplifted toward it, her usually good-natured eyes turned mean and shifty. The hand clutched a small, gray-clad poppet stuck with a long iron pin. Tituba chanted some strange West Indian words from the island where she was born, then some words that Remember could understand.

"Fire and brimstone! Fire and brimstone!

Judgment on men! Judgment on men!"

How tensely the young faces watched her! How the slim shoulders twitched! How oblivious they were of everything except the performing Negress with a black candle burning on either side of her!

Dimly, Remember began to try to work out the meaning of the scene before her. Tituba, she had heard, had been a witch in her own country, but she had been known to work no spells since the Parris family had brought her to Massachusetts Bay. But what else could she be doing now? To make a rag poppet and stick pins in it was to try to kill a man by magic, but whom should Tituba want to kill, and why were these girls behaving so? They were not witches. Betty Parris, the minister's daughter, and little Ann Putnam were children, Mrs. Ann Putnam a pretty, petted wife, the others mostly servant wenches, some greensick, some plump as puddings. They would make only dull scholars at the black art. "For not all can learn it," her mother used to tell her as they sat shelling peas by the hearthside after supper. "The Devil will not have us all, any more than God will--only his Chosen. But he's not a-hoof here like he was in Ayr when I came away." Jonet had known a good many witch tales and told them in the evenings, and as they ran through Remember's mind her fear and confusion left her. She herself would never stick iron pins in a poppet, but she knew as much about it as Tituba did. She stepped forward and spoke, her words sounding in her own ears, stiff and prim.

"Tituba! Does your mistress allow you to practice wicked magic?"

Tituba whipped the poppet under her scarlet robe. Her face changed, became smooth, cunning. The assembled women turned, not sharply, but slowly, as if waking, reluctant, from sleep. They stared at Remember.

"This doll no man. Nobody!" smiled Tituba eagerly. "Tituba no kill. Make play--please girls. Evenings long. They like laugh--like be afraid."

"It's naught to laugh at, what you're doing," said Remember sternly. "It is witchcraft, and witchcraft is evil even in jest."

How strange their faces looked, turned toward her, drooping like sick flowers on flaccid stems! And how many of them there were, drawn close here in the hot, slanting kitchen where the light from the black candles flickered on Elizabeth Parris' orderly rows of pewterware!

"Why, Goodwife Winster," chaffed Mary Walcott gaily, but with an air of dragging herself back from a long way off, "how you frightened us! You're not too godly for a little jest, I hope, and we girls must have some fun! Tituba was not working a spell. She was showing us how to work one. She has seen ghosts in Barbados, and she has promised to help us see some. And she can tell fortunes. Let her tell your fortune for you."

"Yes! Yes!" chorused the girls. The circle opened, made a place for her. Remember sat down, her face grim.

"I do not want my fortune told," she said sternly, "and I can tell you that if you had ever seen one ghost you would not want to see another. There are merrier ways to spend an evening than calling the Devil to come among you."

Mrs. Ann Putnam's great brown eyes rolled, she twisted her fingers nervously in her lap. "We did not call the Devil," she said.

"But you were practicing spells, and he's always like to come wherever that's going on."

Tituba arched her long neck and narrowed her eyes.

"How you know so much about Devil?" she asked Remember.

The group leaned forward. Their eyes glistened. Mary Walcott shook back her bright hair in the candlelight and asked the question for all of them.

"Are you a witch, Goodwife Winster?"

"I?" cried Remember, startled. "Never! After all my mother told me about it, I would not want to be one!"

"What did she tell you?"

"The year she left Scotland they burned a coven of witches who used to meet in Forfar Churchyard. The Devil met with them, sometimes as a black man, sometimes as a yellow bird that sucked between the fingers of those poor lost girls who had signed his book in their own blood and promised to serve him. Sometimes he sent them spirits in horrid shapes to be their familiars. They danced among the graves and the turf burned like a flame under their feet, and the flame lighted the gray old church till the country folk thought Hell had moved into it. And they held a Witches' Sabbath--"

"What's that?" asked yellow-eyed Mercy Lewis. The others listened, hushed.

"A Witches' Sabbath is a most evil gathering to do worship to the Devil. The witches ride to it on broomsticks across the sky. They dance, and sing vile songs, and tell of what evils they have done since the last Sabbath, and how they have tormented people."

"How do they torment them?" asked little Ann Putnam, her soft hair falling into her eyes.

"They pinch and bite and bruise them, choke them and make them fall in fits to the ground. They make them pine and waste. Sometimes they kill them."

"How?"

"By a touch--by a look--my mother was not a witch! She did not tell me how. And they mock the Blessed Sacrament. They eat red bread instead of the holy crust, and drink red wine that may be their master's blood for aught I know. And they blaspheme against Christ. And the godly pursue them. They fling the witches into ponds to try them, for pure water will not receive a body pledged to the Evil One. Oh, the black art of witchcraft is as bad for those who practice it as for those who suffer from it! Do not ever pretend to it! Such jest invites the Devil!"

"But what else do the witches do?" urged Mercy Lewis. "What else that is horrible?"

Remember stood up.

"At Forfar," she finished, "they dug up from the churchyard the corpse of an unborn baby, and they made it into a pie and ate it and washed it down with rum!"

Mrs. Ann Putnam gave a shriek and sank back in her chair. Remember walked slowly toward the stairs; Tituba barred her way.

"That good obi," she leered. "Tituba obi woman in own country. You come again. Tell more."

Remember pushed past her, turned back, her feet on the bottom step.

"Please, please," she pleaded, "can't you see it is horrible? Men and women are burned to death for it as well as swum!"

Horrid laughter filled the kitchen.

Remember ran upstairs, leaving her willow basket forgotten at Tituba's feet. She found Mrs. Parris weak, coughing, too ill to be told what her household was about, and she sat with her for a long time, not only because the poor woman needed care, but to delay her return through the kitchen till the meeting should have had time to break up. When it grew so late that she feared lest Jonathan should take his gun and lanthorn and come looking for her, she wrapped herself in her cloak, bade Mrs. Parris good night, and tiptoed downstairs.

On her way she became aware of a very low, throbbing beat like a small skin drum, and sure enough, it was a drum, and Tituba was beating it. She was chanting. The girls stood, each one holding a mug, about to drain it. Their bodies twitched. Their eyes were glassy. A smell like the inside of a rotting rum keg moved in the close air. The girls drank, dropped their mugs with a clatter they did not notice. They began to dance, a wild, wheeling dance, like drunken seagulls, flopping ever closer to each other, closer to Tituba. Tituba's chant changed to three repeated raucous notes that thrust into Remember's mind the image of thread and spinning wheel. The wheel turned. The thread drew tighter--tighter--tighter! As the thread drew tighter, Remember's muscles tightened till she thought she must die. Tituba screeched--the screech of a taut thread. At the screech, the stiff bodies of the girls dropped to the floor in convulsive fits. They shivered and shook, beat their heads and gnashed their jaws noisily.

Remember clung to the wall for support and looked back at the stairway, wondering if Mrs. Parris had heard and might come tottering down to learn the cause of the uproar. Then she remembered that she had left the woman half mazed with fever and medicines. Tituba, seeing her, crossed swiftly through the squirming girls and shook a bit of discolored bone in her face.

"Parrot's beak!" she grinned. "Brought from Tituba's home. Good medicine!"

Remember pointed to the girls on the floor. "They will hurt themselves," she whispered through stiff lips.

Tituba shrugged her shoulders under the scarlet mantle.

"Body wind tight. Hurt no show. Hurt show when body loose again," she said indifferently.

Remember felt her way along the wall to the outside door. "Tituba," she asked, "what did they drink? What did you give them to drink?"

"Drink? Ha! Good obi drink! Much rum, one drop blood, one grain dirt of grave, shaking of gunpowder. No harm!"

Remember tried to find words for an agonizing thought.

"My girls have never come here? The twins--or Briony?"

Again Tituba grinned. She shook her head. "No, Mis'. Twins spoil obi magic. Gold-haired one might bring them. We no want your three."

Having gained the door at last, she opened it and turned on the Negress.

"Please," she said, "as you fear God, do not teach those girls any more evil."

"Tituba fear no God. Only her own God in ceiba tree. Ceiba tree far from here. You teach them witch-work too. You tell much they never hear before, now they ask for. Now we have red bread and yellow birds--maybe baby pie."

Incredulous with horror, Remember stared at her. "God forgive me, I did! But I tried to disgust them with the wickedness of witchcraft--not to teach it!"

The Negress smiled as if contemplating a lovely secret. Remember crept feebly away from the parsonage.

Two things happened on her walk home. Old Sarah Good, the beggar woman, stopped her and asked for the loan of a shilling. As she turned once to look back at the parsonage, she noticed that Tituba still stood in the low doorway watching her. A shadow joined her and she ushered it inside. The door closed. The shadow moved with the sure grace and decisive strength of John Horne.