Читать книгу Peace, My Daughters - Shirley Barker - Страница 7

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Nothing seemed quite real to Remember again, nothing seemed to have about it the quality of earth and of life drawn from the earth, until the next day just past noon, when she picked her way along the cart ruts that led to Giles Corey's farm southwest of Salem Village. There she saw stiff spikes of yellow grass poking through the slush in the center of the road bed, and yellowed snow about them, dyed by the water and patient sweat of horses. Dead grass, bared by a brief thaw as if the world already sloped toward spring, spoke to her of healthy, wholesome life. The dead brown leaves clicking together as a little wind walked among the oak trees spoke of life too, even in their death; stood in her mind against the fish-belly pallor the girls' faces had worn when Tituba chanted in the midst of the Circle.

Keeping Fairmaid's Hill to the left and Bald Hill to the right, east of the watershed of Norris Brook, she hastened along as fast as the slippery traveling would permit, conscious that the sun moved with her and that noonday and twilight telescoped together at this season of the year, leaving little run of clear light between them. Overhead the sky, almost a summer sky, burned blue and thin. Did God, perchance, look out at her, a poor, scuttling figure going from anthill to anthill, intent on the petty business of a world that had nothing in it more reassuring than brown oak fronds and yellow grass shoots? But what of her treasure in heaven where thieves could not break through and steal? The years for laying it up were so short, and the moment of doom so swift, in which the soul might be taken.

Last night she had come home hysterical after her adventure at the minister's, and Jonathan had listened in silence to her babble, saying nothing, but pouring her a noggin of kill-devil, and leading her upstairs to bed once she was comfortably mazed by the liquor. This morning he did not speak of it at all, but his glance followed her, keenly meditative, wherever she went. It was not Jonathan's way to speak out all he knew. Finally Remember had slipped away from him and gone alone to the cellar to fetch a pumpkin for baking. There in the darkness, passing slowly from apple barrel to turnip bin, she made up her mind what she would do. She was in trouble and she needed help and counsel. She wanted to talk to another woman about what she had seen in Parson's kitchen; not to Jonathan, nor to good Deacon Ingersoll--certainly not to Mr. Parris. A woman could best advise her, a strong and a godly one, such as Jonet Wicom had been in her days. Who else, now living, could be as Jonet had been, sharp and kindly, understanding all wisdom? Remember leaned her cheek against the frosty stones of the cellar wall.

Bridget Bishop was a strong woman who did not scruple to beat a strong man over the head and shoulders with a birch broom, if she thought he needed it. But her tavern was on Ryall Side, not easy to come to, and apt to be crowded on winter days when the men could be neither in the fields nor a-hunting. Nor was Remember so certain of Bridget's piety. Twelve years back they had accused her of bewitching a child and a mad woman who later split her own throat with her sewing shears--but the courts could not prove it, and Bridget's minister, Mr. Hale, believed her innocent. Then she had married Edward Bishop, the sawyer, a well-liked and honest man, so the talk had died down. Still--no, not to Bridget.

Rebecca Nourse was a godly creature, with a soul as white and pleasant as bread new-baked out of English flour, but she was old now, and often bedridden, living only in her eight fine children, in the quavering echoes of her own voice as it told of her childhood in Yarmouth before her father had taken his young family to ship beyond the western ocean. Rebecca had carried a slip of English ivy from her old home, but it would not thrive in the salt marshes off Massachusetts Bay. She had thrived though, and so had the man she married there, Francis Nourse, the tray-maker from Skerry's on the North River. She had made her peace with God, and was ready to go from her peaked house with the trim fields around it whenever He should call her. It would be cruel and useless to upset this good old woman with a tale of the pitch-black doings at Parson's house. Remember kept well to the west of the Nourse farm when she set out that afternoon, bearing toward Lynn rather than toward Salem.

Martha Corey, she thought, would be best to go to. Martha, not young, but spry and keen-eyed, pious wife to the old sinner Giles. Martha could pray as well as a man. Perhaps she could pray the mists out of Remember's mind, for they had been there, certainly, ever since she had looked into a young man's dark eyes across a thorn tree. Perhaps she was truly mad and had imagined the whole scene in Parris' kitchen. How much more likely that the fault should lie in her own mind than in the household of a minister of God. Yes! She must be mad! But Martha would pray her out of it! Otherwise, when her plight was known, Jonathan would have to chain her between the bins in the cellar. He might even send her beyond the seas to that cruel madhouse in Moorfields where they had moved the old Bedlamites near twenty years ago. Stephen Malbon had walked through it once to see the sights there, and sights he had seen that would trouble his dreams for a lifetime after, so he told the Winsters as he sat by their fireside roasting chestnuts. Blind men, men covered with sores, chained like dogs and howling, the bones coming sharp through their blue flesh and their own filth strong around them. And what would become of Briony with herself gone mad and witless? The thought of Briony struck her like an arrow plunged through her cloak into the curving bodice of her gray gown.

She dug her boot heels into the soft snow as she plodded along in the winter sunshine. Now she came abreast of the rough cabin with the turfs on the roof of it that Giles Corey had lived in while he built the good, tight house that his third wife, Martha, kept so well for him. She could see Martha's chimney smoke rise up now, straight into the air, just beyond the hill. The cabin seemed to be tenantless, but over its crazy door, swaying in the wind, hung a carved wooden boot painted bright blue. The sign of the shoemaker! It was here that John Horne had set himself up to ply the trade he seemed so ill-fitted for. Few customers would come down this lonely stretch of road--and as well, perhaps. Had he really gone into the parsonage kitchen last night? What was he to Tituba? To the Circle? Had he met Sarah Good begging in the dark, or the idiot girl from Topsfield who prowled looking for "Old Boy?" Or was she, Remember, too quick to see his shape in every shadow? No smoke climbed from his toppling chimney now; no movement stirred up light and shadow behind the dusty panes. But there were tracks in the snow outside, not cloven, the honest, square tread of a man's boot soles. Remember went on.

Giles Corey came out of his kitchen door as she toiled up the rounded strip of snow that would be clipped grass in the summertime. The whiteness here was all cut and churned with brown mud under the feet of the farm animals. Giles, tall and shaggy, reminded her of Jonathan, except that his mouth hung sullenly at the corners, while her husband's mouth turned merrily upward. Not a wicked man, he had a faculty for quarreling, going to law and getting himself in gaol; wry as one of God's own crooked crab-trees--and just as honest.

He swung down from the house now, like the young man he had been some fifty years back, and big, bluff John Procter followed him. Remember smiled gently when she saw John. His wife Elizabeth, more dearly loved than God could quite approve of, had plucked her sleeve last Sabbath as they were filing out of the Meeting House; plucked her sleeve and whispered that it now seemed their next child would be born about the end of corn harvest. Did either John or his wife know what their serving girl, Mary Warren, had been doing last night in Parson's kitchen? It was not good for a sour wench who trafficked in death and evil to be much with a woman who carried life in her as Elizabeth Procter carried it.

"Good day to ye, Goodwife Winster," welcomed Giles gruffly, stepping into the snow to let her pass on the trampled strip. "Got nothing to do but gadding?"

"I came to see Martha. Is she at home?"

"She'd be nowhere else."

"But you're abroad, I see." Remember's eyes sparkled. She pushed a fallen lock of ruddy hair back under her hood.

"Aye. John, here, has a sick cow. Carrots in her maw, most like. I'm off to help him."

"I'm sorry to hear that, Goodman Procter. I hope she can be saved. You will need her."

John's kind, heavy face reddened. "Aye," he said. "Thank ye."

Remember went to the kitchen door in the leanter and the men turned east at the cart track. She lifted the latch, cleaning her boots on the pine sill. Martha Corey, brisk, tiny, bright-eyed, laid her Bible down on the chest under the window and moved toward her visitor.

"Remember Winster! Set ye down, my dear, and take your cloak off. No! Not there! Here by the fire. Your skirt's draggled in the mire and should be a-drying. Sit close, but watch out a spark does not snap and catch your petticoat. I was just to make tea, now Giles has gone. He's no patience with such doing. Three meals each day are enough, he says. Not that he minds being out of pocket but he hates the folly of it. Now how are all your folk? Briony, and Jonathan's children? I never get to meeting any more, since Giles joined First Church down in Salem Town just to be on off side."

"Perhaps," said Remember slowly, "it's just as well Giles does not go to Mr. Parris' church."

Martha put her pewter teapot on the settle and sank down beside it.

"Why?" she breathed. "Why do you say that? Your face tells me you've good reason."

"Because of this," said Remember. And she told her. But she began with her trip to the parsonage the night before. She said nothing of what had happened to her across a thorn bush at Hallowmas, and she did not mention John Horne, the shoemaker.

As she talked, Martha's brown old face whitened, and she turned the pewter pot round in her moistening hands.

"And why did you come to tell me this?" she asked finally.

"Because you are so good. And so strong. And I needed help. And I was afraid to tell--! Martha! Do you think I am mad? That I only thought I saw those girls trying that awful magic?"

"No," said Martha cautiously, "I do not think you are mad. I think you really saw them."

"But why do they do it? My girls do not do so of an evening. They sing and make marchpane."

"But you let them sing and make marchpane--or any innocent thing. You are not sinful, Remember, but you are not as godly as some in Salem Village."

"What do you mean?"

Martha did not answer at once. She looked out at the white fields, and shadows gathered around her seeming to reflect the shadows on the snow.

"When I was a young thing," she said finally. "Oh, it was long ago, and not in Salem--we had other ways to spend an evening, ways that would not be approved of here. Here the girls may scour the trenchers and sew and spin, read the Bible and listen to old folk pray, cut up pumpkin, set beans a-soaking--and go to bed. That's all they may do. But we used to go out and pick hawthorn in May and nuts when the time came, dance on the green, and watch the strolling players, and walk holding hands with the lads sometimes--and nobody thought there was wrong in our doing it. But here there's none of the things we were so happy in. Black dark comes after a hard day's work, and snow piles to the eaves, and there they sit, poor things, and look at each other, and then down at a page of the Word of God, and back again. And the Word of God's no joy to a maid sixteen."

"But--that's blasphemy!"

"You know it's not blasphemy. You know it's truth. You've been sixteen."

Remember did not answer and Martha went on.

"It's the time with them when the blood's meant to run hot and cold by turns, and the flesh to shiver with the knowledge of what it's meant for. Are they going to spend it running hems and thinking on the Chief End of Man? Myself, I'd rather kiss a lad than dance a witch dance, but if I'm forbid the one, I might well get so tired of staring at the wainscot I'd take to the other."

She had paced the floor while she talked, but now she flung herself down on the low chest across the room, clasped her arms around her knees as a young woman might, and kept on.

"And all our ways in Massachusetts are like that. We try to be good--too good--better than God ever meant us to be--and I have long feared that we should fall into great wickedness this way. Perhaps these poor girls have already fallen so."

"Then pray for them! Pray that their spells will not work and that they will give them up before Satan really comes to Salem!"

But Martha shook her head; her face turned sad. She seemed to be looking at something Remember could not see. "Satan is already here, I think. There is only one prayer for them, and it is not a prayer for any wife of Salem Farms to make. It was made by God's Son on the Cross, and it says to forgive them for they know not what they do."

"You are so wise, Martha."

"I'm wise enough to know that it's past your strength and mine. You must not stop for tea. The sun's none too high and you must go 'round by the Village and tell Mr. Parris all of the matter. It's not for the arm of flesh to settle, Remember. Trust it all to God's minister. He is armed against evil as we are not. He'll pray with you and clear your soul. Then he will move to stop it."

Remember stood up and fastened her cloak. "I will go," she said, "and I will tell him all."

She left the Corey farm and walked east with her back to the falling sun. Shadows purpled the snow and lay thick under the hemlocks in the gully beyond the parsonage as she climbed the little ridge past the Meeting House. She rapped at the front door, hoping wildly that neither Betty nor Abigail would come to let her in.

Upstairs, Samuel Parris sat by his wife's bedside, reading aloud from the Bible. He preferred a good, meaty chapter from the prophets of the Old Testament, insisting bleakly that the wages of sin are death. Elizabeth liked to have him read the stories of God's Son. Strange it was, thought the minister, how women's faces always softened and whatever they had of beauty shone about them when they listened to the legend of the virgin who went with child. It was as if they saw, with their feebler spirits, a light that even a minister of God could not see. It made him uncomfortable. Today he was reading from Matthew, a chapter that had always pleased him, though it did cause him to wonder blasphemously if Christ had quite as good store of motherwit as the rest of men.

"Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the Devil.

2. And when he had fasted forty days and forty nights he was afterward an hungred.

3. And when the tempter came to him, he said, If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread.

4. But he answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.

5. Then the devil taketh him up into the holy city, and setteth him on a pinnacle of the temple.

6. And saith unto him, If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down: for it is written, He shall give His angels charge concerning thee; and in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash they foot against a stone.

7. Jesus said unto him, It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.

8. Again, the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them.

9. And saith unto him, All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me."

Someone tapped on the front door just under Elizabeth's window. Parris stopped reading and waited a long moment to see if Tituba or the girls would answer it. Nobody did, so he put the book into his wife's hand, she smiling weakly up at him, and went downstairs to open the door for Remember Winster.

Remember looked into the face of the minister, pallid and unfriendly, as he set back the iron-bound door for her and allowed her to enter the fireroom. One log charred on the great hearth. A blue and green tapestry across the north window shut out the light and the outdoor cold. A curious, creeping cold of its own lay in the low-ceiled room, making one look about with a shudder, expecting to see a white face in an open coffin. She had seen open coffins there in the past; the earlier ministers, Bayley, Burroughs, and Lawson, had all said good-bye to wives or children under this forbidding rooftree. Now she saw only chests and chairs, a spinning wheel, and an unlit lamp.

"What do you want?" rasped Samuel Parris.

"I wanted to ask--" faltered Remember. "Is your wife better today? She seemed so ill last night when--"

"She does well enough," said the minister. Then he added ungraciously, "But you did not come here for that."

"No." Remember tried to summon all her wit and courage. "I came because I need your help. You are my pastor. You--"

Parris relaxed. He felt on familiar ground. She had not come to haggle over church business--only to seek grace of him.

"Ah! You cannot stand the burden of your sins through the dark hours of another night," he said coldly, "so you would lay them on my shoulders."

Remember, in her mind, had to admit that he spoke part of the truth. For all the pompous cruelty of him, she still believed in his prayers. He preached the Word and he walked with God. He had the power to purge and to intercede. She would never rise with the chosen, she feared--at least, she had never felt regeneration stirring within her spirit. If she was made too fast out of clay to see apparitions of evil, perhaps she was too earthy ever to be allowed in the same heaven that waited for blessed souls like Martha Corey and Mr. Parris. Remember had no illusions about her own worth. She held as well as she could by the law of the church and the customs of Salem Village, but she felt the guiding of no holy light within her. She had got herself into trouble now, as had others not many miles off. Mr. Parris would pray over her and cleanse her soul of its innocent part in evil. If she were mad, he would tell her how she might be cured. And not only for herself must she confess. If he did not know of the evil that had entered his household, how could he move to thrust it forth?

"Aye," she said, bowed her head and plucked at her sleeve. "It is a long tale, but you must hear me out. As I was going home last November Eve--"

As she told her story for the second time that afternoon--the whole of it now--she did not lift her eyes, but she could feel the changes that crossed the cold face watching her. Boredom, interest, disbelief--finally, chilling anger.

"So I went to Goodwife Corey for her advice, and she said I must come straight to you. She believes no evil thing can live if you pray against it."

Samuel Parris spoke, and his voice was low, just as low as God's voice must be when He visits eternal damnation.

"Woman," he said, "you have committed an abomination! Consorted--in your mind--with sorcerers, and named God's house--my house--as their meeting place. I do not know whom you wander with on the hillsides when your goodman is asleep"--his glance burned through her clothing--"but I do know that the damned art of witchcraft is not practiced under my roof, as you in your madness have babbled to the congregation!"

"But I only told my husband--a little--and Martha--!"

"If I did not deem you mad, I should see that you were whipped at the cart's tail all around the Meeting House on the Sabbath. If I hear that you have spread this story any further, I shall act as the instrument of God to so punish you. Now begone to your home! Pray God to restore your wits and sweeten your foul tongue!"

"But Mr. Parris--Will you pray with me?"

"No!"

He flung open the door and held it wide. She crept silently through it and started up the slope toward home. Hannah Ingersoll called to her from her kitchen behind the tavern. Mary Walcott peered at her from the front window of her father's house beside the Training Ground. There were no yellow grasses poking through the snow here, only stiffening gray mud, pools in the wheel ruts with ice glazing over them, and red sunset reflected in the icy meadows tilted west. Little pictures of the scenes she had been describing to Samuel Parris wheeled round and round swiftly in her mind, while she tried to answer her own frantic question. Suddenly all the pictures stopped wheeling, stood still and clear in her mind as the great mountains to the north stood out in autumn weather. She flung her head up, paused for a moment before she slipped into the thicket of dark trees that stood between her and her home.

"I am not mad," she said to the rising moon, "I am not mad!"

Behind her, the Reverend Samuel Parris was just stepping out of his front door, his great coat donned hastily, his broad-brimmed hat awry. He stalked down the road that led to Giles Corey's farm.