Children of Salem

Chapter Seventeen

Later the same night

Mrs. Thomas Putnam tried to sleep amid the uproar of thunder and lightning strikes all round the village. The sound of it tortured her soul as it had the distinct sound of God’s anger toward her, and why not? She’d failed so miserably at all she’d ever touched, beginning with her failed love for the lost James Bailey, a married man and a minister at the time she’d thrown herself at him. A married man whose wife lay dying in the next room. A man who’d just buried his three children, three lovelies who’d succumbed to the disease plaguing the parsonage so many years ago

She’d been pregnant with James’ son, and when James Bailey left Salem immediately after his wife had left this earth, Anne Carr had been left alone with her secret, that she carried Bailey’s child within her. James had not believed her; had not wanted to believe it, and part of his disbelief had been fueled, perhaps, as she looked back on it now, by the sheer obsessive nature of her passion. She’d terrified him with it. She’d run him from the village with her lust for him. A lust so strong it knew no mores, no custom, no rule, no limit, and no decorum. She’d prostrated herself before Bailey, told him she’d do anything for him…just to have him as hers, and for the child’s sake, she’d argued, but she’d lied. It’d all been for her unbridled lust after the Reverend James Bailey.

So strong was her obsession that she’d plotted it even as his family withered and died around him, almost as if she’d willed their sickness and willed their eventual death, so she might have him entirely and without bonds to anyone or any principle or custom.

She dreamed of James for years after, but she’d need a father for the child, and so she had settled for Thomas Putnam at the time. She cast her future in a servile role to this man she could never truly love. Then Bailey’s child died without ever taking a breath outside her womb. At least no one had ever guessed that it’d been James’—not even Thomas.

Putnam was and remained a man who wanted most in life to be important in the village, so he’d immediately set out to right the wrong of his child’s stillbirth by impregnating Anne again. And when the second child died within weeks of birth, again Thomas determined to set it right. And after this one lived but a handful of days, again they tried, and again they failed—she failed, her womb failed until there had been nine failures, and then came Anne Junior. All of it, she reckoned, was by way of God’s curse on her for pride, arrogance, and disobedience.

Cursed, she was. She’d accepted this fact long before Thomas had. Cursed was her womb—bringing forth only the sickly, puny Anne Junior, who lied, cheated, stole, and generally hated her mother, and who was now suspected of engaging in sordid acts beneath the sheets with Mercy Lewis.

“Reverend Parris must come and take that child back or correct her ways,” she’d told Thomas, who needed it explained in detail. “Pluck the devil from his Mercy, as I might every hair on Mercy’s head if something’s not done and done soon.”

The storm roiled and tumbled overhead and all around the dark little village homes. Is it coming for me? Anne Carr Putnam wondered. Or is it come for Little Anne? “Something is coming. Coming for us all,” she spoke to herself and to her sleeping husband, drunk again. He’d come in talking of witchcraft, gibberish mostly. He’d the smell of canary wine on him. He spoke of readying the militia and rallying men to fight the invisible forces of Satan, which he said had laid claim to the parsonage house and to Betty Parris’ little soul. Drunken sot is what the dead children have made of him, she thought, and what’ve they made of me?

Thomas grunted and muttered, “Wh-aaa?” then rolled over, sending up a snore that might as well be Satan’s own grunt, so awful and long and disgusting was it.

“God, God how I hate this life! What it has brought me to. I hate you, Thomas Putnam, and I hate that child we bore together, and I hate the dead.”

Anne Carr Putnam suddenly felt a courageous urge to go out into the storm and shake her fists at the sky, and to dare God strike her down and thereby take her to whatever reward or punishment set down in His book—whatever fate preordained. She wanted it damned well over with. Right now, this night.

But each time she maneuvered to this tentative resolve to end her own life, she couldn’t move as a cold chill entered her bones and her bedroom, and it hovered not over the entire bed, disturbing Thomas not in the least, but hovering just over and around her, and inside her. She felt completely alone. And she knew herself to be haunted, but this was nothing new. She’d been haunted by her dead brother, Henry, for years before the deaths of her children. In Henry’s hoary wake followed a parade of dead children. Sometimes individually they came, sometimes en mass. They never spoke as they had no language. They’d never uttered a single word in life, so why should it be different in death? However, they did accuse her; they accused with their innocent, cherubic grimaces, their flaccid but condemning eyes, their reproachful, pointed fingers. No words came of those gaping mouths, but she knew what they wanted to say; that it was all her fault, all due to what she’d done and said and thought about one James Bailey.

This—her sin of sins—had transformed her womb. What was normally the cradle of life was reconfigured into a poisonous mausoleum.

Even so, this was not the children come to torment her tonight. Nor was it Henry. This was a different presence also well known to her. She imagined James Bailey must have died over the years, as this spirit was James’ ghost, and it wanted in death to claim what he’d in life denied himself and her—his absolute and unconditional love of Anne Carr, the young woman she’d once been.

For James, she could forgo any date with God and being struck by lightning. She instead lay still and allowed the blond-haired spirit to caress her with his spectral body, filling her with emotions and a heat she’d not experienced in all her married life with Thomas.

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Anne Carr Putnam came fully awake and bolt upright when her orgasm came rushing from the pelvic regions to her brain. She found herself lying with her nightshirt pulled up, her privates exposed, the covers pulled over—not by Thomas, but by James’s spectral hand. He’d come to her again, and he’d made her feel again, and he’d whispered something as lilting and as fragile as a leaf in wind, something about his child and the others that’d died between her legs. A special message of importance . . . something of forgiveness, something like: don’t blame yourself; not your fault; don’t believe it. But she could hardly focus on his whisper as his touch had driven her to such abandon, and she licked her fingers that’d come wet from her vagina.

She shivered with all that’d happened tonight amid the storm. She snatched down her nightshirt and pulled the covers over her, content for the moment, certain the contentment would quickly fade, and it did. However, she knew James would be back, that he’d return again to her, that he wanted her to have a healthy child with her. As insane as it sounded, he made it clear: Little Anne is my child. The only one of ten to survive from Anne’s womb.

She smiled at the revelation that all her failed pregnancies had come as a result not of the usual complications or her womb, but of Thomas’ bad seed. James told her the man was no stallion, but that he, Bailey had more powerful seed in an astral fashion than Thomas had in a corporeal one! This thanks to James’ powers; powers that extended beyond the grave, as James had died—the news reported about the village several years ago, news that had come with the new minister, Burroughs.

Anne now heard James’ whisper within the coils of her inner ear, as if his spirit had taken up residence inside her: Little Anne, say it.

“Say what?” she asked aloud.

She alone is mine . . . mine and yours.

“Anne is ours!” The revelation sent her heart beating fast.

The others, those who died, they’re come of Thomas’ pitiful seed.

Still she could not make out the part about it not being her fault.

But for the moment, she reveled in what James could do to her and for her, even now after all these years and an entire dimension between them.

“And to feel not one whit of guilt!” she shouted, her voice carrying through the door and the ceiling to the girls upstairs, yet Thomas could sleep through it. She laid still, luxuriating in James’ earlier ethereal touch and the revelations he’d brought with his touch. Her dead brother Henry, all these years, he’d been trying to tell her the same news, sure. Sure. Now it’s come clear why I am haunted.

Laughter erupted from her. Unabashed, unleashed. To others it may well sound like the laughter of the mad. As for Thomas beside her, he continued to snore. He’d become so enamored of her night visitors and her erupting in either screams or laughter that her bedtime antics disturbed him no more than did God’s thunder just outside.

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