Children of Salem

Chapter Twenty

The following evening in the village

After Jeremiah Wakely’s surprise rendezvous with Reverend Higginson, he’d spent a restless night filled as it was with fears, misgivings, doubts, and forebodings—not only due to what was being said behind closed doors here in the village, but due to the nonstop suffering, blood-curdling screams, and pained howls emanating from Betty Parris and Mary Wolcott. It came as sound of an animal kennel from behind that closed door. Parris found himself far too busy doling out medicine and encouragement to Betty in particular to get into any confrontation with Jeremy.

The adults in the parsonage home found themselves helpless to release Betty from her torments. Each time she came out of the catatonic state, she found only more terrors and beasts plaguing her—coming in at her eyes, ears, mouth, and below the covers. If they were hallucinations created of a fevered mind, they were convincing ones. Convincing not only to Betty who obviously saw these invisible phantasms attacking her, but convincing to her father and mother, to Mary Wolcott, to the doctors, and even to Jeremy. And to Jeremy’s surprise, these invisible forces brought about a genuine horror in Samuel Parris’ eyes. If Parris had orchestrated this grim business, perhaps he was having second thoughts now; perhaps he felt like a child dickering with fortunetelling and the occult only to have a nocturnal portal opened that he could not himself close. A portal through which every sort of spectral creature burst forth. And little wonder that little Betty Parris chose a catatonic state to the attacks.

To his credit, Parris did show a heartfelt, sincere love of his afflicted Betty, while Mary, equally ill now and lying nearby, went without the constant care of the daughter. Mary Wolcott got their attention, however, when she was discovered mysteriously gone. A search of the house turned up nothing. It was as if she’d been quietly pulled into the portal that Parris had dared kick open.

As Jeremy had become something of a member of the family, he’d thrown himself into the search for Mary, and at one point, he’d found himself alone in Samuel Parris’ room, a room off-limits to all but the invited. He’d found no Mary cringing below the bed, in a corner, below a bed, behind a closet door. However, he couldn’t help noticing loose pages lying over his master’s cramped writing desk – another sermon yet to be spoken. Such a document must reveal what Parris was thinking now, and it could prove helpful.

Jeremy scanned it, and what he found, he could not believe. It proved to his mind that this man was not only orchestrating and manipulating Salem Village into a witch hunt, but that he had personally decided who would next be arrested and dragged into his church to be put through the ordeal of excommunication. The name made Jeremy shudder and gasp—Rebecca Nurse.

Had the minister gone mad? Such an accusation would bring him down, yet this direction proved Jeremy’s worst thoughts about the awful possibilities of events here, and his most dire feelings about the so-called minister were equally accurate.

Then a messenger pounded on the door below, raising a deafening alert. It was Thomas Putnam, shouting for Parris to get to Ingersoll’s Inn now.

Parris fussed with Putnam. “I’ve no time for anything now, Thomas, and certainly not Ingersoll.

Jeremy grabbed up the sermon to hide it below his shirt and coat, unsure if it were wise or foolish, but he believed it was time that he act and do so now. Something inside insisted and guided his hand.

He slipped down the back stair and into the kitchen undetected, hoping to slip out the back door and get the stolen sermon notes into the hands of authorities, but who’d that be? Who could be trusted? With this question swirling about in his mind, Jeremy found himself confronted by Parris who loomed giant-like in the small kitchen.

For a moment, Jeremy felt certain the man had discovered the missing papers and was about to scream for them, but all he said was, “I’ve knowledge of Mary’s whereabouts.”

“Ingersoll’s? I overheard.”

“Please, accompany me to fetch her. Appears she’s making a scene in her delirious state of mind.”

Jeremy fought for some reasonable excuse, then any excuse, realizing every minute wasted was time running out for Serena’s mother. For all he knew, Parris had already gotten some dupe like Thomas Putnam or other to swear out a warrant for Mother Nurse’s arrest, which meant Williard and other men might be placing on the shackles by nightfall. But Jeremy could not think of a logical out. To maintain his cover, he instead nodded and said, “Of course. I am at your service, sir.”

“Good, good. If you wish it this Sabbath, Jeremy, you may deliver my sermon in my stead. I believe you’ve earned that right.”

“Me, sir? Sermon? Though I stood against you the other night?”

“I completely understand your perspective on the matter, and indeed was glad that you asked for cautious steps ahead.”

“I . . . see.” But Jeremy didn’t see at all what the sly minister might be up to.

Parris patted him on the shoulder. “Come, come. I’ll provide you with some words if that is your worry?”

He nodded, thinking Parris’ remark ironic as Jeremy indeed had the other man’s words tucked deep into his breast pocket. “Thank you, Samuel. I am honored.” Parris wanted to manipulate Jeremy into delivering the sermon that condemned Rebecca Nurse, ending with calling her forth into the meetinghouse for excommunication. The man meant to use Jeremy as he had Putam, Ingersoll, and others. As he hoped to use Hathorne and Corwin.

With Jeremy shadowing him, Parris rushed for Ingersoll’s where they indeed found Mary. The girl was in the throes of a fight for her life: a horrid, unimaginable fight with a broomstick! Yet no ordinary broom was this. As it was, by all accounts of everyone staring on, including many of the village children, an enchanted dust catcher. Mary struggled with the end of the broom as it jammed itself down her throat so hard as to bloody her gums and loosen her teeth and make her gag and gag. Several loud cracks against the teeth said this was no game, no child’s play, or shenanigans.

She next lay on the floor on her back, screaming, gagging, pleading repeatedly, “Merciful God, please stop Goodwife Corey from churning me! Like I am butter! Stop hurting me!”

Until quite recently, when Mercy moved out of her uncle’s place for the Putnam home, Mary had been maidservant to the giant Giles Corey and the hefty Martha Corey at the grist mill. From the shocked look on faces all across the crowded apothecary and inn, Jeremy knew that they shared one fantastic question: How could Marth Corey be directing this broom that continued to attack this child? How as she was not even in the room! And yet the fevered child cried out that the broom making her suffer was controlled by invisible hands—those of an invisible witch, Martha Corey.

A common belief that a witch who had given over her heart to Satan could step out of her body and make all manner of mischief and attacks on her enemies, and do so in an invisible form.

No one challenged the notion that the miller’s wife worked the jabbing broom; that she’d somehow come in this terrifying state—as an invisible force by means of satanic assistance—expressly to attack Mary. The bloodied, bruised Mary explained it all in her screaming, yet coherent words: “F-For my unkind disrespect toward you, Goodwife Corey, I know and I confess it! F-For wrongs aplenty, and for bad words used against ye, Goody Corey! Please, I’m beggin’. I’m sorry . . . sorry!”

But the broom, which Mary tried to wrench free from the invisible one, kept rising and jolting her abdomen now. She was not strong enough as her stiff arms could not keep the broom away no matter her struggle.

Jeremy thought he recognized Parris’ hand in some of the welts and red markes o the child, and he had no doubt she’d taken a beating. He wondered if there were not a more mundane evil at work here, and not on the part of Martha Corey, and he decided that Mary, not getting the attention of Betty within the walls of the parsonage, had come to find a larger audience when one of the brooms at the broom-stand had leapt out at her and attacked with the ferocity of an angry cat.

Granted, Mary held her teeth, guns, and lips clenched now as the stick slammed desperately into her closed mouth, wanting to return to her throat. Granted, it caused bruising around Mary’s eye and cheek in its effort to strangle her again. Granted that the living broom tore at her, butting, stabbing, pounding with a ferocity no young person could long endure or possibly inflict on herself, and now with her petticoats asunder, the enchanted, angry-as-a-scorpion broom found its way below her dress and petticoats, seeking out another mouth to jam itself into as Mary screamed for help.

“Is there a man among you!” Mary finally cried out, somehow able to form words, when suddenly the broom came out from below her dress dripping blood to the astonishment of everyone present. Parris gasped with the other onlookers, while Jeremy thought the girl menstruating.

Suddenly, the broom had gone lifeless. Mary lay in a heap. She’d ostensibly been raped by an invisible hand, some horrid creature of Satan—like the ones she’d been hearing about now for days. Either that or she had masturbated in public just to show the men in the general store that she could do so without impunity, as she was bewitched, which apparently allowed for all manner of freedom.

After all, it was none of her doing; she was pounced upon by Martha Corey’s invisible other self, the true self, the one sold to the Devil.

Deacon Ingersoll stood in shock, unable to move, unsure what to do as Mary moaned and moaned in pain at his feet. “She’s your niece, Samuel,” he said. “Please, remove her.”

“You saw it, all of you!” shouted Thomas Putnam. “The girl’s been attacked by that witch, Martha Corey. First my children, then the minister’s child, then both his nieces, and my Anne. All our children’re under attack, and yours’re next! Mark my word!”

Parris knelt and lifted Mary Wolcott from Ingersoll’s splintered, dirty floor. “I’ll get her home. The child’s safety is my only object.”

Jeremy tried to fathom the quiet calm of the minister and the thoughts going on behind the quizzical look in his eye, and the way he held Mary close against him, the way a father might yes, but as he was not her father, Jeremy had a far grimmer thought about the way he held her, one hand about her legs slick with blood. One leg ended about her neck, the other turned back into her, and one arm wrapped round the underarm and breast, the other akimbo. Then it dawned on Jeremy that Parris was aroused, sexually so; not so much by Mary’s half nude form but by the attack of the invisible broom monster. That he realized how wonderfully it displayed reason to listen to him in matters of the Invisible World and how best to deal with such things. Jeremy had no doubt at that moment Parris felt ten feet tall and powerful. Yes, the attack on his niece, whether in her head or a new reality of a bizarre nature, the minister was aroused by his niece’s so called victimization by an invisible power. Such evidence of this, he could take to Hathorne and Corwin tonight.

Parris was a man who needed to be in control, and he craved power. That’s why Jeremy had been sent here in the first place, to document this man’s bedrock character traits. Had Parris taken advantage of Tituba in her youth? Ownership of another human being gave a man a sense of ultimate power, after all, to do with his livestock as he saw fit. Might the man have taken liberties with his niece, Mary, Mercy as well as his servant years before?

Parris ordered Jeremy to remain behind to help with the clean up, as Mercy had knocked over far more than the broom stand when attacked. She had in fact made a terrible mess of the place. All the same, Jeremy suspected it an excuse to gave Samuel Parris alone time with Mary while in his state of obvious euphoria—either to ply her with more names to shout out or to ply her with something worse—his manhood. Jeremy hoped to give the man enough rope to hang himself if he should attempt to take advantage of Mary. If Jeremy could prove Parris the worst sort of letch and a rapist of his own niece, the man would be jailed, his credibility and reputation shattered so badly that no one would follow his lead in this snowballing witch hunt. It would be a horrible thing for Mary, but it would completely diminish whatever power Parris wielded, and perhaps save lives in the bargain. Lives beyond Goode’s and Osborne’s—two such disreputable miscreants as perhaps were guilty of murderous thoughts and actions for years.

However, when Jeremy returned to the parsonage home, first rushing to the barn, half-expecting to catch Parris in the despicable act, he found no one but Dancer and Parris barnyard animals.

When he did catch up to Parris, the man was sitting alongside Mary in the bed he’d laid her in, smoothing back her sweat-soaked hair, tearful, saying kindly, fatherly words to her, his hands clasping hers as he prayed for her soul.

A big disappointment, he silently decided, and damned hypocritical of Parris to suddenly decide that Mary was worthy of his attention.

Elizabeth Parris, tearful, exhausted, had fallen asleep sitting beside Betty’s bed. Betty sat up and with the widest marble eyes Jeremy had ever seen, she glared at him as if she wished him gone or dead, but she remained silent. She’d been watching her father intently, curious about his sudden concern for Mary. In fact, Betty seemed upset with Jeremy for bursting in on the scene. She also seemed somehow to have matured by several years.

So he backed down the steps, leaving the afflicted family to itself, wondering how much incest characterized these people. Betty had appeared jealous; Mary had gotten the attention she wanted. Tituba was jailed. Mother Parris? Blind?

Instead of catching Parris in a supposed lewd or compromising act with his niece, Jeremy ended these notions with no evidence beyond a vague suspicion, one he felt might find verification in a solid interview with Titutba Indian L’englesian.

Jeremy imagined her heritage—part French, part Barbados, part English. He also imagined that her seeming lack of understanding of English a method of getting by.

At the foot of the stairs in this sad house, Jeremy recalled Judge Corwin’s invitation to return for brandy this evening.

As it was growing late, Jeremy decided Corwin and Hathorne might well be the authorities he needed to see in private. To this end, he walked briskly out of the house and made straight for Judge John Corwin’s village home.

As a student of the law, he truly wanted to know what was going through the minds of the judges now that they’d had time to digest all that had gone on. Perhaps cooler heads would prevail after all, even in light of the performance that a simple scullery girl like Mary Wolcott could bring to bear—or because of it. Word spread through the village of this incident like fire in a butter churn. No doubt by now Mary’s wild accusation against Martha Corey had traversed the village and beyond to Wenham, Topsfield, Beverly, Salem Town, and other settlements. Jeremy suspected if there was anyone in the area who had not as yet heard of a young girl’s having been attacked by invisible hands on a broomstick, that it must be the now accused witch, Martha Corey.

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