A Break With Charity: A Story About the Salem Witch Trials (3 page)

"He'll need a higher power than the winds," I said sadly. "The seas are plagued with pirates."

"Is that why ye be standing here, outside the parsonage, so often, then? I've seen ye many a cold afternoon."

I looked up into the lined face to see an unexpected twinkle in her eyes. "What would brother William have to do with me standing here outside the parsonage?" I asked.

She laughed, a dry, cackling sound. "Well, what do ye think those girls do in there every day, child?"

I looked toward the gray and forbidding outline of the building. "Stories." 1 sighed. "I heard that Reverend Parris's slave Tituba tells them stories."

" 'Tis far more than stories that cures the useless hours of dullness for those girls," she said knowingly.

"What is it, then? What do they do in there?"

"Fortune-telling," she said. "Tituba is familiar with the black arts. Did not the good reverend bring her back from the West Indies?"

"So they say."

"Fortune-telling," she said again. "Little sorceries. Palmistry. I hear she conjures with sieve and scissors, poppets made of cloth, and candles."

I gasped. "Such practices are forbidden!"

"I hear she reads the leaves of tea."

"In the reverend's own house?"

"Aye."

"And you thought I wanted..."I could not even finish the sentence.

"I thought ye were seeking out Tituba to tell ye when brother William will be coming home."

The idea hung in front of me like a bright candle, lighting up the bleak winter afternoon. "Such things are forbidden," I said again, but my voice was weak this time.

She smiled down at me. And between her smile and the beating of my own heart, desire was born. And the night was separated from day. "God reveals all things to us in His own good time," I recited, knowing it was what Mama would say.

"God is ofttimes busy elsewhere. And we must satisfy our own yearnings by whatever means we can until He turns His face to us again."

" 'Tis the Devil's business," I said sharply.

She shrugged. "If my own brother were missing at sea, I'd do all I could to ease the pain in my heart."

"They wouldn't have me inside," I argued.

"Have ye asked?"

"They don't like me."

"Might I ask why?"

Without realizing that I was doing so, I continued to confide in her. "Because my father is a merchant with twenty-one vessels to his name. And because I live in a fine three-story house in Salem Town and not here in the village. And because we eat from pewter and have many servants. But I don't care. There isn't a decent one of those girls in the lot."

She nodded, agreeing. "Then why are ye about here so much? It's three miles from Salem Town to this place."

"I deliver goods from my parents' shop. But not for the king's shilling. Mama sends needed items to the poor of the village."

"She allows ye to go about with that horse and cart and deliver them alone?"

"No. I usually have our maidservant Ellinor with me. But she was down with quinsy throat this morning, so I came alone."

"And ye just happen to stop at this spot all the time to rest your horse," she said.

"If you must know, yes, that's why I stop here, Goody Bibber," I said.

She sighed. " 'Tis a shame, the way we lie to ourselves and come to believe it," she murmured.

"I'm not lying to myself, Goody Bibber."

"Odd, then, that when I came up behind ye before, I did hear ye thoughts. Enough to know ye is heartsore because they won't let ye join them."

I stared up at her, an angry retort on my lips. Then I saw the slow and benign smile spread across her face, making it almost beautiful in spite of the wrinkles.

"Mayhap ye don't care about the girls. But ye care about Tituba now that I've told ye what she's about, I can see that. Why don't ye ask John Indian to let ye in the back door?"

I looked to where she was pointing. Across the expanse of snow-covered ground that separated us from the parsonage, I could see John Indian, Tituba's husband, chopping wood outside the back door. The steady blows of his ax carried on the cold air and then grew distant as I pondered.

Why, yes, of course! The girls usually took their leave after about an hour. I didn't need them to gain entrance. I was, after all, Susanna English, and our family had never needed anyone's help to gain entrance anywhere.

The thought of my family, my parents, filled me with foreboding. Surely, asking Tituba to read her tea leaves and conjur with sieve and candles to tell me the future would be trafficking with the Devil. What if my parents found out?

Mama would be heartsick. As for my own dear honored Father English (as William and my older sister, Mary, and I called him), well, I knew he was far too enlightened to believe that the Devil was roaming the hills and dales of Salem, as so many others believed these days.

Storms at sea, English pirates seizing his vessels, a cargo of molasses gone bad, Indians attacking his ketches bringing fish back from Newfoundland: these things my father considered natural plagues that beset one in his trade, not visitations from the Devil.

My father's ideas often put him at odds with the town magistrates, selectmen, and ministers. Mama said he was better understood by the merchants of Boston, where he had many friends. Boston was a place of ideas. But ideas were never encouraged in Salem.

For this reason, and because he was loyal to the Church of England, my father would not go to Salem Village Meeting on the Sabbath. He rowed across the bay to St. Michael's Episcopal in Marblehead when weather permitted. And when it did not permit, he prayed alone in the privacy of his home, where he often went about saying there was no religious freedom under the Puritans.

My father always set great store by freedom. But he was always well respected in Salem, nevertheless, and considered a good neighbor, a man to call upon in times of trouble, a man with a clear head, a man of firm purpose.

And of course, folks in Salem always remembered the time he stood with his fellow countrymen in Boston in 1689, when the people sent Sir Edmund Andros, who was then governor, to be imprisoned in the dungeon at Castle William in the harbor.

In Massachusetts Bay Colony, the people had for years been coining their own money and ignoring the navigation acts passed by Parliament and, in general, showing too many signs of being independent. So, in 1684, the Crown took away our charter to punish us.

That charter was second only to the Bible to us because it guaranteed us our land titles. Then the Crown gave us Andros as governor.

He passed harsh taxes and said our land titles were no longer valid now that the charter was gone. So the people imprisoned him in 1689. And my father was one of the men to help draw up our Declaration of the Gentlemen, Merchants, and Inhabitants of Boston and the Country Adjacent, and he stood with the people when it was read aloud.

People marked well that my father did that. Just as they marked well that he put up the money for the journey, on the frigate
Nonesuch
, of the Reverend Increase Mather of Boston. So he could go to England and get us a new charter.

Of course, my father predicted that matters would get worse before they got better between us and the Crown. And we would pay dearly someday for this freedom we so cherish. But he blamed our troubles on neither God nor the Devil.

The sound of a horse's whinny brought me to my senses. Yes, I decided, my father was a man of advanced ideas, but I knew that even he would not approve of trafficking with the Devil.

So, then, I would just have to be sure that neither he nor Mama found out, wouldn't I? For I had, by that time, determined to get in to see Tituba. And if she could give me some good word about William, I would go away satisfied. I would take that good word and keep it as medicine. I would hold it close to me in the middle of the night and tell no one else of it.

"Goody Bibber." I turned to tell her of my decision, but she was nowhere in sight. Gone. I peered through a curtain of snow that I hadn't even realized was falling. How long had I been standing there musing? It was getting on to dark.

There were no footprints. And for a moment I pondered whether she had truly been there or I had dreamed it. Before I could consider the question further, however, I was covering the ground between myself and my horse and cart, to fetch a twist of tobacco for John Indian.

And that is how it started with me. That began my part in the madness that came to our village in the year 1692. But I had no idea of what would transpire once I got in the back door of the parsonage. All I knew was that Tituba told fortunes. And that I wanted to know if William would be coming back to us. Or was he lost, forever, at sea.

William, my beloved older brother, who was always laughing, always bringing joy into the house and lovely trinkets back from his travels for my sister, Mary, and me. Coral shells, books, even bolts of silk from France or England, in colors no one ever saw in these parts. And that one could not get, even in Boston.

I could no longer bear not knowing about William. If, indeed, God was busy elsewhere and did not have time to reveal Himself to the folk of Salem Village, then I would have to satisfy my yearnings by whatever means I could, until He turned His face to us again.

I did not know at that time that the only face I would help bring close to us in Salem, by satisfying my yearnings, was not God's but the Devil's.

JOHN INDIAN DID
not seem surprised to see me. He went right on chopping wood as I approached.

"Wonderin' how long it would be before you came over to visit, little missy," he said.

I hugged my cloak about me. He was a tall man, and I stared. I had never been this close to a blackamoor. I knew they worked in the best houses in Boston. Ships often came into Boston Harbor carrying their human cargo, having first brought rum to the slave traders on the coast of Africa and bartered it for blackamoors. Or sometimes they brought the slaves to the great plantations of the West Indies and traded them for sugar and molasses, which they would then bring home to make into more rum.

"You knew I was out there?" I asked.

"See you all the time." He gave a gentle laugh. "Pondered on when you would walk over. Told Tituba, 'There's a child out there wants in.' Why don't you come with the others, missy?"

"They won't allow it."

"If we waited all our lives to do what was allowed, we would never do anything, now, would we?"

Strange talk for a slave. But he seemed like so much more. His speech was perfect. Surely they weren't all like him. His shirt was bursting its buttons from his exertions, and the gray woolen doublet seemed tight, as if his tawny brown flesh would break free at any moment.

He set aside the ax and picked up a clay pipe. Smoke from the pipe curled over his head as he considered me. I kept my eyes on the bit of bright red fabric that stuck out of his pocket. We didn't see much color in these parts. All frippery in dress was forbidden. And color was frippery.

Why, the whole village was now shunning Bridget Bishop because she had made herself a red bodice.

"Where did you learn to speak the king's English so well?" I asked.

He laughed. "I don't credit the king for it, child. 'Twas my former master taught me. I was born and raised on a plantation in the West Indies. Met my Tituba there."

Yes, I decided, the West Indian place of birth would account for his good diction, his musical manner of speech.

"But my master's luck went bad. We were far up on inland waters, you see. Our overseer, who had dealings with ships' captains, told my master that pirates had plundered many of his cargoes. Truth was, our overseer was in league with the captains, stealing the profits. My master's health went bad. Debts mounted. His wife ran off with the overseer. My master had to sell off his slaves. The Reverend Parris bought me and Tituba."

I absorbed all this in silence.

"You look cold, child. Did you come to see Tituba, now? Or just to stare at me?"

I blushed, for I had been staring in a manner that was most unseemly.

"You have no blackamoors at your house?" he asked.

"My father doesn't abide the slave trade. He refuses to traffic in human souls."

He nodded, while puffing the pipe. "Your father is a good man. Have you no servants?"

"We have fifteen servants."

"Fifteen!" He mused. "Your father must be a wealthy man."

"He brought many from the Isle of Jersey, where his father came from," I explained. "His forebears took refuge there when they fled France. My father brings many servants across the water so they can gain entrance to this land. The men work four years and the women seven, to pay for their passage. Then they are free. May I see Tituba now, please?"

He laughed again. "You want your fortune told? Like the others?"

"I would meet with her," I said. "Would she see me when the others leave? Will they let her speak to me?"

"They do not tell Tituba what to do. No one tells Tituba what to do. I told her it will bring trouble to us all if the reverend finds out about her fortune-telling. She only laughs. Why don't you come into the back passageway, child, and wait? It's much warmer there, and I can smuggle a cup of tea out to you."