The Witches: Salem, 1692 Part 3

Everyone was guilty in this provocation, lectured Lawson. And everyone should apply himself to solemn self-examination. All the villagers-not only those jolted awake in the electrifying presence of the bewitched-were to search their hearts and embrace their faith. A legion of devils should be met with a mult.i.tude of prayers. Lawson's lyrics were soothing but his melody martial: Satan had descended, armed, among them. As he mustered his troops, the villagers were to prepare for spiritual warfare. They should a.s.sume every piece of G.o.dly armor; this was a trial greater than any they had faced. They must and should be afraid. At the same time, Lawson begged the justices to do all in their power to "check and rebuke Satan." They should prove "the terror to and punishment of evil-doers." Glancing off the question of whether Satan might borrow the shape of an innocent, he called for a vigorous investigation and a firm prosecution.

Solemn self-examining may have transpired over the next days but so did plenty of biting and devouring. That Thursday Martha Corey's husband admitted to a town minister that he suspected his wife of witchcraft. Corey was the third husband to suggest the woman to whom he was married was a witch. Rebecca Nurse-whose husband alone did not step forward-continued to torture Ann Putnam Jr., flaying her for thirty minutes with an invisible chain. Tender, ringed welts rose across the twelve-year-old's skin. Little was discussed in and around the village that week besides the Nurse testimony, the Lawson sermon, and the arrest of Dorothy, Sarah Good's daughter. Both Lawson and the senior town minister, John Higginson, accompanied Hathorne and Corwin to prison to examine the child. She had demonstrated a remarkable ability to cripple with a glance, a feat she managed even while several men held her head in place. Dorothy confessed that she too had a familiar, a little snake that nursed at the lowest joint of her index finger. Holding out her hand, she displayed a red spot about the size of a fleabite. Had the black man given her the snake? the justices asked. Not at all, replied the five-year-old, who was to spend the next nine months dragging herself about in heavy irons. Her mother had.

Amid the "terror, amazement, and astonishment," Lawson entreated all to sympathy and compa.s.sion on March 24. While the two ministers conferred closely, while they invoked similar imagery, Parris delivered a different message in the meetinghouse three days later. That Sunday he tangled with a definition of who precisely the devil was. He could be a wicked angel or spirit, the prince of evil spirits, or simply "vile and wicked persons, the worst of such, who for their villainy and impiety do most resemble devils and wicked spirits." Where Lawson invoked Job, Parris favored Judas. He took as his text John 6:70; as there had been a devil among the disciples, so, too, were there devils "here in Christ's little church." He was vehement to the point of accusatory. "One of you is a devil," Parris lectured his tense congregants, making a singular leap and arriving at an exclusionary, door-closing extreme. It provoked an immediate echo. "We are either saints or devils; the Scripture gives us no medium," Parris preached. He dispelled any doubts that had begun to crystallize around another question too. Hathorne remained perplexed as to whether the devil could a.s.sume an innocent's form, but the minister was certain: he could not. Parris drew no distinction between those who covenanted with Satan and those whose bodies he appropriated.

The remarks were pointed, transparently so to some. No sooner had Parris announced his text-"Jesus answered them, 'Have not I chosen you twelve, and one of you is a devil?'"-than forty-four-year-old Sarah Cloyce rose and stormed out of the meetinghouse. To the amazement of the congregation, she either slammed the outer door behind her or left the wind to do so. The heavy door banged shut, its metal latch grating. She would miss Mary Sibley's tearful confession that afternoon but had already heard enough; Cloyce was Rebecca Nurse's much younger sister. Her husband had joined the Nurse delegation. All eyes followed her, although it would be three weeks before anyone connected the conspiratorial hints in Parris's sermon with her exit. And while many villagers understood her to have stomped off in rage, only one sharp-eyed eleven-year-old saw Cloyce curtsy to the devil just outside the meetinghouse entry.

A few misgivings surfaced before Lawson left the village. Probably on the morning of March 25, John Procter, a sixty-year-old tavern owner and farmer, fell into conversation with Mary Sibley's husband. Procter stopped for a drink on his way into town to pick up his maid, Mary Warren, who would become one of the more unusual witnesses for the prosecution. A straight shooter, earnest and forthright, Procter had no patience for either the inquest or the afflictions. He would rather have paid Mary, he roared, than allow her to attend a hearing. Why did he rail so? Sibley asked. Mary had suffered fits too, Procter explained, but he had handily dispensed with them. He had kept her at her spinning wheel and threatened to beat her if she misbehaved again. Only in his absence had she started all over with her nonsense. He intended now to "thresh the devil out of her." (He partly succeeded. Mary soon suggested that the girls were acting.) Were the malingerers to continue, Procter informed his startled friend, they would all wind up charged with witchcraft. The girls should hang! Dutifully Sibley reported every word of that rant to their minister.

The morning after Sarah Cloyce's resounding exit, Rebecca Nurse's son-in-law Jonathan Tarbell headed to the Thomas Putnams. He had a number of questions for the women of the house. By this point, interrogations and accounts of interrogations were so frequent in Salem village it is difficult to believe dinner appeared regularly on the table. In a household crowded with well-wishers and small children, Tarbell asked the Putnams: Had Ann Jr. been the first to name his mother-in-law? The girl had after all initially noted only that her tormentor was the pallid woman in her grandmother's pew. She could not identify her. Mercy Lewis, the maid who had struck the specter on Ann Jr.'s behalf, confirmed that Ann Sr. had first named Rebecca Nurse. Ann Sr. claimed Mercy had done so. No one seemed willing to a.s.sume responsibility, thirty-eight-year-old Tarbell reported. The same day a group of young men discussed new allegations over drinks at Ingersoll's. Several afflicted girls were on hand. Suddenly one cried out that Procter's wife, Elizabeth, was in the room. She was a witch. She deserved to hang! Objecting that he could see nothing, a man accused the youngster of lying. Ingersoll's wife reprimanded her as well; this was no laughing matter. The teenager conceded she had misspoken, with a heavy admission: she did it for "sport, they must have some sport." The same day two young men helping to care for the bewitched Putnams claimed they overheard the family putting words in nineteen-year-old Mercy Lewis's mouth.

Lawson returned to Boston soon thereafter to write up his notes on the diabolical descent. He missed the fast of March 31, a Thursday the farmers spent in prayer for the afflicted. Over the next month accusations flew throughout and beyond the village, their tempo accelerating wildly. Five witches were accused in March. Twenty-five would be accused in April. The next hearing would be conducted by a Boston magistrate before a larger crowd in Salem town's more comfortable meetinghouse. Among the first of the new arrests were Sarah Cloyce and Elizabeth Procter.

LAWSON'S ACCOUNT OF the Salem witches was published nearly as soon as he finished it, on April 5. The rush to narrative was not solely the work of an enterprising bookseller, although Benjamin Harris was very much that. (He billed the ten-page pamphlet as an account of "the mysterious a.s.saults from h.e.l.l.") The rush to narrative was a Puritan proclivity, the reflex of a logic-loving, literal-minded people, questing and causation-obsessed. Scripture provided the bedrock of New England law and served as its fundamental text; all answers could be found there. You fortified yourself, restored and refreshed yourself with those pa.s.sages, familiar to all; at a moral or practical crossroads, you might turn to a page at random. At the same time, G.o.d was silent and maddeningly inscrutable. To discern his will, to decode his purpose, was the lifework of a Puritan, who grappled with the terrible, impenetrable riddle at the heart of his faith: One was selected before birth for salvation or d.a.m.nation; to which camp did one belong? That puzzle left the Puritan on edge, inwardly focused, worrying his way through the world. Long before Lawson's March instructions, he was an ardent, unsparing observer, a compulsive self-examiner.

Watching stood at the heart of the enterprise, whether that meant scanning the heavens, scouring the self, or scrutinizing the neighbors. The word figured in all church covenants. The minister was himself a seer and watchman. Together paris.h.i.+oners joined in "holy watchfulness" over one another. Very little went unnoticed, as the couple who had a child five months after their marriage inevitably discovered. There was every reason the villagers should have scoffed at the a.s.sertion that a s.h.i.+p could dock undetected in Salem town. All was supervised; in addition to fence viewers and wheat surveyors, every community supported a surveillance team in its t.i.thing men. The t.i.thing man monitored families and taverns, where he intervened if liquor ran too freely. (He risked attack by chair and andiron.) He served as tax collector and moral guardian, enforcer and informer. He was to examine anyone out after ten p.m. He encouraged catechism at home and confiscated flying walnuts at meetings. He watched for Indians and, on Sundays, for delinquent paris.h.i.+oners. The town watch was itself watched, twice a week. One could never be too sure, as an insecure people perched on the uncomfortable edge of an unpredictable wilderness-squinting into the murk of their parlors, through the woods, into their uncooperative souls-well knew.

Salvation depended on communal virtue, the reason that Mary Sibley and Ezekiel Cheever offered apologies to the village as a whole and the reason that hesitating to identify a witch might seem tantamount to abetting the devil. "If the neighbor of an elected saint sins, then the saint sins also," Mather reminded his congregants. As a result you wound up intimately acquainted with your neighbor's wardrobe, feuds, temper, inheritance, and idiosyncrasies, as well as the state of his cider supply and the brand on his cow's ear. No one was monitored as closely as the children, whose moral well-being was not yet a.s.sured and seemed at times distinctly improbable. The surveillance was not always malignant. Had a pa.s.serby not peered into the Mathers' Boston windows one autumn evening, he might not have noticed the daughter whose bonnet had caught fire and who, alone at home, would seconds later have been consumed by flames.*

The Ma.s.sachusetts Puritan also knew-or devoutly hoped-that he was being watched. If you inhabited a city on a hill, by definition you stood onstage. That gaze did not discomfort the settlers. It made them-in the words of former deputy president William Stoughton, who helped the colony define itself and would soon define Salem witchcraft-a civilization of which great things were expected. "If any people in the world have been lifted up to heaven as to advantages and privileges," Stoughton proclaimed, "we are the people." That was one way to put it. A modern historian suggested a less exalted one. Having traveled three thousand miles, New Englanders "had willingly risked life and property to come to the wilderness so they could sit on benches in drafty, gloomy barns for three to six hours on Sundays hearing the Word as it should be preached." The combination was in other words ideal. The Puritan was wary and watchful. His faith kept him off balance and on guard. And if you intended to live in a state of nerve-racking insecurity, in expectation of ambush and meteorological rebuke-on the watch for every brand of intruder, from the "ravening wolves of heresy" to the "wild boars of tyranny," as a 1694 narrative had it-seventeenth-century Ma.s.sachusetts, that rude and howling wilderness, was the place for you.

So far as what Mather in March termed "fiery rebukes from heaven" went, the Lord had amply delivered. Since the Puritans' 1630 arrival, the Almighty had sent them immoderate rains and blasting mildew, caterpillars and gra.s.shoppers, drought, smallpox, and fire. For several decades he had spoken only with displeasure. Over the first two generations, the colonists had a.s.sumed a de facto independence from England, which in 1684 had led King Charles II to revoke their charter, a doc.u.ment of near-sacred status; decades of prosperity came to a shuddering halt. The settlers had been refractory and disruptive, coining their own money, ignoring the Navigation Acts, oppressing Quakers. They seemed to believe the laws of England did not extend across an ocean; they had taken it upon themselves to found a self-governing republic while no one was looking. Several years later, the Crown imposed a royal governor on Ma.s.sachusetts to address the settlers' irregularities, resolve "the petty differences and animosities" among the colonial administrations, and coordinate defenses. When Edmund Andros arrived to head up a Dominion government in 1686, he exercised absolute authority over all territory from Maine to New Jersey. He curtailed town meetings and abolished the Ma.s.sachusetts legislature. He threw Puritan hegemony and land claims into question-and left a Boston congregation to wait outdoors for several hours, in March, while he appropriated their meetinghouse for an Anglican service. To many New Englanders, he qualified as both a wolf of heresy and a boar of tyranny.

In March 1689 the uniformed Andros pa.s.sed through Salem with a large retinue. Throwing down the gauntlet, he asked John Higginson, the town's vigorous senior minister, if all the land in New England did not rightfully belong to the king. His conversation described as "a glimpse of heaven," Higginson was too tactful a man to gratify his visitor with an answer. He replied that he could speak only as a curate; Andros had broached a matter of state. That was all the more reason he should like an answer, persisted the iron-fisted governor. Higginson allowed as how he felt the lands belonged to those who occupied them and who had bartered with the Indians for them. At great expense to themselves, over two generations, the settlers had subdued a wasteland. They had tamed what an early visitor termed a "remote, rocky, barren, bushy, wild-woody wilderness." The Salem minister and the royal governor went back and forth for some time, weighing the laws of G.o.d and Englishmen. The king, Higginson argued, had had no stake in North American lands before the settlers arrived. At which Andros exploded, positing another binary choice, if eighty-seven years prematurely: "Either you are subjects or you are rebels."

Andros lasted until April of 1689, when the colonists removed him in a military coup. Instigated by the Boston ministers, it was led by many of the men who would exterminate witches three years later. Even before that revolt Increase Mather had secretly sailed to London-he narrowly avoided arrest-to clarify the colony's grievances and plead for a new charter. The negotiation took the better part of three years, during which time Ma.s.sachusetts knew no political authority. Only in April 1692 was it emerging from what Topsfield's minister called its "fears and troubles." A disgruntled official was not wrong when he noted that Ma.s.sachusetts was as close to establis.h.i.+ng a viable government as it was to building the Tower of Babel; civil affairs remained in a shambles. There was much fear that a royal punishment was forthcoming, that Anglicanism would be imposed. Ma.s.sachusetts felt acutely vulnerable, the more so as Bay Colony calamities registered as verdicts. Each time G.o.d frowned-whether in the form of a hailstorm, plague, overbearing English officials, or witchcraft-he was a.s.sumed to do so for a reason.

The settlers watched then for many things in 1692 besides marauding Indians and nonphantom Frenchmen. They watched for a charter that would restore their rights and for the return of the indispensable, accomplished Mather. They watched for an explanation of and a deliverance from their misery. For some time, Cotton Mather and others had been on the lookout as well for the Second Coming. Given the calamities that had visited New England, it felt imminent. Witchcraft in Salem further proved that time was short; Mather calculated the golden age to be five years in the future. His exact.i.tude points up another feature of the seventeenth-century mind. Described as "that strange agglomeration of incongruities," it consisted of a crazy quilt of erudition and superst.i.tion.* The natural bordered on the supernatural-one eminent minister received the news that his wife had given birth not from the midwife but from the Lord-as medicine blurred into astrology, science into nonsense.

Plenty of clergymen dabbled in alchemy while inveighing against the occult; popular magic was one thing, elite magic another. A great deal of bet-hedging and base-covering went on; just because you were eminently pious did not mean you hesitated to serve up a witch cake. Like any people under a sentence of predestination, the Puritans developed an obsession with fortune-telling. Almanacs sold briskly, offering astrological wisdoms.* Harvard's 1683 commencement was postponed due to an eclipse. By any account the Puritans were very far from kitchen-sink realism; G.o.d spoke to them in rolls of thunder, in what sounds like dragon smoke, in glittering comets. It said something about Samuel Sewall that where others looked for heaven's artillery, Sewall, whose brother had taken in little Betty Parris, kept particularly close track of rainbows-comforting rainbows, n.o.ble rainbows, perfect rainbows, a rainbow directly out of the book of Revelation. Sewall installed angel-head carvings on the gate before his home as protective cover. In the anxious murk, religion sometimes seemed a kind of halfway house between reason and superst.i.tion.

The Bay Colony may have const.i.tuted the best-educated community in the history of the world before 1692. Rarely have so many been able to pa.r.s.e a sentence in the presence of so few books. The majority of adolescent girls in Salem village could read, even if they could not sign their names. (Ann Putnam Jr. numbered among the few who could.) Theirs was also a society in which the most literate happened to be the most literal. The New England clergy collected proofs of the supernatural in part to fend off the surging forces of rationalism. Increase Mather had harvested prodigies and portents in his 1684 Ill.u.s.trious Providences, the precursor to his son's Memorable Providences, the pulpy volume through which news of the Swedish flight and satanic rescue reached New England. A grab bag of apparitions, possessions, earthquakes, s.h.i.+pwrecks, and flying candlesticks, Ill.u.s.trious Providences was a stunning hybrid of folklore and erudition, produced to satisfy the ministers who in 1681 requested a collection of "prodigious witchcrafts, diabolical possessions, remarkable judgments." Those "native wonder tales" served a political purpose, reaffirming G.o.d's commitment to the New England mission in the face of royal incursions.

The Puritan overlooked nothing by way of sign or symbol. When he headed into the marsh with a gun to hunt waterfowl for dinner and his best pig followed him, it meant something. The fury of hailstones that would shatter Sewall's new kitchen windows delivered a providential message. (Mather a.s.sured his disconsolate friend that the damage was Apocalypse practice.) The thirst for meaning introduced an obsession with causality; explanations were a regular feature of Puritan life. A comet was never simply a comet. A burn in the linen was ripe with meaning. As the Goodwin children twisted and writhed, their father naturally a.s.sumed he was being punished for his sins. If Parris read a rebuke in his convulsing children he did not say so publicly. It was the obvious conclusion, however. Cotton Mather would infer as much when another daughter-the Mather home was a dangerous place-fell into the fire.

Human frailty was thought to account for inclement weather; teeth chattering, toes numb, the Ma.s.sachusetts Puritan had every reason to believe he sinned flamboyantly. Immoderate behavior claimed a fair number of casualties; Increase Mather suggested that King Philip's War followed from excessive silk-and wig-wearing. A Connecticut cleric wrote down his widowhood to the fact that he had too much enjoyed s.e.x with his wife. Others attributed the deaths of children to their outsize affections for them. Negligence const.i.tuted the workhorse of explanations, especially for a generation convinced of its inferiority. They were not the pious men their fathers had been; the idyllic age was behind them. The Cambridge minister who went hoa.r.s.e was being chastised for his poor preaching. Was his left knee lame, Increase Mather wondered, in the thirty-fourth year of his sixty-four-year ministry, as witches began to fly through the air, because he had been insufficiently diligent in his service to G.o.d? (He spent no fewer than sixteen of every twenty-four hours in his study.) One could not be too careful; Cotton Mather accidentally omitted a daughter's name from his morning prayer. He finished to discover that an hour earlier the child's nurse had accidentally suffocated her. When in 1690 Samuel Parris attributed New England's suffering to lapses in family devotions, he took the problem to a Cambridge ministers' meeting. The solution was simple: the Ma.s.sachusetts clergymen were to do their utmost to call on each of their paris.h.i.+oners to "inquire, instruct, advise, warn, and charge, according to the circ.u.mstances of the families."

The full-scale embrace of causality sent the Puritan in two seemingly opposite directions. On the one hand it made of him an enthusiastic litigant. Prior to the 1690s, there were no lawyers in the Bay Colony. There were no accidents either. Every conceivable offense found its way to court, as, it seemed, did most Ma.s.sachusetts residents, seduced by the irresistible idea-when things fall apart, disappoint, go awry or astray-that someone, somewhere, must be to blame.* (Much of what we know about the upright Salem villagers comes from the court records, a catalog of their misdeeds. It is at once a dazzling compendium of major and minor infractions and a tribute to a hypertrophied faith in reason.) The residents of seventeenth-century Ma.s.sachusetts were not more given to transgression than others, only more in love with justice. Even when they rewrote the official record, they remained ledger-keepers and score-settlers. A testifying people whose salvation depended on a public confession, they made for natural witnesses. There seemed never to be a shortage of volunteers to report on what had been said, or what they had heard had been said a generation earlier. Mutual surveillance could sound like something else altogether in the courtroom. What Cotton Mather had in mind when he exhorted his congregation in 1692 to remain one another's eagle-eyed guardians was probably not what William Cantlebery's wife had in mind when-standing in a tree-she invited a friend to join her in spying on the neighbor who shoved Cantlebery off her property, pelting him with a rain of objects.

Vigilant though the settlers were, many things went missing, from mares to fences to virtue. Debt and drunkenness were the popular legal favorites, but trespa.s.s in all its forms came close behind. That was unsurprising when land grants were defined as "beginning at a stump and running east four rods, to a stake" or bounded "easterly to a tree 'pretty big' either black oak or yellow oak, upon a ridge by the highway." Even where borders were exact, livestock chose not to respect them. Freewheeling New England pigs sowed havoc for generations; the neighbor's swine seemed perpetually to be rooting in the peas. Serene Rebecca Nurse had erupted in fury one Sat.u.r.day morning when the next-door neighbor's pigs turned up in her garden. She had called to her son to bring his gun. (It would not help her case that the pig owner died soon thereafter.) When Parris pet.i.tioned the village to repair his rotten, decomposing fence, he described it as a "make-bait" between himself and his neighbors. Every spring his livestock ventured to their side, their hogs, cows, and sheep to his. Year in and year out, Salem discussed the minister's pasture fence, which-joining fears of impiety, famine, and invasion-crammed the New England conundrum into a three-word nutsh.e.l.l.

Locks do not appear to have functioned in seventeenth-century Ma.s.sachusetts, where all kinds of boundaries were trampled and thresholds penetrated. The Salem villagers had every reason to advertise their wives' fears when left alone; a woman risked a.s.sault from a visiting neighbor when her husband descended to the cellar for more cider. Consciously and not, men slipped into beds not their own. (It is interesting that spectral women so frequently disturbed men in their beds throughout 1692 when in the visible world the opposite occurred with some frequency.) Dark barns proved especially perilous places. The candle knocked from her hand, a Newbury girl informed the a.s.sailant who lured her into the stable that "she would as soon be gored by the cows as to be defiled by such a rogue as he." There was a conflagrative nature to those complaints; angry words between two parties regularly begat angrier exchanges among their relatives, who handed them down, intact and still smoldering, from one generation to the next. In such a way the Putnams' feud with several Topsfield families had gathered legendary force over the decades; Rebecca Nurse's family and the Putnams had sued and countersued each other in an epic land dispute. The courts functioned efficiently, with English procedures and remarkable speed. Prison sentences were rare. The workforce beckoned, as did redemption-or a renewed court case.

While the punishments were highly original, the catalog of offenses was less so. Servants suffered regular verbal and physical abuse. They sought revenge by raiding the cellar, stealing the kettle, or planting stones in beds. Before running away with his master's shoes and horse, one servant informed his mistress she was "an ordinary wh.o.r.e, burnt-tail b.i.t.c.h and hopping toad." Few were as creative as the girl who slipped the toad into the milk pitcher. Hauled into court over and over-he had an irritating Quaker habit of working, and requiring his help to work, on the Sabbath (he was spotted through a shop window)-Salem merchant Thomas Maule landed there in 1681 for abuse of his maid. He had taken to delivering thirty or forty lashes with a horsewhip to her naked back. She spat blood for two weeks. Why did he so cruelly beat the girl, he was asked, when he could just as easily have sold her? "Because she was a good servant," explained Maule, who largely sat out the events of 1692 but did not mince words afterward.

What a court could not always do was make sense of things. Sometimes, in the headlong pursuit of reason, the best explanation turned out to be the otherworldly one. Sometimes, the most eminent of New England ministers collectively pointed out, it was the only explanation. Certainly it was the most versatile. One husband blamed his impotence on witches in the woods outside. If Sarah Good had not enchanted them, how to construe the death of those village cattle? Witchcraft tied up loose ends, accounting for the arbitrary, the eerie, and the unneighborly. As Samuel Parris was discovering, it deflected divine judgment and dissolved personal responsibility. The devil not only provided a holiday from reason but expressed himself clearly; for all their perversity, his motives made sense. You did not need to ask what you had done to deserve his disfavor, preferable to celestial rebuke-or indifference. And when diabolical machinations were what you were watching for, they quickly became what you saw. Amid glaring accountability, witchcraft broke up logical logjams. It ratified grudges, neutralized slights, relieved anxiety. It offered an airtight explanation when, literally, all h.e.l.l broke loose.

NO ONE IN Salem village lived alone. But suddenly-after Deodat Lawson's alarm and Parris's inflammatory sermon-they seemed less alone than ever. A riot of shadowy sightings followed. On the evening of April 6, Parris reported, John Procter visited the parsonage to attack his niece. He inflicted similar punishments at the Putnam household. The same Wednesday, several miles off, a twenty-five-year-old farmer named Ben Gould woke to find Giles and Martha Corey standing by his bed. They delivered two sharp pinches to his side and returned the following night, Procter in tow. For several days Gould could not fit a shoe to his foot for the pain. He was the first in what would be a series of young male accusers. Men now practiced witchcraft on other men, although they tended not to a.s.sault one another in the presence of justices. Nor did they fend off invisible specters in public a.s.semblies, with one notable exception. Parris's April 10 sermon was interrupted by John Indian, the parsonage slave. John was as aware as anyone that t.i.tuba had now been in prison for five weeks. The spectral Sarah Cloyce descended on him as he sat in his pew; she sank her teeth into him with such force that she drew blood. She a.s.saulted eleven-year-old Abigail as well. Following the sermon, the Putnams' maid convulsed again at Ingersoll's. When she returned to her senses, she could not identify her afflicter. A roll call of suspects was submitted; the same names were on all minds. Had the witch been ancient Rebecca Nurse? Or straight-spined Martha Corey? Sarah Cloyce seemed a safe choice, the warrant having already gone out for her arrest. Twenty-five miles away, in Boston, Cotton Mather that day exhorted his congregants to shake off their sinful sleep, to watch against the devil, for the coming of the Lord, as the "stupendious revolution" was near.

Word of the preternatural events in Salem reached Boston through a variety of channels. Either because Hathorne and Corwin felt they needed reinforcements, because those reinforcements felt compelled to investigate the curious matter for themselves, or because for the first time a male suspect was to take the stand, acting deputy governor Thomas Danforth traveled to Salem to conduct the April 11 preliminary hearing. With him rode a host of officials, including Boston judge and merchant Samuel Sewall. Among the colony's most eminent public servants, sixty-nine-year-old Danforth had for decades tended to Harvard's survival as the university's treasurer and steward. He served simultaneously in the Ma.s.sachusetts legislature. He had fought to defend the colony's lost charter and partic.i.p.ated in the Andros coup. He cut an impressive figure. For some of the same reasons that brought him to Salem, the April hearing was moved to the less rustic, better-lit town meetinghouse, nearly twice the size of the village one, with an extensive, newly built gallery and stylish boxed pews.

Danforth appointed Parris court clerk that Monday, leaving the minister to record his slave's account of events that had taken place in his own home. Parris struggled to keep up. The words regularly came too quickly for the Salem recorders. With quill and ink wholly unsuited to the fast-paced, stereophonic scene, they leaped from direct quotes to paraphrase, from unidentified voices in the courtroom to specters, half noting the changes of speakers as they did so. The blots on the page testify to their labor; it was not easy to keep the ink flowing. They corrected themselves as they went. They summarized and editorialized. (For Parris, the fits before them could be "dreadful," "extreme," "horrible," "miserable," or "grievous.") Thomas Putnam beefed up depositions after the fact. It was sometimes easier to rest their pens, to state that the defendant said nothing worth repeating, that the witchcraft was altogether obvious, that the testimony amounted to a ma.s.s of lies and contradictions. The clerks noted what they deemed most significant (impertinence, laughter, dry eyes), omitting what they deemed insignificant (denials). The logic of accusations tended to win out over the illogic of alibis. What wound up on the page was not always what the reporter heard but what he remembered or believed; few would prove as fastidious as he had been with t.i.tuba. On April 11, amid the restive crowd, Parris could not always hear or see. Errors crept into his transcripts.

Thomas Danforth orchestrated a sort of chorus, with each of the afflicted-three adult women joined the girls-chiming in. Certain truths emerged quickly. First Elizabeth Procter and later Sarah Cloyce had visited John at the parsonage, pinching and biting him in broad daylight, choking the slave to within an inch of his life, insisting he sign their book. A far more imposing figure, Danforth proceeded less harshly than Hathorne. He had dismissed a 1659 witchcraft case, twice overturning the verdict of the jury. He wanted now to be certain: Did John Indian recognize his two tormentors? Indeed he did, replied the slave, indicating one of them, Sarah Cloyce, standing as if spotlit at the front of the room. Cloyce had known her share of misery; she had fled an Indian raid and spent years in poverty as the widowed mother of five. Her life had been far more difficult than that of her older sister, Rebecca Nurse. "When did I hurt thee?" she protested. "A great many times," John rejoined. "Oh, you are a grievous liar!" cried Cloyce.

Cloyce's hearing proceeded more tautly than her sister's, which she had almost certainly attended. The girls did the bulk of the talking. "Abigail Williams!" Danforth called, having been briefed in advance. "Did you see a company at Mr. Parris's house eat and drink?" The first to use the word, she replied: "Yes, Sir, that was their sacrament." A devil's Sabbath had taken place the day of the public fast. Cloyce and Good served as deacons at that service, held just behind the parsonage. For the second time, details of the diabolical meeting issued from the minister's household; over and over, Parris was to hear of witches congregating just outside his home, an idea that may have b.u.t.tressed his position in the community-it pointed up his righteousness-or shamed him. In either event, he had cause to flinch at this sudden interest in his overrun, underfenced pasture. A white man before whom all the witches trembled presided. Abigail supplied a detail more disturbing than even the blood-drinking: there had been some forty witches in attendance! At this juncture Cloyce asked for water, collapsing into her seat "as one seized with a dying fainting fit," noted Parris. It was ten years to the day since the disgruntled Salem potter had warned that the village would never amount to a town if its inhabitants did not desist from their quarreling.

Danforth turned next to forty-one-year-old Elizabeth Procter, newly pregnant with her sixth child, a fact of which she may not yet have been aware. Here the magistrate ran into difficulties. One of the girls protested that she had never seen Elizabeth before. Two were struck dumb. Asked if Elizabeth afflicted her, Parris's niece plunged her fist into her mouth. The doctor's niece fell into a long trance. The girls had either lost their thread or succ.u.mbed to a greater power. Danforth may have intimidated them; the father of twelve, he knew how to speak to a child. John Indian alone obliged him. Scantily clad, Elizabeth Procter had, John revealed, choked him. Twice Danforth asked if he was certain of her ident.i.ty. John was. Gradually most of the girls rallied, supplying additional details of Elizabeth's demonic book.

It was probably at that point-the words flew from every side-that Parris's niece and Ann Putnam Jr. reached out to strike the accused. Abigail's fist magically unclenched in midair. As the tips of her fingers brushed the older woman's hood, she howled in pain. They were scorched! When not in fits the two took over for John, directing the room's attention. The girls would announce: "Look to her! She will have a fit presently"-as the bewitched would. At other times they warned, "We shall all fall!" and seven or eight girls would collapse, raving, to the floor. For their predictive power the eleven-and twelve-year-old were soon dubbed the "visionary girls." They pointed to the meetinghouse beam: Elizabeth Procter, the wizard's wife, balanced there. And soon enough, they cautioned, Procter-who had p.r.o.nounced their claims pure nonsense-would make the m.u.f.f-throwing Bathshua Pope levitate. At precisely that moment Pope's feet rose from the floor. What did he say to this, Danforth demanded of John Procter, suddenly on trial. He barely had time to reply when Abigail pointed to two older women. Procter was on the verge of attacking them, she cried as both began to twist in pain. "You see the devil will deceive you," Danforth warned the accidental suspect. "The children could see what you were going to do before the woman was hurt." He strongly advised repentance; Satan toyed with him. "Woe, woe, woe," Boston magistrate Samuel Sewall noted in his diary that evening, in Latin, the language to which he reverted for delicate matters, like the l.u.s.tful dream about his wife or his father-in-law's criticisms. Only later did he add the loaded word "witchcraft" to the line.

Procter singlehandedly attempted to restore some sanity. Brusque if genial, he was of Danforth's generation. The mother of five of his eleven children, Elizabeth, his much younger wife, a.s.sisted with the couple's tavern. They owned as well a seven-hundred-acre farm. Procter lost no time in informing all who would listen-including the husband of the woman whom he had caused to levitate-that if Parris would allow him a few minutes with John Indian, "he would soon beat the devil out of him." It was the same bl.u.s.tery note he had sounded earlier. The threat could not have been welcome to Parris, well beyond the point where he believed devils could be thrashed away. At least a few others shared Procter's opinion. A Salem farmer named Edward Bishop returned John Indian to the village late that afternoon on horseback. The slave fell into a violent fit. Lurching forward, he bit the rider before him, holding on with his teeth alone. Bishop struck him with a stick, lifting the spell. John promised it would not happen again. Bishop heartily a.s.sured him it would not, vowing in such a way to cure all the bewitched.

The following morning found Parris in the town meetinghouse attempting, in his tight, precise hand, to draft a faithful record of the previous day's astonishments. He met with nothing but interruptions. John and Abigail roared and twisted around him. Mary Walcott, the Putnam maid, sat calmly knitting nearby, though went gla.s.sy-eyed for stretches at a time. Emerging from a trance, the sixteen-year-old confirmed what Abigail abruptly a.s.serted: John Procter sat in the marshal's lap! John Indian corrected her: Procter sat astride the minister's dog under the very table at which Parris expanded on his courtroom shorthand. John coaxed the animal-presumably the witch-cake eater-out from under the refectory table. He then cried to an invisible Sarah Cloyce "Oh you old witch!" before convulsing so wildly that four men could not calm him. Still at her knitting, Mary Walcott casually looked up to note that the Procters and Cloyce together tortured the Indian. John and Abigail were carried off. Mary remained behind as Parris read his account to the marshal. As he finished, she pointed across the room, knitting in hand: the entire coven-Good, the Procters, Nurse, Corey, Cloyce, Good's daughter-had a.s.sembled. Everyone she named sailed to the Boston prison that day, including Procter, who may have wound up incarcerated without first having been arrested. Giles Corey rode with Martha as far as the Salem ferry but could continue no farther. He did not have the money to cross. He vowed to join his wife the following week, a promise on which he could not make good. He too would be in custody Monday.

Various ground rules had begun to emerge, some of them unprecedented. Witches could be male or female, itinerant beggars or prosperous farmers, young or old, full church members or outsiders. As Giles Corey would discover, expressing sympathy for a convicted spouse-even one whom you had previously maligned-was imprudent. Implicating one was more acceptable; William Good never found himself on trial. The skeptic was a marked man. Having observed both the accused witches and the accusers at closer range than anyone other than the Parrises, John Indian may have reasoned that it was wise to name names before anyone mentioned his. Certainly it was safer to be afflicted than accused. Suspicions ran wild over an otherwise eerily quiet week. All hung in a state of suspended stillness. Danforth's interrogation, with the girls' reports of the witches' Sabbath, had been the lightning. Now came the thunder, from which even a dog under a meetinghouse table warming his master's feet was not safe.

MORE AND MORE often, when one of the girls pointed to a specter, someone else saw it too. Vision grew sharper in Salem village. Memories improved. As early-morning swallows announced the spring, Constable Herrick rounded up four more witches; he ran himself ragged over the next days, corralling witnesses and arresting suspects. Danforth had lent a legitimacy to the proceedings but in no way altered them. The only tangible result was that, picking up where his superior had left off, Hathorne revised his opening gambit, more neutral in April than it had been in March. He may have felt he was now playing on a larger stage.

The first of four very different suspects, Giles Corey walked into the meetinghouse at eight o'clock that April morning, trailing behind him a colorful, seven-decade-long past. While the ferry-side date he had made with his wife sounded to some like demonic collusion, Corey was an obvious target for other reasons. When he had joined the Salem town congregation a year earlier, reference was made to his scandalous reputation. A half century earlier, Corey had stolen wheat, flax, tobacco, and a host of other items from a warehouse. (It belonged to the father of Justice Corwin.) Corey had fetched a canoe load of wood while he was meant to be serving watch, then lied about it in court. He had exchanged blows with the local schoolmaster whom he doused with filthy water; he had been prosecuted for brawling and disturbing the peace. In 1676 he savagely beat a thief with a stick, delivering nearly a hundred blows, pretending afterward that the disoriented young man had taken a fall. He died of his injuries within days.

Uprooting fences and threatening horses, Corey trafficked in Sarah Good's brand of spite. He warned a neighbor that if his orchard fence did not burn this year, it would the next. Either way, his trees would yield no fruit. (That neighbor happened to be the father of Corey's son-in-law. The account of the curse came from his daughter's twenty-five-year-old husband, testifying against Corey.) Another in-law reported that Corey had stolen wood, hay, carpentry tools, and twelve bushels of apples. Corey tossed a malediction at him too: the neighbor's sawmill would work no more. Over these years Corey ama.s.sed a hundred acres of farmland, a feat that even the most affable of men could not manage without sharp words and bruised egos. By all accounts-including one taken in the courtroom of Hathorne's father, who heard the a.s.sault case-he was "a very quarrelsome and contentious bad neighbor." His name surfaced regularly in connection with missing mares and dead pigs. There had long been some animus against the Coreys and something ominous about their house.

When flames had shot out of the roof of a Procter home fifteen years earlier, Corey seemed the obvious culprit. He narrowly skirted a different accusation when it was noted that the house could have burned "but by some evil hand." Corey did not address the witchcraft imputation but did prove he was in bed that evening; he was acquitted. Inevitably he sued John Procter for defamation. Procter's bluff good nature was such that when the two later met on the road, Corey hauling a load of wood, Procter teased: "How now, Giles, will thou never leave thy old trade? Thou hast got some of my wood here upon thy cart." Corey admitted as much. The two proceeded to make peace over a gla.s.s of wine, bantering and manifesting an "abundance of love," as one observer recalled. It would come in handy; the men were about to share close quarters.

Plenty of old scores surfaced at the April 19 hearing. Corey did his best to beat them away. "Which of you have seen this man hurt you?" Hathorne asked. Four girls stepped forward. Corey denied the charges. He had entered into no contract with the devil. "What temptations have you had?" Hathorne demanded. "I never had temptations in my life," scowled Corey, who took the same tack when, from the pews, came three reports that Corey had that very morning suffered a scare in his barn. "What was it frighted you?" inquired Hathorne. "I do not know that ever I spoke the word in my life," Corey rejoined, sending his accusers into paroxysms. For their protection Hathorne requested the marshal fasten Corey's hands. Was it not enough to indulge in witchcraft at other times, Hathorne reprimanded Corey, "must you do it now in the face of authority?" He seemed personally affronted. "I am a poor creature, and cannot help it" came the reply of the ornery old man, sounding-in one of the unlikeliest trans.m.u.tations that spring-suddenly sympathetic.

Hands bound, Corey did his best to explain. He had no recollection of having been frightened in the cowshed. Nor could he shed light on the green ointment with which Martha had been arrested. It came from a neighbor, whose husband, it turned out, Corey had called a "d.a.m.ned, devilish rogue." Others introduced some enduring, equally unsavory language. It seemed that Corey had at one time contemplated suicide, for which he considered framing a relative, no great surprise for someone whose in-laws testified against him in court. But you said you suffered no temptations, Hathorne needled. "I meant temptations to witchcraft," clarified Corey. "If you can give way to self-murder, that will make way to temptation to witchcraft," Hathorne scolded, rather antic.i.p.ating Corey's grisly end, if getting the terms backward.

Another suspect that Tuesday-the only one of the four to have formally faced an earlier witchcraft accusation-proved more defiant. A middle-aged resident of Salem town, probably in her early fifties, Bridget Bishop had a history of petty theft. She and a former husband had fought bitterly; she had turned up once with blood on her face, on another occasion with bruises all over her body. In 1677 she had landed in court for having called her husband an old rogue and old devil on the Sabbath; the couple had been whipped eight years earlier for the same offense. The second time both stood for an hour, gagged, back to back, on lecture day in the public market, a paper advertising their offense fastened to their foreheads. Soon thereafter Bishop's husband died under suspicious circ.u.mstances. Within eight months, at odds with her neighbors and with her stepchildren, saddled by debts, she stood trial for witchcraft. A slave had been leading his horses through the November woods when they had panicked and plunged into a freezing swamp. Astonished onlookers declared the animals enchanted. A week later, the slave walked into the barn to discover a transparent Bridget Bishop balancing on a beam. She vanished when he reached for a pitchfork.

Those visions-and the Bishops' quarrels-were well enough remembered that her accusers referred to her still as Bridget Oliver, her previous husband's name. "They say you bewitched your first husband to death," Hathorne observed, reaching back into the swirl of rumor. "If it please your wors.h.i.+p, I know nothing of it," she answered, shaking her head. Parris implied that she did so respectfully. Cheever felt she did so angrily. Given that she had fielded the same questions before, she sounds uncommonly patient. In both men's accounts, the girls jerked with each turn of her head. When she looked to the heavens for help, their eyes floated up in their sockets. Bishop contended that she knew neither the devil nor her accusers. In fact, she knew no man, woman, or child in the room, having never lived in the village. Her accusers disagreed. Putnam cousin Mary Walcott had more compelling evidence yet. When Bishop's specter descended on her, she had cried out; her brother had thrust his sword at Bishop's coat. Mary heard the fabric tear. Was there a hole in her coat? Hathorne inquired of the suspect. There was not, Bishop a.s.sured him. Hathorne ordered a search. Two corresponding rents turned up. Constable Herrick, an upholsterer when he was not apprehending witch suspects, interposed a question of his own: How had Bishop managed to slip into his bedroom one morning? (Ma.s.sachusetts witchcraft again proved itself unlike any other: she appeared there, Herrick claimed, to ask if he had any curtains to sell.) Bishop could be arch if not provocative; unwisely, she sounded a few skeptical notes. She could not say what ailed the girls, nor had she given consent for any evil spirit to parade about in her likeness. She was not a witch. She could not even say what one was. She had the bad luck to be appearing before a fine logician. "How do you know, then," countered Hathorne, "that you are not a witch?" She failed to grasp his meaning. "How can you know that you are no witch, and yet not know what a witch is?" persisted Hathorne. Bishop bristled. Were she a witch Hathorne would know of her powers, she replied. Hathorne heard the remark as a threat. He would not forget it. Did she not know that others had confessed that very day? She did not. Two men stepped forward, sputtering. They had specifically told Bishop as much! "Why look, you are taken now in a flat lie!" Hathorne berated her.

By the time Hathorne examined Bishop that Tuesday, he had struck gold with his previous two suspects. One was pretty Mary Warren, whose initial fits Procter had thrashed out of her. Hathorne attempted to do the same with the truth. Since Procter had beaten her, the two had been engaged in a steely battle. For relief from her distemper she had posted a note of grat.i.tude on the meetinghouse post, a common practice. That post functioned as a community bulletin board; it was where you learned who the new fence viewer was or who had not properly educated his children, now offered in service. The Procters were furious at the advertis.e.m.e.nt of the disorder in their home. An impulsive twenty-year-old given to outbursts of emotion, Mary also defected from her peers. She pa.s.sed in her recovery from victim to suspect, possibly accusing her friends of fraud on the way. Soon enough she would confess to witchcraft, then submit to afflictions all over again. She seemed to want all the roles to herself.

As Mary approached the bar the bewitched choked; they could not speak when Hathorne asked if Warren hurt them. Dr. Griggs's maid managed to compose herself only long enough to confirm that the older girl did so. She was joined by John Indian and Bathshua Pope, the m.u.f.f thrower. "You were a little while ago an afflicted person, now you are an afflicter: How comes this to pa.s.s?" demanded Hathorne. Mary choked and spun. She seemed uncertain herself as to which side she was on. For some time she stood entranced, then launched into a tearful, hand-wringing apology. She promised to tell all, though it remained unclear to which party she was apologizing and what she meant to tell. Each time she attempted to speak she contorted. Hathorne several times dismissed her from the room to recover; the ministers and justices finally deposed her in private.

The twenty-year-old was more forthcoming after a night in prison. The evening after she had posted her note, Elizabeth Procter had forced her from bed. She informed Mary that she was a witch-Salem witches tended to supply formal introductions and helpful exposition, presenting their credentials up front*-something that, on reflection, Mary might have surmised, given that her mistress read so much. Elizabeth owned a number of books, traveling always with one in her pocket. Mary implicated Giles Corey, whose attire she astonished her examiners by describing in detail. Corey abused her for a very earthly reason: Mary had advised her master to raise the price of a meadow Corey had hoped to buy. She described an equally vexed spiritual transaction on April 21. While resisting various prompts, she admitted that she had signed some sort of portentous tome urged on her by her employers while she drank cider at their table. Her finger had left a strange black blot on the volume. It took three days to extract those details from her; Mary cried she would be "torn in pieces" if she divulged them. Procter had indeed bullied her privately, although if he had threatened to burn her out of her fit, drown her, or run her through the hedges, as she claimed, he may have done so for non-sorcerous reasons. He had clearly banked on her discretion. He had confided in Mary that his wife exasperated him. His confidences, or that intimacy, proved a burden. Mary carried about another fear too. She had yielded to Procter's demand that she sign the book because he warned that if she did not, he would not save her in her next fit, when she tumbled into fire or water. She used precisely the terms Parris had used in describing parents dangling children before dangers only to rescue them, educating by way of false alarms.

Hathorne's second suspect that Tuesday delivered the richest rewards. The bad girl of neighboring Topsfield, fourteen-year-old Abigail Hobbs lived just over the village line. For some time she had bragged of a most un-Puritan childhood. She cavorted in the woods at night. She mocked her stepmother, who despaired of her. Several weeks earlier a friend had chided the visiting Abigail for her rudeness. Had she no shame? Hobbs directed her to hold her tongue or she would raise a ruckus. She boasted of her invincibility; she feared nothing, having sold her soul to Satan. In a t.i.tuba-inflected testimony, she edged as close to a unified theory of Salem as was to emerge. She also set off an avalanche. You knew you were making progress when the afflicted girls sat stock-still; none flinched while l.u.s.ty Abigail testified. "I will speak the truth," she began. "I have been very wicked." She had spoken with the devil. In exchange for finery, she had agreed to pinch the girls. Dogs, cats, and semi-human creatures had urged her on. She had signed several pacts, the first of them in the woods, in broad daylight-but not in Topsfield. Abigail led Hathorne to an essential address: she entered into that compact in Cas...o...b..y, eighty miles north, in the province of Maine, where she had survived an Indian raid three years earlier. She added a few names, including the mother of the Topsfield constable who had wrung the pig from the tax-withholding farmer. She lacked t.i.tuba's flair for detail but with her cat-proffered book she would do. The girls evidently thought so; only when Abigail had exhausted herself and seemed no longer able to hear did they cry out for the first time. Her eyes wide open, Abigail went blind, although she did eke out a final explanation: the beggar woman Sarah Good had silenced her.

Hathorne could only have been relieved. His hearings moved ploddingly, in a claustrophobic s.p.a.ce, amid trying interruptions and tedious repet.i.tions. Accounts emerged in bits and pieces. He had a family and a business of his own; witchcraft threatened to consume his life. Abigail illuminated a number of matters, as she would continue to do from prison. The next day she described how she managed the spectral p.r.i.c.ks: the devil provided her with thorns that she drove into wooden images. Had she by chance stuck a thorn in a victim's midsection? Why, yes, she had! Though at her hearing she had known nothing of meetings, by the following day, in prison, she did. She had attended a great witches' a.s.sembly, where she had eaten red bread and drunk red wine. There had been nine celebrants in all, she announced, confirming t.i.tuba's tally by introducing a celebration t.i.tuba had not mentioned. They met in Parris's ill-tended pasture.

The next evening, a new and especially bold apparition taunted Ann Putnam Jr. He materialized again the following day. On the morning of April 21, before her uncle's lecture, Abigail Williams accosted Benjamin Hutchinson, Ingersoll's adopted son, about a decade her senior, outside the inn. He carried a pitchfork. Abigail pointed out a sinister little man by the side of the path. She marveled over his uncommon strength and his various feats: he had killed three women and recruited nine Salem witches! He could fire the heaviest musket with one hand! Where was he? Hutchinson valiantly inquired. Abigail motioned; Hutchinson launched his pitchfork. She convulsed but recovered in time to a.s.sure the young man that he had hit his mark. She had heard the intruder's coat tear. At the inn about an hour later the eleven-year-old sought Hutchinson out again, in the main room; she was neither shy about enlisting older men to defend her nor slow to secure their attention. "There he stands," she informed Hutchinson, who, peering all about him, brandished his rapier, in an odd variation on blindman's bluff. By this time, the apparition had dissolved into a gray cat; Hutchinson struck all the same. Abigail a.s.sured him that he had prevailed. She watched spectral Sarah Good, the beggar woman, carry away the animal.

It was now noon; the two headed off for Parris's lecture. Shortly before four o'clock, Abigail again sought out Hutchinson at the tavern, this time arriving with his cousin, Mary Walcott. They were just able to report that a Topsfield woman had bitten Mary before both girls began to shudder. As they calmed, they pointed to a table: the witch's husband stood upon it! Hutchinson plunged his rapier into what he understood to be their tormentor's side. He withdrew it to learn that the room swarmed with spirits, an Indian and a "great black woman" among them. Wildly Hutchinson and a friend struck left and right, directed by the bewitched, who described the carnage for their defenders; they now lived in a world where when a girl pointed to a notional figure, you a.s.sumed she was right and you were blind. The sanded floor was slick with blood. On the hill outside, the girls spotted a coven of witches, three of them dead.

Warrants went out on April 21 for nine witch suspects, the majority of them in Topsfield; accusations spread across town lines as a local affair bloomed into a provincial crisis. Among those to be apprehended before the weekend were the wife of Salem town's richest merchant, Rebecca Nurse's second sister, Abigail Hobbs's parents, and a black slave. The Topsfield constable dutifully arrested his own mother. So quickly did the allegations pile up that it proved difficult to keep suspects straight. Even to meticulous Reverend Hale, Salem town's Bridget Bishop and Topsfield's Sarah Wilds became one person. Over the next seven weeks, fifty-four witches would be named.

Thomas Putnam's name figured first on the mid-April complaints. On the twenty-first, he felt the need to weigh in personally with the Salem justices as well. Expressing his grat.i.tude for their "great care and pains," he begged the magistrates to continue "a terror to evil-doers." The villagers would a.s.sist them in any way possible. He offered support and benediction but something else too. Events were evolving quickly; he knew of alarming, late-breaking news that had yet to make its way to the magistrates' attention. There was, Putnam warned, a plot afoot, "a wheel within a wheel, at which our ears do tingle." He had biblical prophets Ezekiel and Jeremiah to thank for his phrasing, as he did Reverend Lawson, who had incorporated the tingling ears and the terror to evil-doers into his late-March sermon.*

Putnam's was a pay-attention-to-the-man-behind-the-curtain letter, a timely bit of stage management. He had a flair for the sensational; in his hands, witchcraft victims were never less than "grievously afflicted" or "dreadfully tormented." He would make over a hundred and twenty accusations in all, nearly a third of the total number. He would testify against seventeen suspects. For whatever reason, he felt it necessary that Thursday to add a drumroll to the proceedings. The technique was one he might have learned from the Mathers; when you predicted an apocalypse, you needed sooner or later to produce one. Putnam made no mention of his ailing wife or daughter or his own run of bad luck: His sheep had escaped. A cow had died, as had his favorite horse. He had recently lost a contested inheritance to a much younger half brother. He spoke instead for the community, or at least insinuated that others soon would. Confining himself to dark hints-Jeremiah heralded imminent disaster-he stopped short of the sensational details. He left it to the visionary girls to deliver the "high and dreadful" news: there was an ingenious mastermind at work.

V.

THE WIZARD.

In the terror of seeing the figure, and in the terror of being certain that it had not been there a moment before, I at first ran from it, and then ran towards it. And my terror was greatest of all when I found no figure there.

-CHARLES d.i.c.kENS IF PUTNAM'S HINTS struck the justices as cryptic, the suspense lasted all of two days. Already Hathorne was receptive to their tenor, having ordered the additional arrests. Any number of discrepancies had presented themselves over the previous six weeks; he barreled past each and every one. When an unlikely charge surfaced-at one point someone accused Dr. Griggs's wife-it evaporated. t.i.tuba's tall man from Boston too disappeared in the shuffle. He would return as a short man from Maine.

Hathorne never asked saucy Abigail Hobbs to produce the finery the devil had promised. Nor did he quarantine the girls or interview them separately, as every legal manual advised. He made no attempt to match teeth marks to dentistry, which would have yielded some surprising results, one of the accused having, noted a contemporary, "not a tooth in his head wherewith to bite." Hathorne does not appear to have questioned how-despite all the grievous pinching, choking, biting, punching-the bewitched remained in the pink of health. He trusted their spectral sight even when he himself could not make out a middle-aged paris.h.i.+oner perched, in her skirts, on an open beam. He viewed the descent of witchcraft as did Cotton Mather: the business was "managed in imagination yet may not be called imaginary."* When the girls contradicted themselves, when they fumbled with an inconsistency, he turned a blind eye, discarding the facts that failed to fit his extraordinary case. Neither the fists in the mouth nor the timely trances nor Mary Warren's charge that the girls dissembled gave him pause. All signs indicate a prosecutor single-mindedly pursuing a preordained end.

At Hathorne's elbow, throughout hearings and in prison interrogations, sat Reverend Nicholas Noyes, a plump, uncompromising poet. A Salem fixture for a decade, Noyes was good company, vivacious and witty, the owner of the best local library, a Ma.s.sachusetts mark of distinction. The son of an Ess.e.x County justice, the forty-five-year-old minister was comfortable in a courtroom. Noyes was friendly with the Putnams; the Sewall brothers considered him an intimate. He a.s.sumed a vocal role, challenging suspects before their testimonies, validating bits of evidence, offering his expert opinion, and making it impossible for suspects to get a word in edgewise. At one point he performed a courtroom experiment with burning poppets. He tackled any suspect who attempted to invoke Scripture in his or her defense. Neither Noyes nor Hathorne seems to have wondered why, when Bishop pressed herself upon her victim in bed, nearly stopping his bre