Children of Salem

“Your Master speaks of Satan when he says the Black Man with the Black Book, I know, but I have no book, and I am not black.”

“Yes, de Devil comes lookin’ like a white minister in black cloak.”

Satan may take a pleasing form. Jeremy realized he was dressed entirely in black, from head to toe. “You can be sure, Tituba, I am not Satan or his emissary.”

“Fool!” shouted Parris, standing now at the door, having eavesdropped on them. “I told you not to pay any heed to the heathen. She can’t be redeemed. I’ve done everything. She’s incorrigible. Learns nothing. Nods and nods and says yes a thousand times but understands nothing of Christ or his mercy.”

“I know Christ,” countered Tituba, spitting. “He don’t help me! He take my baby boy!”

Parris ignored this as if not hearing, or as if hearing it too often. “Wakely, I had hoped you’d demonstrate more sense than to get sucked into a conversation about Heaven and Hell with a slave wench.”

“I am not witch!” Tituba came at him. “I am voodoo woman!”

Parris advanced like a jackal and slapped her hard across the face, shouting, “Wench, I said! Not witch!”

Jeremy reacted instinctively, stilling Parris’ hand from inflicting a second blow. He wanted to strike the man and send him to his knees, but such an act would destroy any chance of success here. Instead, he shouted, “It was entirely my fault, Mr. Parris! I should’ve heeded you.”

Parris’ dark eyes bore into Jeremy’s steely gray pools, searching for any sign of deception. With his jaw quivering, and his eyes traveling now to Tituba, he said, “I quite understand, Mr. Wakefield.” There seemed more unsaid between these two than spoken here tonight. Jeremy wanted to hear the minister apologize to the black woman, but he knew that was unlikely.

Instead, Parris spoke now as if nothing had happened. “Now go to sleep, woman, and you, Mr. Wakefield.”

“Wakely, Mr. Parris.”

“Wakely then…come away. Let us all find sleep, shall we, Mr. Wakely.”

Jeremy glanced back at Tituba who wiped blood from her lip onto her nightshirt. He silently looked back at her and thought he saw a crooked smile. Was Tituba secretly pleased at having upset her master? But realizing that Jeremy was looking, her smile instantly vanished.

# # # # #

Jeremy literally followed in Parris’ snow and mud-sucking footsteps as they trudged through the thickening slush back to the parsonage door. Parris missed the excitement at two windows overhead, but Jeremy saw in one an elderly blonde-headed woman, no doubt Mrs. Parris, and at the other second story window two small faces—one a small caricature of Mrs. Parris, the daughter most likely, the other a scarecrow-faced Mercy Lewis, Jeremy assumed. What few notes he had on Parris’ household told him that Mercy Lewis, an orphaned niece, had been taken into the Parris home. His notes had said nothing about the black servant, Tituba. She’d come as a surprise.

Apparently, Jeremy’s arrival, and the subsequent shouting, had awakened the remaining family members. Parris glanced back at Jeremy, preparing to say something, when he noticed where his apprentice’s eyes were focused. Parris stopped and stared at the upstairs bedroom windows. Immediately, the wife, the daughter, and the orphan scampered from Parris’ sight like mice found in the cupboard.

Is everyone terrified of this man, wondered Jeremy. Be damned if I’m afraid of this petty tyrant.

Tituba had revealed a surprising secret, a stillborn child in Barbados . . . and mother denied a moment with her child. This in itself set Jeremiah’s imagination aflame. What more was there to the story?

He followed Parris inside, both men now chilled to the bone. “I don’t feel right, Mr. Parris, taking a woman’s bed on such a night as—”

“Bah! I’ll hear no more of it, Mr. Wakely, and you’ve got to get control here. You do as I instruct in my house without question or hesitation, do you—”

“I intend to sir, it’s just—”

“No faltering, Mr. Wakely. You are tired…have come a long way.”

“Too true.”

“Get ye then to bed—and I to mine.”

Something about the man and his tone made Jeremy feel like a child being sent off to bed. And fatigued beyond thought, off he went, but before laying down, he closed off the curtain and in the dark, he carefully located his saddlebag and dug into to it. He palmed his inkwell and quill pen, and in difficult circumstances, Jeremy began jotting quick notes to himself in the blank pages of the book he would keep on Reverend Samuel Parris—a book that would eventually find its way back to Mather.

Unable to focus by the weak and flickering candlelight any longer, exhausted from the long day and travel, Jeremy realized his mind and pen were no longer in sync. A quick few words of hope that he was entirely wrong in his first impressions of Parris before he blew out the light, and without knowing it, nodded off and into a fitful sleep.

# # # # #

Jeremy found the cubbyhole below the stairwell dark, dingy, musty, and degrading, a place to keep the house brute, not a place for a man of Jeremy’s stature or frame. In fact, not a place for little Tituba’s frame either. Cramped as a ship’s berth. Part of Parris’ less than subtle method of putting a person ‘in his place’, Jeremy decided. And it did have this affect on the young apprentice.

Given the bed bugs and the odors, he slept fitfully at best.

What little sleep he did accomplish was to the tune of tension pulled taut like a wire, so much that it seemed audible, slicing through Jeremiah’s skull, as this dark house seemed to exhale conflict and breathe in anxiety. Subtle yet present like the distant sound of the ocean waves to shore, or a cradle with an insistent squeak. Most of the night, Jeremy lay stiff, board-like as he played Tituba’s words over in his head so as not to forget, but also in an effort to understand her. When he did come awake entirely, he’d hear a squeak-squeak- squeak. At first he thought it a parrot below a black cloth in its cage walking its floor, pacing on clawed feet.

But after a moment, he realized it was a squeaking floorboard upstairs, one which he assumed Samuel Parris was repeatedly pacing over up in room.

Calming himself, Jeremiah wondered if Parris prayed like other men, or if he prayed differently, or if he prayed privately at all.

Finally, Jeremiah gave up any hope of sleep; instead, he sat up, pulled his saddlebag close, opened it, and located his book. He jotted Tituba’s words down as best he could recall—for the record.

He also jotted down his initial, firsthand reaction to Parris, writing: the man is arrogant, selfish, puffed up beyond his stature, but small in grace and spirit in my humble judgment. I would add….

Jeremy fell asleep over his writing, the quill pen and inkbottle left on the wood floor, his journal lying half under him. He dreamed of his powerful right fist slamming into Parris’ teeth.

The following day, Jeremy opened his eyes on a plump-faced little girl with yellow curls, Parris’ daughter Betty, he assumed. The two stared at one another until she said, “Can I write, too?” She wiped away mucous and her pearl white skin showed blotches of red as if rubbed raw with lye soap, but Jeremy recognized the redness as having done battle with the ague—a fever with coughing enough to turn a child’s insides out.

“You are feeling better?” he asked.

“I am. Can I draw?”

Jeremy realized they were, at the moment, the only two in the house awake. “Oh, oh,” he came to a sitting position. “Your name is Betty?”

“Elizabeth, like my mother I am.”

“Sorry, Elizabeth.” He guessed her at ten or eleven.

“I wanna draw pictures.” She pointed to his pen and ink, her cheeks going wide with her smile. She’s an adorable if chubby doll, he thought.

He tore out a single blank page from the back of his journal. “Draw? Yes, be my guest.”