Children of Salem

“Not not unlike your own, sir.”

As if by providence, they wound up at the old chestnut tree again, and both men wondered at the appearance of what appeared the very same raven as before. It seemed either coincidence or sign. “Go on, Jeremy,” urged Parris.

“Reverend Deodat Lawson oversaw my father’s excommunication.”

“My God.”

“And by extension my own, so far as I was concerned.”

“The son is not necessarily heir to the sins of the father,” said Parris thoughtfully.

“He is if he’s in Salem, sir.”

“But you must’ve been a mere boy at the time.”

“Yes, sir . . . a runner for Mr. Ingersoll’s Inn, and I did sit watch a number of times up yonder at—”

“Sit watch?”

“Yonder on Watch Hill with Mr. Ingersoll nights.”

“Aye, I see. The same Ingersoll as is now one of my deacons.”

“Not so at the time, but had he been, I’m sure he’d have opposed what they did to my father and stepmother.”

Parris now stared into Jeremiah’s hard-set eyes, searching the gray orbs. “Your parents then moved off? To the settlements along the Connecticut? Or rather Maine, I suppose.”

“My natural mother died giving me life. My stepmother contracted the fever and died here, but being not of the faith, she was refused burial in the parish cemetery—as was my father for having dared married out of the faith.”

“She was of what faith then?” he asked.

“Catholic…of French decent. Father met her in Salem seaport, saved her from the jailer.”

“Save her, indeed? How romantic.”

“She’d been a stowaway on a Portuguese freighter. They turned her over to the courts. My father, hearing of it, paid her jail fines and took her in as an indentured servant but they fell I love soon after.”

“Married a Catholic. Indeed reason for concern, Jeremy,” Parris paused, patting Jeremy on the shoulder, “but to refuse hollowed ground? To excommunicate a man?”

“Deodat Lawson saw it that way, and so did the congregation, almost every man, woman, and child. I was there. Saw them fired up.”

“I am not a scholarly theologian, Jeremy, and I may not know all the tenets of Puritanism and am perhaps wrong in my condemnation of the wrongs done you, but my God…and in this place…” he waved a sweeping hand to take in the village… “in this hovel, any manner of indignity is possible, Jeremy, and while I might myself balk at having a man in my parish marry a Catholic and presuppose he might sit in my church, I would stop short of excommunication and thereby withhold proper burial to one of my parishioners.”

Jeremiah realized two things on hearing this speech come from Parris. One, the man could convince the bark on a tree to peal itself off, and two, in the single emphasized word ‘hovel’ Parris had given himself away. In that single word, he had revealed his utter contempt for Salem—again calling into question why he’d come here from Barbados if not to, as any business-minded man might, strike a better and more lucrative deal. There had to be a larger motive for his moving his family to Salem than to simply preach here, larger still than his having cut so generous a deal with the parish for lands that were not theirs to deed over to him.

More softly now, Parris said, “Then your birth mother alone is buried in our cemetery?”

“Yes and no.”

“More with the riddles. State it, man! You speak like a poet. Say what you mean outright, please.”

“Both my mothers and my father are buried here but two were outside the churchyard fence originally, but from what I’ve seen, the church yard had to expand the boundaries after ten years. It does appear that now all three of my parents are in your cemetery—sinners or no.”

Parris threw his head back and laughed at this, sending the raven flying from its perch, and for a moment, Jeremy glimpsed the man as he must once have been, a hearty hellion bent on drink and life.

“I see,” Parris coughed out a few words between belly laughs. “I begin to see.”

“She being of the Papal faith, and he being an outcast,” continued Jeremy, knowing that if he weren’t forthcoming that Parris would get the story from another source. “Excommunicated on the heels of burying his wife, my mother.”

“Which makes you what?” Parris did not mean this as any sort of barb, but spoke out of confusion.

“I am my own man, sir.”

“Wakely…Wakely…yes, I’d heard it as Walker or Warfield, but yes, I’ve heard tell of this man, your father. Was he not a dish-turner by trade? Married a Frenchy, yes.”

“And we all know what that portends.”

He gave Jeremy a searching look, trying to determine if his last remark was jest or anger. But Parris said no more on the subject, allowing his dark brown eyes to speak for him. Then he suddenly exploded with more laughter, which drew almost as much curiosity from passers-by as had their run-in with Goode the day before.

“What do you find humorous, sir?”

“Now I understand why you’re here. You in particular, that is.”

“I have no vengeance motive, sir.”

“Sure.” He nodded exaggeratedly. “I am sure.”

# # # # #

With great energy, as if the revelation of Wakely’s having been an ill-treated villager had filled his blood with some strange elixir that fueled this complicated man named Parris, Jeremy watched him march on for the Putnams, to do battle there once again with a little girl causing havoc in his parish—his orphaned niece, Mercy.

Jeremy had to truly rush to keep up, and as he did so, a good fire burned within him as well. Increase Mather had proved a genius, somehow knowing this moment between Jeremy and Parris would occur. For having shared his infuriating past and his anger at the parish with Samuel Parris, Jeremy had forged an instant bond with the maligned minister. Mather had predicted it. While Parris remained suspicious and aloof, he now trusted to a notion that Jeremy’s basest instincts had brought him back to this hovel to minister to these people in the form of some sort of retribution. Something Jeremy imagined that pleased the Reverend Samuel Parris, as if he’d discovered yet another kinsman to stand on his side—Jeremiah Wakely.

And thanks to that false sense of kinship, the man might let his renowned guard down just long enough for me to collect the evidence needed. Evidence that’d perhaps bring Parris to the day of his excommunication from Salem Village. A righteous one, and not the farce that’d devastated the Wakely family.

Again they heard of the abuses Mrs. Putnam had taken from Mercy, and that Little Anne, too, was misbehaving and getting into bad habits, all due to Mercy’s having more and more influence over Anne Junior. Again Parris preached and prayed over the heads of the two little girls who lived beneath the Putnam roof. This time, he called on Jeremy to add his prayer, and having prepared for such moments, Jeremy did not hesitate, asking the children to say the Lord’s Prayer with him. Finally, once more Parris convinced the Putnams to give Mercy more time to adjust to her new master and mistress, and to her new duties and surroundings.

Chapter Seven

The following midnight at the Putnam home

“Your mother is strange, Anne,” said Mercy Lewis from where she lay bundled beneath her woolen blanket atop her straw-tick mattress. Like the younger Anne, she wore a thin and plain linen nightshirt—a feed bag, she called it. Mercy was propped on one elbow where she’d awakened to the noises filtering up to them from below. She felt restless in the small trundle bed here across the attic loft from frail, gaunt Anne Putnam Junior. “I said your ma’s weird, making all those noises in the night.”

“She is not strange nor weird!” Anne replied and sat up, her lips puckering in anger, her own feedbag too large for her tiny frame.

“Then what’s all those nasty sounds coming from her room all night? Gracious! Sounds as much a ruckus as Goody Goode put on my uncle the other day.”