Children of Salem

“Don’t call my ma a witch!”

“I didn’t never call her a witch, but I know some who have.”

“Mother . . . she only talks to herself is all.”

“Talks? That’s talk? She screams like. . . like as if your father’s beatin’er!”

“My father don’t beat nobody! You shut up, Mercy! Just shut up!”

“Your father ever come for me, I’ll stab him with this,” replied Mercy, holding up a huge knitting needle.

“Wherever’d you get that?”

“Goody Goode give it to me for protection. Said it had magical powers.”

“That old witch? You’d best steer clear of that hag ‘lest you turn into one.”

“Ah, She’s not so bad as people make her out.”

“Make ’er angry then! See if she don’t put a hex on ya, Mercy.”

“She says your ma’s a witch.”

“She’s a liar. Goode’s a lying witch!”

“Says your ma traffics with the Devil.”

“My ma’s had a horrible life is all, and she’s . . . “

Mercy came to Anne’s bed and sat with her. “She’s what?”

“She’s haunted; that’s what she is. No different than me.”

“You, Anne, haunted? Anne, talk to me.”

“She cries every night for the dead children she brought into this world before me, and—and so do I.”

“All them sisters and brothers, ten, I heard.” Mercy shook here head. “All born dead.”

“Nine, me being number ten, but they didn’t all go at birth. Not all. Some lived for a time.”

“How long?” Thirteen-year-old Mercy Lewis, elder cousin to Betty Parris, had recently discovered her flesh, and her breasts gave her more pleasure than all the sermons her uncle could spew from pulpit and dinner table, but she was always quick to pick up on any gossip and there was plenty at the Parris’ home. “How long did the longest one live?”

“That’d be Thomas the Third. He lived almost six months.”

“I hear you almost died, too.” Mercy studied the younger girl.

“I’m here, ain’t I? I turn’t eleven back in January.”

“And you ain’t dead yet?” Mercy giggled. “So that makes you the longest to live, not Thomas the Third. You beat out your brothers.”

“No, I ain’t, Mercy Lewis! I’m not one of them.”

“Not one of them?”

“The dead brothers and sisters; they’re together. Me . . . I’m alone.”

“Not no more.”

“Whataya mean?”

“You got me. I’ll be your big sister.”

Anne smiled at the notion. “Y-You mean it?”

“My but you look whiter than death. I got to find ways to get you outside in the sun. What little we get here in this dingy place is awful.”

“How? Mother doesn’t let us out of her sight. Work all day in the house.”

Mercy bounced on her knees on Anne’s bed. “That’s what I mean when I say she’s a witch!”

“Shut your mouth!” Anne’s voice traveled through the house.

“Shhh, you want them coming up and yelling again?”

“Then you shush that talk, and quit thinking bad of us!”

“Just saying what I was told.” Mercy sulked while playing with Anne’s hair.

“Then you was told wrong by a mean-spirited old bitch.”

Mercy laughed and covered her mouth with both hands.

“What’s so funny?”

“Your little white face goes all red when you curse.”

Thin, frail, small-boned Anne Putnam Junior dropped her head and wiped away a tear. “My mother and me, we’re both haunted is all. That’s all. You’d be haunted too by your dead fam’ly if . . . ”

“If what? Go on, say it. I hear it behind my back all the time. Say it, Anne!” She squeezed the younger girl’s arm hard.

“If you truly had any heart—Mercy Lewis—but you haven’t any.”

“I got no memory of how my parents died,” Mercy countered, letting Anne go, her eyes flashing anger.

“None? How can that be?”

“Only know what people’ve told me is all.” Mercy pretended sniffles. “So, so it might seem I don’t have no feelings ’bout it, but I do. I surely do.” Mercy worked to imagine it; how horrible her parents had died when hostile Indians had attacked their farmstead eleven years ago, but she might just as well attempt to dredge up ancient Roman soldiers hoisting Christ on the cross for all the good it’d do—as she did not have any feeling for either event, largely due to her having heard these two stories so often and from so many directions for so many years now that she’d become stonily cold to both fairy tales as she considered each.

Mercy had been found below the burned out home, below the floor, and below the bodies. Or so she’d been told so often that it had no meaning any longer. “Your father and mother loved you ’til the end,” Uncle Wilkins, Uncle Revelation, and Uncle Parris had all repeatedly reminded her. “They protected you with the last measure of their blood. They protected you with their very bodies.”

In truth, she had no feelings about her unremembered parents or the incident that they had earned a kind of ‘sainthood’ for in a community that disdained saints. Mercy’s not caring and not remembering, and her disdain for the oft repeated tale had grown into a cancerous guilt within her—one that manifested itself in hurting others in the most devious ways she could manage. And if she should fail in deviousness, she’d make it up in outright theft and lies. She had once told Uncle Samuel that she dared Satan to come near her.

His response was to again tell her how her parents had died so that she might live. All the same, whenever someone reminded her of the defining incident, she could not grasp it. Perhaps I don’t want to, she secretly told herself. Either way, it only nurtured the guilt until she’d become angry toward everyone, because everyone in the village looked at her with curious or pitying eyes. How had she survived?

“Soooo,” Mercy cooed at nine-year-old Anne, “you two—mother and daughter—are-are just haunted, eh?”

“Haunted, yes, Miss Mercy.”

“You mean bewitched, don’t you?”

Anne hesitated. My ma sees ghosts like I do. That’s all.”

Below them in the house, adults continued, voices raised, making a row.

“What’s going on down there?” asked Mercy, standing and going to the trap door, inching it open to eavesdrop on the adults. She started, seeing that her Uncle Samuel was in the house yet again, and again he’d brought the stranger they called Wakely.

Mercy disliked Parris immeasurably. It’d been cruel of her uncle to ceremonially excommunicate Sarah Goode from the church, but doubly cruel then to’ve taken old Goode’s only child, Dorcas, away from her mother. Goode had been hanging about the parsonage too much; in fact, she and Uncle Samuel’s black servant, Tituba, had been exchanging ideas and recipes and incantations.

Worst of all, so far as Mercy was concerned, Uncle Samuel had tired of feeding and housing her—his sullen niece—and he’d refused Mercy’s sharing Betty’s room and bed when he caught them playing beneath the covers. All of this had led to his pushing her off on the Putnams.

Through the crack in the door over the heads of the adults, Mercy saw coins change hands. That stupid Thomas Putnam has purchased me! It’s final now. Thomas Putnam now owned her, lock, stock, and barrel as the woodsman’s ballad said of his livestock, traps, tools, weapons, and women. Mercy felt a pang of terror; she felt like an animal trapped. She’d disliked the look in the middle-aged Putnam’s eye when her uncle had first broached the subject of taking Mercy in as maidservant to Mrs. Putnam. That’d been a month earlier. Apparently, Putnam and Uncle Samuel had settled on an agreeable price, with Putnam having to make payments