Children of Salem

over time.

Mercy gulped. She slammed the trap door, the noise like a gunshot. She did not intend to let her uncle for a moment think she was as dumb as Dorcas—that she didn’t know what was going on here. She leapt into Anne’s bed, saying, “Did you hear them jump? I made your father and my uncle go off their feet!”

Anne giggled in response.

Mercy pulled the covers over them, and together they laughed at the image of serious grownups, a minister and a deacon, starting with fear at the trap door’s falling. Anne, like Mercy, liked the reaction Mercy had elicited from the adult world.

“Makes me feel good inside to make grown men jump,” Mercy said between laughs.

“Me, too,” added Anne. “Me, too.”

# # # # #

The following night in the Putnam home

Mercy Lewis sat up in bed. She’d awakened to a hot, sweaty hand rising along her leg toward her private parts.

On awaking, she found no one in the attic bedroom aside from Anne, who appeared asleep. If it’d been Anne, Mercy would be more than willing to allow the touching, but if it’d been her father, she wanted nothing to do with it. In fact, the thought made her shiver and want to vomit.

“Anne? Anne? Were you in my bed?”

No response.

“Anne!”

No reply.

“I know you were touching me, Anne, and it’s all right.” Mercy touched herself there. “Do ya hear me?”

No reply.

Mercy sighed and decided to go back to sleep, but once more the crying coming from Anne Senior’s room downstairs kept her awake. Then she heard little Anne’s voice cut through the attic. “It’s my Uncle Henry touched you, Miss Mercy, not me.”

“Your Uncle Henry?” Mercy was aghast at the thought. “What Uncle Henry?”

“I don’t really know him.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know him?”

“He died before I come ’long.”

Mercy swallowed hard. “A ghost? A ghost was touching me?” She really shivered now.

“He comes, my brothers come, my sisters. They all come with the same message.”

“Message? What message?” Mercy sat up at this news.

“They all say they didn’t die properly . . . normally, I mean.”

“You mean naturally?”

“They claim murder.”

“Murdered?” Mercy gasped. This is interesting and strange.

“And they can’t rest in peace cause, cause . . . ”

“Cause why?” Mercy had pulled her legs in tight, gripping her bedclothes.

“Cause they want things righted.”

“They want you to fix things?”

“Me and Mother, yes . . . fix things so’s they can rest in peace.”

“What do ya mean, Anne?”

“Find some justice.”

“Justice in this world? Ha! Vengeance maybe, huh?”

“Like that, yeah—my ma calls it settling of scores.”

“But I never did nothing to your uncle, so—”

“Don’t matter. Neither did me nor my ma.”

“—s-so why’s he got his dead hand on me?”

Anne stuttered, “Ah-ah-h-h . . . ”

“The hand wasn’t cold neither! But ‘twas warm and big like a man’s hand, Anne.”

“C-Can I come over there?” asked Anne.

“Yes, Anne. Yes, you can.”

The moment Anne came into Mercy’s bed, she felt for the first time that it was no longer strange to have a big ‘sister’ other than her two ghosts sisters who’d died ahead of her. Seven brothers, two sisters, all phantoms now, all crying out for reprisal, and Anne the only one of ten infants who’d cheated death. She and Mercy had this in common—guilt at having been spared. Guilt at being alive. But Anne’s guilt was even stronger, far deeper, and Mercy sensed this, and she wondered how she could use this information.

She wondered if she could use it as she had the trap door to frighten the adult world. A world she hated.

And she further wondered how she might use this strange new knowledge to fend off any advances from Anne’s father, and even more urgent advances she felt certain to come.

“Tell me more about Old Goody Goode,” Anne asked, snuggling into the crook of Mercy’s arm. “You’ve made me curious ’bout her.”

“Little liar.”

“Am not.”

“You’ve always been curious of the old witch. Whether she really has any powers or not. Don’t lie.”

“I guess so.”

“I’ll tell ya everything about Goode, if you’ll tell me more about Uncle Henry.”

“Not much to tell.”

“Then the other ghosts haunting this house and your mother. Like why they only haunt her and not your father?”

“Men don’t see ghosts like we women do.”

“I s’pose not.”

Anne snuggled more deeply into her newfound, live older, wiser sister, whose developing breasts jiggled like water beneath Annie’s head.

# # # # #

Anne Putnam Junior felt it wonderful sharing her loft with Mercy Lewis. She hadn’t had a nightmare in all the nights spent with Mercy, and she’d not had one of her paralyzing fits in all the days since Mercy had come to live with her.

The fits were horrible; they turned Anne into a drooling vegetable. She’d bite through her tongue if her mother or father should fail to act quickly and to put the ever present wedge in her mouth. During such fits, she went blank in the head. Her mind seemed to overload and go black, eyes rolling back in their sockets, while limbs uncontrollably quaked. At the same time, her extremities became stone: fingers, toes, feet, and hands like stubby tree branches reaching to the sky.

Anne’s mother had repeatedly explained away the fits as a bewitching, a curse that’d been placed on the Thomas Putnam family from the days when Anne Carr-Putnam, the mother, had made her feelings for the married minister, James Bailey, known. Bad timing as the minister’s wife and children lay dying of a plague on Bailey’s house.

Against her parents’ wishes, Anne had publicly made it known that when the minister’s wife died, that she would marry Bailey, and one night she went to Bailey and bared her soul and body to him even as his family lay in the back rooms coughing their last. Bailey had soundly cursed and rebuked Anne Carr, and in his anger, he had thrown her naked from his home.

Anne, immature and unmarried, was told by her parents that her advances on Bailey had been a sinful display; that she’d be cursed if she did not repent of her foolish passion for the minister, and that she must do so at the meetinghouse before everyone. She refused and she never recanted her love for Bailey.

Today, Anne Senior still suffered for that mistake. And now her only daughter, named for her, suffered for the