Children of Salem

aside like a top spinning on her heels, searching for where to run to and finding her mother’s arms. Parris went now for Mary Wolcott. “You! In the shed out back until I come to tend to your insolence! Now!”

Jeremy stepped in, saying, “Perhaps if we go out on the porch and calm down, Samuel, it might—”

“You, too, Jeremy? Questioning my authority? Haven’t I warned you on that subject?”

Secretly, Jeremy wanted to send a fist into the mouth so near him that the hot breath stank. “We have, sir, but—”

“No buts, Mr. Wakely!” Parris held the rod so tight his knuckles bled white. Mary had also gone to Mrs. Parris’ comforting arms, but he shook the rod at her, and she obeyed, rushing just ahead of the rod, which cut into her twice before she got out of his reach.

Parris returned from the back stair, the tattling rod still in hand. By now Tituba, Mrs. Parris, and Betty had busied themselves with anything they could find in the kitchen. This while Jeremy found the hearth, pretending to warm himself so as to look a great deal less concerned and involved than he felt.

“Sorry, Mr. Wakely,” began a calmer Parris now in his ear.

“Yes, well . . . sorry I said anything.”

“I’m only sorry that you had to witness the . . . altercation. However discipline is one thing I insist upon.”

“I quite understand,” Jeremy lied, as he’d found the scene repugnant, and he’d seen the minister’s eyes the entire time. A kind of delight danced in them the entire time he was charging about and beating the children. One moment doting on his child, the next whipped into a rage at her, and Tituba the catalyst to the minister’s rage? Jeremy realized that he’d stepped into a far more complex web of relationships than he’d at first imagined.

Jeremy, still at the hearth, watched a flaming ember leap out at him, threatening to catch his pants-leg afire. “What the deuce?” He kicked out at the ember, sending fiery sparks up even as his action sent the ember back home to a bed of others. As it happened, a snakelike shiver spread over his brain, but he managed to fight for calm. For reasons he could not fathom, the family incident and the dancing ember recalled a time when Jeremy, as a boy in his father’s grinding shop had caught his hand in the cogs of a machine powered by a small water-wheel outside their cottage. Rather than scream bloody murder for help, young Jeremy had somehow maintained a calm beyond reason—perhaps as much from shame at having made such a stupid error as from any sort of courage. The entire time he was not calling out for help, Jeremy had spent struggling to remove a wooden peg that held the moving parts together. Once he pulled the peg, the cogs came willingly away from his hand. Self- reliance, in his father’s eyes, was more important than all the curtseying that went along with this notion of children being obedient and beaten into obedience.

Am I again caught with a hand inside a crushing machine? Is Parris a shrewder man than I’d earlier thought? Did he give me the written sermon yesterday as a test? Then today leaving me alone in the parsonage again, only to send Tituba in, not to change any sheets but to test a young apprentice’s mettle? To tempt my willpower and flesh? And the final touch: the parental outburst, demonstrating his absolute rule here as yet another test of Jeremy’s being a true Goodfriend? Or worse yet: to prove his twisted idea of parental love before the emissary of one Increase Mather?

Parris hovered as if eavesdropping on Jeremy’s thoughts. He lit a pipe and handed the long stem to Jeremy.

“No thank you, sir. I don’t indulge.” Jeremy eyed the busy women in the kitchen, all shakily and tearfully putting the evening meal together.

Parris eyed him hard, placed the pipe into his own mouth and began puffing away. “Not sure I trust a man who doesn’t indulge in one sin or another, Goodfriend.”

“Gambling, sir.”

“Gambling?” he asked.

“My weakness,” replied Jeremy, pacing the small room now.

“I see. Best then stay out of Ingersoll’s Inn.” He punctuated with pipe in hand, adding, “Men there bet on a glance out a window—on which bird will roost and which will fly from a branch.”

This made Jeremy smile, not because it was clever but because he knew it was true. He recalled it’d been the same at Ingersoll’s when he was a boy, too. Furthermore, Jeremy recalled how quickly Serena Nurse’s brothers bet on the fall of a leaf. “It is a vice for which I’ve paid dearly,” he finally replied, shooing smoke blown in his face from his eyes.

“And so you should dearly work to remain free of the vice, my boy.”

“As well I have since, Samuel.”

“It requires sense, indeed,” joked Parris, whose eyes and face had returned to their normal state.

The man is maddening in his need to dominate and have the last word, Jeremy thought, wondering if this, too, should go into his reports to Mather, and if so, how detailed should it be? Or would it raise the least eyebrow? After all, a man ruled in his home in the colonies as a tyrant over his people, and it was accepted as scripture, and the legal men running the colonies believed it this precept as surely as they believe in Heaven and Hell, God and Satan.

Chapter Eleven

Samuel Parris sat on the edge of his bed, trembling in a mix of giddy excitement and anxious dread. Over him loomed his larger than life shadow from the lantern light at his bedside. Drafts of cold, seeping through the cracks and window frame made the light flicker, despite its canopy—so like a protective cocoon or womb. The flickering gave life to his shapeless shadow in against the splintered log room.

How many times now had he searched the curves and strokes of Increase Mather’s handwritten note to determine any meaning between the lines—any hint, a double entendre, anything in the nature of a coded message, or a single loaded word. But

each time it came out the same: a simple letter of introduction for this fop Wakely. The fools in Boston had now saddled Parris with a know-nothing apprentice, when in all his petitions he’d specifically requested an experienced man—a worldly man who’d handled situations like his before. Situations involving heartless people who dared cause trouble in Salem Village Parish.

“And why now?” he muttered. “Why now after all this time? Three years in a troubled parish, and now this? He’d had big plans when Thomas and the others had talked him into coming here to take hold of the parish property and a share in this upstart mining business of Wilkins-Putnam Mineworks, and to eventually purchase prime land that touched upon the river leading directly to Salem Seaport. In Barbados, for years now, all the talk was of the riches coming and going out of that seaport, and to be in the right position and the right time—that was good, intelligent business. If they could extract ore from the mine and transport it to the sea with ease, if they could have as direct and clear a pathway as some of the millworks and lumber yards and farms in the area, they could all make a fortune several times over. But in the meantime, he must maintain what tenuous holdings he had been awarded. He could not pull this thing off from a distance. He must first establish himself as an upright citizen of Salem and continue to make contacts with the shipmasters and exporters in Salem Town.

It’s been three hard years. Still I’d successfully managed things here— maneuvered is more to the point.

He had gotten his strongest allies placed on the church board in the elections of elders and deacons. Not that he controlled them all, yet. He meant to control every rung in the ladder. Five in all he could count on now. Captain Thomas Putnam, his chief ally, was now parish secretary, while his brother, Captain John Putnam had become Parris’ treasurer. Lieutenants Nathaniel Ingersoll, Bray Wilkins, and Isaiah Wolcott—all men of the local militia company, were in his pocket, as was Porter.

There has been some triumphs, some things to rejoice over.

Parris had marshaled the support of a large segment of the community as well, and he’d gathered damning evidence in the public records bearing the original signatures of all the Select Committeemen agreeing that Thomas and John Putnam visit Barbados to petition Parris, to convince their relative to return to the New England village as their new preacher. He’d also seen the original land grant for the parsonage and its acreage, and nowhere did it say the minister could not hold title to the land, a promise made to him by the Select Committeemen.

Once relocated and in the parish home, Samuel learned of the dissenters, those who’d signed off on his taking charge as their minister but who’d then claimed never to have promised any lands or