Children of Salem

“God, God how I hate this life! What it has brought me to. I hate you, Thomas Putnam, and I hate that child we bore together, and I hate the dead.”

Anne Carr Putnam suddenly felt a courageous urge to go out into the storm and shake her fists at the sky, and to dare God strike her down and thereby take her to whatever reward or punishment set down in His book— whatever fate preordained. She wanted it damned well over with. Right now, this night.

But each time she maneuvered to this tentative resolve to end her own life, she couldn’t move as a cold chill entered her bones and her bedroom, and it hovered not over the entire bed, disturbing Thomas not in the least, but hovering just over and around her, and inside her. She felt completely alone. And she knew herself to be haunted, but this was nothing new. She’d been haunted by her dead brother, Henry, for years before the deaths of her children. In Henry’s hoary wake followed a parade of dead children. Sometimes individually they came, sometimes en mass. They never spoke as they had no language. They’d never uttered a single word in life, so why should it be different in death? However, they did accuse her; they accused with their innocent, cherubic grimaces, their flaccid but condemning eyes, their reproachful, pointed fingers. No words came of those gaping mouths, but she knew what they wanted to say; that it was all her fault, all due to what she’d done and said and thought about one James Bailey.

This—her sin of sins—had transformed her womb. What was normally the cradle of life was reconfigured into a poisonous mausoleum.

Even so, this was not the children come to torment her tonight. Nor was it Henry. This was a different presence also well known to her. She imagined James Bailey must have died over the years, as this spirit was James’ ghost, and it wanted in death to claim what he’d in life denied himself and her—his absolute and unconditional love of Anne Carr, the young woman she’d once been.

For James, she could forgo any date with God and being struck by lightning. She instead lay still and allowed the blond-haired spirit to caress her with his spectral body, filling her with emotions and a heat she’d not experienced in all her married life with Thomas.

# # # # #

Anne Carr Putnam came fully awake and bolt upright when her orgasm came rushing from the pelvic regions to her brain. She found herself lying with her nightshirt pulled up, her privates exposed, the covers pulled over—not by Thomas, but by James’s spectral hand. He’d come to her again, and he’d made her feel again, and he’d whispered something as lilting and as fragile as a leaf in wind, something about his child and the others that’d died between her legs. A special message of importance . . . something of forgiveness, something like: don’t blame yourself; not your fault; don’t believe it. But she could hardly focus on his whisper as his touch had driven her to such abandon, and she licked her fingers that’d come wet from her vagina.

She shivered with all that’d happened tonight amid the storm. She snatched down her nightshirt and pulled the covers over her, content for the moment, certain the contentment would quickly fade, and it did. However, she knew James would be back, that he’d return again to her, that he wanted her to have a healthy child with her. As insane as it sounded, he made it clear: Little Anne is my child. The only one of ten to survive from Anne’s womb.

She smiled at the revelation that all her failed pregnancies had come as a result not of the usual complications or her womb, but of Thomas’ bad seed. James told her the man was no stallion, but that he, Bailey had more powerful seed in an astral fashion than Thomas had in a corporeal one! This thanks to James’ powers; powers that extended beyond the grave, as James had died—the news reported about the village several years ago, news that had come with the new minister, Burroughs.

Anne now heard James’ whisper within the coils of her inner ear, as if his spirit had taken up residence inside her: Little Anne, say it.

“Say what?” she asked aloud.

She alone is mine . . . mine and yours.

“Anne is ours!” The revelation sent her heart beating fast.

The others, those who died, they’re come of Thomas’ pitiful seed.

Still she could not make out the part about it not being her fault.

But for the moment, she reveled in what James could do to her and for her, even now after all these years and an entire dimension between them.

“And to feel not one whit of guilt!” she shouted, her voice carrying through the door and the ceiling to the girls upstairs, yet Thomas could sleep through it. She laid still, luxuriating in James’ earlier ethereal touch and the revelations he’d brought with his touch. Her dead brother Henry, all these years, he’d been trying to tell her the same news, sure. Sure. Now it’s come clear why I am haunted.

Laughter erupted from her. Unabashed, unleashed. To others it may well sound like the laughter of the mad. As for Thomas beside her, he continued to snore. He’d become so enamored of her night visitors and her erupting in either screams or laughter that her bedtime antics disturbed him no more than did God’s thunder just outside.

# # # # #

The following day in the village

Jeremiah had gotten back to the parsonage the night before at so late an hour as to have found everyone fast asleep, and not wishing to disturb the house, he’d discovered the stable empty, and bedding down his horse, he decided to sleep here. He had given only slight curiosity to the whereabouts of Tituba, but he had been far too weary to concern himself beyond a thought. The night’s storm had abated somewhat when, shadowing Serena, he’d seen that she’d indeed gotten safely back home. From the Nurse home, he’d ridden back to the village, the euphoria of having made love to Serena crowding out every other thought.

Asleep in the hay this morning, dreaming of Serena and undisturbed by the mewling of animals and chickens clucking about him, Jeremy was rudely awakened by the booting of one Reverend Samuel Parris, insisting that the young apprentice go with him once again to the troubled Putnam home.

Jeremy, eyes still encrusted with sleep, brushing away straw from his clothes as they went, asked in a tone reminiscent of Mrs. Parris on the subject of the Putnams: “What is it this time?”

“Appears a regular demon inside that niece of mine.”

“Mercy or Mary?”

“Mercy. They’ve evidence she’s corrupting their daughter, Anne.”

“Corrupting? How?”

“Please, sir, don’t be naive. How do you imagine?”

“Ah, I see.” Jeremy knew that corruption was a euphemism for any sexual contact outside of a man’s bearing children with his wife. Something he himself was guilty of now, but if this feeling for what he and Serena had was corrupt, then he privately asked for more corruption.

They arrived at the Putnam doorstep, the trip uneventful—no street altercation between Parris and Goode or any other of his parishioners—and Jeremy, still woozy from lack of sleep and all that’d happened the night before, thanked God for that. Even now set on this grave business at this grim house, all he could think of were the welcoming arms of his love.

At the same time, facing the stout Putnam door before them, Jeremy again wondered at the noticeable absence of Tituba Indian from the barn, and now the seeming disappearance of the old bottle collector, a typical sight about Salem streets this time of day, as it was early mornings that Goode went about trash piles. However, Jeremy believed it wise to not bring up either ‘lady’ at the moment.

Mrs Putnam opened the door this time, dark circles like gray coal sludge deepening her sad eyes. Inside the cramped little Putnam home, Thomas and his wife had the two girls standing at attention and awaiting the ministers. Parris immediately took charge, going to Mercy and pinning her by the ear. He began not a lecture but an exorcism of sorts so far as Jeremy could see.

Parris first made the girl kneel before the fire, then to stare hard into the flames. So close was Mercy’s face to the hearth fire that her skin glowed and reddened.

“The devil loves fire, Mercy! The devil wants to boil all of us in his churning sea of flame and brimestone, and you, child, are well on your way! Confess now of your sins, Mercy, and be done with it!”

“I didn’t do nothin’ to confess!” Mercy defiantly cried out, despite the heat so close to her cheeks and eyes as