Children of Salem

“You’ll love Boston.”

Serena paced, circling the room. “I don’t know. . . I don’t know.”

“Don’t know about Boston or about me?” Jeremy again pressed her hand in his.

“I love you, Jeremy,” she said, their eyes meeting, everyone and everything else in the room melting away, “and-and I accept your proposal of marriage.”

A cheer went up from Francis and Rebecca, and Jeremy took Serena in his arms. Francis hugged Rebecca to him.

“But we shan’t tarry long in Boston, Jeremy,” Serena remarked. “We must get back as quickly as possible.”

“Is that the only condition of marriage you propose?” he joked but instantly saw that she wasn’t amused, and he guessed she was thinking of the empty house on the compound where they’d made love, the one she hoped one day to turn into a home with him. “Yes, it’s a condition. Yes!”

“I accept your condition. Now we need saddle up another horse.”

“My roan will do best on a long journey.”

“When all this nonsense in Salem settles to a dull roar,” promised Francis, “we will have a wedding feast for you two!” He shook Jeremy’s hand briskly and hugged Serena to him, tears in his eyes. Serena went to her mother and they held tight to one another for a long time.

# # # # #

Salem Village Parish, Sabbath Day, March 30^th

From behind his slender pinewood pulpit, the gaunt Samuel Parris stood on a platform that raised him above his people. Parris 6’1 frame was now seven-foot tall, and his hapless expression, nose, chin, even his ears and the veins in his neck had been put into play—now part of the anger and rage he demonstrated against those who’d dare attack a minister’s daughter through channels of witchcraft and demonism.

His eyes, sunken and blackened from days and nights without sleep, seeing to the needs of the congregation while seeing to his bewitched children at home, told the story of a man put upon by the Devil himself.

Parris was disappointed he’d be unable to move to excommunicate Rebecca Nurse and her sisters today. Such action, he’d been advised was premature according to the judges who wished to lay more groundwork and preparation before such accusations as those against the Nurse and Towne women were made official and public. All the same, word got round. Word of what lay in wait on the court docket.

While the magistrates’ hesitation proved upsetting, Parris believed that the judges were leaning in the direction of his view of things. In fact, Parris felt confident that he had convinced Corwin and Hathorne of their duty once he’d ridded himself and his home of that weasel, Jeremiah Wakely. A traitor, whose sole purpose had been to discredit me, no doubt an agent for Mr. Higginson rather than Increase Mather—whose signature was no doubt now a forgery made by the man’s son—Cotton Mather!

Parris had revealed these truths to the Salem judges, but what had truly tipped the scales with the judges had been the matter of the old Towne land grant, which had been contested for years. What with the old man having no male heirs and what with the land falling into the hands of three sisters, all of whom married Nurse, Tarbell, and Cloyse men, and not one of them willing to return so much as an acre back to the common holdings of the village; it all added up to two angry and shrewd judges.

“If any one of these women in that family can be proved a witch . . . ” Parris had led the magistrates to the water.

Hathorne had nodded, saying, “A-And proved a witch at the time of being heir and assign—”

“W-When old Jacob Towne passed on,” added Corwin.

“Then that negates their rights to every bloody acre,” finished Parris the same night as Jeremiah Wakely had knocked him down with his horse—for which he meant to bring charges once he got round to it.

“Careful of foul words on your tongue, Mr. Parris,” Corwin had cautioned at their last meeting. “Such language can invite the devil in, as they say.”

Parris had gone away that night secure in the knowledge that the magistrates had as much to gain as he, as Putnam, as others of his faction if and when Rebecca Nurse and her sisters were formally accused, a warrant made, all three arrested, jailed, and brought to his church for the cleansing needed there. The ritual of excommunication had already been performed today with Goodwife Sarah Osborne. Goode had been put through the ritualized outcasting at the time he’d arranged to have her child, Dorcas Goode, removed from her.

Parris hadn’t brought Tituba into his church for public humiliation, referring to her as a cooperating eyewitness to the demonic reveling going on in Burnham Woods just beyond his apple orchard. He stressed that it was his orchard and not the parish orchard being picked clean by the devils. The previous week he’d stood at the pulpit and denounced those bold felons who filled a bushel basket to bring to his door as paltry payment for his rate. Every parishioner, including his closest allies such as Putnam, owed monies on his rate; every man, woman, and child had routinely paid their tithes to him in goods, often goods he had no need of, and if he saw one more basket of apples on his doorstep with a note attached with the word tithes scribbled across it, he’d publicly read these names at next Sabbath meeting.

“And I need not one more bean, nor potato, nor onion. My woodshed is full even now, my barn full of hay, my animals stocked with grain. What I need is coin.”

After speaking on these church business matters, he delivered his sermon, all the while upset, at the back of his mind thinking how much he’d wanted to deliver the sermon he’d first prepared for today—the one stolen by that miscreant Wakely and now in Hathorne’s hands. While he felt confident that Hathorne would bury the sermon until which time as it was appropriate to give it, and that he would not use Parris’ fervor and enthusiasm, nor his premature judgments against him. “After all,” Hathorne had summed up, “we are all of us going into the battle for souls in Salem.”

Just as Wakely meant for Hathorne and Corwin to condemn Parris for publicly disclaiming a woman not yet arrested, Parris meant to point out that he had a pipeline to the good souls whispering into the ear of his daughter and nieces. On the one count, he wanted to engage the enemy now, today, at this Sabbath Meeting, but on the second, suppose events turned, setting the magistrates against proceeding in the manner that he so hoped that they might? They had hinted at making contact first with authorities in Boston before proceeding. He must be patient and faithful that the judges would act in his favor.

In which case he must curb his tongue and slash his sermon from its present stark, sure prejudice against Francis Nurse and his kith and kin. After which, he hoped to move against his other stubborn, dissenting elder—John Proctor. He’d start with the wife, Goodwife Proctor.

But for the moment, his raw sermon blasting Rebecca Nurse for a heretic, if taken in the same light as Jeremiah Wakely had made of it, could work to his disadvantage; could even ruin a minister and end his hold over these people; could end his hold on the parish property he’d fought to keep now for three bitter years. Years filled with stress and turmoil no man should have to face. Turmoil brought on by people calling themselves his neighbors. People within his own congregation who first chose not to come to meetings, and slowly began having meetings elsewhere—out of their homes.

“I’ve shown the patience of Job . . . endured the pains of hell . . . the suffering yea of Christ himself at your hands!” he’d shouted at his congregation now from the pulpit that lifted him above all gathered before him (an abuse of Puritan belief in itself).

“Yes, at your hands!” he’d continued, his finger pointing and quaking at his flock, many of them children cringing against their mothers, but many another child unable to hold onto their mothers or fathers, as they had been removed from their families and placed into their positions as maid and manservant. Maidservants sat with their adoptive families, and few felt close enough to their foster parents to blubber into their clothing or clutch their hands despite the hell and brimstone the minister administered this morning.

“Do not misunderstand me!” Parris bellowed. “This indictment is not directed at all of you! Many of you have supported me in spirit and wellbeing, and you support me now in my darkest hour while under attack by the most heinous demons and witches ever Hades spawned. And for this, I humbly, humbly thank you who have always