Children of Salem

Jeremy didn’t recognize all the faces. Obviously, people were flocking into the village and to Ingersoll’s in hope of seeing the bewitched and enchanted children, who could be attacked by any object at any time thanks to the invisible enemy. Then he saw Mercy Lewis darting about from table to table, telling tales of torture and suffering. He overheard the words ghost, spirit, Betty Parris, suffering, and torture repeatedly. Then he saw Mercy lift a man’s pewter cup and drain it in one fell swoop.

“Lil’ scamps got me ale!” shouted the man, whose fellows at the table with him laughed. “Child’s got no right to it, and no manners!”

Still, no one else took Mercy to task for it. In fact, she repeated this at another table between tales of how she’d led authorities to the voodoo doll found behind the brick wall in Bishop’s Inn, and tales of how the dead brothers and sisters of Little Anne Putnam cried out for vengeance.

Ingersoll noticed that Jeremy was taking an interest in this newfound freedom that Mercy Lewis had discovered since her bewitchment. “She’s one of the seers now, Jeremy.”

“Last time I saw the young lady, Sam Parris wrung her neck to get the devil out of her, and now this, and you allow minors your ale?”

Without saying another word to him, Jeremy made Ingersoll uncomfortable, the innkeeper erupting with, “The ale helps them see into the secrets of the witches. It’s a proven fact, it is.”

“Ah, I see, and you believe that? A spirit for a spirit, eh?”

Ingersoll tried to match him with his own lame joke. “They’re not called spirits for nothing. Drink up.”

He frowned at Ingersoll before taking a sip.

“Mr. Parris says a little Canary Island wine simmers the girls, too. Says give ’em what they want.”

“Says that does he?”

“Says it’s for the good of us all that they see clearly and make no false accusations, you see.”

This is like being inside a nightmare, Jeremy thought. “And you believe whatever Sam Parris says?”

Ingersoll gritted his teeth, cracked as they were.

Jeremy raised his voice for others to hear as well, saying, “Tell me, Deacon Ingersoll, how is it the poor little children of the village still suffer attacks from witches who are behind bars and in chains?”

Thomas Putnam, at the bar, shouted, “I’ll tell you, Mr. Wakely, neither bars nor chains stop a witch’s flight if she is in her witch’s attitude.”

“You are telling me that Bridgett Bishop or Tituba Indian all the way from Boston, or Goody Goode can go out of their chains from behind bars and continue to torment children?”

“We all know that they can and they have, repeatedly, while you, sir, have abandoned these parts.”

“Goode, and Osborne are no longer in Salem jail,” said Ingersoll to Jeremy.

“Where then?”

“Removed to Boston after being found guilty by Hathorne and Corwin.”

“Why move them to Boston?”

“The jails here are overfull.”

“Ah, yes, and that doesn’t tell you people something?” Jeremy tried to decipher the real reason the first three accused were sent off to another venue, why not Rebecca and Mrs. Proctor? And other more deserving and recently arrested villagers? Then it dawned on him. Room was being made in order of who had been excommunicated first, second, and so on. Ministers and magistrates working in tandem. He could imagine the bargain struck by Parris: “I excommunicate them first, your honors, and you’ll gain their confessions far easier, and should they remain recalcitrant—a judgment will be that much easier for the people to swallow.” Or something to that effect. Guilty until proven innocent—it was the law.

Some at the bar talked of taking bets on which of the accused found guilty would remain stonehearted and unrepentant, and so be the first to hang.”

Ingersoll belatedly added to what Putnam had earlier said. “The very witches sittin’ in Gatter’s jail, Jeremy, they come each night and torment Betty Parris and some of our other children. They can go invisible, slip from their bodies, and make havoc. They’ve Satan on their side.”

“I had a toad in my house other night with the eyes of woman staring up at me,” added Putnam. This statement sent up a gasp among the others, and it ignited a litany of such eyewitness accounts.

“I saw the ugliest spider that’d built the largest web I’ve ever seen in my barn.”

“We had a mouse in our cellar.”

“We were visited by a centipede, the biggest I ever laid eyes on.”

“Are you men serious?” asked Jeremy. “Do you hear what you say?”

This silenced the others.

Jeremy knew he was stepping dangerously over thin ice. “Look, gentlemen, if a witch is capable of going outside her body, escaping bars and chains, and just as capable of possessing say your body, Mr. Ingersoll—“this made the man visibly tremble –“then why on earth would this same witch return to Gatter’s stink hole?”

It was too logical for them.

Everyone at the bar took another long dram from his pint, and Jeremy thought at least he may’ve gotten one among them thinking more clearly when Thom Putnam shouted, “They must have to return to their own bodies is all—for, for nourishment.”

That settled it for anyone wanting to believe in the seer children and invisible evidence.

The enchanted children, as they were also called, had become little celebrities, scryers with the power everyone else lacked, the eyes to see into the Invisible World of Satan. “People’ve traveled all the way from Boston, Jeremy,” muttered Ingersoll in a near whisper. “It’s rather amazing.”

“Amazing? Really?” Jeremy shook his head in disbelief.

“Whatever do you mean, Jeremiah?”

“You have excommunications each night at the meetinghouse, I am told.”

“We do, yes, to punish the wicked among us.”

“One by one, you take the accused before Parris, correct?”

“Well,” Ingersoll raised his hands as if they were clean.

“So that your minister can banish each alleged witch from the congregation by night, and—”

“The sheriff and his men do the takin’.”

“—and by day, the mad play of these supposed bewitched children, yet you’re surprised it draws people like flies to dung?”

“Hold on, now Jeremy. What else are we to do with witches in our midst but to excommunicate them?”

“This presupposes their guilt, sir.”

“Yes, as the law says, guilty—”

“Until proven innocent. I know the law, Deacon.” The innkeeper was right. English law prevailed on these shores. Jeremy gritted his teeth.

Ingersoll launched in again. “Look here, the judges are convening a Court of Oyer and Terminer right here in Salem.”

Jeremy considered this aloud. “So I’ve heard.; meanwhile, the accused are ridiculed and humiliated through the streets and in ceremony in the meetinghouse.” He imagined how bad it’d gone for Mother Nurse. Her worst nightmare, no doubt, to be banished from the church and shunned by all—the worst ordeal of all.”

“They’re only excommunicated after the ecumenical court finds them guilty, Jeremiah.” Ingersoll looked across his bar at Jeremy as if he were mad.

“These arrested are tried then by Parris in the church assize; they go through this barbarous ritual of banishment. Don’t you have any compunction about putting your neighbors through this hell and—”

“Hold on!” shouted Putnam, suddenly at Jeremy’s side. “These witches killed my progeny.”

Jeremy curtailed his anger. Still, he felt a deep pang of spite and hatred for these backwoods villagers—the same as had excommunicated his father for the sin of love and idealism. “Above all else, gentlemen, I hate to see