The Witches: Salem, 1692 Part 2

The villagers met repeatedly to discuss their minister's predicament. Within months of his ordination, his salary was in arrears; as early as the fall of 1690, a movement was afoot to dismiss him. The committee to collect his salary voted late in 1691 not to do so. He was also out of wood. A bitterness seeped into the sermons. The parsonage meanwhile grew colder and colder, as he emphasized from the pulpit. Were it not for a visiting Salem town deacon who made a last-minute delivery, Parris informed his congregants on October 8, he would have frozen. He made no appeal for the relief of his family, acutely aware of the challenges to his authority and presumably s.h.i.+vering as well in the rabid weather; November brought heavy snows and howling winds. Parris informed the committee that came to see him early that month that they should be more mindful of him than of other people. Having dug out from banks of snow, he complained on November 18 that he "had scarce wood enough to burn 'til tomorrow." It did not help that the winter of 16911692 was especially arctic. Bread froze in communion plates, ink in pens, sap in the fireplace. The chimney delivered icy blasts. Parris preached to a chorus of rattling coughs and sniffles, to the shuffling of cruelly frostbitten feet. For everyone's comfort he curtailed his afternoon sermon of January 3, 1692. It was simply too cold to go on.

Village quarrels aside, Parris had ample reason to complain. His was grueling work for which he was little prepared. He had taken on several occupations at once. The minister in a "little village" read divinity one minute and trimmed his mare the next, left off repairing the garden fence to preside over a prayer meeting. Parris might well hang a map of the world in his parsonage, he might appear to be the village intellectual, having at Harvard translated the Old Testament into Hebrew and Greek, but he devoted himself equally to turnip-sowing, cider-making, and squirrel-killing. "So perplexing it is to have the affairs of the ministry and of a farm to manage together," lamented one Ma.s.sachusetts minister. Parris-who speculated in real estate and came late in life to tending his own fields-could only have felt similarly. The pastoral work alone was arduous and endless. "Now of all the churches under heaven there are none that expect so much variety of service from their pastors as those of New England," wailed Cotton Mather, who did not thrill to the pastoral visit. Parris called on paris.h.i.+oners to inquire after religious instruction at home. He served as scribe, judge, counselor, confidant. He kept fasts and performed baptisms, arranged lectures and conferred with neighboring congregations. He comforted the sick and the bereaved, which over the summer of 1689 included four families who had lost sons to Indian attacks. Marblehead's minister calculated that he went eight years at one stretch without so much as a half a day off. There was cause to be bone-tired under the best of circ.u.mstances, which Parris's were not. Already primed for affront, he came increasingly to harp on Christ's wounds and bruises. Well before the pitiless winter of 1692, he sounded better suited to a calamity than a ministry.

In addition to all else came the family devotions that had landed Bayley in such trouble. Morning and evening, Parris prayed and read Scripture with his household, including his slaves, their souls his charge as well. He gathered the family before the hearth for the singing of psalms and in weekly catechism. Many ministers' children heard a preview on Sat.u.r.day evening of the next day's sermon; the Sabbath ended with a digest of the day's service. Parris reinforced basic principles, stressing covenant obligations. Man was born in sin and embarked on a pilgrimage toward grace. A spiritual war was afoot, separating the G.o.dly from the d.a.m.ned. Church sacraments were paramount. Puritan parenting const.i.tuted a full-time activity; Mather was forever devising exercises for his sons and daughters. While Parris was less creative, he paid close attention to his children's education, indistinguishable from their spiritual welfare. Well before the girls began to tense and twitch, their souls were closely monitored, daily palpated; the state of New England's young qualified as something of a preoccupation. Parris devoutly hoped that all of his paris.h.i.+oners were so vigilant. He feared they were not. He took up the popular refrain that family order was disintegrating; what was the matter with kids today? At a Cambridge ministers' meeting he led a charge to see what could be done.

Five years older than her husband, a member of Boston's First Church before her marriage, surrounded by five Putnam wives in her Salem pew, Elizabeth Parris would have shared in those tasks. She was expected to be constant in her devotions and compa.s.sionate toward the neighbors. Her obligations increased after the distractions of 1692; under any circ.u.mstances, she would have read and discussed the Bible with the parsonage children, whose education fell to her and whom she taught to read. Basic literacy was a New England requirement, thanks to the 1647 statute establis.h.i.+ng schools, to which Ma.s.sachusetts owes its educational eminence. That law too amounted to a defensive measure. It was understood that the "one chief project of that old deluder, Satan, [was] to keep men from knowledge of the Scriptures." The point was to outwit him, to stave off demonic ambush; even in the midst of an arctic New England winter, his hot breath could be felt on the cheek. The Salem town father who had not taught his children to read found a notice posted on the meetinghouse door offering them as servants to someone who would. And while basic literacy was a requirement, it was hardly a sufficiency. One future minister made his way three times through the Bible before he turned six. It was not unusual to have done so a dozen times before adolescence or be able to recite long pa.s.sages by heart.

The ideal Puritan wife was self-effacing, and Elizabeth Parris obliged; little trace of her survives beyond her initial on a fragment of dark pewter plate. Of Parris as a father we have a few glimmers. As he warned his congregants: "Wise parents won't suffer children to play with their food." The sage mother engaged "rod and reproof." He may have sounded more ferocious in the pulpit than he did at the dinner table but it is difficult to believe that his children ever won an argument with their standard-upholding, apology-rejecting father when his paris.h.i.+oners so rarely did. Parris could not ignore missteps; he pried open closed issues; he never made one point when he might make three. He delivered another hint of his paternal style with the abbreviated January sermon. As the Salem villagers curled and uncurled aching fingers and toes, as the shutters rattled in the wind, Parris illuminated a dim meetinghouse with the lessons of affliction. They made one more vigilant. They humbled and instructed. The Lord delivered afflictions, preached Parris, in the same spirit that parents, "seeing their young children over-bold with fire or water," will bring them "near to the fire, or hold them over the water, as if they would burn them or drown them." Naturally no parent intended to do anything of the sort. He endeavored merely, Parris explained, "to awe and fright them, that they may hereafter keep farther off."*

The chilly parsonage was soon enough steeped both in awe and fear. In that it was not alone. Just before or just as the February witch cake introduced Abigail and Betty to their tormentors, twelve-year-old Ann Putnam, the daughter of Parris's stalwart supporter Thomas Putnam, began to shudder and choke. Three miles down the road in the other direction, Elizabeth Hubbard, Dr. Griggs's sixteen-year-old niece, convulsed as well. A creature had followed her home from an errand, through the February snow. She now realized it had not been a wolf at all. All four girls could say with certainty who pinched and pummeled them. For the remainder of 1692 Samuel Parris left no further mention of firewood.

III.

THE WORKING OF WONDERS.

I have seen too much not to know that the impression of a woman may be more valuable than the conclusion of an a.n.a.lytical reasoner.

-ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE OVER THE DAYS that followed Mary Sibley's witch-cake experiment, rainstorms gusted through Ess.e.x County, swelling rivers with snowmelt. They overspilled their banks, inundating homes, sweeping away livestock, mills, and bridges, flooding freshly tilled fields. On every count the village was a seething, muddy mora.s.s. Having consulted with his minister, Thomas Putnam braved the tempests to ride to Salem town on February 29 with three friends. The girls now understood who tormented them; that Monday, the middle-aged farmers in mud-splattered cloaks appeared before two Salem justices to press formal witchcraft charges. Hours later, his black, bra.s.s-tipped staff in hand, the village constable knocked at a door just over a mile southwest of the parsonage. He carried a warrant for Sarah Good's arrest. She was to appear before the authorities the following morning to account for having, over the previous two months, tortured two girls in the Parris household as well as Thomas Putnam's daughter and Dr. Griggs's maid. Sin and crime were close cousins in seventeenth-century Ma.s.sachusetts, which drew its list of capital offenses from the Bible.

A semi-itinerant beggar, Sarah Good const.i.tuted something of a local menace. She would seem to have wandered into the village directly from the Brothers Grimm, were it not for the fact that they had not been born yet. And she came trailing a backstory of pitiless downward mobility. When she was eighteen, her French-born father, a wealthy innkeeper, committed suicide. His considerable estate pa.s.sed in its entirety to her stepfather. When Sarah was in her twenties, her husband died suddenly; she inherited his debts. A series of suits followed, leaving her disaffected and dest.i.tute. To the dismay of their orderly, industrious neighbors, she and her family lived for long stretches on charity, in barns and fields. She and her second husband, William, did not appear always to share an address. Recently she had turned up at the parsonage, her five-year-old daughter in tow. Parris offered something to the youngster. Good had stalked off, muttering under her breath. The encounter with their disheveled, snarling neighbor seriously unsettled the members of the household. Relief of the poor was a chronic problem in Ma.s.sachusetts, where resources were scant and where idleness posed a riddle to most minds. All preferred to drive the dest.i.tute from town. The two Salems were over these weeks contending with this very issue, especially urgent as King Philip's War had produced an unwieldy number of widows and orphans. If they were to provide for their own poor, wondered the Salem farmers, bargaining yet again for their independence, might the town exempt them from highway maintenance?

As it happened, Sarah Good had been unsettling Salem households for some time. Three years earlier she and her family had found themselves homeless; a well-intentioned couple lodged them. Good proved so "turbulent a spirit, spiteful, and so maliciously bent" that after six months, her hosts turned her out. They could not bear another moment of her presence. Retaliating for their kindness, Good insulted their children and threatened the family. That winter their livestock began unaccountably to fall ill and die. Told of the misfortune, Good swore she did not care if they lost every head of cattle. When another villager refused to admit her to his house for fear she carried smallpox-Good clearly carried a whiff of something foul about her-she scolded and cursed. If the family did not mean to extend their hospitality, she fumed, she would confer something on them! Sure enough, the next morning the family cow died "in a sudden, terrible and strange unusual manner." Constable Herrick's brother himself turned the muttering Good away when she came in search of lodging. As she continued to wander about the property, he enlisted his son to keep her from the barn. Fond as she was of her pipe-she was far from the only Ma.s.sachusetts woman who had discovered tobacco-she was likely to set the place on fire. Good had promised that the Herricks too would pay for their lack of hospitality. She may have cast only dark hints; we have her words as they were heard, not as they were delivered. In no way did she make anyone feel comfortable. Several of the Herricks' prize cows moreover subsequently vanished. All three families would have cause to review those inauspicious encounters soon enough.

The constable delivered Sarah Good at ten in the morning on March 1 to Ingersoll's ordinary, or tavern, where her interrogation was to take place. Insofar as the village had a nucleus, Ingersoll's was it. Steps from the meetinghouse, just south of the parsonage, on a rise along the Salem-Andover road, the ordinary was the address at which Parris's congregants refreshed themselves between Sunday sermons. Only the absences were notable that morning. Sarah Good's upright neighbor Martha Corey elected not to attend. She attempted to detain her husband as well, going so far as to unsaddle his horse. She lost the battle; Giles Corey missed not a minute of the week's examinations. By the time the town justices arrived, it was clear that Ingersoll's could not accommodate the crowd. They moved the hearing to the village's austere, raftered meetinghouse, a dim chamber at the best of times, dimmer now after years of neglect. The Salem farmers had long deferred repairs, boarding up broken windows and leaving others open to the air. The place was so dark as to be nearly unusable. All the same, a heady, holiday atmosphere prevailed. The colony was without theater, considered a "shameful vanity." While all of Shakespeare's plays existed, no copy had turned up in North America, where the first organ would not arrive for another nineteen years. In the feverish air that Tuesday the usual rules and all hierarchy evaporated, as, in the weeks to come, inhibitions, obligations, and curfews would fantastically lift. The farmers knew very well their places in the dark, planked pews-among contentious issues, seating was nearly toxic, determined by an ego-bruising, oft-contested algorithm of age, rank, and estate-and that morning they were not sitting in them.

From a table before the pulpit, justices of the peace Jonathan Corwin and John Hathorne presided. Widely respected, they counted among the first men of Salem town. A successful land speculator and quick-thinking militia captain, dark-haired Hathorne lived in a fine mansion. A skilled and harsh interrogator as his father had been before him, Hathorne had been hearing cases since 1684. He was the father of six, though as yet had no experience with teenage girls. Corwin owned sawmills, several in conjunction with Hathorne. The son of one of Salem's wealthiest merchants, he had inherited one fortune and married another. The justices were close confederates, in their early fifties, and related by marriage. They lived a block from each other. Together they had seated the Salem town meetinghouse, where Hathorne played a leading role. They had recently traveled together to the Maine frontier to evaluate Indian defenses. And while neither had a background in the law-men with formal legal training did not immigrate to the colonies, which had no law school-both knew the business of the community, the offenders and the offenses, inside out. Hathorne had sat on the committee that five years earlier had urged the villagers to spare the town their animosities. He had devoted hours to adjudicating Putnam family disputes. No doubt with relief, both men had attended Parris's ordination. Corwin had rescued the Parris family from the cold with the emergency October firewood delivery.

After an opening prayer, Hathorne took charge of the hearing from the long table at which Parris and his deacons normally conducted the communion service. "Sarah Good," Hathorne asked, "what evil spirit have you familiarity with?" She replied, "None." Working from prepared notes, Hathorne continued as if she had said just the opposite. Had she contracted with the devil? Why did she hurt these children? What creature did she employ to do so? He proceeded less like a judge than a police interrogator; it fell to him to establish not the truth of the charges but the guilt of the suspect. When an alleged thief had appeared before Hathorne eight years earlier, he had begun: "What day of the week did you steal the money from Elizabeth Russell?" The second question was, When did you take it?; the next, Where is the money you took?

The contest was asymmetric. For all her misdemeanors, despite the suit against her stepfather, Good had never testified before a magistrate when she stood that sodden morning-several feet and a waist-high rail separating them-before Hathorne and Corwin. It was the kind of confrontation that reduced responsible men to gibberish. All the same Hathorne got nowhere. Good continued in her sullen denials, as unforthcoming in the courtroom as she was intemperate on doorsteps. Hathorne tried a different tack. What was all that muttering about at the parsonage? She had merely thanked the Reverend Parris for his charity, she explained. She was falsely accused. She knew nothing of the devil. Hathorne directed the four girls, a.s.sembled together, to rise. Was this the woman who hurt them? Not only did all testify that she had-three had suffered at her hands that very morning-but as they came face to face with Good before the canopied pulpit, each began to thrash. Hathorne had no choice but to move them away. "Sarah Good, do you not see now what you have done? Why do you not tell us the truth? Why do you thus torment these poor children?" he chided. The wrenching and writhing continued; Good could not help but agree that something afflicted the girls. But what did she have to do with it? she asked bitingly. Like everyone else, she knew that Hathorne had arrested two other women. One of them was his culprit.

The fourth or fifth time Hathorne asked who bewitched the children Good supplied an answer. She named Sarah Osborne, apprehended the same afternoon, her house turned upside down for evidence. Recovered, the girls clarified that Osborne and Good together tortured them. Hathorne returned to the muttering. What was it Good said when she stalked away from people's houses? He implied that she was either tossing off an incantation or conferring with her devilish accomplices. Muttering qualified as something else too, New England code for all that was suspect and subversive. The word smacked of iniquities and insurrections. It led directly to anarchy; where murmuring broke out, mutiny could not be far behind. To the minds of their captives, Indians muttered. Cotton Mather had recently written off murmuring as "the devil's music."

Good was caustic at best, insolent at worst. "Her answers were in a very wicked, spiteful manner," noted one of the court reporters, detouring into the third person, his editorial comment supplanting Good's voice. Appearances were on his side. Weather-beaten and bedraggled, Good looked as miserable as her reputation. A child would have taken her to be aged. She was in fact thirty-eight; she had had a baby three months earlier. She continued to resist her well-dressed examiner, who had to drag answers out of her. As for the muttering, she finally relented: "If I must tell you, I will." She had recited the Commandments. Pressed for details, she changed her story. It had been a psalm. She paused, silent, before floundering ("muttering," in the opinion of a clerk) through a portion of it. "Who do you serve?" persisted Hathorne, swerving slightly. "The G.o.d that made heaven and earth," Good replied, though perversely she hesitated to p.r.o.nounce the Lord's name. She could explain her Sunday absences: she had not come to meeting as she had no proper clothes.

If she did not seal her fate with her acrid answers, her husband did so for her. Someone in the room volunteered that William Good had voiced suspicions of his wife, submitting that she "either was a witch or would be one very quickly." Hathorne pressed the hapless weaver for specifics. Had he witnessed any diabolical acts? He had not. But his wife had comported herself rancorously with him. Tears welling in his eyes, he felt compelled to admit "that she is an enemy to all good." If there were gasps in the room, they went unrecorded; Ezekiel Cheever-enlisted that day as one of several clerks-had no reason to preserve them. The years of poverty had not been kind to the marriage; the report of Sarah Good's lack of sympathy for their hosts' livestock had also originated with her husband. The night before his wife's arrest, William Good would reveal, he had noticed a witch mark-a sign the devil was known to stamp on his recruits-just below her right shoulder. It had never been there before. He wondered if anyone else had seen it. Hathorne remanded Good to prison.

He grilled middle-aged Sarah Osborne, his second suspect, with the same rigor. Like Good, Osborne had tenaciously pursued a substantial inheritance, in her case after the 1674 death of her husband. That claim proceeded slowly. In the meantime, she had taken up with and married her Irish farmhand. Rumors had circulated about her for years, the most recent of which she had spent bedridden. Hathorne met again with denials, if from a better-humored, less shabby defendant. Osborne refused to implicate Good, whom she had not seen in some time and knew only in pa.s.sing. But Sarah Good implicated you, Hathorne needled her. Osborne neglected to rise to the bait. Again Hathorne asked the girls to stand. Would they approach the witness? Each identified her positively. When she had pinched and strangled them, they said, she had worn precisely the clothes she did that afternoon. In an acknowledgment of her looking-gla.s.s predicament, Osborne had been heard since her arrest to sigh that she was more likely bewitched than a witch. This too came to Hathorne's attention. What, he asked, had she meant by the remark? Osborne related a familiar nightmare. In her sleep, she either saw or dreamed she saw-the distinction pa.s.sed without comment-an Indian-like figure. He pinched her neck and dragged her by her hair to her front door. What to do under the circ.u.mstances was something most Ma.s.sachusetts women had already contemplated. In her bestselling narrative, Mary Rowlandson noted that before her Indian abduction, she had regularly concluded that she would prefer death to being taken alive by savages.* All had heard of infant heads dashed against trees, of pregnant women disemboweled. Impatient though the villagers were with the dest.i.tute, they willingly contributed to a fund for the relief of former Indian captives. In February, the village collected thirty-two pounds, or half of Parris's annual (unpaid) salary.

Again someone in the packed meetinghouse volunteered a bit of stale history. Between the girls' contortions and the salvos of unsolicited evidence, Hathorne's courtroom, bathed in anemic, late-winter light, was far from orderly. Even on paper the hearings sound chaotic; there is a reason, notes a scholar of the seventeenth century, that we shout "Order in the court!" today. It seemed Osborne had once mentioned having heard a suspicious voice. Was that the devil speaking to you? Hathorne asked. "I do not know the devil," Osborne replied evenly. She had thought she heard a voice proposing she skip meeting. She ignored it. Hathorne persevered. "Why did you yield thus far to the devil as never to go to meeting since?" he demanded. She had been ill, as anyone named Putnam knew full well; Osborne had been absent from wors.h.i.+p for some time, embroiled in a lawsuit with the village's first family for far longer. Her first husband's will named as its executors Thomas and John Putnam, Osborne's adversaries in her decades-long litigation. Her current husband helpfully specified that she had not attended meeting for fourteen months. That day or the next, the innkeeper's wife inspected both Good and Osborne for witch marks.

While arresting Osborne, Constable Herrick had performed a diligent search for any images, ointments, or apparatus a.s.sociated with witchcraft. He appears to have added the fillip himself; his warrant included no such instructions. At one address, the rifling must have been especially awkward. The third name twelve-year-old Ann Putnam supplied was that of t.i.tuba, her minister's Indian slave. She had lived with the family for some time, since at least the Boston years. She may have worked for Parris earlier, in Barbados. It is notable that the parsonage girls-at whose side t.i.tuba lived, prayed, took her meals, and likely slept at night-did not name her. Nor did Parris. He also twice stated that John, whom the villagers understood to be t.i.tuba's husband, had baked the witch cake, following Mary Sibley's instructions. Deeply attached to Betty, well versed in Scripture, t.i.tuba was by no means the usual suspect. All kinds of slaves and servants got into all kinds of trouble. She had not. She had never before landed in court. For years t.i.tuba had sung psalms and recited her catechism before the Parris hearth; she was as integrated into every aspect of family life as the Goods had been shut out. She knew no pinch of hard luck that might discomfit the community. Both Good and Osborne lived on the outskirts of town and attended meeting irregularly. Traditionally witches were marginals: outliers and deviants, cantankerous scolds and choleric foot-stampers. They were not people of color. On all counts t.i.tuba failed to fit the profile. She proved spellbinding, however.

Again Hathorne began with a presumption of guilt. "Why do you hurt these children?" he demanded. In what was clearly not her first language ("I no hurt them at all"), t.i.tuba denied having done so. Who was it then who tortured the girls? continued Hathorne. "The devil, for all I know," she rejoined before-moments later, to a hushed room-she was describing him. She was as expansive as Sarah Good had been curt, less the scapegoat of myth than a sort of satanic Scheherazade. Lifting liberally from the Puritan playbook, in supersaturated 3-D, she introduced a full, malevolent cast, their animal accomplices, their various superpowers. She was masterful and gloriously persuasive.

Only the day before, while she cleaned the parsonage lean-to, a tall, white-haired man in a dark serge coat had appeared. He ordered her to hurt the children. With him were four accomplices, including Good and Osborne. The others were Bostonians. The man threatened to kill t.i.tuba if she did not torture the girls. Had the man appeared to her in any other guise? asked Hathorne. Here t.i.tuba made clear that she must have been the life of the corn-pounding, pea-sh.e.l.ling Parris kitchen; her tale grew more intricate as she warmed to it.* What she reported was vivid and sensational, lurid and harebrained. While earlier the girls had violently twisted and screeched, none now flexed a muscle or emitted a sound, their relief attributed to t.i.tuba's confession.

A yellow bird accompanied her visitor. He appeared as two red cats, an oversize black one, a black dog, a hog. If she served him, she could have the yellow bird. The cats had appeared at the Parris home as recently as the night before, just after prayer when they had scratched her, nearly driven her into the fireplace, and commanded her to torture the girls. Sarah Good had also appeared that evening while the family prayed. She had a yellow bird on her hand and a cat at her side. She had attempted to bargain with t.i.tuba, stopping her ears so that she could not hear the Scripture. t.i.tuba remained deaf for some time afterward. If she lived in fear of Parris-servants and slaves could expect to be beaten, by ministers as often as anyone else-she was more terrified still of her serge-coated caller. He visited four times, threatening to slice off her head if she mentioned him. In their spectral disguises, Good and Osborne had kept her extremely busy, sending her to the doctor's to pinch sixteen-year-old Elizabeth Hubbard; to the Putnams' to afflict twelve-year-old Ann. They commanded t.i.tuba to kill Ann Putnam with a knife, testimony that was instantly corroborated; from the pews came reports that Ann had complained that her supernatural tormentors had tried to lop off her head! t.i.tuba had traveled a great deal in and out of houses during a week of drenching rains, flying as far south as Boston. She was a brilliant raconteur, the more compelling for her simple, declarative sentences. The accent may have helped. She was as utterly clear-minded and cogent as one can be in describing translucent cats. And she was obliging; her examination is five times as long as Sarah Good's. No one objected that the previous day, when t.i.tuba held the conversation in the lean-to, or that morning, when she claimed to have pinched Elizabeth Hubbard, she had been in custody. Nor did anyone ask why the visitor directed t.i.tuba's attention to only two of the parsonage's four children or point out that t.i.tuba dated her newfound acquaintances to after the girls had experienced their first pains. But then no one seemed inclined to interrupt her either. Finally, they were getting somewhere.

How had t.i.tuba managed her travels? Hathorne wanted to know. "I ride upon a stick or pole, and Good and Osborne behind me," she confessed, elaborating a little; the three traveled with their arms around each other. She could not say if they sailed through the trees or over them as they flew so swiftly. Time and distance held no meaning for them. t.i.tuba may have been smallish; she several times asked her examiners to believe that Good and Osborne strong-armed her into those excursions. She cleared up a few other mysteries as well. That wolf that had stalked Elizabeth Hubbard? It was Sarah Good, transformed. The hairy creature with the wings and the long nose that warmed itself before the Parris fire? Sarah Osborne. She claimed not to know the words to describe the creature but fared admirably. She could not name the tall man's accomplice but knew the woman from Boston; she recognized her white-lined hood. t.i.tuba neither stinted on the visual details nor failed to deliver on any of Hathorne's leading questions. If he mentioned a book, she could describe it. If he inquired after the devil's disguises, she could provide them. She had had time that morning to talk to Good and Osborne. She had had weeks to wonder at, worry about, and care for Betty and Abigail. She adored the girls and deferred to her master, of whom she lived in some fear; a clergyman was meant to show more love than terror to his children and more terror than love to his servants. t.i.tuba was as desperate for a resolution as anyone. Her life was upended. Here was a performance through which no one slept. Only at the end of her testimony did the girls again begin to convulse. "Do you see who it is that torments these children now?" demanded Hathorne. It was Sarah Good, t.i.tuba a.s.sured him. The girls agreed. They continued to howl, but t.i.tuba ran out of words. She could not manage another syllable. "I am blind now, I cannot see," she protested before the March 1 hearing concluded with a prayer.

BY THE END of the afternoon t.i.tuba and Osborne were locked in the Salem jail. It had been a stimulating, destabilizing day for all involved. More prosaic business followed the justices' departure. A town meeting had been called for one o'clock; it began late. The Salem villagers wrangled still with their obligations to Salem town. The differences, it was decided, remained irreconcilable. The farmers resolved to pet.i.tion the court for full autonomy, appointing a constable to spearhead that effort. They voted as well to reject the town's offer to trade highway maintenance for their support of the village poor. Charity was an unaffordable luxury.

That evening after dark a persistent, unearthly noise startled a village cooper and a laborer. Drawing near, William Allen and John Hughes discovered a "strange and unusual" beast on the ground. As they approached it dissolved in the silvery moonlight; two or three women materialized in its place and flew swiftly away. More or less concurrently, Elizabeth Hubbard heaved at the Griggs homestead. "There stands Sarah Good upon the table by you!" she cried to Samuel Sibley, Mary's husband, who was tending to her in her sickness. Shockingly, Good was barefoot, bare-legged, and bare-chested. "If I had something I would kill her!" roared Sibley, reaching for his walking stick. With it he struck the spectral beggar woman across the arm. Hubbard's account was easily corroborated. Constable Joseph Herrick held Sarah Good that evening at his farm so as to deliver her the following day to the Ipswich jail. Somehow the irascible prisoner managed to elude her guards and slip out into the night, taking her infant but leaving her shoes and stockings behind. In the morning, Herrick's wife noticed lacerations along Good's arm, from elbow to wrist. There had been no sign of blood the evening before. Sibley's blows had evidently struck home.

Herrick's deputy could only have been relieved to deliver the suspected witch to Ipswich, a trip of several hours that she made as difficult for him as possible. She rode pillion, on a cus.h.i.+on behind the saddle. It made for slow going; three times that afternoon she also leaped from the horse in attempts to escape. She was not a witch, she railed. Nor would she confess she was one. They had only t.i.tuba's word. It would be absurd to believe a smooth-talking slave, Good protested, simultaneously fretting that someone actually might. She cursed the magistrates. Addled, she tried to kill herself; it was difficult to say who was more terrified in the wake of t.i.tuba's hypnotic performance. On Wednesday, March 2, the authorities clapped Good into the Ipswich jail, an insalubrious address even by her standards. It was squalid and stinking. That evening found John Hughes at the Sibley home, where some account of Sarah Good's antics and his encounter with the flying beast were doubtless discussed. Hughes left around eight o'clock, followed for some time by an unfamiliar white dog. When he was in bed at home, behind locked doors, a great gleam suddenly illuminated his room. He sat up to discover a fat gray cat at the foot of his bed. The twenty-two-year-old cooper, William Allen, also suffered a restless night. A fluorescent Sarah Good landed on his bed. She sat on his foot, though when he kicked, she vanished, taking her light with her. It was as if t.i.tuba had handed out hallucinogens. The terrifying, psychedelic confession, rather than the voodoo of legend, was to be her contribution to the events of 1692.

Who should Ann Putnam Jr. discover in her room the following day but Dorothy Good, the itinerant Sarah's five-year-old daughter. The pint-size witch bit, pinched, and choked Ann, all the while urging her to sign a diabolical pact. Meanwhile Hathorne continued to interrogate the suspects in jail, where t.i.tuba continued, over the course of four days, to deliver revelations. She had entered into an agreement with the devil. "He tell me he G.o.d and I must believe him and serve him six years and he would give me many fine things," she related. What else had he said, asked Hathorne, nearly supplying the answers; the first mention of a satanic compact is his. He had suggested pacts with the devil to Good and Osborne as well, neither of whom picked up on them. "Did he say you must write anything? Did he offer you any paper?" he asked t.i.tuba. He had. She had told him she could not accept him as G.o.d and tried to run upstairs to confer with Reverend Parris, but the visitor had prevented her. He traveled with his confederates. He forced her to torture the girls. He arranged things so that Parris could see neither himself nor t.i.tuba, a well-known maneuver. t.i.tuba knew her Bible and traded in all the right imagery; if she was not obedient, she understood how obedience sounded. On a subsequent visit-generally the devil called around prayer time-he produced a book from his pocket in which she was to inscribe her name. She was spared from doing so as Mrs. Parris called for her at that very moment from the next room. t.i.tuba was meant to sign in blood, though she muddled her account of how this was arranged. How many marks were in the book? inquired Hathorne. t.i.tuba could say exactly: there were nine, in red and yellow, Sarah Good's and Sarah Osborne's distinct among them. In custody Good confirmed the mark was hers. Osborne scoffed at the notion.

Before t.i.tuba's initial testimony the tall man had reappeared, she revealed, to warn her not to breathe a word. Were she to do so, he would decapitate her. Pressed for other names she was hopeless. She began to veer into incoherence, or at least the account of her testimony does. Could t.i.tuba at least say where the nine lived? "Yes, some in Boston and some here in town, but he would not tell me who they were," she replied. This was unsettling news, as were the blood signatures and the hint of conspiracy. t.i.tuba had seen something of which every villager had heard and in which all believed: an actual pact with the devil.

John Hale, the thoughtful Beverly minister, lived four miles from the village. Having attended hangings as well as prison examinations, he knew his witches. He had observed the parsonage girls in their first fits; he was among those on hand when Hathorne deposed t.i.tuba in jail. The magistrates interrogated her four times, more extensively than they would any other suspect. Three men took copious notes; they dared not miss a febrile word. t.i.tuba insisted she was not a witch, though she had previously worked for one. Her mistress had taught her how to identify witches and how to avoid being bewitched, a lesson she had evidently forgotten. In prison she was reexamined for suspicious marks, which she turned out to have after all. Were further evidence necessary, as Hale and the justices looked on, she began to writhe and shriek. Her diabolical confederates tortured her for having betrayed them.

A week after their arrest, Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and t.i.tuba were carted off to await trial in Boston's prison, Good's infant along with them. Even a.s.suming no one jumped from her horse, that journey const.i.tuted a full-day affair. It could only have been tense, given the mutual accusations. As for their destination, with its fetid air, dirt floor, and armies of lice, the Boston jail const.i.tuted "a grave of the living." John Arnold, the Boston jail keep, was notoriously cruel, said to be as obdurate as the shackles with which he fixed the suspects in place. The chains had no locks; a blacksmith alone could remove them. At the same time, Arnold opened accounts for the women's charges, for which they would be billed. He was soon buying blankets for the prisoner-infant, settled in the dungeon. The chains were as much a testimony to the women's preternatural force as the defects of the Ma.s.sachusetts jails. It was understood that witches could control their victims with their every gesture; if they could not move, they could not enchant. Prison breaks however occurred with stunning regularity. An Ipswich prisoner blithely decamped by lifting the boards over his head. Salem inmates at one point dismantled not only the door but an entire wall of the facility. A year earlier, two had called for a pot of beer. They were in a canoe paddling to freedom by the time the jail keep's wife delivered it.

a.s.suming t.i.tuba was convinced by her own testimony, she must have been petrified. Not even a st.u.r.dy prison could prevent the tall man from decapitating her. The justices found her entirely credible. She suffered for her confession. She repented. Her details were precise; they tallied unerringly with the reports of the bewitched. t.i.tuba had moreover been consistent from beginning to end. "And it was thought that if she had feigned her confession, she could not have remembered her answers so exactly," Hale later explained. A liar, it was understood, needed a better memory. t.i.tuba had absorbed all of Parris's teachings, even if her incandescent account was notably short on professions of piety; she mentioned G.o.d only once. a.s.sured throughout, she held up remarkably well for someone caught between a merciless inquisitor and a ghastly decapitator. The irony was that all might have turned out very differently had she been less accommodating. Confessions to witchcraft were rare. Convincing, satisfying, and the most kaleidoscopically colorful of the century, t.i.tuba's changed everything. It a.s.sured the authorities they were on the right track. Doubling the number of suspects, hers stressed the urgency of the investigation. It introduced a dangerous recruiter into the proceedings. "And thus," wrote Hale evenly of an affair that had seemed modest, local, and-Salem town's senior minister implied-so ordinary as to be uninteresting, "was this matter driven on."

WHAT EXACTLY WAS a witch? Any seventeenth-century New Englander could have told you. Adversarial though the relations.h.i.+ps were, Hathorne and Corwin, the court officials, the accused, and the accusers all envisioned the same figure, as real to them as had been the February floods, if infinitely more pernicious. Directly or indirectly they drew their definition from Joseph Glanvill, a distinguished English academician and naturalist. With unimpeachable authority, the Oxford-educated Glanvill had proved that witchcraft existed as plainly as heat or light. As he defined the term: "A witch is one who can do or seems to do strange things, beyond the known power of art and ordinary nature, by virtue of a confederacy with evil spirits." From those pacts, witches a.s.sumed their power to transform themselves into cats, wolves, hare. They had a particular fondness for yellow birds. A witch could be male or female but was most often female. An English witch in particular maintained a kind of menagerie of imps or "familiars," demonic mascots that did her bidding. Those companions could be hogs, turtles, weasels. Cats and dogs were prevalent, though toads were a universal favorite. The witchcraft literature is thick with toads: burned toads, exploding toads, dancing toads, groaning toads, pet toads, pots of toads, human-born toads, cats disguised as toads. The sixteen-year-old servant who slipped a plump toad into the family milk pitcher delivered an explicit message, as she fully intended.

The witch bore a mark on her body indicating her unnatural compact with the spirits that engaged her. Those marks could be blue or red, raised or inverted. They might resemble a nipple or a fleabite. They came and went. Essentially any dark blemish qualified, though a mark in the genital area was particularly incriminating. As had t.i.tuba, a witch signed an agreement in blood, binding her to her master, to whom she pledged her services. He recruited by means of customized bribes. Witchcraft tended to run in families, along matrilineal lines. While a witch's power was supernatural, her crime was religious. She could be relied on to stumble over the Lord's Prayer, anathema to the devil. She worked her magic with charms or ointments-incriminating news for Salem's Elizabeth Procter, whose maid was about to reveal that her mistress kept a greenish, foul-smelling oil on hand. To work her magic at a distance, a witch resorted on occasion to poppets, the doll-like figures for which Constable Herrick had ransacked the Osborne and Parris cupboards. And the witch's connection to the wildly convulsing Salem children? An Englishman had long known precisely what enchantment looked like. According to an early legal guide on several Salem desks in 1692, it manifested as senseless trances, paralyzed limbs, fits, jaws clapped shut or grotesquely deformed, frothing, gnas.h.i.+ng, violent shaking. The author of that volume tendered as well some vital advice: in the presence of such symptoms, consult your physician before blaming your neighbor.

Witches had troubled New England since its founding. They drowned oxen, caused cattle to leap four feet from the ground, tossed skillets into the fire, tipped hay from wagons, enchanted beer, sent pails cras.h.i.+ng and kettles dancing. They launched apples, chairs, embers, candlesticks, dung through the air. They sent forth disembodied creatures, in one case a man's head connected to a white cat tail by several feet of nothingness-a Ches.h.i.+re cat centuries before Lewis Carroll. (It should be said that there were a fair number of taverns in the colony. Salem town was particularly well served, with fifteen taverns, or one establishment for every eighty men, women, and children.)* Witches alternately charmed and disabled. Out of the blue, Hathorne asked t.i.tuba if she knew anything about Justice Corwin's son. Most likely Hathorne wondered if she had crippled Corwin's lame nine-year-old, although there were other candidates; in quick succession, Corwin had buried three boys. Witches managed to be two places at once or emerge dry from a wet road. They walked soundlessly over loose boards. They arrived too quickly, divined the contents of unopened letters, spun suspiciously fine linen, cultured uncommonly good cheese, knew secrets for bleaching cloth, smelled figs in someone else's pocket, survived falls down stairs. Witches could be muttering, contentious malcontents or they could be inexplicably strong and unaccountably smart. Indeed they often committed the capital offense of having more wit than their neighbors, as her former minister had said of the third Ma.s.sachusetts woman hanged for witchcraft, in 1656.

Compared to their European counterparts, New England witches were a tame bunch, their powers more ordinary than occult. They specialized in disordering the barn and kitchen. When the New England witch suspended natural laws, those laws tended to be agricultural ones. She had no talent for storms or weather of any kind; she neither called down plague nor burned Boston. Continental witches had more fun. They walked on their hands. They made pregnancies last three years. They turned their enemies' faces upside down and backward. They flew internationally. They rode hyenas to baccha.n.a.ls deep in the forest; they stole babies and p.e.n.i.ses. They employed hedgehog familiars. The Ma.s.sachusetts witch's familiars-which she suckled, in a maternal relations.h.i.+p-were unexotic by comparison. She did not venture very far afield. Even in her transgressions she was puritanical. She rarely enjoyed s.e.xual congress with the devil.* When she visited men in the night she seemed interested mostly in wringing their necks. Prior to 1692, the New England witch seldom flew to illicit meetings, more common in Scandinavia and Scotland. While there was plenty of roistering in New England, little of it occurred at witches' Sabbaths, which seldom featured depravity, dancing, or voluptuous cakes and took place in broad daylight. Revelers listened to sermons there! (The Salem menu consisted primarily of bread, wine, and boiled meat.) The witch's ultimate target, the point of all those p.r.i.c.ks and pinches, was the soul rather than the body. And despite her prodigious powers, she did not break out of jail, something many less advantaged New Englanders managed with ease.

Among the abundant proofs of her existence-where proofs were needed-was the biblical injunction against her. "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," commands Exodus, although there was some debate about that term; in Hebrew it more accurately denotes "poisoner." As workers of magic, as diviners, witches and wizards extend as far back as recorded history. They tend to flourish when their literature does. The first known prosecution took place in Egypt around 1300 BC, for a crime that would today const.i.tute practicing medicine without a license. (That supernatural medic was male.) Descended from Celtic horned G.o.ds and Teutonic folklore, Pan's distant ancestor the devil was not yet on the scene. He arrived with the New Testament, a volume notably free of witches. Nothing in the Bible connects the two, a job that fell, much later, to the church. It took religion as well for anyone to propose satanic pacts, more popular in Scotland than in England. You could not really bargain away your soul before it was established that you had one.

The witch as Salem conceived her materialized in the thirteenth century as sorcery and heresy moved closer together; she came wholly into her own as a popular myth yielded to a popular madness. In 1326 Pope John XXII charged his inquisitors with the task of clearing the land of devil wors.h.i.+ppers; the next two centuries proved transformative. When she was not being burned alive, the witch adopted two practices under the Inquisition. In her Continental incarnation she attended lurid orgies, the elements of which coalesced early in the fifteenth century, in the western Alps. At the same time, probably in Germany, she began to fly, sometimes on a broom. Also as the magician molted into the witch, the witch-previously a unis.e.x term-became a woman, understood to be more susceptible to satanic overtures, inherently more wicked. The most reckless volume on the subject, the Malleus Maleficarum, or Witch Hammer, summoned a shelf of cla.s.sical authorities to prove its point: "When a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil." As is often the case with questions of women and power, elucidations here verged on the paranormal. Weak as she was to devilish temptations, a woman could emerge dangerously, insatiably commanding. According to the indispensable Malleus, even in the absence of occult power, women const.i.tuted "a foe to friends.h.i.+p, an inescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic danger, a delectable detriment."

The fifteenth century-the century of Joan of Arc-introduced the great contest between Christ and the devil. The all-powerful Reformation G.o.d required an all-powerful enemy; the witch came along for the ride. For reasons that appeared self-evident, the devil could not accomplish what Lawson would term his "venomous operations" without her. Frenzied prosecutions began at the end of that century with the publication of the Malleus, the volume that turned women into "necessary evils"; witchcraft literature and prosecutions had a habit of going hand in hand. And while Satan wors.h.i.+p was a useful charge to level at a rival religious sect-Catholics hurled it at Protestants as vigorously as Protestants hurled it back-all agreed on the prosecution of witches.* For their part, witches were perfectly ec.u.menical. They frequented Catholic and Protestant, Lutheran and Calvinist parishes. Exorcism alone remained a Roman Catholic monopoly. Nor had witches any preferred address. They were neither particularly English nor exclusively European.

As to what country engaged in the greatest hunts, the compet.i.tion is fierce. Germany was slow to prosecute, afterward fanatical. A Lorrain inquisitor boasted that he had cleared the land of nine hundred witches in fifteen years. An Italian bested him with a thousand deaths in a year. One German town managed four hundred in a single day. Between 1580 and 1680, Great Britain dispensed with no fewer than four thousand witches. Several years after Salem, at least five accused witches perished in Scotland on the testimony of an eleven-year-old girl. Ess.e.x County, England, from which many Ma.s.sachusetts Bay settlers hailed, proved especially prosecution-happy, though it convicted at a steady rate rather than in the flash-flood manner of Salem. A diabolical rooster figured among the many hunt victims, as did the mayor of a German city and several British clergymen. For the most part, English witches were hanged while French ones were burned. This posed a riddle for the Channel island of Guernsey when three witches turned up there in 1617. Ultimately, they were hanged according to British law, then burned, according to French.

The witch made the trip from England to North America largely intact. With her came her Anglo-Saxon imps. Similarly, the contractual aspects-the devil's mark, the book, the pact-represented Protestant preoccupations. The Sabbaths, like the flights, derived from the Continent; English witches evinced no interest in broomsticks. The little Swedish girl who had plummeted from her stick had also been on her way to a riotous, open-air meeting to enter her name in a satanic book. The devil swooped in after her crash to minister to the injury that caused the "exceeding great pain in her side."* (He proved less obliging in New England; Ann Foster would benefit from no such rescue in 1692.) When he was not proffering pacts or practicing medicine, the devil was very busy. He baited deviously and worked stealthily, specializing in the perverse. He a.s.sured the skeptic that witchcraft did not exist. He knew his Bible, from which he quoted strategically, to odious ends. He interfered with the ministerial message by lulling men to sleep during sermons. He impeded scientific progress. A gifted medic, he understood more of healing than any man. He was the best scholar around. He too had a serious work ethic; agile and labile, he was always present, always recruiting. He knew everyone's secrets. And he came to the job with six thousand years' experience! As William Perkins, the early Puritan theologian, noted, he could cause you to believe things of yourself that were untrue. (A number of distressed Ma.s.sachusetts residents asked themselves a related question in 1692, one that a.s.sumed greater urgency as spring turned to summer: Could I be a witch and not know it?) These ideas the New England settlers imported wholesale, derived primarily from the work of Glanvill, with whom Increase Mather corresponded, and Perkins, from whom Cotton Mather cribbed. When the colonists established a legal code, the first capital crime was idolatry. The second was witchcraft. "If any man or woman be a witch, that is, hath or consulteth with a familiar spirit, they shall be put to death," read the 1641 body of laws, citing Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy. Blasphemy came next, followed by murder, poisoning, and b.e.s.t.i.a.lity.

While he was not cited in that statute by name, the devil was soon up to his usual tricks in New England. The first person to confess to entering into a pact with Satan had prayed for his help with ch.o.r.es. An a.s.sistant materialized to clear the ashes from the hearth and the hogs from the fields. That case turned on heresy rather than harm; the Connecticut servant was indicted in 1648 for "familiarity with the devil." Cotton Mather-who could not resist a calamity, preternatural or otherwise-disseminated an instructive account of her compact. Early New England witchcraft cases included no broomsticks, satanic gatherings, or convulsing girls. Rather they featured bewitched pigs and roving livestock, proprieties trampled, properties trespa.s.sed. They centered on the overly attentive acquaintance or the supplicant who, like Sarah Good, was turned away. Most involved some stubborn, calcified knot of vexed, small-town relations. Many charges had a fairy-tale aspect to them: spinning more wool than was possible without supernatural a.s.sistance, completing housework in record time, enchanting animals, inquiring too solicitously about a neighbor's illness, proffering poisoned treats.

In the years since its laws had been codified, New England indicted over a hundred witches, about a quarter of them men. The flying, roaring, religion-resisting Goodwin children accounted for the most recent Ma.s.sachusetts trial. The culprit in their case turned out to be the mother of a neighborhood laundress, whom the eldest Goodwin girl accused of theft. The older woman erupted in fury, upbraiding Martha Goodwin; the teenager's fits began immediately. Within the week, three of her siblings heaved and screamed. On the stand, the accused was unable to recite the Lord's Prayer in English, having learned it in Gaelic, the only language she spoke. A search of her house turned up poppets; through an interpreter, she offered a full confession, if one foggy on the devil.* (Years earlier the woman's husband had accused her of witchcraft, establis.h.i.+ng a role that would be reprised at Salem.) The Irish Catholic witch was hanged on November 16, 1688, warning as she rode to the gallows that the children's fits would not abate with her death. She proved right; they grew more severe. Martha continued to kick ministers and ride her aerial steed for some time.

Of late-seventeenth-century Boston, a Dutch visitor remarked that he had "never been in a place where more was said about witchcraft and witches." Indeed the word "witch" got batted around a good deal there. So did witchcraft diagnoses. The first settlers had emigrated from England when that country's witch craze was at its height; they came in large part from the most enchanted counties. Newly arrived in town, a stranger might take one look at a convulsing child and-all goodwill and sympathy-inform his family that a witch lived nearby. They might beg to differ, rea.s.suring him that their neighbors were models of piety, but he knew better: "You have a neighbor that is a witch and she has had a falling out with your wife and said in her heart your wife is a proud woman, and she would bring down her pride in this child." When Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and t.i.tuba were fitted with chains in March, they joined another accused witch, languis.h.i.+ng in prison since the previous October. Sorcery adapted well to New England-a howling wilderness haunted by devilish Frenchmen and satanic Indians-as it did to Puritanism, an immersive, insecure-making creed that antic.i.p.ated conflict if not downright cataclysm, having nearly been persecuted into existence. New England trials were nonetheless on the wane in 1692, as they were in the mother country. Connecticut had been more troubled by witches than Ma.s.sachusetts. That colony had executed a series of them in the early 1660s then relented, never to hang another. Other cases erupted sporadically rather than in frenzied outbursts.

Nor did New England demonstrate any particular eagerness to convict. "We inclined to the more charitable side," noted John Hale following a controversial 1680 reprieve, when the court had refused to convict a woman for injuries caused by a demon in her guise. Justices proceeded cautiously; magistrates dismissed cases and overturned jury convictions. One accused witch was fined for lying, another whipped for chatting with the devil. The Plymouth woman who swore that a neighbor had appeared to her in the shape of a spectral bear was interrogated closely. What kind of tail did the bear have? asked a shrewd magistrate. The woman could not tell; the animal had faced her straight on. Bears, she was reminded, did not have tails. For her fiction she was offered the choice between a whipping and a public apology. Of the 103 pre-Salem cases in New England, the conviction rate hovered around 25 percent. In all, Ma.s.sachusetts hanged only six witches before 1692. On the initial day of hearings, when a deacon from Parris's Boston congregation placed a copy of William Perkins's famed book into the village minister's hands, no one, with the exception of the Goodwins' tormentor-the three women jailed in Ipswich would be rea.s.sured to remember-had been executed for witchcraft in well over a quarter century.

In the decades prior to 1692, a great debate over the reality of witchcraft had raged in Britain, where prosecutions essentially halted. That discussion fell to the elite; the witch was a subject for the academician and the educated clergyman. Skeptics argued their case a full century before Salem, though to Joseph Glanvill-writing late in the 1670s-it was still just possible to believe that all intelligent men were on your side. The existence of witches, it was understood, was something on which men of all ages, wise and unwise, Jewish, Muslim, Christian, and heathen, could agree. It remained as obvious that a spirit could convey men and women through the air as it was that the wind could flatten a house. The first steps away from the belief were tentative ones. The rationalist came up always against Perkins, than whom no one defended witchcraft more cogently. Of course there were all manner of frauds, cheats, and counterfeits, he conceded, sounding a variation on the paranoiac's anthem. Just because there were impostures did not mean the genuine article did not exist! The cheats rather proved the case; there would be no counterfeits were there not things to be counterfeited. Cotton Mather echoed that argument, as he would a great deal of Perkins. Sorcery did not account for all dubious accidents. But some things could be explained no other way.* To doubt its efficacy was, as Perkins had noted, Mather reiterated, and Ma.s.sachusetts believed, to doubt the sun s.h.i.+ning at noon.

Glanvill elaborated on Perkins's contention that we should not deny the existence of something because one fails to understand it. We did not know how the soul operated either, observed Glanvill. Why did the Bible warn against witches if they did not exist? Every nation had a word for the phenomenon. How had they all managed to name a nonent.i.ty? There were moreover plenty of confessions. Here as elsewhere, consistency proved the point. "We have the attestation of thousands of eye and ear witnesses, and those not of the easily deceivable vulgar only, but of wise and grave discerners, and that, when no interest could oblige them to agree together in a common lie," a.s.serted Glanvill. It was inconceivable that "imagination, which is the most various thing in all the world, should infinitely repeat the same conceit in all times and places." Proof was elusive but by no means impossible. By the same logic, argued the royal academician, among the keenest minds of his century, touching up against the nature of knowledge, how can we prove that Julius Caesar founded the Roman Empire? (In Mather's version, this was tantamount to ranking the entire history of Great Britain among the tales of Don Quixote.) To disbelieve was to reduce history to fiction.

Indeed the imagery was startlingly similar, as were the convulsions, trances, shrieks, and stranglings. A New Englander knew what a witch looked like as today we recognize a leprechaun or a vampire, although we have (presumably) never met one. Which was no proof of anything. Just because you did not see the robbers on the road, argued Mather, did not mean they failed to exist. The skeptic insisted witchcraft was absurd and impossible, a fantasy, as one doubter would contend, propagated by "little imposters." But that was precisely the point, countered Glanvill. Witchcraft was so far-fetched, so preposterous, so improbable, it had to be true. You couldn't make this stuff up! To the impossibility of a shared delusion was added the most compelling reason to believe in witchcraft, one pinched from the t.i.tle page of the Malleus: "Not to believe in witchcraft is the greatest of heresies." The seventeenth-century skeptic was made to appear an appeaser. "Flashy people may burlesque these things," sniped Mather in 1702, taking aim at the "learned witlings of the coffee-house," the latte-sipping liberals of the day. But sober minds did not make sport of the invisible world, especially in light of the evidence. Mather was very close to a larger theme from his father's 1684 Ill.u.s.trious Providences, stuffed with mind-boggling portents and prodigies, an occult Ripley's Believe It or Not. Without mystery there was no faith. To deny witchcraft was to deny religion, a small step from a more provocative a.s.sertion: to deny witchcraft was to advocate it.

As for the wily figure who came to the job with six thousand years' experience, the master of disguise who could cause things to appear and disappear, who knew your secrets and could make you believe things of yourself that were not true? Here matters grew murkier. Perkins a.s.signed the devil a concrete form but did not describe him. No New Englander seemed particularly clear as to who he was or what he looked like. There were no bat wings or forked tails in sight, though in one Salem account, he stuck out a cloven foot, and in another he turned up as a hybrid monkey, man, and rooster. It was uncertain whether he was male or female. One accused witch wondered if he might be a mouse or a fast-moving turtle. If he had a physical existence, the devil the New Englander knew was a "little black man" or a "great black rogue" or a "black hog." In the more or less official 1692 version, he was barely taller than a walking stick, tawny, with straight, dark hair and a high-crowned hat. While he