“Which makes you what?” Parris did not mean this as any sort of barb, but spoke out of confusion.

“I am my own man, sir.”

“Wakely…Wakely…yes, I’d heard it as Walker or Warfield, but yes, I’ve heard tell of this man, your father. Was he not a dish-turner by trade? Married a Frenchy, yes.”

“And we all know what that portends.”

He gave Jeremy a searching look, trying to determine if his last remark was jest or anger. But Parris said no more on the subject, allowing his dark brown eyes to speak for him. Then he suddenly exploded with more laughter, which drew almost as much curiosity from passers-by as had their run-in with Goode the day before.

“What do you find humorous, sir?”

“Now I understand why you’re here. You in particular, that is.”

“I have no vengeance motive, sir.”

“Sure.” He nodded exaggeratedly. “I am sure.”

# # # # #

With great energy, as if the revelation of Wakely’s having been an ill-treated villager had filled his blood with some strange elixir that fueled this complicated man named Parris, Jeremy watched him march on for the Putnams, to do battle there once again with a little girl causing havoc in his parish—his orphaned niece, Mercy.

Jeremy had to truly rush to keep up, and as he did so, a good fire burned within him as well. Increase Mather had proved a genius, somehow knowing this moment between Jeremy and Parris would occur. For having shared his infuriating past and his anger at the parish with Samuel Parris, Jeremy had forged an instant bond with the maligned minister. Mather had predicted it. While Parris remained suspicious and aloof, he now trusted to a notion that Jeremy’s basest instincts had brought him back to this hovel to minister to these people in the form of some sort of retribution. Something Jeremy imagined that pleased the Reverend Samuel Parris, as if he’d discovered yet another kinsman to stand on his side—Jeremiah Wakely.

And thanks to that false sense of kinship, the man might let his renowned guard down just long enough for me to collect the evidence needed. Evidence that’d perhaps bring Parris to the day of his excommunication from Salem Village. A righteous one, and not the farce that’d devastated the Wakely family.

Again they heard of the abuses Mrs. Putnam had taken from Mercy, and that Little Anne, too, was misbehaving and getting into bad habits, all due to Mercy’s having more and more influence over Anne Junior. Again Parris preached and prayed over the heads of the two little girls who lived beneath the Putnam roof. This time, he called on Jeremy to add his prayer, and having prepared for such moments, Jeremy did not hesitate, asking the children to say the Lord’s Prayer with him. Finally, once more Parris convinced the Putnams to give Mercy more time to adjust to her new master and mistress, and to her new duties and surroundings.

Chapter Seven

The following midnight at the Putnam home

“Your mother is strange, Anne,” said Mercy Lewis from where she lay bundled beneath her woolen blanket atop her straw-tick mattress. Like the younger Anne, she wore a thin and plain linen nightshirt—a feed bag, she called it. Mercy was propped on one elbow where she’d awakened to the noises filtering up to them from below. She felt restless in the small trundle bed here across the attic loft from frail, gaunt Anne Putnam Junior. “I said your ma’s weird, making all those noises in the night.”

“She is not strange nor weird!” Anne replied and sat up, her lips puckering in anger, her own feedbag too large for her tiny frame.

“Then what’s all those nasty sounds coming from her room all night? Gracious! Sounds as much a ruckus as Goody Goode put on my uncle the other day.”

“Don’t call my ma a witch!”

“I didn’t never call her a witch, but I know some who have.”

“Mother . . . she only talks to herself is all.”

“Talks? That’s talk? She screams like. . . like as if your father’s beatin’er!”

“My father don’t beat nobody! You shut up, Mercy! Just shut up!”

“Your father ever come for me, I’ll stab him with this,” replied Mercy, holding up a huge knitting needle.

“Wherever’d you get that?”

“Goody Goode give it to me for protection. Said it had magical powers.”

“That old witch? You’d best steer clear of that hag ‘lest you turn into one.”

“Ah, She’s not so bad as people make her out.”

“Make ’er angry then! See if she don’t put a hex on ya, Mercy.”

“She says your ma’s a witch.”

“She’s a liar. Goode’s a lying witch!”

“Says your ma traffics with the Devil.”

“My ma’s had a horrible life is all, and she’s . . . “

Mercy came to Anne’s bed and sat with her. “She’s what?”

“She’s haunted; that’s what she is. No different than me.”

“You, Anne, haunted? Anne, talk to me.”

“She cries every night for the dead children she brought into this world before me, and—and so do I.”

“All them sisters and brothers, ten, I heard.” Mercy shook here head. “All born dead.”

“Nine, me being number ten, but they didn’t all go at birth. Not all. Some lived for a time.”

“How long?” Thirteen-year-old Mercy Lewis, elder cousin to Betty Parris, had recently discovered her flesh, and her breasts gave her more pleasure than all the sermons her uncle could spew from pulpit and dinner table, but she was always quick to pick up on any gossip and there was plenty at the Parris’ home. “How long did the longest one live?”

“That’d be Thomas the Third. He lived almost six months.”

“I hear you almost died, too.” Mercy studied the younger girl.

“I’m here, ain’t I? I turn’t eleven back in January.”

“And you ain’t dead yet?” Mercy giggled. “So that makes you the longest to live, not Thomas the Third. You beat out your brothers.”

“No, I ain’t, Mercy Lewis! I’m not one of them.”

“Not one of them?”

“The dead brothers and sisters; they’re together. Me . . . I’m alone.”

“Not no more.”

“Whataya mean?”

“You got me. I’ll be your big sister.”

Anne smiled at the notion. “Y-You mean it?”

“My but you look whiter than death. I got to find ways to get you outside in the sun. What little we get here in this dingy place is awful.”

“How? Mother doesn’t let us out of her sight. Work all day in the house.”

Mercy bounced on her knees on Anne’s bed. “That’s what I mean when I say she’s a witch!”

“Shut your mouth!” Anne’s voice traveled through the house.

“Shhh, you want them coming up and yelling again?”

“Then you shush that talk, and quit thinking bad of us!”

“Just saying what I was told.” Mercy sulked while playing with Anne’s hair.

“Then you was told wrong by a mean-spirited old bitch.”

Mercy laughed and covered her mouth with both hands.

“What’s so funny?”

“Your little white face goes all red when you curse.”

Thin, frail, small-boned Anne Putnam Junior dropped her head and wiped away a tear. “My mother and me, we’re both haunted is all. That’s all. You’d be haunted too by your dead fam’ly if . . . ”

“If what? Go on, say it. I hear it behind my back all the time. Say it, Anne!” She squeezed the younger girl’s arm hard.

“If you truly had any heart—Mercy Lewis—but you haven’t any.”

“I got no memory of how my parents died,” Mercy countered, letting Anne go, her eyes flashing anger.

“None? How can that be?”

“Only know what people’ve told me is all.” Mercy pretended sniffles. “So, so it might seem I don’t have no feelings ’bout it, but I do. I surely do.” Mercy worked to imagine it; how horrible her parents had died when hostile Indians had attacked their farmstead eleven years ago, but she might just as well attempt to dredge up ancient Roman soldiers hoisting Christ on the cross for all the good it’d do—as she did not have any feeling for either event, largely due to her having heard these two stories so often and from so many directions for so many years now that she’d become stonily cold to both fairy tales as she considered each.

Mercy had been found below the burned out home, below the floor, and below the bodies. Or so she’d been told so often that it had no meaning any longer. “Your father and mother loved you ’til the end,” Uncle Wilkins, Uncle Revelation, and Uncle Parris had all repeatedly reminded her. “They protected you with the last measure of their blood. They protected you with their very bodies.”

In truth, she had no feelings about her unremembered parents or the incident that they had earned a kind of ‘sainthood’ for in a community that disdained saints. Mercy’s not caring and not remembering, and her disdain for the oft repeated tale had grown into a cancerous guilt within her—one that manifested itself in hurting others in the most devious ways she could manage. And if she should fail in deviousness, she’d make it up in outright theft and lies. She had once told Uncle Samuel that she dared Satan to come near her.

His response was to again tell her how her parents had died so that she might live. All the same, whenever someone reminded her of the defining incident, she could not grasp it. Perhaps I don’t want to, she secretly told herself. Either way, it only nurtured the guilt until she’d become angry toward everyone, because everyone in the village looked at her with curious or pitying eyes. How had she survived?

“Soooo,” Mercy cooed at nine-year-old Anne, “you two—mother and daughter—are-are just haunted, eh?”