When she arrived back home with her father, she managed to get him into bed on her own. No one else was around. The place had become hauntingly deserted since Mother Nurse’s execution and the secret burial. Ben had been sent away, as his language against the court and the ministers had become so seditious as to put him under suspicion. It’d taken great and long-suffering arguments from Serena and Francis to get Ben to disappear for a while.
After getting her father settled in, Serena stepped out onto the porch, her mind a jumble of fears for Francis. He’d acted as if out of his head. Going down into the village to murder Mr. Parris on sight, and his behavior on the carriage seat. She feared his mind going.
“Some bustling noise rose up from the nearby road that went by the house, but she paid little heed to it. The Ipswich Road was a main thoroughfare between Salem Town and Village, and it was ever restless except in the wee hours. Instead, Serena wandered out toward the huge stand of oaks, the meeting tables set out below them, one covering the fresh earth below where her mother’s remains lay in secret.
She pulled herself onto the table, her feet on the bench, and head in hand, she began to cry. She missed Jeremy terribly and worried about him, too. She’d had nightmares of his being accosted in a dark Boston alleyway, robbed, and left bleeding on the cobblestones.
She recalled the night they sang hymns over Rebecca. Only the most immediate family members and John Tarbell knew her remains were here and not in the pit below the gallows, which’d been covered over. It appeared no one knew of the ‘theft’ carried out by the Nurse men. At least not yet.
When she thought of the last meal they’d all shared here with Mother Nurse still among them, the day Serena had held the blunderbuss trained on Jeremy, she recalled an underlying melancholia that had hold of her mother. Somehow, Rebecca had known that this storm of madness in the village was coming but how? Now and in fact ever since Rebecca’s arrest, their home had become a sad place, and these tables silent. It felt like an eternity ago that the large, extended family had gathered as one. And now Rebecca’s two sisters were behind bars, and one of them condemned to execution.
Serena tried desperately to pray for her sick father, but she felt unsure if she wanted him free of the illness or free of this troubled world; she wondered if his heart could only be lighted again by joining her mother. At the same time, she wanted to hold onto him. Both thoughts made her feel a sense of guilt—guilt coming of two unresolved thoughts, each coming unbidden and colliding.
The noise coming up off the road roared loudly now, loud enough to cause her to look up to determine just who and how many were passing when she saw the awful sight of what had come to be called the witch cart.
It cranked and creaked from side to side, looking as if it might topple and break apart at any time—else remove itself from its wooden wheels. The old oxen pulling it looked disinterested and weary at once. Riding horseback around the empty jail cart, were Herrick, the same men who stood by him in the village, along with Reverend Nicholas Noyes, and trailing alongside rode four of the celebrated ‘seer’ children.
As the ominous parade went by, the children in particular stared long and hard at Serena where she sat below the trees. The young girls all rode white horses, and they whispered among themselves, giggled, and pointed their terrible accusing fingers at first the house and then in Serena’s general direction.
Reverend Noyes, his nose lifted high, noticed the disturbance among the children on white chargers. He reined in his dark mare and gave a stern look to Serena as if following the awful gaze of little Anne Putnam, whose scrawny frame atop such a large horse looked ludicrous to Serena. Get that child a pony, she heard herself thinking.
The entourage continued onward toward the east, toward Salem Town. Serena wondered who might the little brigands be after today. It appeared Mr. Noyes had some enemies in his parish now who needed to be brought down.
Soon after the noise of the witch cart and the band of people around it had subsided entirely, Serena stood and made her way back toward the house. Nowhere safe, she had told Jeremy, and now her home felt like the largest target of the evil in control here, like a bull’s-eye for the accusers. Her father’s rashness this morning had only made it more so.
She feared they’d simply chosen to not stop for her on the way to the harbor, but had every intention of picking her up on their way back—especially if they failed to find any witches in Salem Town. She imagined, and it seemed so, that Herrick carried blank arrest warrants in his britches so that if one of the nasty little prophets should make an accusation on the road, that he’d be prepared. Noyes would be the name on the warrants today. “Proper procedure be damned!” she shouted to the trees. “In the face of immediate danger, in war, action must be taken. Witchcraft must be met with a suspension of basic human rights and laws of normalcy.”
All this while Parris and to some lesser degree, Thomas Putnam had faded into the background, and the law nowadays was based on some notion of an invisible nature. How terrifying, she thought. How barbaric. How far from sane rule have we come?
Serena hadn’t long to learn an answer to her question.
The accusing children returned before dusk, and they sat at Serena’s gate like vultures. Francis brought up the blunderbuss, pointing at the men on horseback and those horrible children pointing their combined fingers at Serena, calling out that she sent needles into their eyes and ears and in private places. Then Sheriff Herrick read the warrant before his men and several ‘witches’ already humbled and squatting behind the bars in the jail cart.
Serena wrested the gun from her father. “They will kill you, Father!”
“I can’t see you taken away a witch!” he cried out. “Not a second time, Herrick! You’ve killed my wife! Now you wish to sanction the murder of my daughter?”
“There is nothing I can do. The warrant is made out. I only follow orders.”
“Parris’ orders? Noyes? Those damned children!”
“Father, go to John’s place, please!” She hugged Francis tightly to her. “I’ll not be the cause of your dying here today.”
“Where is Wakely?” asked the old man. “If he were here and Ben were here, we’d have a turkey shoot sure. They’d not let you be dragged off a witch!” He grabbed his chest, his face stricken with pain, jaw slack. He slid from her grasp, heavy and unable to stand.
“His heart!” Serena looked to Herrick and Noyes and the others for any sign of sympathy or help but none came. “He needs be helped inside! Will you help me get him abed?”
“It’s a trick!” Anne Putnam raised a fist skyward. “A witch’s trick!”
Herrick ordered two men to help get Francis inside and in a bed.
“I can’t leave him alone like this, Mr. Herrick, please.”
“Told you it was a trick!” shouted Anne.
Herrick ordered one of his men to stay with Francis, a second to alert John Tarbell to come to the house to see to him.
“Does that suit you, Good-daughter Nurse . . . ah, Mrs. Wakely?”
“You’ve known me all your life, Mr. Herrick, and I’ve given you no more cause to suspect me a witch than did my mother. Soon they will be asking you to give up your mother, your sister!”
Herrick quietly replied, “I won’t go the way of Williard.”
“And you know him to be an honorable man, and yet he is to be hanged tomorrow along with my aunt!”
“I must obey my orders, ma’am.”
“Yes, I’m sure you do.”
Serena was escorted to the jail cart, the same as had been used to humiliate her mother before her. “You’re all transparent liars, all of you! You won’t be happy until you’ve stolen our lands!”
“Get in there, now!” Herrick’s anger showed on his face. “I’ve collected no lands or buildings, mills or inns, young woman. And I’ve not been paid my rate for two months!”
Inside the cart, the entire world changed. Serena’s home became smaller and smaller, cut into sections by the bars she gazed through. She no longer had to imagine what her mother had faced, what she had gone through; she was now living it.
The other three women in the cart appeared as normal as Serena could imagine. She had no personal contact with any of them in the past, but they looked like housewives, bakers, mothers, sisters, nieces and daughters. None looked or acted like the addled Sarah Goode or the vile-tongued Osborne, or unwashed Martha Carrier—the dregs that her mother’d been jailed alongside. These arrested looked like respectable, kindly, perhaps saintly women like her mother, like herself.
No matter. They were all on the way to Gatter’s ugly black hole in the village as it had been emptied, the prisoners there housed in the newly built Soddy-jail built by those now making a living off the misery of neighbors. Many another prisoner had by now been carted off to other villages and to Boston, all awaiting time on the court docket in Salem Village and Salem Town now.
Serena shared glances with each of the other so-called witches in the cart. What has Jeremy to return to now? Now I am gone the way of Mother. Arrested, thrown into the same jail where Mother spent her last days. That vile place run by that vile man who claimed that he had been saved by her mother but who would not say so publicly.
# # # # #
The following day, August 19th, 1692
From inside her jail cell, Serena heard the village crier’s voice wafting down to her as he called out the names of those condemned to die today: George Burroughs, George Jacobs Senior, John Proctor, John Williard, Martha Carrier, and Samuel Wardwell. She breathed a sign of relief as her Aunt Sarah Cloyse and Mary Easty had not been included on today’s calendar.
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