Read The Witches: Salem, 1692 for Free Online Page B

if—assuming she admitted to her sin and repented for it—they might hear as much from her own mouth. Public expiation was essential. Sibley offered an emotional apology. Parris continued: “Brethren, if herein you have received satisfaction, testify by lifting up your hands.” Every (male) hand in the room went up, the last time a consensus would prove possible in the 1692 village meetinghouse.
    At the parsonage Parris reproached the servants as well. Already charged, the atmosphere there must have crackled with resentment. By that time the minister had larger matters with which to contend, however. While his niece and daughter made a great deal of noise, it had beenimpossible to decipher what precisely they meant to say. The cake worked its diabolical magic; within days, Betty and Abigail named names. Not one but three witches were loose in Salem. The girls could see them perfectly. And by the sodden end of February—sheets of rain fell all week, flooding fields and turning the village into a coursing river of mud—those witches were on a pole flying through the air.
    SALEM VILLAGE OWED its existence in part to its fear of ambush. The oldest settlement in Massachusetts Bay and very nearly New England’s capital, the town of Salem had been named in 1629. A fine, flourishing community about a mile long, scented by salty sea air and the rich, crisp hint of pine, it counted among the most agreeable addresses in the colony. Salem’s gem of a harbor was second only to Boston’s; the town enjoyed a brisk trade with Europe and the West Indies. Built on a peninsula, surrounded by velvety green hills and idyllic coves, it was home to thriving fisheries and shipyards. When a new king ascended to the English throne in 1685, he did so with acclamations and celebrations in Boston but with proclamations as well in Salem, the only other Massachusetts town of more than two thousand people. Quieter and less cosmopolitan, Salem was every bit as refined as Boston, with an array of painted, gabled, multiple-storied homes and a number of newly minted fortunes.
    As early as 1640, farmers had begun to venture north and west, away from the prosperous port, beyond the town’s rolling hills, in search of more arable land. Their loose-limbed settlement became Salem village (and modern-day Danvers). Soon enough, those enterprising villagers—known locally as the Salem farmers—began to lobby for institutions of their own. While their families disliked making the five-to ten-mile trek through driving snow to attend meeting, there were additional considerations as well. In 1667 the villagers petitioned the general court in Boston. Did it really make sense for them to trudge to Salem town to take their turns at military watch? It was awfully far for them, particularly onerous after dark, “in a wilderness that is so little cleared and [by] waysso unpassable.” Many of them lived a full mile from their nearest neighbors. The farmers’ departures struck terror in the hearts of their wives, “especially considering what dreadful examples former times have afforded in that respect, in this country, from Indians (and from others also), in the night season, when their husbands have been absent.”
    Moreover, they continued with unassailable logic, was it not profaning the Lord to travel so far armed to watch a town in peacetime? The older community insisted on the unceasing danger. (Its leaders preferred to reduce neither its tax base nor its territory.) But were the farmers—in a rustic settlement of fifty isolated farmsteads, then without even a meetinghouse at their center—not more vulnerable than those in the compact, commercial lanes of Salem, with its larger population and its many fine homes? Surely the town could keep watch without the villagers. Its leaders balked, countering that only recently a French ship had somehow managed to sail undetected into port after nightfall. How was that possible? scoffed the farmers, who knew well that