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

household also included ten-year-old Thomas Parris and four-year-old Susannah, neither of them afflicted, both presumably petrified.
    Although they kept two Indian slaves, Tituba and John, the family had reason to feel practically as well as spiritually besieged. When she was not tending livestock, the garden, or a fire, when she was not baking or candle-making, a Puritan girl was meant to be knitting, spooling, or weaving. A five-year-old could be relied upon to sew a counterpane or spin flax. The flailing girls utterly disrupted the family routine. They could not be left alone. Nor could Parris have easily prepared a sermon upstairs given the mayhem downstairs. The most gifted of his colleagues devoted seven hours of fevered concentration to that exercise; others allotted a week of solitary study to each discourse, reading and meditating on his subject. If the Puritan minister spent a good deal of time parsing silences, Parris’s ordeal was now reversed. He worked to ear-piercing screams. He was accustomed to being the one visitors came to hear, a role his daughter and niece usurped.
    At all times, the parsonage welcomed callers; as of February, it was overrun. Illness was a public event in the seventeenth century, unexplained illness a province-wide one. The curious and the well-wishers crowded in, gooseflesh rising on their arms. The howls and grotesque writhings disturbed. They were riveting. They were the kind of thing that made you flee in horror, gape in hair-raising, heart-racing disbelief, or faint dead away. In similar cases as many as forty or fifty pressed into the sickroom. Some were repeat visitors and helpful neighbors enlisted to watch and restrain the frenzied children. The neighbor who did not call was the exception, as one would be reminded soon enough. Others traveled from miles away to sit in the smoky, opaque light of the Parrises’ low-ceilinged parlor. Between prayers they sang psalms together, as had a great crowd at the Goodwin household for days on end. Sometimesthey got more than they bargained for; those children were abusive with ministers and insolent with visitors. *
    A natural list-maker and scorekeeper, Samuel Parris was impatient and exacting, but he did not act precipitously. From his disordered household some hints of the affliction crept into his sermons, which he delivered regularly, once on Thursday, twice on Sunday. Those were uninspired affairs; Parris was an unoriginal thinker to whom markedly original things would happen. He did not deviate substantially from his previous themes, dilating on Christ’s ascension, on his mediation between God and man. Through February Parris looked largely to fasts and prayer. He consulted with fellow clergymen. His cousin and contemporary the Milton minister may have been particularly helpful; his daughter had earlier suffered convulsions. With cider and cakes, Samuel and Elizabeth Parris entertained the well-wishers who crowded their home. They prayed ardently. But when he had had enough of the “odd postures and antic gestures,” the deranged speeches, when it became clear that Scripture alone would not relieve the girls’ preternatural symptoms, Parris called in the doctors.
    Years later the practice of medicine in Boston would be deemed “perniciously bad” by a university-educated physician; in 1692 no university-trained physician had yet arrived in either Salem town or its neighbor, tiny Salem village, where the girls twitched and snapped. A basic medical kit of the time looked little different from an ancient Greek one, consisting as it did of beetle’s blood, fox lung, and dried dolphin heart. In powders or plasters, snails figured in many remedies. They were at least easier to harvest than unicorn’s horn. The fat of a roasted hedgehog dripped into the ear constituted “an excellent remedy for deafness.” The most informed medical man in the colonies at the time swore by saltpeter for measles, headache, and sciatica. Cotton