Tituba of Salem Village Read Online Free PDF Page A

and then they both laugh.”
    He sat down on the settle, close to the fire, staring into it, “It’s not a man’s work. Not a man’s work.”
    One night when he came home he was very upset. Witch Glover had been hanged that morning. He went to the hanging. Everybody went. They even closed the tavern.
    He sat with his head in his hands. Just the two of them were in the keeping room. The master and mistress and the children were asleep in the little room that served as their bedroom.
    “It was horrible,” John said. “She wasn’t anything but an old crazy woman. And they hanged her. Horrible. Then afterwards they all came into the tavern, so many they couldn’t even sit down. And they drank rum and laughed and said, ‘A hanging is thirsty work.’”
    “What had she done?” Tituba asked.
    “They said she witched the Godwin children. Just before she died she said hanging her wouldn’t cure them. You should have seen the crowd of people gawking at her—an old woman, dirty, crazy. They said the black man stood by and whispered in her ear before she was hanged.”
    “Why did you go?” she asked sharply, not liking to see him so upset and wondering what he meant by “the black man.” She hesitated to ask any more questions, and was angered with herself for not asking.
    “I didn’t know what was going on. They said, ‘Let’s go watch the Witch Glover. Come on, everybody. We’ll have some sport. Come on, John Indian, come and have some sport.’ I didn’t know it was a hanging.”
    It was weeks before he mentioned it again. Sometimes when he sat silent, staring into the fire, she wondered if he was remembering the hanging of the Witch Glover.
    Meanwhile, they settled into the little house as best they could. When the weather was fine, she took the little girls down to the wharf with her to buy fish. It was an exciting place. The wharf reached out into the open sea, and the boats could pull right up to it to dock. There were warehouses and countinghouses and shops and places where auctions were held, all along one side. There were wharves and small docks, all along the edge of the city, and places where they dried fish on frames, and then alongside there might be a bakeshop and a tavern, so that as you walked along you smelled fish, and the smell of the sea, and the smell of bread baking, and the smell of rum.
    The mistress didn’t like these trips. She had all the fears that an invalid has. They would get lost. They would fall in the water and drown. (“Don’t go near the Long Wharf.”) They would go into the woods and be attacked by fierce animals—wolves or bears or wildcats—that inhabited the untracked forest that stretched for miles outside of Boston. (“Don’t go near the woods.”) She warned them about the danger of fires, of being trampled by horses, teased and tormented by foreign sailors, chased by dogs.
    At last Tituba said, “Mistress, if we waited until we thought it was safe, we would never go outside the house.”
    “I wish you wouldn’t,” she said. “I mean—I wish you wouldn’t go unless John is with you.”
    “In that case, we would never go out,” Tituba said gently. “He is at the tavern all day, and a good part of the night.” She tucked the covers in around the mistress a little more tightly. “It’s perfectly safe,” she said. “Betsey is on one side of me, and Abigail is on the other. We hold each other’s hands.”
    Betsey’s grip on her hand was always tight—it was a frightened little hand. Sometimes the grip tightened beyond belief, and Tituba was sure the child was thinking: bears, wolves, wildcats, foreign sailors, big fierce dogs, angry cows, maddened pigs, stampeding horses.
    Abigail’s curiosity overcame any fear she had. She chatted as they walked along, head up in the air, asking questions.
    “Why do all these boys wear leather breeches?”
    “They’re apprentices. Leather is tough, and they won’t wear out their breeches as fast as though they