The Witches: Salem, 1692
Foster and Carrier overflew twelve miles between sparsely settled communities. That no one saw them streak through the sky made sense. That no one heard the crash was more surprising. Sound echoed and ricocheted through the New England air, which had an amplifying effect on the ear and the imagination. The slap of a beaver's tale against the water could be heard a half a mile off. The "hideous noise with roaring" of fat black bears carried far and wide, as did the screech of the crowd when a scaffold fell. Each disturbance begged for an explanation. That crash of the ocean in the landlocked distance? A flock of pigeons, alighting in a tree. The freakish bellow? In Boston, Samuel Sewall discovered it to be the lament of his cow, bitten by a dog. Dogs howled nightly at marauding wolves. But sometimes the wild barking, the predawn crack of timber, indicated something more sinister. Sometimes it meant that - board by board - the neighbors were disassembling the house next door, the deft resolution of a bitter property dispute. Who would have guessed that what sounded like a washerwoman beating her linen deep in the forest would turn out to be giant tortoises propagating?
Nor did it necessarily make sense to believe your eyes. Sometimes the scuffling and stomping in the dark revealed brilliantly uniformed foreigners. They left visible tracks before evaporating into cornfields, orchards, and swamps. They fired real bullets but - over two nerve-wracking weeks - proved impervious to those returned by sixty Ipswich militia men. They were understood to be phantom Frenchmen and Indians. That was a better explanation than some. You might wake to commotion in the night to discover a family of frisky cats. The bright moonlight could as easily reveal the scrabbling at the window to have been Susannah Martin, who had crashed into your bed and was settled on your stomach, reaching for your throat. In broad daylight, Ann Putnam's uncle saw Mrs. Bradbury vanish into her yard, to reappear seconds later as a blue boar. When a live calf came hurtling down the chimney and into the kitchen, a mischievous teenager prowled about. But what of the glow-in-the-dark jellyfish in the late-night fireplace? There were at least a dozen of them, marveled Elizer Keyser. The maid saw them too! The mare was there one minute, then gone the next. Who had moved the landmarks, leaving an Amesbury man to stumble about the brush - and into a nonexistent pit - three miles from home, on a moonlit Saturday night? Eighteen-year-old Susannah Sheldon rubbed her eyes: a saucer had transported itself out of doors. What was the broom doing lodged in the apple tree again?
Shapes emerged from the darkness to resolve into different entities all together. A troop of men and horses on the beach in the mid-distance turned out to be a lame Indian with a fishing net over his shoulder. When an apprentice in the Sewall house clubbed a dog outside the door, he in fact leveled a nine-year-old boy. And when Reverend Samuel Parris's slave Tituba came upon a hairy, three-foot-tall creature with wings and a long nose warming itself in a dark room before the parsonage fire, she naturally took it to be peevish Sarah Osborne. She swore it was, in fact. Beverly minister John Hale was perhaps more correct in surmising that when something came tearing down the chimney, ripping an eight-foot hole in the roof, rattling the pewter, and paralyzing his arm, it was lightning. In an equally sure-handed attempt to reconcile perception with understanding, several eminent ministers standing in a refurbished kitchen on a hot April afternoon discussing why "heaven's artillery" seemed disproportionately fond of clergymen's homes had every reason to conclude - as buckets of hailstones suddenly crashed through the brand new windows and skittered across the floor - that someone, somewhere, was making a point. Neighbors gaped at the heap of broken tile and shattered glass. It remained only to discern the message. A Puritan did not waste a catastrophe.