Free The Witches: Salem, 1692 by Stacy Schiff

her husband died suddenly; she inherited his debts. A series of suits followed, leaving her disaffected and destitute. To the dismay of their orderly, industrious neighbors, she and her family lived for long stretches on charity, in barns and fields. She and her second husband, William, did not appear always to share an address. Recently she had turned up at the parsonage, her five-year-old daughter in tow. Parris offered something to the youngster. Good had stalked off, muttering under her breath. The encounter with their disheveled, snarling neighbor seriously unsettled the members of the household. Relief of the poor was a chronic problem in Massachusetts, where resources were scant and where idleness posed a riddle to most minds. All preferred to drive the destitute from town. The two Salems were over these weeks contending with this very issue, especially urgent as King Philip’s War had produced an unwieldy number of widows and orphans. If they were to provide for their own poor, wondered the Salem farmers, bargaining yet again for their independence, might the town exempt them from highway maintenance?
    As it happened, Sarah Good had been unsettling Salem households for some time. Three years earlier she and her family had found themselves homeless; a well-intentioned couple lodged them. Good proved so “turbulent a spirit, spiteful, and so maliciously bent” that after six months, her hosts turned her out. They could not bear another moment of her presence. Retaliating for their kindness, Good insulted their children and threatened the family. That winter their livestock began unaccountably to fall ill and die. Told of the misfortune, Good swore she didnot care if they lost every head of cattle. When another villager refused to admit her to his house for fear she carried smallpox—Good clearly carried a whiff of something foul about her—she scolded and cursed. If the family did not mean to extend their hospitality, she fumed, she would confer something on them! Sure enough, the next morning the family cow died “in a sudden, terrible and strange unusual manner.” Constable Herrick’s brother himself turned the muttering Good away when she came in search of lodging. As she continued to wander about the property, he enlisted his son to keep her from the barn. Fond as she was of her pipe—she was far from the only Massachusetts woman who had discovered tobacco—she was likely to set the place on fire. Good had promised that the Herricks too would pay for their lack of hospitality. She may have cast only dark hints; we have her words as they were heard, not as they were delivered. In no way did she make anyone feel comfortable. Several of the Herricks’ prize cows moreover subsequently vanished. All three families would have cause to review those inauspicious encounters soon enough.
    The constable delivered Sarah Good at ten in the morning on March 1 to Ingersoll’s ordinary, or tavern, where her interrogation was to take place. Insofar as the village had a nucleus, Ingersoll’s was it. Steps from the meetinghouse, just south of the parsonage, on a rise along the Salem-Andover road, the ordinary was the address at which Parris’s congregants refreshed themselves between Sunday sermons. Only the absences were notable that morning. Sarah Good’s upright neighbor Martha Corey elected not to attend. She attempted to detain her husband as well, going so far as to unsaddle his horse. She lost the battle; Giles Corey missed not a minute of the week’s examinations. By the time the town justices arrived, it was clear that Ingersoll’s could not accommodate the crowd. They moved the hearing to the village’s austere, raftered meetinghouse, a dim chamber at the best of times, dimmer now after years of neglect. The Salem farmers had long deferred repairs, boarding up broken windows and leaving others open to the air. The place was so dark as to be nearly unusable. All the same, a heady, holiday atmosphereprevailed.