Free Six Women of Salem by Marilynne K. Roach Page B

fighting in the burning fort left at least 80 colonists dead and 150 wounded, but they killed perhaps a thousand Narragansetts either directly or from exposure, as men, women, and children tried to flee the carnage.
    Further, Thomas Sr. was not only prosperous but also generous. He built a new house east beyond Hathorne Hill for himself, his second wife, and the younger children (including eight-year-old Joseph, the only child from the second marriage) and then or soon after gave the use of the old homestead to Thomas Jr. The 150-acre farm included house, barns, orchards, uplands, pastures, and meadows. It stretched to the Ipswich River, its angles marked by a great rock and blazes on certain trees—white ash, white oak, red oak, and black oak, hornbeam, and maple.
    Ann, aged seventeen, married twenty-six-year-old Thomas on November 25, 1678. If she had a hired girl to assist her in her new household, the servant could hardly have been much younger than her mistress. But she was Mistress Putnam now (Mrs. for short), not simply Ann (like a child, a servant, or a lower-class woman). Young as she was, as Mistress, she outranked even a Goodwife (Goody for short) like Rebecca Nurse. For both she and her husband were the children of wealthy men and began their married life with a fine material start. A prosperous future was a reasonable expectation. But expectations, either material or spiritual, however reassuring, are not inevitable in this mortal, earthly life.
    Old controversies erupted the following winter when Nathaniel Putnam, whose support of Bailey had since soured, along with Bray Wilkins announced that Bailey was not qualified to be a minister. Their reasons—especially Nathaniel’s change of heart—are now cloudy, but the allegation sparked a spate of charges and countercharges. One side declared that only a few had invited Bailey to preach, that he sought to “carve out a considerable estate” in the Village when he was not their permanently ordained minister but there only “upon sufferance,” and that Bailey did not even conduct prayers and Scripture reading for his own family. Thomas’s father and several other men, including ten who lived outside the Village, defended Bailey’s religious life. The slander of religious negligence escalated until it went to court, where witnesses gave conflicting accounts as to whether Bailey conducted family prayers and Scripture readings. (Ann was not called to testify, though she had lived in Bailey’s household before her marriage.) With the Salem Church serving as mediator, Reverend John Higginson advised that the majority’s wishes would rule, that the Village pay Bailey the salary due him, and that they “follow the things that make for peace.” The last suggestion especially fell on deaf ears.
    Thirty-eight men, including Thomas and his father, signed a letter supporting Bailey, but little changed. By July Salem Village’s first minister announced, “I see no further grounds of hope for my future comfortable living amongst you in that work of the ministry in this place, and therefore am seriously thinking of my removal from you.” In September a committee voted to raise Bailey’s salary to £55 for the next year, granted him the freedom to leave if he found another place, and reserved the option for the Village to hire another minister at year’s end.
    In the midst of all this discord Ann was pregnant with her first child.
    Her mother lived several towns distant; her sister was likely to move away soon. No doubt the older women of the neighborhood (Rebecca Nurse perhaps) or those skilled in folk medicine (like Elizabeth Procter) had plenty of advice for Ann—whether or not she appreciated or accepted it. Neighbor women as well as the midwife customarily gathered to encourage and aid when one of their own faced the travail of childbirth. Ann gave birth to a daughter on October 18, 1679 and named the child Ann.
    Back in Salisbury around this time Jemima True