Prologue
1760
I have come early this afternoon to sit, before anyone else arrives, in the quiet of Salem Meetinghouse. It is cool in here, though the August sun beats down outside-even at the end of the day-on corn that stands high in the feilds and on fruit trees already laden with their fall harvest.
I am a stranger in this church. Indeed, I have not been here since spring of 1692, so long ago now that it seems but a dim memory, and the girl I was at that time seems certainly like another person. Me and yet not me, that young girl. For she was as innocent to the dangers around her as my own baby daughter who now sleeps peacfully in my arms.
Another world it was back then, although most of us hereabouts live with some mark of the events of that time still upon us. And those marks might as well be a limping leg or a scarred face or lost fingers on one hand, for the way in which so many have been crippled.
As for me, I speak seldom, if ever, of those terrible months of 1692. Nor does my husband. Indeed, I thought I had put them behind me until I came into this church today. When I did< once I entered these portals, it all came rushing back to me.
Mostly of Mama. And when I first sat down here, with my three-year-old boy besides me and the baby in my arms.It was Mamas face i saw, Mamas voice i heard, like it was yesterday.
Sometimes I miss her so much! I missed her so when I married. And there are many times when I ache for her as I took on my childrens faces. But today, when i came to this place, it was more than aching for her or missing her. It was as ifher presence was here with me, all around me. And I cried.
This was Mamas meetinghouse, the place she loved so until that fateful day when she stood Sarah Cloyce as the others shunned Sarah and called Mama a friend of witched. She never came back here after that day. As I look around me now i wounder, should I have come today? Or do I dishonor her memory by doing so?
Oh, I did not want to come! 'Twas my huusband bade me to do so. "Consider how torn asunder the community still is, even after all these years," he said. "You should go and stand by your naighbors. If only for the sake of our two little ones who will grow u here."
So i said, "Yes, I will go," though in my heart I will never understand why women are always assigned the task of peacemaking. "I will go, but I will not forgive Ann Putnam. You cannot ask me to do that, husband!" I told him. And I wonder, now that i am here, how can i look her in the face again without seeing the faces of all women whom she destroyed.
The meetinghouse is peacful, though . And I can see it has not changed from those days of my childhood. It was the Reverend Parris's church back then. But he is long since gone. Since January of 1693, when the towns folk met to make void his salary.
Reverend Joseph Green took his place when he left. Green was only twenty-two when he came. And though I do not come to hear him preach, I myself have seen him takeoff his doublet to help a neighbor build a new barn or take up his musket to go out and help hunt wolves on the edge of town. They say he has worked long and hard to heal the community from the effects of what people call "the recent tragedy."
That is the way they refer to the witch madnessof 1692. And all the hangings. As if they cannot bear to mention the word Witchcraft ever again.
Mitsuki Tokiha Community Member 
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