Whatever escapes the normal paradigm of the commoner makes him loose his uneasy peace of mind. Peace is an interesting concept; supposedly, peace signifies nothing more than the end of struggle for the people. By definition, it is the absence of conflict or suffering. Yet, it has never been granted freely to mankind; people have sought it for as long as they have known they have been subjugated, and for longer still they have fought to achieve it. Fight for peace? For most men are so stupid that in their pursuit they fail to see that they create that which they seek to eliminate.
Peace was all that the colonists sought to achieve by leaving from all the corners of the old kingdom of England; for those who could afford it, the men and women left all their kin and possessions in search for the promise of a life a new, a life without the constant threat of civil war, invasion, murder and famine. Centuries of death, civil unrest and religious turmoil had plagued England and the New World was the dream of their hopeful children.
Men and women always find a way to carry their past into their present and, a new land couldn’t make them escape from their true afflicted nature; far from being the paradise many thought this new world would be, many retreated further into fanaticism and made this new land a pit of despair, prejudice and judgement. The Puritan colonisers sought to lead a life of moral refinement; never did they thought that their very desire would lead them to the depravity that haunted them for centuries. Such was the incident of the proceedings that developed in the community of Sow’s Lament and its neighbouring villages; deprived of a real enemy, they turned to each other in search of corruption.
That was the certainly the case for Mary Warren and her daughter Jane, along with many of the inhabitants of the city.
Be it in politics, science or religion, people afraid of the unknown fight back fiercely to that same fear. Only a century ago, daring to sail west was considered blasphemy and a death wish, and now a whole new society gestated in a land far away from the old lands.
What threat could a defenceless unborn child do to society? Well, children like Jane and women like Mary posed an undesired questioning to the validity and usefulness of society’s most sacred beliefs; the unquestioned belief in religious dogma, one of the few things that preserved the idea of order in a chaotic time.
Puritans weren’t aware of their own paradox. Might they have been able to discover it, change their ways? They were amongst the most critical of the protestant movement, and they thought to reform the church from within, losing sight of the reformation of their own beliefs, never going beyond what a thousand-year-old book told them to do, a book written for the sole purpose for the unification that took place only by the sacrifice of thousands, if not millions of souls. Peace brought war, and from the survivors came the uneasy peace they sought.
That defenceless baby proved to be a threat to their lifestyle, their most sacred beliefs; the rebellion of her mother to submit to the will of her father, of doing what she thought was an unforgivable sin, led her to enact a greater one; defying patriarchy, a force that even surpassed the love of his father.
Every single one of the Puritans, deep down inside, had doubts; nowhere were they content with the teachings of the church of England, and they viciously rejected the Roman Catholics; nevertheless,when it come to judging and dictating what they saw fit was correct morals, they didn’t hesitated, even when the life of a human being is at stake. Irony was at the base of their beliefs. Their way brought peace and hard work, the promise of the afterlife and a decent way of living; who, in their right mind, they argued, would reject that? Appearances proved to be more important than living life as their own God demanded. If something can’t be seen or heard, it doesn’t exist. Adopting another philosophy for convenience was an acceptable thing to do, for the sake of keeping the original one of course. Such was the hypocrisy of their ways.
Flesh, lust and desire though, seemed to be ubiquitous and human nature seldom changes. Puritan or not, Roman Catholic or from the Church of England, it was all the same. In the midst of a raged frenzy, a man took advantage of a teenage girl in a brook where she used to wash her family clothes. A man that have lusted after her hidden features, her slender figure and delicate ways, and mostly the fine voice that entertained everyone at the celebration of the harvest. Holding values of virtue and honesty had not prevented what the man had really wanted and, like hunger, desire took over him. A baby named Jane was the product of that lineage, a product which was both despised and selected before birth to damnation.
Love, it seemed, had not entirely escaped from her father, who arranged for her to go with one of their distant relatives who was in search of service for his household; John Proctor, a well established man from the community of Sow’s Lament, Massachusetts. Everybody would benefit from such an arrangement; Proctor would get assistance for her beloved wife Martha, and Mary could avoid the social stigma. It was a win-win situation for everyone, or so her father forced himself to thought.
Appearing as a benevolent samaritan, John Proctor took under his wing the ill luck Mary Warren on his service and, as he plotted along with her father, they told the convincing story of how Mary, a distant relative suddenly became the pregnant widow of a Mr. Marcus Warren, who wasn’t a real man but a comforting invention of theirs. Mary had no choice but to keep on with the lie.
News travelled slowly back then; gossip was as interesting as in any age, but it was seldom from other villages, except of course for the most important political and economical happenings so, Mary Warren and her newly born daughter Jane weren’t subject of talk for too long, neither in her birthplace nor in her new home. Death was as common as life, and lives were easily replaced, so nobody thought it was strange of a woman losing her husband and becoming a widow.
Not everything is what it seems and that is specially the case of the community of Sow’s Lament and its inhabitants, for the bad luck that had struck Mary didn’t end with an undesired child, for another threat was awaiting her in the form of a wolf wearing sheep’s clothing.
Carlos Torres Books 