Salem Witch Judge by Eve LaPlante Read Free Book Online

flushed: “Thou wilt destroy the fruit that doth proceed of them out of the earth, and their seed from among the sons of men.”
    The words stung. In taking Henry, God was punishing Samuel and Hannah. After the psalm singing Samuel prayed internally, “The Lord humble me kindly in respect of all my enmity against Him, and let His breaking my image in my son be a means of it.”

2
    SYMPTOMS OF DEATH
    The cold ground that received the body of three-week-old Henry Sewall on that bitter December 24 is still marked. Near the rear of the Old Granary Burying Ground on Tremont Street in Boston, between the tomb of Paul Revere and that of Ben Franklin’s parents and siblings, is a large, rectangular nineteenth-century monument marked SEWALL. (The Franklins were regular members of Samuel’s prayer group and attended his church.) Carved atop the great tomb are the words “Judge Sewell [sic] tomb / Now the property of his heirs.” Beneath this monument lie the remains of three-week-old Henry Sewall, fifty-eight-year-old John Hull, and forty other members of the family.
    This burying ground, Boston’s third, was originally part of the common on which cows, bulls, and pigs grazed. Gravediggers deposited eight to ten thousand bodies on this two-acre plot in the hundred years after 1660, when the cemetery opened. In 1737 a digger complained of having to bury bodies four deep. The ground does not drain well, so bodies decomposed quickly. The cemetery’s modern name comes from its proximity to a wooden granary, a warehouse for up to twelve thousand bushels of grain for the poor, erected by the town around 1730 at the present site of the Park Street Church, which had previously been the site of an almshouse. In 1685 this cemetery was known as the New, Central, or South, Burying Ground, and this spot was the Hull and Quincy family tomb.

    At the close of the lecture service, at around four in the afternoon of December 24, the funeral procession began. It started at the Third Church. According to a contemporary account, the meetinghouse was “large and spacious and fair,” with three large porches, or raised galleries, square pews, a side pulpit, a bell, and a steeple. Sheet lead covered the roof. It was on Boston’s main road in the same spot as today’s Old South Meeting House, which was erected in 1730 as a stone replacement for the cedar building.
    Describing the short walk from here along a snow-covered road to the burying ground, Samuel wrote, “We follow little Henry to his grave: Governor and magistrates of the country here, 8 in all, beside myself, eight ministers, and several persons of note.” Samuel’s grief did not dull his awareness of social status. The governor, who still served in that post if only in name, was the esteemed eighty-two-year-old Simon Bradstreet, who had presided at the marriage of the deceased baby’s parents. Bradstreet was now one of only two survivors of the original twenty thousand English people who had settled Boston a half century before.
    In acknowledgment of their central role in his baby’s short life, Samuel had asked two women to bear the tiny chestnut coffin to its final resting place. The coffin weighed so little that Elizabeth Weeden, the midwife, and Nurse Hill took turns carrying it. The nurse had wrapped the body in a linen pall, but she saw no need to add tansy, thyme, or other herbs, as she would have in summer.
    Samuel followed the coffin. He held the hand of his oldest son and namesake, now age seven, whose three younger siblings stayed home. His mother-in-law, Judith Quincy Hull, came next, arm in arm with Ephraim Savage, the forty-year-old widower of her niece, Mary, a daughter of Judith’s only sibling, Edmund Quincy. “Cousin Savage,” as Samuel termed Ephraim because his late wife was Hannah’s first cousin, was a member of the Harvard class of 1662, a son of another Third Church founder, Colonel Thomas Savage, and a grandson of the banished heretic Anne Hutchinson.