13INTERLUDE THREE
Anna. Salem, 1692
Anna is fifty-six, with knobby fingers and a goat named Spot, and half the village owes her for herbal remedies.
That is exactly why, when the Putnam girl starts having fits, people think of Anna.
The village logic is as simple and inescapable as a trap. The crops have rotted two years running. Children are falling ill. Indians are burning farms to the north. This much misfortune doesn’t just happen — someone must be to blame. Finding that person means making the world manageable again: cut out the rotten link and the chain will work once more. The community projects its anxiety onto a single person, just as sins were once heaped onto a goat in the ancient desert. Only that goat was sent into the wilderness alive.
At first, Anna laughs. Then she argues. Then—and this is the worst part—she begins to doubt.
At night, she sifts through her life like prayer beads. She really had been angry at the Putnams over the property line. She really did think unkind thoughts when not invited to the christening. What if a thought alone is corruption? Since childhood, she’d been told: an evil thought is the devil’s seed. Forty judges hold perpetual court in her mind, and the chief justice speaks with her own voice.
At her interrogation they ask her a question with no right answer: “If you aren’t a witch, why did all this start after your quarrel?”
Anna says nothing. She has no words for “survivorship bias” or “false correlation.” All she has is a humming exhaustion and a thought thousands of years older than Salem: if everyone says I’m to blame, maybe they see something I don’t?
Three hundred years later, the descendants of those judges would issue an official apology. Historians would write that the scapegoat mechanism is the oldest way a community has of shedding unbearable anxiety—by giving it a bearer.
But another Anna—the one living today, who wakes up every morning feeling “I’ve ruined everything”—does exactly the same thing to herself. She is her own Salem: the community, the judge, and the accused all at once. The trial happens every morning, and the verdict is always the same.
The only difference is that you can’t flee her courtroom to the next state.