The answer may be hard to come by in our time, when we are so far removed from such dangerous, sometimes fatal, thinking. But bestselling author Chris Bohjalian tackles the question with verve and skill in Hour of the Witch, a 2021 thriller that explores life in Puritan New England from the perspective of a woman facing just such a fate.
Bohjalian’s novel is set, not in 1692 Salem, but rather thirty years earlier, in Boston. Mary Deerfield, the 24-year-old wife of 45-year-old widower Thomas Deerfield, initially becomes the object of gossip and idle speculation when she seeks to divorce her sadistic husband who often is, as Mary puts it, “drink-drunk” when he arrives home from work.
But Hour of the Witch is no stereotypical tale of devilry. This is not the stuff of haggard crones, black cats serving as familiars and hysterical “victims” writhing and screaming in crazed fits. Mary is a respectful but independent-minded woman who came to Boston as a child with her well-to-d0 Puritan parents. To the chagrin of her husband and herself, she is childless, which in itself is cause for suspicion within the Puritan community.
A woman seeking a divorce in that time and place is problematic enough, but Mary’s marital problems are compounded by the ever-looming fear of demonic possession. The evidence that Mary is a witch is thin, but damning enough for credulous Bostonians who view the three-tined fork, newly introduced to New England from Europe, as the “Devil’s tines.”
When someone plants two such forks in Mary’s garden, she removes them and asks her servant, Catherine, if she stuck them in the ground. Catherine denies it, and Mary replants the forks, hoping that leaving them where she found them will persuade whoever put them there in the first place to reveal himself or herself.
In the process of burying the forks, however, Mary finds that a new item has been placed at the same location: a wooden pestle with a three-pronged trident carved into it. It’s at that moment of discovery that Catherine emerges from the house and, spotting Mary with the forks and the pestle, accuses her of being a disciple of “the Dark One.” Shortly thereafter, Mary’s husband, in a fit of rage, stabs her in the hand with one of the forks.
Mary’s divorce filing follows in short order, but her husband is smart enough to make sure there are no witnesses to his frequent attacks, making the already skeptical magistrates who hear her case all the more hostile to her request. Fueled by superstition, jealousy, sexism and religious zealotry, the accusations of witchcraft build slowly at first, amid dramatic twists and turns in the suspenseful plot.
Bohjalian’s research is impressive; he writes in his acknowledgements that he has “a fascination with the Puritan mind.” The novel’s ending may well take readers by surprise, but it’s a fitting conclusion to a dramatic and engrossing tale that fits the definition of a page-turner.
As Bohjalian makes clear, witchcraft was viewed in the time period of his novel as a very real phenomenon that could cost the accused his or her life. In 1662, the people of Boston would have been no strangers to the supposed threat.
That year, a real-life witch scare occurred in Hartford, Connecticut, some 90 miles from Boston as the crow flies. There, four people were hanged as witches, including three women and a man. Several people were executed for witchcraft in New England before 1662, including Ann Hibbins in Boston in 1656, only six years before the events that unfold in Hour of the Witch.
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