He gave testimony that the court used against his wife. He spent the rest of the year making it right.
Martha Corey knew what they had come for before they reached her door. When Edward Putnam and Ezekiel Cheever arrived at the Corey farm on the twelfth of March 1692, she met them in the yard and told them directly: "I know what you have come for. You are come to talk with me about being a witch, but I am none".
She had heard the accusations spreading through Salem Village and she had formed a clear view of them. She thought the afflicted girls were lying. She thought the community receiving their testimony was behaving like a crowd that had decided what it wanted to find and was finding it. She said this, in those terms, to her neighbours and to anyone who would hear her.
In Salem in 1692, that was the mistake.
She was seventy-one years old. Her husband Giles was eighty. He was a prosperous farmer, a full member of the Salem church, a rough and difficult man who had spent his life in the particular friction of someone who did not manage his relations with his neighbours easily. He had been fined decades earlier for the death of an indentured servant. He had clashed with the families around him across a lifetime of disputes that a small community records and does not forget. He was not a man Salem found easy to love.
He loved Martha.
When the accusations against her hardened into a formal examination, Giles went to the hearing and spoke on her behalf. He condemned the girls who had accused her. He argued her innocence with the blunt force of a man who knew what he knew and did not understand yet what kind of room he was standing in.
He also gave testimony that the court wrote down and used against her.
He had not understood what the court would make of what he said. He described a Saturday evening in which he could not pray, and Martha coming toward him, and an ox found unable to rise in the yard, and a cat taken strangely ill. He was describing the ordinary strangeness of a winter farm, the small disruptions of daily life that accumulate without meaning. The court heard a man describing his wife's witchcraft in his own words. He had not understood what he was saying until after he had said it.
He spent the rest of the year understanding it.
In April, the girls accused Giles too. He was arrested, examined, and committed to the Salem jail to wait alongside Martha for a trial that both of them already knew the shape of.
By September, Giles had understood something precise about his situation. If he stood trial he would be convicted. He knew this because everyone who stood trial in Salem that year was convicted. Conviction meant death, and it also meant facing a corrupt sheriff eager to seize his belongings and disrupt the inheritance he had spent eighty years building for his family. He had already legally deeded the land to his two sons-in-law while in his cell. He had one instrument remaining.
He refused to enter a plea.
Without a plea there could be no trial. Without a trial there could be no formal conviction. The penalty for refusing to plead in the Massachusetts colony was death by pressing, a sentence never before applied and never applied again in the colony's history. Giles Corey knew this when he stood silent.
On the nineteenth of September 1692, he was taken to a field near the jail. He was stripped. A board was placed upon his chest. The sheriff asked how he would plead.
He did not answer.
The stones began.
His neighbours watched. They piled the weight on the board and waited for him to speak and he did not speak. The sheriff leaned down and asked again. Giles Corey looked up at the people of Salem standing around him in that field and he said: "more weight."
They added more. They asked again. He said it again. He said it through the pressing and the pauses and the accumulating weight of it, until his tongue was forced from his mouth by the pressure and the sheriff used his cane to push it back in, and still he did not plead, and on that third day of the ordeal he died.
Samuel Sewall wrote in his diary: About noon, at Salem, Giles Corey was press'd to death for standing mute.
He was buried in an unmarked grave near the field.
Martha was hanged three days later, on the twenty-second of September.
She went to Gallows Hill knowing what had happened in the field. She had been in the Salem jail when Giles died and the jail was not a place where news did not travel. She knew. She climbed the hill with seven others and she was hanged.
She was part of the last group executed at Salem.
After that day, the executions stopped. The accusations had by then reached the Governor's wife. The logic that had consumed the margins of Salem and then the respectable centre of Salem and then a seventy-one-year-old churchwoman who had said from the beginning that the whole thing was wrong had nowhere left to go. The court had eaten everything it could reach.
It stopped.
Giles Corey had given testimony in March that the court used against his wife. He had not understood, in March, what the room was doing. By September he was lying in a field under the stones of Salem and he understood everything and he had said more weight and he did not stop saying it until he could no longer speak.
Whether he was asking for death to come faster, or refusing to give them the satisfaction of a plea, or both simultaneously, the record does not say.
It only records the words.
"More weight."
