Spider in a Tree Read online

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1: June 1731, Newport to Northampton

  Chapter 2: May – June 1735

  Chapter 3: July 18, 1735

  Chapter 4: August 1735

  Chapter 5: December 1735 – January 1736

  Chapter 6: March 1737

  Chapter 7: March 1737 – January 1740

  Chapter 8: June 1740 – October 1740

  Chapter 9: July 1741, Enfield

  Chapter 10: July 1741

  Chapter 11: September 1741, New Haven

  Chapter 12: January 1742

  Chapter 13: July – December 1742

  Chapter 14: March 1743, New London

  Chapter 15: October 1743 – June 1744

  Chapter 16: August – December 1746

  Chapter 17: January – June 1747

  Chapter 18: September 1747 – January 1748

  Chapter 19: February 1748

  Chapter 20: May – October 1748

  Chapter 21: December 1748 – July 1749

  Chapter 22: July – November 1749

  Chapter 23: December – August 1750

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Short story collections and novels from Small Beer Press for independently minded readers

  Spider in a Tree

  a novel

  Susan Stinson

  Small Beer Press

  Easthampton, MA

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed

  in this book are either fictitious or used fictitiously.

  Spider in a Tree copyright © 2013 by Susan Stinson. All rights reserved.

  susanstinson.net

  An earlier version of Chapter 4 appeared as “Spider and Fly” in the Volume 9, Number 1,Winter 2011 issue of Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal.

  Thanks to The Common Magazine, Necessary Fiction, and Frequencies: a collaborative genealogy of spirituality, where excerpts from the novel have also appeared.

  Small Beer Press

  150 Pleasant Street #306

  Easthampton, MA 01027

  www.smallbeerpress.com

  www.weightlessbooks.com

  [email protected]

  Distributed to the trade by Consortium.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Stinson, Susan, 1960-

  Spider in a Tree : a novel / Susan Stinson.

  pages cm

  Summary: “In his famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” Jonathan Edwards compared a person dangling a spider over a hearth to God holding a sinner over the fires of hell. Here, spiders and insects preach back. No voice drowns out all others: Leah, a young West African woman enslaved in the Edwards household; Edwards’s young cousins Joseph and Elisha, whose father kills himself in fear for his soul; and Sarah, Edwards’ wife, who is visited by ecstasy. Ordinary grace, human failings, and extraordinary convictions combine in unexpected ways to animate this New England tale”-- Provided by publisher.

  ISBN 978-1-61873-069-5 (pbk.) -- ISBN 978-1-61873-070-1 (ebook)

  1. Edwards, Jonathan, 1703-1758--Fiction. 2. Preachers--Fiction. 3. Massachusetts--History--Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775--Fiction. 4. Northampton (Mass.)--History--Fiction. 5. Biographical fiction. 6. Historical fiction. I. Title.

  PS3569.T535S75 2013

  813’.54--dc23

  2013028893

  First edition 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

  Paper edition printed on 50# Natures Natural 30% PCR Recycled Paper by the Maple Press in York, Pennsylvania.

  Cover illustration © 2013 by Elisabeth Alba (albaillustration.com).

  To Sally Bellerose—who was alarmed when I started this book and immersed in the sublime when I was first ready to send it out—in honor of twenty years of love, work, and company as writers.

  To Lynne Gerber for deep work, strong love, gorgeous willingness, and witness.

  So deep were their prejudices, that their heat was maintained; nothing would quiet ’em till they could see the town clear of root and branch, name and remnant.

  Jonathan Edwards to Joseph Hawley

  November 18, 1754, Stockbridge, Massachusetts

  Prologue

  In Northampton, where, long after his time, daughter Mary would worship on a chair outside the sanctuary so she wouldn’t have to join the congregation (she took a boat across the river to Hadley for communion), they say that the Reverend Mr. Edwards wrote his sermons in a tree. He would climb the big elm in front of his house by boards nailed to the trunk and dangle his long, skinny legs off a limb.

  People peered up at him through leaves that sifted light, which, he had taught them, was akin to sifting God. Even in the tree, he was aloof and somber, but passersby craned their necks to enjoy the spectacle of him in his Geneva collar and second-best wig, writing furiously against a smooth place worn clean of bark. His inkpot was wedged in a knot, and when his elbow jostled branches, great arches of leaves shook.

  Jonathan Edwards ate from pewter plates, not wooden trenchers, which did not go unnoticed in the town. He was useless with an auger, and his wife was better than he was on one end of a two-man saw, but most people who passed by the house on King Street had felt his sermons hammering at their souls. A yeoman like Mr. Root, driving by in his wagon, might think of a pumpkin gone soft on the ground after a frost and imagine reaching through the wet skin for a fistful of seedy pulp to fling at his minister (perched so oddly and conspicuously on the limb) as at a criminal in the pillory. He might have the thought, but he would know it to be Satan whispering in his ear. He would tip his hat and drive on. Others, more docile or reverent, would stop and reach up to give Mr. Edwards plums, cups of chocolate, and prayer bids written on scraps for him to read aloud from the pulpit. He would lower a bucket on a rope to receive the gifts, but came down for those in need of counsel. They would retire to his study, another place where he wrote long days and into the night.

  One breezy day, he was working in the tree, writing in a booklet made from scrap paper. He was only half conscious of reading fragments of old prayer bids on the backs as he turned the pages.

  Thos Wells and his Wife Desire Thanks may be given to God In the Congregation for his Goodness to her in Childbed in making her the Living Mother of a Living Child.

  As he dipped his quill into the inkpot, a red ant reached the knee buckle of one leg of his breeches. Mr. Edwards brushed it away.

  The widow Southwill Being Sik of a Feavour desires the Prayers of the Congregation.

  A translucent yellow spider with light brown stripes rushed up the broadcloth of Mr. Edwards’s shirt as if he were a peak to be conquered. As it neared his collar, he took up his pages and knocked it away.

  The spider landed on the ground, where it balled up and became almost invisible, a tuft of earth in the grass. After a time, it climbed the underside of one blade to the very tip and froze there, vibrating in the faint breeze. Mr. Edwards was looking in the other direction, upwards, as verses from Genesis rose in his mind. Suddenly, the spider lifted its abdomen and spun off to come toward him again, crossing a scraped root to begin to climb the tree.

  Mr. Lyman and his wife desire Prayers for their negro tht is dangriusly sick.

  It moved very quickly over the lichen-covered bark to a mossy cleft strung with strands of web, flecks of seed pods, and small wings. It stopped on a tiny shelf of bark, went flat, then headed farther up into the folds, crevasses, and s
mooth places where the tree had been skinned by fire.

  The spider skimmed higher, passing the preacher without attracting his notice. It jumped and crossed a gap of sky left by broken limbs, leaving a thread behind it. Still looking up, Mr. Edwards witnessed a darting and tugging in the air.

  Samu Wright & his wife Desire the prayers of this Congregation that god wood sanktifie his Holy & aflicting hand To them in Taking a way of thire Son Samu Wright by Death Thay Desir prayers that god wood fit and prepare them for thire grate and last Change.

  Mr. Edwards looked down at the blank side of the next page and began filling it again, unhearing and intent on his struggle to bring shadows into language while the spider preached a silent sermon from the web in the tree:

  Whatever your God would say of me, I am not damned. I did not turn to salt. Maybe that’s because you never looked back to crack me into tiny crystals like Lot’s wife. It’s all dissolving in water, salt water, the blue part of the world’s eye, the planet looking back at God, who blinks.

  You need me more than you’ve ever admitted. I’m still with you. I didn’t perish. I didn’t burn, although God dangled me over the fiery pit as you knew he would. He dangled me over the fire, but you observed spiders carefully, once. Didn’t you know that I would sail out of his hand as if taking great pleasure in the motion of my escape, spinning out trails behind me lighter than air might be? I am a hunter, and I ate as I went. God was disappointed, of course, but he wasn’t the least bit surprised.

  No birds or bats ate me, no toads, frogs, no reptiles of any kind, no tree limbs cracked and smashed me, no near stone fell. You were right: at the end of my life I was swept on an insistent, crowded current of air with all of the other insects to the sky above the sea. We came disguised in clouds, and we fell, I fell. You were right about all that, too. I fell into the water; light, brittle bodies dimpled the surfaces of waves all around me. I was washed over, lost my breath and disintegrated, but I didn’t die. God wasn’t chasing me; he was busy burning sticks, watching the tips heat and color, wondering how long he dared to let the flame go before he ground it out in his box of sand. I entered the deeps as something very heavy and very small. I sank without reason, I sank with abandon, I went down, losing everything but motion, gravity, density—my ability, still, to fall. I had no legs by then, no chance of swimming, no dream of correcting the course, no course at all. I was low, far under the roots and depths of everything I knew. Lost to God, although, of course, he could have found me if he hadn’t been still playing in the fire, tilting dripping candles over his hand to see if it would burn. I was falling, and he was waving his fingers in the air to cool, slipping perfect wax impressions from the tips.

  What happened then was that I tried to take a breath. No lungs. I landed.

  I fell, but I didn’t burn.

  Slowly, Mr. Edwards became aware of a sound like many fingers rubbing together. He looked up at the rustling dome of leaves and saw meaning in it. Wind was a shadow of spirit. The world was as full of images of divine things as a language was full of words, but he found spiders hard to read. They were sagacious and hard-working, taking flights on glistening strings, but would devour each other like devils after the day of judgment if they were trapped and shut up without any flies.

  He took a note on the shape of the web. A dense scattering of gnats rose around him like spray from the great rippling waves of branches.

  Chapter 1: June 1731, Newport to Northampton

  The girl saw a tall, gaunt man look up from a slice of raisin pie (she had baked it, perfecting her hand with cold water crust) when she walked into Captain Perkins’s parlor with Phyllis close behind her. She could see that he was the one doing the buying. Phyllis put a hand on the small of her back to position her near the table where the men sat. The girl stared at the oozing, dark-flecked pie from which the buyer had spooned a tiny bite.

  “Mr. Edwards, this is Venus.” Captain Perkins spoke smoothly. “I kept her as the pick of the lot when I unloaded most of the cargo in the Caribbean on my last voyage. I got a shipment of very good allspice, as well.”

  “Impressive,” murmured someone.

  The girl held her hands clasped and her back straight, but her legs were trembling. Phyllis kept a hand on her back. She had said that there would be others in the room, come to witness the sale over pie and rum punch. The girl barely took them in.

  She raised her eyes and found Mr. Edwards looking at her face. She felt locked out of her own mind, both numbed and spinning, but she held his gaze. This was improper, but he kept looking himself, steadily, into her eyes. He was, perhaps, twice as old as she was, so still young. He had on a black coat with a beaver hat resting on his knee. She could see that he was a stranger, and his collar marked him as a preacher. Whatever else he might be, as a person to exchange glances with, he was uncommonly intense.

  Captain Perkins spoke up from his chair. “She’s a dutiful girl. And she’s already had the small pox.”

  Phyllis made a tiny sound, using breath as speech, so the girl dropped her eyes. A servant in this house, herself a slave, Phyllis was the one who had braided her hair beneath her headscarf, an act which had left the girl shaking with grief because the touch was so different from her mother’s. She was grateful to Phyllis, who had been kind in teaching her better English and all the proprieties in the months since Captain Perkins had led her away from the holding pens at the docks with her hands tied in front of her.

  The captain had put the girl up for auction at the Granary near the docks soon after his ship had arrived home in Newport. She had stood stock still, as had been clear that she must, for an old farmer, but had made a serious break in deportment by grimacing with her jaw clenched when he tried to pry open her mouth. The auction master had lashed her ankles with his quirt, hard enough to burn but not mark. She had stilled everything in her and opened her mouth so the old man could examine her teeth. He had leaned close, with his smell of sweat and tobacco, running his finger around her teeth. She could do nothing but swallow her gagging. She had felt her true self leave to hide in a clean, prickly heap of palm leaves waiting to be sliced and split into strings of raffia behind her mother’s house. The moment sometimes came back to her later, his sour finger pulling slickly under her tongue the way she’d seen Saul open the mouth of a new horse to check its age by its teeth. Not every time it rose in her, but often, even after she was awakened, she would imagine giving a bite that took that old man’s finger off. As she thought of this, leaning over the wash pot or kneading bread, she would wonder whether she actually did have the strength to bite clean through bone, and how quickly she could turn her head to spit the raw stub out of her mouth, or if she might have to swallow his blood, and what they might cut from her as punishment afterwards. In the story of the finger as she told it to herself, the focus was the crack and pull of that one hard, fierce bite.

  But she had not done it. The old man had pulled his hand out, wiped it on a kerchief stiff with stains that he stuffed back into his waistcoat before he said, “No.”

  That had been the first attempt at selling her. Phyllis had told the girl that Captain Perkins had gotten only offers far below his asking price of eighty pounds. This meant nothing but ugliness to her, but Phyllis had said, “It is useful, at times, to know your price.”

  The girl had done well in the months of her training. Phyllis had been through it with many others before. The girl no longer jumped every time she heard hooves and carriage wheels pass on the stone street. She didn’t even blink at the sight of a cast iron pot. She knew how to dress a turtle or a calf’s head for the table, knew that meat pies required a hotter oven than fruit, and bruised the crookneck squash well when she made a pudding. She knew how to brew spruce beer, which the captain swore by against scurvy, and she could manage to smooth shirts and aprons with the box irons without being a danger with their coals. Her mind strained
meaning from the things said to her, and she spoke English that could be easily understood. There was a ferment of loss and confusion working in her, but there was nothing to do but let it stand, for all that she was blood, memory, spirit, and skin, not a cask full of watery hops and molasses.

  Now, as Captain Perkins listed her skills to Mr. Edwards, she tried to empty herself. She thought of the story from home of the spider who tied the lion to a tree with its own hair. That story had made her laugh and roll her eyes when her father told it to her. It hurt, coming back at this moment. Her dry mouth suddenly filled with spit. She swallowed, waited.

  Mr. Edwards stood up to look at her more closely. She thought she saw a break in his certainty, some sense of discomfort, a blankness. He reached and picked a bit of dough out of her hair. She could do nothing. A window in the parlor was open, and a fly had begun circling the piece of pie on his plate. He stepped back from her and waved his hand at the fly.

  Captain Perkins said, “She’s from the Grain Coast, you know. Best slaves there are. I could take her down to Sullivan’s Island and get 100 pounds for her on the spot.”

  One of his friends lit a pipe covered with scrimshaw. She knew that kind of carving from the sailors on the slave ship, but the conversation was gibberish. “No doubt about it. I’d take her to Charleston myself if I weren’t distracted by marauding Papists.”