Spider in a Tree Page 10

  How Bernard Bartlett must be suffering. He was kneeling in the wagon with squash still on his face, and the prayer was interminable. To prepare for the flogging, Mr. Edwards had sat with his young scholars in the parlor and spoken about the struggles he had had before his own awakening. Rubbing the family jaw, he had said that he had long been unable to see the justness of the ways sinners suffered in hell. Joseph, who had nightmares about being tormented with red-hot pinchers beside his dead father, had sat forward, listening intently, looking at the floor.

  “Father,” said Mr. Edwards. “I talked about it with my father in the orchard, then went walking on alone. The beauty and rightness of God’s sovereignty over every being, every instant, and every action came over me. I could love and glory in the strength of God’s mighty hand in punishment as I loved the strength of God’s voice in thunder, which had always made me desperately afraid.”

  Joseph had listened in the parlor with his own desperation, digging his fingernails into his palms, and now, on the horse with his fidgety brother, it was Mr. Edwards’s voice he heard again, not the other preacher droning on. “Bernard Bartlett’s pain at the flogging, as great as it might seem, is but a fraction of what he will suffer for eternity if he doesn’t repent and repudiate his crime. To repent is no guarantee of heaven, but failing to do so will certainly trap him in hell.”

  Sarah, who had watched her husband rip down the bed curtains in fury the night he learned of Bartlett’s public taunting, had shut the door to the kitchen when she heard him lecturing the boys about it. Scrubbing skin and lumps from a turnip, she had said to Jerusha, “God’s punishment and a flogging might be two different things.”

  Now Mr. Root helped Bernard Bartlett, who had repented and confessed, from the wagon, keeping an eye on the stranger boys. He helped him off with his coat, waistcoat, and shirt, then bent him down and fastened him into the pillory.

  When the first lash fell, Elisha wished he had the reins to ride away. Since he was behind Joseph, he slid off the far side of the bay and leaned his head against the horse’s belly, blocking the beating from sight. The horse smelled intensely of leather drenched with sweat. Elisha had seen floggings before and would, impassively, watch them again, but on this one January day, he only listened, thinking shoulders, just the shoulders, over and over. Bernard Bartlett gave a groan after the fifth hit, and then his guttural sounds didn’t stop, but rose and fell in a terrible rhythm with the whip. His sons and their mother stood in a stiff row. Joseph could see them counting the lashes. He noticed pious little Phoebe Bartlett, whom he usually thought of as a bit prissy, watching the flogging of her uncle with terror-struck eyes. Joseph reached down to pat the bay’s neck, then rubbed Elisha’s shoulder.

  Leah watched, too, not crying, not praying, but self-protective and vigilant, very clear on which direction she would turn if she had to get out of the crowd in a hurry, less clear on how to shake free of the Edwards children or how she could live in the woods. She knew there was no immediate danger, not to her, not to Saul (who was safe at home), not even to those children, whose lives she tended even as she fled them in her head. She had been reading the Bible every evening in the main house with the Edwards girls, Sally waving the hornbook in front of her and ordering her to recite the alphabet long after Leah had passed her by in command of the letters. The scripture had been yielding up guidance and meaning, but the harsh ways of serving in Northampton had also taught her a refrain that fell in cuts inside her as Bernard Bartlett’s back welted up and started to bleed. “Not me. Not Saul. Please, not me.”

  Sarah, as a discipline, looked straight at her own revulsion, trying to imagine herself under the lash. She failed in picturing herself bent to the public pillory. The closest she could get was the memory of stinging, tight-lipped smiles from certain women of the congregation, who seemed to despise her for her pride in her husband, her fine house full of children, and her surfeit of joy. Other women, and sometimes the same ones in moments of desperation, brought stories to a preacher’s wife, and so she could, instead, picture being beaten by her husband with a horsewhip. He would not do this, she knew, but she could imagine that he might. The test she set for herself as she stood watching the flogging was to find a place of total submission to God’s sovereign will, if that fate should be what he chose for her. Holding Mary, looking down at her children’s shaken faces, she found herself unable to submit. She prayed for greater humility for herself, for Bernard Bartlett, and, so urgently, for her husband, whose face had gone dead white as the blows fell. Joseph saw his lips move, and whispered to himself what he thought his cousin said: “Thunder. Love the thunder.”

  Elisha held on to Joseph’s boot, until Joseph wriggled his stocking foot free for fear of being pulled off the horse.

  The fifteenth lash bit into Bernard Bartlett’s back, and then the flogging stopped. Bernard Bartlett was half fallen in the pillory, his back welted and striped with dripping cuts. Mr. Root, winded and stricken, lowered the whip, resting his hands on his knees. Joseph noticed Eben’s hands shaking on the reins of the wagon horse, then felt his own body shaking, as well. Elisha raised his face from the bay’s warm side and, staring away from the pillory, saw tough young Timothy Root’s shoulders heaving, crying for his father because he had to give the whipping. He was comforted from both sides by his cousins Simeon and Martha. Dr. Mather stepped forward to rub salt in Bernard Bartlett’s wounds, which caused the man to scream. Leah picked up Esther, who held tightly on to her neck. As Sarah turned to lead her children away, Bernard Bartlett’s wife approached with rum and blankets. The sons carried their father’s clothes. One of them dropped a bandage, and Mr. Edwards leapt forward with surprising swiftness to catch it before it landed on the trampled snow.

  That night, Leah and Saul, who had stayed in the barn sharpening tools during the flogging, blew out the candles, pushed back the chairs, and danced. They sang a song that Saul taught her, more softly than it called for but loud enough to matter, and moved in thumping steps across the uneven plank floor. Outside, squirrel nests were thick and easy to pick out in the stripped limbs of the trees. Inside, Leah and Saul sang themselves into a full circle of people, calling to the clouds to come see how a redbird flies and making calls like slurred whistles until Leah’s mind flapped and her body dropped.

  Chapter 6: March 1737

  Leah put a hand on Jerusha’s cape to keep it from flying off as they walked past the burying ground on the way to meeting. In truth, the burying ground was not directly on the way, but Jerusha had heard of an improving sight to be seen there, which she proposed to meditate on before the sermon. Sarah, who believed that Jerusha had a true spiritual gift, allowed her to leave the house early with Leah, so that she might see.

  The girl lifted her arms for a moment as if taking to the air, then stopped, with a smile at Leah, to tie her cape more securely at the neck. It was a warm, windy day in March, but the winter had been so severe that more than half of the grain sown in the county had been killed, and in places nearby, multitudes of cattle had died of hunger and cold. Brown grass was visible in hollows where snow was slowly melting around the headstones. As Jerusha had heard, one big maple had blown down completely. The huge knot of displaced roots had brought up enough earth to dig a crater in the ground. A gravestone was fallen beneath the tree, but, although Leah stood with Jerusha staring into the hole, they saw no remains. “It’s scary,” Jerusha said. “The way of all flesh.”

  Leah started her own prayer for the tree, the emptiness beneath, and the dead buried in the surrounding ground.

  Behind them, she heard Bernard Bartlett, who held his shoulders stiffly more than a year after the flogging, tell his family that it was a work of Satan when the earth opened up and relinquished its hold on a tree. He was still a man with big opinions. Jerusha cast worried looks over her shoulder as Bernard Bartlett’s wife said that she had heard of a town where it once rained wheat, an
d couldn’t they use some of that? Jerusha whispered prayers until Leah gave her a comforting pat on her shoulder, took her by the hand, and hurried on. They could not be late.

  Elisha had also persuaded Joseph and Rebekah to take a quick walk to the burying ground before meeting to see the upside-down tree. Rebekah was willing, as she found it a comfort to visit her husband there. Elisha was sad to see that it was this maple. It was a tree he knew. The first time he had noticed it, nearly two years ago, he had been visiting his father’s new grave with Rebekah. A small snapped limb wedged in the crotch of a much larger branch had caught his eye. He had tried to knock it down with a rock, but it was stuck fast. His mother had turned from the mound of bare earth and told him to stop. After Rebekah had left off coming to the grave so often, he looked for it during every burial, waiting for the broken limb to fall. It was a shock to lose the whole tree.

  When they got to the meeting house, Leah sent Jerusha to the front to be with her sisters among the first of the children. The elder Edwards girls now looked after the younger ones at meeting. Humming a little to herself, Leah climbed the stairs to her seat at the back of the gallery. Bathsheba scooted over to make room on the crowded bench. The people’s heat rose, as always, from below.

  All winter, Leah had worshipped as a member of the church. She and Bathsheba—along with four other slaves and Mary and Phoebe Stockbridge, who were Mahicans awakened during the revival—had been admitted to full communion. It had caused little stir in the congregation and made a warmth in her heart even as cold numbed her cheeks. There were no more disturbances during the sermon, but there was a fiery calm within her as she worshipped. She and Bathsheba had been sitting up straight for months to keep away from the ice on the wall behind them, which had formed slowly as seepage from the roof rotted splintering wood. The ice had frozen in drips and ripples as if the wall had waves. Now, it was melting.

  Leah wished she could see Saul on his bench near the door. Sooner or later, most likely, he would do the cold, dirty work to seal the leaks and sop up the water. Work was moving forward on the new meeting house, but, as yet, they were still using the old one. Bathsheba stayed far away from the wall, but, this morning, Leah reached back and got one of her palms wet, thinking of how Phyllis in Newport had coddled a black feathered hen all winter, then, come spring, looking solemn and distant, had cut off its head to help feed the people gathered for the festival at the black election. The memory made Leah want to have a dance in the woods. It was still much too wet and sloppy for that.

  This past summer, with the help of Sally and Jerusha, Leah, who had been reading almost every night for more than a year, had learned to write. The back side of every receipt, note, and prayer bid that entered the household was fodder for Mr. Edwards’s sermons and notebooks, and Leah read the piles of them in his study, gathering language for how much things cost and what people wanted of God. Sometimes she slipped a bit of paper into her sleeve or the gathered top of her stocking, where it crackled just a little when she walked. At night she covered the scraps with letters and words, then she would burn them. Often, she worked on her name: Leah. It had seemed strange and angular when she first saw it, but she practiced it. She wanted to be able to make her mark with one of her names.

  One muggy night in late August, Leah had thought to ask Saul if he liked the name Leah, but instead had called up to his loft to say, “Will you call me Mariama?” It was the name her mother and father had given her.

  He had rolled from his pallet of cotton stuffed with straw and put his eye to a generous gap in the floorboards. “I will,” he had murmured, and when he said the name aloud, it caught and pulled her, hard.

  Leah had considered asking Mr. Edwards if she could join the church as Leah Mariama, but found that she did not want to give her second name to him. It was not a name for the meeting house, but for her and Saul, for the shell in her pocket, the family who had lost her and the river in the night. It was good, though, to have “Leah” written in the book of the church.

  Mr. Edwards climbed the stairs to the high pulpit, his stomach rumbling as it often did. He was more aware than anyone might have guessed of the people looking up at him from the benches and down from the gallery. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Leah and Bathsheba sitting on the edge of their bench. Bernard Bartlett was sitting forward, too. He always did, and Mr. Edwards let his own gaze linger on the man for a moment, imagining a back full of scars still painful when pressed, a year after the flogging. The thought of it brought Mr. Edwards a tangle of feelings—empathy, grief, satisfaction, dimming anger, sadness, loss, calm. He welcomed the fervid mess in his heart, willing it to drop away from Mr. Bartlett and open up to all of the people here. Every week he started the climb to the pulpit feeling stifled and clenched, trying to make a wholeness, trying already in his mind to pull scripture through the book and through himself into the building, which couldn’t hold it, and into the community, which almost could. The people were there: yearning; varied; pregnant; sleeping, which enraged him; baffled, which exhausted him; owned; blessed; gurgling; adamant; wigged; and rough-clad. He wanted to be far away from them, riding through the woods on Mount Tom, but, even more than that, he wanted to join together with them for the glory of God. They had been quiet in worship for years now. He wanted to believe that, for most of them, it was the quiet of ordinary grace, more powerful by far than special moments of revelation, but he had some reason for doubt. He sought Sarah’s eyes to keep from retreating into an internal chill far away from the stickiness of their gathered souls. She was ready for him, fully there in her gaze. It helped.

  That winter, Mr. Colman in Boston had printed a condensed version of his letter about the Northampton revival as an appendix to a book of sermons entitled The Duty and Interest of a People, among Whom Religion Has been Planted, to Continue Stedfast and Sincere in the Profession and Practice of It, from Generation to Generation. With Directions for Such as Are Concerned to Obtain True Repentance and Conversion to God. The author was William Williams, Mr. Edwards’s aged uncle. Now he had learned that famous clerics wanted to publish a version of the letter in London. When Sarah, who knew his ambitions, had sought him out in the woods to bring him the news, he had broken through the crust of ice to throw snow in the air, which she had knocked away with her elbows, both of them laughing. But by the time he was riding home with her, breaking frozen twigs with the brim of his hat, he had felt uneasy, because it seemed that many of his people, whom he had written about as models of piety, had become careless and indifferent to God.

  Now, he stood in the pulpit and stared straight out at the congregation. Rebekah Hawley, exhausted, refrained from slumping in her front pew, as did Saul, struggling to stay awake on his bench near the door. Joseph sat up straight beside Elisha, who had his coattails bunched up behind him to make a little cushion so that he could slouch more comfortably. Timothy Root mimed popping a blemish for the amusement of his cousin Simeon, while Simeon’s sister Martha, watching from the women’s side of the aisle, rolled her eyes. Sarah, baby on her lap, was turned toward the pulpit, but he noticed that now she was keeping one eye on the Roots, too.

  The attention of these people, imperfect as it was, brought Mr. Edwards closer to God. It wasn’t the only way this happened, but he knew that it was one of them. There was no point in preaching unless their faces were toward him. He craved connection with their tangled hearts and the halting ways that they brought their experiences of grace into language. Strangely, he needed them. He laid down the text of his sermon.

  Behold, ye despisers, and wonder, and perish.

  There was a terrifying noise like a clap of thunder, so startling on such a warm day. Leah was looking at Mr. Edwards’s face as the gallery gave way. She lost sight of him as she slid sideways, away from Bathsheba, who was screaming.

  Mr. Edwards stared in horror as the gallery sank in the middle. Before he could react, there was ano
ther great wrenching crack as it broke and fell—people, benches, timber, and all—upon the heads of those seated below. The building was being ripped apart by the heavings of frost and thaw. He took his hand from the Bible and ran down from the pulpit into the screaming.

  As the crash came, Joseph grabbed Elisha and went under the bench. They huddled there together, not crying, not screaming, ready to fight their way through another disaster, if they could. Elisha closed his eyes, his face right up against Joseph’s waistcoat, and breathed together with his brother in their shared conviction that, at any moment, they might, like their father, suddenly die.

  Mr. Edwards cradled his two-year-old, Mary, who was bruised and crying. Jerusha, beside her, clutched a hunk of timber, saying, over and over, “I tried to catch it. It knocked her down. I tried to stop it.”

  Mr. Edwards crouched down to Jerusha. “Put that down and help me hold her.” Jerusha reached up and wrapped her arms around Mary, which let him hold on to both of them at once until Sarah pulled at his robe to say, “I’ll take them. I’ve got them.”

  He couldn’t hear her speak, but knew what she wanted to do. She had the baby in her arms, with Sally and Esther holding on to her skirts. She let Jerusha, who was nearly seven, carry Mary as she helped her daughters pick their way to the door. Mr. Edwards watched them reach it, then hurried to join the men heaving timber to free the people groaning beneath.