Spider in a Tree Read online

  She wanted to grab him by the hair to keep him from going, wanted to knock him over with her heaviest wheel of cheese, sit next to him on the ground, and stuff his gullet, to overwhelm him with sustenance so that he wouldn’t have to get on that tall horse and ride off to immerse himself in the company of scholars and tutors, boys and men. She wanted him to flee everything and run back into the woods, to keep running until his shoes wore off and he was barefoot as a babe, to be the child he was, and never have to grapple with questions of livelihood, rank, or salvation. She was proud that he was going, and she wished that he would not go.

  He was looking down, waiting, she could see, for her to dismiss him. She touched the brim of his hat as if to correct its angle, and said, “You’ll be hungry. God bless.”

  Missing Joseph, Elisha befriended a barn cat and named it Sister. It was skinny and wary, but he had noticed it as a kitten, and it came when he called.

  Rebekah was still at least half in mourning, although she did her work in the store and was silent in the buttery, with no great cries wracking the house. Elisha had moved up to Joseph’s cold space in the attic, where he heard chewing and rustling. It had always been there, he supposed, and worse each winter when all the rats and field mice came into the house, but it had been distant, far up. Now, sleeping with the grain as he was, he was in the midst of the gnawing.

  He taught Sister to drink whey from a gourd and persuaded his mother that the cat would not yawl or menace the cheese if she were allowed to live in the attic. Sister stalked among the grain barrels and brought him bodies of mice while he praised her fierceness softly so as not to wake his mother sleeping below. The rustling and gnawing lessened, but, of course, it never stopped.

  Joseph was hungry at Yale, almost all the time. Bread and milk, milk and pie, salt pork and bread. The meals were scant, but the company was good. He relished meeting scholars whose family he didn’t know from places he had never been. The whole college, with sleeping chambers for sixty-six students, was one unpainted clapboard building on a corner of the New Haven green. The chapel and the dining hall were the same room. He bore up well under his burden of serving the upper-classmen: fetching them cider, polishing their boots, and trudging into town to buy them ink, which they lacked facilities to make for themselves. It grated, but he was well-liked, and got off lightly. He joined a few rum-inspired rampages through the town, cursing and once jumping into a pen with some agitated geese. One night he parted from his fellows at three in the morning only to hear them pounding on the tutor’s door, demanding a word. He liked his tutor, Phineas Lyman, and had no wish to risk expulsion by rousting him out in the night. He particularly did not wish to have to give an account of himself to Mr. Edwards and his mother if he were sent home in disgrace. The fact that he could see the Pierpont house across the green, shaded by elms and full of Mrs. Edwards’s near relations, every time he stepped out of the hall, kept that possibility close at hand.

  He moderated his ways and took solace for the resulting loss of companionship by walking the wharf. New Haven wasn’t bigger than Northampton, but Joseph loved to watch the sloops, schooners and brigs sail in and out of the harbor. Their expansive, rippling sails and flags reminded him that, if he were far from home, at least he was reaping experience. The tidy green, on the other hand, with the First Church so close to the Hall that he had more than once to prevent a drunken scholar from stumbling into its doors instead of into the college, made him anxious with displaced familiarity. He very much missed his mother, Elisha, and all his people.

  His other escape was the library, which, though rich in books, was simply another room in the Hall. One afternoon, feeling homesick and out of patience with logic and Latin, he stopped thumbing through a five-year-old bound set of Tatler and sought out Mr. Edwards’s book about the revival in Northampton. Mr. Edwards had mentioned bringing a copy of the British edition to Yale. The title page raised his emotions into an agitation of yearning, pride, and dread, which he tried to ignore.

  A Faithful Narrative of the Surprizing Work of God in the Conversion of many hundred souls in Northampton, and the neighboring Towns and Villages of New-Hampshire in New England. In a LETTER to the Revd. Dr. Benjamin Colman of Boston. Written by the Revd. Mr. Edwards, Minister of Northampton.

  He liked seeing the phrase “many hundred Souls in Northampton,” but it was irritating that the town was misrepresented as being located in New Hampshire rather than being accurately described as being in Hampshire County, Massachusetts. Mr. Edwards had expressly told him that he had written to both Benjamin Colman in Boston and Dr. Watts and Dr. Guyse in London twice before publication to correct this error, but evidently they couldn’t be bothered with such specifics of wilderness geography. In this copy, though, New had been crossed out and “County of” had been added by hand. Joseph recognized Mr. Edwards’s writing. Both the shapes of the letters and the insistence on making corrections long after others might have given up sang to him of his minister, and so of home.

  “They have it wrong in London and we are right at Yale,” Joseph thought, feeling sinfully puffed up, even as he stifled his excitement over the names of Dr. Watts and Dr. Guyse, so much larger than Mr. Edwards’s own. It would have taken a saint of a greater magnitude than Joseph not to linger over the bottom of the page: Printed for John Oswald, at the Rose and Crown, in the Poultry, near Stocks-Market. London. He was practically there, smelling chicken and fishing out a shilling for a stitched copy of the book.

  He opened the volume and read with a renewed quiver of guilt about how the young people in his town had left off their frolicking. He had been awakened himself during the revival. Reading about it gripped him with a terrible ache. He knew the farm houses in Pascommuck where the first five or six had been savingly wrought upon. He knew the loose persons who had found piety and those who had lost it again. He remembered the scoffing by people from South Hadley, Suffield, Hatfield, and Green River in Deerfield, until their towns had caught fire as well.

  Just reading the lists of familiar place names on a printed page was a pleasure to him, as lonely for home as he was, but, even as he read, “This Town never was so full of Love, nor so full of Joy, nor so full of distress as it has Lately been,” his heart was pounding with what must come next. He skimmed over the pious, modest, bashful death of Abigail Hutchinson, and Phoebe Bartlett’s four-year-old raptures, more and more uneasy in spirit. It was very strange to have the awakening in Northampton so alive on the page when it had died so abruptly in the place itself when his father died.

  He put the book down on the table, and thought of the many delightful drinks a body could make with buttered rum. He found himself thinking of all the birds to be spied in Western Massachusetts in early June, how his father had taught him to recognize loons, bitterns, flycatchers, warblers, eagles, and sparrows. He thought of how he had heard that tithing men used to whack worshippers with knobbed sticks if they slumbered in church.

  He tried to resume his reading, and, as he did, a pale, crablike insect scuttled along his arm, long pinchers dragging. He noticed it when it stopped on his wrist and leaned back on its abdomen, pinchers in the air. Joseph brushed it off his hand and onto the book, where it crawled upside down into the long, delicate tunneled arch that had been made as one page had begun to rise from another, pulled but not fully persuaded by the weight of the spine.

  Joseph peered down that paper tunnel and saw the bug’s dark head and squarish translucent fangs as it started toward him again over more corrections in his distinguished cousin’s hand. He stood, walked away from the table and out of the library, not killing the insect, not closing the book.

  He sat through the rest of his classes that day like a sleeper in church, fighting the devil in his own ear who would have traded hundreds of souls from Northampton to North London to ease the certainty that one driven soul dear to him was blotted out, forever lost.

  Chapte
r 8: June 1740 – October 1740

  Saul and Leah started bundling. They didn’t do it openly, in the manner of some English families, with the visiting suitor and the daughter of the house sewn with only their heads free into cambric sleeping sacks by the young woman’s mother, indulgence and watchfulness tightening every stitch. Saul and Leah were not visitors, and they were not under the care and protection of their parents. No matter what was said about ethical slavery among the sentimental, an owner was neither mother nor father.

  Leah and Saul practiced bundling alone and in secret.

  One night when it was very late and the main house was dark, Leah climbed the ladder to Saul’s loft. Should they be caught, it might have been easier to explain why Saul was downstairs rather than why Leah was up, but she chose when to join him, so it was she who climbed. Also, she wanted that, wanted to feel her nightshirt brush against the wood as she used the strength in her arms to balance out her weak leg. She liked that she had to make a physical effort to bring herself to him. She knew that he understood the worth of that kind of work, even when it was only a woman with a stiff leg climbing a ladder. He saw the gift in it.

  He didn’t hide the bundling board, but kept it in a stack with other wood against the wall in one corner of the loft. When he heard her coming, he lifted it from the stack and slid it into place on his mattress stuffed with straw. It was a clean board cut from one of the trees so big that by law they were to be saved for the use of the King of England, but the King was very far from the Hampshire County woods, and so pantries and back rooms of buildings up and down the valley were built from wide planks. The bundling board was wide but also thick, so that it would rest solidly on the mattress. Saul pulled the blanket over the board and lay still beside it for the time it took Leah to make her way over the top of the ladder. Bent beneath the low rafters, she eased under the blanket on the other side of the board.

  Saul had his mattress lined up east to west so as not to sleep crossways with the world. They turned their faces to each other, the rough cut end of the bundling board just under their chins, smoothed and muffled by the blanket. She greeted him formally, saying his name. He greeted her, too, as Mariama. His hands were open on his own thighs, and his eyes gathered everything they could from the nearness of her face in the fingers of light from gaps between the slats of the wall.

  Pressing against the board between them, they breathed together, lips not touching at first, but then the breath opened their mouths. The sound of breath passing from one to another was like a wind troubling the woods. Air blew out the edges of their lips and the corners of their mouths, and pulled back in again to keep the two of them caught and resting in the same lung-married, life-bound, board-edged rhythm until they dizzied and had to gulp separate air.

  Leah had chosen this, first hinted and then flat-out asked for it not long after it became clear to her that, because of her knee, she had become slow to dance. She swam, still, with strength and pleasure, but stroking hard through a traveling river did not bring her any closer to touching Saul. Now she pulled her arms inside her nightshirt, and, shielded by the linen, pressed her palms hard against the board. Her breasts pressed, too, against the backs of her hands. She had wanted the restraint (and so he had agreed to it), wanted this covert custom of the culture that was claiming her, wanted to be righteous and also to know her desire, wanted no children, ever, to be born in shame. She felt that there was virtue and protection in staying on the other side of the board.

  Oh, she could smell him. She could eat his breath. She looked at him above the edge of the board, which he was against, too. She could make out the shape of his arm, the textures of his face. She kept breathing back at him, her breath in his throat, his in hers.

  Her hands were in fists against the board. Their feet met beneath it. His toe found a hole in her stocking, small opening of skin on skin. There was a catch in her breath.

  Like a board nailed behind the pulpit by a skillful builder, the one tilting between them on the mattress amplified everything so that each one’s breath and hushed voice echoed deep in the other. She wanted him wildly. He was desire, was love, was distance, so perilously close to grace. He forgot the distinction between wanting and getting, forgot everything except the dissipation of one more amplified breath.

  They never crossed the board, but kissed and whispered until they felt approached by morning.

  The next day was unseasonably hot for June. Leah stood among other women in the chamber attending to Sarah, who had been brought to bed with what would be, God willing, her sixth child. Saul had driven the wagon to the hills to take the Edwards children berrying, all except Jerusha, who had been allowed to stay home. The little girl, just turned ten, was in the kitchen tending an unhelpful fire under the supervision of elderly Mrs. Clapp, who burst into wavering snatches of hymns in an attempt to drown out the worst of Sarah’s screams. Jerusha, boiling hot and choking back tears, wished that she had left in the wagon with Saul.

  Listening helplessly from his study, Mr. Edwards found himself unable to complete a sentence. He finally gave up trying to write and rested his head in his hands. He didn’t want to abandon Sarah and flee to the elm, so he took out a copy he had made of a letter he had written months ago. It was to George Whitefield, a young minister who had been preaching in England to crowds so huge that they had to take to the fields. Local ministers had been reading letters about Mr. Whitefield from their pulpits to stir up excitement about his coming tour of New England. Listening to Sarah in travail, Mr. Edwards dug a hole in his desk with a penknife and read his own letter to Mr. Whitefield again.

  I have a great desire, if it may be the will of God, that such a blessing as attends your person and labors may descend on this town, and may enter mine own house, and that I may receive it in my own soul.

  In the birthing room, Leah moved forward with a clean towel to replace a bloody one, then stepped back to her place by the door. Mrs. Dwight and Prudence Stoddard were holding Sarah by her arms on the birthing stool, while the midwife knelt between her legs and Mrs. Hawley held on from behind. Dr. Mather had come and gone, and Leah stood ready to fetch him if he were needed, but, in an ordinary way, this was a business for women.

  With them, but in his room apart, Mr. Edwards read on:

  Indeed I am fearful whether you will not be disappointed in New England, and will have less success here than in other places: we who have dwelt in a land that has been distinguished with light, and have long enjoyed the gospel, and have been glutted with it, and have despised it, are I fear more hardened than most of those places where you have preached hitherto.

  Mrs. Stoddard beckoned Leah over to take a turn supporting her mistress on the stool. Leah breathed in rhythm with Sarah. Did everything in this world come down to breathing and pushing? Sarah let her head loll back against Rebekah Hawley’s belly and made a guttural sound. Leah crouched as she helped the midwife rub Sarah with hog’s grease to ease the new baby girl into the sweet, sinning, sweat-salted world.

  Rebekah Hawley cut the umbilical cord with care. Leaving it too long would make a girl immodest, and if she let it touch the ground, the child might never be able to hold her pee. Leah swaddled the baby tightly and brought warm wool from a living sheep to press at the site of the mother’s pain.

  Mr. Edwards lifted his head and dropped his penknife when he heard his new daughter begin to wail. He ran to the kitchen to find Jerusha huddled under the table as if she were half her age, singing faintly with Mrs. Clapp. He bent down and held out his hand. In her scramble to take it, she bumped her head. As they walked down the hall together, he smoothed her hair away from the hurt place. He felt glutted with love for his family, but as soon as they entered the chamber where Sarah and the baby had both quieted in sleep, he knew he had room for much more. He drew up a chair beside the bed and let Jerusha get a peek at her red-faced little sister before he sent her to the p
arlor to help Leah serve groaning cake to the exhausted women.

  On the day Mr. Whitefield was finally due to arrive in Northampton, the baby was already sitting up in the kitchen, eating mashed peas with her mother while Mr. Edwards climbed the elm. It was a Friday afternoon in October with a sky full of clouds too bright to look at because the sun was beating in back of them, sensed but not seen. Mr. Edwards went higher than usual and stayed on the side of the tree facing the house, trying to escape notice from the masses of people streaming down the road on their way to the river to watch for Mr. Whitefield. So much for fears that the English preacher would have less success in Northampton than in other places. Mr. Edwards had never seen so many people on the road, but he himself had to climb.

  The big tree had already lost most of its leaves. There were piles of them on the ground, damp and supple, almost translucent, veined like skin. A few had been left on the limbs. He watched as one shook, then dropped. Below him, Sheriff Pomeroy—whom Mr. Edwards had lately observed sleeping in church, gurgling with his mouth gawping open and no one taking up the Christian duty to jab him in the ribs—had paused to call a blessing to a wagon driver hauling a load of deer skins. His voice cracked as he commended the driver to God, as if he would faint in the road in front of his fellows, struck once again by his sins. Nothing like that had happened in Northampton for years. The driver was a Root, less moved by the fervor around him than Mr. Edwards would have wished. He touched his hat in a reserved way, clicking his tongue at his team of oxen, which seemed oblivious to the crowd of half-grown boys scrambling behind the wagon. Nobody looked up at Mr. Edwards at all.