Spider in a Tree Page 14

  The women murmured at the force and beauty of the verse, flicking flies away from the table by switching their fans. People kept coming to the door to ask the itinerants about family in Northampton, Hebron, Longmeadow, or the Crank, and the ministers accepted letters and packets to bring back to their towns. Mr. Wheelock, returning to the table with a handful of letters, said, “I tried to make it clear to the man that I didn’t know when I might next be going home. I’ll keep traveling as long as the Lord keeps blessing my preaching.”

  As he spoke, Mr. Wheelock’s voice, already hoarse, failed him altogether. He had been preaching past midnight the night before, and again that morning. Mrs. Reynolds hurried to bring rum for his throat, and, as he sipped it, he turned to her husband and croaked, “Mr. Edwards seems much strengthened today. Perhaps he could preach this afternoon.”

  Mr. Reynolds took a bite of pear to mask his disappointment. He had very much wished to hear a sermon from Mr. Wheelock. But he nodded graciously at his Hampshire County colleague, Mr. Edwards, who, with a great wave of relief and excitement, immediately left off eating and went to his satchel to look over the notes he had brought to find a sermon fitting for the occasion. It was for this that he had been made.

  It was a sweltering day, a Wednesday, and they had already had a sermon on Tuesday, but people were waiting in the packed meeting house. The heat rising from so many gathered bodies was enough to make anyone light-headed. Women mopped sweaty brows with handkerchiefs pulled from their sleeves; men refrained from chewing tobacco or getting out their pipes, but, instead, swapped stories they had heard about religious excitement in the surrounding towns, with frequent mentions of the Suffield woman suspected of fornication who had been allowed to own the covenant, and the deaf man found kneeling for prayer in his chamber, sweat rolling down his chest in streams, who had been making such a strange noise that it drew the whole neighborhood.

  The congregation was wasting daylight, and it wasn’t even their usual lecture day, which came on Thursday. They knew that they had been called to the meeting house because Suffield was in a fever of religion just across the river, and the divines were hoping for contagion. The people gathered that afternoon in Enfield were hoping for it, too. Most of them had heard George Whitefield the year before, and it was hard to imagine that a handful of New England ministers could top that. Getting to watch them try was both a chance for salvation and an experience to be threshed like wheat for inspiration, edification, and gossip long after the itinerants were gone. People from other towns were crowding the pews next to acquaintances and family connections, stuffing the gallery and clogging up the aisles.

  Joseph and Elisha Hawley slipped in the back with Mr. Edwards’s slave Saul. Joseph was home from his studies at Yale for the summer, and Elisha was only ten days from his fifteenth birthday. Their mother had charged them with bringing a cartload of deer skins from Northampton to Enfield to give to a local merchant, who would travel to Boston and New Haven, hawking them for a good price. Elisha had extracted a promise from her that she would bring scraps to his cat in the attic while he was gone.

  Rebekah had not been sure that she had liked Elisha’s eagerness to go to the children’s meeting in Northampton over the past few months. She had not liked what she could hear walking by, which sounded to her like animals grunting and yelping, but which Elisha assured her was most moving and fitting prayer. She wasn’t sure that he would be any better off worshipping with a congregation of strangers, but she counted on Joseph to enforce all proprieties. Besides, the skins needed to be moved. She had hired the Edwardses’ Saul, known to be trustworthy—and now, she had heard, even pious—to go with them and help with the loading. Saul had the expectation of keeping some of the money from his hire.

  A tithing man spoke to the Hawleys; then Joseph and Elisha were given a spot on a bench in the back, while Saul sat with slaves and indentured men on the stairs to the galley, just below a very dark-skinned man in a brown coat with a striped waistcoat and unbleached breeches.

  Saul leaned back against the stairs, just a little, and the man sitting above moved his knees to make room. One of the man’s pinchbeck buckles grazed the back of Saul’s head. He looked up, and saw the stranger glance around at everyone who was nearby. Then the man murmured, “Where are you from?”

  Tilting his head just a little more, Saul could see that the man’s breeches were the roughest fustian, and that he had a pattern of scars marked with gunpowder just visible under the cuff of his coat. Reminding himself that he was the true stranger in this place, Saul turned to look him in the face and said, softly and politely, “Northampton.”

  The other man leaned down farther, cocking his head toward Joseph and Elisha. “With them?”

  Saul nodded. Joseph was peering over his shoulder at them, trying to look stern. Elisha was distracted by a young lady across the aisle, who had dropped her fan and, perhaps unwittingly, kicked it so it slid against his boot. Elisha trapped it between his feet, then picked it up to return to her. Once he did that, Joseph glared at him instead of Saul.

  The stranger, who gave his name as Pompey, was speaking with a lilt that made Saul think he might have spent time as a sailor. “I heard Whitefield when he was in these parts. He’s the best of these preachers.”

  “I know,” Saul said. “I heard him, too.”

  Pompey leaned down until his face was as close as his knee was to Saul’s ear. “What I hear is, he’s got a big charity orphanage down in Georgia, where it’s against the law to own slaves. He’s one of those who wants to change the law so that he can bring in slaves to do the work of running the orphanage.”

  Saul let out a breath. “Huh,” he said. “Huh.” It was not surprising to hear that one more white preacher owned slaves or was looking to own them. At least half of them did, as far as Saul could tell. But he had felt God move in his heart when that squinty-eyed Englishman had taken on the liars who preached but didn’t live as they said others had to do.

  Pompey stopped his whispering as the pack of reverends came striding in the door. Mr. Edwards was so tall and thin that he always seemed just a little unhealthy, but he was straight as a cross and unhesitating as he made his way up the aisle to the front of the church.

  Mr. Reynolds beckoned to the singing master, a fierce old man, to start up a hymn. The master clasped his hands behind his back and strained his neck to throw out the fa do so do of the tune, which the people took up in an old-fashioned raucous caterwauling that made Mr. Edwards wish for the more restrained harmonies which his own congregation had mastered. Still, the hymn made a tremendous noise, and while people left off their murmuring to raise it up to God, Mr. Edwards regarded the shivering mass of the singing master’s wide-bottomed wig, which even he knew was a style thirty years out of date.

  He slipped his hand into his waistcoat where it was unbuttoned over his belly, the old familiar pattern for a sermon pounding in his brain like a pulse. Text. Doctrine. Application. He had been experimenting with preaching more from notes and the fresh inspirations of God, rather than working methodically to build arguments for experiences which superseded logic. Still, he loved the old forms. The singing master let one hand rise as he sang bass. Mr. Edwards listened as the people carried the song. Were they spoiled by so much awakening? Would they accept light and truth from him as they had from the expressive, charming, famous, and English Mr. Whitefield? Mr. Edwards brought his shoulder blades together and then let them drop as he felt himself begin to go dull beneath the grip of envy, then realized that in succumbing to his baser nature this way, he was as corrupt as the worst of the churchgoing sinners whom he was about to portray being trampled by God. He had to face this almost every time he preached, and he hated it in himself every time. The sermon. He held his mind on the sermon. He had preached a version of it earlier in the summer in Northampton, throwing it out like one more stone skipping across those familiar souls,
leaving barely a ripple, although some were plenty stirred up already, he knew, particularly the young people. Now he glanced at Elisha, who was looking across the room to the back benches of young women, some of whom, flushed with song, were looking back. His brother, Joseph, though, was gazing at Mr. Edwards with the eyes of true belief, as earnest a young man as he had been as a three-year-old. Mr. Edwards was moved by the sight of the Hawleys, with their family faces and vulnerable souls, fatherless sons that they were. The thought of their father and how he died scraped an old wound. Steadying himself, Mr. Edwards rose to take the pulpit as the hymn finished, palmed his sermon, put one hand on the Bible, and—speaking in his soft, certain voice—began.

  Their foot shall slide in due time.

  Saul’s hip started aching as soon he sat down on the stairs after the hymn. At the opening verse about the slipping foot, his ankle, where a mule had once kicked him, joined the throbbing in his hip. He had heard this sermon in Northampton, and recently, too. He tried to be open, tried to truly listen, but all he felt was that ache, ankle to hip.

  Mr. Edwards was going at it hard, looking into the faces of the people and preaching out:

  That world of misery, that lake of burning brimstone is extended abroad under you. There is the dreadful pit of the glowing flames of the wrath of God; there is hell’s wide gaping mouth open; and you have nothing to stand upon, nor anything to take hold of; there is nothing between you and hell but air; ’tis only the power and mere pleasure of God that holds you up.

  Elisha had heard the sermon before, while his brother had not. He watched Joseph’s hands grip the bench beside him as if he feared that he might slip off. Women began screaming, “What must I do?” The young woman who had dropped her fan was on her feet, calling out over and over, “Help me, oh God, help me.” Men were standing as well, shouting out to God to save them, and some reached for the timbers of the church, any seam or joint in the walls to hold on to. Some fell to the ground and rolled on the floor, coat tails splayed and flying, calling out for God.

  Joseph made himself see the lake, feel its molten heat beneath him, let the cries all around him separate into the voices of angels and the hellish screams of the damned. He thought he heard his father’s voice among them, never risen, never resting, never quenched, and he felt his own soul spilling blood under the gnashing of his sins. He shook, sunk, and felt himself horribly alone, unreachable to his brother beside him or to anyone except the devils come to bind him and drag him into the pit that his father, in his sloppy dying, dug for him. He dropped from the bench to his knees, holding his head in his hands as he shook it back and forth. His only contact with the warmth of life was the good, known voice of Mr. Edwards telling him what he was and what he must do.

  You probably are not sensible of this; you find you are kept out of hell, but don’t see the hand of God in it, but look at other things, as the good state of your bodily constitution, your care of your own life, and the means you use for your own preservation. But indeed these things are nothing; if God should withdraw his hand, they would avail no more to keep you from falling, than the thin air to hold up a person that is suspended in it.

  Mr. Edwards could feel God alive within him, lighting his words. Every dram of jealousy and worldly ambition had drained from him, and he felt dry and light as a husk. His throat was parched, but he did not stumble or cough. His voice was his body. He let it go harsher and louder, leaned forward over the pulpit, and kept preaching:

  Your wickedness makes you as it were heavy as lead, and to tend downwards with great weight and pressure toward hell; and if God should let you go, you would immediately sink and swiftly descend and plunge into the bottomless gulf, and your healthy constitution, and your own care and prudence, and best contrivance, and all your righteousness, would have no more influence to uphold you and keep you out of hell, than a spider’s web would have to stop a falling rock.

  Men dropped from front seats one after another to crawl and stagger toward the pulpit. They rose to their knees or stayed on their bellies to reach up and hold on to it, begging for help from God.

  Were it not that so is the sovereign pleasure of God, the earth would not bear you one moment; for you are a burden to it; the creation groans with you; the creature is made subject to the bondage of your corruption, not willingly; the sun don’t willingly shine upon you to give you light to serve sin and Satan; the earth don’t willingly yield her increase to satisfy your lusts; nor is it willingly a stage for your wickedness to be acted upon; the air don’t willingly serve you for breath to maintain the flame of life in your vitals, while you spend your life in the service of God’s enemies. God’s creatures are good, and were made for men to serve God with, and don’t willingly subserve to any other purpose, and groan when they are abused to purposes so directly contrary to their nature and end. And the world would spew you out, were it not for the sovereign hand of him who hath subjected it in hope.

  Mr. Edwards could see that the men at his feet were sobbing. One was grabbing at his stockings. He shifted his legs and shouted, “Quiet!” The yelling and crying didn’t subside. He took a breath and, ignoring the tugging at his ankles, went on, raising his voice to give the name of God its full weight every time he said it, feeling strangely unsurprised by the screaming and clutching below him.

  The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect, over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times so abominable in his eyes as the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours.

  Pray, prey, Joseph thought. Is the sinner the spider? He was still on the floor on his knees. If he held a spider over the fire, couldn’t it fly? Couldn’t it retract the web, propel itself back up until it reached his hand, sank fangs and filled his blood with poisons and demons, making him into a spider self? Couldn’t that be the danger, dangling the spider at all? And fire, so dangerous. Babies, old people, and drunkards fell into it. If the fire went out, a boy would be sent to ask for a coal from the neighbors, and terrible things could happen to a little boy carrying fire home who, starting to fall, seized the coals.

  Oh, Mr. Edwards, Joseph thought, preach hard to me. I want—still, again—to be saved.

  Saul wanted to be taken with spirit again, himself, wanted to howl out for shelter, for safety, for the fountain of love at the center of heaven to rise and pour forth over him, but felt instead as if he had just watched the gallery in Northampton fall again, as if he should be bruising his fingers and straining his back to throw timbers off of the people groaning and crying all around him. He had been left cold by Pompey’s whispers about Mr. Whitefield and slaves. As predictable as it was, Saul had failed to account for it. He felt himself shaking off his new faith even as he watched Pompey slide past him to the bottom of the stairs and lie belly up, shivering on the slats of the meeting house floor. The cuff of his coat rode up his arm so that Saul could see that the gunpowder picture on his wrist was a tree.

  And there is no other reason to be given why you have not dropped into hell since you arose in the morning, but that God’s hand has held you up; there is no other reason to be given why you han’t gone to hell since you have sat here in the house of God, provoking his pure eyes by your sinful wicked manner of attending his solemn worship; yea, there is nothing else that is to be given as a reason why you don’t this very moment drop down into hell.

  Saul looked past Elisha putting his arms around the trembling shoulders of his brother to gaze intently at Mr. Edwards. Saul watched his master’s face as the screaming became so frantic that no one could hear the sermon. He saw what he always saw: a man who thought others owed him work, who didn’t tend to bodies because he was busy with God’s law, who, just then, stopped in t
he middle of a sentence and seemed a little bit lost.

  The noise was so loud that Mr. Edwards could not continue. This had happened to him before when the meeting house itself was breaking apart. His heart was pounding, but his belly, for once, was calm. He stood at the pulpit above the men who, still sobbing, had all gone limp, and looked out across the congregation at a young woman whom he had noticed earlier because her skin had flushed so beautifully as he read the scripture. Now she turned to the women on each side of her, seizing their hands and calling out. The din was much too loud for him to hear her. The women bent to her, blocking her face with their leghorn hats, so that he could not see her mouth as she spoke, and he thought that God was telling him to let the words go, let the text go, let the elegant shape of the sermon with its heartfelt assurances of love at the end go uncompleted, only half preached. People were reaching toward God, whether he shouted above them or not.

  Mr. Reynolds, who had been praying over the singing master as he writhed on the floor, stood up as he saw his aunt fall into a faint, tended to by her children. He climbed to the pulpit, stepping carefully around the huddled men, and put his hand on Mr. Edwards’s shoulder. Mr. Edwards looked into the sweating face of his colleague, at Mr. Wheelock behind him, then down at his notes. His hands were trembling.

  Mr. Reynolds, leaning toward him, shouted in his ear. “God has sanctified your words. Now, let Mr. Wheelock pray with the people, then let us minister personally to those souls in distress.”

  “I am ready, sir,” said Mr. Wheelock, his voice hoarse but strong.

  “Of course,” said Mr. Edwards, standing aside. He felt emptied and, for a moment, almost alone, but sank to his knees next to the base of the pulpit, bending close to listen to the cries of the men fallen there and guide them if he could.