Spider in a Tree Read online

  Mr. Reynolds didn’t take the pulpit, but cupped his mouth and hooted over the din, sounding like a boy calling in dry cattle, until he had the attention of enough of those gathered that Mr. Wheelock could lead a prayer.

  Saul slipped out the door while Mr. Reynolds was hollering. He half expected the steps of the meeting house to be strewn with sinners overcome by the prospect of hell, but instead he walked out into a still, hot summer afternoon empty of prayers and lamentations, although he could hear the desperate voices calling from within.

  He walked toward the horse shed, where he and the boys had left the emptied wagon. When he got there, he wanted nothing more than to take a blanket and go to sleep on the shaded ground beside the wheels. Instead, he slapped the oxen on their shoulders and led them down to a shallow spot in the river to drink their fill before the people of Enfield pulled themselves together and brought their own animals down to muddy the water.

  While the oxen stretched their thick-muscled necks to drink, Saul squatted down to wet his hands and face. He had done no shouting or writhing, but felt as tired as if he’d been hauling water from the river to try to drench the fire Mr. Edwards had raised up in that church. He dug up a little dirt from the bank and drizzled it into his pouch, in case he might need it, thinking of a holy man he had known who carried dried fish scales that he would rattle in his pocket with an eerie, unworldly sound. Saul had seen too much to be easily scared, but always walked away from—not toward—such rustlings.

  He braced his palms on the bank to help support his aching hip as he stood, then turned away from the river and started back up the hill to the horse shed. It was a small climb, but he was very tired. As he and the oxen crested the hill, he saw that the doors of the meeting house were open, with some people spilling out, although the noise had not subsided within. He spied one of his young overseers, Elisha, holding the ankles of the girl who had dropped her fan as he helped carry her to rest on a lady’s shawl spread out in the shade of a tree.

  Saul rolled his eyes and caught a grasshopper in mid-leap, which he fed to the right-hand ox, who ate it as calmly as if it were a palmful of grain before they settled down to wait.

  People groaned and cried long into the night.

  Chapter 10: July 1741

  Saul went to find Leah as soon as he and the boys had returned the wagon. Rebekah had paid him with a chit for store credit for the Edwardses, with a portion for him. Before they got into town, Saul and Joseph had rousted out Elisha, who had spent the greater part of the journey curled up against a bolt of canvas in the back of the wagon, sweating in his sleep. He had been upright and driving, although still a little puffy around the eyes, when they pulled up the team before the store and greeted Rebekah, who looked him up and down, but said nothing.

  Leah was walking home from the well, hauling water in two heavy buckets that left ridges in her hands and stiffness in her neck. Moving swiftly in the heat, Saul caught up with her and gave her a slight bow before he took the buckets.

  Leah, who limped herself, said, “Don’t argue with me,” and took back the bucket Saul was holding on the side with his stiff hip.

  They walked together for a while in silence, Saul looking down at the cracks in his fingers where they curled around the handle of the bucket. Before they were in view of the house, he said, “Come on with me.”

  Leah nodded, and they stepped off the road and walked to the shelter of a field of high-grown wheat and rye, sure to be Saul’s next work.

  He took off his coat and spread it on the ground for her to sit, then dipped his hand in a bucket and drank before he sat down beside her. “I brought you something,” he said, opening his pocket and pulling out a brown pear from Enfield.

  He put it in her hand and said, “Eat it now, Leah.”

  She reached up and stripped a seed head, averting her gaze. “You’ve told me nothing about your journey.”

  He stretched his legs and propped himself up on one elbow. “I brought you a pear. And many souls were saved.”

  She looked at him sharply, but he put his hand around hers and raised the fruit to her mouth before she could tell him not to speak lightly of the great things of religion. He drew a breath and said it himself. “I am not speaking lightly. Eat.”

  She lowered her eyes and bit. The crisp flesh gave a crack as it came away. The taste was sweet. Juice welled up in the hollow, wetting both their fingers as she took another bite. She ate it down to the stringy stem and sucked the seeds, which she dropped carefully into her pouch when she was done.

  He brushed the juice on her face with his lips, then spoke softly into her cheek. “With just a pear for a bride price, will you still be my bride?”

  She sucked the last piece of skin from between her teeth with slow aplomb, and said, “You honor me.” Then she kissed him.

  He wept like a convert, tasting pear.

  When Mr. Edwards got home, he told Sarah that he never should have eaten the salmon. He had suffered on his horse and was taken with the heaves all night. Despite his physical discomfort, he was so excited that she thought he might be feverish, weak and exhausted as he was, but as she listened it was clear that he had spent himself on another mighty work of God. She applied burdock leaves to his stomach and kept the bed curtains closed in the morning to keep him from waking at first light. As if anything could.

  On the day before Saul and Leah’s marriage, Sarah, humming, dipped into the portion of flour she had set aside to give to the widows who came begging food at her kitchen door. She gave it instead to Jerusha, who wanted to bake a cake for the couple. The girls had been berry-picking all week, so Jerusha crushed a few raspberries and tied them inside a whisk to flavor a bowlful of cream for a topping while the cake was baking. It was a ginger cake, because Jerusha knew how much Leah hated allspice.

  Leah was out in the yard, where it was cooler than in the kitchen, gutting a barrel of shad to be pickled for winter. Sarah had wanted to salt it, but they were low on salt, although Rebekah Hawley had said that a shipment was due any day. While they had been discussing how to preserve the fish, Leah had felt Sarah’s desire to send Saul with the wagon to haul a few hogsheads of salt from Hadley, but Sarah had not said it, and so the wedding would not be delayed. Leah supposed she should be grateful, but she had to wonder if her own thoughts could possibly be as visible to the English as theirs were to her. She was of the opinion that when they looked at her, most of the time they were thinking of what they needed from her next, so that her thoughts about anything else would be beside the point. Still, the wedding was on for the next morning, and Jerusha, who had been hanging on her shoulder to tease her about Saul, was busy baking gingerbread, and so was giving her these moments of peace.

  Leah’s fingers were stinging with many tiny cuts. The cool bodies of fish in her hands—living when she seized each in one barrel, stilled and emptied when she slipped it into the other—made her think of her mother, who had taught her to grasp a fish by the gills, but who had not given her the secrets of marriage. Leah had been too young, and then she had been gone. There was no knowing if anything her mother might have said or if any of the women’s teachings—the mask, the dancing, the secrets and whispers of knives that were suddenly flooding back to her as she slit the belly of another fish—would have helped her at all once she had been taken, tied, and trapped in the sea with other cargo (allspice), surrounded by people sick and dying in many languages, nearly stacked against them as she sloshed with slow inner waves like the barrels of molasses, whose stink, perhaps strangely, now caused her no offense. Gutting fish, turning life into food, Leah missed her mother, who had beautiful long hair and, even when she had been irritated, looked at Leah with a density of feeling that came back to her daughter now like a smell of palm oil strong enough to rise over a bucket of guts, over barrels full of fish, brine, and river water, and blessed her on the eve of her marria
ge in New England with a strong sense of certainty in love.

  She was just beginning to think of her father, how tall he had been and how gently he had knelt down beside the twin kids just born of the nanny goat. He had told her to watch as the nanny licked them clean because the smaller one with the shaky legs would be hers. She was remembering how he would listen in the morning to what she had dreamed the night before when Mr. Edwards rode into the yard.

  Leah rose from her seat on the stump between the two barrels. Mr. Edwards glanced at her and motioned with both hands that she should be seated, as if she were a congregation. His sleeves and the whole front of his coat were covered with scraps of paper that rustled as he moved. He looked as if he had been rubbing up against pine trees sticky with tar, and then standing much too close to a chicken being plucked, but Leah knew that he had chosen to put himself into this bizarre state. She had seen it before. He stopped under the elm, twisting to pull the coat off one shoulder, trying to read what he had pinned to the seam. Leah reached into the barrel for another fish, shaking her head.

  Sarah, following Esther and Mary out the door with an exhalation of heat and gingerbread, shook her head, too. She was very aware that her appearance was under constant scrutiny in the town—the gift of a locket and chain from Mr. Edwards could provoke sly comments about extravagance instead of household economy for months—but her husband treated himself like a living hornbook with no thought to how he looked. “Your humours must be starting to be back in balance, Mr. Edwards,” she said, taking the reins and handing them to Esther. “You’ve been gone all day.” There was a note of reprimand in her tone. Leah heard it from across the yard, but Mr. Edwards did not. He dismounted with care, holding one arm across his chest to keep from dislodging the notes pinned there, then opened his arms wide and presented himself to her. “I’ve been working,” he said, handing the reins to Mary, who was elbowing her sister to keep her from giggling. “I’m finally getting somewhere with that Northfield business.”

  “Girls, take the horse to the barn.” Sarah looked over her shoulder at Leah, who was slitting another shad, then turned back to her husband. “May I accompany you into your study? I’d hate for you to lose any of your notes to the wind.” She put her hand on his sleeve, willing him to notice her unspoken suggestion of discretion, this once.

  Mr. Edwards followed his wife’s glance to their slave’s face, and said no more about Northfield. Instead, he patted her hand, paper crackling at his elbow. As they walked toward the house, he called out to Leah, “Fish!” It was all he could think of to say.

  Leah, who knew full well what Northfield meant, said, “Yes, sir.” There was little that happened in the households and congregations of Hampshire County clergy that Leah didn’t know. Mr. Edwards had accepted an assignment from his association of ministers to write a defense for the Reverend Mr. Doolittle against a charge from some of Mr. Doolittle’s Northfield parishioners that his ownership of slaves was a sin. Leah released the cleaned fish and kept her eyes down. “Shad for dinner.”

  He nodded and said, “I smell gingerbread.”

  “Are you hungry?” asked Sarah, letting go of his arm to unlatch the door.

  He shook his head and looked back at Leah. “Come to my study when you have finished your work, and I will give you counsel before your wedding day.”

  Leah imagined walking over to him and ruffling the bits of paper on his chest with her sour, messy fingers. Instead, she thrust her hands among the live fish again and said, “Yes, sir. I will come.”

  Jerusha was keeping an eye on her baking as she scalded neat’s foot and chopped apples to make a minced pie. She got up from her chair as her parents passed through the kitchen, suppressing a grin at the sight of her father’s coat. She, who her sisters claimed was his favorite, risked making a joke. “Father, you are bristling with ideas.”

  Sarah gave her a quelling glance, but her father reached for a slice of apple and, chewing it, assumed a beatific expression, as if it were the best thing he had ever eaten. “Your labors are bearing fruit as well, Jerusha.”

  She laughed in delight. Any effort at levity from her father was rare enough to be funny in itself. Also, he looked so silly. She sucked cinnamon from her finger to keep from laughing again.

  Her parents went into the study and closed the door. Sarah—reminding herself to pray later about worrying too much about what people thought of Mr. Edwards, and so, of her—rummaged in her pocket and found a nearly empty paper of pins. “May I assist you?”

  He stood happily before her. “Start with the left shoulder and work across the coat, leaving the sleeves to the last. They’ve got to stay in order.” He loved it when she unpinned notes from his coat. It was the best of all worlds. He looked down to correct the path of her hands, already amending arguments in his head before he even had a chance to copy them to a whole piece of fool’s cap. They didn’t speak about the letter he was working on, but she read bits of the fragments as she fell into the rhythm of her work, carefully sticking each pin into her paper as she freed it. Despite her worries about what people must think of him, she loved unpinning his thoughts, too.

  If they ben’t partakers of the slaves, they are of their slavery, wherein the injustice, if there be any, consists.

  Sarah smoothed the cloth over his chest, noting the tiny holes the pins left in the worsted serge of his coat. She would like for him to get fabric for her to make him a new linsey-woolsey coat the next time he traveled to Hartford or Boston, but knew that he was reluctant to be seen spending his salary on clothes.

  Either let them answer them, or let ’em own the matter is well proved, and not go on pretending that those arguments are of no force which they can’t or at least don’t see cause to answer, only to make disturbances and raise uneasiness among people against their minister to the great wounding of religion.

  Sarah had felt the brush of their own congregation’s judgments about her beauty mark and the cut of her dresses, but no one had questioned their need for slaves. She was a little surprised to find Mr. Edwards being so incisive in defense of Mr. Doolittle, whose repression of revivals which Mr. Edwards saw as surprising acts of God, was what was causing some of his flock to speak out against him. She knew that her husband had prayed mightily about this, but he was doing his duty in support of the authority of another minister.

  The practice that prevails in the world of eating and drinking tends to sin, and a world of iniquity is the consequence of it, but we are not therefore to abstain from sin.

  She saved another pin, listening to Jerusha clanking pans in the kitchen. Despite his display for their daughter with the apple, her husband was indifferent when it came to eating and drinking, more willing to abstain than anyone else she had ever encountered, but it was true that the work of Leah and Saul was as common and helpful as salt. The family could have done without it if slavery were truly an affront to God, but many of his gifts that could have been otherwise well-used would then have to be left to rot.

  It supposes that God gave a law that did tend greatly to encourage iniquity in all the nations round about Canaan by his own pleasure. So that instead of their being a light to the earth, a blessing in the midst, it was dangerous for other nations to live near God’s people, which would be a blasphemous way of talking.

  Slavery. The whole subject made Sarah uncomfortable, even more than such a grave offense as blasphemy. Thank goodness it rarely came up.

  “Finished,” she said, gracefully setting the unwieldy pile of notes on the desk with his inkpot on top of it to keep them from scattering. And, then, because she knew that he had felt her eyes on his writing, and was awaiting comment, she added, “Strong arguments.”

  “Thank you, dear one,” he said, rubbing a pricked place on his wrist. “The scripture is very clear.”

  She fetched a yarrow leaf to clean the tiny cut, and then took his
coat, slipping the paper of pins up one sleeve so that he would have them the next time he got inspired on horseback. She kissed his forehead and left him at his desk, already lifting the inkpot to get at the notes.

  When Leah came in from the yard and wiped her hands on a rag bound for the wash pot, Sarah sent her to the study with a piece of warm gingerbread and a cup of hot chocolate for Mr. Edwards. There was plenty of cake left for the wedding party, and the sight of Leah with her straight back carrying the treats made an allegorical illustration of Mr. Edwards’s point about eating and drinking and slavery that Sarah found piquant as she watched her servant knock on the study door. Beneath her satisfaction, there was a stirring of questions, but she did not allow herself to approach them.

  When he looked up and saw Leah, Mr. Edwards, who was unaware of the depth of his own uneasiness, wished that he had suggested that they speak at another time. He could tell her to go, of course, but his concentration had already been disrupted. He drew a vertical line through a paragraph, and set down his quill.

  Leah set the cake and the cup of chocolate gently on the desk, then stood back to await his word.

  He gestured at the cherry wood chair that was the place of seekers, church committee men, and Sarah late at night. He hadn’t bothered to locate his cap, but had taken off his wig, so his scalp shone through his sparse bristle of hair.

  “Sit down, Leah,” he said. “You know, I see you and Saul as a couple of the beloved children of God, soon to be joined in happy bands.”