Spider in a Tree Page 17

  Joseph, melted, was rapt, taken by familiar power, for this was the voice he had grown up with, and he had knowledge of Mr. Edwards far beyond what he could ever hope to know of someone like Mr. Davenport. His mind closed over the arguments like the teeth of a mule on a bit. He filled with surprising love for Mr. Edwards, who had acted in both material and spiritual ways with deep concern for him. Joseph’s father’s ghost was not forgotten, but neither was it heard to speak.

  At the lectern, Mr. Edwards was describing the folly of gathering in a field to pray for a rain, then finding it to be a confusion or an unhappy interruption to have to break off because of a shower. He spoke of ministers who doubt or clog the work of God’s spirit. By the time he said that silent ministers stood in the way of the work of God, Joseph was gasping at Mr. Edwards’s nerve before Rector Clap and the silent trustees.

  Mr. Edwards said that those who waited to see a work of God without difficulties were like fools at the riverside waiting to cross until all the water ran by. He raised his voice to declare that the great Jehovah had been in New England.

  Later, Joseph realized that he had listened least to the section of the sermon intended most for him and other friends of the awakening. Mr. Edwards spoke against pride and praised the influences of ordinary grace. He warned the young scholars against following impulses or despising human learning, and urged them to more fully consider how far, and upon what grounds, the rules of the holy scriptures would truly justify passing censure on other professing Christians.

  I once did not imagine that the heart of man had been so unsearchable as it is. I am less charitable and less uncharitable than I once was.

  As he spoke these words, Mr. Edwards looked directly at Joseph, whose ability to concentrate was lost for a few moments. Mr. Edwards kept speaking.

  The longer I live, the less I wonder that God challenges it as his prerogative to try the hearts of the children of men, and directs that this business should be let alone till harvest.

  Joseph held his preacher’s gaze with dry eyes, feeling as if he and his family were receiving an apology. Well-trained in the practice of testing his own heart, he was seized with terror as he realized that he was not at all sure whether or not he would accept it.

  Chapter 12: January 1742

  It was a hard winter in Northampton. The girls had trampled a path in the snow to the woodshed and the barn, but it had steep sides. Walking in it, Leah slid and hit her sore knee on an edge of ice. The pain was so sharp that she dropped the chamber pot she was carrying. The contents were half frozen and too sluggish to spill more than a dog would leave to mark its ground. Leah, wincing, kicked a bit of snow over the stain, picked up the pot, and went on.

  Making her way over the uneven ice ratcheted up the pain in her knee, but she was glad to be out of the house, where Mr. Edwards was shut up in his study and Sarah had been sharp-edged and bitter for weeks. Everyone who was interested, which included most of the women and all of the gossips in town, could see that Sarah wasn’t pregnant even though it had been a full eighteen months since Sukey had been born.

  Earlier in the week, Leah had found herself slipping out to the barn carrying a coal from the kitchen in a warming pan so that Saul might have some source of heat as he tended the livestock. She had set the pan on a bit of bare earth safely away from hooves and straw, then leaned against the warm belly of an ox—which leaned gently back, as if she were one of the herd—and watched Saul pour a bucket of icy, rotten turnips into the trough for the hogs before he raked out their pen. Finished, he had come toward her with that uneven walk of his complicating his grace. Drawing warmth from the ox and none from the pan, she had let herself be drenched with the details of him—the elegant hang of his old coat, his deceptively mild eyes, buckwheat in his hair—then had drawn his cold, cracked hands to the waist of her apron and said, “A child.”

  He had tucked his fingers around the waistband and looked at her face, his mouth opening into a half-grin she had wanted to drink like cider. The worries and talk about dangerous labor and being born owned came later, in the dark, but in the cold, sheltered barn amidst the quick stock, Saul’s eyes had been alight, and what he had said was, “My dear one. My sweet.”

  Leah, who figured herself to be three months along, had told no one else. She wished that Mr. Edwards, who listed her and Saul on his will as quick stock themselves, might never know.

  Now, carrying the chamber pot, she slipped again on the way back to the house, but the narrowness of the path kept her on her feet like a child tied with a bolster around her middle. There was very little room to fall.

  The house was cold in corners, cold everywhere away from the hearth, where the large tea kettle had been hung on its hook in the center of the fire to boil. The Reverend Mr. Chester Williams was visiting with Sarah in the parlor, and he had tramped in thick gray slush from the road. Leah dried the floor with a mop made of strips of old shifts, then gave Mary a hand carrying the china tea cups into the parlor. At the clinking of the cups, Mr. Edwards came out of the study to join the company, just in time to hear Mr. Williams, who considered himself a friend of the revivals, say, “Well, but people on their knees braying like donkeys hardly constitutes prayer.”

  Sarah took a cup from Leah, then, with a delicate rise at one side of her mouth, took a sip. Leah, who could see that she was furious, was impressed. Sarah, who had a temper, could paste her beauty mark to her cheek and hold the posture of serenity under almost every public circumstance. Leah, who had to know when to steer clear, could always see the force of other feelings underneath. She knew for sure that some could not, but suspected that others could, too. Now she watched Sarah give another tiny flinch as Mr. Williams, who was definitely one of the unobservant, took the tongs from the sugar dish, used them to stir his tea, then put them back in the dish.

  At that moment, Mr. Edwards stepped into the parlor from the hall, but Sarah did not glance at her husband, whose entrance could have been a graceful way to redirect the conversation while Leah, who had her own skills at serviceable neutrality, saw to the sugar. Instead, gazing at Mr. Williams, Sarah said, “I am of course not qualified to judge such matters as you are, sir, but if you are wrong, to have compared a soul in an intimate state of contact with God with a dumb animal bawling out its lusts will perhaps come to be a source of regret.”

  Leah stepped between her mistress and the visitor to retrieve the dish and the sugar-caked tongs. Mr. Edwards, hoping to prevent a reply, called out, “Mr. Williams! What a pleasure to see you, sir.”

  Mr. Williams peered around Leah to murmur, “Quite, Madame.” Leah, moving slowly, spared Sarah the sight of him bowing over his cup before he turned to Mr. Edwards and pointed with his elbow toward the study. “Another masterwork in the making?” It was Mr. Edwards, after all, that he had come to see. The gentlemen withdrew.

  Leah put a log on the fire in a show of sympathy while Sarah seethed over her cup. When Mr. Williams emerged from the study an hour later, she was flawlessly polite, and he left smiling, but she was uneasy all evening. That night, while Mr. Edwards snored with most of the coverlet tucked under his long legs, she lay within the bed curtains wrestling with herself for submission, quietness of spirit, and the willingness to wait upon God.

  At the moment sleep finally came to Sarah, Leah was awake on her pallet with her hand on Saul’s thigh, thinking about whether or not she believed that her first child would complete her marriage, as her mother had taught. She had left a palmful of flour and a few walnuts as an offering under a red maple in the corner of the meadow lot and, now in her bed, prayed to God to keep her body and the baby from harm, but she had no way to return to her mother’s house, as she should, and she was scared. Soon she would tell Bathsheba, who would grind up herbs into a paste and promise to attend her labor, as surely Sarah would do, as well, but Leah felt tugged from inside, pulled beyond promises into a kind of
forced patience that felt both crudely familiar and against her nature. She wondered if anyone would make groaning cake for her.

  The next morning, Sarah slipped out of the curtains and raised her shift to squat with knees stiff with cold over the chamber pot. She would have preferred to dress and walk to the outhouse, but her body, dross that it was, would not wait. She covered the pot and pushed it back under the bed, then returned through the silk fringe of the curtains, letting in cold air, and slid beneath the coverlet to lie next to her husband, who was almost awake.

  It was good to let her hands drift over the curve of his hipbone beneath his long shirt, to draw close and pull her hands easily over his belly, a smooth, delicate pathway beneath the linen. Her touch was not insistent. Her husband, more awake now, held her near, bending his bare leg over a knee to stretch. Light was beginning to sift in through the edges of the curtains, and he was reaching across her to find, she thought, his flannel vest where it was tucked in beside the coverlet, when he arrived on top of her as if she were another place to sleep, and she felt that she was, that she could hold him. Desire was simple and predictable, both burden and gift. She lifted her hips beneath him. Her breasts were tender that morning and his weight was keen, like the cold coming in under the blankets and the squalls of the heifers wanting to be fed.

  They dressed within the scant warmth of the bed before rising to go into the parlor for morning prayers. Leah had already laid a fire, and the girls were still dressing or out tending the animals when Mr. Edwards pulled his chair a bit closer to Sarah’s (she caught the scent of cedar soap), and said, “I felt that you failed in some measure of prudence when you were speaking with Mr. Williams yesterday.”

  Sarah bit her lip, losing her hard-won calm. As she flinched from his criticism, she also felt the disposition to fight it. Not the criticism, which she knew to be justified even as she felt it like a slap, but how much it made her reel to be confronted with her imperfections by her husband. His good opinion meant too much to her. She shot a look at him before she lowered her head. He patted the back of her neck. She said, “I’m not a plow horse.”

  Now he was shocked. “Of course you’re not. Sarah . . .”

  She interrupted, “I will do better.” She wouldn’t look at him again, but reached up, took his hand from her neck, and clasped it in her lap as the children, slaves, and visiting ministers came into the drafty parlor.

  Mr. Reynolds, visiting from Enfield, led the morning prayers. Sarah sat in the midst of her children, unable to sort out what she was feeling, but very sure that she was longing to hear Mr. Reynolds say Father as he prayed. If she were going to fuss like a tired child, she wanted Father God to put her right. God, not her husband. She was neither accustomed to nor willing to be childlike with him.

  Jerusha’s chair was next to hers, and the sound of her daughter’s breath helped her control her own. Then she could hear nothing, not the prayer, not Jerusha’s breath or her own as all of her sins started hammering loudly inside her skull. Her knees hung slack against her skirt and her hands dropped from her lap as God laid aside his displeasure and smiled at her.

  When she could manage her limbs, she rose from her chair and went to her chamber to be alone with God. She was weeping, the presence of God so near that she was scarcely conscious of anything else. She lay on the coverlet with the bed curtains open wide, seemingly lifted above earth and hell, out of the reach of everything she knew, so that she could look on the enmity of men and devils with holy indifference. The same words came to her mind over and over. “My God, my all; my God, my all.”

  She thought of the ministers in the house, not just Mr. Edwards, but Mr. Reynolds and young Samuel Hopkins, who was lodging with them as a student. She thought of their worst habits: her husband’s condescension, Mr. Reynolds’s pompousness, and poor Hopkins looking covetously at her daughters. She saw all that, and still felt willing to undergo any labor if they would but come to the help of the Lord.

  Sarah felt more perfectly weaned of the world than ever before, but, stretched out on the bed with her shoes leaving smudges of dirt on the coverlet, she tested herself further. She let herself imagine the worst: that the hostility she felt from a few in the congregation would heighten into hatred and spread throughout the town. If they ever chose, the people of Northampton could strip her and her family of their home and livelihood and leave them disgraced and naked to the world. She imagined being driven from her house into the snow, chased from town with the utmost contempt and malice and left to perish in the cold. She could feel how the dogs would snarl at her heels and tear at her skirt, and how boys would throw rotten eggs and balls of ice packed around rocks at the back of her head as she fled. There on the bed fully dressed, she was shivering, but alone in the woods, she would have a burning, deadened feeling in her skin. Her hands and feet would stiffen and swell until she could not even manage to knock branches away from her face as she stumbled along. There would be a constant ache in the back of her throat and pain in her chest as she coughed. She could feel herself desperate, lost and shaking, simplified by snow to knowing only the need for protection, but, in her bed-bound trance, she was safer than she had ever been, full of compassion and in deep abasement of the soul, able to see herself in a life of hard ice without the least disturbance in her inexpressible happiness and peace, thinking only, “Amen, Lord Jesus!” as the instinctive language of her soul.

  She saw a small bug with a black body standing on splayed legs at the half-folded edge of the coverlet. She wasn’t sure if its back were shell or wings until it flew. Remaining in a sweet and lively exercise of yielding to God, Sarah got up, brought a bushel of potatoes and turnips down from the attic, scalded the meat from a hambone, and started a soup. She felt inspired but distracted. After she nearly cut off the tip of her finger, she called her daughter Mary over to finish the chopping. She didn’t tell her husband about the state that had gripped her body and dimmed the world. It was not his, but hers.

  Mr. Edwards was called away to preach. He left on Monday. By Wednesday, young Mr. Buell had come to try his voice in the Northampton pulpit. He was scant months out of Yale, but already his reputation as a preacher came ahead of him. Sarah noticed that their boarding scholar, Hopkins, who had been a classmate of Mr. Buell’s at Yale, was accompanying his private prayers in his chamber with sounds that were suspiciously suggestive of a fist (or head) banging against the wall. She thought Mr. Hopkins might be battling envy of Mr. Buell’s spiritual success, and made sure to seek him out in conversation and offer him extra helpings of the pudding when they dined.

  She was relieved to find in herself neither envy nor anxiety at Mr. Buell’s instant popularity amongst her husband’s congregation. The young divine had an open manner which Mr. Edwards could never match. He stepped closer to people as they approached him, looking into their eyes, ready to listen to their struggles. Sarah, who knew so many ministers, admired his discipline and found it easy—young as he was—to open herself to his instruction.

  As Mr. Buell preached in Mr. Edwards’s pulpit on Wednesday afternoon, his white horsehair wig fell about his collar and framed his rawboned face in a way that heightened the light in his eyes. Looking out over the congregation, Sarah saw Mrs. Clapp shaking, Mrs. Hutchinson rocking, and the oldest Bartlett boy in tears. She felt God returning to Northampton again, strong as in the fiercest days of earlier revival. These were her husband’s people: his criers, his singers, his unruly crowd calling to God as with one voice.

  After the sermon ended and the people went out, she felt drained of bodily strength. She couldn’t stir from her pew, but remained, slumped and talking excitedly about her raptures to anyone who would listen long after the meeting was done. Her children stayed with their mother, Jerusha and Esther tending the younger ones, praying, listening, and keeping a protective distance between Sarah and any who might look upon her agitation with critical eyes.

>   Leah, carrying baby Sukey wrapped in a beaver skin, had left the meeting house with Bathsheba in a snow squall, before the sermon was over. The oldest Edwards daughter, Sally, was sick in her bed. Leah had to tend the fire, put on water for tea, and lay out cold beef and pickled cabbage before the family and their guests arrived, famished from their spiritual exertions. It was best, after a sermon, to have the meal on the table with no visible effort to remind the company of the distractions of the carnal world.

  Bathsheba came with her along King Street instead of heading directly up Main toward Sheriff Pomeroy’s. She stopped in the hall of the parsonage to shake the snow off her shawl and warm up a moment before she hurried home to enact her own version of the miracle of the loaves and fishes.

  Leah listened for any stirrings upstairs before she motioned Bathsheba into the kitchen, lay the baby on her fur near the hearth, then took up the chopping knife and sliced a well-peppered sliver of cold roast, which she folded into a piece of bread and handed to Bathsheba. She cut a piece for herself and took a big bite. All meat, no bread.

  Bathsheba said, “Feeding the stranger?”

  Leah, who had not yet spoken of her circumstances, looked at her and swallowed.

  Bathsheba laughed, “Oh, now, don’t worry. It isn’t everyone who keeps such a sharp eye as I do on a happy wife.”

  Leah took another bite and started bringing plates to the table. “Will you help me when it’s my time?”

  Bathsheba swatted at her sleeve with her beef and bread. “Starting now, Leah. Keep those arms down. You want your whole womb up around the poor thing’s ears?”

  Leah made a face, but she drew a stool from a corner and climbed up to reach the rest of the plates in the sideboard, handing them down to Bathsheba. “He’s off to preach in another town, and she’s forgetting where her feet are every time she hears a hymn. Who do you think will be doing the work?”