Spider in a Tree Read online

  Bathsheba set the dishes on the table, then put the food half eaten into her big pocket and shook out her shawl before she tied it around her shoulders and pulled it up over her head. “I figure that it’s been fifteen years since Sarah Edwards has gone this long without starting a new child herself. She’s probably in distraction from drying up.”

  “Shush,” said Leah. The stairs were creaking. It had to be the oldest daughter, up from her sick bed. Bathsheba gave Leah a hug, flicked a bit of beef fat away from the corner of her mouth, then unlatched the kitchen door and disappeared into the snow.

  Jerusha stayed with Sarah at the meeting house, but the other girls returned home and helped Leah serve tea to those who were flocking there in hopes of a private meeting. Esther, in her mother’s absence, was effective in engaging Mr. Buell in suitable conversation, offering him her father’s study if he wished time to reflect after his exertions.

  He bowed slightly as he accepted her offer. When she opened the door, however, they disturbed Samuel Hopkins, who was slumped in a straight chair in a corner as if too cowed to sit near the great man’s desk, reading and picking idly at a hole in his stocking, through which protruded a pale, hairy toe. He flushed quite scarlet as they entered, tripping on his empty shoes as he leapt to his feet, but Mr. Buell laughed and said, “Oh, sit down, Hopkins,” while Esther, with only the slightest smirk, graciously withdrew.

  When Sarah finally came back from meeting, they all prayed and sang again. Mr. Buell held forth in the parlor, but Sarah felt it her duty to see to the house before she stopped to listen. Finally, looking for her cloak, she stepped into the parlor and heard him say, “Oh, that we, who are the children of God, should be cold and lifeless in religion!”

  Sarah had paused just inside the door when her legs began to tremble, and she fell to the ground, knocked over by a gut sense of the ingratitude of the children of God. She felt formal and calm, oblivious to the others in the room, but her belly started jerking and her breath came in sharp pants. She felt protected, encompassed, and utterly known. She was making small noises. “Uh huh. Huh. Huh.”

  The grit in the floorboards was rough against her cheek. She opened her eyes and saw crystals like salt, soot from the fire, little scratches in the wood, and a single black hair, longer than her own, that she knew as her daughter Jerusha’s. The sight of it gave her a tiny twitch of her old desires, of a sense of propriety, but she lay there and let it go, willing to be the messiest soul in the colony if that was the will of God.

  Gradually, she became aware of the uncomfortable way her clothes were bunched beneath her ribcage. She thought of the seeds of everything inside her, including, at the core of her immaculate ovum, old Adam himself. She cleared her throat, coughed a little in the dust, then leaned her face against her palm, holding her forehead. A strand of her own hair threatened to scratch her eyeball, and she brushed it away so that it dragged the floor as she raised her head, picking up bits of dirt.

  There were people on the floor beside her, trying to lift her. Young Mr. Hopkins. Mrs. Clapp. She was returning to her body again, as if she hadn’t left it. God was with her as she brought her hands to the floor, let her weight rest on her knees, then pushed up to stand. Those who had come to her aid quickly settled her back into a chair.

  Sarah started talking. Her younger daughters came running to hear, standing clumped in the doorway, except, of course, for the infants in their obliviousness. Jerusha had her hand on the arm of her mother’s chair as Sarah spoke from the fullness of her heart. “God has saved me from hell. My happiness runs parallel to eternity. There is such peace and joy in giving up all to God, in an entire dependence on his mercy and grace.”

  Mr. Buell began to hum beneath her words, and then to read, almost chant, a hymn by Dr. Watts. Jerusha pressed closer to Sarah as she leaned forward to listen, and felt the rush of skirts as her mother leaped from her chair, drawn upwards.

  Mr. Buell kept reading hymns and another minister prayed while Sarah danced out the glories of the upper world on her parlor floor.

  Leah was close behind the little girls in the hallway with a pain in her belly. She couldn’t see her mistress’s feet in her satin slippers, which Sarah had put on that morning as if it were not winter, missed the half pliés and the elegant sliding capers, the pointing of the toes and the placement of the heel. She couldn’t tell if Sarah was rising onto the ball of her foot or rising into the air. Her shoulders were symmetrical, still and controlled as she sprang among the parlor chairs. People sang the hymns as Sarah sank into a half coupé and bounded again, sweating, red-faced, and exultant, giving honors to the company and to her partner, who was clearly God.

  Leah was one of the women who carried her mistress to her chamber when she collapsed again, her strength gone. She saw the heeled slippers; then, as they laid Sarah on the bed, Leah removed them carefully, thinking what a hard time Sarah would have had making her way to the barn in the snow wearing those. The Pomeroy ladies, Mrs. Hutchinson, Mrs. Clapp, and other women of the town, along with the eldest Edwards daughters, were all milling about the room, discussing whether to offer Sarah an infusion or a decoction in the way of herbal tea, except for elegant Mrs. Stoddard, who advocated Madeira, and Esther, who, with her mother indisposed, once again assumed the duties of hostess in the parlor. They seemed flustered and excited, but also genuinely kind, all of the small animosities that could accumulate between a minister’s wife and the congregants in a small town dissolved in their generosity and her need. As the sudden terrible pain struck her, Leah saw Mrs. Hutchinson move a strand of hair from Sarah’s face as gently as if she were her own child.

  Leah stumbled away, feeling a hard cramping and a wetness where her shift was tied between her legs, thinking, strangely, still of slippers: ladyslippers in the woods in early summer with their swollen, veiny pinkness, shoes buried under houses, beneath hearths and doorframes, sacrificed from the rough feet of people stubbing their toes and scrabbling through muck to keep the spirits from walking through openings in any habitation, blocked by their soles curling in the dirt.

  Leah knew her thoughts were scattered, but the pain was bad, and the house was overcrowded with the pious and the hungry. She was sure that she couldn’t cook or fetch anything. Saul was gone with the sleigh to the woodlot. She opened the back door and started down the path to the outhouse, but saw Mr. Buell ahead of her, his wig whiter than the snow.

  She cut out off the path into the deep snow, sinking past midcalf when she broke through the crust, and scrabbled her way to her dark cabin. There, she squatted over a pail, snow dripping from her stockings, while she passed clots of blood and tried to think of a name for the baby before everything was lost.

  When it was over, she was exhausted, and slept through the mid-day meal, but the chaos in the house was such that she wasn’t called to task. She was back there in time to mind the babies while the people went to meeting again to hear Mr. Buell.

  At the end of the day, Saul came to her with a weariness almost as deep as her own. He didn’t weep when she told him, but sat up nights until January was out, soaking and bending wood to make a new bucket. He had taken the old one deep into the woods, almost to the base of Mount Tom, and hung it, unemptied, in a tree.

  Mrs. Clapp ran from her house, hallooing at Mr. Edwards as he rode down King Street on his return from the preaching tour. He sighed, taking a deep breath of tannery air, when he saw her coming. He was eager to be home, and she was an exuberant gossip. She scared him, though, by clutching his stirrup and saying, “We’ve been frightened that we might lose your wife, with all of her leaping and swooning, before you finally got back.”

  He stared for a moment at Mrs. Clapp’s face, shaped as it was by concern and minor malice, and remembered the same face during the first awakening, covered with tears, looking at him and past him to God.

  She offered him a corked bottle. “S
yrup of mullein. Good for women’s troubles.”

  He accepted the bottle and thanked her without any questions, but took the rest of King Street at a run, prodding his tired horse, reckless of people and carts.

  Sarah, who kissed him on the chin and pinched him at the waist to make sure he hadn’t lost more weight, seemed fine. Mr. Buell had moved on, but she was still riding herd on a houseful of children and ministers. Mr. Edwards left her to it and stayed in his study until late that night, when even Leah, who seemed sluggish and sad, had gone to bed. He had noticed Saul hauling water to the kitchen, though that was usually Leah’s job. When the house was finally still, he persuaded Sarah to go out of it with him. She gave him a look to let him know that she was being indulgent, but put on an extra pair of stockings, borrowed his flannel vest, and walked with him as he carried a stool and a lantern across the snow-rutted yard.

  He leveled the stool carefully, holding it steady as he helped her step onto it. When her footing was solid, he set the lantern down on the hardened snow and tried to hoist her into the crotch of the elm. The stool wobbled, and Mr. Edwards stumbled back under his wife’s weight, but she grabbed the lowest branch and scrabbled up the slippery trunk with her skirts trailing and him heaving from below. She heard the back of the waistband rip as she swung into a seated position with both of her legs dangling over one side of the branch. It was slick with ice, but she inched farther out and held on as, leaving the lantern melting a hollow in the snow, he clambered up to join her.

  “Tell me what happened,” he said, hugging the trunk with one arm as he wrapped the other around her waist. “All of it.”

  Sarah, who had been talking with unstoppable fervor to everyone she encountered, suddenly felt shy. She stalled as if they were chatting at dinner instead of perched in the yard. “Did they feed you anything interesting while you were gone?”

  He kicked against the trunk, and their thick branch swayed. “Pickled lobster,” he said. “Pepper cake.”

  She reached past him to the trunk, steadying the branch, aware of both his impatience and the cold dampness soaking through her skirts, feeling chilled and foolish, but also very much at home. Then she began.

  She described her recent spiritual experiences, which it grieved him so much to have missed. She did not refrain from references to his ill will or to the bliss of her release from it. Speaking calmly, she changed nothing to please him. He so loved that in her. She said that God in his mercy had given her a willingness to die and also a willingness to live. One thing she offered as evidence of the depths of her new humility was that she would rejoice to follow behind the negro servants into heaven. He didn’t wince at that, but thought again of the look he had seen on Leah’s face as she banked the fire. Could it have been grief?

  For a moment, listening in the cold tree, he heard pridefulness twining in with Sarah’s ecstasy. The blunt shove of recognition pushed him up against his own failings. He held on to her tighter and let it pass, obscuring his questions about Leah’s feelings with the urgency of his wife’s and his own. Even as he—like a sleeper in church—gave way to human corruption enough to skew his response, the grace in the rest of Sarah’s story rang true.

  When she finished telling him everything, he let go of the trunk and turned to her. She reached for him, too, and they fell off the branch. He knocked over the stool, and Sarah landed so close to the lantern that, raising his face from the snow, he feared her skirts would burn.

  Chapter 13: July – December 1742

  One late afternoon in high summer, Joseph was annoyed to run into Samuel Hopkins not far from his mother’s house. What was the point of graduating from Yale if he was going to keep running into Hopkins on Pudding Lane? He pulled off his hat without waiting for his friend to go first, even though he felt that Hopkins’s degree of distinction did not require it.

  Hopkins, gawky and friendly as ever, responded in kind, adding a bow that, in Joseph’s view, risked affectation and the loss of his wig. Joseph was fleeing the house to walk off irritation with his mother—who seemed to talk of nothing but the virtues of her dairy cows and the failings of their neighbors—and was in an ungenerous mood. He wiped sweat from his neck with a handkerchief, then flicked it at Hopkins, who jumped. “You’ve got oatmeal on your cravat,” Joseph said. “I thought you were preaching on supply somewhere.”

  Hopkins brushed his thin hands over the front of his coat ineffectually, leaving the oatmeal gummed in place, then came closer to Joseph, oblivious to his irritation. “Mrs. Edwards sent me with these for your mother.” He held up a string bag half full of balls of chocolate wrapped in linen. That Hopkins was carrying evidence that he had been boarding with the Edwards family increased Joseph’s irritation. “Wait a moment while I give them to her, then I’ll walk with you and tell you where I’ve been.”

  Joseph reached out and knocked the damp oats from his old friend’s collar, then waved him inside. He waited in front of the house, although he wasn’t sure that he wanted to. He already knew exactly where Hopkins had been: West Suffield, where, last summer, Mr. Edwards had brought a houseful of people to shrieking just before—Joseph would never forget it—he crossed the river to preach “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Now the sermon was famous, and the people who had been baptized in raucous crowds last year were impatient with what they had started calling the Suffield church’s Old Light preacher, and so had split off and were looking to hire a New Light for their congregation. Joseph and Hopkins were both studying with Mr. Edwards (in fact, Joseph should have been inside reading Body of Divinitie by Bishop Usher instead of grinding a lump of oatmeal into the dirt with his shoe), but Hopkins had been licensed to preach in May. Mr. Edwards had urged him to consider applying for the position at West Suffield, so Hopkins had turned itinerant to take the measure of that congregation and let them get a look at him.

  When Hopkins came out of the house carrying a round of cheese in his string bag, Joseph, who had been hoping to pursue the West Suffield position himself, now felt forced to choose a destination or be exposed as an idler, so he jerked his head toward town, and the two of them fell in stride.

  Hopkins, kicking up dust as he shuffled along, launched into the story of the blessings that had been showered on his preaching in West Suffield. Joseph watched Hopkins’s face get redder as he spoke of how strengthened by spirit he had felt when he heard people calling for salvation in screams fierce enough to pierce the most sin-hardened soul. Hopkins had come near to fainting himself, but God had held him up before them and his words poured out like sweat in the steaming meeting house.

  Many were affected, but some, it emerged, were not pleased. He had preached again that evening at a private house, and had felt the Lord moving all night in his dreams, then had walked back to the meeting house at daybreak, ready to preach again. Joseph could picture Hopkins, who would have forgone breakfast, marching through town alone, jittery with excitement, praying as he went and swinging his long, skinny arms. As he passed, people tending their animals called out to him, praising God with high feeling, but as he climbed the hill to the meeting house, the houses were still. He saw men converging silently toward the meeting house. There were five of them, all of them larger and older than he was, and one, who had a neck like a bull, said to the others, “Shut up the meeting house door.”

  They swung it closed with a defiant thud, then lined up before it as Hopkins, feeling a strong sense of menace, continued to climb. He stopped a good ways away from them, suddenly weighted down with exhaustion, as the bull-necked one called out, “You will not preach here today.”Joseph suspected Hopkins of embellishment, although, in their time together at Yale, he had not been prone to it. The two of them came to the end of Pudding Lane and stopped at the middle of the Bridge Street bridge. Hopkins put his hand on the railing, as if to hold himself steady. He had clearly told the story before, more than once, but he was shaking as he
spoke, and Joseph, whose blood was up, was stripped free of doubt by the bewildered intensity in his friend’s eyes.

  He asked, “Did you fight them?”

  Hopkins shook his head. “It was the house of God. And they had thick staffs. I tried to pray, but they were unmoving. People, some hot-headed, gathered behind me, and some, too, with the men before the door. They held the meeting house for seven hours, while I went out of Suffield proper back to West Suffield, where I preached in a regenerate man’s outyard. Despite the gobbling turkeys and sudden flurries of distraction when everyone looked over their shoulders in case of attackers, the people who gathered there were much moved.”

  A yoke of oxen pulling a cart was approaching. They moved off the bridge in order to give it room to cross. Joseph had a strange mix of feelings, much like those that had swept him when he had heard that David Brainerd had been expelled from Yale for saying that his tutor had no more grace than the chair he was leaning on. Brainerd, it was true, had been overheard through a window in a private conversation, but, still, he had presumed to judge the heart of one who ranked above him, then had refused to stand up in the Hall before the whole student body for the humiliation of a public apology. Yet now Brainerd had other ministers, Hopkins and Mr. Edwards among them, pleading his case. Hopkins had nearly caused a brawl at a meeting house: could this be a work of God? Nobody knew better than Joseph that Satan could start whispering and unleashing his hounds in the midst of a revival—that was what had done in his poor father—but he also remembered how strongly Mr. Edwards warned that equivocating could damn a religious man’s soul.