Spider in a Tree Page 19

  They reached the well at the crossroads of Main, Pleasant and King, in front of the courthouse, which had been there for some years now, about as long as the spire had been up on the new meeting house just up the hill. Hopkins bent to try to get a drink of water, but his hands were shaking too much and he dropped the dipper. Joseph was unsettled in his feelings, but the dipper was muddy on the ground, so he reached into the well and raised his cupped hands to offer his friend a drink. Hopkins looked at him a moment before he bent to take it. Then he reached and drank again, using his own hands. They had steadied.

  Joseph said, “May God guide us.”

  Hopkins took his leave and headed off down King Street to attend to his duties at the Edwards’s house, while Joseph stayed to clean the dipper for the next person coming thirsty to the well. He stood for a moment, looking down King at boys from the brickyard hauling wheelbarrows of clay from the river, smelling the stench from the tanning yard that meant they were working the hides with dung, nodding up Main at the young Stoddard ladies coming out of Mr. Hunt’s hat shop. It was all ordinary business. No people were crying out for their souls from a private house, or, if they were—unlike in the late summer and fall of the year before, or even as, as he had heard his mother say, as late as this winter, when Mr. Buell was preaching and Sarah Edwards had been practically swooning in the road—it was not now loud enough to hear.

  He turned and walked purposefully back across the small bridge toward the ferry to Hadley, as if he suddenly were drawn by duty. He took off his hat and fanned his face, only half aware of where he was really going. It wasn’t far.

  Joseph tried to pray as he walked, but instead of scripture, his mind raised thoughts and feelings matted together like the feathers dipped in milk that he’d seen Sarah Edwards give a sick baby to suck on. He tried to smooth them into order, or, at least, draw sustenance.

  He was, he knew, consumed with desire to have done what Hopkins had, to have preached with such power as to fill the people with spirit like pipes fill a tavern with smoke. He wanted to have faced defenders of dry religion at a meeting house door. He thought he might have struck a blow, staffs or no, and he might have been struck himself, knocked to the ground, kicked and cursed or prayed over in an insulting way, with the worst of intentions. Joseph could imagine himself huddled on the ground, admonished for pride and blasphemy, and he could see the men raise their cudgels, but then stop them in midair and help him to his feet, as with bruised lips and broken teeth, he spoke the words that were needed to make them follow behind him with changed souls as he limped to the meeting house and pushed open the doors. Then, again, he admitted to himself, he might not be brave at all. He wished never to be persuaded by the forceful will of others to act against what he knew to be right, but he felt it was possible that he might have just slipped out of town in fear of the cudgels. He wished to know the quality of his own courage. He wanted, like Hopkins, to be tested.

  It was hard to know that people were doing battle about the things of religion so close by, while, in Northampton, once again, Joseph was noticing the intensity of religious feeling start to fade. He himself was pious as ever, but he wondered about Elisha, who had been so taken with crying out at young people’s meeting with his fellows such a short time ago. Now Joseph, sitting next to his brother at meeting, could feel his attention wandering. It did no more good than it ever had to elbow him in the ribs.

  Joseph reached the graveyard just past the Parsons’s place, laid out between the meeting house and the river (and the tavern near the ferry dock) so that the people of Northampton would feel the possibility of their own deaths and think of God every time they passed. Joseph couldn’t say that this truly seemed to do much to alter most people he knew, who passed by so often that the graves seemed like pails or fence posts, ordinary artifacts of lives full of feeding pigs and fetching scythes from inconvenient fields, nothing to slow the mule for, unless there were particular graves that drew the mind, or if the passersby in question felt vulnerable to spirits and the day were cutting too quickly toward dark.

  The sun was still hot, though, as Joseph, a habitual ambler who could uncoil in sudden impulses of speed, entered the graveyard. He felt the slight dip in the ground that marked part of the fence line of the old palisade that had forted in the whole town when the settlers first arrived. His head itched under his wig, but his stubbled scalp would burn should he be so rash as to take it off. A catbird made mad ribbons of the songs of other birds. Joseph, following the pious habit of inner probing, felt how jealous he was of Hopkins over the scholarly attentions of Mr. Edwards, and he felt himself both longing for those attentions and—he was in fear for his soul as he realized this—resenting them as well. He had never decided whether his father had died because he listened too much to Mr. Edwards or because he didn’t listen to him enough. Joseph knew that the question was unholy and unfair. Men didn’t control the fate of other men’s souls, or even that of their own; as everyone knew, this was a power that was sovereign to God. If God had visited Joseph’s father with something of grace, then the man would not have listened when Satan came whispering in his ear.

  Joseph came to his father’s grave, with its deathhead angel carved into rough pink stone, leaning a little away from the stone of Lydia, his father’s mother, whose body was laid between that of Joseph’s father and the body of his father’s father, Captain Joseph Hawley, Esquire. Joseph crouched, thinking of the ox that gored his grandfather, thinking of the stain in the parlor from his own father’s blood. Then he let his knees, sweltering in his stockings, dent the grass with their blunt, blind weight, so that, almost without volition, he had taken up a posture of prayer.

  Sweat was dribbling down his neck, so he lifted his wig to let a bit of air cool his head. He settled it back against his skull, then closed his eyes. His shoulders clenched, as they often did, beneath his coat, so that someone who loved him could have picked him out from the road by the tilt of them alone.

  What he heard inside himself above the churn of his jealousies and desires was the voice that had been promising momentous, terrible things since he first had the power to discern meaning. Mr. Edwards. He had tried to ignore it, but it had a pull like the beat of the sun, hot with truth and error, made even louder by family and familiarity.

  Joseph, in his meditation, was given, at last, a verse of scripture, Isaiah 60:9. “Surely the isles shall wait for me, and the ships of Tarshish first, to bring my sons from far.”

  Just the evening before, Mr. Edwards had leaned forward in his chair toward Joseph and Hopkins within the outer circle of listening daughters, and said, “That verse is one of many things that make it clear that the millennium will dawn in America. ’Tis signified that it shall begin in some very remote part of the world, that the rest of the world have no communication with but by navigation. It is exceedingly manifest that this chapter is a prophecy of the prosperity of the church, in its most glorious state on earth in the latter days, and I can’t think that anything else be here intended but America by ‘the isles far off.’”

  The idea of America, much less Northampton, as having the honor of communicating religion in its most glorious state to great Europe had been strange and compelling as Mr. Edwards made his case there before the fire (Joseph had not heard such things from his minister at any other time), but what was catching in Joseph’s blood in the hot graveyard was the phrase “to bring my sons from far.” Near to home as he was, he felt far. He felt toward Mr. Edwards such son-like feelings, things that he had felt for his father, and, at his best, also for God—so sinful to let the human, the dead, and the everlasting blur in this way, so difficult to make them hold their edges. He wanted a legacy from Mr. Edwards or his father (he knew better than to demand such things from God) and couldn’t bring himself to feel that it mattered much which. He opened his eyes and, staring at his father’s stone, felt a crackling flurry in his chest. He was ins
anely angry, just for long enough to think our father, as if starting a prayer. The wave of it knocked him out of his kneeling stance, so that he sat back full hard on the ground and saw some kind of beetle coming toward him across his father’s grave.

  It was large, with an abdomen so swollen that it could barely walk, but it kept struggling on. It tried to climb a blade of grass, but was too heavy, and bent it awkwardly with flailing, sticky limbs. It looked sticky all over. Its shell was striped copper and iridescent green, and it kept trying to flick it open, but then would fall over and have to struggle back to its feet to go on, clear inner wings slipped out from beneath the shell and dragging in the dirt.

  It stopped near Joseph’s left hand, close enough to make him uncomfortable, although he held still. It had big pinchers and seemed to see him. Watching it, Joseph felt on the verge of remembering something important and insistent, stoked by indefatigable insect energy. He wanted to be seeing God burning the bush, but knew that if this beetle was beyond nature, it was more likely to be of the devil. Sun of righteousness, he thought, sweating, keep me on your paths.

  The beetle sat up almost on his cuff, and began stroking a back leg across its shell as a dog might scratch for mange. It seemed to ride the rhythms of the blood pulsing in Joseph’s wrist. It rubbed its head with two more legs, and still had legs to hold its crouch as it bent forward, the light behind it hitting a tight horizontal joint of the wing shell and making it spark green.

  It had begun, terribly, to rub sticky whiteness off its belly, which had a dark red blotch on its high center, when Joseph was distracted by the sound of human voices reaching him softly from much closer than the road. Before he could make out the words, he heard a passionate undertone that made him think, for a moment, that he had stumbled across Northampton people overtaken by prayer, after all. They seemed to be moving toward him, though.

  Feeling pointlessly embarrassed to be discovered at his father’s grave, he dropped flat to the ground and saw the bug scuttle off through the thickets of grass. If anything, he felt more embarrassed to be lying in the grass than he had sitting in it, a sense of mortification that was a bit relieved when he recognized the voice of his brother Elisha saying, “Here, I brought this for you.”

  Joseph had nothing to fear from being discovered by Elisha, so he sat up, frankly brushing dirt from his coat. He didn’t see anyone, but heard a woman’s voice answering, or perhaps a girl. It could have been any of a number that Elisha had been idly courting that summer, Joseph thought, probably a Bartlett or maybe a Root. Her voice was soft, held to a murmur, but Joseph heard his brother say clearly, “Here, let me thread that for you.”

  Joseph stood up, thinking that the graveyard was a strange place for a girl to do her sewing, but the thought of his brother, who had just turned sixteen, leaning over anyone’s mending seemed like a sight to see. Before he could move to find them, though, he heard her laugh, and say, louder and in a state of some agitation, “Oh, I keep them half-laced to let me work in the fields. Thank you kindly for the bodkin, but I can manage my own stays, if you don’t mind, sir.”

  Joseph froze when he should have gone running. Elisha, who had lowered his voice, was speaking, but Joseph could no longer make out what was said. He knew that he had a duty to himself, his mother, and to God to catch the sinners and reprove them at once, but he didn’t think he could bear putting his brother through the consequences of his conduct. If David Brainerd had lost everything rather than face a public confession, how much more stubborn might Elisha be about renouncing a dalliance that, from the rills and hesitations in their receding voices, had brought nothing but a bit of a frolic in a graveyard. Why graves, Elisha? Joseph had to wonder. Why not the woods?

  He was standing there, boiling hot, unsanctified, letting his brother wander away having offered to use the blunt needle of a bodkin which he must have brought from the family store to thread a woman’s garment, when, once again, he saw the beetle, big enough to be visible from a distance, still backlit and catching sun, raised upright while a crow cawed in a tree above it, but, for as long as Joseph stood watching, did not swoop.

  Rebekah was waiting for him in the kitchen when he got home. Elisha, of course, was nowhere to be found. She stood up from the table when he walked in and handed him a slice of bread spread with some of her new white cheese. “I’m not asking you questions,” she said as he bit into the bread. “I suppose I can do the milking by myself. I did it most nights all those years you were gone to Yale College.”

  He sat down at the table, and said, “Mother, do you ever fear for our souls? Elisha’s and mine?”

  She pulled her spine a little straighter like the Stoddard she was, and said, “Joseph, the soul resides in the stomach, and fear is a great cause of indigestion. Ask me again when you’re done chewing if you really haven’t had enough of such talk today.”

  So he ate good bread and soft cheese, making plans with his vigorous mother for a trip to net eels. Sister the cat was yowling in the attic. When Elisha came home, not late enough to cause a scandal, he helped himself to more of the loaf than the two of them combined.

  Winter again. Nearly a year had gone by since Leah’s miscarriage. She was restless with the memory, made sharper by the return of the cold. She had spoken of it only with Saul and Bathsheba, but not much, and not for months. She was surprised at how keenly she felt the loss of her baby, whom she had known as a presence inside her, a tightness, a gurgle that might have been her own guts. She had had the certainty of danger, so many dangers, and still she had wanted this life, this one baby coming, to come further, to be with Saul and her. Eleven months later, her gut ached when she thought of it. The baby would have been five months old now, speaking sweet babble and raising its arms for her like any of the Edwards babies, if the birth had come at its time. She did not know what the Edwardses might have done, had she told them, but she thought that she might have been left to do her work and raise her child with Saul. What was one more mouth, soon to be useful, in a household so peopled with children and visiting divines? Who in this house would sell a soul that could be led to God?

  She prayed in secret, in the woods, whenever she could. She got down on her knees on the fallen, frozen leaves and prayed to God that her baby’s death be sanctified, that it become a holy thing in her instead of this nauseous weight of loss that seeped in and spread like the ice and rot melting into her skirt. She found little relief; giving up all desire for that was her hope.

  When the days came that snow stayed on the ground to pile up with each storm, she prayed inside while Saul carved. One night, she wrote a prayer bid on the back of a curled scrap of paper scavenged from Sally and Jerusha’s lacemaking:

  Saul & Leah Negro Desire the prayers of this Congregation that God sanktifie his Holy & aflicting hand To them in the Taking a way of thire unborn child by Death.

  She dropped it in the fire without reading it to Saul. She couldn’t call on the congregation to pray with her over a death she did not let them know. It did not matter whether or not they would. They could not.

  Her knee ached more in cold weather, so Bathsheba made her a poultice of basswood to bring the swelling down, muttering that she’d do better if she could bathe it in turpentine, but basswood was all she had. If Leah couldn’t stand the pain of kneeling, she would lie prostrate on the rough planks of the floor. Saul’s hip ached more than Leah’s knee, or, at least, by his bearing, she thought it must. He slept with snow packed in lint held against it at night. The snow, as it melted, drenched the bed, so that Leah would wake with the hem of her shift wet and her knee throbbing. One bad night, she slung the lint at his chest as he slept. He let out a frightened cry and threw the lint out of the loft before his eyes were even opened.

  Leah said, “It’s nothing. All is well.”

  He stared at her, then went back to sleep. She was full of regret in the morning when she found
the mess of lint hanging like an abandoned mouse’s nest on the bottom rung of the ladder to the loft.

  She took to keeping a bowl next to the pallet, so that she could move the lint there to drain when the melted snow did Saul no more good. Sometimes the room was so cold that, away from the warmth of their bodies, it froze again in its bowl. If Leah noticed, she’d pry it out, wrap it in a dry stocking, and put the bundle of cold against his hip to balance its hot choler; then she would draw up her knee to press against it, too.

  Restless, she would be visited by thoughts that were not the stuff of day. She did not wish to be with child again. She was wordless and practical about it, bringing a cupful of hog’s grease to the loft. Saul didn’t push her, but let her draw his fingers between her legs. He watched her face as intently as when they had first learned the nuances of each other’s responses with the bundling board between them. Now he limned her breasts with grease until they slipped and shone. She knelt across one thigh and bent to let her breasts fall around his yard as she held it tightly between them. He thrust and rested on the rustling bed, and she rubbed hard against his thigh. They were both subject to sudden moods of shyness, and sometimes had to stop abruptly and turn away from each other, estranged, but even at these moments, Leah would reach behind her to hold onto his leg, and Saul would touch his mouth to Leah’s neck and breathe there, letting the smell of her mix with his troubled humours like smoke from burnt camphor, which was said to heal.

  They had heard religious talk of sodomy and abominations—although in the past months Leah had noticed less religious talk of every kind in Northampton—but she felt stubborn in her wishes and correct in her attentions to her husband, which were as reverent as she could make them. Saul had shame and thwarted desires, but what could he love more than he loved her?