Spider in a Tree Read online

  The men laughed, except Mr. Edwards, who addressed her. “Do you know your catechism? What must you do?”

  She didn’t understand the first part of the question, but thought he must be talking religion. The second part was obvious. “Obey. Work hard.”

  Mr. Edwards nodded, but seemed to be waiting for something else. She only knew what scripture she had heard listening at the back of Trinity Church of a Sunday, but thought to offer some of that which, as had been made clear when Phyllis elbowed her ribs, she was to say aloud with all the others. “Let the people say, ‘amen.’”

  Phyllis became a bit more stiff behind her. Captain Perkins put down his pie. “Perhaps you know, I’m an Anglican.” He spoke soothingly to Mr. Edwards. ”She hasn’t learned that a phrase from our prayer book might not be a proper thing to say to a Congregationalist clergyman like yourself.”

  Mr. Edwards nodded again, then spoke to the girl. “You must learn the catechism for Negroes. To the question I asked you, you should respond, ‘I must love God, and pray to him, and keep the Lord’s day. I must love all men and never quarrel nor be drunk nor be unchaste nor steal, nor tell a lie, nor be discontent with my condition.’”

  Eyes down, she said, “I will be happy to learn.”

  The previous Saturday, Captain Perkins, red-faced and cheery from Election Day celebrations, had given Phyllis a pig to take to the balloting for the black election held under a huge tree. She killed a black chicken she had fed all winter, too. The girl, curdling with fear about the future, had been allowed to go.

  “It’s a mixed thing,” Phyllis told her. “The town fathers make the black governor give punishments and do their dirty work. They laugh at us. But, you know, it is our day and our man. And it’s a better party than they have.”

  The two of them had helped urge men to line up behind Quashi, who had led a procession through the woods to a clearing after he won. He was so strong, people said that he could flip a bull to the ground by the ring in its nose. They had all drunk punch, eaten cake, and roasted the pork.

  Drums and fiddles had been brought out, small bells and a rattling squash that had reminded the girl of the shegureh her mother and aunts played at home. She had gasped at the sight of it, then started to weep, saying their names.

  “Hush now, child. Hush, do.” Phyllis had pulled her into a ring of women to dance. Stomping her feet as if she meant to crack the dirt, she had felt her fear and grief loosen enough to let her scream and laugh when masked figures wearing costumes of torn army uniforms and swathes of gold sea grass had come leaping out of the woods.

  Now Mr. Edwards said, “I’ll take her.”

  She took a step back from him, nearly losing her balance. Phyllis put up a hand to steady her, and, leaning forward, gave a low hum that buzzed in the girl’s ear.

  She was still numb as she walked behind Mr. Edwards and his cartful of purchases down Griffen to Thames Street and the harbor. They didn’t go to the Granary or the slave pen at Honeymoon Wharf, but she felt panicked as they boarded a small ship. Mr. Edwards looked at her standing rigid and silent, and said, “You go below and keep watch on my things.” He did not say “my other things.” Before he turned away, he added, “It’s not far to New Haven. This is not a long voyage.” Was he thinking of the slave ship? She could think of little else.

  She sat below on a crate of candles, sucking a piece of hard cheese that Phyllis had slipped her. Sooner or later, the new master would arrange for her to be fed, but from the bony look of him, there was no telling when that might be.

  Memories were slopping around inside her like stinking refuse from the necessary buckets in the hold of that demon slave ship. Captain Perkins had kept her up on the deck for much of the voyage, tied or under the sharp eye of the boatswain to be sure that she didn’t get through the netting to throw herself over the side. She had not tried to do so, but it had been clear that the captain thought she might. He had given her the name Venus, whipped her himself when she refused to eat and spoke to her often to teach her English words. With an eye to her value and his soul, he had kept her from further abuse, but she had not been spared long stretches in the hold chained in the fetid heat with many other ill and dying people who had been, like herself, considered cargo.

  She swallowed a bit of Phyllis’s cheese, then raised her feet to the wooden edge of the crate when she saw rats scurrying in the passage. She wrapped the rest of the cheese in a bit of cloth and slipped it back into the pocket Phyllis had made her to wear beneath her clothes. She kept it tied around her waist with a thin, soft, plaited rope. The captain might have objected, had he known. The girl had a broken shell and a paper of pins in her pocket, along with the rag Phyllis had given her in preparation for her monthlies, which had not yet come. Phyllis had said that it was a matter of decency that a young girl—a new slave so far from her mother—not leave her tutelage without at least a pocket and a rag of her own.

  The girl, who missed Phyllis already, could hear men singing a rude tavern catch about cats night-walking and yowling. She kept out of sight behind the stacks of barrels. It was dark around her, rocking and damp. Trying to drown out the drunkards, she worked silently on a song of her own about going to a river in the morning. She thought of her mother bending low to pound cassava roots in the yard. She remembered the wetness on her face as the gray river flung itself against great flat rocks in breaks of spray that hit the air with intricate, dissipating fierceness. She thought of the sound Phyllis had made in her ear at the moment of the sale. She took it as a kind of goodbye, much more than she had gotten when she had been stuffed in a sack and snatched from the yard of her mother’s house. It came back to her there in the hold of the ship, a low hum that seemed to rise from inside her, or else from far away.

  The next day, Mr. Edwards rode ahead of the hired cart carrying the girl and the rest of the goods he had picked up on his journey. The cart mule was slow, and the driver knit as he drove, making mittens and stockings to sell in towns he passed through. He had said nothing to the girl and only good day to Mr. Edwards, but would suddenly cry out, hawking his goods, whenever new people were in earshot. Mr. Edwards found this annoying.

  He brought his horse too near the clanking wheels of the cart so that he could look at the girl closely again. In New Haven, where they had spent the night, his elegant mother-in-law had looked her up and down, then pronounced her serviceable. Now, Mr. Edwards watched for the flash of a soul in her eyes, which were the color of oak gall. Some claimed that there was no such thing as a soul in an African slave.

  As the girl looked back at him, he felt some discomfort, almost as if some part of his agile mind were deprived of motion, despite the fact that he, the girl, the driver, and the animals were all jolting along the road. In the stoppered space within him, though, all solidity had ceased, and there was neither white nor black, neither blue nor brown, bright nor shaded, pellucid nor opaque; no noise or sound, neither heat nor cold, neither fluid nor wet nor dry, hard nor soft, nor figure, nor magnitude, nor proportion, nor body, nor spirit. It was a place of nothingness, for all that what he was doing was perfectly ordinary and nothingness was impossible in a world of necessary, eternal, infinite, and omnipresent being.

  She looked away, to the trees along the road. The horse was skittish about the cart, so he dropped his eyes and moved on ahead, but skilled at such concourse with people in his congregation, he was sure. A soul.

  He thought of the book of Job, chapter thirty-two, verse thirteen. He wanted to look it up when he got home, but believed that the point it raised was that God might justly do by a man as that man did by his own servant. If Mr. Edwards were to despise the right cause of his maidservant when she came to plead with him or stood before him to be judged, what then would he do when he came himself to stand before God and be judged? Mr. Edwards was God’s servant as the girl was his, and much more inferior to God than she was
to him.

  He hit a boggy patch of road and attended to the horse while she chose her footing, then stopped to watch the cart come safely through. He tried to remember her name. Was it Nancy? That seemed right, but he wasn’t certain. It had, he thought, been spoken, and it had also possibly been mentioned in the letter from his mother suggesting that he enquire in Newport after Captain Perkins. She had heard from a member of his father’s congregation who had recently traveled there that there would be a good house servant for sale, suitable for the country and nicely younger than her prospective mistress, fresh and ready to train to her liking.

  Mr. Edwards had contacted the Reverend Mr. Clap at the Congregational church in Newport. Mr. Clap had been amiable in his confirmation of the availability and suitability of the young slave, and had extended an invitation for the Northampton minister to stay with him should he travel to Newport, which Mr. Edwards had been happy to accept.

  They had enjoyed each other’s conversation on matters of theology the night before the purchase. Mr. Clap had described the tumult which had overtaken his church when the flock had become so stiff-necked and contentious as to split when he had refused to administer the Lord’s Supper to them because they had been unable or unwilling to testify to individual encounters with grace.

  Mr. Edwards, who, like his grandfather before him, did not require members of his own thriving congregation to make professions of their experiences of godliness, had been sympathetic. He had tapped his pipe against the table, and said, “Surely, Mr. Clap, you have enough trials here in a seaport full of heretic Quakers, Jews, and Arminians, without dissension in your flock.”

  Mr. Clap shook his head and passed the tobacco, murmuring with rueful composure, “I did manage to keep half the congregation.”

  The cart cleared the bog. As they rode on, Mr. Edwards tried to think about scripture that could bolster the application of a sermon he was to give in Boston, but he couldn’t keep his mind on his argument. Instead, he was overtaken with memories of other times in his life spent traveling in this part of the country, on a horse borrowed from his father in East Windsor or rattling in a dusty cart between Wethersfield and New Haven. Mostly, he thought of courting his wife.

  Sarah had been thirteen when she first caught his eye. Younger surely, than the slave now traveling behind him in the cart, but not by much. She had been seventeen and he twenty-three when they married. He had come to know her in New Haven when he had been an impassioned student of theology at Yale. Her father, the late Reverend Mr. James Pierpont, had been one of the ten ministers who had piled their books together on a table to found the college. Young Mr. Edwards, voracious reader that he was, had felt hidden pleasure whenever he opened a book and found Sarah’s father’s inscription. It was as if in turning the pages of the big old books, he had been bringing his fingers nearer to her engendering spirit, and so nearer to every part of her. He had gotten along well with her brother, too, who had been first in his class, based on sheer social status. Mr. Edwards had been the top scholar.

  He had been surrounded by other young men, some of them boisterous in drinking too much hard cider and pounding on each other’s doors late at night. He had worked in the buttery: tending to the meals of his classmates, bossing around his younger cousin, and avoiding the excruciating chatter at meals. His cousin had been so negligent in the task of drawing pots of cider that Mr. Edwards had wept with frustration in the cellar among the cider barrels more than once. He had resolved to enter more into conversation, but, as he was also determined not to gossip and to keep the talk as often as possible to the great, saving things of religion, he had little success. When the other students had organized a protest against their meager meals of bread and milk, Mr. Edwards, who never cared much what he ate, wrote his father to reassure him that he wasn’t taking part. He was very lonely.

  His solace had been losing himself in Latin with Augustine and Calvin, or loosening up in English with Caryl’s exposition with practical observations on the book of Job. He had studied logic, philosophy, and the natural sciences. He had read the Bible as the source of God’s words and laws, and it had submerged him in language that got into his eyes, beat down his neck like blood, and articulated muscles in his fingers to move his quill. He possessed the beauty of focused attention, which his teachers loved, but he felt alien to those less ardent about the things of religion.

  One morning he had been walking in an early mist that obscured the shapes of the trees. When he came to a meadow, he gasped as the mist opened before the approach of a very young woman whose face was starkly illuminated against the shrouded air. At first, mesmerized, he had noted nothing except for damp skin, eyebrows like moth wings, and that she looked away without seeing him, singing as she walked across the field, leading a horse. The buckskin snorted against the chill, and she lifted her hand to rub its chin. The outlines of their figures had been muffled, almost ghostly, but her face was as detailed and specific as the manuscript copy in a familiar hand of a passage he loved. He read her face as a sacred text, both before and after he recognized her as young Miss Pierpont. The horse, too, had been approaching the perfection of its creaturely nature in the way it walked behind and then beside her with quick steps muted by grass.

  As he stood at the edge of the woods, listening to her singing without being able to make out the words, she had seen him. She made a wry face and he stepped backwards into the trees, embarrassed to be caught gawking. She took a swig from the water skin she wore slung across her shoulder, then raised her hand to greet him. She clucked to her horse and strode toward him while he gathered himself to approach her as well.

  She called out, “Good morning, Mr. Edwards. Would you like an oatcake?”

  He silently revised the terms of a self-imposed fast, and said, “Yes, thank you, Miss Pierpont.”

  What he remembered wasn’t his surprise that she had known his name, or the oatcake she had taken from her saddlebag and broken in half to share with him, or the dryness that had filled his mouth and slowed his tongue after he had eaten it, since he himself had been without water and could in no way consider presuming to ask for a sip from her skin. What he remembered was listening, transfixed, from a distance, to the wordless sweetness of her voice.

  Now, four years wed, he knew things about her that he never would have thought to imagine: that she could be haughty; that she had strong preferences among other ministers; and that she kept her beauty mark in a silver box when it was not on her cheek. He loved her more than he did his own bones. Their little girls ate her oatcakes, drenched in milk, with a spoon. The thought of them made him shake the reins to hurry his horse. He was eager to be home.

  When he and the girl finally arrived in Hartford, Mr. Edwards arranged to have his things loaded onto a barge. In the course of transferring the goods, he looked over his receipt for the girl. He had paid the full eighty pounds. It was more than half a year’s wages, but a fine household slave was worth it. The receipt gave the girl’s age as fourteen and her name as Venus. Although both classical and common, it was heathen. This, he felt, would not do. In scripture, God had much regard for the names of persons, which might signify remarkable things concerning them. Mr. Edwards resolved to give the matter of naming his servant some attention.

  After the cart driver tipped his cap and went off to barter his socks and mittens for a cartful of goods for the return trip, Mr. Edwards glanced at the girl standing quietly behind him, then lifted the pillion he had retrieved from the cart and put it over the rump of his horse. He mounted, rode over to a raised pallet on the dock and said, “Get on.”

  He had to show her how, but, once instructed, she rode the rest of the trip behind him, her legs hanging modestly to one side of the horse as if she were his wife or one of his daughters. He could smell her: mostly sweat from the long journey, with hints of allspice and spermaceti from the ship’s hold, then a tang of pomade from his own
wig. He could tell that she had never been on a horse before, but she hung on.

  They stopped for the night in East Windsor, where Mr. Edwards bumped foreheads with his father leaning over the Bible in the study before dinner. Both of them had great red knots on their faces at the table, which slowed their tongues not at all, until his mother bade them stop talking to eat. The sisters gave messages for Sarah about the fit of the dresses they’d been making for the little girls, slipping in a few theological opinions of their own. The whole family traipsed out into the orchard after the meal, tripping over fallen apples and observing the fireflies until time for evening prayer. Usually, they would have read after supper, but father and son had headaches, and the pleasure of the visit was too much to be contained within the house. The slaves took care of the kitchen. Two of the sisters retired to the parlor so that Mr. Edwards could sleep in his childhood bed. The girl had a blanket in the attic.

  They travelled along the Connecticut River all the next day. As they rode down the slope to the ferry on the Hadley side very late in the afternoon, Mr. Edwards felt the girl lose her struggle for erectness and jostle against his back. He approved of her effort; she had not once complained of the tailbone of the horse, which he knew, himself, could be jutting and sharp, even when cushioned by a pillion. As she slumped, he was reminded of how young she was. He hadn’t spoken to her for hours, but knew that she had been watching the soft lines of the mountains in the distance, her whole body behind him turned that way more than she turned to the river or to the promise of wheat, corn and flax in the stretches of open fields, still boggy from spring floods.