Spider in a Tree Page 20

  One night she brought him black currant jelly instead of grease. What they stained, she cleaned. What couldn’t be cleaned, she threw into the fire or picked into threads to use to make something new. Often as he held the plow, the palms of his hands remembered themselves, sticky with currants, cleaving to her hips.

  The snow was too thin on the ground for sleighs and the ice was too treacherous for horses, so the children walked to the ruin of the Lymans’ burnt house. Mr. Edwards, wearing his old great coat and a beaver hat that was shedding fur, was at the head of the group, with the procession of children coming silently behind him. He hated to bring the children to this place, which he could barely bring himself to look at, but even as he helped the people in the community grieve their great losses, he did not flinch from his terrible duty to the little ones. He did not notice how unusual he was in this regard, but others did.

  Joseph followed miserably at the back, trying not to think of the snowball fight he knew that Elisha, Oliver Warner, and the Root boys were having in the frozen meadows. Someone was sure to be hurt, and it was a foolish, raucous way to mourn. But he wanted the thuds and cries of hurling snow at his brother and his red-faced friends, so crude. So full of life. He bent to pick up a red mitten that one of the children had dropped.

  The fire that burned down the Lymans’ house had happened at night and so quickly that no one had time to run to the meeting house to ring for help before it was too late. It had started in the chimney and burned through the kitchen. Mrs. Lyman had grabbed the baby from the trundle and fled the house while her husband had smothered the fire in his middle daughter’s hair, then seized a shovel to beat back flames in the hall, but he had not been able to reach Anne and Hannah where they had succumbed to the smoke on the floor beside their bed.

  The house had been gone by morning, a pile of ash smoking in the sparse snow. Mrs. Lyman’s sister and her husband had taken in the family, wracked with loss.

  Now, as Mr. Edwards was gathering the other children of the town, Sarah sat with Mrs. Lyman in her sister’s parlor while the grieving mother pounded her fist into a piece of cake that someone had put in her lap. Sarah took the plate, murmuring, “The Lord their God shall save them.” It was what she had in answer to Mrs. Lyman’s unburned stupor, that and pulling her chair closer and waiting with an air of witness until Mrs. Lyman finally ripped off two buttons of the borrowed dress that was cutting so tightly into her waist (all her own clothes were lost—everything was) and said, “The hand of the Lord.”

  Sarah touched her then, wiped crumbs from her clenched fingers and placed a torn stocking, thread, and needle on the empty chair beside her, offering the consolations of useful occupation. That, and witness. Sarah was more than willing to sit with her as long as she possibly could.

  The two women pretended for some barren, endless time to sew together, then put the work aside as Mrs. Lyman’s surviving daughter came into the room, smelling of the poultice (rum, onion, and Indian meal) which Sarah had used to dress the little girl’s burns. Sarah and the mother went with her to the table and sat on either side of her to help her write a prayer bid for Mr. Edwards to read in God’s house on the Sabbath.

  “Mention your sisters,” said Mrs. Lyman, her voice oddly mild, as if she were reminding her daughter to share a boiled egg. The child rubbed her-heat blistered neck through the bandage, then carefully took up the posture of a scholar to write to thank God

  for his goodness to her when she was in so grat dangior of being burnt up in her fathers hous in that She was presarvd and held of the burn She met with thare and deziers prayers that the dath of her two Sisters and the murcy may be Sanctified unto her and her parants desier the Same.

  At the ruin, most of the children stood very still. Martha Root, an older girl slumping near a doorframe, kicked at the corner of it with her damp boot. Mr. Edwards, grieving in heart and gut, was saying what he had brought them there to hear. “If you live and die insensible of your misery, you will come to feel it in hell.”

  He went on with his warnings. The children who cried did so without moving. Joseph, flooded by their feelings, could barely identify his own. He was a little boy again, winded on a stump, his father newly dead, with Mr. Edwards murmuring about his own soul in his ear. He brought himself back to the present with a lungful of air cut with cold smoke. The ragged half circle of children were sniffling before their minister and the burned house, but not one of them dared to cough.

  Mr. Edwards was still speaking, but Joseph, sweating in the cold, could not listen. This had been a conflagration of a house and of children, not of the spirit. Standing there at these new ruins, he found himself unable to wish that such a thing might come of this. He had been taught that all children were, by nature, heirs of hell, exposed every moment to destruction, unless they were in Christ. In theological discussions with his scholars, Mr. Edwards allowed that children could be saved if their parents were subjects of grace, but he had not brought them to the ashes of the Lyman house to speak of that. Joseph noticed Lucy Edwards standing too near the heap of ashes with a still face and a twitching mouth. Her father loved her, Joseph was sure of it. He loved all of these children and was fighting with everything he had for them. His voice was trembling.

  Joseph toyed with the mitten, twisting and pulling wet wool. Next to Lucy, a Bartlett boy with one mitten was crying hard. Watching the boy’s nose start to drip, Joseph saw that he himself might not be cut out to be a minister. Or maybe just not his cousin’s kind of minister. He wasn’t sure, though, what other kinds there might be, although he had heard that Harvard produced some very different men.

  He did know that he did not have the stomach to put a child through facing the remains of a fire where other little ones had died, not even to save a soul. Wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, he decided that it was time for his studies with his cousin to end.

  He edged over so that he was between Lucy and the ruin. Even though Mr. Edwards was still talking, Joseph squatted down to the Bartlett boy, who reminded him of Elisha. He held out his handkerchief, and, feeling like his own mother, whispered, gently, “I’ve got your mitten.”

  Chapter 14: March 1743, New London

  One day in early March, Rebekah Hawley and her son Elisha traveled by wagon to New London in pursuit of trade. Rebekah had heard that a large shipment of indigo had come in from the south, and she wanted to do business with a merchant whose home on the waterfront gave him a first look at everything that came into New London. She was fond of this merchant, who had known her late husband, so she had chosen to combine some sociable trading with keeping an eye on Elisha, whom she feared was too distractible to be trusted alone in a seaport full of sailors and strangers.

  Besides, Rebekah and her youngest enjoyed each other’s company, perhaps even more since Joseph had left Northampton to study theology in Cambridge. She had to admit to herself that the chance to talk with him alone was part of why she preferred to go overland rather than by river or sea. They spent hours of the slow trip with their empty wagon talking about the gaits, markings, and humours of their small herd of dairy cattle, arguing about which calves most resembled their mothers, and whether they might sell more cheese if they planted a field of sweet timothy and grazed them only on that to flavor the milk.

  Elisha found the idea fussy and impractical. “Why not feed them roses? Why not rebuild the chimney with gold bricks, while we’re about it?”

  Rebekah, who knew she would plant what she pleased, had clucked the oxen and said only her son’s name, enjoying his firm opinions. She suffered him to call her “Rosy” and “Rosemilk” for the rest of the trip.

  They were delayed in their travels by the spring snow, which swirled around the ankles of the oxen and caked the wagon wheels. They spent the Sabbath crowded on the back benches of a freezing little meeting house, cheek and jowl with what seemed to be a population of onion
eaters. It was already Monday evening as they approached New London. Elisha, who had a scarf Rebekah had made him wrapped high around his cheeks, watched his mother’s face, bare under the hood of her cloak as she drove. Flecks of snow caught in the dark hollows under her eyes, and in the wattles just starting to crease the sides of her cheeks. She was a handsome woman for all that, and he was just unwinding his scarf to offer it to her when she pointed through the blowing, fitful snow to a denser place of white, and said, “Is that smoke?”

  Elisha wasn’t sure, but as they drew closer, they could make out puffs of gray and black within the white column, and soon began to smell burning over the tang in the air from the sea.

  The town, as they entered, seemed empty of life. They had planned to drive straight to the wharf, but the usually placid oxen got balky in the smoke and noise rising from that direction. Rebekah managed to find a boy who agreed to tend the animals and watch the wagons for a shilling. He directed them into a stable where he was employed.

  Elisha jumped from the wagon and leaned against the stable door, looking out at the hazy, empty street. “What’s happening here?”

  The boy fidgeted with the buttons of his checked waistcoat. “Mr. Davenport and them. My master said he’d whip me if I went anywhere near them. Their fire burned all Sabbath and through the night.”

  Rebekah and Elisha looked at each other. Things had been quiet lately in Northampton, but they were not frightened by the effusions of the Holy Spirit. Elisha took his mother’s arm and said, “Steady, Rosy.” Then they set off to do their business by the wharf.

  “You should stay here,” Elisha said as they passed a tavern. “Just in case there are ruffians or any sort of excesses.” The outcry was increasing, and now the streets were crowded with people headed toward the docks. They saw a woman running with her arms full of what looked like fine crewelwork bed hangings, and a group of young men with their cropped heads bare, waving wigs in their fists. Others were trudging grimly toward the flame, which could now be seen flickering in the street. Some carried staffs over their shoulders like clubs, as if prepared to defend their town and its peace from all comers. Rebekah, beginning to feel rattled, held onto the sleeve of her son’s surtout. She didn’t speak as they walked in the midst of the thickening crowd.

  When they reached the waterfront, they were stopped short by the density of townspeople who were refusing to budge as strangers and neighbors attempted to jostle past them with arms full of clothes. There were something approaching a hundred people near the fire, singing single lines from hymns over and over and throwing velvet capes, fine shirts, and petticoats into the blaze.

  “Indigo,” said Rebekah as a pile of gowns smoldered over the thick timbers that must have been hauled from a prime wood lot miles away from the coast. It took a few moments, but she soon recognized her husband’s old friend, the merchant, face smudged with ash, casting bolts of raw cloth on the fire, which, she realized, had been set directly in front of his house on the wharf. They would do no business in New London that day.

  Beside her, a young woman said, “I could do with a new dress. Yesterday, it was books.”

  Rebekah turned to look at the speaker, who raised her eyebrows and pushed back her cap with a dramatic gesture of her arm, narrowly missing a child’s head with her elbow. “We came out of Mr. Adams’s sermon at the meeting house, saw smoke, heard this great noise, and came running, not knowing if the town were on fire or if the papist pirates had come marauding into the harbor, ready to kill us as we prayed.” She gave a snort. “Instead, we got here to find Mr. Davenport and those Shepherd’s Tent people.”

  She pointed through the smoke and snow to the disheveled young man with rather plush breeches and clerical bands, seated in a chair that someone must have brought into the street for him, head back and howling, “The hand of the Lord is upon me! The hand of the Lord is upon me!” as the crowd around him sang, too, dancing and feeding clothes to the flames.

  Rebekah, transfixed by the screams of Mr. Davenport, barely noted that she had lost hold of her son. The woman beside her edged closer, full of the story, seeming to want to tell it rather than be too much a part of what was happening. She kept her plain cloak clutched tightly over her collar and whispered to Rebekah, “I left my best hood safe at home.”

  Rebekah was staring at the great light of the fire, her nostrils full of the stink of burning wool, watching as better goods than she could get for the shelves of her store were burned by their owners under the sing-song chant of “the hand of the Lord is upon me,” which ebbed and peaked as more people hugging garments approached the flames. The woman beside her was murmuring on about Mr. Davenport, how she had gone to see him two summers ago when he had preached through a thundershower until two in the morning under an oak tree near the old meeting house. He had preached for days out on the rocks and under trees to great crowds of people who had haying to do.

  She said, “I myself was much affected. I had felt stirrings in my heart until Mr. Davenport was so severe in condemning our own good minister that I went back inside the meeting house to hear him preach instead.”

  A stately lady in visible distress threw a pearl necklace into the fire. Boys who looked like brothers were burning their nightgowns, setting them alight but not quite letting go, until a young man with an authoritative look took hold of their wrists and shook the gowns loose, the white stuff of them fluttering and caught on the edge of the fire, but the boys safe from setting their stocking on fire while still on their legs.

  “Books, yesterday,” the young woman said again, her face red, snowflakes melting in her hair. Rebekah was relieved to see Elisha, not disappeared in the crowd but hovering on the other side of the young woman to listen. The crowd was getting even thicker, pressing in behind them, pushing them closer to the flames. “They burned the work of great divines. Mr. Henry, Mr. Sibbes, Increase Mather, Benjamin Colman.” Rebekah was startled to hear the name of Mr. Edwards’s publisher, a staunch friend of the revival. Her informant was still talking. “Mr. Chauncy’s pamphlets against the revival, of course. People were rushing down here with great stacks of books by our own pastor, who has tended our souls with such care. All into the fire, while people sang Hallelujahs as if they were hard at prayer.”

  Now Mr. Davenport was struggling to stand. Young men stepped forward to help him upright, and he rested his hands on the back of his chair, seeming not to care about the heat or his unsteadiness near the flame. The seminarians from Shepherd’s Tent were stomping around the fire—coatless, most of them, without wigs and some without waistcoats—faint with heat and hunger, swallowed up in God—or something else.

  Rebekah, close enough now to get heat from the fire, could feel their conviction and the possibility that the whole world was consumed with change. She stopped listening to the woman beside her, who was talking about all the radical strangers pouring into their town, the split in her church, trials and arrests. Rebekah was watching the faces of the rampaging worshippers, young, most of them, as they burned the things they loved too much. Mr. Davenport had left off chanting to shout, “Root out Heresy! Pull down Idolatry!”

  A slave woman threw her head cloth onto the fire, then a well-turned out young man ripped the velvet collar from his neck and tossed it into the flames.

  Rebekah was too warm in her thick scarlet cloak. She was not young, and not usually an excitable woman, but strong-willed and stubborn, a divine’s daughter and the relict of Mr. Hawley, whom she remembered with clear-eyed love as a soul too troubled by Satan and God. Rebekah had done a rare thing in that she never remarried, but had raised two sons to pray and prosper, equipped with good posture—although she had noticed that Elisha was starting to slouch and spit into the hearth when he thought she wouldn’t notice—and fed with plenty of her good cheese.

  But now she was hot, even as the night grew darker. It stopped snowing, and she unfastene
d the fine lace that tied her cape at the throat, tempted by the flames. The burners, divested of every piece of clothing that had more than one color, were praying together as Mr. Davenport called out for a full discovery of the Mind. The divine Mind. God. Rebekah wanted this, too, wanted to be known in the place of every knowledge, wanted to loose the strings that held her so hard to the ledger book, wanted to feel scripture sew through her like needles of light and bind her to the fires of the Lord. She was a visiting merchant with nothing to buy on such a disrupted, violent night, but she was also a Christian with a soul to ignite. She looked up at the sky and saw wells of indigo where the clouds were beginning to clear, and hot crackling stars too far away to drop into cinders, but burning, she was sure. Smoke crossed them as it blew hard out to sea.

  When she looked down, still holding her loosened cloak at her neck, she gasped at what she saw. Mr. Davenport had dropped back into his chair and was struggling out of his plush pair of breeches, already unbuckled at the knee as he pulled them off over his stockings and shoes. He was covered by his long, crumpled shirt as he wadded his breeches into a clumsy ball and hurled them into the mound of burning clothes, shouting, “Go you with the rest.”

  The woman who had been talking to Rebekah gave an outraged scream and darted forward. She thrust her hands into the fire, dragged out the breeches, already burning, and threw them at the preacher’s feet, shouting, “Put these on, sir. You put these on. We will not have nakedness in our streets.”