Spider in a Tree Page 22

  The rudeness, to speak to women about their monthly courses in an insinuating, sniggering way, even though all Oliver Warner had managed to communicate was his own oafishness. Leah gazed at the base of Mount Tom and said, “Bathsheba, I’ve been meaning to ask. Have you ever heard anything about blue circles around a woman’s eyes when she’s bleeding?”

  Bathsheba put her hands on her hips. “No.”

  Leah took her friend’s arm. She didn’t ask again to leave things be, even though she thought that the next step would be dangerous for both of them. And even though she believed most of the men involved to be dolts, she was mindful of her own encounters with Satan’s temptations in regards to wantonness and concupiscence. Some part of her believed that insults of this nature, and far worse, were bound to come to any woman living as a slave. The taunting of English women who were not indentured changed that, but she could not parse exactly how. For love of Bathsheba, who felt besieged and pestered to the point of giving up her vocation of healing, Leah said, “I’ll speak with them.”

  Bathsheba, tucking the chicken and the sack of feathers under her arms, took her leave. When her friend was out of sight, Leah turned her back to Mount Tom, resisting a strong desire to climb it, for she had been gone from her work too long already. She had never been up the mountain, although she knew that Mr. Edwards and Sarah rode there almost every afternoon. She was usually much more drawn to the river than the heights. Saul had been to the top and told her of how steep the highest part of the path was, how full of small, loose stones, and how beautiful it was to see the prospect from the summit: to see the valleys round about and the great number of mountains heaving up one beyond another—and here, he had looked at her—some supposed to be sixty or seventy miles off. She knew that he dreamed of the mountains, of a cave, perhaps at first, then a small, plain house, enclosed in a fence like the houses of their separate childhoods. He dreamed of their own children tending chickens and chewing tamarind seeds in the yard; in a place like that, she would be willing, again, to risk becoming a mother. Saul spoke, too, of the company of others whose names had been crossed from account books or the rolls of church membership, or whose names had never appeared there; people who lived by stories and sometimes danced in British clothes made into something different by their wearers. Leah had once seen a woman in a man’s tri-cornered hat dipping a net in the river.

  This was not the day to go to the top of the mountain, which had been mapped, prayed over, and eaten upon by Mr. Edwards, visiting scholars, and ministers, the ground serving these formal of men as table, no one but themselves to clear it. As she looked at it, Leah wasn’t sensing God’s presence. She felt pulled too far into the affairs of men.

  Leah found Jerusha breaking ground for an early garden. She fetched another hoe, and they talked as they chopped at dirt still hard with frost. Jerusha was the object of deeply respectful attention from pious boys like David Brainerd. Samuel Hopkins had made her a gift of a Bible. Sally, the eldest, had not been the recipient of such gifts, and Jerusha sometimes forgot to be scrupulous in deferring to her older sister, but the loyalty between the Edwards girls was not subject to doubt.

  Jerusha brushed wisps of hair behind her ears and listened very seriously to Leah’s account of a midwife’s book being compared to the Bible. She had heard bits of gossip about the bad behavior of certain boys, and everyone knew that Timothy Root had trouble governing his tongue, but to speak profanely of the Bible was not something that the spiritually gifted daughter of a rigorous father and an inspired mother was inclined to overlook.

  Jerusha’s hoe hit a rock. “I’ll speak to mother. She’ll know what to do.”

  Mr. Edwards had not declared the morning of the hearing on the matter of the midwives’ books to be an official fast day, but as the women got ready to feed the church elders and witnesses who were coming to the house, he forswore breakfast. Sitting at his desk while the others ate, he studied Colossians 3:8. “Put away all filthy communication out of your mouth.”

  The scripture was clear enough. The young men involved were church members, most of them, come to religion through Mr. Edwards as part of the surprising work of God in Northampton. Through the early revival, and through waves of the second one, the great one, which now felt very far from Northampton, although it was still sweeping across the colonies. The degeneracy of these young men was a slap in the face. They had indulged in it together, in public, corrupting others in the process. He had been, perhaps, too trusting when accounting for conversions and letting young people join the church. He felt the importance of the revivals pulsing in him, sure as his own blood, but he had let false awakenings and hypocrisy take root in the congregation. He could not be sure how deep the trouble went.

  His quill was sharp, but he picked up his penknife, rolling the handle in his palm a few times before he started scraping at the hole in the surface of his desk. In testing himself and his own weakness, trying to find the fault which had allowed such widespread lust and talk of lust to pollute the young people of Northampton, what he found did not please him. It was the question of profession. Of speaking, out loud, in public, before the church, not of corruption but of personal experiences of grace.

  He had long followed his grandfather Stoddard’s policy of allowing people to join the church without having to make a public profession of faith. In East Windsor, though, his father required such professions, in detail. It might startle and alarm his people were he to require a profession in order to join the church. But it was the only solution he could see that might prevent such corruption as he had been told that so many young men under his care had wallowed in. He resolved to search out the writings of other ministers on this subject, and to pray about it.

  He would be the only minister among those sitting in judgment. Colonel John Stoddard was on the committee. His presence always bolstered Mr. Edwards with powerful backing and family love, and that pocket watch of his could come in handy for timing breaks in the deliberations as well. Captain Roger Clapp would be there, and as would Deacon Pomeroy, whose son was suspected of hiding a book in the chimney.

  He put down his penknife, closed the Bible, and muttered a prayer that none of the Northampton youth, unlike the Reverend Mr. James Davenport, had been reckless enough to contract gonorrhea. He hurried down the hall, seizing his last chance before the hearing to get out of the house. He heard Sarah and Saul in the parlor, arranging the best chairs for the committee. They had carried plain chairs upstairs for the women waiting to testify. Mr. Edwards banged his shin against one of the hard benches crammed in the hall, which had been fetched from the meeting house for the accused young men. “Blast,” he shouted, the pain in his leg heightening the anger he wanted to walk off. He had to be able to preside over the hearing in a judicious manner, without longing to kick the legs off the furniture. He didn’t feel judicious. He felt nauseous. Those young men had been coming to his church, signing on to his covenants, and, all the while, carrying on with the vilest coarseness, whole groups of them. It was disgusting.

  He went to the front door, but cut back toward the pasture rather than face the people already loitering on King Street, hoping for news. Ever since Mr. Edwards had read the list of suspects and witnesses to the brethren of the church, the town had been in an uproar, with parents first condemning then defending their wayward sons and compromised daughters by invoking the rule of the eighteenth of Matthew, which held that private offenses should be first addressed in private, not by names read from the pulpit before most every man in town.

  Mr. Edwards was clear that this case was widespread and well known enough to be considered public. He also felt very sure—as he always did—of his scriptural backing and of church law, but, still, as he tromped across his back lot, his anger faded, and he was sore at heart. The children of his first Northampton revival, which had reached so many and changed so much, had been committing gross sins in barns
like beasts. And there was something else that was bothering him, something he was not at all sure of how to classify. It had, perhaps, to do with the fact that he was the father of seven daughters.

  Yesterday, on his ride with Sarah, he had said, “Did I ever tell you of the moment of extraordinary grace my sister Hannah once had while she was walking in our father’s orchard?”

  She had shaken her head, slowing her horse to ride beside him. “Tell me now.”

  They had ridden along Hulbert’s Pond almost all the way to Hog’s Bladder. He had looked out at the marsh and the river. “She told me that she had been walking, working to offer herself to God. When she leaned against the back fence, she saw a huge Bible rising in the sky above the trees.”

  Sarah gasped loudly enough that it spooked her horse, but kept a firm hold on the reins. They both gave such acts of God, mind, and grace their gravest attention.

  Mr. Edwards had waited until the animal settled, then continued. “This was twenty years ago. She and my sisters were employing themselves by boning corsets to aid the household economy. When she looked up in the orchard, she said that the pages of the Bible were open, and she wanted to read it, but a corset stay lay across the pages, keeping her from the words.”

  He had looked at Sarah, thinking of her beautiful voice reading scripture, of all their daughters, and of his sisters, as well. If anything were to keep any of them from the words of the Bible, it would be a terrible thing.

  She had been silent for a moment, then asked, “How did Hannah interpret it?”

  He had shaken his head. “The world. The corset stay was her work, and she was letting too much of the world come between her and God.” That answer seemed right to him, but somehow, also, at this moment when bad words, bad images, and bad books had been spreading by young men to young women in ways that had made some of the women very unhappy, he felt that there might be something else to see there, too. It was not a question of virtue. It seemed to him that it might be a kind of blocking, a stay across a page, or some kind of dangerous lack.

  Sarah, eyes down, had patted the neck of her horse. “The world. That must be correct,” she said. She had scratched the horse’s long jaw; then she had looked at him and touched his face as well. “Glory to God.”

  Now Mr. Edwards gave frustrated praise with the clomp of his shoes on the grass, free for a moment from trying to negotiate the shallows of human society. He went into the barn, which his people had built for him during an illness a few years back. Exhorting himself to remember their kindness as well as their sins, he reached into a burlap bag nailed to a post and fed handfuls of last year’s acorns to the horses in their stalls. Then he opened the stalls and slapped the horses on their rumps, letting them out to graze for the first time since fall. He waved his hat to hie them into the pasture, then, feeling the nervous twinges in his belly that always came before he entered a group, hied himself back to the house.

  Sarah told their girls to go about their duties in the upper chambers, where the little ones spent the day underfoot of the group of women, all of whom were sewing while they exchanged family news, staying away from talk of the case under Sarah’s watchful eye.

  Bathsheba and Leah snapped a final withered heap of last year’s beans, sitting on trunks that Saul had dragged into the kitchen to replace the chairs. Bathsheba had brought a hambone from Mrs. Pomeroy to help with the provisions, so Leah was working on an enormous pot of soup to go with the bread. They were too tense to speak much, but as they reached for beans from the basket between them, each felt that she was working for herself and for the other, with enough beans to spare for everyone else who assumed that they would be fed.

  The committee called witnesses in for testimony one by one, starting with the women and preceding slowly down the list of accused.

  As the tithing men escorted English women down the stairs one by one, and finally, after the midday meal, brought Bathsheba in from the kitchen, the young men were very restless on their benches in the hall. They had been talking defiantly, not only in barns or behind them, but in taverns and around their own family’s fires, garnering both condemnation and support.

  They sat in the dark hall while the sun shone, a group of stiff-necked, unruly young men, waiting for hours with no acknowledgment except ugly looks from the tithing men, who mostly left them to their own devices, and a cold shoulder from the slave who had shown them to their seats so many hours ago. None of them had brought anything to eat, nor had they been offered food.

  It was while the first of the two town doctors were testifying that Timothy Root said to Oliver Warner, “Stop complaining about being thirsty and go in to ask leave of the committee for us to get some refreshment.”

  Oliver, who had a squinched face, blushed beet red, neck to scalp. “Why should I do what you say, Timothy Root?”

  Timothy’s cousin Simeon gave Oliver a shove with one of his boots, which were propped on the seat of the bench. “Because you are thirsty, haven’t we all heard?”

  Oliver fell to the floor and got up with his face even more red than before. “I shall say that you sent me. Do not think that I would not.”

  “Say what you please,” answered Timothy. “I won’t worship a wig.” It was loud enough to bring Sarah into the hall upstairs.

  Eben Pomeroy gasped, and said, “Respect is due to our elders.”

  Timothy, who had heard about the burning of finery in New London, said it again. “I won’t worship a wig. Wig!” he yelled. “A wig!”

  “I am going. I’ll ask them,” said Oliver. “Just be still.”

  He straightened the buckles on his good breeches and marched to the parlor door to knock. As soon as he was admitted, the young men heard a shout of disapproval go up from inside the room, much louder than the ruckus they had been making. Oliver, more scarlet than a judge’s robes, was summarily pushed back into the hall. He swallowed hard, and looked at his friends standing among the benches. “They were very much displeased.”

  Simeon jumped up and pounded toward him. “Displeased, were they?” He was speaking in what Colonel Stoddard and Captain Clapp would characterize in later testimony as a loud and earnest manner, very near the parlor door. “What do we here? We won’t stay here all day long.”

  Timothy slapped Oliver on the back, “Good fellow. Come, we’ll go away. Do you think I’ll be kept here for nothing? They are nothing but men molded up of a little dirt. I don’t care a turd or a fart for any of them.”

  Eben Pomeroy was appalled. “Timothy! The ladies!” They could, it was true, hear skirts rustling on the landing. Timothy said, “I need some air,” and marched out, not through the front door past the staircase, but out the back, through the kitchen. Simeon was close behind, dragging Oliver with him by his collar. Others followed, too, although Eben Pomeroy (thinking of his father, the deacon, sitting with the rest of the committee within the parlor) stayed put.

  Leah and Bathsheba waited out the unruly rush through the kitchen by chopping onions and stirring soup with their backs to the men, but left the kitchen door open to keep an eye on them as they charged around the Edwards back lot like spring colts. Simeon danced a wild jig in the grass. Timothy was still yelling, with half an eye toward Bathsheba beyond the kitchen door. He didn’t spare a glance for the upstairs room where a dozen women’s faces were pressed against the window.

  “I will go away, and if you were not devilish cowards, you would have gone some time ago. If they have any business with me, they may come to me; I ben’t obliged to wait any longer on their arses, as I have done.”

  He was heard by John Birge, going along in the street, who later testified, as did Joseph Lyman and his wife, who saw Timothy Root and Simeon Root come to the tavern among a company that called for a mug of flip, and drank it.

  After they had their flip, the young men some were calling boys returned to the Ed
wards back lot. Passing by on his way to the woods, Elisha Hawley saw them. Before they were caught, Oliver Warner had offered him a chance to read Aristotle’s Master-piece for the outrageous price of ten shillings, but Elisha, who had laughed in his face, would not have spent two pennies for that book. On the day of the trial, he watched them flinging themselves over each other’s huddled backs in a wild game of leap frog, but, up to new wickedness of his own, he never came forward to testify.

  Timothy Root’s father took to turning around in the meeting during hymns to stand with his back to the pulpit, because, he told Mr. Edwards, he considered it very wrong that the church had set aside the singing of psalms in favor of hymns by Isaac Watts, with the music firmly written out, taught by a singing master, not called and led. Mr. Root sometimes went so far as to walk out during a hymn.

  Mr. Edwards, gritting his teeth, let the rudeness slide. Although he found the congregation to be in very bad voice, he did not let them give up singing hymns.

  In June, Mr. Edwards called for a fast day when he learned that France, with troops so close to the north and allies among the Indians as near as Albany (or—terrible thought—even nearer), had joined in war against England.

  He gazed hard at the town’s young men as he preached. “Sin above all things weakens a people at war.”

  Oliver Warner, Timothy Root, and Simeon Root stood at the front of the meeting house to make public confession of their sins before the church. Timothy and Simeon, mumbling, admitted to “scandalously contemptuous behavior toward the authority of the church.” Timothy’s father made a noise that sounded suspiciously like a snort when his son resolved to behave himself “more humbly, meekly, and decently.” Simeon stared at the ceiling as he vowed to treat his betters “with due honor and respect.”