Spider in a Tree Page 23

  Only Oliver Warner, who moved away soon after, confessed to using unclean and lascivious expressions. As he read his confession, his voice shook. He said that he did not remember using those expressions. He was confessing because of the two witness rule in Matthew eighteen, since two witnesses “so positively and constantly declare that I did utter those expressions.”

  As he spoke, he gazed at the floor, but one of those two witnesses, Bathsheba, who while walking down the street with Hannah Clark had been asked if her eyes were encircled with blue, sat very straight next to Leah with her hands clasped in her lap, watching him tremble before her.

  Chapter 16: August – December 1746

  Elisha lay flat on his belly on the platform of the watchtower at the end of Pleasant Street, near the pen for stray livestock, calling down the ladder to Simeon Root’s sister. “Come up,” he said, “it’s safer.”

  Martha Root looked up at him, eyes glinting in the dark, then raised her skirt and stepped onto the bottom rung. “Keep your voice down.”

  Elisha held the top of the ladder to steady it, then reached around her shoulders as she came to the top, so that as she clambered off the ladder onto her knees, he clasped her to him and rolled with her to the center of the platform, which had a roof but no sides. They might have been in danger of falling seven feet to the ground, but he had helped build the tower and knew its edges well. He was meant to be guarding the people of the town from attack by night from this quarter. Fort Massachusetts had been burned, its residents taken to Montreal. Joseph—gone again now to study in Suffield—had been to battle at Louisburg on Cape Breton as chaplain to the general. They were at war, and Elisha was resolved to protect his mother and the town.

  At the moment, though, he was opening Martha’s cape and his own great coat. They kissed, long and deep, held together by a rush of feeling. They might have been seen, but the night watch had already passed by, and there were two stray cows in the pen that would bawl if anyone came near. They were white-faced red heifers, and Martha knew they could be counted on to raise a fuss, since they were her excuse to be out in the night. Her brother Simeon had been careless with the gate. She had seen them in the town stock pen before dark and was hoping that Elisha might help her get them out without paying the fine for stray livestock. He had not come to her house for dinner and bundling for weeks, not since his mother had followed him there and stood in the road hollering for him to come home.

  Now, though, he was stroking her bodice and teasing her, saying, “You have so many bows on this gown, anyone would think you were Madame Pompadour.”

  She drew apart from him, dark hair falling in her face.

  He said, “Of course, you are the enemy. I should have known.”

  She didn’t care for that, but he had a laughing kind of smile on his face and she could see that he was taking the most exuberant pleasure in her. They were still holding hands, and she kept near him, away from the edge, as he stroked her gently, touching her face, running his hands beneath her shift. She pulled him to her, and soon they had no thought of protecting the town, which, despite everything, did not burn.

  It was very late when Elisha scaled the fence and unfastened the latch on the paddock while Martha plied the heifers with oats and salt, which she had brought to keep them quiet. He kissed her and climbed back up the ladder with agile nonchalance. Martha had a switch to drive the cows, but she walked all of the way home up Pleasant and onto King Street past the minister’s house with her arms around their necks, which were dusty, but so warm in the dark.

  Within a fortnight, two houses abandoned by people who had fled the outlying settlement of Southampton were attacked. A bed was torn to pieces. Cattle were killed. Only eight miles from Northampton.

  The government of Massachusetts made it known that the scalp of a Frenchman or an enemy Abenaki would be worth thirty-eight pounds. A living male prisoner was worth forty. The bounty for women and boys under twelve was twenty pounds for prisoners and nineteen for scalps.

  In his study on a September afternoon, Mr. Edwards was writing urgently about how to tell which affections were truly spiritual and gracious, arising from those influences and operations on the heart which were supernatural and divine. He explicitly rejected arrogance by stating that he had no signs that could enable saints to certainly discern who was very low in grace, or who had departed from God and fallen into a dead, carnal, and unchristian frame.

  He rubbed his hand over his face and took a sip of water from a white stone teacup to calm the painful spasms of his belly, which were always with him.

  He had been writing about Christ’s tears and moving through his Bible to find references to God’s feelings, to holy joy and brokenness of heart. The scriptures, he could see, did everywhere place religion very much in the affections, such as fear, hope, hatred, desire, gratitude, and zeal. Most of all, though, they represented true religion as being summarily comprehended in love, the chief of the affections and the foundation of all others.

  Mr. Edwards was calming his fears by lingering over scripture in order to make more plain the ways and will of the Lord, so far as the human mind could apprehend it. This was, of course, a labor he loved. He was responding to attacks on the awakenings as miasmas of emotional excess, and to the wildness he had seen in scorch marks on the New London wharf. He was wondering, too, if he could allude to his new ways of thinking about public profession as a requirement for joining the visible church. He wasn’t sure if this was the place to do it, for reasons of inner logic and coherence of his arguments of the book as a whole, as well as for pastoral reasons.

  In his way, he was responding to the war with his writing, as well. There were soldiers staying with them, stationed in the parsonage. Mr. Edwards had been keeping track of their meals, for reimbursement from the government in Boston. He had pumped Joseph Hawley and Seth Pomeroy for news on their return from the expedition to Louisburg. He had the same anxieties as everyone else, but he was also looking for signs of the coming salvation of the world. He believed that God wanted the British to defeat the French, but the English government was itself a problem, worldly and corrupt. Every skirmish or attack by the Abenaki was a sign of God’s wrath because the colonists had not done more to bring scripture to the heathens. He thanked God for missionaries like David Brainerd, and for the mission to the Mahicans at Stockbridge. The thought of young Brainerd, who was, no doubt, diligently laying up stores and firewood for a meager winter camp, made Mr. Edwards restless. He put down his cup and pen to go outside. Sarah had had to write to the church committee several times, but their parishioners had finally delivered two wagonloads of good birch, which Saul and Timothy had been stacking in the woodshed. Sarah told him that she thought the delay in delivering their wood was deliberate, that people had been punishing their family ever since the humiliation of so many of the town’s youth over the midwives’ books. He could not waste thought on activities as petty as that.

  He went through the gate in the pickets, put up by order of Colonel Stoddard and the militia, to fortify the house. Sarah had sent Saul to the sawmill to get pickets. They were nine and a half feet long and sharpened on the top, as she had heard was required. The whole town had been divided into garrisons, each with a large home that had been surrounded by palisades in case of a raid. The parsonage was an official shelter for their garrison, so, if they were attacked, most of those who lived along King Street would rush within the pickets. He had heard Sarah suggesting in the churchyard that families might keep an extra bucket of beans at the ready and near the door of each household, for who knew, if the people of King Street were forced to flee to the parsonage, how long they might have to stay.

  Sarah had been careful to make sure that the elm tree came within the pickets. Mr. Edwards had seen Jerusha climb to the very top of the elm to read and look out over the palisades. None of the family cared for the loss of light, or for
having their house filled with soldiers instead of preachers, but they had heard of one Mr. Phipps, up in Putney, who had been killed while hoeing corn alone in his field.

  Mr. Edwards started to move hunks of wood from the messy pile where the loads had been dumped to the half-finished stack. He had formed a difficult resolution and needed the physical work. He fitted the pieces of wood carefully together, tight enough to be stable, but with gaps for air to discourage rot. He had learned how to stack wood as a boy in East Windsor, right along with Hebrew and Greek, and now began to go at it with swift efficiency, thinking that it might be wise to start a new pile within the pickets, so that they would have enough fuel, should they have to withstand a siege. He thought that Sarah might already have a plan for the wood supply if they were to come under attack. He would ask her. He was eager to talk to her about his new decision, too. She read the mood of the town so much better than he did.

  He was reaching for another hunk of wood when he saw a small, pale spider drop out of the stack, then crouch on the end of a rough-hewn log. Strangely, it began to turn in a circle.

  Mr. Edwards stopped to watch, feeling the old itch to find meaning, motive, or mechanism in the spider’s actions, an impulse which was far stronger than his desire to get the wood stacked.

  The spider took up a pugnacious stance, jointed legs waving in air while the shorter legs on each side of the body rubbed together. Mr. Edwards was bending closer to examine its fangs when another spider suddenly leapt off the top of the stack and hung in midair, not far from his shoulder. As he turned to watch, it flipped upside down and made some kind of knot in its strand of web, then began to climb the web again, curled around the knot, carrying it higher, then dropping away from it to hang far below, completely still. It swayed a bit in the slight stirring of air, then bunched together again to make another knot.

  Mr. Edwards was thinking that the knot might be an egg sac when he looked up to see Sarah coming out of the house into the yard. She walked toward him, holding up a small earthenware pot. “I’m going to put salve on the lead ox. His hide is rubbing under the yoke.”

  Mr. Edwards rested his hand on the end of a log, reckless of spiders, and said, “Sarah, do you remember, when we were young, how I wrote to you about how soon lovers see all that is to be seen in each other?”

  She blushed like she was still thirteen. He could see that she was taking pleasure in being reminded of their long knowledge of each other, but she gave him a very solemn look and said, “What I’m seeing right now is that your wig could use a dressing with pomatum and a little time in the oven to tighten its curls. Perhaps it would help if you refrained from wearing it while chopping wood.”

  Sarah was the only person in the world to tease him to his face. He didn’t laugh, but he appreciated the spirit of it. Scraping a bit of bark with his thumbnail, he broke his news. “I can’t in good conscience continue to let people join the church who cannot make a profession of their experiences of godliness. Outward appearances are not enough.”

  Sarah, taken aback, fumbled for her pocket to stow the salve. In many New England churches, people gave public accounts, often highly repetitive and stylized, of their spiritual history before they joined as members. But no one had been asked to submit themselves to this requirement in the church in Northampton—or in most of Hampshire County, for that matter—in decades. “They now must make a profession? And what of your grandfather? Sixty years of his influence here, and all these years of following him yourself?” She was shocked. The people would take this very badly.

  Mr. Edwards glanced at the road and saw Martha Root driving the family’s cows and heifers home from grazing in the meadows. The Roots lived a little farther up King. He lowered his voice as she passed by. “I have no wish to disrespect Mr. Stoddard or to enter into the arrogance of those who claim to be able to discern by their own sense whether or not another is converted, but it would be better for one or two good Christians be turned away from the church than for it to be filled with hypocrites.”

  The wood beneath her fingers had a fresh smell. Her heart was pounding with worry. “So many in the congregation have become backsliders and returned to their sins. We are all jittery about the war. Is now the best time to introduce them to something new?”

  Mr. Edwards tried his skin against the point of a splinter. “I am their shepherd. I must act on their behalf as led by scripture and conscience.” He looked at her face and sought to reassure her. “I will try not to startle them, but will wait until the next person asks to join the church before I speak of this in public.”

  She sighed. “You have noticed, have you not, that not one person has asked to join the church since the trial about the midwives’ books?”

  He looked down to see another spider hanging off the corner of a log and launching itself straight at him, coming at his throat along a tendril that he hadn’t known had been attached to his wig. Mr. Edwards threw up his hand and batted the web aside. The spider dropped to the ground and escaped from sight.

  It was only a spider. He was not distracted from her question. “Of course, I’ve noticed. It has been more than two years.”

  “They are angry at you. At us. There will be trouble.”

  A little disturbed, he said to her, “I will wait until one of them comes to me, ready, and asks to join. I am very loathe to contradict my grandfather. But the mood of the people cannot dictate who becomes part of the visible church.”

  She flecked a stray strand of web from his wig. “They will be even more reluctant to listen than you are to speak.” She took his arm. “Come walk with me to the pasture. Give me time to reflect on this.”

  Before they turned away from their house, now also a fort, he paused to look for more spiders, but saw only the shine of new filaments threading over the wood he had stacked.

  October was mild. Standing in her family’s henhouse, Martha Root cracked an egg still warm from the hen. She tilted the yolk from one half of the shell to the other and collected the whites that dripped off in a wide-mouthed vial—already half-filled with water—which she held below. She dropped the yolk in the dirt and buried it with the shells by digging a hole in the dirt with her foot, then swirled the vial and watched the way the egg whites floated and curled, whispering and counting off with her fingers against the glass. “Farmer, weaver, merchant, miller, preacher, tinker, tanner, soldier.”

  Her sister had told her that this was a way to predict her future husband’s occupation, but she wasn’t sure how it worked. She was careful not to give the option of “none.” The twist of the egg white seemed to point to the finger for “miller,” or maybe it was “preacher,” which would disqualify the whole attempt for sheer unlikeliness, but neither of those choices could in any way be thought to point to Elisha.

  She was sick again as she stood (and then bent) there, but she buried the vomit next to the yolk and covered the spot with clean straw before she left the henhouse.

  On a cold day in December, Elisha had gone to the uplands to cut wood with several families of Pomeroys, who used more wood than was common in order to fuel their smithing. They wanted to chop as much as they could while limbs were bare, the snow was deep, and sleighs were easier to pull.

  Mrs. Pomeroy sent Bathsheba to tell Rebekah Hawley that the men had made a camp in the woods, the better to get to work early next morning, and, Bathsheba was sure, knock back plenty of rum. She hurried down Main Street, looking up at the clock in the steeple as she passed the church, then looking again at the sky. She wanted to make it to the Hawleys before dark, and found it easier to slide along on the icy crust on the side of the road than to try to fit her steps to the frozen ridges in the trampled snow in the road itself. She wished for snowshoes. Moving swiftly, she approached a figure standing on the little bridge over the freshet where Main turned into Bridge Street at the corner of Pudding Lane. It was a tall woman with d
ark hair under the hood of her cloak. It took Bathsheba a moment to recognize Martha Root.

  “It’s a cold day to be out,” Bathsheba observed as she stepped carefully onto the bridge, which was slick. She had known Martha since she was a child, so spoke with some freedom. “And nearly night at that.”

  Martha was a weaver, and her cloak was blue and thick. She shook snow off it, enough to make Bathsheba think that she must have been standing there for quite a long time, and said, “Oh, Bathsheba. Where are you going?”

  “I’ve got a message for Rebekah Hawley that might interest you. Elisha made camp with the Pomeroys cutting wood tonight and won’t be home for a day, perhaps two.” Bathsheba reached out to dislodge a patch of snow that had settled on the front of Martha’s cloak. As her hand glanced across Martha’s belly, the other woman took a quick step backwards and would have fallen if Bathsheba hadn’t caught her arm.

  Once she regained her balance, Martha brushed the snow off herself. “A crossroads is the worst place to linger,” she said, as if that explained her skittishness. “I was on my way to the Hawleys myself to see if Rebekah might let me have a cheese. I can give her the message, if you wish.

  Bathsheba nodded slowly. “That would be kind of you,” she said formally. “I’m going on to the Edwardses, since their Saul is out with the woodcutters, too.”

  Although Martha would be going home to King Street, she did not offer to take the messages, too. Bathsheba was as happy that she did not, because she welcomed the chance to spend some time with Saul and Leah. The women parted ways. Bathsheba turned back toward King Street, and Martha finally crossed the bridge and turned onto Pudding Lane. Her face was protected by her hood, which she had dyed with berries that past summer. She was warm with the resolution to speak to the mother, since she could get no satisfaction from conversation with the son.