Spider in a Tree Page 27
She slid her tongue over her lips; then, trying again, managed a whole sentence. “I don’t desire to live longer for the sake of any other good but living to God and doing what might be for his glory.”
It was so exactly what he would wish her to say. Her mouth fell slack after the effort, which, he could see, had exhausted her. Beside him, Esther started to cry. Mr. Edwards felt overcome, unable to reach for either daughter. Often when he prayed with the ill, they could do little more than grunt or complain. He was not so perfect as his daughter in turning everything over to God’s will as he watched her chew her dry lips with the late afternoon light making patterns on her face. He took her hand. Esther made a breeze for them both.
Sarah saw Jerusha wince against the light. She made her way to the window, letting her hands brush the shoulders of her other children as she went. She did not, for a moment, close the shutters, but instead shut her own eyes. She found the light still there, coming through her lids as red, with threads and blots floating through it, or as a flash then a hive of brightness, red-gray ponds and deeper marshes, something different every time she opened and closed her eyes. When she kept both eyes open and looked out over the yard, she saw pickets and the highest limbs of the elm bare against a strip of cloud drenched with light.
Deeper in the room with his back to his wife, Mr. Edwards watched her shadow shelter Jerusha, who was straining to breathe again. Then he caught the smell of burning cloth.
He lunged for the warming pan. Esther, beginning to cough, fanned smoke away with great swoops of her arms. The rest of his children jumped to their feet, all talking at once. Sally backed toward the door with the wailing baby. Sarah called out from the window. “Mind the coals!”
He shook the warming pan free of the blackened bedding. The handle was still cool enough to touch.
Esther dropped her fan and took the smoking pan from him. “The bed’s not on fire.”
Now, Sarah was beside them. She pushed aside the scorched quilt and said, “She’s unharmed. No burns.”
He heard her tell Esther to take the pan to the hearth. Sarah said something to him, too, a question about butter for his hands, but he did not answer. All he could do was stare at Jerusha as she drew a harsh breath and otherwise did not stir.
It was only five days from the onset of the fever until she was dead.
The family’s grief was structured by submission to God, but trying to contain it was like trying to fence in smoke. On Saturday, Sarah left the family prayers with Timothy, who had fallen into ragged sobs that sounded like Jerusha’s struggles with breath. Hearing that from him was awful. She took him outside, and they sat, shivering, on overturned buckets near the henhouse until he could control himself. Finally, he spoke in a whisper, gasping after every sentence. “I’m scared to pray. What if I do it wrong? I’m not as good as Jerusha. What if I die?”
Sarah drew him close to her, wrapping them both in her cloak. He threw his arms around her waist and huddled against her. She thought that by leaving the house she risked bringing them both closer to the beasts, but she had to tend to Timothy, whose face contorted and strained as he tried to stop weeping. A flock of crows set down to peck and hunt like chickens in the icy yard.
Sarah couldn’t promise Timothy that he was saved. She rubbed his back and held him, crying herself. They rocked together. She did not question God, but, for a few moments on a bucket in the cold with her oldest boy, she howled.
Saul came up behind Leah as she heated the irons to press Sarah’s mourning dress and whispered, “Mr. Edwards was crying in the barn.”
She spoke without turning around. “He’s heartbroken.”
Saul stayed close. “When I walked in, he was oiling the scythes, with his eyes red and great streaks of bear grease on his breeches.”
Leah thought of Mr. Edwards in the parlor that morning, leading the prayer after Timothy and Sarah had left. His voice had been steady while his hands trembled.
She leaned back against Saul, grateful that she had him with her. “I’ll read you the story tonight about Jonah and the whale.”
The story would be for Saul and for her. Who didn’t like a story about a man who could survive being thrown off a ship in a storm and swallowed by a great, hollow beast? In some ways, this story was their lives, Saul’s and hers. She could tell it in a voice that made their loft shiver, planks groaning beneath them like storm-hurt waves or like the combs of baleen in a whale’s mouth. In her version, Leah and Saul swam in swallowed water, snatching tiny creatures with shells or gills that the whale had sucked in for its own. They made a dwelling place together where no one could actually dwell. Still, they did, or that was the way Leah told it, backed up by the Bible and, just now, by the fact that Saul’s hand was pressing the muscles in her shoulders, loosening pain.
This night, though, she would not tell the story, but read it. She would read for Jerusha, who had been one of her charges and also one of her teachers. Leah had loved her and was mourning her in the held-back way in which knowledge is love—but not only love—when one person studies and serves another without being much studied but is still (somewhat) known in return.
“That will be good,” said Saul, into her hair.
Once he was gone, Leah put the cold iron back into its holder in the fire and warmed her hands on the skirt.
Before he left, though, he made her sore chest ache with a stifled laugh as he kissed her neck and murmured, “It’s a sign of divine grace that he found where the bear grease was.”
Joseph folded a letter for Elisha, sealed it with wax, and brought it to the hall, where a sergeant was pacing impatiently, anxious to begin the dangerous journey back to the fort as early in the day as he could. Joseph thanked the man, listened to him march out the door, then went to the kitchen in search of Rebekah and breakfast.
She gave him porridge with cream. As she dished it up, he said, “I’ve just written Elisha that Jerusha Edwards is dead.”
She clanged the ladle against the side of the pot, which rang like a bell. “If it’s true what they say about consumptives being vampires, perhaps David Brainerd is rising at night to drink the blood of that family one by one.” She set the bowl on the table in front of him and handed him a spoon.
“Mother.” He was shocked.
“Eat.” She pointed sharply at his mouth.
He obeyed.
The porridge was delicious. As he worked his way to the bottom of the bowl, he considered that he had never before seen how much fury his mother had at Mr. Edwards and his family. As he swallowed, he felt the weight in his gut of long-buried fury of his own.
Mr. Edwards dug through his records to find the sermon he had preached after a youth named Billy Sheldon had died suddenly seven years ago. That had been the winter when Sarah was in ecstasy and the young people were on fire. He took comfort in touching the old sermons, sewn neatly into booklets. It was the first Sabbath after his daughter’s death, and he could not bear to start from nothing.
He read the scriptural text for Billy Sheldon’s sermon. It had been haunting him:
Job 14:2. He cometh forth like a flower and is cut down: he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not.
He felt, with Job, that his stay in this world was not clean and not long. The bitterness of his grief choked him. He opened his blank Bible and reread the chapter in Job, the ghost of younger selves taunting him with scribbled references to Use and Intent of Prophecy in the margins. That man, with his scholarly notes, had not known this loss. He came to the end of the chapter.
But his flesh upon him shall have pain, and his soul within him shall mourn.
He cried with his fist in his mouth. His hands had not, after all, been burned by Jerusha’s warming pan.
When he took it out, he said her name. “Jerusha.”
He gathered thin scraps of
paper that his daughters used to make fans. It was paper she had touched. He piled it on his desk with the sermon for Billy and an old marriage notice, which he flipped over so that the blank side was up. Then he picked up his pen.
Sarah and her children wore mourning to the meeting house, crapes and hatbands that Jerusha had brought home with Mr. Brainerd from Boston. Her mind shattered and wandering, Sarah found herself thinking that she was glad that Jerusha had taken the chance to go to the dry goods shop at Cornhill. Just the week before, she and the girls had spoken of the flowered velvet and capuch silks that Jerusha had seen there. Last Sabbath day, Jerusha had been at meeting, seated between Sally and Esther. Facing that empty place on the bench before the entire congregation was the hardest thing that Sarah had ever done.
He cometh forth like a flower and is cut.
Mr. Edwards was preaching.
There was in this case, after she was first taken ill, speedy advice of physicians, like means speedily used, and physicians were consulted from day to day while she lived, the means used that they jointly agreed upon, yet nothing prevailed.
God’s appointed time was come and no care or tendence of friends or means or consultation of physicians could avail to prevent death from doing its work.
It was awful for Sarah to hear her husband recite the events of the previous week. His voice was stiff and jerky, like a frozen pump. Her mind flicked away.
Which may be a warning to you not to flatter yourself in a dependence on anything for the preservation of your lives.
If there had been time while she was in Boston, Sarah was sure, Jerusha would have brought home striped brocades and poplins for her sisters to make into dresses for winter.
Her pains and bodily distress from day to day were so great that if she had not taken care beforehand she would have had but a poor opportunity.
They had no need for kid lamb and satin gloves, but Sarah had wished for some English stays. Mrs. Hutchinson—mother of Abigail, long-dead—met her eye, then looked away.
What will you do when your extreme parts grow cold and death begins to get hold? What will you do with death? Where will you look for comfort? What will you do for your poor soul that is going to leave the body?
Martha Root, as she listened, thought of her Esther cold in the grave. Anne, still unclaimed by her father, was wriggling in her lap. If Martha died today, she would, she knew, appear tired before God.
I would take occasion from this instance of that blooming flower that was lately cut down by death more particularly to exhort the young people here present to the following things:
Avoid a light and vain conversation. Don’t let any filthy communication come out of your mouth contrary to that rule, Colossians 3:8. Come, don’t delight in lascivious talking and jesting and lewd and filthy songs contrary to those rules, Ephesians 5:3-4.
Simeon and Timothy Root did not look at each other because Simeon knew that there was nothing like a condemnation of mirth, even in the most solemn of circumstances, to tempt Timothy to laugh.
Avoid those customs used by young people and those liberties they are wont to take in company that by sufficient experience are found to be of an evil and corrupt tendency. As, for instance, not only the gross acts of lasciviousness, but such liberties as naturally tend to stir up lust. That shameful, lascivious custom of handling women’s breasts, and the different sexes lying in beds together. However light you may any of you make of these and may perhaps be involved. The custom of frolicking as it is called.
He was burning with grief, but through its heat, he felt the unease of the people as they sat before him, thinking their own thoughts about bundling and the lascivious custom of handling women’s breasts. He had been blunt, but, lingering tensions from the midwives’ books trial or not, at this moment, he would do anything to reach them. Bringing more people to God would sanctify Jerusha’s death and relieve his grief. It was the only thing that could.
Mr. Edwards spoke to the young women, urging them not to allow liberties. Joseph could not look at his mother. The Edwards girls sat very straight, numb with loss. Timothy sat straight, too, still afraid to pray. Bathsheba took up her own prayers, which skewed off from the sermon, as did those of Martha and all of the other women present. Even Sarah, who held this unspeakable loss with Mr. Edwards, let her mind drift to bone lace.
Voice rising, he spoke of Jerusha. In the continuous present, he saw his daughter manifesting a relish appetite as her supreme good. She had also ever found the most strong and lively hungerings and thirstings after grace and holiness. Finally, he said, O that this instance of death might be a means of awakening the young people.
Sarah was with him, now, seeing Jerusha’s thirsts and appetites, too. Oh, she had been such a healthy baby, eager for the milk. In the pain in her husband’s voice, Sarah could hear traces of Jerusha’s curiosity and the small flashes of vanity that reminded her so much of herself. She caught strains of her daughter in all of her beauty, and felt slammed again with the loss. Awaken, she thought. Awakenings. The souls of the valley coming back to life would keep her daughter close.
Leah and Saul did not mark any passages in the sermon, because Leah was too ill to come to meeting. Saul stayed with her. By morning, she, too, was dead.
Elisha read Joseph’s letter at the fort:
Mrs. Jerusha Edwards died last Sabbath morning of a pluretek disorder of about 5 days continuance. A very sudden death and a most awakening and admonitory providence, is to be interred this day.
Elisha was twenty-one to Jerusha’s nearly eighteen. Reading of her death, he got a very clear picture of her six years earlier, prostrate and wailing in her family’s parlor during a prayer meeting, then recovering enough to help her sisters pass out doughnuts and cider with trembling hands. Jerusha had been cordial and sweet, but what he remembered best from that day was standing in the corner of the room, stuffing his mouth with a doughnut to make his cheeks bulge out like a chipmunk’s, chittering at Martha Root, who had neither laughed nor scorned him, but had pushed on her nose with her thumb and snorted like a pig.
Reminding himself never to tell that story to Joseph (although, of course, he wanted to), Elisha wished rest to Jerusha’s soul, then turned back to the letter. After some business about a money-making venture they were attempting by trading in deer skins, Joseph went on:
As to yr affair I was to manage, I tried for an agreement before the court. They insisted on 150 pounds which I thought was too much, considering what risk there is of
(here there was a word so shaky and jumbled that Elisha couldn’t make it out, but he thought it must say something like short)
life. I therefore thought better to tarry a while longer before I concluded the affair, and till I could have some account of your mind, nor doubting but I could obtain a continuance of your recognizance, which accordingly I did—though with some difficulty. I hope before next session I shall accommodate the affair upon easier terms than they seem at present to insist upon; if not I should think it best to abide by the order of the Court but hope I shall have opportunity to inform you further of the affair ere long.
Elisha swore, freshly angered as if he were reading it for the first time instead of the fourth. It was, he thought, the worst possible news. He could not believe that Joseph would need a new account of his mind to know that what he wanted above all other things was to conclude the affair. “Tarry a while longer?” How lightly Joseph put it. Elisha half suspected his brother of enjoying both his own precarious position and the way in which being his advocate allowed Joseph to display his skills before the court. One hundred and fifty pounds made up a very tidy sum, but if the settlement would silence Martha and put the matter behind him, how could Joseph doubt for one moment the urgency of his need for it to end?
Apart from the sad news about Jerusha Edwards, God rest her soul, the remainder of the lette
r was no improvement in tone. After writing that the sergeant waiting for the letter was in a considerable hurry, Joseph took the time to deliver a substantial amount of advice. There was the usual—
Pray let your conversation and belief be religious towards God, steady and manly towards men
—which Elisha read as a familiar mixture of judgment and love. He had no need to be urged to be manly, and the terms of the rest had changed for him since he had left home, although he was not inclined to parse out just how. He did not care at all for the tone of the last sentence:
Take heed you be not surprised through carelessness which is a very ignoble cause of mischief.
yr. Brother and hub. ser., Joseph Hawley
Ah, Joseph, Elisha thought, you do a poor imitation of being my humble servant.
He felt uneasy with the implication that they should try to get a bargain rate for the settlement because the baby might die like her twin. He knew that this was a matter of practical concern, but surely it was also a matter of the famous conscience to which his brother so constantly referred him to provide support for a child he had fathered, even one born of sin. Elisha was in no position to say so, but he felt that Joseph might be well advised to mind the danger to his own soul.