Spider in a Tree Page 28

  Saul had not wanted to leave Leah’s body, so he and Bathsheba had worked together to wash her and lay her out. The family, wrung out with grief as they were, had given her a Christian burial at the edge of the graveyard, which Saul, who had made sure that she had her head to the west, thought was fit and right. Devils might have business with the unrepentant slave owners buried in these graves, and it would be no rest to lie in the midst of all that.

  No sooner had Saul returned to this thought at morning prayers with the family than he spared a prayer of his own for Jerusha, who had been decent and was gone, now, so young. He imagined that Jerusha was content with her spot beside Mr. Brainerd. Leah knew how to be any place she found herself. Great God, he missed her.

  The family prayed for Leah morning and night as they prayed for Jerusha. The girls had taken up most of her duties. Work was the wheel that kept Saul grinding out his time. The first night after Leah was buried, he had tried to sleep in the barn with the blameless cattle breathing cold smoke for company and no smell of Leah such as was found in the loft. The barn proved too cold, so he had stumbled back to the cabin in the dark to climb the ladder with half-frozen feet.

  Over the next few nights, he sat up carving himself a bowl from a piece of ash which, last fall, he had found in the woods, dragged home, and saved from the fire to make a Bible stand for Leah. Her fingers had been starting to tingle and lose their grip, and he had thought that she might like to go back to reading more if she could let her hands rest. Mr. Edwards had a book table, of course, but Saul had thought that he might make Leah’s stand be a place to hold two books, instead of just one or Mr. Edwards’s six, so that two people could, if circumstances ever brought this to pass, sit across from each other and read two different books, or one could watch the face of the other full on as she read. There was enough ash for two bowls, but he left it at one.

  Now it was Saturday night, almost a week since she had died, burning hot and strangled, it had seemed, by her coughs, and choking on every infusion Bathsheba had tried to get down her. He had sat behind her all that night, keeping her propped against his chest as might bring her ease. This had helped a bit, but not nearly enough.

  Late as it was now, Bathsheba came to his door and entered without knocking, softly saying his name. “Saul. People are coming.”

  She showed him a sack of bottles and a package of food. He took up his own sack and walked with her toward the woods along the Mill River, where the ground was firm, not swamp.

  Saul paused at the edge of the trees, and Bathsheba stopped with him. He closed his eyes and thought of his unborn child, his and Leah’s, buried in these woods. He asked their baby if he might enter, as he never thought to do during the day. He wanted to ask her now, though, and to ask his mother and father, and Leah’s mother and father, and their aunts and uncles, all those he knew to be dead and all who might be, to give him leave to enter. He didn’t go in until he felt that he could. Bathsheba waited quietly beside him, eyes open in the dark.

  Joab was already at the clearing close to the water with its islands of ice, beating his drum. Anyone coming through the woods could follow the sound, the same way that people were called to meeting by the bell. There were four or five people in the clearing, talking quietly, and more came in behind Saul and Bathsheba. The men grasped his shoulder and murmured in sympathy. They were servants and slaves, come to pay private respects.

  Bathsheba walked to the center of the clearing, and the drumming stopped. She threw back her head and recited the Twenty-third psalm, as Leah had taught her. “Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.”

  Saul remembered the words, found them easy to remember. He heard Bathsheba saying them, and Leah’s voice was there, too, on the edge of exasperated as it might have been if, as often happened, he had been falling asleep as she read to him. He had loved the comfort and company of drifting off to the sound of her voice, and she had been so irritated at him almost every time for wasting her effort and not listening to the words.

  Bathsheba was beside him again, not touching, but very near. The people had formed a rough circle, lit by lanterns hung on the tree and pine-tar torches stuck in the snow. No one was speaking, but they had started a song. Saul, stamping his feet for warmth and release, felt the slap of the drum in his body, but he wasn’t listening. He was trying to remember the first time he had seen Leah, what she had been doing and whether she had spoken or just cut him a glance in that way she had that scared him as much as it drew him closer. He couldn’t get there, couldn’t remember anything but the way she had bent down away from him to lift a pail, the strength in her hips, and the way that, already, young as she had been, she had held herself unevenly, as if in pain. It was the thought of the ache in her joints all those years ago that made him start to cry and yell, “No. Oh, no,” over a song he couldn’t really hear, but which didn’t stop.

  Other people were sobbing. When he opened his eyes, he saw the tears on Bathsheba’s face. She glanced back at him, shook her head, and then looked down at the ground, which they had stomped and kicked clean of snow. Saul waited for the worst of his confusion, waited for anger. When it came, it hit so hard that he was knocked to his knees on the cold dirt. He wasn’t repentant, wasn’t begging to be saved, but felt the weight of Leah’s spirit slamming him chest down on the ground. He stayed there, chin to a small ridge of mud and ice, breath pressed out of him as if she still needed it, needed his. He was crying and holding her on his shuddering back as if he could keep her low, soiled, and wet with him if he became a snake who could part the snow.

  He was kicking the ground like no snake ever could, and Bathsheba crouched down to him, holding open his sack. He sat up and pulled it between his legs, hugging it to him. Someone had brought out a fiddle and was sawing away. He waited a long time on the ground with his arms around the rough sack. Then he reached in and pulled out a plate, which he placed carefully on the ground. He found the cups with the chips on the rim that Sarah had given Leah on their wedding day. He wrapped his hands around them in the familiar way, then stood, turned, and flung them one after another against a tree with a lantern hung from a branch.

  His friends surged around him, throwing plates and saucers which shattered against the trunk. Saul broke all their bowls and wished he had brought the new one to throw, too, but he didn’t touch the plate on the ground. Bathsheba was heaving stoppered bottles, precious things she used and loved, yelling Leah’s name, telling illness and devils to go on. There was no music now, just the sound of things breaking against a living tree which wasn’t a church or a grave. Some of the things that missed the tree hit the river, skidding and shattering on the ice. Saul threw everything he had, then moved close to the tree to gather shards and throw them again. He picked up fallen chunks of bark soft with algae and threw them, too. He was hit a few times before everyone else saw to stop.

  Then they brought out food, sitting on logs, stumps, and empty sacks to eat and talk. Bathsheba unwrapped the packet she had brought and held it out to him. He looked at it, then reached in and took a greasy piece of smoked shad, which he put on Leah’s plate with cold mashed turnips and left on a rock beside the tree for her.

  Chapter 20: May – October 1748

  No new awakening came to the valley. Instead, Martha Root put on her best dress, borrowed her mother’s lace cuffs, and walked toward the courthouse. Her mother and brother offered to come with her, but she chose to go alone. The cherry trees along King Street scattered the yards and pastures with white flowers.

  The rest of Northampton was caught up in war fever. A young farmer had been killed in Southampton, walking home in the morning from the pasture where he had just driven his cows. The entire town had fled the eight miles to Northampton, where they were now crowded in with their relatives, and a party of men were out scourin
g the countryside for enemies. Still the walk to the center of town, not away from it toward the pasture, seemed safe enough, even for a young woman on her own. The worst thing Martha could imagine would be Joseph Hawley lurking to try to speak with her again, and even that seemed highly unlikely, given the nature of her business with the court.

  As she neared the courthouse, Martha smelled the newly opened pits at the tannery and spared a thought for Elisha in danger at his distant fort. She felt that he was too frightened to live his own life, and she didn’t want him to be part of her own, but had no wish to hear that he were injured or dead. Take care, Elisha, she thought. Don’t get killed because you can’t face meeting me or my Anne on the street. Anne, home with Martha’s mother, was already a year old, already so much her own. Elisha had fled his chance to ever see little Esther. That thought made Martha tug on her cuffs and step a bit more briskly as she walked through the courthouse door to swear out a statement:

  Know all men by these present that I Martha Root of Northampton in the county of Hampshire, in the province of Massachusetts Bay in New England have received of Elisha Hawley of Northampton the sum of one hundred fifty-five pounds old tenor in full satisfaction for and toward the support and maintenance of a bastard child born of my body now living, which child with another some time since deceased which was a twin with the for mentioned child that I the for mentioned Martha charged upon the for mentioned Elisha as their father.

  She kept her eyes down before the witnesses, but signed her name with harsh satisfaction. One hundred and fifty-five pounds. Five pounds more than what, months before, Joseph Hawley had declared was too much.

  Sarah was called to Boston to tend Colonel Stoddard, who had suddenly taken ill. Mr. Edwards urged her to go. She had been quiet in the months after Jerusha’s death, speaking with animation only to the children, and he hoped that the travel, even if to another sickbed, might do her good. In her absence, he threw himself into work. It was one of his ways of mourning, as easing bodily suffering was one of hers.

  She rode much of the way in the company of Elisha Pomeroy, who had business in Boston involving the possibility of a large order for some of Seth Pomeroy’s guns. Sarah was grateful to be accompanied on the path through so much unsettled country, although they were in much more danger of raids in the west. Still, after many hours, she found both silence and conversation with Mr. Pomeroy to have become a chore. Ever since Jerusha died, she had found herself easily exhausted, frequently muddy-headed, and much more limited in patience than she had been in the past. Now both travel and onerous company wore her down.

  Finally, late in the day, shortly before they were to part for separate lodgings, she dropped her guard so much as to fall into a theological dispute with him. He had been speaking ill of churches in the towns they passed through in the east, whose pastors demanded professions and thought that they could take on the weighing of human souls as if they were fit to do the work of God. Every bone in Sarah’s body told her to hold her silence on this delicate matter, but she had had time to study and pray about it since Mr. Edwards had first told her his inclination toward change in Northampton, and when she finally spoke, her words poured from her with more passion than she would have wished.

  “Sir,” she said, turning her face toward him. “I cannot agree. Mr. Edwards has been giving this matter much reflection, and he feels that it is suitable for only those to join the church who can give credible profession of Godliness.”

  Mr. Pomeroy was not a man in the habit of attending closely to the thoughts of women. Surprised to be contended with, he turned jocular. “Did he say such a thing? Perhaps, madam, you may have misunderstood.”

  She rode along silently for a long moment, trying to calculate the miles before they would reach Boston. She looked up at the sky, where the clouds seemed to be making a slow advance until it suddenly became an enormous white mass, the flank of a great whale filling the sky. Then she spoke again. “I have felt God speak in me, sir. I spoke to people of it as it happened, and I wrote it down. I spoke of its sweetness to my husband and our children, and to all those in our town who would listen.” Wisps of darkness were mist from the spume of the cloud, and there were modulations in texture that became water, waves, ocean, then schools of dolphins swimming in smoke from a fire above them. Sarah looked at her companion. “Anyone who has come to God should be happy to speak of it.”

  Mr. Pomeroy gaped at her. She did not ask him if he thought this were true.

  Back home in Northampton, Mr. Edwards had been soliciting letters and subscriptions for his edition of Mr. Brainerd’s journal. (Hopkins, Brainerd’s old classmate, had responded quite fondly.) Now he turned to the many letters that Jerusha had written about Brainerd from Boston. Smoothing the hole in his desk with his knife, he lingered over her intimate accounts of pain, nocturnal sweats, and vapory confusions. She, like her mother, had an unflinching eye for a body’s worst mess. He felt close to her spirit as he drew on her words, tending to the record of the young man’s life just as she had tended his body. As he marked passages and made clarifying comments, he felt as if he were inhabited by the voices of Brainerd and Jerusha as well as his own. He welcomed their company.

  He missed Leah, too. The children spoke of her as often as they did of their sister. Saul was distant, inconsolable. Mr. Edwards saw it, but kept his counsel to a bare minimum. Saul was a man who spoke when he was ready, and Mr. Edwards, mourning himself, knew more than he used to about how to tend a grieving soul. He let Saul be.

  Days without Sarah turned into weeks. The household was in upheaval. When both Sally and Esther came down sick, Mr. Edwards had to call Hannah Root in to help. He wrote to Sarah:

  We have been without you almost as long as we know how to be.

  A little awkwardly, he asked her to bring cheese from Boston, if she had money to spare. He preferred, at the moment, not to have commerce with Rebekah Hawley, who was still abetting Elisha as he refused to do his duty by the Root child and her mother. He knew that there had been a settlement for money, but money wasn’t the half of it. Unrepentant sin like that had no place in his church, and without the church, Mr. Edwards considered Elisha to be without any hope for true life.

  Colonel Stoddard died of apoplexy. It was another terrible blow.

  When Sarah came home, still looking weary, she brought, not only new English stays and an excellent cheese, but also a slave, whose name was Rose. When they first rode into the yard, the younger children hung back, startled by the sight of the stranger on the back of their mother’s horse. Sarah regarded Saul’s drawn face as she handed him the reins, then sent Rose to an attic room instead of into the shed with him.

  Rebekah went to the buttery to cry for her brother. She turned the big rounds of cheese and polished them with oil, mourning and wondering why John Stoddard had sent for Sarah and not for her. Sarah was better with tinctures and poultices, everyone knew that, but Rebekah would have wanted to see his face.

  When he heard her crying, Joseph came and stood in the doorway of the buttery, as he had never done in all the years she had grieved for his father there. Then, he had known that she wanted to be alone, but now he walked in like the man he was. She found comfort in the wry way he offered her a handful of sage, torn to bits, ready to flavor new curds.

  Rose was a young woman, Boston born and raised, who knew how to weave fine linens. She spoke with deference and a touch of city brusqueness. Saul half hated the sight of her in her checked petticoat and red skirt headed toward the henhouse on the path that Leah’s feet had made. There was nothing to blame her for, but he avoided her as far as he was able. He stood beside her at family prayer, and they ate silent meals together, but he never asked what had brought her to be sold.

  “Dead mistress.” Bathsheba, who felt no compunction about talking to Rose, had him know. “Small pox, but Rose said that her mother had dosed her with it as a chi
ld, so she never got sick. She doesn’t know what to think of us, especially you, but the selling is done with, and that’s one thing. It wouldn’t kill you to speak to her.”

  Saul took a sip of birch beer from his wooden cup and didn’t answer. Leaning forward, elbow to knee, she answered herself. “And it wouldn’t kill you to be quiet, Bathsheba.” She took a drink, too, then got his knife from the peg where it hung in its sheath and offered it to him. “Carve me something if you won’t talk.”

  He regarded it bleakly. “Might as well.”

  He went outside and broke off a branch of green wood. He carved her a cane with the crude head of a bird for a handle, not carefully and not well.

  Bathsheba watched in silence. As she had loved Leah, she was determined to search out what might get Saul to do something except work when he had to and act civil on request. He didn’t offer to make her anything else, and she didn’t ask.

  It was a dry, hot summer. The river was muddy and low. Peas never swelled, but turned brown and dried on the vine. Everyone washed less and moved more slowly, carrying buckets from the well to try to save their crops and gardens.

  Mr. Edwards, deep in Brainerd’s journals, tried to imagine what it would be like to be a missionary, sleeping alone under the trees (in his mind, he edited out the cold shack and the bloody coughing), far from any British town. He liked the idea of preaching to people who might have never before heard the word of God instead of to his hardened congregation, who—he thought of them at their worst—had been snoring and snickering under his sermons for two decades now. Escaping into missionary dreams was difficult because he could imagine neither hauling his family through the wilderness nor leaving them far away for months at a time. Also, he loved his study and the elm in his own yard. Still, he was so tired of the endless bickering among the people in Northampton.