Spider in a Tree Page 3

  It was rich land, and, although he knew that the fields had first been cleared by the Nonotuck and others (some of whom, redeemed as Christians, still farmed and fished there), Mr. Edwards felt his people, his grandfather’s people, had been called to this part of the valley by God. There was a dip in the mountain range that to Mr. Edwards looked like a dent where God’s thumb, no, better, his presence, had pressed on the earth, was pressing still, smoothing out the ground and raising the waters. The river was dark, while the new leaves on the trees were translucent in the low sun.

  The ferryman came from his gray shack, waving a small bone by way of greeting. Duck or dove, perhaps; he had been interrupted at his dinner by the sound of hooves on the road. He tossed the bone into the river, then ambled over to his barge.

  The girl was upright again, on guard against a stranger. Mr. Edwards, stranger and master to her that he felt himself to be, was touched by the momentary lapse (now over) in her intense apprehension, which they had both been travelling with for these past two days. He didn’t choose to be aware of this, but he was on the same horse with her, so he was. He raised his arm and pointed at the opposite shore, with its thick fringe of trees, stirring more than the surface of the water. Noxious smells, not yet warmed to summer fullness, drifted on the breeze.

  “Northampton,” he said. He did not turn, but felt that she did, attention pulled from the mountains and the ferryman to the far bank.

  “Two pence a person,” yelled the ferryman. Most would remember the fare to the place they lived, but Mr. Edwards never did. “Six pence for the horse.”

  They crossed on the flat barge, the ferryman pushing with his pole while his son helped pull them across by grabbing a rope tied across the river. The river was high from spring floods, and they rode low in the water. The girl held the horse. Mr. Edwards stood at the front—he could hardly think of it as prow—tilted back ever so slightly on his thin hips, enjoying, with a proprietary air, the open river after so many miles of narrow road hemmed in by trees. The water was holding color from the day’s last light.

  “One hand on your hat, Mr. Edwards,” the ferryman called out. His own was tied on with a leather strap.

  Mr. Edwards, who was not wearing his best, nodded at the man, but didn’t touch his hat. As he turned back to raise his own eyes to the hills, he caught a glimpse of the girl’s face. She was watching the water, after all, covertly, with an unreadable intensity that reminded him of his duty to her as his servant.

  “Elwell Island,” he said as they passed that heavily wooded shard of land in the middle of the river.

  “Yes, sir.” She spoke over the evening cicadas beginning to thrum; the splash of the pole in the river; the water rustling limbs long down, caught on a rock; the current clapping against the sand and rock of the bank.

  There was always a smell of piss at the river’s edge. Mr. Edwards wondered why men, if not their beasts, didn’t send their streams into the river and save others the stench, but, of course, he knew it was part of a great odor from the tannery, mills, swamps, and the dung heaps in the road. The horse gave a sigh as he climbed back on, and the ferryman lifted the girl up behind him.

  “Thank you,” she said as he walked back to his boat.

  Mr. Edwards felt a shift in her seating as the pillion she was sitting on slid halfway off the horse’s rump. “Not far now,” he said in his dry, sure way. Then, “You will know this as Bridge Street.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said. She was more rigid than ever behind him.

  Without turning to glance at her, he caught a question that she did not ask. “It’s not the big river. Nothing but boats cross that. You will see.”

  They were passing a few houses with much space between them, all of them bare clapboard seasoned brown and gray. Every house lot had a low wooden fence to contain the household animals at night, although the Proprietors—the town’s founders, their descendants, and those, such as Mr. Edwards, they chose to include—let their sheep and cattle graze the common meadows during the day, watched by boys who brought them home to their owners at night.

  Mr. Edwards nodded vaguely toward the east and said, “The meadows are over there, bounded by a curve in the Connecticut.” He started telling her the names of roads and sections of land: Young Rainbow. Old Rainbow. King’s Bottom. Webbs Hollow. Bark Wigwam. Great Swamp.

  The sun was setting behind the burying grounds as they passed. They were riding along the edge of the old palisades that the Proprietors had forted themselves in with when they had founded the town nearly eighty years ago, but Mr. Edwards did not see any need to mention this to the girl. There were few on the road, nothing like Newport, with its harbor bristling with ships and its markets full of goods, but the stench was growing stronger. The girl didn’t speak, but he had no expectation that she would.

  “Here is Pudding Lane,” he said. “The Hawleys, who are kin to me, live at the south end of the road.” He guided the horse onto a small bridge over the murky stream that crossed Bridge Street, fed by freshets coming from the two directions on the other side, and joining to follow along Pudding Lane. “Market Street to the west. We’re on Main Street now that we’re over the bridge.”

  They rode up a hill to the center of town. Mr. Edwards pulled up at a wide crossroads, with a well and the small school. The smell was denser than ever, acrid enough to make them both cough as he pointed up the hill to a large, squat, square building with a cupola, showing its age. “The meeting house,” said Mr. Edwards. He paused this time, waiting for her response.

  She waited, too, but finally said, “Amen?” She lifted herself up and hitched the pillion more securely beneath her.

  He said, “Amen.” Any moment could be a prayer. They turned to the right. He said, “Our road. King Street. Not named for the monarch, but for one Mr. King.”

  On the lot adjacent to the meeting house, men and boys were working this close to dark, dumping barrels full of fluid over hides in a great pit and riding horses ankle deep in tanbark over another. He pulled a handkerchief from his sleeve. “They must have opened the pits while I was gone. It’s a good thing that they’re curing with lime instead of sour milk. The fall slaughtering smells much worse.”

  She groaned a little, and he shifted to look at her. Most towns built tanneries downstream, well away from the center. Northampton had not, nor did they show any signs of moving it as the town grew. “You will become accustomed to it.”

  He did not bother to point toward the brickyard, but started humming to himself as they passed a few more houses, then pulled up at his own: large and, unlike the others, painted white. White paint was expensive and hard to get, but Sarah had managed to secure some through her New Haven connections. She said that it protected the wood, although some of townspeople had indicated to him that she was putting on airs. He could imagine little that mattered less to him than his congregation’s opinion of the color of his house.

  As he got off the horse, she hurried into the yard, passing beneath their cherry trees in late bloom. She came close enough to him that her skirt brushed the tops of his boots as she reached up to touch the purplish spot on his forehead where the bump from the collision with his father had been. He bowed awkwardly so that she could look at it.

  “A comfrey poultice for that bruise,” she said.

  “As you say.” Pulling two leaves from a flourishing elm, he presented one to Sally, three, who rolled it up like a precious scroll, and tucked the other into little Jerusha’s bolster. “My girls.”

  The girls laughed, and Sarah did, too, before she took Jerusha’s leaf so that she wouldn’t chew it. She stepped back then and looked at the girl, who was holding both the reins and the pillion, looking tired enough to go to sleep where she stood. She didn’t seem frightened to Mr. Edwards, but Sarah said, “You must not be afraid. Take the horse to the barn, just there, you can see it. Give it
some grain and water, wash the sweat from its body. There’s a bucket near the door. You know how to do that, do you not?”

  The girl, hugging the pillion, said, “Yes, Madame.”

  Mr. Edwards’s interest in mundane details was fading. He started toward his study, but, once Sarah had told the girl her first work, he heard her ask her name. He answered for her. “It’s supposed to be Venus,” he said from the doorway, doffing his hat, “but we will not have that.”

  The girl did not look at him. Soon enough, Sarah told her that she could go. She touched Mr. Edwards on the sleeve, and said, “We might get on inside before mosquitoes come out.”

  She had an eel pasty waiting with elderberry wine and a raisin tart. Jerusha nursed before they ate. Sally offered him a taste of her tart. The girl helped set out the supper, then Sarah sent her with her meal to the shed out back where she would be sleeping. After they ate, Sarah rang a bell to call the girl back for washing up, and then motioned her to follow the family into the parlor for prayers.

  Sarah nodded as the girl stood uncertainly in the doorway, letting her know that this was a suitable place for her to stay. The family drew their chairs together. Mr. Edwards gave them Genesis chapter twenty, with Jacob working in the fields for seven years to earn a wife. Here, Mr. Edwards looked at Sarah as she delicately traced a small gather in her waistband with one finger. He read how Jacob chose to serve seven years more to get the beautiful Rachel, whom he had been promised and truly loved. First, though, he had to marry her undesirable older sister, Leah, who had been forced upon him. Jacob was blessed with heaps of sons, from Leah, from maidservants, and finally, most gloriously, from Rachel.

  When Mr. Edwards finished reading, he asked little Sally who in the story was most loved. She said “God” right away, because that was never wrong, then said “Mama,” and finally “Rachel,” because this was teaching, and she had to get the answer right. When she tried to lean against her mother, Sarah placed her gently back in her chair.

  Her father wasn’t finished with questions. “And if we were to choose a good name for our servant, what name from the scripture would you choose?”

  Sally thought hard and started to say Rachel again, but turned her head to look at the girl, who seemed to be having trouble with her stomach. The child turned back to him and said, “Leah.”

  “Good,” said Mr. Edwards, nodding first at Sally—who nodded back at him with lucid attention—and then at the very still young woman holding her hands clasped against her belly just inside his parlor door. “That is who she shall be.”

  That night beside Sarah, Mr. Edwards dreamed of the swamp where, as a boy, he had built a booth for secret prayer. Surrounded by ferns, trout lilies, purple trillium, marsh marigolds, beaver, possum, and newts, he followed the subtle migrations of leaf-filtered light into a patch of skunk cabbage that attracted insects with a reek like foul meat. He lay on the wet ground, working on his Greek and watching birds and squirrels being charmed into the mouth of a snake like sinners being charmed by the devil, and so destroyed.

  Chapter 2: May – June 1735

  Four years later, on a warm spring Sabbath, Leah stood at the back of the meeting house gallery, holding the baby with three-year-old Esther asleep on the bench beside her, singing a psalm. Below her, the congregation was fervent and harmonious, raising the song in four parts. The people’s frenzy hadn’t started with the singing this morning, but she knew it would come, as it had almost every Sabbath and lecture day for the past six months. They were all waiting for it.

  Shifting his daughter against her shoulder, Leah looked down at Mr. Edwards, who was singing with his head arched back, muscles straining in his neck. He wasn’t loud, but his urgency drew out the music. Hummers and mumblers sang more cleanly joined with his voice.

  Leah’s hip pressed against that of her friend Bathsheba, who was using the sound of the singing to cover the crack as she squeezed two walnuts together. Bathsheba was in servitude in the home of Sheriff Pomeroy. All of the female slaves and servants sat in the gallery; many children did, too. Sally and Jerusha Edwards, young as they were, had been honored with seats downstairs near the front. Saul, the other slave in the Edwards household, was out of sight to Leah at his place by the door, but she knew that he would not even be moving his lips.

  As the baby sucked on one of her fingers, Leah sang out. Bathsheba nudged her, offering nutmeats in their broken shells. Leah shook her head with a look at Sarah Edwards, who stood before a bench perpendicular to the wall that anchored the pulpit, half facing the people. She sang with vigor, the gold wires in her ears glinting in the dim light.

  Bathsheba leaned closer to Leah, and, through a mouthful of walnuts, started messing with the words of the psalm. Leah, staring straight ahead as little Esther reached up from the bench to take hold of her skirt, caught something about who got the fat and who did the work. She gave her friend a sideways glance and got a little louder with the proper verse.

  Yea blessed shall that man be called, that takes thy children young:

  To dash their bones against hard stones, which lie the streets among.

  Esther stopped playing with her skirt and went to asleep again, curled against the planked wall of the meeting house. Leah gave the baby a soothing little jog in her arms as she sat down. The violence of the verse spoke to her more than it scared her. It was a harsh world. Bathsheba swallowed her walnuts.

  Mr. Edwards had his Bible open on the pulpit before him, one finger pressed hard against the small pile of notes resting in the crack of the book. He read the doctrine in a thin, whispery voice.

  But to him that worketh not but believeth in him that justifieth the ungodly his faith is counted for righteousness. Romans 4, verse 5.

  He began to speak of an opinion he opposed: the belief that obedience to the commands and laws of God was justification of a person as a true Christian, fit for life on this earth and in the world to come. As she listened to his arguments—which he built in meticulous lists that were shot through with heat like an iron screen before a fire—Leah watched him breathe, not from his chest, but from deep in his skinny gut. His robe rose and fell. His use of logic plucked at her mind, joining together edges of thought that had never touched. She often felt this during his sermons, and when he didn’t preach, she craved it like food on a fast day.

  The baby made a sound, so Leah began to rock as she listened. She traced the hem of the swaddling cloth, checking that her stitches were still tight. Mr. Edwards expanded on the phrase he that worketh not. She understood him to be saying that faith was godly in a way that work could never be, that faith was like blood running in the body, blood without which there could not be acts of the hands, or none that were in any way good.

  A faint moaning started. Mr. Edwards didn’t falter, and Sarah, swaying a little, had her lips pressed closed. Leah could see only some of the faces on the main floor, but, underneath the sermon, sounds of distress were coming from all around her, from people in the gallery as well as from their betters below. Excitement rippled through her. The baby’s eyes were open, and Esther sat up. Bathsheba was silent, but she had put away her pocket of walnuts.

  Mr. Edwards stood tall and still, regarding his people intently, and spoke of an act of the soul directly toward God.

  Faith is that in us by which this union is accomplished and ’tis only upon that account we are justified by it and not on account of the goodness or loveliness of faith.

  Leah relaxed into the strictness of his thought. She felt his words as exhalations of the room’s common lungs, rising above the smells of old milk, damp wool, tobacco, and manure. She knew that he must smell it, too. They were all in a close body together.

  In a prominent seat, Joseph Hawley hung his head. He crossed his arms tightly across his chest as his shoulders started to shake. His wife, Rebekah, leaned forward to look at him from the wome
n’s side of the aisle. She was Jonathan Edwards’s aunt and usually quite forceful, but now she seemed parched and worried. In the children’s section, their son Joseph groaned loudly, ignoring rapid jabs in his ribs from his younger brother, Elisha, who was trying to make him laugh instead. Sheriff Pomeroy, a stern man of seventy, began weeping with his mouth open. Seth Pomeroy, his nephew, panted as if he were at his anvil. Bathsheba let her empty hands rise and fall.

  God treats man as a reasonable creature capable of act and choice and therefore judges it meet that in order to the establishing of a relation or union between Christ and the sinner there should be the mutual act of each, that each should receive the other.

  The moaning got louder, swelling from all parts of the meeting house in concert with Mr. Edwards’s dry voice, which, in heightened discourse, crumbled the ordinary world. It was not any one thing he said. It was, as everyone knew, the outpouring of spirit from the unusually near presence of God. Bathsheba, who had been born in Northampton, said she’d never seen anything like it.

  Now, all around them, people forgot themselves. An old woman drew her lips awry, as if convulsed. Mr. Hawley collapsed with his chin on the knee of the man beside him. Some rows behind them, a young man fell from the bench headfirst, his coat tenting over him lining side out, his neighbors arching away from his flailing boots, until he got his feet underneath him and popped up again, standing in the tight space between benches to pray with his eyes closed and the hem of his coat folded up to his waist. There was a gasp from those around him, but it was swallowed up by the general clamor, and the sermon went on.

  On the women’s side, Mrs. Hutchinson slipped a handkerchief to her invalid daughter Abigail, who coughed violently into it, then raised sticky hands, wrists turning and fingers rippling in elegant articulations of the air above her head. Nobody, not even the sick, wanted to miss meeting.