Spider in a Tree Read online

  Mr. Edwards lowered his eyes. Could the drought finally be ending? At the height of the great awakening, he had welcomed hundreds to the church in Suffield in a single day. Now, for four years in Northampton, not one soul. Not since the young man before him had played leapfrog while on trial for abusing midwives’ books. He was almost afraid to believe it. He felt a buried tension begin to ease, then a rise of fear about what might come next.

  He stayed silent long enough that Simeon sat forward in his chair, squashing his hat as it slipped sideways in his lap, and said, “I am to be married.”

  “Ah.” Mr. Edwards wished that he didn’t have to do this with Simeon, with his stubborn family and their public sins. Although everyone knew he considered it well past time for Simeon’s sister Martha to be married, this was not about the Roots. Bracing himself, he said, “Simeon, I have come to believe that members of the visible church in complete standing should be, in profession and in the eyes of the church’s Christian judgment, godly persons.”

  Simeon nodded as if this seemed obvious. “Godly persons. Right. Of course.”

  The young man was not getting the point. Mr. Edwards tried again. “All manner of persons may observe the Lord’s day, worship, and pray that they might be led to give themselves over completely to Christ. But only those who have actually done so and,” Mr. Edwards spoke slowly, “publicly professed to it with their mouths”—he paused—“should be full members of the church.”

  Simeon stopped nodding. “Publicly professed to it with their mouths. Sir, what does that mean?”

  Mr. Edwards was tempted to catechize Simeon in the old way, prompting as needed, then go find Sarah and spend the rest of the afternoon rubbing his wife’s feet with vinegar and rosewater while reading aloud from the Canticles. He had never idled away a day like that, but he was strongly tempted.

  His conscience would not allow it.

  “You’ll need to make a profession,” he said to Simeon. “A public profession of godliness.”

  Simeon turned red. “That’s not how it’s done.”

  Mr. Edwards kept his gaze steady on Simeon’s face. “I am your minister, charged with seeing to the good of your soul. I have prayed and studied about this, searched scriptures and examined books that defend the admission of persons to sacrament without a profession of saving faith, but I no longer believe them to be correct.”

  Simeon muttered under his breath. “What about your dead grandfather? Did you happen to read him?”

  Mr. Edwards ignored that. He knew he was asking something that no one in the town had been required to do within living memory. Even extreme states arrived at under the influence of an awakening had never required a declaration of faith before the whole congregation. He himself had followed his grandfather Stoddard’s practice in the matter for more than twenty years. Until this day. “You only need say heartily, based on inward assent, that you wish to lead a life of true godliness. Can you say that, sir?”

  Simeon stood up. He clutched his hat, as had most of the youth who had sought counsel or disgraced themselves before Mr. Edwards over the years. Mr. Edwards regarded Simeon as he stood there, jaw clenched tight, wanting to be churched and married, already thinking ahead, no doubt, to the baptism of his children. Simeon was miles ahead of Elisha Hawley, who might yet be brought by church discipline to become Simeon’s brother by marriage. Still, it was not enough.

  Simeon’s lip trembled. “I can say that I wish to be godly, Mr. Edwards, and say it with the knowledge of my heart. I could say that, sir, but it seems to me that I should not have to make a profession to join the church. Nobody else has. My own father never did. It doesn’t sit right.”

  He did not turn to go after he spoke, but stood there, shaking. Mr. Edwards, sensing an opening, stood as well. “I could write a model profession for you. You could amend it to suit your own experiences, as long as it kept the crucial elements.”

  “I need to think on that.” Simeon took his leave.

  Over the next several days Mr. Edwards wrote and refined four professions, all variations on:

  I hope, I do truly find a heart to give up myself wholly to God, according to the tenor of that covenant of grace which was sealed in my baptism, and to walk in a way of that obedience to all the commandments of God, which the covenant of grace requires, as long as I live.

  When he read this to Simeon the following week, the young man barely listened. He stood like a rock before the desk with his hat still on and the study door wide open. After Mr. Edwards finished reading the profession, Simeon looked him dead in the eye, and said, “Sir, I’ve spoken to my family and examined my conscience. My answer is no.”

  Elisha, sitting at his portable desk at a small table in his room, unfolded a letter, then leaned to scratch Delilah’s belly where she lay sprawled by the fire. He had relented and brought her inside at the first snow. There was a new shirt from a Northampton seamstress draped over the back of his chair and three pounds of Rebekah’s butter, still frozen from the cold trip in a soldier’s knapsack, gleaming in pale balls in a bowl on the table. Elisha scraped one of the balls with his fingernail and dangled his hand for Delilah to lick as he read what Joseph had to say about his upcoming church trial.

  Were I in the case, I should have no regard at all to anything they pretended to do authoritatively in the particular of matrimony, nor would I attempt to labour to prove anything against her, since the burden of proof beyond all dispute lies wholly on either the woman or the church as they are respectively considered as acting.

  Joseph wrote that he was confident that the church couldn’t enforce matrimony without proof of absolute virginity on the part of Martha Root prior to her liaison with Elisha. Enticement would have to be proven, and Joseph thought that there was a case that Elisha, not Martha, had been enticed. It was to their advantage that Martha, her father, and mother had now all declared themselves against marriage.

  Delilah, who had sat up to address the butter on Elisha’s finger, gave his knuckle a light nip, and looked up at him, wanting more.

  “No,” he said severely, pointing at the floor.

  All therefore I at present would do (let the church take what course they would) should be to offer them a proper confession, and rest the matter. As to matrimony, I would do what I knew was right in conscience and before God, if there was anything that was particularly damning that nobody else knew of. I am, sir, your most affectionate brother.

  Joseph Hawley

  Delilah gave up on Elisha, and curled with her nose toward the fire. He tried to consider whether there was anything particularly damning between him and Martha Root which was unknown to others, but all he came up with was the memory of laughing after meeting while she gave herself a snout like a pig.

  After the sermon one gray January morning, Sarah let the children go back to the house to get the noon meal on the table. She thought to have a few moments to herself in the woods. The ground was ridged and frozen, but the snow was not yet deep enough to swallow her feet. She craved the peace of it. As she crunched past the back of the meeting house horse shed, she heard men talking inside.

  “The great Stoddard never would have invited him here if he had known.”

  “Of course not. He never thought his own grandson would betray him.”

  “Betray us all. Who would?”

  Sarah slowed, taken aback by the venom in the voices.

  “He never would have dared if Colonel Stoddard were still alive.”

  “Knew what side his bread was buttered on. The Colonel was the making of him.”

  She froze as the other men sniggered. The air smelled of pipe smoke.

  “Kept it all a secret, his so-called change of heart. He despises us, that’s what it is. Wants to keep our babies from baptism.”

  “He’s a radical. Next thing, he’ll be building a b
onfire and burning our clothing.”

  “He almost ruined our young men. Everyone knows it. Shamed them over those bad books in front of the whole congregation, instead of talking to any of them as might have a problem in private, as would have been decent.”

  “Thinks he can look into a man and see his soul. Only God can do that.”

  Sarah’s face was hot in cold air as the voices went on, getting louder and talking over each other in their eagerness to spread poison about her husband. They must be malcontents, she thought. Bartletts or Roots, although one loud voice sounded a lot like Sheriff Pomeroy. She could have opened a court case by walking around the shed to see whom she must accuse, but found that she had no stomach for it. The best it could bring would be more floggings. Besides, she didn’t want to know who had sat through the morning sermon with such bitterness. Feeling sick, she turned away from the shed and the woods, toward home.

  That night, she and Rose missed evening prayers to help a cow struggling with a breech calf. Once it was safely delivered, she sat, exhausted, on a bale of hay, watching the cow lick the mess of birth off the little one’s trembling back. She tried to offer up her mind to be licked clean of the contempt in those men’s voices. She missed Saul, who might have sat with her. Rose had already gone back to the house. Before the calf was half-clean, Sarah got up, washed her own hands in a bucket of rainwater she had set near the fire to fend off a skin of ice, then went inside to find Mr. Edwards.

  He was writing at his desk next to a stub of candle, so that the shelves and cubbyholes filled with his papers looked like so many small dens rising before him in the flickering light. She approached quietly and drew up a chair. She didn’t speak at first, but sat there noticing how much she still smelled of hay, muck, and blood. He nodded at her and kept writing, finishing a thought.

  When he looked up, she said, “They are starting to talk as if they hate us.”

  His face crumpled as if he were a small boy. “Who?”

  She thought for a moment. Elihu Parsons had been coming to the house to see Sally, and Timothy Dwight, whose whole family had stayed friendly, for Mary. Esther had a flock of admirers. But, still. “Almost everyone.”

  She drew her chair closer and told him all she had heard.

  Mary Hulbert kept her head down when she came into the study, too shy to glance at Rose as she shut the door. Mr. Edwards was folding paper into the size he liked for writing and didn’t stop as he gestured with his elbow toward the chair. She was the daughter of a man who owned a saw mill, a fat young woman wearing a new collar and her best gown. The whole town was more or less openly against him, and they had been bringing attacks to his study alone and in committees. He wasn’t afraid of Mary Hulbert, or of any of them, but he wasn’t looking forward to the conversation. “Miss Hulbert. What can I do for you?”

  She almost tripped as she sat down, but, once she was settled in her chair, he was struck with the intensity of her silence. Finally, she said, “Sir, if you think it fitting, I would like to join the church.”

  He stopped folding and regarded her closely. This was unexpected, and it was brave. Simeon Root and Sarah King, having posted their banns and entered their intentions with the town clerk, had been duly married, but Simeon had not joined the church. People talked about what had happened between Mr. Edwards and Simeon as if it had been a hanging. Mary Hulbert fiddled with the strings of her cap. Mr. Edwards turned his chair all the way around to face her. “Do you wish to make a public profession?”

  She folded her hands over her belly and said, “I will. I want to.” The crackling of the fire was louder than her voice, so he had to strain to hear her. “If it won’t make me the center of an uproar.”

  Mr. Edwards kept one hand on his desk to steady himself as he began to talk with Mary Hulbert about grace. It had been too long.

  He brought Mary Hulbert’s case to the church committee. They refused her.

  “No,” said Sheriff Pomeroy, color rising in his face. “We want no precedent of anyone having to stand up before you to be nakedly judged in order that they may join our church.”

  “Ah.” Mr. Edwards spoke coolly, ignoring the bile rising in his throat. They were willing to risk a young woman’s soul just to spite him. “Then perhaps you might wish to hear me preach about the nature and foundations of my position, since it is clearly being misunderstood.”

  “No preaching about this.” The sheriff was eighty, but he bellowed like the son of a blacksmith. “Not one word.”

  “It’s your pulpit.” Sarah stopped stitching a tear in their counterpane to stare at him. “You choose what to preach.” The counterpane covered her lap and spilled off onto the floor.

  He picked up the new goose quill from the windowsill, where it had been hardening. He took up his penknife, cut it down to length, and removed most of the feathers without speaking. The silence tormented Sarah, but there was no way to make him speak before he was ready.

  Finally, he said, “I am satisfied that it is best, at present, not to preach on the controversy. The people are in so great a ferment that there would be no opportunity to be heard with any degree of calmness.”

  She finished the mend and tied off her thread. This was her nightmare coming true. “If they expel us, where will we go?”

  He had no answer. She cut her thread with a bite before he thought to offer the knife.

  She watched him grit his teeth in the pulpit before he began to preach about the threshing, grinding, and baking of bread. It was a subject that she knew much more about than he did, but the point was that it was not—at least, not directly—about the controversy between him and the people sitting stone-faced before him. As she listened, she noticed Mary Hulbert crying on her bench. Sarah’s eyes sought her own children. The older girls were composed, but it tore at her to see her young ones so miserable, sitting among people who would no longer greet their family on the street. Timothy was chewing his nails. He had, she knew, bitten them down to the quick. When she raised her eyebrows at him, he drew his hands away from his mouth with a clumsy alacrity that reminded her of his father. He sat on his hands. She pressed hers to her face, slapped by grief in front of the townspeople, who stared without mercy beneath the thrumming of her husband’s persistent voice.

  Bathsheba watched Rose coming up King Street as she sat on a bucket and sorted dried herbs on a rock near the town well. She had been brutally lonely all winter, so, as the days began to warm, she found herself coming up with work she could do in public places where people might pass the time of day with her. The Pomeroys hadn’t given her trouble about it. In fact, the Sheriff, always a bit of a gossip, had been listening with more than the usual eagerness to stories she brought back from the well. She knew he was keeping close watch on the mood of the town. She tried to slant anything she told him toward calm, but he always turned up the flame. “Rose!” she called. “How are your hands?”

  “Much better.” Rose carried her bucket with a piece of wool that Bathsheba had given her padding the handle. She was doing almost all of the errands in town for the Edwardses now, since Sarah and the girls preferred to stay home rather than face the hostile silence at Pomeroy’s store. When Rose reached Bathsheba, she set her own empty bucket on the ground.

  “Let me see.” Bathsheba took one of her hands and turned it over to look at the cuts across her palms from where the handle of the bucket had been slicing in. They were scabbing up. “Good.” Bathsheba liked Rose. She didn’t have the energy to waste being mad at her for not being Leah. “Did you ever hear anything about that minister up in Northfield? Benjamin Doolittle?”

  For somebody who worked at a house crammed with news and visitors, Rose missed a lot. Some people thought she was a snob because she didn’t seem to bother to listen. “Who?”

  Bathsheba shook some sage leaves free of webs, catching bits of herb as it crumbled in her s
kirt. “They say he freed his slave Abijah Prince because Abijah served in the militia during the war.”

  Rose twirled her bucket on its bottom on the muddy ground. Watching, Bathsheba was reminded of how young she was, making a bucket dance, barely attending to things she needed to know. “At one point, this same Reverend Mr. Doolittle was under attack from people in his church for all sorts of reasons. They even criticized his slave-owning as unchristian.”

  Rose stopped playing with her bucket and stared at Bathsheba. “They did?”

  Bathsheba gave her the bad news, dusting sage from her fingers. “Mr. Edwards was ready to step up with scripture to defend him. Said slavery was in the Bible.” She took a breath. “Leah told me.”

  Rose tilted her bucket so that it stuck on one edge in the mud. She shook her head. One of the things Bathsheba liked about Rose was that she didn’t talk when there was nothing to say. There was an unsurprised silence long enough to let Bathsheba tie her cleaned sage into a square of linen and spread a gritty tangle of rosemary before her on the warm rock while Rose pushed the bottom of her bucket deeper into the mud.

  When Rose finally spoke, she gave a sideways look at Bathsheba. “Do you think Mr. Edwards might have freed Saul, too, if he had made it back to Northampton?”

  Bathsheba realized that she had been fishing to hear the girl say Saul’s name. Saul and Leah. She missed them both so much. “Weren’t you listening to what I just said? The evidence is against it.”