Spider in a Tree Page 33

  The summer passed full of hostile meetings and declamations. Fall brought more of the same. On a mild morning in late November, Sarah pasted her beauty mark to her cheek, put on her shawl, took up her basket, and walked to Pomeroy’s store. She was happy to be out of the house and away from livestock and children, attending to the simple task of buying spices. Carrying a small quantity of allspice and cinnamon would not, she thought, trouble the babe in her womb. She was pregnant again, nearly five months along. No matter how things unfolded with the congregation, baptism would not be disrupted in any way that might keep her baby from receiving it; that was clear to her. That she even had to consider it was ridiculous, but the church had voted to suspend communion. It was a brutal refusal of trust that tore at her husband’s deepest places. His belly ached every day. Sarah served him thick slices of warm bread even as she worried about how—and, dear Lord, where—they would eat if they lost their home. Not even her husband could live on air.

  Her thoughts pounded to the hammering as she walked past men taking down some of the town’s fortifications. Last month they had received word that negotiators for the colony had signed a treaty in Falmouth with the eastern tribes, so, since England and France had also ended hostilities, the town was no longer at war. There had been celebrations in Boston when the proclamation was read that the tribes had stopped fighting, but people in Northampton didn’t celebrate. They were too much in the grip of their own struggle. Mr. Edwards preached a sermon with the doctrine that the joy of the soul was oftentimes like the joy of finding great spoils in war, but no one had seemed much moved.

  Sarah liked the thumps and crashes from the forts coming down, but had taken to putting beeswax in her ears so that she didn’t have to listen to the bell, which called people to meetings as well as to worship. Most of the meetings now involved the precinct, which consisted of every male taxpayer. Mr. Edwards did not moderate precinct meetings as he did church ones, so, over his objections, the precinct had evaded his control and taken up the questions before the church. It pained Sarah no end that Joseph Hawley had begun to add his name to their reports.

  She passed a cluster of children who scattered at her approach, but paid them no mind. When she reached the store, she found the young Pomeroy boy with the cowlick behind the counter. She was relieved that it wasn’t the sheriff.

  The young Pomeroy was busy helping one of the Bartletts, who was too small to reach into the barrels to get what she needed. Mrs. Clapp was waiting patiently to make her purchases, and Sarah, stepping up behind her with the allspice (they had no cinnamon after all), said, “Good day to you, Mrs. Clapp.”

  Mrs. Clapp did not turn. She did not move, but stood holding her own basket with a placid expression on her weathered face. Sarah thought that she must be getting hard of hearing, so stepped closer and leaned toward her ear. “Good day.”

  Mrs. Clapp pretended that Sarah, whom she had known for more than twenty years, wasn’t there. With her neck thrust forward and her shoulders hunched, she held her eyes steady on the same spot between the kettles and the sugar where she had been gazing when Sarah had joined her. She gave no sign of knowing she had been spoken to except for the smallest twitch of pleasure that Sarah, peering into her face, watched tighten her mouth.

  Sarah stepped back, heart beating hard. She had thought that she was used to the hostility of people here, but she had never been shunned in such an intimate way that she could not help but know it. She felt humiliated, almost gone, as if the pointed hatred of a familiar old woman were enough to obliterate her. The Pomeroy boy finished with the Bartlett girl, and Mrs. Clapp stepped toward him. Sarah barely noticed. She wasn’t noticing anything except waves of anger and obscure shame. Finished with her business, Mrs. Clapp walked around Sarah as if she were a stack of tea napkins and went calmly out the door.

  The Pomeroy boy beckoned to Sarah and surprised her by calling her politely by name. This brought her back to herself, not the same self, but a consciousness blurred by Mrs. Clapp’s tiny smile, and by the cumulative pressure of the thousands of small ways that most of the people around her for months, even years, had been letting her know that she was despised. She called on God. The boy was careful with the scales as he weighed her allspice, the scent hot like clove. Sarah expected to be cheated, but was not.

  As she stepped out of the store, she looked at the brown grass, each blade distinct in the undemanding November light, and realized that she was willing. It had been almost seven years since she had dissolved in the presence of God, and in that time she had lost a daughter whose body was held in the earth of this town, but she found herself willing, still, at his sovereign pleasure, to stay or to go.

  Near the well, she gave a polite nod to Martha Root, who, so often scorned herself, put aside her mixed feelings and called out, “Good day to you, Mrs. Edwards” in a strong, clear voice.

  Chapter 23: December – August 1750

  When Joseph got home from visiting Mercy on a December afternoon, Rebekah was waiting in the hallway. He stomped snow from his boots, exhausted from urging his horse down a narrow, uneven trail between great shoulders of half-frozen snow. His mother was never happy when he came home from Brookfield, because, he knew, she wished he wouldn’t go at all.

  She gestured him in the door and slipped a note in his hand as she helped him off with his coat. “From Sheriff Pomeroy,” she said, sweeping snow from his clothes back outside. “Meetings spawning bigger meetings.”

  Joseph raised his eyebrows and said, “When it’s all over, I should make sure that the man who rings the bell gets extra pay.” She laughed. Griping about meetings had become like complaining about the weather. It was everyone’s common ground. This time, though, it was different. There might be an end in sight. Standing in the hallway with Rebekah hovering, he unfolded the letter.

  Five churches from other towns and their ministers were being asked to form a council to give advice and judgment to the church in Northampton on the conflict between them and Mr. Edwards. In the warrant to form the council, the Northampton church had formally supplicated the council to dismiss and release the church and Mr. Edwards from each other. The church had chosen three men to argue their case before the council. The note Joseph Hawley read with his mother in the hall let him know that he was one of them.

  He sat down on a chest, put his satchel on the floor. In it was a doily that Mercy had made for Rebekah as a timorous gift. He said to his mother, “I would never stand a chance arguing against Mr. Edwards.”

  She sat down beside him. “Elisha won’t be forced to marry. You won that.”

  Joseph half nodded, then shook his head. “Mr. Edwards wasn’t at the hearing.”

  She looked into his face. “He was kind to you when you were a boy.”

  He wished, at that moment, that, after her period of mourning, his mother had married a Parsons or a Pomeroy. Somebody suitable. She could have had more children, other children who were not his brother and himself with their stumbles. The thought of taking the lead in opposing his cousin was very unseemly, but the thought of not doing it burned, too.

  She had been gazing at him throughout his long silence, as if reading a psalm on his brow. “All the local ministers oppose him since he broke with my father’s teachings. Many others do, too.”

  “I don’t know what to do.”

  “You’ll do what is right.” She regarded him with a tenderness that was nothing short of beautiful, but her face tightened considerably as he bent down, unlatched the satchel, and brought forth the doily from Mercy as if presenting her with a crown.

  Sarah rested one hand on her belly as she watched Joseph walk up King Street, picking his way over pits and ridges in the snow. He looked cold and miserable, making attempts at a dignified stride whenever he hit a patch of solid footing. Sarah loved being able to follow the comings and goings of people through the window in her ki
tchen since they had taken the palisades down, but she was not happy to see Joseph.

  Still, as he used his walking stick to knock the top off a drift, she felt a rush of fondness. She remembered him at the age of her Johnny, when she and Mr. Edwards were newly married and living with his Stoddard grandparents. She thought of walking up the hill to their manse from the meeting house with John Stoddard (she couldn’t remember if he had been a colonel then), who had taken a liking to her. He was dead now, like his parents. She and Col. Stoddard had Joseph with them because Rebekah had been home with a colicky Elisha. The boy had sung psalms all the way up the hill in such a serious way that Sarah had been surprised to notice that he had also managed to catch a frog.

  She remembered watching Joseph ride back to his dying father with his arms wrapped around her husband’s waist while Jerusha brought his little brother to her by the hand. Her girl had believed that her mother, then and always, would know the healing thing to do. Jerusha. If only it had been true.

  Now Joseph, who was joining with those threatening to scatter every earthly thing she held dear, stood at her door, doffing his hat and knocking as if he were coming to bring them cheese and eggs. He had to be in pain or else so dry that he knew nothing at all of what he was feeling. “That Joseph,” she thought. Then, “Poor Joseph.”

  She went to the door of the parlor and flicked her fingers. Esther and Mary rose to gather the younger children and take them upstairs. Sarah let her hands rest on her belly once more as she watched them go, then smoothed her gown and answered the door.

  “Mr. Hawley,” she said warmly. “Do come in. I expect that you are here to see Mr. Edwards. He is in his study. May I bring you some tea? And how is your mother?”

  “No tea, thank you, Madame.” She watched him hang his coat on one of the pegs he had been using since he was a boy. Then, as if he had suddenly become a ten-year-old running errands again, he did, in fact, offer her a small cheese.

  “From Mother,” he said.

  Sarah took it gravely. She said, “We shall have it tomorrow with our bread.”

  He seemed to be lingering, looking at her as if he wanted something. “I’ve been away,” he said. “Seeing Mercy.”

  She could not help but smile at the quaver in his voice. The preoccupations of the young were so unsurprising. “And how do you find Miss Lyman?”

  He flushed with gratitude. She imagined that his mother did not smile at the sound of the young woman’s name. He said, “She is very well.”

  Joseph followed her to the door of the study. The way he stared at his feet and knocked his wig askew as she knocked made her think of his father. Still, he bowed to her with an attentive delicacy all his own before he went inside to do whatever damage he had come to do. It broke Sarah’s heart.

  Mr. Edwards continued to write for a moment after he heard Sarah shut the door of the study. His whole self was bent over his sermon, taut with concentration and, within that, the release that came from engaging with scripture, language, and God. When he looked up, he saw Joseph Hawley standing there, staring at him with a tremendous look of wistfulness on his blunt young face. All of that human need, so insistently visible, came as a shock to Mr. Edwards as he wrenched himself from his work. What did Joseph, who had taken up such lax principles in religion, want from him? He sighed, not patiently, and put down his pen.

  Joseph pulled up a chair and planted his feet. “I’ve just learned that the committee has asked me to be one of their representatives at the coming council.”

  “I know.” Mr. Edwards looked at him, waiting.

  Joseph sat up straight, suddenly vaguely affable like the lawyer he was. “True religion,” he began. Mr. Edwards raised his eyebrows. Was he to listen to a layman’s sermon? Joseph faltered, his mouth trembling. “Unprejudiced,” he muttered, then stopped abruptly, clearly in distress.

  Mr. Edwards tried to regard him calmly, as he had watched so many people thrash in that straight-backed chair, but he found himself writhing inwardly, too. Each of them barely moved. Joseph, his wig completely covering one ear, face contorted, staring down at hands clenched in his lap, looked so much like his father that Mr. Edwards felt a rush of the anguish he thought had been fully burned away in service to God. Joseph had come in service to other things, he was sure of it, at the bidding of a committee knotted together by their fibrous resentments, old Sheriff Pomeroy pulling the strings, and Joseph, unaware of his own vulnerability, flattered into eloquence, betrayal, and sin. Sitting across from him in his study, Mr. Edwards could see it so clearly.

  Yet he was not resolved. He was not calm. He knew that he would very likely lose his congregation, his livelihood, this room. He knew it. The church wanted to turn him out. He had been writing letters to friends all over New England and Scotland, letting them know what he was facing in this wildly ungrateful town, trying to think through what a next step for him and his family could possibly be. He wasn’t done fighting, but he was reconciled to the whole material world as he knew it being yanked away. Still, at this moment in the study, he was not ready to let go of Joseph, whom he had sheltered in every way he could think of for most of his life, and who, now, was reaching toward him, he thought—could he bear it?—about to take his hand. Instead, Joseph leaned across him to the desk. Mr. Edwards moved aside a little, shifting his chair to let Joseph brush a sleeve across his papers and pick up his penknife.

  Will he kill me? Am I to be stabbed? Oh, Joseph son of Joseph, will he turn the blade on himself? Mr. Edwards stood, ready to grapple for the knife, but Joseph only bent over the desk like a scholar and slid the blade gently around the smooth pit in the wood that Mr. Edwards himself had dug over years of work and thought.

  Joseph put down the knife and let his fingertip linger in the hollow. “I have always wanted to do that.” He spoke plainly now, looking into the older man’s face. “Ever since I was a boy.”

  Mr. Edwards sat down again, his own voice lost. He put both hands flat on the desk and lowered his head. Then he looked at the young man in front of him. “Please,” he mouthed. “Please don’t.” No sound came out.

  Joseph stared at his face as if in wonder. Mr. Edwards let him look. There was a pause. The young man raised his chin, folded his hands in his lap, and gave Mr. Edwards what he wanted. He said, “My judgments differ from yours in many things, but not all. Therefore, I cannot in good conscience plead for the church’s position before the council.”

  Mr. Edwards took a breath and nodded slowly. He had no words.

  The following Sabbath, Mr. Edwards let the women and children stream out into the bright afternoon after his sermon, but he stayed the men to make the announcement that Mr. Hawley would not be arguing the church’s case. Sheriff Pomeroy, slowed by age as he was, stalked out in disgust, using both of his arms to wrest open the door. The full weight of it slammed behind him. Seth Pomeroy stood and bellowed that he would know why, but Mr. Edwards could not be goaded into further comment. Joseph, sparing himself the questions and anger, had slipped out the back after the prayers and before the news.

  Seth Pomeroy, sitting at the table with Rebekah and Joseph, speared a hunk of parsnip as if he were hitting a wooden peg with an iron hammer. He swallowed it whole. Most of the town still ate only with spoons and knives, and Seth had never been one for European niceties, but Rebekah had inherited forks from Widow Stoddard, so he went ahead and stuck it in another chunk of parsnip before he said, “He’s a tyrant, Mr. Hawley. And we’ve got him cornered. This is no time to back off.”

  “Mmm.” Joseph, watching Seth manhandle the fork, thought about what he had seen at Louisburg, when Seth had led the men to unplug the touchholes of blocked cannons, drag them around to face the fortress, and fire cannonballs that had been aimed at them back at the French. He would never give up. Joseph, who had turned over his bed in the captured town to Seth when he was near dead with the flux, lo
ved him for that. Testing his own heart as he chewed a piece of bread, Joseph did not find the same resolve.

  Sheriff Pomeroy had been by the house earlier with a gift of pickled pork, which made Joseph think of funeral meats as Rebekah passed it around the table on her best platter. He took a sip of cider to clear out the smell of vinegar and tried to find a sticking place in himself. Seth and his mother ate their food, waiting for him to speak. He would despise himself if he went back on his word to Mr. Edwards, but if he won the case against him, it would be the making of him. He did not want to act from such a base motive, but he could not help but think it. He tried to draw on his newly acquired sense of true religion, so different from that he had received from Mr. Edwards. The good sense of humankind, wasn’t that what he should be relying on? Not one rigid minister standing above all others like a king, but a whole town full of good people, his people. They knew what was right, and what they cared about mattered so much to him.

  Oh, but Mr. Edwards had asked him not to do this. He had not commanded him as the instrument of God in this town, but asked him in a choked, vulnerable way. Joseph, on the verge of tears, pushed back his plate.

  As if this was the signal he had been looking for, Seth stood up, towering over the table. “All right, then, man,” he said. “Are we resolved?”

  Joseph felt the force of Seth’s certainty. He wanted very much to be on his side. Rebekah, who had been uncharacteristically silent, put down her mother’s fork and smoothed the edge of the doily under the platter at the center of the table. He suddenly realized that she had given Mercy’s gift a place of honor. Looking him in the eye, she said, “Perhaps Miss Lyman would come from Brookfield to hear you argue before the council.” She pressed the tines of the fork so that the end of it lifted from the table, then let it drop. “I should be delighted if she came to dinner.”