Spider in a Tree Page 34

  Joseph took a swig of cider. It would mean so much for Mercy to have a welcome in his mother’s house. He could see what Rebekah wanted: an answer to old grief. Joseph had cracked open when Mr. Edwards showed raw need, but how could he deny his mother if she wanted the preacher gone from their town? He had said it himself more than once: true religion consisted in what the informed sense of humankind maintained was right.

  Seth was still hovering beside his chair. Joseph stood up and punched him on the arm like a brother. “All right, Seth. We are resolved.”

  There was a moment in the meeting house that June which would haunt Joseph the rest of his life.

  Sweating in his lawyer’s robes, he was seated in the box where his father would have been sitting, if his father had lived, listening to the arguments. He himself had provided hours of vituperation toward Mr. Edwards, which (he could feel this deep in his belly and throat) had crossed the line from heated oratory into something feral, with the breathless approval of the crowds jamming the benches and packing the gallery so full that many Northampton folks had lost their seats to strangers who didn’t want to miss the spectacle. He hated to think of Mercy among them, but she was.

  One of the ministers who had traveled from outside of the valley to give judgment with the council stood up and said to the assembly, in his strongest preaching voice, “Let me remind you of the good things Mr. Edwards has brought you . . .”

  Joseph leapt from his seat, yelling at the top of his lungs. “No! We want no such talk here!” The crowd raised a great din of shouting and catcalls as the dumbstruck minister closed his mouth and shook his head.

  Mr. Edwards listened to the jeers with an air of injured calm. It was the sight of his face, as quiet and ominous as the empty pulpit high above them, that stuck like a splinter in Joseph as, with the voices of hundreds behind him, he shouted down any word of the blessings which had once rained upon the town.

  The church won the case, and Mr. Edwards was dismissed.

  One week after the church vote that decided the fate of her family, Sarah could not sleep. She put on a gown over her shift and found herself sitting in the parlor in the dark. Pierpont, the baby, two and a half months old, was down at last. She could have gone into the study and lit a candle, but she was too tired to read, and she didn’t want to disturb her husband and the children by roaming about the house.

  It was a warm night in late June, and her neck was sweating as she rested her head against the wall, the great nest of her hair unloosed from its combs to fall down her back. She might have expected to be sobbing—the council hearings, so terrible, had been haunting her—but, tonight, she found herself calm. She wondered if her Sally, just two weeks married to Elihu Parsons, was sleeping well. Soon, Mary, too, would be wed, to Timothy Dwight, and gone from the house. Soon, they must all of them be gone, herself and Mr. Edwards as well, to a place that would want them and could support them, although she could not imagine where that might be. Another town outside of this valley, Scotland, or a mission in the wilderness?

  The vote of the church had been so greatly against them: two hundred to twenty, or maybe it was two hundred to twenty-three. Sarah was tired of counting their few friends over and over, and of numbering those among the women who would have supported them, if women had been given a vote. She closed her eyes, and as she did so, she heard a crackling sound like a falling twig. Opening her eyes and, looking down, she saw that a June bug had landed on her lap.

  She was tired enough to stare at it with its hard, brassy back. Its rear leg flicked out as it squatted solidly on her thigh. Sarah watched, almost listening, as the June bug began to let its head protrude and pull back in a rhythmic way. She was pulsing in her own skin as the June bug stroked itself with its antennas, both of them vibrating with something like feeling, thought or sound, although, truly, it was none of these, not even a buzz. She breathed in time with the discourse of the June bug, impossible to comprehend with her rational mind, and impossible to ignore:

  We shall endeavor to give an account of what it is like to be filled with dense exhalation that can reflect less flexible rays, which still appear a little reddish on the hard carapace of our back, or what it feels like to be drenched in fine drops of water dashed up by a stick from a puddle, but the thing that wants a solution is what should cause a reflection to be circular. The blue of mountains at a distance is not made by any rays reflected from the mountains, but from the air and vapors that are between us and them. The mountain occasions the blueness by intercepting all rays that would come from beyond to disturb the color by their mixture. Your beloved has observed this. But, enough science.

  The bellows are burnt, the lead is consumed of fire, the founder melteth in vain, for the wicked are not plucked away.

  Chewing under the floorboards, we have listened so long.

  Sarah had been watching the June bug’s abdomen quiver from within something close to the urgent and exhausted body of emotions with which she had watched Jerusha breathe in her sickbed. Now she sat up with a jolt. Nothing was dying here, except that which was born to die. All that must live would live. She raised a corner of her gown to keep the bug from falling to the floor as she stood, although it clung on tightly. She walked with it, barefoot, into the yard.

  If we stayed, you would not love us, for all that you make love your work and then work to expel it as a small drop which extrudes into a great glistening trail you cast and follow into the air. We address you as a spider as you whisk us from the house. We can’t help but drop here, in our generations. This is the season of our throbbing, flying and hunkering down, as it has been your time to use mind and limbs to imperfectly embody affections which otherwise might never cease grubbing in mold and roots. If you manage to leave us, we will sing after you.

  Sarah didn’t go near the elm tree, but stopped just outside the door of her dark house. The bug was bigger than a blueberry, and she had heard somewhere that, in the exigencies of drought or other famine, a body could roast a June bug in hot ashes, and then peel off the crisped legs, wings, and shell to eat the internal parts, which would be golden and taste like raw molasses.

  Sarah, though, was far from starving. She was anxious and unsettled, haunted by sins that she never found words for, but—belly, life, and spirit—she was full. She shook her skirt and brushed against the insect three times with her fingers before she could get it to drop from her. Once it did, she could not distinguish the shape of it on the damp ground.

  She could feel the dirt, though, cool and uneven under the soles of her feet. There was a breeze. She put a hand on the side of house (which was to be lost), then raised her toes and twisted both heels into the ground. It was hard packed, but when she looked in the morning, she saw two smeared, shallow dents among the purslane and wild mustard, not far from the trail of broken weeds that Rose’s husband had made from the shed to the road as he left before dawn. There was no sign of the June bug, but Sarah’s heel marks were still there.

  After it was over, even years later—when he was married to Mercy, and Rebekah had put up the walls that divided the house in half (along with another addition to her buttery); after he had written his letters of apology—Joseph never accused himself of hypocrisy.

  On a ravishing spring afternoon, when Mercy was out searching for fiddleheads and Rebekah was in the pasture checking on a new calf, he lit a fire in the dark of his study and read the copy he had made of his letter of apology to Mr. Edwards again. He had been, he wrote,

  irreverent, immodest, derisive, magisterial and savoring of haughtiness and levity and such as very ill became me when arguing with you, sir, who was so much my superior in age, station and accomplishments, and who deserved from me great respect and deference for which I humbly and sincerely ask your forgiveness and am very sorry, not only for that it was disrespectful to you, sir, but also a very ill example to others and a tendency to aba
te the respect and reverence which the bystanders ought to have maintained and probably had an influence upon the hearers toward prompting them to a disrespectful and irreverent treatment of you afterwards.

  Joseph, sweating by the fire, meant every word. He felt profound regret for the vehemence with which he had become the leading spokesman for the case against Mr. Edwards. The years seemed to sharpen his regret rather than dull it. He put down the letter and picked up An Humble Inquiry, the despised book that Mr. Edwards had written in the midst of the controversy. It fell open like a broken loaf to the familiar spot where Joseph tried again to comfort himself with a line that Mr. Edwards had written about their grandfather Solomon Stoddard, whose rules for the church membership he had overturned to such turmoil and dissension:

  Certainly we are not obliged to think any man infallible, who himself utterly disclaims infallibility.

  Joseph felt this applied to Mr. Edwards himself. He may have carried himself as if he were infallible, but he never claimed to be. Dry down to his fingertips beside the spitting hearth, Joseph wished himself capable of tears as he ran his eyes over the passage that Mr. Edwards then quoted from their grandfather:

  It may possibly be a fault (says Mr. Stoddard) to depart from the ways of our fathers: but it may also be a virtue, and an eminent act of obedience, to depart from them in some things.

  Some things, he thought. Which things? He had been so wrong in acquiescing—or worse—to the derision and torment of the whole Edwards family. Would he acquit himself better in any other rebellion that arose over the course of his life? He turned to the fire, dangling chilled fingers over the flame.

  It was the second fall after Mr. Edwards was dismissed that the household moved to Stockbridge, where he had been given the position of minister to the small frontier community of colonists, Mahicans, and other Indian people. Mr. Hunt had been so glad to see Mr. Edwards go that he had released Joab Binney to be with his wife, Rose, who was pregnant. As soon as Bathsheba heard the news, she went to Sheriff Pomeroy’s barn and fetched Leah’s box, which she kept hidden under a half-splintered bucket behind a pile of hay. She felt bites of envy and knew that she was facing more loneliness, but, mostly, Bathsheba took up the warping, incomplete relief of Joab’s manumission as her own. She swiped the box clean of hay and dust with an old rag before she opened it, carefully tracing carved vines and the letters of Leah’s name. She left the Bible where it was, but took out the other book and carried it one night to the shed.

  “Here,” she said to Rose, who, spending the night alone, as Joab was needed early and late at the Hunt’s for harvest, had welcomed her in with a cup of hot chicory. Bathsheba placed Aristotle’s Master-Piece carefully on a stump. “Madame Edwards can help you with childbirth, but you might want to know about the secrets of generation, yourself.”

  Rose stared a bit blankly at the book, but said, “Thank you kindly.”

  Bathsheba touched the cover. “It’s not that good. But there are pictures. If it’s not useful, you can sell it.” Bathsheba knew that she herself could never sell the book, not in Northampton. Aristotle’s Master-Piece was still too notorious, although she did not doubt that young men had another copy, or something like it, circulating again in the barns and back fields. She was happy to be rid of it.

  Rose took her hand. “I’ll look at it and think of you.”

  Bathsheba made a wry face. “You sound like Timothy Root.” They laughed. Everyone knew the story of the bad books, even a latecomer like Rose. Bathsheba let go of her hand. “I hear that there are all sorts of people where you’re going. Mahicans, the Mohawk, and the Oneida, at least. Mary Stockbridge said so.” She looked down at the stump where she had sat so often with Leah and Saul, feeling her losses. “If you should happen to catch sight of Saul, say hello.”

  Rose looked at her as if she were having delusions.

  Bathsheba, who was nothing if not practical, added, “And make sure that the Edwardses do not.”

  Mr. Edwards, walking in the woods outside Northampton one afternoon the summer after his people so thoroughly and publicly rejected him, saw a crow flying from shadow to shadow beneath the trees. He stopped to watch it land on a high branch. Half hidden by leaves, it began to call with its whole body, tail lifting and falling as it cawed.

  Another crow cawed in return, and, as Mr. Edwards seated himself beneath a maple, he saw a third jump from a rock to the grass. Crows were birds that had too much traffic with the earth, he thought, as he leaned back and watched a squirrel, summer fat, leaping heavily among the branches with a small clutch of maple leaves in its mouth. He looked up at the radiant mass of leaves, from which the crow on the limb began to sound anguished and, so, too human.

  Mr. Edwards groaned in answer. He thought about his grandparents and daughter buried in this place; David Brainerd, too. He thought of Leah. All his children had been born here, and this was where his wife had come to be, if not fully, then deeply, known to him. He thought about the years of exceeding labor and difficulty in caring for the souls of these people, now so filled with spite, who were witnesses to how he had spent the prime of his life.

  Shifting to try to ease the stiffness in his back, Mr. Edwards noticed a black feather on the ground. The tufts were matted in clumps. He observed the hollow in the white shaft from which the ink would flow if he were to use it as a quill, and, although there were bits of membrane flaking from the tip, it had broken off into a sharp point. Mr. Edwards couldn’t recall that he had ever written with a feather from a crow, but he could see that the line it would make would be very fine.

  He reached for the feather, feeling as if he might be taking something wicked in his hand, but the impression dissipated as the wind came up. The flock of crows was gone. He felt grass and sticks poking through his stockings. He didn’t consciously notice the ants climbing his shoe, but used the feather to scratch his calf. Then he raised it toward the ruffling leaves above him to trace something not yet written into the air:

  Therefore there is room left for no other conclusion than that the primary object of virtuous love is Being, simply considered; or that true virtue primarily consists, not in love to any particular Beings, because of their virtue or beauty, nor in gratitude, because they love us, but in a propensity and union of heart to Being simply considered; exciting absolute benevolence (if I may so call it) to Being in general.

  His legs were itching (later there would be rings of red bumps around his ankles), so he stood up, feeling, despite everything, true union of heart to being. He could not put it into words, but, finding that he did not have to, he dug his heel into a chunk of fallen bark as he blessed the place, along with some of its inhabitants and the whole length of its river valley stretching in peopled fields beneath the hills.

  He kept the feather, which he never cut into a pen.

  It was Martha Root who got the first letter of apology from Joseph, which he sent that summer, just a month after Mr. Edwards had given his farewell sermon at the Northampton meeting house, addressing the professors of godliness, the graceless, those under awakenings, the young people, the children, and also, without naming them, the aged and the bitter. He had taken as his doctrine “Ministers and the people that have been under their care, must meet one another, before Christ’s tribunal, at the day of judgment.” His opinion of who would be judged correct on that great day had not been in doubt. “A contentious people will be a miserable people,” he had said before he ended the sermon, as he never did any other, with a simple, final word: “Amen.”

  Martha read over Joseph’s painstaking recount of the number of times he had seen her on Pudding Lane before she was with child. He admitted that he could not have been certain of how many times he had seen her on their road, and that, on cool consideration, while it was true that he frequently saw her there within the space of that half a year, and more frequently than any other member of her fathe
r’s family, yet as far as he represented this matter beyond the truth, he didn’t suppose that he saw her more than once every week and twice every other week, which didn’t add up to the forty several times he had declared to be his judgment before the council. And he had mentioned particular places where he had seen her, suggestive places such as the corner by the bridge or where the ways met, when he had no particular remembrance of any of those places. For that, so far as he had really injured her, and so far beyond what he had certain knowledge was truth, he was heartily sorry. In observance of the divine rule James 5:16, he confessed that to her, and did humbly and freely ask her pardon and forgiveness, and pledged himself always ready to own what he had written above.

  Martha had never imagined that an apology could be that stingy. Elisha’s had, at least, come with some rabbit skins. She set the letter on the table, took a deep breath, and laughed until her eyes ran and her daughter came trotting into the kitchen to find out the joke. Martha’s mother, who came in from the garden, didn’t have the heart to reprove her for levity.