Spider in a Tree Read online

  There was singing coming from the parlor, but Rebekah Hawley must have been listening intently for the sound of the study door, because she came rustling into the hallway from the kitchen, carrying a sauce boat in one hand. She was not a woman who could wait in a working kitchen without putting a hand in, and she had had enough of the parlor. She took a good look at her husband, eyes red from crying and his wig in his hand, and said, “This way, my dear. Kitchen door.”

  Rebekah, who was not prone to the use of endearments, reminded Mr. Edwards so much of his mother as she nodded gravely at him and drew her husband into the warm room, which smelled of roasting chicken. There were probably others under religious convictions crying in the parlor, but Uncle Hawley was deep in difficulties, and Rebekah was protective of him. She handed Leah the gravy boat, gently situated the wig on his head once again, then rid his coat of powder with a few brisk sweeps of a kitchen towel.

  As she stepped back, Uncle Hawley roused himself to take up her shawl from the back of a chair and hold it open for her. She looked startled but pleased as he wrapped her more tightly than the mildness of the day demanded.

  “Mind the fritters,” she said to Leah, who was basting the chicken with a brass skimmer.

  Leah said, “Madame.” She had found that saying a title aloud was received as well as “yes,” but it saved something in her, too. She was, in fact, already minding the fritters, the chicken, and chopping the last of last year’s parsnips, as well. She also needed to get the rest of the household cups from the parlor to be washed before the Saturday evening sun went down, and, in Mr. Edwards’s household if not everywhere in Northampton, the prohibition on work began.

  As if drawn by her thoughts, a group of little girls stalked and toddled into the room, carrying cups, except for Esther, who could yet barely carry herself. Sarah came in behind them, holding baby Mary, but it was the child of a neighbor, Phoebe Bartlett, who rushed up to Mr. Edwards and hugged his legs. “Oh, my minister,” she said rapturously, coffee dregs slopping out of her cup. Phoebe was four. Sally, Jerusha, and even Esther, fist in mouth, stared at her, affronted. Mr. Edwards patted her head a bit shyly. He had never felt so well-liked.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Bartlett need to talk with you about Phoebe before they go,” Sarah said to her husband, handing the baby to Leah, who had put down the shovel and was standing between the overexcited little girls and the hearth. “She’s been praying constantly in her closet, and may be in a regenerate state.” Phoebe looked modestly at the drops of coffee on the floor. Aunt Rebekah noticed that Uncle Hawley, whose face had shown so little feeling for so long, was regarding the child with a look full of rank envy.

  Mr. Edwards, utterly wrung out, took Phoebe’s cup. She let go of his knees and didn’t look up. Seeing that they had nothing more to say to each other at the moment, Sarah stepped forward. “Go outside, now, girls. The eggs need to be gathered before dark, and the animals need to be fed. Listen to Sally, she knows what to do.”

  The little girls were out the door before she finished speaking. Aunt Rebekah and Uncle Hawley were moving more slowly, so Sarah unpinned the flannel from her husband’s coat and handed it to Aunt Rebekah. “A poultice at the temples,” she murmured. “Or feed it to him with strawberries soaked in Madeira. Sure to aid digestion and revive the spirits.”

  Aunt Rebekah nodded her thanks without asking any questions, slipped the flannel up her sleeve, took her husband’s arm, and said, “Come.” As they opened the back door, Sarah caught a glimpse of their boys sword fighting with rake handles under the cherry trees in the yard while the little girls chased chickens, cheering the eggs.

  Mr. Edwards went back to work on his letter to Mr. Colman about the revival without finishing his dinner. If he tried to make it all the way through the meal, he feared he might fall asleep. He prayed at the table, questioned Sally on the names of the branches of the river that ran out of Eden, and gave Jerusha an easy one about how long Jonah was in the belly of the great fish, while little Esther fed half her biscuit to the baby. He drained his cider, ate a biscuit himself, and came away. Sarah sighed as he got up from the table, then slipped another biscuit into his hand. He did not refuse it.

  In his study, he set the biscuit on a piece of paper. It was an old shopping list for a trip to Boston: cheese, lute strings, chocolate, and Chambers’ Cyclopedia, which he had searched for in vain. He usually folded such scraps into booklets and wrote on the backs, but now he brought a stack of clean foolscap to the center of his desk. He ached to continue the story, but he was hungry. The smells of ham and biscuits were distracting him. He found it hard to believe that he could be tempted by dinner at the moment when, after such a long day, he finally had the chance to get the spirit that had been flooding the lives of his people down on paper for publication, but he was. Putting his hands flat on the desk, he meditated on the verse from Jeremiah that he had recited as grace at the table: Then the Lord put forth his hand, and touched my mouth. And the Lord said unto me, Behold, I have put my words in thy mouth.

  He took a quill, sharpened the end where it had split, and put it down again. He felt as if he were breathing swamp air thick with the sin of enjoying his own righteousness. He gritted his teeth to stop them from chattering with the excitement of the wildfire of conversion among his people, and, especially, of sending the story to the Reverend Mr. Colman. (That famous name rang like a bell, and he kept pulling the rope.) He willed himself to act in humility, for the glory of religion, and tried to bring himself back to the task at hand. He thought of Uncle Hawley, too distraught to maintain control of his own wig. This was a harrowing thought, but Mr. Edwards was, still, so hungry. He thought he could eat sheets of paper with nothing to wash them down but his own copious spit, and then speak books. His mouth was full of desires.

  He broke off a piece of biscuit. He wanted his flesh and mind to quiet so that he could write. He thought of Jerusha’s radiance as the spider let go its thread. He meant to eat slowly, but swallowed before he could stop himself. He took another bite, waited for it to melt on his tongue, then pressed it against the roof of his mouth, eking honey from it. It was subtle and sweet. He thought of Sarah’s hands shaping the dough. That it had actually been Leah did not occur to him. He thought of Abigail Hutchinson’s swollen throat and sure faith. As he swallowed, his hunger abated, and he felt that the act had been sanctified. The natural world was filled with grace so that eating a biscuit was not a carnal indulgence, but as good as a prayer. It was a rare state, but these were unusual times.

  He dipped his quill in the ink and lost himself in his faithful narrative of the surprising work of God in Northampton. He knew himself best as a writer. There was a rhythm to writing that he thought might be tied to the breath, and so, of course, to the soul. Certainly, yes, this was felt in the curl and press of the fingers on a quill, in the way an arm slid along a page, how a sleeve might pick up ink, might smear the words of the careless. Certain ministers—Mr. Edwards was one of them, and the late Solomon Stoddard had been even more so—could write so small as to get the full hours of a sermon onto one or two sides of a most diminutive page. The whole town could be held still by the rise and lean of inked letters, to wait for God in his house.

  To write a letter was to reach for another person in a private, circumspect way. A letter that might be published was still allowed a certain personal expression, a feeling of casual discourse, not to say intimacy, that was rarely approached in a sermon. A letter writer could feel the pull of a true correspondent from the other end of the world. There was that itch, that opening of feeling in privacy, the recalcitrant pleasures of pressing meaning into a surface, of letting a silent version of one’s voice spill recklessly across the page, or in tracing the minutest inflections of beloved matters in careful sentences, composed and reflected upon, then copied again. And then, bravely, uncertainly, irrevocably, sent.

  He finished the letter. After h
e signed and sealed it, he touched one fingertip to a spot on the desk that was sticky with honey, then, like one of his daughters forgetting her manners at the table, put the finger into his mouth.

  In the shed behind the house, Leah spoke from her pallet with the slow syllables of exhaustion. She slept on the floor, with Saul overhead in the loft. They talked through gaps in the thin boards. “Did you listen to the prayers in the parlor, or were you sleeping then, too?”

  He was silent long enough to make her think that he wouldn’t answer. Sometimes, if he was too tired or disliked the question, he didn’t. He was older than she was, but she had been with the family longer. He had worked in Barbados until his hip gave out, then had been shipped to the smaller New England market to bring a new price. When she had first seen him two years before, limping into the yard behind Mr. Edwards’s horse wearing a tow shirt, checked trousers, and a red cap, she had been wary about the stranger she would have to share her quarters with. He had barely spoken, even once they were alone.

  Bathsheba had seen him in the road, and had come that first night with basswood to make a poultice for his hip. Bathsheba, who had never been so far out of the confines of Northampton as to cross the river into Hadley, liked to get a look at anyone newly arrived in town.

  After Bathsheba had made Saul the poultice and been thanked for it, she and Leah watched to be sure he could manage the ladder to the loft. Then the two women had gone outside to stand talking at a spot near the elm where they were visible to neither house nor road. They could hear the stream that ran along the other side of King Street gurgling and slapping its banks. It was good to be upstream from the tanning yard, and upwind, that night, as well. Leaning against the tree, Leah had said, “If he groans and snores all night, I will never rest again.”

  Bathsheba, leaning, too, had smoothed her tucked-up skirts against her opulent belly. “Maybe you won’t want to.”

  Leah had turned and slapped the tree not far from her friend’s head. Bathsheba had jumped and they both laughed, but Leah had meant it when she said, “I ask you not to talk that way.”

  Bathsheba had made no promises, but settled back against the tree as if she planned to stay all night, and, changing the subject, said, “Listen to that,” as a catbird ran through demented versions of a whole woods’ worth of songs.

  When Leah had gone back inside, Saul had, in fact, been snoring, but over time she found that she usually fell asleep before he did, and so was not disturbed. They shared meals, and she came to appreciate his company. Bathsheba kept a speculative eye on them. They looked at each other, not with desire, but with a partial, pressing sense of recognition that had its own commitments.

  She had given up on a response to her question about prayer and started to drift off, when she heard a rustling in the loft, and he said, “I floated.”

  Saul stood beside her near the doorway during family prayers, and now she pictured him floating as he listened, turning very slowly like a spoke of a wheel until his feet were in the air and his head over the fire. She asked him, “Why was that?”

  He sighed, and she knew that she would have to let him sleep soon. He said, “I’ve got no use for God.”

  Leah caught her breath. She thought every day about reaping the promises. It was in her like anger, shrouded, hot and deep. It was scripture: whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased. That was one of the promises not everybody seemed to hear. She had been thinking to raise the idea to him of joining the church, and to ask his advice about how to approach Sarah about it, unless he thought it best to try Mr. Edwards himself. Now there seemed to be no point to starting that conversation. She sank into the sound of both of them breathing, then told him, “Fair enough.” Which was as good as good-night.

  No work was to be done the next day because it was the Sabbath, not even the making of beds, but young Joseph Hawley awoke to the rasp of his father grinding a knife. He’s forgotten, the boy thought. His mind has wandered that far.

  Joseph fell back to sleep and dreamed of following the birch bark torches at night to go with his brother Elisha and hunt eels in the river. As they jabbed at the water, a sharp sound broke his sleep.

  Joseph, who had moved upstairs to the attic at the approach of spring, put on his clothes for the cold trip to the privy. He climbed down the stairs and walked quietly past Elisha on his cot in the kitchen. Sometimes they slept up there together, but lately Elisha had wanted to stay closer to their mother and father. The fire had been kindled, so he knew that his mother had already gone out to feed the cows. Only chores essential to sustaining life were not sins on Sunday. The grinding had stopped, but the door to the parlor, where his parents slept in their fine bed, was open. When he glanced in, he saw his father gasping on the floor, his chest wet, his eyes glazed, and his mouth leaking blood. In the instant before Joseph screamed for Mama and pulled off his shirt to try and stop the blood, he knew that his father was after the answer to the question of whether he was truly, finally, saved.

  Mr. Edwards sat beside the woodshed on the scarred stump the family used to chop wood. There was no sign of Jerusha’s spider. He held the pages of his sermon against his knees in the cold morning wind, but he already knew it well—text, doctrine and application—so that all he needed to do to prepare was to open himself like a hunk of ash wood before the strikes of the Lord.

  A black bug so tiny that he thought at first it was a comma crawled across the sermon. It sat still for a moment while he stared at its wispy legs and then vanished so quickly that he was unable say whether it flew or jumped. Suddenly, he heard a rustling in the thickets of seedlings that were trying to bring the woods back to take over the garden. He thought it was an old porcupine that he had seen pounding through the woods on the way to its stony hill riddled with dens, indifferent to the amount of noise it might make, dragging its bristling tail. But porcupines were slow, and whatever this was, it was approaching fast.

  He had just formed the idea—dogs—when his young Hawley cousins astonished him by breaking through the thicket. Joseph’s half-tucked shirt had a dark stain rising from the hem and Elisha had on only his woolens and shoes under an overlarge cloak now covered with brambles.

  They pelted into the yard at such speed that Joseph was already hard up against the stump, pulling Mr. Edwards’s coat, gasping, “Please, oh, please.”

  Elisha, a little behind, ran into the axe handle and knocked the blade from where it had been lodged in the stump. As it thudded to the ground, the preacher rose, and Joseph, giving a moan too deep to come from the throat of a boy, let go of his coat to snatch at his brother and keep him from falling.

  Mr. Edwards slipped the sermon into the pocket of his coat and put a hand on each of their shoulders. “Kinsmen,” he said, thinking to shore them up with this honorific as they wavered back in forth in front of him, unable to return to speech. “Boys. It is the Sabbath. Why are you in my garden?”

  Joseph looked at him desperately, then gave his brother a shove toward the house, where Jerusha had just emerged through the back door with scraps for the chickens. Elisha broke away and staggered a few steps in that direction, then started crying in the middle of the dusty yard. Jerusha, always tenderhearted, dropped the crusts and came to him.

  Joseph moved close to Mr. Edwards again, twisting his mouth before he spoke softly, as if to keep the words from his brother. “It’s my father. He’s cut his throat. My mother says to come.”

  Mr. Edwards reached for the boy and pulled him close, overwhelmed by the impulse to protect him. In that first stunned moment, he thought of web folded into a bit of flannel. Sarah’s web had not worked. He thought of God, then of his own father, and then his mother, whose sister Rebekah was now asking him to come. “Does he live?”

  The boy gave a look of such wretchedness that Mr. Edwards was sorry to made him speak at all. “Yes.”

  Mr. Edwards di
dn’t ask him anything else, but held on to him and called out to his daughter, “Jerusha! Take Elisha into the house and tell Saul to get over to the doctor’s and fetch him to Mr. Hawley’s. Tell him to take your mother’s horse.”

  Jerusha, five years old to Elisha’s eight, already had her arm around the boy’s waist and was leading him toward the kitchen door and her mother’s sure help.

  It calmed Mr. Edwards to witness Jerusha’s tenderness. Her example brought him back to his own duty to young Joseph, who still waited before him, white-lipped and swaying. Mr. Edwards had no son, and here was this boy, as in the book of Daniel, a child in whom there was no blemish, standing there to do his duty under a blow that would have knocked many of his elders to the ground.

  Mr. Edwards pushed gently on Joseph’s shoulders so that the boy sat on the stump, dropping as if the wind had been knocked out of him. Looking down at the boy half collapsed on the stump, Mr. Edwards remembered Uncle Hawley’s frantic agonies in the study, his obliviousness to reassurance. Also, the happy look on the man’s face one morning many years ago when he had sauntered down from the porch of his house, climbed onto his ox, and Mr. Edwards had put little Joseph before him on the animal’s back. The thought of it wrenched Mr. Edwards’s heart and made his gut burn.

  The boy was swaying, not keeping perfectly still. He didn’t look at the preacher, but down at the axe in the dirt, or at nothing but the dirt itself.

  “Joseph,” Mr. Edwards said, “son.” As if the boy were his own.