Spider in a Tree Page 7

  Elisha knew that devils roamed both the earth and the waters, hunting human souls, and that the ground itself might bleed where a murderer walked. He suspected that his father’s death had been violence enough to excite monsters and marvels, although possibly not this far from the house. He endured the hungry mosquitoes covering his neck without moving or flinching. When a prayer started to rise, it didn’t come from him.

  The swimmer in the river was chanting in a woman’s voice, reciting the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostle’s Creed.

  Elisha couldn’t have been more astonished if his knife had started to preach in his hand. Would a devil pray? He dropped the knife and gripped the dirt, caught with the wild fear that the figure in the river was his mother, chasing him with prayers. The voice that was not at all his mother’s was very near him, saying what he thought was a Psalm.

  “Deliver me, oh my God, out of the hand of the wicked, out of the hand of the unrighteous and cruel man.”

  He heard her pass him, then stop and clamber out onto the bank. He held himself low and still as he heard her strike a flint, and stared through the flash as the Edwardses’ servant Leah stood on the riverbank in her wet shift, cupping her hand over a lit pine knot as she reached into a hollow and brought out a hidden pair of shoes. Was she a witch? He had heard old stories about witches and water, but he had seen her swimming the same as him, only farther and better. Maybe she was a runaway. There were ads about escaped slaves in the Boston paper all the time. If he had been standing, he might have stepped forward, but he stayed on his belly in the dirt.

  She never saw him as she put on her shoes, doused the light, and began to walk back toward town, murmuring the Ten Commandments as if she were a pious white mother seated in a parlor with a child to teach upon her lap. She didn’t follow the stream that would lead between Pleasant and Pudding into the center of town, and then fork up King Street. Like him, she chose the dark path through the meadows. Still, walking to town was not running away. He watched her go.

  A small bug with a hard carapace and threadlike legs crawled the length of Elisha’s arm, indifferent to swimmers and prayers. It followed his shoulders to the loose neck of his shirt, skirted the feeding mosquitoes with its solemn, methodical pace to take a meditative position, shining back aslant, in the hidden, scaly region behind Elisha’s unwashed ear. It clung there, vertical to the ground, and preached as the boy waited unhearing until he thought he was alone in the night:

  You killed a mosquito when it was sluggish and sated with your blood, then washed the stain in the river without ever knowing it was there. You want a life of adventure? Dip yourself in the wet from the fresh crushed belly of a mosquito.

  Mourning is crisp enough to eat like a leaf. Let the birds have the berries and chew where you are, boy. I who thought to leave my hungers now do little but gnaw. It’s a short life, and anything that walks in sap has understood the adhesions of sweetness.

  Elisha groped for his own shoes, then began his own walk home, the bug still clinging to his head.

  I won’t lay eggs to split and wriggle in your ear. I’m wishing vigor to you and the larvae, both. Insect wishes whir and crack under everything. I might have kissed you that morning and left my breastbone whole, but I was so intent on carving the world into an eternal meal that I had nothing to offer you, then.

  I’m riding you so lightly. My feet taste your skin. I won’t get greedy and scuttle. You might feel me, and that’s not a thing I can afford to want. Still, I’ll crawl a little higher, into the fine streets and bridges of your hair. A mosquito will keep biting under water, even as it drowns. Am I saved? Are you? You smell of the river.

  When he got back to the house on Pudding Lane, Elisha paused, sobbing now, before the kitchen door. He scratched his head, fingers brushing against the bug, which opened its armored back in buzzing flight.

  Chapter 4: August 1735

  As Mr. Edwards rode through the meadows on the outskirts of town, he raised his eyes to the soft, green rise of Mount Tom. A few crows rose from the dust in front of him. Two took up perches on a pair of dead trees. As he watched them, it came to him that ravens fed on rotted carcasses just as devils fed on the souls of the wicked. Since Uncle Hawley’s death, which had been dominating his mind and troubling his sleep for nearly three months, he’d heard of other suicide attempts and unexpected fits of melancholia. Devils had descended on Hampshire County and stomped out the revival. Satan raged against God’s close presence and used the vilest means to stop the awakening from spreading, but he could not stamp out the great good that the awakening had done. Still, the Northampton congregation had become stolid and indifferent. Last night in his study, Sarah had shocked him by saying she felt he was in the danger of succumbing to melancholia himself. Now, as his horse stepped alertly, ears up and forward, Mr. Edwards took up that possibility by letting his mind spin out the question of how true grace was to be distinguished from the experience of devils.

  The devil was once holy, but when he fell, he became perfectly wicked. And if those qualities and experiences which the devils are the subjects of had nothing of the nature of holiness in them, then they could be no certain signs that persons who have them are holy or gracious. Devils clearly believed in the one holy, sin-hating God, so that in itself was no evidence of grace. Mr. Edwards began ticking off all of the things that damned men and devils would experience on judgment day, which therefore could be no sure sign of grace. Applying logic to dread revived him.

  As he rode Pleasant along a cornfield, the crows suddenly left the stalks in a dense flock, troubled away from their thieving by an onslaught of boys. The boys, mostly Roots and Pomeroys by the looks of them, came hurtling fast from the direction of the river, pelting the air with fists full of stones. As Mr. Edwards saw the Hawley boys running through the corn, he felt his heart clutch as if they were once again hurtling into his yard to cry out that their father had cut his throat.

  Most of boys stopped running when they saw Mr. Edwards, who had to work to control his mind and his horse, but Elisha, the smallest, hurled another rock at the circling flock. The boy stumbled to the ground and came up screeching, holding a crow’s body high in the air. Mr. Edwards, who had seen nothing fall from the sky, was in some doubt as to the cause of the crow’s death, but there was no doubting the boy’s pride as he claimed his prize. There were so many crows in the fields that summer that the town had put a bounty on their corpses.

  Elisha, still brandishing the body of the crow, led the rest of the boys away from the road. Most touched their hats to acknowledge their minister, but Elisha did not glance his way. He seemed much more frantic than he had been before his father had died. His older brother, Joseph, was lagging behind. He stopped and waved at Mr. Edwards, disturbing the crows, which seemed inclined to settle back on the corn in the wake of the other boys, who were dropping abruptly out of sight in the stalks, stooping, no doubt, to gather more stones with which to earn their shillings. Joseph, standing alone, waved again and called out something impossible to hear. Mr. Edwards couldn’t face turning his horse to walk through the corn to speak to the boy, just then, so, belly twinging with guilt, he raised his hat, then clicked his tongue to urge the horse into a canter, away from the cultivated places to the woods.

  The woods were swarming with mosquitoes, so he found a clearing where he could kneel in the sun. All around him, grasses spiked off into seed heads, gold and dry. Berries turned white behind small flowers. His knees crushed low leaves that smelled of lemon. Green shimmered everywhere, but instead of resuming his analysis of devils or marking the resemblance between the shining field and a virtuous soul, he knelt there, clutching his gut, fighting despair.

  Until Uncle Hawley died, the people had been with him. Now, he could barely keep them awake. Perhaps if Mr. Colman in Boston published his account of the revival, it might stir people’s souls again, but, as yet, there had been no
word.

  All around the clearing, leaves were shushing as if their surfaces were mouths. Some loosened and dropped as, even in August, they do. Crows flapped by, first one, then three together, making their percussive, conversational cries. Mr. Edwards felt another clutch of worry for the Hawley boys; for Elisha, who seemed to think that he could knock every bird from the sky, and especially for Joseph, who looked so lost as he stood waving in the field, and was so quick when questioned about matters such as where the Israelites had pitched their tents when the Philistines gathered their armies at Aphek.

  Christ expressly used ravens as types of the devil in the parable of the sower and the seeds. Perhaps he could add this to a sermon, directed to Joseph, to all the boys, who were spending so much time hunting crows in the fields. Mr. Edwards received the thought as a gift. He fumbled in his great coat, but he had no paper, quill, or ink. Denied the comfort of making notes, he felt a spasm of putrefaction in his nether parts. The charcoal he had been taking in his porridge seemed to do him no good. He was not approaching prayer, and bugs had followed him into the sun.

  The crack and thud of a tree coming down made him realize that he had been hearing the sound of an axe. Glancing over toward the next rise, he saw Bernard Bartlett and two of his sons working their wood lot. It occurred to Mr. Edwards that he might set his man Saul to work chopping wood, too, if Sarah could spare him from the fields. Although they were often slow about it, the townspeople supplied the Edwards family with wood as part of his living as their minister. If Saul did some chopping, as well, Mr. Edwards would have enough to spare that he could send a cartful to the Hawleys to season for winter. It was a small thing after such a terrible loss.

  Crows cawed above him. He thought that they, hunted themselves, might be harrying an owl, as they often drew together in daylight to do. Mr. Edwards suddenly remembered the story of his great aunt, who had killed her own seventeen-year-old son in his bed, and that of his great uncle, her brother, who had killed yet another of his sisters in front of the hearth. Both had used axes. Mr. Edwards’s grandmother was sister to them both.

  The stories had been half whispered to him by a boy his age—Joseph Hawley’s age now—who had been the family’s slave. Once or twice, hard trouble had been referred to indirectly, with evasive walls of praise, when Mr. Edwards’s father had spoken about his own father, who had married into that family. Now he pictured the murder before the hearth with a terrible freshness fed by the image of Uncle Hawley bleeding to death in his own parlor. Both deaths had been witnessed by children.

  He shivered in the sun, thinking of Joseph holding on to his coat in that parlor. The boy had stayed close behind him as if they were still on the horse. His mother had to take him by the shoulders and lead him bodily into the kitchen to give Mr. Edwards room to kneel. Remembering the stillness of Joseph’s face as he had been pulled from the room, Mr. Edwards thought again of his own father. Timothy Edwards’s mother had been pregnant with another man’s child when she had married his father. Later, she had threatened to cut her husband’s throat, sister of two murderers that she was. It had all come out in the divorce proceedings. Timothy Edwards, their eldest boy, had given testimony against his mother. Mr. Edwards hated the thought of this public ravaging, although he knew it had been right. He felt panicked, as if the hoarse calls of the birds had separated from their throats and wrapped his own. The children had been taken from the woman, and if anyone knew what became of her, he had never been told.

  He slapped a mosquito that had settled on his eyelid. The slights of mortal suffering were soon over for a bug. He knelt, bitten and swatting, thinking again of Joseph, so like himself as a boy, stopped in the field. When human life was too much for a man to bear, what could be asked of boys? Convulsed by a shudder of nausea, Mr. Edwards lost all thought.

  Bernard Bartlett looked up from his chopping to see Mr. Edwards on his hands and knees, vomiting bile black as charcoal all over the ground. Mr. Bartlett dropped his axe and rushed through the woods, his sons running behind him. They lifted Mr. Edwards onto his horse to lead him home, calling the boys in from their hunting in the cornfield to walk alongside ready to catch him, should the need arise. Joseph felt hysterical at the sight of Mr. Edwards slumped helplessly on his horse, but he marshaled his courage and kept close as he walked so that his shoulder braced his minister’s knee. Elisha, by turns running ahead and falling behind, was equally serious, although of less actual help.

  Later, in the tavern, Bernard Bartlett told the whole bar that when Mr. Edwards fell sick, he had given a raucous cry like that of a crow.

  “Devils are everywhere in these parts these days,” he added. No one declared him in the wrong.

  Sarah put her husband, who often suffered disturbances of the stomach, to bed. When she joined him after the children were asleep, she felt heat and misery along the whole sweaty length of him. She lay awake much of the night, trying to think what might help heal her husband’s grief, which would also ease her own. Mr. Edwards seemed much restored in the morning. Sarah, who didn’t trust his abrupt equanimity, wanted him to rest in bed badly enough to consider giving him a double dose of anise and rhubarb to further trouble his bowels, but knew her duty and did not do it.

  Late in the morning, Sarah sat on a stool stringing beans as Mr. Edwards paced back and forth in front of her in the hot kitchen, reading a draft of his sermon. “But this very much spoils the beauty of the public worship to see men to and fro in the assembly sleeping in the time of public service. ’Tis a very disagreeable and unlovely sight and will tend very much to the prejudice of religion amongst us, and especially to be a stumbling block to the unconverted.” He lowered the manuscript. “Honestly, do they not know that I can see them snoring? They have returned to their sins like a dog to its vomit.”

  Sarah snapped a bean in two, “That reminds me, did you inhale your birch smoke this morning? I mixed charcoal in with your oats, but it might not be enough.”

  Mr. Edwards (who, had, in fact, forgotten) did not relish being reminded that he was suffering from a bad case of griping in the guts. “That’s hardly the point, Sarah,” he said, his belly rumbling unpleasantly, just as Mrs. Clapp, carrying a dish covered with a cotton napkin, knocked at the kitchen door.

  “Leek stew,” she announced, pushing a mound of beans aside to set the dish on the table. “Good for what ails you. Have a bowl, sir.” Mr. Edwards, not poised in the best of times, was hit by a wave of nauseous cramps. He half bowed, quoting scripture on his way out the door. “No thank you, Madame.”

  Sarah was on her feet, resisting the urge to glare at her husband’s back in favor of gesturing Mrs. Clapp toward the seat of honor at the head of the table. The last thing they needed was for a member of the church to take offense when she was attempting a kindness. “What beautiful leeks, and so early, too.”

  Mrs. Clapp took a seat, looking thoughtfully after Mr. Edwards as he rushed toward the jakes. “What ails your husband?”

  Sarah was trying her best, but she did not like the woman’s tone. She put down the leeks and quoted the Bible. “His mind is entertained with meat to eat that others know not of.”

  In May in the grip of the awakening, Mrs. Clapp might have burst into tears and begun to praise God at the sound of a Bible verse. Now, though, she rolled her eyes.

  “Comfrey tea and a poultice for his belly.”

  Sarah gathered herself and controlled her temper. She didn’t know how much of the conversation with her husband Mrs. Clapp had overheard, but decided to count her blessings not to be discussing dogs and vomit as they pertained to the congregation. She took a small breath, then spoke sweetly. “Shall we sample a bit of your soup?”

  Late that afternoon, Sarah found herself—irritable from worry, Mrs. Clapp, and lack of sleep—chasing her chickens. Too foolish to come in out of the rain, they were splashing across the yard on their splayed, scaly
feet. Finally, one forgot to run and started pecking the muddy ground, so she grabbed it and tossed it squawking into the henhouse.

  “I should leave you out all night to feed the foxes,” she yelled at a particularly agile hen with a leaf caught in its wattle, which darted past Sarah’s sodden skirts into the barn.

  She stomped in after it to find Saul stacking hay with a steady rhythm, ignoring the hen, which was settling down on loose hay with satisfied little clucks. The sight of its sudden contentment made Sarah feel wild, but she could hardly scream at a chicken in front of a servant, so she turned to him. “That’s not all the hay, is it?”

  He stopped stacking. “No, Madame, it’s all cut, but we had to leave some in the field. The rain.”

  Sarah usually made an effort to give her directives in a mild, reasonable way, but now she was furious. “You should have finished. I find that slothful.” She tried to wring the anger out of her voice, but it was no use. Feeling polluted herself, she said, “Saul, you must conquer the pollutions that are so strong in your people.”

  Saul did not answer, but simply looked at her, letting her see every bit of hard weather in his face. Christians had the duty to point out each other’s sins and errors, but he knew he had no leave to speak of hers. All she had given him to work with that day was a team of borrowed oxen and Timothy and Simeon Root, a pair of sly cousins who had staked out a tiny corner of the field in which to do their cocky, slovenly, lackadaisical work. They had fled at the first sign of rain, and still she had stopped Saul in his stacking—hungry, dirty, and wet—to speak of his people in a way that would never cause any good work to be done in the field or in the soul. The insult burned in places where he had thought all feeling was gone. He didn’t speak or nod, but turned back to his work until Sarah, ashamed for reasons that were obscure to her, gathered the hen and left the barn. Then he spit on the hay-covered ground.