Spider in a Tree

by Susan Stinson

  He didn’t speak of this, or of much of anything, to Leah for two nights. On the third, Leah swept out the kitchen hearth, went to the back-house, and sat down to shell beans. Saul was already up in his loft, but, tired as he was, he climbed down the ladder, sat across from her on a stump chair padded with a folded blanket, and said, “Mrs. Edwards was mad about the wet hay.”

  Leah looked at him. “There’s always something to be mad about.”

  The expression on his face made her think that he might be about to curse or cry, so she got up to fetch the stone jug. She poured spruce beer into a wooden cup that he had scraped and carved over many nights until it was smooth to the lips and decorated with faces that were all round eyes and deep lines for each nose. She poured beer into her own carved cup and sat back down before the purple-specked beans and their split, shed skins. She waited a long time for him to talk. He drank and said nothing, until finally he shook his head again, swallowed big, then made a bow in her direction and got up from the stump to climb the ladder to his loft to go to sleep.

  The next morning, Leah cleaned a pig’s foot for pie while Sarah kneaded the bread. Thinking of Saul’s raw silence, she said, “Madame, may I speak to you?”

  Sarah was finding her dough a bit flat. Still, she and Mr. Edwards had both slept soundly the night before, so she pushed into the loaf and said pleasantly, “Yes, Leah, what is it?”

  Leah scraped the hoof and risked her question. “I feel an urge in my heart to join the church.” Not a question, after all. She kept working the hoof.

  Sarah looked down. The only sounds in the kitchen were the spitting fire, the thump of her hand in the dough, and the rasp of Leah’s knife. She thought that her servant’s intensity about the task with the pig’s foot seemed almost like criticism, and as she gazed through her lashes at Leah’s moving hands, she did not fight the recognition that she deserved it. Neither did she articulate why, not to God, and not to herself, but she punched the dough and considered her duty. Finally she said, “Undertake to study the Bible. I will tell the girls to help you. And I will talk with Mr. Edwards.”

  “Thank you, Madame.” Leah had learned the alphabet in the household of her first enslaver, but she never used it, and had largely forgotten. She had a gift, though, for remembering passages of scripture. She had the sixty-ninth psalm with its waters and deep mire pounding in her head, and had come today ready to recite it. Instead, she put her full weight behind the knife. Madame had not said yes, but this was an opening.

  In the afternoon, Leah took some eggs to the Pomeroys and helped her friend Bathsheba lug the washtub into the yard as she reported on her conversation with Sarah. “So, what we have to do now is apply ourselves to the study of religion.”

  “Well, now that most of them have left off crying in the Edwardses’ parlor every night, there should be room for us to take it up.” She laid more wood under the tub.

  Leah shook her head at her friend’s hard tone. She knew it was earned, but it would not help them in the study of religion, which she intended to do in earnest.

  Bathsheba poured another bucket of water in and said, “It has got to be at least as profitable an employment as beating dirt from bed linen with a stick.”

  In the morning, Leah went to the barn to milk. She sat beside the brown cow with the speck of white on the right side of its nose, rubbing the udders to bring down the milk. When the animal swung its head to look at her, Leah leaned forward and waved flies away from the corners of its eyes with her cheek pressed against its loud, warm belly. She felt strangely moved by the gurgles, the circling flies, the slowness of the milk, the emptiness of the pail, the calmness of the eyes, the darkness of the barn, and the glints of light on the dust that rose in a stately haze from the scattered hay and grain in the raked-over mud to the weathered crossbeams above the wooden ladder to the loft. She wanted to sleep, but she wanted more to climb. She rose, and, stepping around the empty bucket, went up the ladder hand over hand into the hayloft. The cow raised its head to watch, and the flies, disturbed from their sojourns on mounds of dung, swarmed more thickly into the slant of light.

  Ignoring the rustling in corners and the lowing of the cows below, Leah dropped on her back in the fresh-stacked hay while the flies settled into stillness in cracks and flat places on the rough plank walls. She took off her shoes and let her bare feet rest on the scattered pads of loose hay on the weathered boards. There were spiders in the corners, gnats shaking the webs. Moths gnawed and flew above the cribs full of oats and corn. Leah smelled the sharp, smothering, awakening smell of hay, then she felt a Bible verse pulse through her as if she had taken into her body a ball of light the size of a fist.

  I have digged and drunk water; and with the soles of my feet have I dried up all the rivers of the besieged places.

  Still on her back, Leah remembered that her mother had taught her never to put her feet on a chair, and never to do another person the disrespect of pointing her soles toward them. Her feet had power. She kicked hay aside and began to stomp, reckless of noise and the shaking of the boards. Straw scratched against her legs and caught on her hem, but she didn’t stop. She beat the floor of the hay loft with the soles of her feet until the blood in her veins slowed to a seep.

  If any do thirst, let them come to me.

  A voice seemed to rise from the cracks between the boards. Stilling her feet, she heard a rustling below her, as if something, maybe a rat, were coming through the hay. She sat up, but could find nothing, until a brush on her forearm made her look down to see the shine of a spider’s abdomen dragging across her rolled-up sleeve and disappearing around her elbow. Feeling skittish, she lifted her arm but could not see the back of it. There was no tickle of legs through the fabric of her sleeve. She didn’t want to try to kill it, for hadn’t she heard scripture and been thinking of her mother, both things to mark a moment apart from ordinary life? Besides, attacked, the spider might bite, so instead of slapping, she brought her arm near her face, pursed her lips, and blew.

  The spider, the color of tar and old honey, rounded the top of her arm. It stopped there, raising bristled front legs. Leah blew directly at it, and just as she was fighting the idea of it crawling across the edge of her mouth onto her teeth, it crouched and jumped to where her skirt folded over her lap.

  Leah, losing sight of it, took a breath. “Trickster,” she whispered. As she relaxed, the spider appeared again, climbing her dress, coming upside down over a breast, heading toward the skin of her neck.

  Leah took up a handful of straw and knocked the spider to the floor of the loft, but it righted itself and jumped onto the straw in her hand. She flung the straw away. The spider landed under the small heap, but climbed out and crouched. She blocked its jump with one of her shoes, coaxed the spider onto the sole, then shook it off into a crack between the boards of the loft. It might have fallen, but, instead, dangled high above the bucket and the cow looking up from below.

  Leah put her shoes on and watched as the spider, still in the crack, walked the thin edge of board, coming toward her. She did not know what it wanted, could never know. This, in itself, was revelation. Her feet and legs prickled with how much she couldn’t know. She shivered, then sat utterly still, praising, thanking and fearing God while the spider came with inhuman persistence along the board. Finally, she bent over the crack and hummed into it. She made the sound, which was almost a whistle, with parted lips. The spider dropped from the loft, throwing a strand of web that glistened like a piece of her own hair.

  Leah came down the ladder, filled with God and suddenly thirsty. The cow gave her more than enough milk to fill the bucket and also to fill the tin cup which hung on a nail for anyone needing to drink. Leah gulped it down, frothy and warm, keeping her eye out for the spider, but it had gone to a secret place, or else was hiding in plain sight as a dappled spot on the hay that littered the ground.

 
Saul was spreading a stack of damp hay to dry in the field when he saw Leah coming across the pasture. She was carrying a packet of food and a bucket of water, and she had her hair tied in a white cambric cloth. The hem of her skirt was tucked up in her waistband so that the bottom edge made a scallop moving cleanly above the ground. She had a beautiful motion, as if she carried the promise of fall’s wheat rippling through her as she strode forward, bringing a meal, watching him.

  The sun was high, so they went to eat in the shade of a maple. They sat among its roots at the edge of the common woodlot, which was the only place for those without a lot of their own to get wood for ten miles around. All the wood rights had recently been voted to revert to the proprietors—the founding families of the town and their designees—in ten years’ time. What could be owned, what should be shared, and who decided were questions that Saul muscled around in his head most every working day, which was every day except for the Sabbath, fast days, and thanksgivings, when sometimes he prayed about them, too. Saul prayed like he worked, not with belief or hope, but with a percussive strength that the gods of this valley demanded of him. He and Leah thanked the Lord before they ate their pig’s foot and bread.

  Leah dipped the cup into the bucket, took a drink, and then said, “Something happened over the milking this morning.”

  Saul wiped his hands on the grass and sat back to listen.

  As she told him about the spider and the verses of scripture she had heard, wind was blowing in the maple leaves, which crackled like fat in a skillet. Saul looked to the hay, which was stirring. Leah knew she had to tell him. “I want to join the church.”

  He didn’t even shake his head, but as she suffered his silence, she felt that he was standing before her as he did during prayers in the parlor, worshipping nothing. A verse of scripture came to her, and she said it aloud, although whether it was a warning for him or her, she could not tell: “How much she hath glorified herself and lived deliciously, so much torment and sorrow give her: for she saith in her heart, I sit a queen, and am no widow, and shall see no sorrow.”

  Saul closed his eyes as she spoke. When she finished, he opened them slowly, then stood, knees stiff and back aching. The wind had calmed. He gave her his hand, and she took it and rose. He picked up the half-empty bucket, then began to walk to his work. He didn’t have anything to say about her vision. Leah was disappointed but not surprised. As she caught up to him, he was looking back at a dragonfly darting among midges at the edge of the woods. It made her hope. Leah had learned from listening to Mr. Edwards that inclining toward beauty was a sign of a soul receiving and embracing the savior that devils and the damned never see.

  Saul shifted the bucket in his hand. “I need to learn how to stay up in water. Will you teach me?”

  She blinked, but did not hesitate. “Yes.”

  That night she made him turn his clothes inside out to discourage ghosts, then led the way to the Mill River, silently saying prayers to appease the bears and bobcats, as well as the sleeping people of Northampton and their fiercely jealous God. She kicked in the water and called aloud to the father with his hallowed name.

  Saul thrashed as she gave him instruction in swimming. After he made it back to the bank, he watched intently, as, neck deep in the river, she found her footing and drank.

  The next afternoon, still in a heightened state, Leah cleaned the study. The cut hay in the field was not yet dry, so Saul was out harvesting corn. Madame was husking with her daughters and neighbors on stumps and chairs set in the yard. Leah finished her sweeping and approached Mr. Edwards’s reading table, where books were gathering dust.

  There were no windows in the study, but Leah could hear the girls and women speaking and laughing over the sounds of ripping husks and scraping cobs. As she touched the big, leather-bound Bible, she thought of the pleasures of corn husking: opening the corn, the silk and mess of it, the pearly kernels full of sweetness. She could, she knew, join that work, and would go when summoned to bring cakes and drinks out to the ladies gathered in the sunlight, surrounded by the dance of gnats slowed and made fewer by the season’s cooling air.

  She let the Bible’s pages drop as lightly as husks to wherever they opened naturally. The scripture was printed in the center of each page, surrounded by ruled paper covered with Mr. Edwards’s handwriting. She thought to try to recognize the letters, or maybe even words, without any knowledge or context, nothing read aloud to leave a path of sound from which to trace their shapes. When the book fell open, though, she found that the words, printed and handwritten, weren’t speaking at all, but had settled into a backdrop for a dead fly. It was a portent, like the spider.

  She tried to read it, thicker than paper, flattened and still. The small head was all red eyes, which were divided into facets like jewels cut for a ring. One leg was stretched out straight—jointed, twiggy, and delicate; the other was in the familiar crouch, pulled up close to the soft, lint-gray body which had leaked yellow at the shoulder and out the back. There was only one antenna.

  Leah was bent low over the table, her hands framing the page, but now she stood up straight, no longer touching the open book, looking down at the fly from her full height. What she saw was a small, dead body with big red eyes. It was a nuisance, a letter written in skewed wings that said that she might die sooner than she thought, that she too might be caught in the thoughtless closure of a book. Anything that lived in the sky might look down or not, might see Leah or not, might wait until she had died to play with her bones, or might have other business with greater beings than her and never open the world to this page at all, if the world were a book. If the world were a wind, everything would buzz. If the world were a fly, people might speckle its wings or gather on dung in hopes of the coming of vast, rubbing legs or the damp paths of the young or the glories of being swallowed into one urgent day of god-swatted life.

  Leah was still reading the fly against silk strands of words when Mr. Edwards opened the door behind her, letting in afternoon light.

  “Lawful heart!” Leah swung around to face him. She had been hoping to find him, but now she was nervous.

  “Ah, yes, Leah, I am glad you are here.” He approached her curiously. He followed the teachings of his grandfather Stoddard, minister in Northampton for sixty years before him, and, so, unlike many churches outside their valley, did not require that a new member give a spoken profession of an experience of grace before the congregation in order to join. Still, bearing witness to accounts of such experiences, no matter how humble, was one of his most sacred and sustaining duties. It was especially dear to him now that he had had to use the pulpit to condemn sleeping in church, advocating that good Christians jog the slumberer’s arm, and that no persons so jabbed should take offense. Sarah felt that the sermon had not been well received. He very much wanted to hear what his slave had to say. “Mrs. Edwards advises me that I should question you about your faith.”

  Leah grasped the broom more firmly to remind herself that she had been cleaning, and both of them looked down at his Bible open on the reading table, the fly dead on the scrawl of notes. For several moments, they gazed at it together in silence.

  Finally, he said, “You can’t read, can you? I have been neglectful. The girls must teach you.”

  Leah wanted to tell him about reading the fly, and how the spider had made her tremble yesterday morning in the barn. She wanted to talk about how she had trusted in God as the boards of the hayloft had groaned aloud under her feet, and try to explain how the touch of the spider skittering on her skin had felt like reading each of her names, known and secret, in the language in which it had been given, in the book of life. She wanted to tell him, and he was looking at her openly, eagerly, thirsty himself for signs of grace come to end this dying time in Northampton.

  She was about to speak when little Jerusha knocked on the door frame. When her father turned to beckon h
er in, she came close enough to Leah to brush against her skirts. “Mama said that she would have you go and fetch more corn with the hand cart.”

  Corn. Leah nodded, and Mr. Edwards walked to his desk, glancing at the pile of papers there. Jerusha noticed the fly and (the image of her efficient mother) pulled a handkerchief from her sleeve which she used to knock it to the floor. The body lodged against the bristles of the broom with other such dust. Then, five-year-old that she was, Jerusha squatted down to look more closely. “If it were still alive, we could capture it under that bowl and name it Zacharias.”

  “Tell your mother that Leah will be there soon,” Mr. Edwards said. “I need to ask her about sin and divine love.”

  The possessiveness of the child, the casual claiming, made Leah glad that she had not spoken. By the time they finished in the study, Mr. Edwards believed that Leah was under genuine religious convictions, confirming what she felt so deeply herself, but she said nothing to him about the dead fly or the spider in the hayloft. She did not feel required to give them up as testimony. As much as a creature living or dead could belong to anyone but God, they were hers.

  Chapter 5: December 1735 – January 1736

  As the months passed, the town settled back into ordinary life. There was more time to be social as work slowed in winter. On a militia training day in December, when men filled Stebbins’s tavern down by the ferry after their drills, Elisha sat near the door, teasing the cat with a cork attached to a string and earning a few shillings by keeping his eye on the horses tied out front, especially Bernard Bartlett’s old swayback, which sometimes chewed fences. He was to be paid for looking after the horses, but spent as much time surreptitiously watching Bernard Bartlett himself, who, at the center of a rowdy table drinking flip, was the loudest man in the place.