When Sarah got the children outside, she gave the baby to Sally, the oldest, and examined Mary. A bruise, she thought, just a bruise, please God. It was coming in a terrible purple down Mary’s arm and shoulder, but she could lift her arm and waggle her fingers without grimaces or sharp cries. Sarah sent Jerusha running for the satchel of herbs and bandages she kept ready for doctoring at home, and told Sally to walk to the house with Esther and the baby, taking it slow and putting everyone in bed to wait until she got there. Sally was shaking but clearheaded. She took Esther’s hand and set off down King Street. Then, keeping Mary with her, Sarah went back into the meeting house to do what she could.
Joseph and Elisha heard their mother shout as she started to fight her way back to them. Joseph pulled his brother out from beneath the bench as roughly as he had shoved him down and hoisted him in the air. Elisha kicked and struggled free as Joseph yelled, “Mother! Do not worry! We are not harmed!”
She saw but did not hear him because the meeting house was filled with shrieks of terror and cries of pain. Saul—together with Roots, Bartletts, and other men at the back—was up and tearing at the heavy timbers that had buried those who had fallen, along with the women and children from the middle aisle who had been seated beneath them. Everyone who was free to move quickly joined them.
Leah heard the thuds as they threw the heavy wood aside. She could hear Bathsheba crying, but all she could see of her was the cloth of her skirt trapped under a beam. She moved her hand to touch the cloth, but could not yet speak. Cries and voices were coming from all around her, so it was the direction of the light and the thudding sounds that let her know which way was up. She felt sickened and strangely unsurprised. She could move her arms but not her legs, and that was all she knew before she saw Saul heave a broken bench behind him through a new opening in the debris. It was a little like peering up from the hold of a ship. Leah saw Bathsheba’s skirt rip as someone pulled her free, then she was able to call out to Saul. He came, with others behind him, lifting her away from the wreckage to whisper her secret name and carry her out the door.
Outside the meeting house, Elisha slipped away from Joseph and Rebekah, who had let go of him to help Martha Root staunch the bleeding from a cut on her head. Sick of being manhandled and God-handled, Elisha ran for the burying ground, where he could be alone except for the fleas hopping on old snow. He slipped on the edge of the hole made by the roots of the downed tree, then walked the trunk like a bridge to get through the tangle of limbs and grab the wedged branch, which had fallen without stirring from its place. It came away easily in his grasp, dropping lichen and bark. Like his mother and father before him, Elisha had never been given a toy. Now, ignoring the cries in the distance, he waved his stick in the air, then raised it to his shoulder and sighted down it like a gun. He kept it resting against his shoulder as he ran back to find Joseph and his mother, still in front of the wrecked meeting house, where his mother, howling, had just noticed that he was gone.
Chapter 7: March 1737 – January 1740
The thaw that brought the gallery down kept coming on, swelling the river with shad and snow melt. Wagons bogged down in the deep mud of the roads. It rained every day with dark insistence, the sky keeping to an unrelenting gray that weighed on the air as the fields of snow dissolved into muck, unburied old ham bones, flecks of eggshells, and broken crockery. Few hens were laying as the weather changed, but most would be broody soon.
People limped up the hill carrying crates and bushel baskets to sit on in the unfinished new meeting house (among other things, it lacked a spire) to keep a day of thanksgiving for their preservation. As she prayed, Sarah could smell onions on her hands from slicing them to hold to the feet of parishioners with infected wounds. Although neither she nor the boys were hurt, Rebekah and her family stayed home. Ever since her husband died, she had hated a fast day, and she was not moved to praise. The people there were huddled, damp and nervous, barely mumbling the hymns.
Mr. Edwards chose to emphasize the positive in an account he sent to Mr. Colman to be published in a Boston newspaper:
But so mysteriously and wonderfully did it come to pass, that every life was preserved; and though many were greatly bruised, and their flesh torn, yet there is not, as I can understand, one bone broken, or so much as put out of joint, among them all.
Sarah paused when she read this in their chamber one evening. She had been visiting the injured with Madeira, snake skins, herbs, and bandages. She helped people write prayer bids and sang with those longing for ease. Now she nudged her husband, who was rinsing ink from his hands in a bucket. “There are injuries that are serious yet.”
He stood up, shaking his fingers in the air to dry them. “Not one death. Not one bone. You and Dr. Mather both have said it.”
Sarah put the paper aside. “Still.”
As he bent to blow out the candle, he looked across at her, stubborn and sure. “Still.”
Leah’s legs were bruised from the tops of her feet to the top of her thighs. She had a gash in her belly that Sarah had carefully cleaned of splinters, and one knee was swollen and throbbing, unable to take her weight.
Saul made her a crutch from a limb of the downed tree in the cemetery, not waiting for the proprietors and the town council to meet to parcel out the wood. He went out at night for the limb, and brought home a bucket full of graveyard dirt, which he gave to Bathsheba for her cures. He kept a few spoonfuls for Leah, but they didn’t want to store the dirt in the cabin. It was too hard to control what spirits it might attract.
The girls brought wool for padding and an old stocking that Sally had reshaped into a kind of bag, to be stuffed with the wool and tied to the crutch. Leah hobbled about her work, and was mentioned in the family prayers with a warmth that surprised her, but her knee became so tender that she could barely endure the brush of her petticoat against it, let alone hold Lucy in her lap.
Dr. Mather was too busy with the injuries of others to attend to a slave who could still do some work. Sarah asked Leah every day about her pain, and tied a rattlesnake skin around the puffy, discolored flesh of the affected knee.
Saul tried to store snow to use to cool Leah’s injury, but soon all he had was water leaking from a barrel in a corner of the barn, good for hogs to drink, but useless for her knee. He watched her face when she stood, waiting nearby her to offer his arm. He found reasons to come to the house and carry wood and buckets for her. Sometimes the girls made extra efforts, too, but they were inattentive and these efforts sporadic.
When the roads were passable, Saul sought Sarah’s permission to go to the swamps. He walked to Wolf Pit swamp, which made a shallow marshy pond between Elm Street and Broughton’s brook, where he removed shoes and stockings and waded into the cold, green-skimmed water almost to his knees. As the slippery mud he had raised settled around him, he could see the dim shapes of small fish darting in the water. Clusters of frog eggs floated on the surface, which a hungry man might gather for their jelly, but Saul stood stock-still.
He waited, shivering a little, with the calm intensity any hunting could bring. It was too early for mosquitoes, too early even for mayflies, so, above the water, he was undisturbed. He began to feel things brush against his legs, sticks or leaves floating in the water. Or fish drawn to the heat and salt of his skin. Watching, he saw other quick, sinuous shapes, felt a touch, a muted tingling. He gritted his teeth and waited longer, but not too long, before he waded slowly out onto the uncertain bank with small, dark leeches dangling from his bleeding legs. He filled a tied-off pig’s bladder with pond water then stood watching the leeches feed as they stretched and thickened with his blood. He waited, watching them closely, until they were sated and dropped off. Then he caught them in the bladder and held the top shut tight against the wriggling until the next one was ready to fall.
He was very careful to check his legs for any still feeding before h
e bandaged the bites and put his stockings on. Still holding his catch and still bleeding, he sat down on a stump and ate a piece of salt pork that he had brought with him. He was cold, drained and tired, and knew that he would be bleeding for hours, but that Leah should get relief for her knee.
They had to wait for the leeches to get hungry again, but once they were shrunken and active, Bathsheba came at night to apply them to Leah’s knee. She kept an eye on the leeches until they latched on, and checked back every few minutes to be sure that none of them were wandering over Leah’s skin.
Bathsheba had a bruised face and a sore back. She also had stories of everyone’s injuries and rumors about what it meant to have the meeting house gallery fall. Someone had told her about a place called Blackfriars in London, where the gallery fell and papists died while secretly praying to the pope. And she’d heard about another church stuffed full for a Puritan funeral, where the beams began to crack but, by God’s grace and preference for those who practiced true religion, held firm.
Leah barely listened, but watched the leeches, which had stopped their writhing after the bite. She felt the pull of the viscous, muscular bodies, and could see her knee shrink as they swelled. When they were full and slackened their bites, Bathsheba plucked them from wherever they fell and threw them in the fire.
Saul did not watch Bathsheba apply the leeches, which would have been indecent, but he watched Leah’s face ease as the weeks went by.
Leah’s knee never stopped aching, but she climbed into the gallery of the new meeting house with dogged concentration. She liked to get there early so that she could take her time. She was changed since the fall: more cautious and much slower to dance.
Leah was always waiting for another awakening, but, in the meantime, she and Bathsheba kept track of the squabbles about seating in the new meeting house. Saul said that they should just go ahead and place wagers if they were that interested in bear-baiting and cockfighting, but he shut up quick when she asked what he knew about such things. Some of the prominent townspeople had ended up clustered comfortably together in private family boxes, while others had stuck or been stuck with men’s and women’s benches, receding in significance toward the door. The seating committee, which did not invite the participation of Mr. Edwards, had let wealth erase age and contributions to the community as the criterion on which it placed people. On the Sabbath after the congregation first took their new seats in the meeting house, Mr. Edwards had reminded those who were pleased to be seated high that, soon enough, they would be dead and not interested in the stature of their seats, but Leah couldn’t see that the reminder had had much effect on the contentiousness and preening.
Bathsheba and Leah nudged each other as ladies and gentlemen of the town passed in the aisle and established themselves on benches. Bathsheba gave Leah the elbow when she spotted the young rapscallion, Timothy Root, sticking out a stocking-clad leg to try and trip Seth Pomeroy, who dodged it with a kick as he strode to the front.
One hot day in August, Sarah’s beauty mark fell off while she was offering water from a bucket she was lugging home from the well to some tired-looking boys who were emptying clay from molds to dry on the ground before firing in the brickyard next to the tannery. Sweat from her face melted the paste, and the beauty mark slid off her chin and dropped into the bucket. The boys, who had been lining up politely to drink, laughed, and she saw men look up from cutting clay to grin at her. She felt foolish to mind the laughter of children and laborers, but noted that people always seemed to choose moments when she was trying to be kind to find her foolish. She fished her beauty mark out with her finger and passed the bucket to the boys. They drank so much that she had to go back to the well.
That afternoon, determined to do her duty, Sarah got on her knees outside the door of her husband’s study and scrubbed the floor while he was at work inside. Leah, who had relinquished the job with some amusement, kept the children busy boiling lye and hunting eggs in the yard.
Mr. Edwards had barely spoken to Sarah all day. She was fighting tears as she dipped her rag in dirty water and went at the floor. She heard more criticism and gossip than she could stomach; much more, always, than her aloof husband. She spent many more hours than he did in sick rooms and parlors (which were, in most homes, one and the same) and understood more about how shaken the community was by the fall of the gallery. She wanted to quote his sermons back to her husband and remind him that while holy visions were a great gift, they were less great than the ordinary way God came alive in a human heart.
She imagined being free of all of it, walking in a field with salt air blowing in from the harbor and no dirt as her duty ever any more. The children could come with her, with help from Leah. They could sail away on a ship of children every morning, and she would wave to them from the shore, then wave them home again at nightfall, and they would all eat clams and berries and never pray at all.
This was sin, she knew, the blandishments of an impure heart. She faltered at her scrubbing, and then went at it harder, grinding devils into slivers. Cleaning was only sometimes a prayer, but she had chosen this position before the study door. The water spilled through her fingers and the wide planks of the floor swelled and eased apart until she seemed to be floating in a sea of solace with each knee on a board and the bucket bobbing before her.
Sarah kept to her work. The boards heaved, but she reached out to the bucket for balance. Duty unleashed feeling and meaning, all that she could hold. The floor solidified. She wrung out her rag over the bucket, finished with cleaning, then rested on her knees for a moment. The door of the study opened. Her husband looked at her as she knelt there, red-faced and grimy, then he bent down to help her to her feet. Willing again, she stood and walked with him into the study.
They sat in chairs opposite each other drawn close together, as was their habit. She touched the buckle below his knee. He looked at her with an attentive expression.
She didn’t tell him that she had been angry. Instead, she planted her feet and said, “I know that expenses are tight, but I think we should pay Joseph Hawley’s tuition at Yale.”
Taken aback, he glanced down at his desk. He had not been thinking of the Hawley boys at all, but as she waited, he felt an obscure relief. He nodded, and said, “Secretly.”
It was a fine September morning when Joseph left for Yale. Elisha was thirteen in the fall of 1739. At thirteen, Mr. Edwards had been serving cider to upperclassmen with the proper deference and rectitude, while inventing a private language to record his strategic plans for shaking the known world. At thirteen, Sarah had been singing to herself in the New Haven fields. At thirteen, Leah had been learning to be a slave in Newport. Phyllis had braided her hair Sunday afternoons on rocks near the sea.
Rebekah had braided Elisha’s hair that morning with a quick smooth and tug before milking. It was just one thick tail down the back, and he could have done it himself like Joseph did, but he liked the swift, tidy reassurance of her hands.
Joseph, who was to continue his studies to become a minister, wandered into the room as his mother was tying back his brother’s hair. He said, “Did you hear that the Hampshire Association of Ministers took the position that one cause of the throat distemper that has been ravaging us is that God is displeased because parents are too indulgent?”
Rebekah and Elisha just looked at him, then Rebekah got up and said, “Praise God that both my boys are comely and healthy.” She straightened Joseph’s collar and got on with her work. Joseph and Elisha did the milking together while Rebekah packed johnnycake, cheese, and salt pork in a bundle so big that she had to pack it again in two bundles so that Elisha could help Joseph carry it down to the river.
Joseph and Elisha walked to the woods with an axe as if to work rather than to say goodbye in private, although the only one who saw them was Rebekah, who was not fooled. It had been cold early in the season, and walking
on the fallen leaves was like walking on light. Joseph stood on a stump as if he were already a preacher in a pulpit and mock-lectured Elisha about vice, Godliness, and hard labor. Elisha leaned against another tree, laughing and loving his brother, who had never known how to be funny. Then he raised the axe and rushed the stump as if to hack it out from beneath Joseph’s feet. He made chips fly with two dangerous swings, but Joseph simply stood on the stump in his thick travel boots and refused to yield an inch. “Little brother,” he said, “be careful.”
Elisha swung again and planted the axe next to Joseph’s foot. He had strong arms for a boy his age. He let go of the handle, which stayed tilted in the air, as if seized by a ghost. “I’ll miss you,” he said, bumping Joseph with his shoulder to knock him off the stump. “Write to me.”
Rebekah stood in Pudding Lane and looked her oldest boy in the eye before he got on his horse. He reached out his hand and rested it on her shoulder, neither pulling her to him nor holding her off. When the rector of the college had sent word that Joseph’s education had been paid for, she had suspected Mr. Edwards, but decided not to ask questions about the source. She hadn’t wanted to tell Joseph, but feared that Rector Clap might mention that he had a benefactor, so she had said as much to him herself. He had been grateful, but, like her, made no enquiries.
She had lost a tooth in July, and now pursed her lips in a density of wrinkles that almost scared him. He thought that she might speak of his father, but instead she thrust her parcel at his chest. “Bread,” she said, beckoning his brother to pick up the other one. “Cheese.”
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