Spider in a Tree

by Susan Stinson

  Mr. Davenport stood there in his long shirt, one of his knees swollen and both blotchy, his mouth open to call on God, but a new flush of something else in his cheeks. Rebekah was holding tight to her cloak, trying to make sense of the scene before her, when she saw her son rush to stand beside the incensed young woman, very near the fire. Elisha shouted, with obvious insincerity, “I’ll burn you, Mr. Davenport! I’ve made you too much an idol, as you have done with your breeches, and must thrust you right into the flames.”

  The people hanging back on the edge of the crowd let out a great laugh, but Rebekah gasped at the impertinence. She was relieved to see him move quickly away from the fire as some of the men standing close to Mr. Davenport began to advance on him. Another gentleman stepped forward as Mr. Davenport, silenced for once, awkwardly picked up his singed breeches and pulled them back on again. This man yelled out in a stentorian voice, “You, Mr. Davenport, have made a golden calf of this fire!”

  Mr. Davenport was backing painfully away from the flames, face full of confusion, surrounded by his followers, one of whom grabbed the chair.

  Rebekah, who had come fully back to herself, was circling, searching for her son, when she caught a glimpse of him striding away from the wharf in the company of the young woman who had been so bold in grabbing the preacher’s breeches from the bonfire. Rebekah drew in a great lungful of smoke and bellowed out his name. “Elisha!”

  If he heard, he did not look back.

  She walked the streets of that unsettled town calling him for more than an hour by the town crier, until he finally turned up at the stables, full of apologies, his only explanation that he had feared that the woman was at risk for attack and so had seen her home. Rebekah was on him like a burning cloak while he gave the tired boy another coin to lead them to a safe, warm tavern room. It would have been a quiet room as well, but she shouted at him long after she was hoarse, until strangers were brought in to sleep on the floor.

  Mr. Edwards walked into a New London parlor filled with ministers, some of them kin to him. He was sick and travel weary from a long preaching trip, but they had persuaded him to come to New London to admonish Mr. Davenport for his behavior on the wharf. Mr. Edwards felt Mr. Davenport’s excesses as a personal insult and a great wounding of religion, but he had not wanted to do this. He had agreed to this meeting only on the condition that a large group of other divines would come, too. And, so, here they all were.

  Underneath the ague and the weariness, he was seething with anger. He considered that Mr. Davenport might have been seized by the devil or by physical maladies as he suffered from gonorrhea contracted in his youth (sin for which he had fully repented, or so Mr. Edwards understood), but what seemed most likely was that he had fallen into spiritual pride. It was a constant danger for ministers, as Mr. Edwards well knew.

  Work had piled onto work, as it always did, so that once Mr. Edwards had agreed to meet with Mr. Davenport, he had also ended up preaching after the trial of others who had participated in the bonfire. He had taken it up as doctrine: the sin of spiritual pride. The magistrate himself had commended his sermon as very suitable for restoring order. Three of the men who escorted and protected Mr. Davenport on his travels and three from the Shepherd’s Tent seminary had been convicted, with fines of six shillings, plus court costs, each.

  This morning, Mr. Edwards had stood on the scorched wharf in the sea wind, thinking of the ashes of little girls at the Lymans’ ruined house. His throat ached. He squeezed his handkerchief in his fist, furious at the arrogance of Mr. Davenport, who had taken it on himself to destroy by fire.

  As he turned and walked back up the hill to the house where Mr. Davenport was staying, he had thought of Sarah. He could have been sitting at the table at home with his head under a towel, breathing steam from herbs and boiling water which Sarah would have poured into a sauce boat for him to use to clear his head. If his throat were bad enough, she would have sent one of the girls to card some black wool for him to wear, wet with vinegar and salt, from ear to ear. It would be a comfort, despite the stink.

  He worried about Sarah, who had suffered bodily pangs and weakness all winter. Dr. Mather had sent to Boston for Myrnischtu’s Emplastrum Matricale, used to treat hysterical cases caused by an unbalanced womb, and had advised her to take Jovial Bezorardick and a decoction of mugwort and apply them as a poultice to her navel and forehead with a damp cloth until the supply ran out. Mr. Edwards missed her sharply, but, as he stood now in the parlor door, he became impatient with himself for grinding out pharmaceutical thoughts as if his mind were a mortar in which to mix salves and clisters rather than a bowl to be filled by God.

  He looked around the room. These were men he had preached and prayed with; men who had felt God moving through Enfield with him as the people in the meeting house held on to keep from sliding into hell; men who had brought a rush of spirit to his contentious congregation; men who had listened to him at Yale as young scholars, then had taken to the highways and byways with his sermons as atlas and the scripture as light.

  Men who now made people ready for the heat of revival all across the colonies, which brought Mr. Edwards hope now when there were dead times again in Northampton.

  There were nearly a dozen them, sitting formally about the room as if each were prepared to preach to the others, some with scraps of notes in their laps, some looking nearly as travel worn as Mr. Edwards felt. Every chair was full. Young Samuel Buell, whose preaching had so moved Sarah in Northampton, was there. He stood and bowed to Mr. Edwards, who nodded his head. Mr. Buell gestured to his empty chair.

  A middle-aged slave woman was bending in one corner, offering someone a cup, and when she stepped aside, Mr. Edwards saw Mr. Davenport, still wearing scorched plush breeches, the bandages on one leg visible under his stockings, looking ill, shrunken, and so withdrawn as to be unreadable. Still, he made the effort to stand and call out, “Welcome,” in a rotund voice when Mr. Edwards came into the room.

  Mr. Edwards took the chair that Mr. Buell vacated for him, stared at Mr. Davenport, and said “Let us pray.”

  Mr. Edwards barely spoke for the rest of the meeting, but his eyebrows rose and settled like troubled crows. Mr. Buell, who was the youngest man there, stood quietly against the wall. Everyone else took turns reproaching Mr. Davenport and invoking God’s word. Mr. Davenport was uncharacteristically quiet, listening to men he was known to admire chastise and condemn him. Now and then, he rubbed his leg.

  The room was chilly, and they didn’t open the door to draw heat from the rest of the house. When the slave came in and offered more tea to Mr. Davenport, Mr. Edwards heard her whisper, “I burned my head cloth in your fire.”

  Mr. Davenport lowered his eyes and shook his head. She nodded back, affirming what she had said, then left the room without pouring any more tea. She shut the door, so that they were, once again, closed in and cold. Mr. Davenport gazed at the faces of the men who encircled him in parlor chairs, and then at the floor as he gathered himself to speak.

  He said, “Brothers in Christ, I would be naked to you, naked in spirit. I have been blessed by God’s presence and ask for your prayers that I do no more to mar or dishonor it. If by encouraging lay preachers and relying on impulses, I have unloosed disorder in the country, I renounce them. I will go back to the towns I have visited and try to undo the damage I have done.”

  At this, there was some uneasy shifting in the chairs, especially among the ministers from Connecticut, none of whom were eager to have Davenport back in their towns.

  “If I have been distracted by pride, I repent. But I cannot step away from the flames. God appeared to the apostles in cloven tongues of fire. I have felt myself feverish from illness, and I have felt myself alight with the Holy Ghost. With my fellow divines here to stoke my powers of discernment, I can see the truth that is in you, and see the difference between sickness and God’s light in
myself. I repent my sins.”

  Mr. Buell murmured, “Amen,” and stirred to go to Mr. Davenport, who began to weep, but Mr. Edwards motioned him to stop. Mr. Buell sank to his knees on the floor. Humbleness was rife.

  Mr. Davenport closed his eyes and threw back his head. He left his eyes closed, his face upturned, his sun-reddened neck arched and vulnerable. His hands rose slightly, open at his sides, and he neither sighed nor spoke, but, giving off heat they could all feel, surrendered himself.

  Mr. Edwards had a terrible urge to spring from his chair and knock the much smaller man to the floor. He was still angry, but he knew a soul in need when he saw one. He stood and crossed the room in two strides. Taking Mr. Davenport’s head in both hands, he said, with a welling of tenderness, “May God forgive you, Mr. Davenport. May God forgive us all.”

  Chapter 15: October 1743 – June 1744

  Bathsheba was laughing in a Northampton barn. She had been hired out to help with the preparations for Noah Baker’s marriage, which was to happen as soon as Mr. Edwards returned from a preaching trip. Ever since he had brought people to crawling and screaming in Enfield, he had been much away from home. It seemed that every New Light church in New England wanted him to preach the same sermon to them.

  Bathsheba was done with her day of beating linens and baking with the bride, who now had gone to her sister’s house to have supper with her family. Naomi Judd, a hired girl herself, had coaxed Bathsheba into a night walk and a frolic in the barn to keep Naomi, saucy as she was, from being the only young woman there with Noah Baker, Timothy Root, and Oliver Warner.

  The boys were all in their twenties, plenty old enough to be men, but without land or, except for Noah, the husband-to-be, a wife. Timothy Root threw a deer hide down on a stack of hay and invited Naomi and Bathsheba to sit. Bathsheba, who carried a piece of broken glass sharp enough to cut in the pocket tied around her waist, was alert but relaxed. She knew these men, had tended to Timothy Root when a half-sawn tree had fallen on his leg, and had given Naomi hysterick powder when she had troubles with her courses. Now Timothy and Oliver were making sport of Noah, threatening him with the pitchfork if he should try to flee his wedding day. They knocked each other over and flopped down on the hay like a row of scarecrows with their sticks pulled away. Bathsheba laughed, feeling the glow of being performed for. Oliver got up to light the lantern, and Noah Baker reached into the lining of his coat to draw out a book.

  “Oh no,” said Naomi, who had clearly seen it before. “Not that unclean thing.”

  Bathsheba stood up, sure of danger, but Timothy Root got up, too, talking in a gentle voice, standing between her and the door. All three of the men were standing, their manner still joking and easy, while Naomi sat up a little straighter on the hide, and Bathsheba put her hand on her piece of glass.

  “Well, fellows,” said Noah, crossing over to Timothy, “I have learned plenty of what a man needs to know on his wedding night. I reckon I know more about my wife than she does herself.”

  The men all laughed, and Naomi called out, “Stop,” in a voice like the bawling of a calf penned away from its mother before slaughter. Timothy held the book up for Bathsheba to see the title. She could not read, but did not have to, since Timothy was telling her all about it. “You know this book, don’t you, Bathsheba, a midwife like you? It’s Aristotle’s Master-Piece: or, the Secrets of Generation Displayed in all the Parts thereof. Here, come here, look at it with me, maybe you can explain some matters that puzzle me.”

  He took a step closer to her, and she stood her ground. Noah Baker sat back down on the hay, and Oliver Warner leaned against a plow. Timothy Root flipped the book to a page that fell open, as it had been visited many times before, to an illustration titled the form of a Child in the Womb, disrobed of its Tunicles, Proper and Common.

  Bathsheba stared at the picture: the strange cut-away of the child sitting cross-legged and wide-eyed in the belly of a woman who has been opened in four flaps of veiny, petal-like flesh. Her torso ended at the upper thighs, with the birth furrow represented as a line. The cord was tucked under the babe’s knees. Breasts marked the uppermost limit of what could be seen.

  As Bathsheba looked, feeling less degraded than mystified, Timothy was reading in a soft, pleasant voice, with suggestions of trembles underneath: “The stones of a woman contain several eggs. . . . The clytoris is like a Yard in scituation, substance, composition and Erection. . . . The preparatory or Spermatick Vessels in women do not differ from those in a man but only in their largeness and manner of insertion.”

  Naomi stood up. “Stop that nastiness about womankind.”

  Oliver Warner suddenly ran at her, grabbed her shoulders, and shook her. He was laughing, his face very close to hers. Naomi didn’t scream or laugh, but thrust her elbow to his gut and broke away. Oliver doubled over, and Noah Baker rose from the hay. Timothy said to Bathsheba, so softly that no one else could hear, “I’m ready to kiss you.”

  Bathsheba, who had seen this man helpless in pain, pinned beneath a tree, said, “As you love God, you will not.”

  Naomi grabbed the pitchfork, thrusting it in front of her. Oliver stared at her, angry, while Noah, the husband-to-be, tried to calm him. “Don’t mar my happiness. We were reading Aristotle. That is all.”

  Timothy turned to them. “Don’t catch hold of her again.” He shut the book and walked over to hand it back to Noah. “It’s the young folks’ Bible. You’ll be a preacher of it, soon enough.”

  Oliver backed off with an eye on Timothy. Naomi was still jabbing air with her pitchfork. Bathsheba let go of her edge of glass and groaned like every woman she had ever tended giving birth. The people in the dim barn all looked at her. No one made a joke about what might be cross-legged in her belly or cut open above her heart. She shoved back the board that served as a latch, threw open the heavy doors, then took the pitchfork from Naomi, unmolested, and walked her out into the scratched-over yard past the edge of lantern light.

  Leah tied her shawl around her waist and took the left-hand path beyond Wilton’s Meadow Brook to begin to climb the hill on the way to the cranberry bog.

  Sweating from her exertions, she found the round spot like a mark to shoot at that someone had made on a pine tree by beating the bark off with a rock. She stopped and traced it with her fingers before she followed the line of stones from the root of the tree toward a tall spruce near the bottom of the descent from Mount Tom. From there, she checked the sun and walked northeast, picking her way across the swamp until she reached a dry stump, where Bathsheba sat waiting for her, plucking a chicken and stuffing the feathers in a sack so that she would have work to show Madame Pomeroy on her return.

  Leah sat next to her on the stump and said, “Saul told me that you wanted to see me. I hope you and that chicken didn’t leave a trail of blood in the woods. As it is, you’ll be attracting beasts.”

  She expected her friend to laugh and make a joke about how much like a moose she had sounded thrashing up the hill, but instead Bathsheba stretched up the skin of the carcass to pull another feather, and said, “I’ve been to see Hannah Clark. She said you should go to Miss Jerusha.”

  Leah sighed and pulled her shawl up over her arms. She never thought of Jerusha, who was fourteen, as calling for a title like Miss or being anything but the small girl who used to try to order her about from below knee level and who had been the most passionate among her sisters about teaching Leah to read and write.

  Leah knew that Bathsheba had been listening at the well, at meeting and in kitchens, gathering stories of the young men in town and their secret books. Some young women wouldn’t tell such stories in front of a slave, but others couldn’t imagine how it would matter if they did; still others simply wanted to talk and to hear what everyone else had said, and what had been said to them.

  Leah sat on the stump with Bathsheba and listened to extracti
ons from the list she already knew: Naomi Judd. Hannah Clark. Rebekah Strong. Rachel Clapp. Timothy Root. His cousin Simeon Root. Oliver Warner. Ebenezer Bartlett. Noah Baker. Eben Pomeroy, who was the grandson of Bathsheba’s owner and the son of a church deacon. Eben’s sister Betty Pomeroy had found a different book, The Midwife Rightly Instructed, which she assured Bathsheba was not her mother’s, hidden in the chimney.

  Leah watched her friend’s face as she stripped the chicken and said the names. Her own impulse had always been to hold the most important things close and secret, away from the ugliest assumptions of the English. She never would have dreamed of trying to gather testimony. “Bathsheba, can’t you forget all this?”

  Bathsheba tied shut the bag of feathers. “I wanted to. You know that. Naomi Judd won’t say a word. But they are sputtering on about what they call ‘guts and garbages’ every time they see me, saying unclean, lascivious things: ‘We know what nasty creatures girls are.’ The same men, and different ones, too. They’ve all been talking. I don’t have a husband like you do, no family to protect me. Hannah Clark says she will speak if I do.”

  Leah was not sure if it was because of Saul, Mr. Edwards, or just dumb luck, but she had never been read to from a midwife’s book at any time by anyone, not even when she was with child. The loss of her baby, always with her, cut more sharply as she listened. The child would have been fifteen months old now, walking, following her from room to room as she worked, hard to keep away from the hearth. No one had ever come up to her on the street as Oliver Warner had come up to Bathsheba and Hannah. He had stood much too close to them, muttering, “When does the moon change, girls? Come, I’ll look at your face and see whether there be a blue circle around your eyes. I believe it runs.”