Spider in a Tree

by Susan Stinson

  After the hearing about the midwives’ books, Sarah Edwards had presented Bathsheba with the copy of Aristotle’s Master-Piece: or, the Secrets of Generation Displayed in all the Parts thereof that she had first encountered in Noah Baker’s barn. Bathsheba had been confused when Sarah called her into the Edwardses’ kitchen. Sarah had gestured at the book on the table as if introducing Bathsheba to a guest. “I have been entrusted with employing this book for the medical purposes for which it was intended. I know that the servant population sometimes makes use of your services as a midwife and trust that you would benefit from the instruction of learned men in those matters.”

  Bathsheba had hesitated, looking at Sarah’s face. Neither of them were slow to broach the subject of the female anatomy in the course of their midwifery, but she had not been sure of Sarah’s intentions. The book was the last thing she wanted. It brought back ugly memories, and she was not sure if she would be safe with it in her possession. She had gone unmolested since the trial, and, since those troubles had been made so public, thought that she might be able to go to the sheriff should she have trouble. Still, Sheriff Pomeroy had not been happy to have his grandson Eben among those called in to testify, and he was, Bathsheba knew, unhappy with Mr. Edwards about that yet.

  Sarah had been pouring mustard seed into her mortar when Bathsheba came in, and she went back to grinding as Bathsheba thought. Bathsheba watched the minister’s wife, who, for a moment, had reminded her of her own mother grinding spices for a meal. It was strange that Sarah Edwards should think that a slave might be suited to decide the fate of a valuable book, one that she might have made use of herself. Bathsheba sensed that she was trying to right an injury, or perhaps more than one. It would take a terrible delicacy to refuse the gift. Bathsheba had wished that Leah were there, but the two of them were alone. She decided to risk accepting the gift instead of risking to refuse it. She had said, “That’s good of you, Madame.”

  “There are illustrations. You could study the pictures.” Sarah had handed Bathsheba the book, then her voice became uncertain, as if she hadn’t quite anticipated the sight of her with it in her hands. “That is, if you are confident in your ability to keep it from further misuse by youth.”

  Bathsheba, who had seen the pictures, rested the book lightly against her hip, and said, “Oh yes, Madame. I know how to do that.”

  She had left the book with Saul and Leah. She herself had no place to keep anything safe, and neither of them were afraid. Leah wrapped it in a shawl and put it in a book box that Saul had built for her, carved with twining leaves and her name. She kept her Bible in there, as well. Sarah, who had seen the box in the making, had given Saul winter work of making another bookcase for the house, since Mr. Edwards kept scavenging for books.

  Bathsheba came to Leah when she could. They would tell each other everything that they had heard and seen in the two households, and Saul, if he was there, would give his news from the fields. They would drink cider and work out the most likely meaning of events to their own interests as best they could. Then, from time to time, Saul might carve a little, and Leah would read to Bathsheba and Saul from the Bible or Aristotle’s Master-piece. Over time, Bathsheba found that, in Leah’s voice, it had lost its sting. The Bible had better stories, but also more devils and death. Aristotle, they knew, was improper except for use in travail, but it promised that by describing the parts of a woman’s body it would open “a cabinet of many rare secrets.” Also, some passages were funny. Saul usually went to the loft early if this was the choice, and, as he snored above them, Leah and Bathsheba would try to discover if there was information in Aristotle of any practical use.

  And so, on this particular cold December evening, already fully dark by the time Bathsheba got to the cabin, Leah went to the house and informed Sarah of Saul’s camp with the Pomeroys in the woods. She came back with a bowl of roasted pumpkin seeds. She and Bathsheba chewed seeds and sipped cider while Leah read that a man was different from a woman in nothing else than having his genital members without his body rather than within. It seemed that “once nature hath made a female child, and it has so remained in the belly of the mother for a month or two,” then a rush of heat made the genital member push out (“like an overcooked turkey leg” added Leah) and convert a baby girl to a baby boy.

  Bathsheba split a pumpkin seed with her fingernail to get at the kernel, and said, “Well, then, cold as Martha Root is keeping by wandering out in the snow, she’s bound to have a girl.”

  Leah—who had been trying to remember if she had felt a rush of heat in the last month of her lost pregnancy, years ago now—wasn’t particularly surprised, but she said, “What! That girl is with child? With no husband?”

  Bathsheba handed her the shelled seed. “She was out on the bridge, just now, on her way to the Hawleys. Said that she was out in the snow at dark to buy cheese.”

  “Oh. Elisha Hawley.” Leah felt tired of this topic, tired of babies and bodies, and tired of Aristotle. Her little one would have been four and a half now, old enough to wade with Leah into the river if they held hands. She didn’t want to read any more, and she didn’t want to talk.

  Madame Edwards was with child again, too, but Leah didn’t bring it up. She closed the book, heaped the shawl around it, put it back in the carved box, then sat silently with her friend eating pumpkin seeds in the lantern light. After a while, they sang a little, a psalm about a vine brought out of Egypt land and planted here, but every line about the heathen became lists of fava beans, lima beans, scarlet runners, acorn squash, cucumbers, and every other thing that might drop off a vine.

  On his return, Rebekah asked her son, “Do you wish to wed Martha Root?”

  Elisha took the heavy pail of milk from her. “No.”

  “Then you shall not.”

  Chapter 17: January – June 1747

  Seizing a few moments alone in the parlor after the noon meal, Sarah sat in a straight chair and read Religious Affections, her husband’s new book.

  Sometimes the change made in a Saint, at first work, is like “a confused chaos;” so that the saints “know not what to make of it.” The manner of the Spirit’s proceeding in them that are born of the Spirit, is very often exceeding mysterious and unsearchable . . .

  Ecclesiastes 11:5: “Thou knowest not what is the way of the Spirit, or how the bones do grow in the womb of her that is with child: even so thou knowest not the works of God, that worketh all.”

  Sarah would never claim to know the way of the Spirit, but she knew a lot about being with child. The swelling in her ankles and the ache in her back from her current condition had urged her to the chair in the midst of her duties. Uncomfortable and restless, she decided to pay a call on Rebekah Hawley.

  As she rode over the snowy roads and across the bridge to the Hawley place on Pudding Lane, she found bits of her husband’s writing drifting through her mind along with idle speculations about whether or not she could get Hannah Root to make over her green silk gown with sleeve flounces that were short inside the arm and long over the elbow in what she had heard from Prudence Stoddard was the new style in London. With all of Colonel Stoddard’s traffic with governors and generals, Prudence heard news of Europe fresh from the harbor. She said that shoe buckles were getting bigger, with pointed toes and lower heels, but there was no call to waste perfectly good brass buckles, so there was nothing Sarah could do about that.

  Between considering these problems of dress and the chastising mysteries of the way the bones do grow, Sarah didn’t think seriously about what she might say to Rebekah until she was tying her horse in the shelter of the barn. Then it occurred to her that she might suggest to Mrs. Hawley, who was the head of a household which was resisting the duty to heal the sin of fornication with marriage, that she consider how the generation of a principle of grace in the soul was similar to the conception of a child in a womb.

&nb
sp; When Rebekah came to the door, though, all Sarah said was, “Mrs. Hawley! I’ve come to enquire whether I might purchase some cheese.”

  Rebekah, who was used to dealing with Leah or one of the girls on such an errand, barely stifled a snort, but she said, “Of course, Mrs. Edwards, please do come in.”

  Sarah, shaking snow from her skirts, observed that Rebekah’s face looked puffy and the shadows under her eyes were darker than ever. “I hope you don’t mind, I’ve already put my horse in a stall.”

  “Of course, that’s fine. As you know, neither of my boys are here to see to it.”

  Sarah thought that they would go to the parlor, since that was where she was used to being received, even when she was on a humble errand like the acquisition of a cheese. But Rebekah, who as her husband’s aunt was entitled to familiarities, led Sarah through the hallway past the empty rooms to the kitchen. She pulled out a chair and said, “Sit down, my dear,” with unexpected warmth.

  Sarah, who had been unsure of her welcome, took a seat while Rebekah moved between the table and the stove. She set out a plate for Sarah and one for herself. “I’m delighted that you could join me. I invited Mary Pomeroy, but she had her children to feed.”

  Sarah had not been expecting a meal, and thought that the food smelled better than anything she had ever tasted in her life. She had been trying to stay out of the kitchen as much as she could in the early months of her pregnancy at home, turning the meals over to Jerusha and Leah and settling her own belly with endless bowls of boiled oats. But now she prayed with Rebekah—“Ye shall know them by their fruits”—over this strange, sparsely-peopled meal with a God-given hunger that moved her to take and eat. Even though the soldiers who had been garrisoned at Sarah’s house were gone now to their new base at the Fort Massachusetts, her table was always crowded. She could not remember the last time she had sat down with only another grown woman for a meal. Had she ever? Rebekah was giving her a feast worthy of the Sabbath, heaping her plate with corned beef, biscuits, and mashed turnips. There was roasted squash, too, its hollow filled with ginger, nutmeg, and maple syrup, making a dark, sweet crust that crackled under her fork (a rare utensil which Rebekah had inherited from Widow Stoddard). Rebekah didn’t say much, but her stern face softened as she watched Sarah eat. Rebekah had closed the family store to concentrate on cheese and butter, and seemed a bit strapped for company.

  Warmed by the food and the cider, Sarah found herself talking about her children, her Mary’s fear of thunderstorms, so like her father, although, of course, God had reformed his terror into proper awe. How Nabby and Sukey had gotten lost in the woods, and Timothy had been the one to find them, and how it worried her that the baby, named Jonathan for his father, seemed to have an affliction that gummed up his eyes. She didn’t bring up the fact that her eldest daughters were beginning to attract admirers or complain of the many small humiliations her family had been facing since the trial about the midwives’ books. Not in this household, which was suffering from the licentious courtship of a son.

  Rebekah was taking slow bites, chewing carefully, occasionally closing her eyes to savor her own cooking in a way that gave Sarah an impulse to tease her, and if she hadn’t come expecting to find Rebekah in shock or raging or in some kind of mourning, she might have tried. Mostly, though, the older woman was watching her face with a kind of tender intensity, which Sarah, sopping up juice from the beef with her biscuit, received as an ambiguous blessing.

  When Rebekah brought out the whortleberry pudding, Sarah exclaimed, “Berries in January! You’re wasting your treasures on me.”

  Rebekah served her a wedge and said, “I was about to squander them on myself alone. I am glad that you came along.”

  Such a big empty house, Sarah thought, could make a woman strange. She tasted the berries, then said, “You must miss your boys.”

  Rebekah blinked, then sucked her spoon. She took another bite and wiped her mouth. “When Joseph came home from the siege of Louisburg, he wept at the table. Elisha found it terribly embarrassing. Joseph followed me that night when I carried a gourd full of whey to the attic to feed Elisha’s old cat Sister and told me that he was going to Suffield to stay with his old tutor from Yale and study law.” Someone else might have amended her comments for Sarah Edwards, but Rebekah took a sip of cider and pushed on. “I don’t care much about whether Joseph becomes a lawyer or a minister, but Elisha was so disappointed that his brother had come back from capturing a fort with sixty-foot-high stone walls from the papist French with nothing to say except that the flux was a bloody mess of a disease and Seth Pomeroy was handy at unstopping a plugged-up cannon.” She looked at Sarah over her cup. “That was when I knew that Elisha was bound to be a soldier.”

  “Mmm,” said Sarah, who had her own opinions on this matter.

  Rebekah put down her spoon and folded her hands in her lap. “Joseph is coming back from Suffield to set up here as a lawyer. Phineas Lyman thinks he’s ready to be licensed. I won’t have to live alone.”

  Sarah had heard this. “You must be pleased.”

  “I am, of course.” Rebekah was recovering her usual distance. “Finish your pudding.”

  Sarah felt a little rattled and aware of the sin of gluttony. Still, the berries were tart and the cream was light, and each bite she took brought her a wave of pleasure, heightened, she knew, by her condition. This was her tenth pregnancy. She had had such carnal interludes before.

  Rebekah licked her finger and waggled it at Sarah, who had to struggle to control a fit of giggles. Rebekah said, “Elisha ate this. This meal.”

  Knowing that the family was prone to melancholia and other mental and spiritual distempers, Sarah stopped laughing. “Did he?” she enquired delicately, wondering if Rebekah was feeding the ghost of her husband, along with the spirit of her younger boy in his peril. “You mean that he is here?”

  Rebekah’s tone was brusque. “You know that he is not. He’s at Fort Massachusetts, poor child, the fort they threw together again, and shoddily, too, no doubt, after the papists and heathens burned it to the ground.”

  Sarah had come hoping to speak to Rebekah about this, about Elisha’s sudden enlistment at the very moment when Martha Root’s condition began to be visible, and how the safety of his soul demanded that he return to his church to confess his sins and marry the girl. The situation was terrible for Martha and her coming child, wrong for Elisha, and this open disregard for Christian duty by a member of the church (and a kinsman) was an awful blow to Mr. Edwards. Sarah could not believe that Elisha would have joined the military campaign without his mother’s blessing, so she had come to see for herself how things stood with Rebekah.

  “Did you hear about that court case?” Rebekah leaned back in her chair. “Joseph told me the details when he was here the last time court was in session. The unexpurgated details. I insisted. It seems that what Mr. Adams actually said of my brother, Colonel Stoddard, was that he is—do excuse the coarseness of expression; it’s hard to believe that the fine was only five shillings—‘a cussed lazy devil; he sits there on his cussed arse.’ He also said that it was my brother’s devilish, cursed doings that those forts were built and that those at Fort Massachusetts were taken.”

  Sarah had risen to her feet. “Madame, I know that you are in distress, and have no doubt about the affection in which you hold your brother, whom I honor and love as well, but surely such language is best not repeated.”

  Rebekah gestured for Sarah to resume her seat. “You must have heard some version of the incident before this. Yes, I do love my brother, and I trust him with my own life, which is what I did when I called on him to give Elisha a commission and send him into the fighting rather than stay here and fall into the hands of that Root woman.”

  Rebekah began to cry, but as Sarah came around the table, ready to comfort her, she raised her voice sharply. “Mrs. Edwards, ple
ase sit down and eat.”

  Sarah murmured, “I am quite full,” and returned to her chair.

  Rebekah scraped her plate with a fork. “Seth Pomeroy sees him, you know. He was in Louisburg with Joseph, too. God knows, I worried about Joseph, but he was on the campaign as a preacher, not a soldier. Mr. Pomeroy writes home more than Elisha does, and his wife told me that he sent her a letter about having this meal in Deerfield. Biscake, suet, whortleberry pudding, corned beef, squashes, and turnips. Far better than what they usually get, although he said they had no cider.” She looked at Sarah. “I’ve been eating this same meal for a week, ever since Mrs. Pomeroy read me the letter. I’m out of beef and berries now, but I have been trying to taste some of what Elisha might be having to swallow, the very daintiest part, I’m sure. And, still, I would rather he be out fighting than for our homes to be lost to the heathens, or for him to be trapped by this woman.”

  Sarah reached across the table. Rebekah let her take her hands. “What could it possibly be that has set you so hard against Martha Root, to the point of grave risk to Elisha’s soul?”

  Rebekah pulled her hands away, placed them in her lap, and sat up straighter. “He was entrapped, and has no wish to wed her. Besides, she is not of our station. Your own husband, so bent on forcing a marriage, has taught us that an archangel must be supposed to have more existence, and to be in every way farther removed from nonentity, than a worm or a flea. Elisha is not to be wasted on lesser lives.”