Spider in a Tree

by Susan Stinson

  Sarah shook her head, but pressed the matter no further. They said a prayer for Elisha’s safety. Sarah left with cheese and the rest of the pudding.

  “Sustenance,” said Rebekah.

  “Mrs. Clapp has tethered her horse in the road,” Joseph, uneasy in his militia uniform, complained to his mother as he led a donkey loaded with a sack of cabbages and potatoes down Pudding Lane.

  “Mrs. Clapp has been tethering her horse there since before you were born.” Rebekah negotiated a mud patch, holding her skirt above her ankles. “You used to carry old apples tucked in your gown to feed it as we passed by. Remember?”

  Joseph, who did remember, paused to scratch the old nag under its chin. If his mother had not been there, he might have broken off a hunk of cabbage and let the mare split it with the donkey for old times’ sake. Despite his complaints, he was very glad to be back in Northampton. He raised his chin and said, in a tone that reminded himself of her, “It is a violation of town ordinances.”

  Rebekah patted his arm as if he were a small boy instead of a new lawyer. She was sixty, which astonished him every time he thought of it. They walked along, listening for the drums.

  When they reached the bridge at the end of Pudding Lane, the donkey stopped cold at the noise. Much of the town had turned out to Main Street to watch a company of Mahicans from Stockbridge being mustered to send to Fort Massachusetts. Joseph, who secretly shared the donkey’s wariness, clucked to her, and they went on into the crowd.

  The sound of drums took Joseph back to Louisburg, to washing blood and vomit off his hands with reddish swamp water after tending the sick and injured, and then stumbling back to his dank pit of a turf house to sleep on a mud floor with worms falling from the dirt ceiling. He had been sick on the ship from Boston to Cape Breton, sick in the dug-out, then sick again in a bed after they had seized the fort and the families who had lived in the houses had been put on a ship back to France. When he was well enough to stand, he had given up the bed to Seth Pomeroy. They were both lucky not to have been among the many who died of the flux. He shuddered.

  When Rebekah stopped to chat with Mrs. Hutchinson in front of the courthouse, Joseph approached Colonel Stoddard with the donkey. “Cabbages and potatoes for the troops, sir.”

  The load was generous. At Louisburg, Joseph had seen hungry Northampton men butchering stolen horses for food. He wanted to spare his brother from the stealing and the hunger, both.

  The colonel nodded in the direction of a supply wagon. “They will be glad to have it, if we can get it there over the hog trails that pass for roads. Any message for Sergeant Hawley?”

  Joseph handed his uncle a packet of letters. He wrote often, advising Elisha against being too familiar with the men, trying not to remember seeing a youth’s leg blown off by the very cannon he was lighting. He said, “My mother and I appreciate everything you have done in the interests of our family.”

  Colonel Stoddard gave a slight bow. “No thanks are due me, Mr. Hawley. Your brother makes a good soldier.”

  Joseph had a hard time picturing Elisha at war, but he stood a little straighter under his uncle’s level regard. Fatherless as he was, he found the respect of the older men of the town irresistible. He clasped the colonel’s hand.

  After he unloaded the supplies, he joined Rebekah in front of the courthouse to watch and cheer the new troop. He gave a brisk wave to Saul, who, dapper in his own militia uniform, was regarding the soldiers intently. In the course of his work as a lawyer, Joseph had been reading land deeds. He knew that the ministers who had formed the mission to the Mahicans at Stockbridge, Mr. Edwards among them, had traded these same people 280 acres of good bottom land for 4,000 acres on the edge of Stockbridge. He couldn’t help but wonder if all of the soldiers, who had been issued government hatchets, were happy with the terms of that deal and others like it.

  Rebekah spoke suddenly in his ear. “I’m thinking of Eunice.”

  Confused, Joseph looked at her. The Edwardses had a daughter by that name. She watched the troop. “My sister.”

  Joseph put a hand on her back. His mother’s sister had been killed by Abenaki years ago in the raid on Deerfield. He said, “Don’t worry about Elisha, mother. He can take care of himself.”

  She sighed. “I’m thinking of her daughter, too, the one who was taken and married into the Kanienkehaka. I heard she became a papist.”

  Joseph didn’t know what to say. His mother never spoke of her niece, the captive who had stayed in Canada. As boys, Joseph and Elisha used to sneak out to eat roasted green corn at fires in the orchard with visiting Abenaki who had, years before, captured Mary Clapp in the Deerfield raid. Long returned and settled in Northampton, Mary had welcomed her visitors and their children with a fondness that had always confused him. His grandfather, the Reverend Mr. Solomon Stoddard, had, he knew, proposed to the legislature that dogs be used to hunt Indians, as they were to hunt wolves. “But these men are Christians.”

  Rebekah looked at him with more rage and sorrow than he could stand to see. He looked away, and saw, across the road in the doorway of Pomeroy’s store, Martha Root with her enormous belly, big as sin. He did not meet her eyes, but turned back to Rebekah. “Wouldn’t you like to move a little more up the hill toward the meeting house? The smell from the tannery is worse than it usually is in winter.”

  She glanced at Martha Root and planted her feet. “We’re fine right here.”

  Martha Root went into her travail the first week in May. Bathsheba had been with her all day before they sent for her women, but now Martha was upright on her sister Hannah’s lap, screaming. Another sister had taken the first baby, but before Bathsheba could call for a basin for the afterbirth, it was clear, as she had suspected, that another baby was coming. Martha’s mother was beside her, talking to her softly and helping to hold her on the chair.

  Bathsheba was kneeling to wipe Martha’s thighs with a dry cloth, warm from the irons. Martha, exhausted, was crying, then screaming again. One of the sisters said to Mrs. Root, “It is time to ask.”

  The older woman took her daughter’s hand and spoke close to her face as Martha shrieked and struggled. The height of travail was known to be a time when much good could be done for a frightened woman’s soul, but her mother didn’t ask Martha about her spiritual estate. Instead, just as she had as the first little girl was being born, she said, “Daughter, who is the true father of this child?”

  Martha stopped biting her lip, and, in a voice coarsened by pain, said, “Elisha Hawley.”

  He could not be convicted of fornication without witnesses, but her testimony in travail was enough to make him the reputed father, responsible for support of the children. Everyone knew that a woman in midst of giving birth could not lie.

  Her mother held her around the waist and her sister hugged her across the chest until Bathsheba had received Martha’s second daughter and closed off the new mother’s loins with cloths over her belly, between her legs, and bound loosely over her thighs.

  The women lifted Martha into the parlor bed and wrapped the babies tight. They were Anne and Esther. Their mother said their names. She was soon asleep, and the women had cake with the men and children in the kitchen, arguing about whether or not it was good luck to give birth to twins. Bathsheba said that Anne, who was born second, was the eldest because she had the good sense to send Esther out first to see what the dangers were, but the Roots made no note of that in records in the family Bible.

  Sarah Edwards had her tenth baby, Elizabeth, the next day.

  Leah left Sarah to her daughters and the cake to the neighbors after the birth and went to sit outside on the chopping stump. Her own breasts were aching. While she had been thinning gruel for Sarah, she had heard Madame Pomeroy remark that barren women often made excellent nurses. Leah hadn’t turned her head. She was not barren. Her own child would have be
en nearly five years old.

  Sitting on the stump watching flicker-tailed squirrels shake the tree limbs, she caught a glint from a single strand of web bent in a long arc from the bark near her hip. She followed it with her eyes, trying to see if it were attached to the big-budded limbs of the tree above her or just going nowhere, blown by the wind. She lost track of it against the sky. She wished that she had a cup of rum to warm her, but there would be no chance for her to go back inside and leave with a tonic for herself with so many birth attendants and visitors to serve. She felt like talking to Saul, who listened even in his sleep, but was too exhausted to search him out in the fields.

  Leah had stopped reading much, but she had opened Religious Affections by Mr. Edwards a few months before when she had found it in the study. Now she thought of the verse of scripture he had used to begin part one: Whom having not seen, ye love.

  That was, of course, Jesus. Leah did love him. She didn’t see him, but she felt him, strongly. Feelings, it seemed, were what Religious Affections was about. She had been working her way through the pages when she could. She had not gotten very far, but far enough to find brokenness of heart counted as a great part of true religion, along with fear, zeal, hope, hatred, and holy joy, with love, a source of all the other affections, at its very core. Now, on the stump, she drifted for a moment, and started to tell herself a story about a spider with nothing to trap with except strands of light, but her mind trailed off as she watched a crow dart at a scuttling bug and eat it quickly in the grass. She felt a sob rise in her, then fall back, dry.

  Her mind was on her child, never born: another whom, having not seen, she loved. She had walked away from Sarah’s groaning cake to groan alone in her soul, but the sun was like honey on the budding limbs, and she did not feel alone. This was prayer, secret prayer. She kept her open eyes on the tree limbs, which moved, then fell still.

  The affections, Mr. Edwards had taught her, resided not in the body or in the animal spirits, but in the soul. An unbodied spirit could feel love. True religion was known in love. Her love for her child, the child whom she had never seen, never raised, never risked in a world where even a baby could have been sold or ground down in the service of owners, was unbodied.

  Still, it was a specific surge in the great waters. Her heart knew its current by feel. She gave it up to God, raised her head as she sat on the stump as if the strand of web had wound round her hair and was gently pulling her skull upward, her neck straight, and her spine more upright. She stretched her body, raised her arms, and accepted absence, presence, and consolation, then turned away from the trees to watch the open sky. She could find no language within her, not even private words from home, for the way the sky filled with birds that were so soon gone on by.

  Elisha, in his fort, was smoking a pipe with Major Seth Pomeroy, who was there in command of the Northampton-based company that had been formed in anticipation of another invasion of Canada. At the moment, though, all they had done was march to the Dutch settlement at Hoosack. Elisha and Seth had just eaten soup made from the last of the cabbages that Joseph had sent. Although he knew that, come winter, he might long for cabbages, Elisha was not sorry to see them go.

  Seth tamped down his bowl, and said, “I hear from my Mary that Martha Root has twins.”

  Elisha, who had not heard, breathed in the news with his smoke. He had spent a long day supervising the troops as they worked on the road to Deerfield, which was rocky, narrow, and nearly impossible to negotiate with wagons full of supplies. He loved being in charge, even if just of a road crew. It felt as if parts of himself that he had not known to exist were being harnessed and used. When he thought of Martha, it was like thinking of swimming in the river in the middle of the night as a boy: deep sensations, clouded by loss. He was someone else now, very far from Martha. He couldn’t even imagine the babies—her babies, their babies—and didn’t try. He wished her every happiness, but not hard enough to wed her. He wasn’t even sure that she wanted that, although he knew that Mr. Edwards did. Elisha wished that he could go see Martha and get a look at the babies when he went home, but Rebekah would never tolerate it, and he doubted that Martha would, either.

  Seth was still regarding him over the bowl of his pipe with stern but not unsympathetic eyes. Elisha said, “I know that she names me, sir, and that I am many times a sinner. My brother advises me to speak no further of this matter until there is a judgment in the courts.”

  Seth drew in smoke, and said, “What does your conscience tell you?”

  Elisha dumped his ashes, though they were still hot. “My duty is here.”

  Chapter 18: September 1747 – January 1748

  Martha Root held her four-month-old daughter, Anne, who was, at that moment, a gape-mouthed, lumpy-headed sleeper, with dark hair like her father and blue veins where her eyebrows would be. Careful not to wake her, Martha put her living daughter into the cradle and turned to her Esther. Same dark hair and in a pose close to sleep. Martha, crying in a utilitarian way, washed the body of her child, then dressed her in a small shroud that Martha’s own mother had made from the baby’s nightgown while Martha had lain gasping with grief in her bed the night before.

  Martha had long since confessed before the congregation to the sin of fornication. With Elisha so quickly gone to the fort, sparing her no word—although his mother and brother spared her plenty of looks—she had been truly sorry for her sin. Truly. Sorry. But she loved her girls.

  Now, as she finished stitching her baby into burial clothes, her mother came into the chamber, touched the small body and then Martha’s hair. Martha swayed a little. Her mother steadied her with a hand on her shoulder, then picked up the cradle and carried Anne, still asleep, into the parlor. Martha knew she should follow, but stood in a stupor, holding the needle, until her mother came back and led her by hand to the parlor.

  She sat numbly on a trunk while her mother made a fire, although it was a warm September day. There was a sound as her brother Simeon, who usually stomped, came quietly into the house. Martha turned her head and found herself looking into the face of her minister, Mr. Edwards. He was stooping in the doorway with bright leaves fluttering behind him.

  Mrs. Root was on her feet to welcome the minister, who had never before been to the house, although he lived but two home lots away on King Street. He kept his eyes on Martha. She was slumped on the chest, fingering the needle with no sewing in her lap. As he approached her, she sat up straighter, but didn’t stand.

  “Martha.” Her mother spoke sharply. “Don’t forget yourself in grief.”

  Martha stuck the needle neatly into her skirt and regarded Mr. Edwards. He looked back at her, sadly. She spoke no word, but got up and walked out the front door, leaving Anne to her mother and Esther to God as she ran for the woods to find a leafy canopy thick as suffering above her.

  Leah washed David Brainerd’s feet in vinegar while Jerusha held the basin. Jerusha, very poised at seventeen, gazed discreetly away from the young missionary as he hacked and gasped, but Leah saw her watching out of the corner of her eye to make sure that he didn’t need the basin at his mouth instead of at his feet. Patting the oozing soles dry, Leah smiled in approval. Over months of nursing Mr. Brainerd, she and Jerusha had built a rhythm together.

  He had come, coughing and sweating, at the end of May from his mission in New Jersey, where he had been preaching to twelve-house towns of Delaware people in the howling wilderness between the Susquehanna and Delaware rivers. Boiling his bedsheets in the yard, Jerusha had told Leah that she could not decide whether Mr. Brainerd’s life as a missionary was penance or prize for the excessive zeal which had gotten him kicked out of Yale.

  “Luckily,” she had said, stirring the sheets with a stick, “no one asks me.”

  Leah, who had just asked Jerusha what she thought of Mr. Brainerd, tucked up the hem of her own skirt to keep it out of the fi
re. “Huh.”

  Not long after he had arrived in Northampton, the town had been violently stirred when a man in Southampton was killed threshing grain in his barn. The Abenaki had left sixteen poles in his yard, which people said meant that there had been sixteen members of the war party. David Brainerd had told Leah that the praying Delaware at his mission, with kindness he attributed to Christianity, had brought him food and made fires on mornings when he had been too oppressed with illness to rise, just as Leah and Jerusha had been nursing him since he had come to town. Sarah, her own hands full with a three-week-old baby, had set them to it.

  Now he fell back, half propped up in bed, and closed his eyes against the afternoon light, murmuring, “Faces like men and tails like scorpions. Locusts.”

  “Are you quoting Revelations?” asked Jerusha, emptying the basin into a bucket.

  He was already asleep. Leah covered his feet lightly with a sheet, and Jerusha sat down in one of the good parlor chairs, which was covered with a checked cotton towel to protect it in the sickroom. Sarah had moved Timothy to a cot in the kitchen and let Eunice share the trundle with Johnny so that she could give Brainerd a bed in the parlor. He could no longer climb the stairs. Jerusha looked at Leah, who was draping towels on the windowsill, and said, “There’s a bump breaking out on my chin.”

  She flashed a grin, and Leah laughed. She could see that the girl was indulging in triviality with an eye to amuse her, which it did. It was something Leah loved about Jerusha: that she knew herself well enough to attempt self-parody. Leah started to reply, but then Brainerd groaned. In a heartbeat, Jerusha was out of her chair, leaning over him to learn what he needed. Unsurprisingly, it was the basin again.