Spider in a Tree

by Susan Stinson

  Rose pulled her bucket loose from the ground. “What do you really think, Bathsheba? You knew him better than anybody. Did he drown, or did he go?”

  Bathsheba, who had been wracking herself with this question, shook a few sprigs of rosemary clean of dirt and wrapped them into a tiny bundle. “Saul didn’t say he was going, not to me. But I think he carved himself a cabin out of a single piece of pine and polished it so that it shines like honey in a dark part of the woods.” She looked at Rose, who was just a little older than Leah had been when she had been hauled to Northampton on the back of the minister’s horse, but Rose was listening with a skeptical squint that Leah never had. City girl. Bathsheba shook her head. “Can’t know either way, so might as well believe.”

  “Uh-huh.” Rose’s gaze had drifted back to the road. Bathsheba turned around to see Joab coming in his checked vest. She had noticed him circling the well anytime Rose was drawing water. She pressed her bundle of rosemary into the girl’s hand. “Crush it a little. It’s named for you, after all.”

  Rose, who was no fool, broke a few leaves and cupped the crumbs in her palm. “Thank you.”

  Feeling old, Bathsheba murmured, “Let him smell your fingers.” Rose smiled and strolled closer to the well.

  Joseph walked into the wigmaker’s shop for a shave and found Seth Pomeroy in the chair with the top of his head lathered up, waving a piece of paper at him and calling, “Hawley!”

  The barber nicked his skin. “Please, Major. Stay still.”

  Seth rolled his eyes while blood trickled over his forehead. “Read this.”

  “All right, sir.” Joseph took the paper and sat down to wait. “Your wig will never fit right if you don’t let the man do his work.”

  Seth snorted, and Joseph started reading while his old comrade-in-arms watched him with most of his head swathed in a towel. It was yet another round in the war of the letters that had been shooting back and forth between Mr. Edwards and various committees ever since he had told Simeon Root that he had to make a profession if he wanted to join the church. Since Joseph was as much a grandson of Mr. Stoddard as Mr. Edwards was, he had been the object of a lot of attention from prominent persons in the town. He would have liked to think that the cordial way men twenty years his senior were tipping their hats had more to do with the fact that he had argued his first case before judges in their red robes at the court of common pleas than with an accident of birth, but he knew it wasn’t true. If he chose to take a stand on the controversy, his words would carry weight. He knew what Seth wanted of him.

  Mr. Baker started working his bristle brush on Seth’s chin while Joseph read Mr. Edwards’s letter:

  I, the subscriber, do hereby signify and declare to such as it may concern, that if my people will wait until the book I am preparing relative to the admission of members into the church is published . . .

  “A book!” Joseph exclaimed. “A letter isn’t enough anymore? Not even a pamphlet?”

  “He’s arrogant.” Seth waved off the barber and glared from beneath the towel. “You know most of the ministers in the county oppose him. We’ve got good Stoddardians around here.” He pulled away the towel and lowered his voice. “It won’t do Elisha any harm when he has to go before the council if feeling against Mr. Edwards is running high.” He beckoned the barber back to his work.

  “Mmm,” said Joseph. Elisha’s case was coming up again in June. A council of ministers would decide once and for all whether Mr. Edwards and the Northampton church (in name, at least) could force Elisha to marry Martha Root and take up raising their two-year-old. Of course, Joseph wanted every advantage in Elisha’s case. The problem was, he wasn’t convinced that, in his position on making a profession of faith before joining the church, that Mr. Edwards was entirely wrong. He kept reading.

  . . . I will resign the ministry over this church, if the church desires it, after they have had the opportunity pretty generally to read my said book, and after they have first asked advice of a council mutually chosen, and followed their advice . . .

  “Resign,” whispered Joseph. He had no idea what he felt.

  When the barber lifted his razor, Seth said, “We’ve got him where we want him.”

  When Joseph came into the house on Pudding Lane after his shave, Rebekah looked up from her candle molds and sniffed the air. “Lavender.”

  Joseph, who enjoyed the barber’s scented soaps, nodded nervously. Rebekah had accused Joseph of playing the peacock last week when she had caught him checking the fit of his stockings before he had set out to Brookfield to see Mercy. Mercy was mild and yielding of manner, which Joseph found distinctly pleasant. It was traditional that if the eldest son in a household should marry, his widowed mother, if she had no plans to form a union with a new husband of her own, should quietly retreat to a spare corner and turn the running of the establishment over to the new bride. Joseph suspected that, in the case of his mother and the house she had ruled since she had married his father, such accommodation might not happen smoothly.

  There was a knock at the kitchen door. Rebekah answered to find a soldier carrying a knapsack and dressed for the road. “My leave is up, Madame, and I’m heading back to the fort. You asked me to stop by for a letter?”

  “Oh, yes.” said Rebekah, leaving her candles to harden. They had not heard from Elisha for months. They had arranged for a local yeoman to plow his land, since he wasn’t back in Northampton in time to do it. It was irritating to see soldiers home from the fort with no word from him. “Joseph here has one he is just finishing up. Have some grapes?”

  Joseph hurried into the study. He found the letter and picked up his pen. Half listening to the talk from the kitchen, he filled Elisha in on the juicy details of the conflict between Mr. Edwards and the congregation. He realized that the soldier and Rebekah were pushing back their chairs and tromping out toward the buttery. Rebekah must have enlisted the man’s help in turning some of the larger wheels of cheese, so he’d be tied up for a while.

  Joseph sat very still for a moment, then began to write about something he’d been a little afraid to say:

  True religion, my dear brother, and thorough religion, is of the pleasantest aspect of everything this side of heaven. It is the most reasonable of all things.

  After he wrote that last sentence, Joseph flushed and gave a guilty glance over his shoulder. The religion Mr. Edwards had shown them was many things, but reasonable was not one of them. God’s ways were not subject to being grasped by human beings.

  What Joseph was writing tilted toward apostasy, except in the surprising schools of thought he had discovered in Cambridge. It made his heart race to commit such thoughts to paper. Elisha, he knew, would not condemn him, his own moral decisions being what they were. Joseph pushed on.

  It don’t consist in abstruse nice notions and speculations. But in that which, if unprejudiced, informed sense of humankind says is right . . .

  He wanted his brother to know that he could have the happiness of religion without submitting himself to the capricious dictates of an inscrutable God who would toy with lives as he pleased without any relationship to sense or reason as understood by the human mind. Mr. Edwards, in all his brilliance—and Joseph never doubted that—used logic and measured argument along with Bible-fueled poetry to draw from the scriptures a picture of an utterly sovereign God to whom all creation belonged, and to whom human beings were called and compelled to turn over every aspect of their lives.

  Joseph took a deep breath and wrote:

  We are thereby required to believe nothing but what is supported by good evidence, and in no other manner than the evidence will avail.

  Joseph was giddy with the idea of a world that made sense. All he and Elisha had to do was to examine the evidence and try hard enough. They did not have to be trapped, like their father, in torment and doubt.

  T
he soldier was loaded down with butter when he left the house.

  Parched and sweating from riding through a June drought, Mr. Edwards reached the meeting house in Portsmouth so late that he walked in on the Reverend Mr. Moody winging a sermon in his place. The journey had been very taxing. The man Mr. Edwards set off with had been so terrified by stories of drought conditions in the country they were entering that he had turned back, with Mr. Edwards trotting beside him, using all of his powers of oratory to persuade him to keep going. He was glad, now, to be traveling on alone.

  He walked quietly to the pulpit and stood behind Mr. Moody, scanning the congregation for his daughter Mary’s face as the old minister praised him to the skies without having noticed that he had arrived. Mary, who was visiting relatives in Portsmouth, seemed fervent as she prayed, but she gave him several discreet glances, full of affection, but perhaps a bit worldly, or even amused. He was resolving to speak with her about the state of her soul, when Mr. Moody finished, turned, and jumped like a squirrel at the sight of him.

  “Brother Edwards,” he said, recovering, “I didn’t intend to flatter you to your face, but there’s one thing I’ll tell you: they say that your wife is going to heaven, by a shorter road than yourself.”

  Mr. Edwards stared at Mr. Moody, who lost his joviality to a cringe. He saw Mary shaking her head at him, and it crossed his mind that he might be acting a bit rude. Still, muzzled in his own pulpit, he did not have it in him to joke when it was time to preach. He had traveled too far, and, besides, Sarah would hate having her religious experiences remarked on in a smiling way. He bowed, stepped up to the pulpit, and did what he had come to do.

  He was very glad to see old friends in Portsmouth and to have his talk with Mary, but he didn’t linger many days before he went along to Boston to check with the printer regarding the progress of his book about the theology of the controversy in Northampton. He had written it in just two months, defining words like “saint” and “Christian” with exacting precision. When he had worked his arguments with great thoroughness, he articulated twenty objections to his own position, and answered every one. Still, something was missing. He thought it had to do more with the temper of the people than with theological arguments, but he could no more address that than he could bring back his grandfather to ask his advice. Some things were beyond him.

  Meanwhile, Northampton people were trying to find another minister to answer his arguments. It would be, no doubt, an escalation of the letter war, with the material welfare of his family and the souls of his congregation at stake. He addressed the possibility at the end of the book:

  If anyone opposes me from the press, I desire he would attend to the true state of the question, and endeavor fairly to take off the force of each argument, by answering them directly and distinctly, with calm and close reasoning: avoiding (as much as may be) both dogmatic assertion and passionate reflection.

  He doubted that this would happen, but a man could hope.

  People in Northampton were getting more and more restless, so he was eager for them to have the book. He met in Boston with the Reverend Mr. Thomas Foxcroft, who had written an appendix, and was proofreading, collecting advance subscriptions to help cover the costs of printing, and taking pains to help. Mr. Edwards put his arm awkwardly around Mr. Foxcroft’s shoulder and urged him to finish with all possible speed.

  He set out for home on Thursday late afternoon, riding alone under a free and plentiful, drought-ending rain. He had promised his people when last he preached that he would return to them after two Sabbaths and was determined not to leave them to be made destitute or unruly by any further absence on his part. He had not been sorry, it was true, to be gone on other important business when the council of local ministers gathered at his meeting house for the last hearing in the matter of matrimony between Elisha Hawley and Martha Root. The wayward young father was to be absent, as well. The hearing would be over by now, and he knew that he needed to be in Northampton to face his detractors in the congregation for the sake of both his reputation and their souls.

  The rain would not relent and the going was slow. He was riding a horse that he had exchanged with friends for his own on another trip months ago, when this horse had been fresh and his own horse had needed rest. Now the loaned horse was tired. He didn’t reach the house of his friends until three in the morning, when he roused one of the sons to send for his horse. Mr. Edwards slept briefly while the boy got dressed and went out; then he drank rum and coffee to warm himself in the dark kitchen. The mother of the family gave him bread and cold sliced pork for the road.

  The boy finally tromped back into the kitchen, shaking rain from his hair. As daylight later confirmed, the horse was skinny and dull-eyed from having been kept so long in pastures burnt with drought. As he mounted and waved to his friends (who stood in the kitchen door, lit from behind; it was raining too hard to keep a lantern burning in the open air), Mr. Edwards felt the discouragement of his horse to be even more profound than that of the travel-worn beast he had been relieved to return to his owners. They trudged along with rain plastering his already soaked great coat to his leather vest and breeches, which smelled so strongly of wet animal that he began to feel joined to his horse, both of them exhausted already with so many miles to go.

  The day came on with a diffusion of gray light. The trees swayed back and forth like the tongues of bells beating to draw the people in to wait for God in his house. Mr. Edwards, urging the horse on with his heels as he pulled the collar of his great coat higher to try to shelter his face from the rain, remembered watching the bell from underneath when he was a child in his father’s church. His thoughts covered more ground than his horse. He found them drifting to young Brainerd hacking and coughing his way across so much rough country. Brainerd had described dragging himself out of a near deathbed and barely managing to stand long enough to offer communion. Mr. Edwards, raising first one long arm and then the other over his head to try to stretch out his aching back, thought of Brainerd’s brother at the mission now, and the hopeful reports he had sent of awakenings among the people there. Mr. Edwards had shipped the newly published volume of Brainerd’s journals to his correspondents in Scotland and had heard back from them about awakenings in those lands, as well. Even in bedeviled Northampton, there were stirrings among the young people, and, now, not just the sawmill owner’s daughter but even a few more were waiting to join the church, professions and all, when for so many years not one person had stepped forward. The fight between him and the congregation worked for the glory of God in this way. If only the church committee would allow it.

  The thought of true Christians praying together across expanses of rocky, muddy land which took almost more than he and his horse had in them to cross, and, praying even farther, across the troubled oceans which he had never attempted to traverse, brought him comfort.

  The rain which had been pooling in his collar spilled over and soaked the back of his neck. He pulled his great coat closer and went on.

  He met with a party of strangers and was glad of the company. Their pace seemed to help forward his horse. They were heading to Worcester by way of Marlborough, and, encouraged by them, Mr. Edwards reached Worcester that night without being much exposed to the malignant influence of the evening air. He dreamed of groping through cold muck in the swamp in East Windsor with the young boy enslaved by his family who had explored with him there. His feeling as the dream receded upon waking was that he was pulling away from something both terribly troubled and dear to him.

  The next day, again much hindered by rain, he pushed his horse so hard as to nearly ruin her but did not make it home for Sabbath, after all.

  On Monday afternoon, his horse finally came limping down King Street with her head hanging low, so far gone that not even the close proximity of a known barn with its hay and shelter could quicken her pace. The sun was out and, as a bristly black bug hunker
ed down on the edge of the saddle, Mr. Edwards was surprised to be hard struck with love for Northampton.

  The road was empty. Everyone must have left their work for a meeting. He was sick to death of endless, quarrelsome meetings. Now he spoke to the town itself in an intimate, formal way, as if preaching to the well, the courthouse, meeting house hill, and to all the people who used the tannery and the brickyard and whose horses scattered the road with manure. Tired and dirty from his days of hard travel, he slipped off his own suffering horse, and, walking beside her, he said aloud:

  “How could I leave you whom I so love? How could I abandon you except in the grip of pure, clean fury? I am right, of course. I have been right. I must be right. You have turned against the clear instructions of the holy word. You are taking something clean and making it dirty, muddled, shabby, useless. Everything I’ve offered you, all my teaching, striving, and love, you squeeze, wrench, and twist until it drips like rain.”

  His voice was soft and shook with anger. He stopped speaking, but the voice became louder in his head as he walked in the rutted road, which did not answer him. He broke into wordless vision, which, he knew—always—was rising from the words and mind inside him and was not anything that he was seeing with his bodily eyes.

  He remembered moments when the people of Northampton had risen, when he and they rose together, when they had been fainting, weeping, writhing, or lying still on the ground. They had filled with the spirit, the holy spirit, and it had been as if their bodies spoke without words, and maybe it had been their bodies speaking, the natural, the base, not the true heat and light rising in them as it rose in his own Sarah. Her body as much as broke the feeble laws of nature, expressed such great piety that it seemed that she could float over the rough wood floor in their hallway and levitate into the parlor—in a household full of children, servants, and visiting students of theology, mind, a house full of witnesses—rise and float into the formal room of greeting guests.