IN THE LITTLE GRAVEYARD BEHIND REDWINE CHURCH
William was too dazed by the misfortune of his superannuation to think
or plan for the future. For him there was no future. He sat in the
chimney corner, following me about the house with his vacant eyes, but
really grieving for one of the choice, hard circuits, with its
dried-fruit salary, such as he had received for years, or remembering
the good pastoral times he had upon one in this or that year.
I have sometimes wondered what would be the moral effect upon a church
community if an old and helpless preacher like William should be sent
to it with the understanding that the church should minister to him
instead of his ministering to the church; that every saint and sinner
should be invited to contribute to his peace and comfort, even as for
years he had labored for them. There would be less preaching, of
course, but more development in real Christian service. An old
preacher treated in this manner would become very dictatorial, a
perfect autocrat about ordering charities for the poor and prayers for
the penitents, but would it be so bad for the church?
However, that was not my consideration now. The Redwine Circuit was
only twenty miles distant; the little house between the two green hills
that had been the Methodist parsonage thirty years before was long
since abandoned for a shiny, green and yellow spindle-legged new
parsonage at Royden. And while William, who had always had his home
dictated to him by the Conference, showed a pathetic apathy about
choosing one for himself, I hankered for the ragged-roof cottage with
its ugly old chimneys that had first sheltered our life together. So
within a month the horse and buggy were sold, the cottage at Redwine
rented, and we settled in it like two crippled birds in a
half-feathered nest.
Now, for the first time since I left Edenton, a happy, thoughtless
bride, I had leisure to think just of ourselves, of our sum total, as
it were. And I found that we were two human numerals added together
for a lifetime which made a deficit. Yet we had not been idle or
indifferent workers. For thirty years William had been in the
itinerancy, filling nearly every third and fourth class appointment in
his Conference. He had preached over three thousand sermons, baptized
more than four hundred infants, received nearly four thousand souls
into membership. He had been untiring in his efforts to raise his
assessments, and had paid more pastoral calls than half a dozen doctors
need to make in order to become famous and wealthy.
Time changed us; we grew old. I abandoned my waist-line to Nature's
will and my face settled into the expression of a good negative that
has been blurred by too long exposure to a strong light. Toward the
end William looked like the skin-and-bones remnant of a saint. His
face was sunken and hollowed out till the very Wesley in him showed
through. His beard was long and had whitened until it gave his Moses
head the appearance of coming up out of a holy mist.
So, I say, we aged; but we went on from circuit to circuit with no
other change except that when we saved enough money William bought a
new horse. It is a terrible treadmill, and we could expect no reward
or change in this world, no promotion, no ease of mind except the ease
of prayers, which I never enjoyed as much as William did. I had
feelings that prayers did not put down the desires that they did not
satisfy. There were times when I almost hated prayers, when I had a
mortal aversion to Heaven and wished only that God would give me a long
earth-rest of the spirit.
We found the same kind of sinners everywhere and the same defects in
all the saints. Sometimes I even wished some one would develop a new
sort of wickedness, a kind that would vary the dreadful monotony of
repentance and cause William to scratch his theological head for a
different kind of sermon. But no one ever did; whether we were in the
mountains or in the towns, among the rich or the poor, the people
transgressed by the same mortal "rule of three" and fell short of the
glory of God exactly alike.
At last I came to understand that there is just one kind of sin in the
world--the sin against love--and no saints at all. I can't say that I
was disappointed, but I was just tired of the awful upward strain of
trying to develop faculties and feelings suitable to another world in
this one. And to make things worse, William took on a weary look after
his superannuation, like that of a man who has made a long journey in
vain. This is always the last definition the itinerancy writes upon
the faces of its superannuates. They are unhappy, mortified, like
honorable men who have failed in a business. They no longer pretend to
have better health than they really have, which is the pathetic
hypocrisy they all practice toward the last when they are in annual
fear of superannuation.
So, I looked at our deficit and knew that something was wrong. Still,
I went about the little old house and garden, trying to reconstruct the
memory of happiness and planning to spend our last days unharassed by
salvation anxieties. I have never doubted the goodness of God, but,
things being as they are, and we being what we are, it takes a long
time for Him to work it out for us, especially in any kind of a church.
Meanwhile, I tried to find some of our old friends, only to discover
that most of them were dead. I planted a few annuals, set some hens
and prepared to cultivate my own peace. But William was changed. He
had lost his courage. Whenever the rheumatism struck him he gave in to
it with a groan. Then he took up with Job in the Scriptures, and
before we had been back long enough for the flowers to bloom he just
turned over on his spiritual ashheap and died.
[Illustration: Then He Took Up with Job in the Scriptures.]
He is buried in the little graveyard behind Redwine Church, along with
most of the men and women to whom he preached in it thirty years ago.
I can feel that I am not setting things down right, not making the
latitude and longitude of experience clearly so that you may see as I
can when I close my eyes the staggering tombstones in the brown shadows
behind the little brown church. But when one has been in the Methodist
itinerancy a lifetime one cannot do that.
I used to wonder why Paul, passing through all the grandest cities and
civilizations of his times, never left behind him a single description
of any of their glories, only a reference to the altar to An Unknown
God that he found in Athens; but now I know. Paul lost the memory of
sight. He had absent-minded eyes to the things of the world. So it is
with the itinerant. The earth becomes one of the stars. I cannot
remember roads and realities. I recall most clearly only spiritual
facts, like this: Timothy Brown was a bad man, soundly converted under
William's ministry; but how he looked, on which circuit he lived, I
have forgotten long ago.
In spite of a really well-settled, worldly mind William prayed away its
foundations during those thirty years, until now the very scene of his
passing floats a mist in memory. I know he lay in the same house where
he had brought me on our wedding day. Through the window in the pearl
light of the early morning there was the same freshness upon the hills,
the same streams glistening like silver maces between; there was the
same little valley below, fluted in like a cup filled with corn and
honey and bees and flowers. The same gray farmhouses brooded close to
the earth, with children playing in the dooryards. It was all there
the morning he died, as it had been that blue and glad morning thirty
years before; but I could not see it or feel it with him lying
stretched and still upon the bed, with the sheet drawn over his face,
and the people crowding in, whispering, shuffling, bearing the long,
black coffin among them. I say, it is dim and blurred and I cannot
think it or write it properly. There seemed a rime upon the
window-panes; the hills were bare, and the cup of the valley lay
drained and empty before me, with the shadow of death darkening all the
light of the day.
A very old woman, bent, shriveled down to her hull and bones, with her
thin lips sucked in between her gums, came and tugged at my sleeve. I
recognized Sister Glory White, wearing the same look of rapacious
cheerfulness upon her bones that she used to wear upon her fat face
when she had a "body" to prepare for burial.
"Come, Sister Thompson, you must git up and go out. We air ready to
lay him out now."
"Oh, not him!" I cried; "you have laid out so many. Let some one else
do it!" For I could not forget the frightful pleasure she had taken
years ago in her ghoulish office.
"And why not him? I've helped to put away every man, woman and child
that has died in this settlement since I was grown, and I ain't goin'
to shirk my duty to Brother Thompson--not that I ever expected to do it
for him." She babbled on, gently urging me from the room, where her
presence was the last blinding touch of horror for me.
* * * * * *
So far, my autobiography has been mixed with William's biography, just
as my life seems to mingle with the dust in his grave. But I came to
an experience now of my own; unglorified by William, so strange that I
cannot explain it unless there is what may be called a reversion to
type in spirit, like this: that a person may be absolutely dominated
for years by certain influences and not only feel no antagonism to
them, but actually yield with devotion and inconceivable sacrifices,
yet, when the influence is removed and there is no longer the
love-cause for faithfulness the illusion not only passes, but the
person finds himself of his original mind and spirit, emancipated, gone
back to himself, what he really was in the beginning before the
domination began. Such at least is as near what happened in my own
case as I can tell it.
I remained in the little house between the hills, walking about,
attending to my few wants, receiving an occasional visitor in a sort of
trance of sorrow. William had always meant more to me than Heaven. I
had endured poverty, prayers, persecutions and revivals for his sake.
And now I had lost him. The very thought was immeasurable. I wore it
for mourning. I missed him when I looked down the bridle path into the
valley, and I missed him when I looked at the stars. Nothing meant
anything to me without him. Then suddenly the veil lifted. I seemed
at last to have conceded him to what is beyond the grave. At once my
own mind came back to me, not the humble, church-censored mind I had
during his life, but my very own, and it was like another conversion.
I remembered scenes and thoughts and faces that I had not recalled
since girlhood. The innocent gayety of my youth came back to me, and I
recalled distinctly with what naïve, happy worldliness I faced the
world then, and not the Kingdom of Heaven that I have been staring at
since through William's eyes for thirty years.
The next Sunday I went to church as usual, but I did not go up near the
front, which had always been my custom. It occurred to me that now I
did not have to sit in the saint neighborhood, but might sit back with
the honester human beings. The preacher was a young man of the
progressive new order, who sustained the same relation as pastor to the
church that an ambitious foreman sustains to a business that must be
renovated and improved. He was taking up his foreign missionary
collection very much after the manner of an auctioneer:
"Five dollars, five dollars, five dollars: who gives five dollars that
the Gospel may be spread in China and Siam? Who gives five dollars
that there may be light in India and to save women from casting their
innocent babes into the Ganges? Thank you, Sister Tuttle. The women
are leading off, getting ahead of you, brethren. Put down five dollars
from Sister Tuttle. Now, who will give four dollars?" and so on down
till even the sinners on the back benches subscribed a rattle of dimes.
I listened with comfortable indifference. I thought of how William
died without enough oil in him to grease his joints. And how many more
like him had died too weak and depleted to have even "assurance" of
their own salvation. I remembered how I wished toward the last that I
could afford a few delicacies, for William liked cordials and real
cream which might have strengthened and cheered him. Then and there I
resolved never to give another cent to foreign missions. I am not
opposed to foreign missions, you understand. William and I did without
much that the heathen might have missionaries, and the gospel preached
to them. But that is just it. We did without too much. I am not
saying that anyone else ought to lessen their contribution to this
cause. Let them give even more. But I am certain they ought to treble
their contribution to old preachers. There is something fearful in the
Bible like this:
"But if any provide not for his own, and especially for those of his
own house, he hath denied the faith and is worse than an infidel."
That Scripture expressed my feelings exactly as I listened to the
preacher take up his foreign missionary collection and remembered
William's dreadful poverty. So, I say, I made up my own private mind
that there is something wrong with the way church collections are
distributed, and that if I ever had any spare money it should be
devoted to purchasing a taller tombstone for William.
Immediately I felt my own "I am," sitting up in me and taking courage.
It was a grand sensation. For so many years I had not belonged to
myself. I was simply a prayer-meeting numeral, William's personal
dynamo at the women's societies. Suddenly it came to me that I was a
free moral agent for the first time in my life--widows are the only
women who are. The scandalous reflection took hold of me as I listened
to the collection and reflected that never again would I have to worry
lest William fail to raise all his "assessments," that I should never
be anxious now for fear his sermons might not please the "prominent"
members of his church. But the most refreshing, rejuvenating of all
was the thought that at last I could be a little less good. I looked
at the slattern-formed men and women sitting in still rows across the
little church, with their faces lit like candles from the preacher's
face, and I experienced a peaceful remoteness from them and from the
pulpit light.