A Circuit Rider's Wife. Corra Harris
found him curled up on the window sill next to the milk pitcher, sunning himself.
William went out to put up his red-headed horse, and I drew a chair before the shelf containing the bread tray, the dishpan, pot and skillets, and stared at them with horror and amazement. Why had William not mentioned this matter of cooking? I had never cooked anything but cakes and icings in my whole life! I was preparing to weep when a knock sounded upon the door and immediately a large, fair woman entered. She wore the most extraordinary teacup bonnet on her huge head that was tied somewhere in the creases of her doubled chin with black ribbons. And, on a blue plate, she was carrying a stack of green-apple pies nearly a foot high. Catching sight of the half-distilled tears in my eyes as I arose to meet her, she set the pies down, clasped me in her arms and whispered with motherly tenderness: "I know how you feel, child; it's the way all brides feel when they first realize what they have done, and all they've done to theirselves. But 'tain't so bad; you'll come down to it in less 'an a week; and you mustn't cry now, with all the folks comin' in. They won't understand."
She pointed through the open door and I turned in the shelter of her arms to see down the road a strand of people ascending the hill, dressed like fancy beads, each behind the other, and each bearing something in her hands or on his shoulders—and William standing at the gate to welcome them.
"Who are they?" I asked in astonishment.
"It's a donation party. I come on ahead to warn you. Them's the members of the Redwine, Fellowship and Macedonia churches, bringin' things to celebrate your weddin'. I'm Glory White, wife of one of the stewards at Redwine, and we air powerful glad to have you. So you mustn't cry till the folk air all gone, or they'll think you ain't satisfied, which won't do your husband any good."
That was my first lesson in suppressing my natural feelings. As the years went by I had more lessons in it than in anything else. And I reckon it is not such a bad thing to do, for if one's natural feelings are suppressed long enough one develops supernatural feelings and feels surer of having a soul.
The donation party poured in, Sister Glory White and I standing between the kitchen table and the fireplace to receive them. William acted as master of ceremonies, conducting each man and woman forward with great empressement for the introduction. Everyone called me "Sister Thompson" and laid a "donation" on the table in passing. I was not aware at the time of their importance, but as William only received two hundred and forty-five dollars for his salary that year we should have starved but for an occasional donation party. In fact, they are smiling providential instances in the memory of every Methodist itinerant. Upon this occasion they ranged from bedquilts to hams and sides of bacon; from jam and watermelon rind preserves to flour, meal and chair tidies. One old lady brought a package of Simmons' Liver Regulator, and Brother Billy Fleming contributed a long twist of "dog shank"—a homecured tobacco. The older women spread the viands for the "infare," as the wedding dinner was called, upon the table, and we stood about it to eat amid shouts and laughter and an exchange of wit as good natured as it was horrifying to bridal ears.
"So," said a huge old Whitman humorist that I afterward identified as Brother Sam White, as he clasped both my hands in his, "this is Brother Thompson's new wife"—as if I were one of a series—"you are welcome, ma'am. He's been mightily in need of a wife to perk him up. He's a good preacher, but sorter like my young horse Selim. There ain't a better colt in the country, only he don't show it; sperit's too quiet unless I lay a cuckle bur under his tail. And your husband, ma'am, what he says is good, but he don't r'ar and pitch enough. He can't skeer young sinners around here with jest the truth. He must learn to jump up and down and larrup 'em with it!"
All this was delivered in a bellowing voice that fairly shook the feathers in my hat. And it indicates the quality of William's ministry and the ideals of his congregation.
CHAPTER II
I BUILD FOR MYSELF A MONUMENT MORE ENDURING THAN BRASS
As Sister Glory White had predicted, I "came down to it" at once and soon learned to perform the usual feminine miracles in the bread-tray and skillets. Our happiness did not differ from the happiness of other young married people except that it was abashed morning and evening with family prayers—occasions when Thomas, the cat, invariably arose with an air of outraged good-breeding and withdrew to the back yard. William had long, active, itinerating legs in those days, a slim, graceful body, a countenance like that of Sir Walter Raleigh and eyes that must have been like Saint John's. They were blue and had in them the "far, eternal look." And in the years to come I was to learn how much the character of the man resembled both that of the cavalier and the saint. Also, I was to learn that it was no light matter for one's husband to have descended from an ecclesiastical family that had found its way up through church history by prayer and fasting.
A Presbyterian may make the most abiding forefather, because his doctrinal convictions are so strong they prenatally crimp the morals of those who come after him; and it may be that a Methodist ancestor counts for less in the third and fourth generation because his theology is too genially elastic to take a Calvinistic grip upon posterity, but it is certain that he will impart a wrestling-Jacob disposition to his descendants which nothing can change. So it was with William; he was often without "the witness of the Spirit," but I never knew him to let his angel go. He had a genius for wrestling in prayer as another man might have for writing great poetry. His words flew together into coveys when he fell upon his knees, and rose like mourning doves to Heaven, or they would be like high notes out of a black-Saul mood of the soul, and then they thundered forth from his lips as if he were about to storm the gates of Paradise. And sometimes, in the dramatic intensity of his emotions, he would ask for the most terrifying things.
At first as we knelt together there in the quiet little house with no one near for help but the hills, I was alarmed less Heaven should take him at his word, for if half his petitions had been granted we could not have lived in this world. We should have been scattered like the fine dust of a too great destiny. But presently, when nothing adequate to them happened during the night, I learned to have more confidence in the wisdom of God and less in William's. With him prayer was simply a spiritual obsession based upon a profound sense of mortal weakness and very mystifying to his young wife, who had cheerfully said her orisons from a book night and morning with an easy Canterbury conscience.
The Saturday after our marriage I accompanied him to Redwine, his regular appointment. It was the custom then to have preaching Saturday and Sunday. The church was withdrawn from the road into a dim forest of pines, black and mournful. Here and there, horses and mules bearing saddles or dangling harness stood slipshod in the shade, switching their tails at innumerable flies. Near the door was the group of men one always sees about a country church on meeting days. They are farmers who have an instinct for the out-of-doors and who, for this reason, will not go in till the last moment. Beyond the church, in the thicker shadows, lay its dead beneath a colony of staggering gray stones. Upon one grave, I remember, where the clay was freshly turned, there was a bouquet of flowers—love's protest against the sonorous sentence—"earth to earth and dust to dust"—which the other graves confirmed. The pine needles lay thick above them, and not a flower distinguished them from the common sod. They had the look of deeper peace, the long, untroubled peace of sleepers who have passed out of the memory of living, worrying men. These churchyards for the dead were characteristic features in country circuits, and I mention this one because ever after it seemed to me to be just inside the gateway of the Methodist itinerancy, and because, in the end, it came to be the home place of my heart.
I had never before been in a Methodist church. A certain Episcopalian conceit prevented my straying into the one at Edenton. And I was shocked now at the Old Testament severity of this one. There was no compromise with human desires in it, not a touch of color except the brown that time gives unpainted wood, not an effort anywhere to appeal to the imagination or suggest