Christian fiction; Circuit riders -- Fiction; Domestic fiction; Spouses of clergy -- Fiction
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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