“I’m sorry to decamp, Mr. Varney, but I know that the meeting will be in good hands.”
“Aye, don’t you worry, I’ll manage.” Varney looked pleased. “Is the little one your daughter?”
“My granddaughter. The only girl in the household now.” Martha had fallen on the step and was wailing. Lewis smiled. “But do you know something? I think she makes more noise than all the boys put together.”
Lewis scooped the little girl up and bundled her onto the horse, putting her in the saddle in front of him. Her sobbing hiccoughs eventually subsided as she surveyed the passing countryside.
“Cow!” she shrieked, pointing at a herd pastured in a field along the road. Lewis agreed that, yes, it was indeed a cow.
“You were very lucky today,” Betsy remarked as they jogged along.
“What do you mean?”
“You were lucky that you weren’t called to account there in the churchyard. You don’t know enough Latin to debate a frog, and you don’t know Greek at all.”
“Yes, but no one else knows that. Besides, I didn’t claim to know anything at all. I merely offered the opinion that Latin or Greek would be more entertaining. And it would have been, too, I expect.”
“That’s a mighty fine line you’re walking there, Thaddeus. The way you’re twisting words around, you’re beginning to sound like an Anglican.”
“Oh.” He knew she was right, and that he had deliberately uttered a misleading statement. “Yes, dear, perhaps you’re right.”
“You know I am. Sometimes you’re too clever for your own good.”
“Wait a moment, Betsy. I’ve just thought of some Greek words. Alpha, for one — and Omega.” He kicked his horse into a fast trot that bounced them up and down, making it harder for her to answer. But just as he was looking back to laugh at her, he caught a glimpse of a female form slipping around the side of a barn that stood at the edge of the road. Her cap had fallen down her back, revealing a mass of chestnut hair.
“That’s odd,” he said, as he slowed the horse.
“What’s odd?”
“I think that was the sister-in-law of the small woman you sat with at the service.”
“The pregnant woman who helped with Martha, you mean? Minta?”
Lewis looked at his wife, astounded. “Now how do you know she’s pregnant?”
“Oh, for crying out loud, Thaddeus. After all the children I’ve had, do you think I can’t tell? She’s expecting all right, and it’s making her sickly.”
He shrugged. “Oh, well. None of it matters, I guess, except that Minta gave me to understand that her sister-in-law was ill at home.”
He craned his head around, but he couldn’t see whether there was anyone else there or not.
V
The following week there was a camp meeting called at Gatrey’s farm in Adolphustown, just across the Bay of Quinte, with William Case as the featured speaker. Lewis had not been invited to preach. He was not a member of church union, and therefore could not officially take part in the events of the day. Besides, a great deal of the allure of this sort of meeting was that people got to hear someone different. As a rule, these camp meetings made Lewis a little uneasy anyway. He had never been sure whether they actually accomplished anything or not. It was all too easy for people to get caught up in the frenzy of the moment and profess to something they didn’t genuinely feel. Sometimes, he suspected, the young men came forward and fell on their knees simply to impress the young women present.
Betsy laughed, as she always did, when Lewis grumpily presented this last part of his argument. “It’s hard enough to bring people to the Lord without questioning their motives,” she said. “Just rejoice that they’re sincere at the moment and work hard to make it stick.”
The meeting was to be held in one of Gatrey’s back fields. There was no building large enough to accommodate the number of people who were expected, and even if there were, they would probably not be allowed to use it. Camp meetings were a specialty of the Episcopal Methodists, and sat uneasily with the more sedate British Church. They instead preferred the protracted meeting, held inside over a number of days. It took less trouble to stage, and offered less opportunity for trouble-makers to disrupt the proceedings. It also helped establish their ownership of the buildings being used. The Wesleyans may have frowned at the Episcopals’ exuberant approach to saving souls, but camp meetings were popular and resulted in many conversions, so they had decided that this one would be allowed to proceed.
It was a scene familiar to Lewis: a platform with a roof set up over it at one end of the field under the shade of hickory trees that had been left along the fence line; the penitent’s bench in front; the entire area enclosed by a stout fence with a gate at the far end. The rest of the pasture was littered with slabs of wood that would serve as benches. Some of the older attendees brought chairs, but not many. It was, after all, an enterprise of the soul. Comforts of the body were something that was not supposed to be considered. Farther back in the field the tents were going up. The meeting could well last several days, and families were taking the opportunity to stake their claims on patches of pasture that would accommodate their housekeeping needs.
The Varneys were there, setting up their campfire, and Lewis nodded to them as he passed. Beside the Varneys were two fine-looking young men — the Caddick brothers he presumed — who looked to have brought samples of their wares and were doing a brisk business selling miniatures and small landscape scenes. The most popular and least expensive items seemed to be the little dressmaking pins with the Lord’s Prayer painted on the head.
The taller of the two, Benjamin, had a small magnifying glass, which he handed to Lewis so that he could inspect the handiwork. “I have to carry one with me,” he confided, laughing. “Otherwise people are suspicious that there’s not really anything there.”
Lewis held the glass over the pin and could just make out the minute script. I’m getting old, he thought. Even magnified I can barely see it.
“Very nice,” he said, and handed it back to the boy. He didn’t know what else to say about a prayer he couldn’t even see.
“Wouldn’t you like to buy one? Maybe for the Missus?” Benjamin asked.
“That’s all right,” he said. “We both already know the prayer by heart.”
“A miniature portrait then, perhaps?” said the other brother, whose name Lewis later remembered was Willet. “I can do one in a few minutes. We even have lockets to put them in.”
“No, thank you.” He was a little rankled that the sales were going on so blatantly at what was supposed to be a religious meeting, but then many other people were making good coin selling pocket-size bibles, and there were any number who had shown up with food and water for sale, among them the peddler, Isaac Simms. Some enterprising women had set up huge vats and were preparing stews and soups for sale to those who were too busy praying, or too idle to feed their own families.
Just then, Minta Jessup and her sister-in-law Rachel strolled up to admire the lockets, a group of young men following along behind them — admiring Rachel, Lewis figured. He tipped his hat to them in greeting.
“It’s the preacher from Demorestville! Good day to you, sir. I thought we might meet again.”
“I’m pleased it’s under such pleasant circumstances.”
Minta smiled too, but he thought she looked pale and even more tired than when he had last seen her. “Are you preaching today, Mr. Lewis?”
“No, not today. It’s Mr. Case’s meeting today.”
“Now I’m disappointed,” Rachel said. “Minta told me how much she enjoyed your sermon, both the one in the church and the one in the yard. I was looking forward to hearing you.” He could see the twinkle in her grey eyes. “If you expect to convert me to a Methodist, you’re going to have to let me hear you preach, you know. Otherwise, I may go off with the Presbyterians, or even the Anglicans.”
“Now you’ve given me a real challenge. I must make a note to myself
that I need to preach to Rachel Jessup, otherwise she may wander into false creeds.”
They had been walking as they talked, but now Minta objected. “I need to sit for a moment, if you don’t mind.”
Rachel was immediately solicitous. “Of course, I’m sorry. Here’s a vacant piece of log in the shade.” She helped her down, and fussed about her for a moment.
Lewis was about to go on his way and leave the two women, when Minta said, “I’m fine, really. There’s no reason for you to sit around. Go on with Mr. Lewis and see what there is to see.”
Rachel hesitated for a moment. “All right, but I won’t be long, and then I’ll come back and keep you company.”
“Minta’s expecting her first child,” she confided when they were out of earshot. “She’s sick most of the time, but tries to keep going. That’s why Seth asked me to come and live with them, to give her a hand.”
“This child-bearing business is hard on some women,” Lewis said. “It wears them out, even the strong ones, and I don’t think your Minta was too robust to begin with.” So Betsy was right, he thought. He might have known.
“Do you have children, sir?”
“Yes, three boys. I had girls, but I’ve lost them all.”
His grief must have shown in his face. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” Rachel said. “I didn’t mean to intrude.”
“It’s all right. It’s just that one of the losses is recent. I can’t help but believe that they’ve all gone to a better place, but I admit that I miss them sorely.”
Whatever she might have said in return was lost in the hubbub of the start of the meeting. William Case mounted the platform and gazed out over the crowd theatrically before he uttered his first words.
“Brothers and Sisters …” he began.
Lewis rather disliked William Case. He found him pompous and intolerant, failings that he knew are often ascribed to men of God, but in Case they were refined to an unbearable degree. He also had a reputation as a ladies’ man of sorts, but his specialty seemed to be marrying up lady preachers so as to shut them up. At least that was Lewis’s theory.
His first wife had been Hetty Hubbard, a local preacher who had had some success. But after Case married her, she mounted the pulpit no more. When she died a short time later, he took as his second wife the well-known preacher Eliza Barnes. She had been a popular speaker who had laboured hard among the Indian Missions. Case had professed on more than one occasion to detest her, and during her preaching days he even refused to sit on the same platform with her if she were scheduled to speak. Now that he’d married her, of course, he refused to allow her to say anything, much less profess the Word of God.
Lewis had heard Barnes preach on several occasions, and had admired her eloquence and the force of her voice, which carried easily to the farthest-flung of the congregation.
In the new order of Methodism, however, women were no longer encouraged to profess their faith in public, instead being relegated to the home on account of their “fragility.” Lewis knew this was nonsense, given the lives they led. Take Betsy, for example. For most of her life she had been about as frail as a draught horse, had given birth to ten children and raised them virtually alone, had suffered fevers and accidents and sorrows by the score, and yet was still able, on the days when her ague didn’t plague her, to work the average man into the ground. If Betsy had ever been inclined to take up the travelling connection and give public vent to her faith, Lewis would have encouraged and applauded her.
She had laughed when he said this to her at one time. “I declare, Thaddeus, that’s the last thing I would want to do. One of us on the road is enough.”
“But if you wanted to, I’d do my best to help you, you know.”
“No, Thaddeus. The only thing I ever wanted was you and the babies.”
And then her voice had softened. “I do thank you for saying it, though.”
Not so Case. And not so with most of the other Methodists, in spite of the fact that they had for years relied on women to supervise class meetings, to carry the gospel to the Indian Missions, and yes, even to preach wherever there was someone to listen. His church was falling into line with the Wesleyans, who had gone so far as to pass a resolution forbidding women from taking the pulpit, and men like William Case had agreed to it.
Lewis had seen how effective women could be, how they could move a crowd and stir its conscience. Why not let them, in a country that spread its people across countless miles and scattered them thinly across its face? It wasn’t as if there was a surfeit of male ministers.
By the time he realized that his reflections had caused him to lose track of what Case was saying, Lewis had missed the entire first part of the sermon. He chided himself for letting his mind wander.
Case was met with polite attention, but as the first speaker of the day, he failed to engender the wild enthusiasm that was the hallmark of the camp meeting. As the day wore on, however, each sermon would spur the frenzy of the crowd until, at the very end of the meeting, Case would speak again and claim the conversion of many.
But now it was the turn of the exhorter. James Simpson mounted the platform. It was the exhorter’s job to encourage the crowd to shout and proclaim their faith, to “do what was right.” He began with “Hallelujah!”
“Hallelujah,” the crowd shouted in return.
“I should go back and make sure Minta is all right,” Rachel said and she darted away before he could say goodbye.
Most of the crowd was sitting well back, but there were a number, mostly young folks, who crowded in a ring around the platform.
“Hallelujah, brothers and sisters,” the exhorter called.
“Hallelujah,” came the reply of many voices, although there were a few catcalls from the back. These meetings attracted mostly the sincere, but there were always a few who came along just to see what trouble they could cause.
“Haven’t you heard the news?” A voice came floating up to the platform.
Simpson ignored it.
“Hey, Preacher, haven’t you heard the news?” the voice persisted, “The devil is dead!”
Although he had barely seemed to acknowledge the heckling, Simpson now seized on this statement. “If the devil is dead,” he shouted to the crowd, “then I see he’s left a dreadful number of fatherless children!”
The crowd roared its approval, and he continued. “We are all fatherless children unless we acknowledge the true benevolence of the Lord Our God, who is truly our father. Like a father, he will forgive us. Like a father he will admit us to his House. Like a father he will love us, but only if we surrender ourselves to the Mercy of his Grace and give up our whole hearts to the joy of his Word.”
“Hallelujah!” the crowd shouted, and the heckler gave up. If there was anything a Methodist crowd admired, it was a ready wit, and Simpson had shown that he had it in abundance.
As the exhortation went on, Lewis realized that Rachel had worked her way through the throng of people and had rejoined him.
“Minta’s fine,” she said. “She insisted I come back up.”
The young people at the front began to stir. They were nearly always the first to go forward and proclaim that they had been saved. He could see a couple of the girls swaying and knew that they would soon fall to their knees, caught up in the emotion of the day. Sure enough, a yellow-haired girl threw herself to the ground, crying, “I’ve got it! I’ve got it!”
This was what Simpson had been waiting for. “Got what?” he cried from the platform.
“I’ve got it! I’ve got it!” the girl shrieked.
“What have you got?” said Simpson in return, and the crowd joined him in asking, “What have you got?”
“I’ve got the Grace of the Lord!” she cried.
“Hallelujah!” called Simpson.
“Hallelujah!” the crowd echoed.
Right on cue, two more girls fell forward at this, and several young men followed. One of them in particular caught Lewis’s eye. He was rathe
r weedy-looking, with greasy hair, and dressed far more shabbily than those around him. He threw himself in front of the platform and began to moan. “I’ve got it! I’ve got it!” he shouted, in imitation of the first girl.
“What have you got, young man? What have you got?”
“I’ve got the spirit of Jesus Christ Our Lord,” he cried. He began to moan and writhe, but all the time Lewis could see that he was watching the girls out of the corner of one eye. He realized that Rachel had noticed this too, and she had a wary look on her face.
“That’s that Morgan Spicer,” she said. “I can only hope the Lord improves his personality along with his soul.” Her hand flew up to her mouth as she realized what she had said and who she had said it to, but Lewis laughed.
“I take it you know him?”
“Yes, he’s a pest,” she replied, but elaborated no further.
As Lewis himself had just been entertaining similar sentiments about William Case, he didn’t feel he could rightly chastise the girl for being uncharitable.
One by one, worshippers went to the front of the platform and threw themselves to the ground, and with each one the crowd would yell out encouragement. The meeting was building to a gratifying level of frenzy when Simpson decided enough was enough for the time being and called for a hymn. Breaking off the frenetic pace now would make people all the more eager to come forward later to be a part of the grand awakening.
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