Circuit Rider's Bride
By Corra Harris Mary Elizabeth Eden, an Episcopalian and a popular belle in small-town Georgia, falls in love with William Asbury Thompson a Methodist preacher on the backwoods circuit. Mary soon finds she must adjust not only to marriage but also to Methodist worship, life among poor country folk and the unique role of a minister's wife. In this excerpt from The Circuit Rider's Wife (Bristol Books), a novel based partially on the life of author Corra Harris, Mary gets a preview of what life will be like as a circuit-riding preacher's wife.
The Saturday after our marriage I accompanied him to the Redwine Methodist Church, his regular appointment. It was the custom then to have preaching Saturday and Sunday. The church was set back from the road in a dim forest of pines, black and mournful. Here and there horses and mules bearing saddles or dangling harnesses 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.
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 holy imagery. Only the semi-circular altar rail about the narrow box pulpit suggested human frailty, prayer and repentance. On the men's side—the law of sex was observed to the point of segregation in all our churches—there was a sprinkling of men with strong, red, craggy faces who appeared to have the Adamic nature highly developed in them that seemed to set them back in the garden of Eden and hide them from God because of their sins. On the other side there was more lightness, more life and hope expressed in the faces of the younger women. But in the faces of the old there was the same outdone look of fallen humanity facing God.
There was no service from the standpoint of my Episcopal rearing, just a hymn, a prayer, and then William took his text-the Beatitudes-a of them. I have since heard better sermons on one of them, but the figure of him standing there behind the high pulpit in the darkened church with his eyes lifted, as if he saw angels above our heads, has never faded from my memory, nor have the faces of the old women in their black sunbonnets upturned to him, nor the drooping shoulders of the old men sitting with bowed heads in the Amen Corner. Somehow there was a reality about the whole scene that we did not have at home with all the fine music and heaven-hinting accessories.
William was expounding on the blessed peacemakers, the vision-seeing calm growing deeper in his eyes, when suddenly a woman on the front seat stood up, laid her sleeping infant on the floor with careful deliberation, took off her black calico bonnet, stepped into the aisle, slapped her hands together and began to spin around and around upon her toes with incredible speed. Her homespun skirt ballooned about her, the ruffle of her collar stood out like a little frill of white neck feathers. She had a fixed, foolish expression; maintained an energy of motion that was persistent and amazing and gave out at regular intervals a short staccato squeal that was scarcely human in sound.
Not a word was spoken; William himself was silenced as he watched the strange phenomenon. And I have often wondered since at the quality of that courage in an otherwise shrinking country woman which could cause her to rise, taking the service out of the preacher's hands as serenely as if she had been sent from God. And this is what she really believed. And every other member of the congregation, including William, shared the belief that she had an extraordinary blessing that day.
After all it is a tremendous blessing to believe that one's God is within immediate blessing distance. In this connection I venture to add that it has always seemed to me a lack of comprehension which gives the Methodists the chief reputation for having an emotional religion, and it is certainly cheating the Episcopalians. For every time the service is read in an Episcopal church the congregation shouts the responses, quietly, of course, and by the book. But it is shouting just the same, and with a beseeching use of words both joyful and agonizing that surpasses any sporadic shouting of the Methodists.
After the sermon we had dinner on the grounds, for this was an all-day meeting with another service at the end of the day. And Saturday dinner on the grounds of a Methodist church 30 years ago was a function that appealed to the threefold nature of man as nothing else I have ever seen. Socially speaking, all the best people in the community were present, the real best people, you understand. Spiritually, it was an occasion hallowed by grave conversation; for were we not within the shadow of God's house, in the sacred presence of the dead? It was gruesome if you had an Episcopalian temperament, but certainly it was conducive to good breeding and sobriety. But more particularly, there was the dinner itself set out of huge hampers on white cloths that appealed to the natural primitive man simply and honestly, without a single pretense of delicacy to hide the real sensuality of the human appetite.
On this day an abundance of food strewed the ground, from Sister Glory White's basket to Sister Amy Jurdon's and Sister Salter's. There were biscuits the size of saucers and of the thickness of bread loaves, hams, baked hens, roasted pigs, more biscuits, cucumber pickles six inches in length, green-grape pies, custards of every kind and disposition, and cakes that proclaimed the skill of every woman in the church.
William advised me to eat as I had never eaten before or the women would think I did not like their cooking and would be correspondingly offended. I was expected to consume at least three of the great biscuits and everything else in proportion. Fortunately, I sat near a tangle of vines in which I discovered a dog was hiding, a hound who gazed imploringly at me through the leaves with the forlorn, backslidden-sinner expression peculiar to his species, as much as to say, "Don't tell I am here, maybe then I'll get a few crumbs later on." I not only did not tell, but I fed him eight of the biscuits, five slices of ham and nearly everything else in reach of me except the cucumber pickles. I never saw a dog eat more furtively or so well.
Meanwhile I was raising for myself a monument more enduring than brass in the hearts of my husband's people as a hardy woman who could make herself one of them. William, who did not suspect the presence of the dog, grew faintly alarrned, but I persevered till the last man staggered surfeited from the feast. It was my first and, I may add, almost my only triumph as a minister's wife on a backwoods circuit.
After the night service it was arranged that we should go home with the Salters to spend the night. Sister Salter was one of the Redwine saints, but Brother Salter was not a brother at all—he was still in the world—a little, nondescript man with a thin black beard and sad black eyes. But he was not proud of his godless state, especially as it compared with his wife's radiant experience; he was literally a humble sinner and showed it. We took our places behind them in split-bottom chairs in the one-horse wagon.
Sister Salter was still in her baptismal mood, and as we rumbled on into the deepening twilight through the lovely spring woods, she continued to sing snatches from the old hymns. Higher and higher her fine treble voice arose till the homing birds answered and every living thing in the forest felt the throb of the poignant melody-everything except the baby on her breast. It slept on as soundly as if it breathed her peace into its soft little body.
Night had fallen when we reached the house, a one-room log cabin.
"Light and go in," said Brother Salter. "I reckon the children air all in bed. You 'uns kin ondress and git in while me and Sally unhitches the horse."
We "lit" and entered the large room flooded with moonlight. There was a bed in each comer, all occupied save one. This was evidently the "company bed." We knew by its opulent feather paunch, by the white-fringed counterpane and by the pillow-shams bearing dull mottoes worked in turkey-red thread. One could not tell the age of or how many persons were already asleep in the other beds, but judging from the number and varying sizes of the shoes that cluttered the floor beside them there must have been a hearty dozen, ranging all the way from adolescence down to infancy.
It is needless to add that we were apparently asleep with the covers over my horrified head when the elder Saiters entered. Where they slept is still a mystery. But we were awakened very early the next morning by the sound of Sister Salter's voice singing, "His loving kindness, oh, how good!" as she rattled the stove doors beneath the cookshed in the yard.
Three very young children were sitting half under our bed examining our shoes and other articles of apparel, and as many older heads stared at us from the opposite beds. My anguish can be better imagined than described, and the nonchalance with which William arose and pulled on his trousers did not add to my opinion of him. I afterward learned that nothing was more common than this populous way of entertaining guests, and that he had long since become hardened to the indelicacies of such situations.
Corra Harris' experiences contributed to the fictional account of an itinerant preacher's life, The Circuit Rider's Wife, from which this article was excerpted. She and her husband lived and ministered in rural north Georgia.
This article was published in Good News (September/October 1988).