Part 2
“I have opened my heart to God,” he said, “and He has instructed me to forgive Sister Letts. This afternoon I shall wash her feet.”
There was a murmur of enthusiasm all over the church, and one leather-lunged Brother popped to his feet and shouted: “Amen, Brother! Glory to God!” And then Sister Letts bounced to her feet and cried that she, too, praised the Lord and would wash the feet of the Brother.
That afternoon the church was crowded. Almost every family of the countryside was on hand to see God end this bitter quarrel which had come so near to disrupting the congregation. The service proceeded as usual, opening with some such catchy hymn as “Bringing in the Sheaves,” and then through the sermon to the slow, solemn songs like “How Firm a Foundation” and “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” Then came the foot-washing, when the Brothers and Sisters proved their humility and showed that when it came right down to brass tacks they were no better than Jesus Christ. It was felt that the legal Brother and Sister Letts should have the honor thus to show off first before God, and so for a little while no one moved when the Preacher announced that the time had come, and that basins of water and towels would be provided.
But at length the Brother got to his feet and marched stiffly down the aisle to the pulpit, where he procured a pan and a towel. With these in hand he paraded back up the aisle toward the last row, where Sister Letts rocked back and forth and murmured in ecstasy:
“Praise the Lord, Brother! Praise the Lord!”
Moving slowly to a chorus of amens and unintelligible mumblings of piety, the Brother was some distance up the aisle when Sister Letts started to meet him. Halfway between the back door and the pulpit they stopped, facing each other. And then a new difficulty arose. They had by now thoroughly given themselves to God and were suffused with a wonderful glow of self-appreciation at this proof of their humility, but each wanted to prove it first. Each appeared to feel that the one who first washed a foot would receive the greater amount of kudos from the Lord.
So they began to argue, and the heat of the discussion spread all over the congregation, and here and there Brothers and Sisters became so upset by the spirit that they jumped to their feet and began shouting loudly, bouncing up and down and flinging their arms about. My sister, a small child, was practically overcome by curiosity, and added to the excitement by leaning too far from her seat and falling into the aisle, so eager was she to see the ceremony. She was promptly spanked and put back in place by my Aunt Ophelia, and several devout persons near her intimated strongly that she was a sinful, blasphemous little wretch.
It seemed for a time that there would be a deadlock, as neither Sister Letts nor the Brother was willing to give in. So the congregation sang a hymn while they stood staring at each other, and then the Preacher prayed to the Lord to make a decision as to who should wash whose feet first. And apparently God said Eeney Meeney Miney Mo and picked Sister Letts to be It, for the Brother suddenly surrendered and sat in a chair which had been pushed into the aisle for him. He bared his foot, and Sister Letts dropped to her knees and poked it into the basin of water. I do not know if the Brother wriggled his toes. Having laved him, Sister Letts plied her towel vigorously to a groaning chorus of “Amen!” that arose from all parts of the church, and then she sat in the chair and removed her shoe and stocking and the Brother performed the ceremony. The congregation, everyone filled to the bursting point with emotion, then stood and sang quaveringly “How Firm a Foundation.” Sister Letts and the Brother returned to their seats. It was generally agreed that by washing each other’s feet they had practically assured themselves choice seats in Heaven.
5
I was fallow ground for all these seeds of piety, for I was a highly emotional and excitable boy. I wept when I heard slow music, I shivered with fear over the ghost stories and the frightful tales of Hell that were told to me with such regularity, and it was usually I who saw the spooks when we played or hunted for bumblebees among the tombs of the Masonic cemetery. There is no telling what I might have seen had I ever been able to summon sufficient courage to enter the Catholic cemetery at night. I did go as far as just inside the gate once, and immediately there arose in front of me an apparition that to my mind could be nothing less than the Devil himself. And this was not surprising, for I well knew that the Catholics were worshipers of a false God, and it was quite likely that their graveyard was the abode of evil spirits.
Because of my temperament, which impelled me to believe everything I was told, and because from time to time I had shown indications of being a bad boy if restraint were not exercised, I received more religious instruction than my sister or my brothers. Again, there was the matter of ancestry. Our family connections, especially my father’s people, were very proud of our relationship to the Bishop and our direct descent from the Rev. Daniel Asbury, and they settled on me to carry on the family tradition. There was much talk of sending me to a theological school, and I appeared to be destined for the Church, so that I was always waiting for the call to preach, though conscious of a vague hope that it would be delayed.
But I had no idea that I should escape such a fate, for I accepted as a basic fact of life that in every generation at least one Asbury should be a Methodist preacher. Wherever I went I encountered the assumption that I was to succeed the Bishop and the Presiding Elder, and become a Methodist Messiah howling in the wilderness of sin and shoving souls into the heavenly hoppers with both hands. Everyone seemed to take it for granted, and when I talked to a stranger he invariably said:
“Well, well! So your name is Asbury?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Kin to the Bishop?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, well! I suppose you will be a preacher, too?”
“Yes, sir. I guess so.”
If the person to whom I talked was himself a Preacher, or a Brother, he would smile gently, pat my head with a moist palm and say: “God bless you, my boy,” and pad on down the street. I can recall but one person who did not make some such senseless remark. He was a hardware drummer from St. Louis, a fat, waggish person in flashy raiment, doubtless a sinner, who stopped me as I marched proudly past Doss’s barber shop carrying a string of fish, one of which was as large a bass as was ever taken out of the St. Francis River. He tried to buy the big fish, and when I refused to sell he asked me my name and the inevitable conversation followed. But when I said to him: “Yes, sir, I guess so,” he wrinkled his nose and said: “Don’t be a damned fool, kid.”
I felt a sudden rush of affection for this outspoken person, although I shuddered at the thought of what would happen to him if a Preacher or a Brother heard him using profanity and told God about it. I proffered him one of my string, a fine crappie, which he accepted gratefully and on which he feasted later at the St. Francis Hotel. Later in the evening I met him as he swung blithely through the doors of Perringer’s Saloon, and he jovially invited me in to have a glass of beer. I thought he must be crazy; I would no more have entered a saloon then than I would have committed mayhem upon the Preacher. In later life, of course, I did enter saloons, but have never been able to bring myself to bite a preacher, although at times I have been sorely tempted. But it was a long time before I understood what the drummer meant when he said, as we parted:
“Well, look out, kid, and don’t let them put that Bishop stuff over on you.”
THE MACHINERY OF SALVATION
Farmington was about eight or ten miles from the lead-mining district of Southeast Missouri, where a great number of low foreigners were employed, but God did not permit any ore to be found near us and so kept our town holy and undefiled by their presence. We did not greatly concern ourselves with their evil ways, because we knew that foreigners were little if any better than the beasts of the field, and that God had put them on earth for some inscrutable purpose of His own, with which we were not to meddle. Even the Preachers and the amateur devil-chasers in such towns as Flat River and Bonne Terre devoted their activities principally to spreading the Gospel among the home-bred and let the Hunkies carry on whatever nefarious practices pleased them best. We didn’t want them in our Heaven, anyhow.
Our town nestled in the foothills of the Ozarks, some eighty-six miles from St. Louis and two miles from the De Lassus station on the Belmont branch of the Iron Mountain Railroad. But the civilizing influences of the city seldom touched any of us except a few wealthy families who could afford the railroad fare for frequent trips. We had then some 2,500 inhabitants, the vast majority of whom were devout workers for the Protestant God, especially on Sunday. During the week many of them put sand in the sugar and weighed their thumbs with the sausage, and otherwise engaged in legitimate and profitable business enterprise, but on Sunday they praised the Lord.
There were but two or three Jewish families in town then, and I do not recall that they ever attempted to practice their religion; certainly not in public. Doubtless our God would have destroyed them if they had thus flaunted their sin in our faces, and mocked us with their heathen rites. It is my recollection that they attended the Presbyterian church, but if so it was for business or social reasons. The Catholics had a church, but they were not numerically strong, and did not amount to a great deal in the town’s scheme of things, although they occasionally captured a city office or did a bit of proselyting among the backsliders of the Protestant congregations. They labored earnestly one whole summer trying to ensnare my sister after her allegiance to the Methodist Father had wavered, but they were unsuccessful. She could not swallow the Pope, or the holy images and the like. Nor could she learn to cross herself properly, although I became much interested and helped her; we used to go behind the barn and practice in all seriousness, but we invariably found ourselves giggling at the rite. And few things can destroy religion quicker than a hearty giggle.
The Protestants of Farmington made little if any effort to induce the Catholics to abandon their debaucheries and embrace the true religion; generally we considered them benighted heathens and crazy people and let it go at that, confident that in due time God would blast them with His wrath, destroy their churches and perhaps send their young women to Heaven to be virgin angels in a Protestant paradise. I was very eager to see this wholesale destruction, and waited patiently for many years, hoping that God would furnish advance information to His intimate, our Methodist pastor, so we would be able to view the performance. I strongly favored an earthquake and a bolt of lightning, as being more spectacular. But I am sorry to say that nothing ever happened, although one night lightning struck the steeple of the Catholic church and there was some talk about town that God was limbering up His muscles and getting ready to show what He could really do.
Some of our most advanced thinkers conceded that perhaps the Catholics and the few nondescripts who professed religion for the sake of business but who would not attend church, had their own God, quite different from ours and unquestionably a very inferior Deity. But people who held this view were considered entirely too charitable; it was all right to admit that God might, in the fullness of time, and out of that loving mercy which keeps half the world constantly at the throats of the other half, relent and permit a few Catholics to enter Heaven as low menials, but to say that they might have a Heaven of their own was going a bit too far. Both socially and spiritually they were on the other side of the railroad tracks. They were simply not in our set, and when any of them attended our parties, as sometimes happened despite every precaution, it was a matter of very great concern. Things may be different now, but when I was a boy cringing before the threatening lash of the Methodist God, there was grave doubt that anyone who lived south of the Post Office would ever amount to anything spiritually.
All of the reigning sects of the Protestants had churches in our town. There was also a Lutheran Church somewhere down by Schramm’s Ice Plant, but its congregation was made up of Germans and what not, who ranked scarcely higher than the Catholics and the Jews. For some time during my final year in high school I was devotedly attached to a young Lutheran girl, and this attachment was the cause of considerable concern among some of my relatives. It was, then, my intention to marry her, although I quickly abandoned it after I had tentatively broached the matter to one of my aunts.
“She is not a Christian girl,” my aunt protested.
“She is a Lutheran,” I said. “They are Protestants.”
“But some of their services are in German! How can they be Christians?”
She was perfectly sincere. She believed firmly that God understood no language but English, and that, having no knowledge of German, He could not look with favor upon a Lutheran. But it developed that this particular Lutheran could not look with favor upon a Methodist, which was probably an insult to our Methodist God. It was a great many years before I overcame my surprise that God did not do something about it, yet He seems to have done nothing but make her happy and her husband prosperous.
Most of the churches in our town were on Columbia Street, the principal thoroughfare, and they and their subsidiary schools were so numerous that we proudly called Farmington “The City of Schools and Churches,” and enjoyed great renown throughout Southeast Missouri for municipal piety and Christian education. On this street worshiped the Presbyterians, the Southern Methodists--this was the church of the Asburys and enjoyed special favors from the Lord--the Northern Methodists, and the Christians or Campbellites. The Baptists had a church in another part of town, in Doss’s Addition. Each of these churches had a great many interlocking organizations, including Home Missionary Societies, Foreign Missionary Societies, Ladies’ Aid Societies and other holy groups.
The Ladies’ Aid Societies of the Middle West have become famous, and they deserve their renown. When I was a boy they were in truth most noble organizations. They rotated their meetings at the homes of the members, performing at each house about once every two weeks, according to the number of women who belonged. Their sessions were excessively sanctimonious; they opened and closed with prayer, and frequently some good Sister would at other times feel the spirit of the Lord working within her, and she would pop up from the quilting frame or the shirt on which she was sewing for the heathen and yelp an appeal to God to give her something or damn somebody. There were also Bible-readings at these meetings; in fact every time a member of our church called on another member, a verse from the Bible was read and a prayer was offered. And curiously enough these devout Christian Sisters displayed a greater liking for the books of the Old Testament than for those of the New.
In all of our congregations there were many special societies for young people, to which the children of the godly had to belong and whose meetings they had to attend. Their number was great, and the majority of their titles escape me, but I recall such outfits as the Christian Endeavor, the Loyal Temperance Legion, the Epworth League, the Baptist Young People’s Union, and the Sunshine Brigade. The Legion was a union organization of juvenile foes of rum, and we used to meet on Sunday afternoons in the Presbyterian or Southern Methodist church and hear lectures on the evils of drink, after which we would stand, raise our right hands and shout in unison:
We hate Rum! We hate Rum! We hate Rum! Our bodies will never be ravaged by drink!
The Sunshine Brigade was another union organization, in which all of the churches combined, and was composed of boys from eight to twelve or thirteen years of age. We met two or three times a week, in the evening after supper, generally on the spacious lawn of Merrifield Huff, the lawyer, and first we heard a Bible-reading and a prayer. Then we drilled, in military fashion, under the command of older boys who had been away to military schools. Then there were more verses from the Bible, another prayer, and we were sent home with unctuous commands to be good boys and think often of the mercy of the Lord. They called us “Little Soldiers of the Lord,” and “Our Group of Manly Little Fellows.” There was nothing we could do about it.
The activities of the Epworth League and the Baptist Young People’s Union are too well known to require comment; they persist to this day, and there seems to be no likelihood that the present generation will make an intellectual advance sufficient to laugh them out of existence. Fortunately Farmington was spared the Young Men’s Christian Association, and I had no contacts with that remarkable agency of salvation until I went to France with the American Army. Of my many encounters with the Y. M. C. A. abroad, two stand out in my memory. One occurred when I wanted a toothbrush, while in command of a platoon of infantry in the support line on the Vesle river front, between Fismes and Bazoches. I walked the eight miles or so back to division headquarters with a five-franc note in my pocket, all the money I had in the world.
The Y. M. C. A. canteen was open there, and after the secretary in charge had greeted me sweetly as Brother and inquired after the condition of my immortal soul, he produced a toothbrush, for which he wanted two francs, then about forty cents. I said I would buy it, there being no Red Cross hut near where I could have got one for nothing, and laid down my five-franc note. But the Y. M. C. A. man could not change it, nor could we find anybody else around headquarters who could do so. The Y man said that he could not let me have the toothbrush without payment and put it back in the case, and I walked the eight miles back to my command without it, rejecting his offer of a free pocket Bible with the observation that the line was one hell of a place for a Bible.
The second encounter with the Y. M. C. A. occurred a week or so later, at La Pres Farm, on the same front and on the road between Mont St. Martin and Chery Chartreuve. I had about two hundred sick and flat-footed infantrymen there, waiting for gas masks and other equipment so they could be moved to the front, and they had nothing to smoke. Neither did they have any money, because they had not been paid for months. To the farm came a Y. M. C. A. man laden with boxes, and when I asked him what they were, he said cigars. He showed them to my platoon sergeant and myself; they were fine, fat, handsome smokes.
I suggested that he lay out his stock, and that I would have the sergeant march the troops past in columns of twos, so that each man could have a cigar.
“That’s fine,” said the Y man, “they’re fifteen-cent cigars, but the boys can have them for ten cents.”
I told him that to my knowledge there was not ten cents in the whole outfit, and suggested that he give the cigars to the soldiers and look to Heaven for payment. But he would not; he said that he had brought the cigars to the line to sell and that he had to have the money for them. So I did the thing that seemed best under the circumstances. I took his cigars away from him, the sergeant headed him for Division Headquarters, and I kicked him as hard as I could in the pants. The last I saw of him, he was stumbling down the hill toward the crossroad vowing vengeance. But I paid little attention to him; I was busy handing out free cigars, and a few minutes later everybody at the farm was puffing happily.
We had also in Farmington three denominational schools, Elmwood Seminary, a girl’s college with primary and grammar departments for both sexes, operated by the Presbyterians across the street from their church; Carleton College in the lower end of the town, a Northern Methodist institution, and Baptist College, near the Baptist church. Carleton and Baptist were coeducational. I was educated--God save the mark!--at Elmwood and Carleton, and at both there was much emphasis on religious teaching. Carleton, of course, since it was run by the Northern Methodists, was frankly a mill for grinding out workers for the Lord, and they poured out of the hopper in large numbers for many years. Gawky country boys came from the farms around Bull Run, Hazel Run and French Village, and down-state toward Libertyville and Fredericktown, and entered Carleton College, to emerge a few years later rip-snorting evangelists hot on the trail of the Devil. Those who did not become professional Satan-chasers developed, in the course of time, into pussyfooting Brothers with keen ears for scandal, gimlet eyes for boring searchingly and suspiciously into all amusement and pleasure, and wagging tongues for scattering seeds of holiness. And God made their teeth very sharp, for backbiting.
Curiously enough, the Presbyterians in Farmington comprised the liberal element, in so far as we had a liberal element. This was because our wealthy families, or at least our social leaders, were apparently Episcopalians at heart and perhaps belonged to the Presbyterian congregation only because we had no Episcopal church. They were able to go to St. Louis frequently, and did, and consequently acquired a bit of metropolitan polish, and rubbed off some of our small-town intolerance and roughness. From time to time rumors were afloat that some of these people had been seen entering Episcopal churches in St. Louis, but I have never heard that they were verified.