AGENTS OF GOD
In Farmington we had not only those Preachers who had been ordained to the ministry and so licensed to preach by both God and man, but the town was overrun with volunteers, Brothers and Sisters who shouted the word of God whenever they could find an audience, who gave the testimony at the camp meetings, the protracted meetings, and at those orgies conducted by the professional evangelist who chased the Devil from any town that would guarantee him a fat fee. These Preachers and their allies controlled Farmington to a very large extent, and when they were defeated, at elections or otherwise, they raised their voices in howls of denunciation and called upon God to punish the guilty. It was many years before I learned that a candidate endorsed by a Preacher was not necessarily called by God to assume the office.
It was essential for any man who wanted to hold public office to profess religion and be seen at church, and usually the more noise he made in religious gatherings, the greater his chances of success at the polls. If any candidate dared to hold views contrary to those of the godly, a vile whispering campaign was started againsthim, and his personal life was raked over and bared with many gloating references to the Christian duty of the people to punish this upstart. Occasionally the ungodly or anti-religious element elected a mayor or what not, but generally religion triumphed and thanks were offered to God, and then throughout his term the office-holder was harassed by pious hypocrites seeking favors and special privilege. My father, as county surveyor and city clerk, was constantly being checked up to determine if he remained steadfast in the faith.
I do not think that my father was regarded as a first-class Christian in Farmington; I am sure that in many quarters it was felt that he was more or less disgracing his ancestry because he did not bound to his feet at camp meetings and similar gatherings and make a holy show of himself with hypocritical testimony. He went to church, and until I was old enough to do pretty much as I pleased, he saw to it that I went also, and to Sunday school and Epworth League and other places where the Methodist God could take a peek at my soul. But he was only passively religious; he showed no tremendous enthusiasm for the Wesleyan Deity, and he never made a particularly active effort to keep me in the path that, according to some, leads to spiritual glory.
In a religious sense I was annoyed much less by my father and my mother than I was by the busybodies who seemed to be appointed by the Lord to take care ofeverybody’s business but their own. Most of the religious instruction that I received came from volunteers, either relatives of my parents, or Brothers and Sisters whom I encountered during my pathetic efforts to have a good time. And, of course, from the Preacher. To many of these I put questions; I asked them to explain certain things in the Bible and in the church service that I did not understand, and which seemed to conflict with the little definite knowledge that I had of life and human beings. Invariably I was told that the Bible needed no explaining; I was merely to believe it and have faith.
I was afraid of the Preachers in Farmington, and of the Brothers and Sisters, desperately afraid of them, because they filled my mind with horrible pictures of Hell and the roaring fires of old Nick; their object in talking religion to small boys seemed to be to frighten them into being good. And I think that most of the other boys were afraid of them, too, except such brave souls as my cousin, Barney Blue, who was a “bad boy” and afraid of neither God nor Devil. One of my great moments was when I heard Barney tell a prying old Brother to go to hell. And curiously enough, and incomprehensibly to many of the good old people of Farmington, Barney is to-day exceedingly prosperous and well thought of in his community.
But there were very few like Barney; most of ustrembled in our boots, even the red-topped ones we were so proud of, when a Preacher or a Brother or Sister came snooping about, head bowed under its burden of religious horror, and demanded information as to our conduct and the condition of our souls. In the cities the cry of the youngsters was “Cheese it, the cop,” but in Farmington it was “Look out, there’s a Preacher!” We could not start a game of marbles anywhere in town but one of them, or else a Brother or Sister, did not pounce upon us and demand to know if we were playing “for keeps.” And since we invariably were, and did not know enough to tell the Preacher what was politely called a fib, the game stopped then and there while we absorbed a little religion and learned that God abhorred little boys who played for keeps.
We were told that God had His eye on us when we did such things, and that our Guardian Angels put black marks in their little books every time we shot a marble.
“You must give your heart to Jesus,” we were told. “He will not let you dwell in the Heavenly Mansions if you persist in this sinful practice.”
We used to play marbles in a vacant lot behind the Christian church, and it was a very fine playground, with a level stretch on which the marbles rolled beautifully. But we had to give it up, because the lot was near the home of a Sister, who spent most of her waking hours in front of her window, staring out throughthe curtains in a constant search for sin and scandal. We had no more than drawn the ring and legged for first shot than she came out on her porch and shouted:
“Are you boys playing for keeps?”
And we answered in unison, politely, as we had been taught:
“Yes, ma’am.”
She stopped the game, swooping down upon us with the glint of the Heaven-born fanatic in her eye. She told us that we were wicked and sinful and blasphemous and Heaven knows what else besides to play for keeps in the very shadow of a House of God. She invariably threatened us with punishment ranging from spanking to everlasting torment in Hell, and if we dared to say anything to her other than the conventional “Yes, ma’am,” she said we were saucy and threatened to telephone our mothers. Occasionally she did so, and a marble game behind the Christian church was then followed by the wails of little boys being led into the woodshed. She performed her war dance many times, and finally we went to play near the livery stable. The atmosphere there was not so uplifting, but at least we were in peace, for the hostlers had no interest at all in our immortal souls, although they were very much interested in who won the marbles.
The livery stables in Farmington were a sort of symbol of the heretical element of the town. The big Mayberry & Byington barn, down the block from Braun’s Hotel and Saloon, was a particularly delightful place to loaf; it was infested by sinners, abandoned wretches who swore horrible oaths, smoked cigarettes, and drank whisky and gin out of big bottles. The politicians loafed there at such times as they felt they would not be seen by the more godly part of our citizenry.
Two of our most celebrated darkies, Uncle Louis Burks and Uncle Mose Bridges, spent most of their time at the Mayberry barn, and we considered them quite fascinating, especially Uncle Louis. He regaled us with tales of the days when, in the South before the Civil War, he had no duties except be the father of as many children as possible; that was his job. He estimated the number of his progeny anywhere from fifty to five hundred, according to the amount of liquor he had consumed before counting, and we generally gave him the benefit of the doubt and called it five hundred. We ranked him with the great fathers of the Bible, and I recall that it seemed to me somewhat strange that the preachers did not offer Uncle Louis’s achievements as proof of the truth of certain portions of the Book.
Uncle Mose’s principal claim to our attention was his dog, a sad-eyed little mongrel that trotted at the end of a string everywhere Uncle Mose went. We were permitted to play with the dog occasionally, much to the disgust of our parents, as we invariably went home scratching. Both Uncle Louis and Uncle Mose were regarded as sinners, partly on account of their color. It was not believed that a black man could enter the Kingdom of Heaven, although the deluded creatures had churches and prayed to God. And then their domestic arrangements were somewhat haphazard, and Uncle Louis frequently boasted that he did not marry all the mothers of his children before the War. Both he and Uncle Mose were familiar figures around Farmington for many years; they did odd jobs at the homes of the godly, and for their pay received part cash and part religious lectures and prayers. They thrived on the cash, and apparently the prayers did not hurt them.
It was at the livery stable, also, that the drummers from St. Louis, waiting for rigs to take them to the towns of the lead-mining district around Bonne Terre, Flat River and Elvins, left their stocks of stories. The coming of a drummer was an event with us; it meant that we should hear things that were not meant for our little ears, and that for a little while at least we could revel in the sight of a man given over to sin and seemingly enjoying it. He used to assure us solemnly thatplaying marbles for keeps was not a sin anywhere in the world but in Farmington, and tell stories, which we regarded as fanciful untruths, of towns in which little boys did not have to go to Sunday school.
The drummer came in on the herdic from De Lassus before the interurban railroad was built, and he was generally a gorgeous spectacle. He was not welcomed in our best homes, and even his presence in church was not considered a good omen for the forces of righteousness, so he could usually be found loafing in front of the livery stable or dozing in a chair tilted against the wall of the St. Francis Hotel. He brought with him not only the latest stories, but the most advanced raiment; the first peg-top trousers ever seen in Farmington adorned the legs of a shoe drummer traveling out of St. Louis, and they created a furor and established a style. Soon our most stylish dressers had them.
Besides being the abode of wickedness and the lair of Satan, and therefore an extraordinarily fascinating place, the livery stable was also the principal loafing place of a darky who had fits. He was one of our town characters, and was regarded by myself and the other boys as a person of remarkable accomplishments. We felt that to be able to have fits set him above us; we gloated enormously when he suddenly shrieked, fell to the ground and began foaming at the mouth. Our attitudetoward him was respectful, and he appreciated it. He was, it seemed to me, proud of his fits. I have known him to rise, finally, brush himself off and ask, simply:
“Was it a good one?”
Generally we thought it was. This darky became such an attraction for us that for a long time, when a group of us could find nothing interesting to do, and when there was for the moment no one in sight to remind us of our duty to God and the church, it was the custom for one of us to say:
“Let’s go over to the livery stable and see Tod have a fit.”
We thereupon trooped solemnly to the big barn and gathered in a circle about the darky, who was generally sitting against the side of the building whittling on a stick. We watched him silently for a while, and then someone mustered up courage enough to say:
“Going to have a fit to-day, Tod?”
With the instinct of the true artist, Tod ignored us for a time, intent upon his whittling. Finally he gave us brief attention.
“Maybe,” he said, and returned to his task.
And then suddenly he uttered a blood-curdling shriek and tumbled headlong from his chair. We watched, fascinated, uttering little murmurs of “ah!” as he writhed and moaned, and when it was all over we settledback with a little sigh of satisfaction. We felt that we had seen a first-rate performance, and when the darky had a fit in front of the Post Office, or in the yard of the courthouse, his audience was increased by as many boys and men as were downtown, shopkeepers leaving their wares to run across and watch.
There was nothing of callousness in our attitude toward the darky. My own feeling in the matter was that Tod was having fits for our benefit, and because he enjoyed it, but at length I came to learn that he could not help it, that the poor fellow was ill. Then I was sorry for him, and one day I asked one of our most prominent Brothers why Tod had fits. He immediately seized upon the question to give me some religious instruction.
“He has sinned,” said the Brother, “and God is punishing him.”
He elaborated his statement, explaining that Tod had probably neglected to attend Sunday school, or had not read his Bible, and that he had thus become a blasphemous sinner and was being properly dealt with. He pointed out that I, too, might grow up and have fits if I was not a good boy. Now, I did not want to have fits, and neither did I want to be a good boy. I wanted to have some fun; I wanted to run about, and play marbles, and go swimming, and put tick-tacks against people’s window on Halloween night. I wanted to do all sortsof things that good boys did not do, yet I most certainly did not want to have fits.
“But, Uncle Si,” I said, “how do you know that God is making him have fits? And why does God do it?”
“Herbie!” He was shocked. “You are blasphemous! You must not question the wisdom of the Almighty. I have faith, and I believe in God and the holiness of His acts. I know that this man must have sinned, or God would not punish him so.”
I was not prepared to confound this faulty logic; it was not then the business of small boys to question anything their elders told them, but to accept without comment the pearls of wisdom that fell from bewhiskered lips. But it seemed to me small business for God to be engaged upon. Yet it did not cause me great surprise, for I had long known that the God who pressed so heavily upon Farmington was a conception of unutterable cruelty, an omnipotent Being whose greatest joy lay in singling out the weak and lowly and inflicting horrible tortures upon them, to the vast and gloating satisfaction of the Brothers and their kind.
Some time afterward, because I was worried over this torturing and punishment of the darky whose writhings had now become less an amusing exhibit than a terrible manifestation of the Almighty, I asked another Brother how he knew that God had a hand in it. But neither he nor Uncle Si ever told me. None of themwere ever able to tell me how they knew so well what God wanted and what God did not want; they merely left with me the impression that on occasion they walked with God and that God spoke to them and asked their advice on the conduct of the human race. But the source of their information I could not determine.
I have never found anyone who could satisfy my curiosity on this point; I never then, or later, found a religious enthusiast who would admit that he was offering merely his personal interpretation of the utterances that other men had credited to the Almighty. But there was nothing that entered the mind of God that the Preachers and the Brothers and Sisters of Farmington did not know and that they could not explain and apply to local affairs. They knew precisely what was a sin and what was not, and it was curious that the sins were invariably things from which they received no pleasure. Nor was anything which paid a profit a sin. They knew very well that God considered it a sin to play cards or dance, but that He thought it only good business practice to raise the price of beans or swindle a fellow citizen in the matter of town lots, or refuse credit to the poor and suffering.
As I grew older, and began to be skeptical of whatI was told, I became increasingly annoyed not only by the mental mannerisms of these people, but by their physical mannerisms as well. Not only did they walk as if their soles were greased, sliding and slipping about, but they talked as if their tongues were greased also. Their language was oily; they poured out their words unctuously, with much roundabout phrasing and unnecessary language. If they wanted to tell about a man going across the street from the Court House to the Post Office they would take him up the hill past the Masonic cemetery, with side trips to Jerusalem and other Jewish centers. If I went downtown and met a man like Sheriff Rariden, who will always have a place in my affections because he permitted his son Linn and myself to roam the jail yard and stare through the bars at the nigger prisoners, he would say:
“How’re you, Herbie? How’re your folks?”
But if I met a Preacher the greeting was this:
“Good afternoon, Herbert. And how are your dear father and mother?”
And then he patted me on the head, pinched my arm, and padded away, sliding greasily along the pavement, his eagle eye alert for little boys playing marbles or for other signs of sin. He might have been skinny and pitifully in need of food, but nevertheless I thought of him as greasy. He had about him an unwholesome atmosphere; I could not be comfortable in his presence.I felt that he had to be watched, and when I became old enough to understand some of the looks that he bestowed upon the young and feminine members of his flock I realized that he should have been.
I had not lived very many years before I learned to look upon Preachers, and their familiars, the Brothers and Sisters, as useless incumbrances upon an otherwise fair enough earth. But while I hated all of them, with a few natural exceptions, the one I always hated most was the current pastor of our Southern Methodist church. He was my spiritual father, the guardian of my soul and the director of my life in the hereafter, and he tried to see to it that I went into the hereafter with proper respect for him and a proper respect for his God. I had to call him Brother and be very meek and gentle in his presence, and stand without moving while he patted me on the head, asked me fool questions, and told me how much God loved little boys and girls. He called me a “manly little fellow,” which annoyed me exceedingly, and I have the word of my young nephew that small boys are still annoyed by it.
But he made it quite clear, out of his profound knowledge of the wishes of the Almighty, that God did not want little boys and girls to have a good time. Quite the contrary. God wanted them to do exactly what the Preacher told them to do; He wanted them to accept the Preacher as their guide and their philosopher and tobelieve everything they were told, without fretting him with unanswerable and therefore blasphemous questions. He wanted the little boys and girls to spend most of their time praying to Him to “gimme this and gimme that,” and the rest of it being little gentlemen and little ladies, solemn and subdued, speaking only when spoken to and answering promptly when called. God told the Preacher, who relayed the message on to me very impressively, that it was a sin to play marbles on Sunday, or to play for keeps at any time; that it was a sin to roll hoops on the sidewalk in front of the church or rattle a stick against the picket fence in front of the parsonage. Everything that I wanted to do, everything that seemed to hold any promise of fun or excitement, was a sin.
But it was not a sin to saw wood for the Preacher, or to carry huge armfuls of sticks and fill his kitchen bin, and it was not a sin to mow his lawn or rake the trash in his back yard. The children of the godly were permitted to do these things because of the profound love which the Preacher bore for them; his motto was “Suffer little children to come unto me, and I will put them to work.” And since by his own admission the Preacher was a Man of God, we were permitted to perform these labors for nothing. A boy was paid twenty-five to fifty cents, enormous and gratifying sums in those days, if he mowed the lawn or raked the trash for a familygiven over to sin, but if he did the job for a Preacher or a devout Brother, he received nothing but a pat on the back and a prayer, or he could listen to a verse from the Bible and a lecture on his duty to serve the Lord and, incidentally, the self-appointed ambassadors of the Lord.
Once when I was about twelve years old our pastor telephoned my mother and asked that I be sent to his house to help him perform certain tasks which should have been done by the darky men of all work about town. But our family did not wish to offend the Preacher, so I did the work. And it was hard work. I toiled all morning cleaning out the Preacher’s woodshed and stacking split stove wood in neat piles, and then I carried in enough to fill two big wooden boxes in the kitchen. During this time the Preacher sat in his study, holding communion with God, and I presume, reading the Scriptures. Occasionally he came out to the woodshed to superintend my work, ordering me to do this and do that and scolding me because I did not work faster, but he did none of the work himself. And when I was through he told me to come into his study and receive payment. I hurried after him, very weary, but with pleasant visions of a quarter floating before my eyes. I believed that was the least I should receive, and to me it was a great deal of money; properly expended at McKinney’s or Otto Rottger’s, it would keepme in jawbreakers for more than a week, and there might be enough left to buy a bag of peewees or an agate.
But I did not receive the twenty-five cents. The Preacher closed the door when we got into his study, and then he commanded me to kneel. He put a hand on my shoulder, and he said:
“My dear boy, I am going to pray for you. I am going to ask the Lord Jesus to enter your heart and make you a good boy.”
And then he knelt and prayed somewhat in this fashion: “O Lord Jesus, bless this little boy who has this day performed labor in Thy behalf,” etc.
It was all very confusing. I went home somewhat in doubt as to whether the Preacher or God owned the woodshed.
But labor of little boys was not all that the Preachers got for nothing. They were inveterate beggars, and all of them had fine, highly developed noses for chickens and other dainties; it was seldom that a family could have a chicken or turkey dinner without the Preacher dropping in. It is true that their salaries were not large, but they had free use of the parsonage, and they were not in dire circumstances at all. Yet they always had their hands out, grasping; they were ecclesiastical tramps begging for a donation. In our town we used to give showers for them; many families made periodical donations to the Pastor, and sometimes there were surpriseparties, when the Preacher and his wife were led into a room and shown piles of old clothing, food and discarded furniture, all of which was sent next day to the parsonage. The Preacher was always pathetically grateful for these things; he would kneel in the midst of them and offer a prayer for the souls of the good people who had thus given him the clutterings of their cellars and attics, which they had no further use for. He seldom had enough self-respect to refuse them.
The notion was prevalent in Farmington, among the Brothers and Sisters, that the Preachers were their servants and should peddle God to them 365 days a year. It was felt also that their wives should be constantly at the Lord’s work; that they should be at home at all times, available for consultation and prayer meetings, and that when they went abroad they should dress soberly and walk with due humility. The wife of Brother Court, one of our Methodist pastors, was severely criticized for her departure from this formula of conduct. Apparently the Courts had means other than the salary paid them by the church, and they kept a maid, which in itself was enough to arouse suspicion that Mrs. Court was not a true servant of the Lord.
But the straw that broke the religious back of theCourts and hastened the end of Brother Court’s ministry was the fact that Mrs. Court took a nap each afternoon. This was considered nothing less than scandalous, and for a long time our Brothers and Sisters refused to believe that the wife of a man of God should so far forget herself as to lie abed when she might be praying or sitting at her front window looking through the curtains for a sin to happen. But the story persisted, and was broadcast by a discharged servant who swore that with her own eyes she had seen Mrs. Court sound asleep at three o’clock in the afternoon. Finally two Sisters appointed themselves a committee of investigation. They rang the bell at the parsonage one afternoon, and told the maid that they had called to join Mrs. Court in afternoon prayer, and, although they did not say it, backbiting gossip.
“Mrs. Court,” said the maid, “is asleep and cannot be disturbed. Can you call later?”
They could not. They had barely strength enough to get home, but after prayer they revived sufficiently to sally forth and carry the awful news throughout the town. There could no longer be any doubt. The wife of the Pastor of the Southern Methodist church took a nap in the afternoon. The Sisters had called, and had been so informed by the maid, and while a few chronic doubters remained, the vast majority realized that in a matter involving such serious consequences to Mrs.Court’s spiritual welfare, a matter that directly affected and almost destroyed her chances of going to Heaven, the Sisters could not tell a lie.
So Brother Court soon resigned and accepted a call to a town where members of his family could sleep when they felt like it, and could even snore without jeopardizing their immortal souls. Nor did his successor last very long. He was an Englishman, and spoke in a high nasal voice, pronouncing his words very distinctly, syllable by syllable. He was criticized for several reasons. One was that his favorite phrase was “and an-gels can do no more,” and it was felt that it was somewhat blasphemous to mention angels so often before mixed company. And then he spoke from notes, whereas it was a custom of our Pastors to preach solely out of divine inspiration at the moment of delivery.
There was much talk about the new Preacher’s notes, and it was felt that, somehow, he was lacking in devotion to God; many Brothers and Sisters argued that if he were really a Man of God he would not have to use notes, but would be inspired and filled with words as he rose in the pulpit. His finish came the Sunday morning that the wind blew through an opened window and scattered his notes, so that he had to leave the pulpit and chase the scraps up and down the aisle before he could proceed with his discourse. This was regarded as directevidence that God had deserted him, and he left town soon afterward.
The personalities of the preachers of my home town, impressed as they were upon my growing, plastic mind, probably will remain with me always, but I am thankful that for the most part their names elude me. I remember clearly, however, Brother Jenkins and Brother Fontaine, of our Southern Methodist church; Brother Nations, of the so-called Christian church; Brother Hickok, of the Presbyterian church, and, clearest of all, Brother Lincoln McConnell, the professional itinerant evangelist who “converted” me with the aid of half a dozen strong-armed and strong-lunged Brothers and Sisters who dragged and pushed me down the aisle of the church to the mourners’ bench, where I was surrounded and overwhelmed by “workers for the Lord.”
Brother Jenkins I recall as a meek, thin little man with a sad smile and a classical appetite for fried chicken. At the time I was very much in awe of him, and listened to his every utterance with the most profound respect. I thought him saintly, and concluded that he and God were the closest sort of friends, and that the Deity would not dare launch upon a plan for a new universe or start a new war without consulting BrotherJenkins. But in truth he was probably only under-nourished. Brother Jenkins was a demon quoter of platitudes and Biblical passages; nothing happened that it did not remind him of a quotation from the Bible.
Brother Fontaine was a plump man who would have been jovial and possibly likable—that is giving him the benefit of a great doubt—if he had not been so burdened by the troubles of God and if he had not been so frightfully aware of the responsibilities of his position as a recipient and promulgator of Heavenly wisdom and commands. He officiated at the wedding of my sister, principally because our family belonged to his church and the presence of another preacher at the wedding would have deprived Brother Fontaine of a goodly fee and made an enemy of him for life. Christian charity does not function well when it hits the pocketbook. I think my sister would have preferred Brother Hickok, but she yielded to public opinion and Brother Fontaine got the job. He arrived at the house chewing tobacco, a habit of his which he disliked intensely in other men, but for which he found justification for himself in the belief that he walked with the Lord and that it was tacitly understood he was to have a little leeway.
He was excessively sanctimonious; and so was his wife. We have never forgiven her for her attitude at the wedding. I recall that she looked suspiciously fromtime to time at the groom, and watched the whole proceeding with an air that said there must of a necessity be something wrong somewhere; for one thing, there was quite a deal of laughter in our house that day, and that in itself was a sign that the Lord was not hovering over the housetop. Immediately after the ceremony Sister Fontaine paraded up front and began waving her hands back and forth before my sister’s face, shouting at the top of her lungs: “Praise the Lord, Sister! Praise the Lord!” We gathered that she thought my sister should immediately fall upon her knees and thank God that she had at last acquired a husband, even though Sister Fontaine did not seem to think much of him. But we were greatly offended; we considered it a reflection on our family and wholly uncalled for, because my sister was, in fact, neither old nor homely, and she had had and rejected a great many first-class matrimonial opportunities.
I had an intense dislike for Brother Fontaine and his ways, and time has not softened my impression of him. He dearly loved to be the only man in a feminine gathering, where he could make heavy inroads upon the cake and ice cream and lay down the law to the adoring Sisters. I have seldom known a Preacher who was not afflicted with this mania, but in Brother Fontaine it had developed into a highly acute disease. I remember that he was always present at our house when themembers of the Ladies’ Aid Society came once each week for their bit of sewing for the heathen and to enjoy their pleasant afternoon of scandal. He had no business there; he did not sew and he did not contribute much to the symposium, but he listened avidly and ate heartily.
It was “Don’t you think so, Brother Fontaine?” and “I fear I must take issue with you, Sister. The Lord provideth answers for all problems affecting human conduct.” Fool talk like that.
It was the practice of our Southern Methodist preachers to stand at the door of the church after every performance and shake hands with the customers, making such remarks as “Praise the Lord, Sister! Get right with Jesus, Brother!” I always dreaded this part of the service, and several young girls told me that they did also. All of the preachers who did this, and almost all of them did, shook hands with a clammy pressure that put me in mind of an oyster, and it always seemed to me that when a lady customer passed through the door the Man of God invariably found it necessary to sigh.
But although I cannot rate Brother Fontaine very highly among the servants of the Lord, my younger brother consigned him to even lower depths. They went fishing together once, at Brother Fontaine’s request, and Fred appeared at the parsonage with lunch, fishing tackle and car fare. Brother Fontaine knelt and askeddivine guidance for the expedition, and then they boarded a trolley car and went to De Lassus, to fish the St. Francis River around Blumeyer’s Ford. Fred paid his fare.
“You must pay my fare, too, Fred,” said Brother Fontaine. “I am the minister.”
So Fred paid. There was nothing else that he could do; he was afraid that if he did not Brother Fontaine would whistle to God to call down an avenging angel armed with thunderbolts and lightning. Then it developed that Brother Fontaine had brought neither lunch nor fishing tackle; he had brought only himself, and being a Man of God that was sufficient. Perhaps he felt that since his influence with the Almighty was undoubtedly great enough to make the trip successful, Fred had no right to expect him to bear any of the expenses or furnish any equipment. So he used Fred’s tackle and ate Fred’s lunch, and when that was not enough for him he sent Fred a mile and a half to a farmhouse to buy a bottle of milk, for which Fred paid and which the reverend one guzzled without offering to share it.
Throughout the whole day Brother Fontaine alternately prayed and fished, but there must have been something wrong with his connecting line to Heaven, for he caught no fish. He finally turned the tackle over to Fred, with the remark that Fred had not brought theright sort of worms, and with the further explanation that worms being God’s creatures as well as fish, God probably did not want the fish to eat them. Fred fished earnestly; he was ordinarily a good and successful fisherman, and it was a matter of pride with him not to go home without a string. But neither did Fred catch any fish, and he became increasingly annoyed at Brother Fontaine.
The preacher apparently labored under the delusion that Fred required religious instruction. He told, several times, the story of the loaves and the fishes, and many other Biblical fairy tales as well. Once, when Fred was anxiously watching his cork and felt certain that a perch was nibbling at his hook, Brother Fontaine stopped him to read the Sermon on the Mount from a Bible which he drew from his pocket. Everything he saw reminded him of something in the Scriptures. So passed the day, and when Fred came home that night, with no fish, he ate heavily of supper and then dared parental wrath by saying:
“No more of these damned preachers for me.”
Brother Nations is probably Farmington’s most illustrious gift to religion. It is true that he eventually resigned from the ministry and became Probate Judge and Principal of the High School, but he remained a steadfast adherent of the Protestant God and a singularly devout and godly man. I presume he still is, ashe is the same Gilbert O. Nations who in 1924 ran for President as the candidate of what he called the American party, asking for the votes of the electorate on a pro-Ku Klux Klan and anti-everything else platform. I am told that he is now the editor of a magazine devoted to baiting the Catholics.
Once when Brother Nations was principal of the Farmington High School he whaled me because Barney Blue and I had thrown snowballs at Jake Schaeffer, the town truckman. I felt that the licking was coming to me and I bore no malice; only the week before I had thrown lumps of coal at Pete Anderson’s house across the street and had been warned that the hurling of anything at all would result in punishment. But after the thrashing was over, Brother Nations told me that throwing snowballs at Jake Schaeffer was a sin against God: that Christ had reference to it when he said: “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.” I could not plead that I was without sin, because it had been impressed on me by every Brother and Sister and Preacher that I met that I was practically broken out with it. But young and gullible as I was, Brother Nations’ statement sounded silly.
I could understand that from Jake Schaeffer’s viewpoint I had sinned, and grievously, because Jake was stooping over when the snowball struck and I had put a stone in the center of it to make the snow pack tighter;I was willing to admit that and repent. But what did God care if two boys smacked snowballs against a soft part of Jake’s person? It seemed to me that if God had been really interested in the matter He would have advised Jake Schaeffer not to stoop over when two boys were abroad with snowballs. Thus He might have prevented a sin. Further, if God was as intelligent as I had been led to believe, He must have known that boys cannot resist the temptation to throw snowballs, and since He made both the boys and the snowballs He was responsible for the sin committed against Himself. But Brother Nations appeared to believe that God had permitted me to sin in order that I might taste the joys of castigatory rebuke. And I did.
Brother Hickok was the only Preacher of those days to whom I gave the slightest measure of respect. I had a genuine admiration for him, but it was not because he was a Preacher or because he pretended to any inside knowledge of the customs of Heaven or the thoughts and wishes of God. On the contrary, I have heard him admit that there were things in the Bible he did not understand, and I have heard him admit that there were passages in it that he did not particularly care for. But I liked him simply because he chewed tobacco without any effort at concealment, and played lawn tennis on the courts near our home, and because I suspected, every time I saw him wallop a tennis ball or bite a chunkfrom a slab of plug-cut, that he was Wild Bill Hickok in disguise.
About the time Brother Hickok came to Farmington I acquired a book devoted to the adventures of Wild Bill, Kit Carson, Buffalo Bill and other heroes of the Western plains, and of them all I liked Wild Bill best. He seemed to me to be everything that a man ought to be. He had more notches on his gun than any of the others, and it appeared that he could not so much as sneeze without a redskin biting the dust. I put the question of identity to Brother Hickok rather bluntly, and told him I would respect his confidence, but he denied it, although I gathered the impression that he was a relative of Wild Bill and, of course, mighty proud of him. But I was not satisfied, and for a long time I shadowed him in the manner set forth by Old and Young King Brady in that sterling nickel novel, “Secret Service,” hoping to learn his secret. However, I never did solve the question to my own satisfaction.
But principally I admired Brother Hickok because he was the only Preacher I knew who did not proclaim incessantly that he was a Man of God and therefore entitled to the largest piece of pie, and because he was the only one who did not seem to be impressed by my relationship with Bishop Asbury. He didn’t seem to give a damn about the Bishop; his only ambition, so far as I was concerned, was to beat me at tennis, which he did.But from the others, and from the Brothers and Sisters, I got the impression that the right reverend deceased, seated at God’s right hand between Jesus Christ and St. Peter, perhaps crowding the latter a bit, had nothing to do but receive messages from the Almighty touching on my conduct, and relay them to me by whatever Preacher I happened to meet. For many years I thought that God and the Bishop had a consultation on my case every night.
I do not think that I shall ever forget Brother Lincoln McConnell, although I probably should not recognize him if I saw him to-day. I hope not. But for some eighteen long years I have cherished a compelling desire to stand him in a corner, minus his band and singers and his other aids to emotion, and then bind and gag him. After that I want to talk to him for hours and hours, embellishing my remarks with such florid words as I have acquired in various military and journalistic enterprises, and possibly inventing new ones for the occasion. He was responsible for the most miserable period of my life. But it was he, too, who definitely kept me from being a Preacher, or even a Brother, and so, perhaps, I should thank him. If he had let me alone I might at this moment be calling some other preacher Brother; I might be an intimate of God, and a walking Baedeker of Heaven; I might even be gloating over the glories of a Heaven paved with gold and populated by angels, allfemale, all beautiful, all amiable. Certainly I should not be given over to a life of sin; that is to say, I should not be having a pretty good time with this business of living.
Brother McConnell, as I write, is a pastor of a Baptist church in Oklahoma City, Okla., with occasional forays onto the Chautauqua platform, and is a potent force in the life of that abode of righteousness. But if reports are to be believed, there are even there those who consider him a blight. He has been the central figure in several rows that have undoubtedly redounded to the greater glory of God; he tried to prevent the citizens of his town from seeing one of the best American plays of recent years because it dealt a bit too truthfully with certain aspects of religious fanaticism, and he erected a radio broadcasting station which blanketed the city and forced the population to listen, willy-nilly, to his sermons and his ponderous pronouncements against sin.
I once wrote a magazine article in which I discussed a few of the activities of Brother McConnell, and he put me in my place in an interview which, it seems to me, shows that he has not changed a great deal since the time that I first shook hands with him as he leaned over the mourner’s bench and beseeched me to give my heart to his God. I give it here. It appeared in the Oklahoma CityNews, on January 27, 1925.
“He is a very small potato.” That was the reply of the Rev. Lincoln McConnell, First Baptist Church pastor.... “I have some doubt,” said the Rev. McConnell, “as to whether I should feel honored or otherwise by the repeated mention of my name in this article by Herbert Asbury without realizing that this writer cannot possibly have inherited anything more from his illustrious ancestry than his name.“I confess that it is rather surprising to me that editors of a magazine could attach enough importance to such cheap drivel as this as to give it the position and the space they do.“The natural assumption is that they believe about religion, the religion of Christ, what this poor fellow does, and therefore, actually believe that this ‘weak stuff’ is a contribution to their cause.“I remember Farmington, Mo., very well, having been there about twenty-five years ago. I do not remember Herbert Asbury at all.“I am not surprised that I do not, as he must have been then somewhat as he evidently is now—a very small potato—and while I would feel naturally as interested in his conversion as in anyone else, at the same time I am forced to admit that it would not be possible for a man of training and experience to list a man of his evident mentality very highly, even though he were a professed convert in his meeting.“I am very sorry that he was not really converted. If the Editor of theAmerican Mercurycares for things of a really constructive nature, I can give him the life story of thousands of men and women whom because of the genuineness of their conversion to Christ in my own meetings, have given to the world characters of such beauty and worth as have reflectedcredit upon themselves and their church and have proved a blessing to society at large.“I have never asked people to stand up if they want to go to Heaven. I think that very ridiculous.”
“He is a very small potato.” That was the reply of the Rev. Lincoln McConnell, First Baptist Church pastor.... “I have some doubt,” said the Rev. McConnell, “as to whether I should feel honored or otherwise by the repeated mention of my name in this article by Herbert Asbury without realizing that this writer cannot possibly have inherited anything more from his illustrious ancestry than his name.
“I confess that it is rather surprising to me that editors of a magazine could attach enough importance to such cheap drivel as this as to give it the position and the space they do.
“The natural assumption is that they believe about religion, the religion of Christ, what this poor fellow does, and therefore, actually believe that this ‘weak stuff’ is a contribution to their cause.
“I remember Farmington, Mo., very well, having been there about twenty-five years ago. I do not remember Herbert Asbury at all.
“I am not surprised that I do not, as he must have been then somewhat as he evidently is now—a very small potato—and while I would feel naturally as interested in his conversion as in anyone else, at the same time I am forced to admit that it would not be possible for a man of training and experience to list a man of his evident mentality very highly, even though he were a professed convert in his meeting.
“I am very sorry that he was not really converted. If the Editor of theAmerican Mercurycares for things of a really constructive nature, I can give him the life story of thousands of men and women whom because of the genuineness of their conversion to Christ in my own meetings, have given to the world characters of such beauty and worth as have reflectedcredit upon themselves and their church and have proved a blessing to society at large.
“I have never asked people to stand up if they want to go to Heaven. I think that very ridiculous.”
It was these people who taught me of God, and who had dominion over my spiritual welfare! And not only did they instruct me to worship their conception of Him; they threatened me with eternal damnation if I didn’t, and with even more horrible punishment if I ventured to cast doubt upon the truth and holiness of the Bible. Eternal damnation meant that I should, in the life to come, hang throughout eternity on a revolving spit over a great fire in the deepest pit of Hell, while little red devils jabbed white-hot pokers into my quivering flesh and Satan stood by and curled his lip in glee. I received the impression that Satan was the only one actively concerned with religion who was ever permitted to laugh. God was not, nor His disciples, and that Satan could and apparently did was sufficient proof that laughter was wicked.
And they described God to me, and told me in minute detail of the architectural design of Heaven and the furnishings of the Mansions in the Sky. I do not know where they obtained their information. I gathered thatGod was an old man who wore a long white nightgown and boasted a luxuriant growth of whiskers, with a disposition compounded of the snarls of a wounded wildcat and the pleasant conceits of amustelephant. He chewed tobacco—perhaps that impression was due to the fact that so many of our preachers were addicted to the vile weed—and He had an enormous head which contained an eye for every person on earth, and this eye was constantly upon its object. And it was a vindictive and jaundiced eye, peering into the innermost depths of the soul and the mind and the heart for some thought or feeling that might call for punishment.
The descriptions of Heaven and the physical appearance of the angels varied somewhat, according to whether the tale was told by a preacher or a Brother, or a Sister. But all of them talked with gusto of streets paved with gold and of clouds lined with silver, of magnificent buildings constructed of precious stones, and of angels sitting on the clouds with no worthier purpose in life than strumming a golden harp, protected from the weather by no more substantial raiment than a white nightgown, a halo and a pair of sandals. And whoever told the tale, there was always that underlying idea of sybaritic magnificence; Heaven bore no resemblance to the lowly stable in which the founder of their religion was born, and it was not a somber retreat for the further development of the soul and the cultivation of thosevirtues that are lost sight of upon the earth. As it was described to me in my youth, and as it is still described on those rare occasions when I can bring myself to hold converse with a Preacher, Heaven was a celestial reproduction of the palace of a Babylonian monarch. Nobody worked, and God’s House abounded with gold and silver and rubies and diamonds, and on every cloud that rolled down the street was a beautiful woman, eternally young and amiable. The Heaven that I was taught to aspire to was a motion picture set on an even grander scale than the creations of Cecil De Mille.
But even more emphasis was placed, in these tales, on feminine virginity. It seemed that Heaven was filled with virgins; I have never heard a Preacher describe an angel without mentioning the fact that the angel was a virgin, and I have never heard a Preacher describe Mary simply as the mother of Jesus. She is always the Virgin Mother, and he pronounces it all in capitals. Even as a boy I was impressed with the frequency with which the word “virgin” appeared in the discourses of our Pastor and in the lectures so freely bestowed upon me by the Brothers. It seemed to me that the word fascinated them; although I might be trembling with fear that God would strike me dead because I had not learned my Sunday-school lesson or had forgotten the Golden Text, I was so impressed that I found time towonder at the enthusiasm with which they mouthed it.
It seemed impossible for Preachers or devout Brothers to say “virgin” as casually as they did other words; they gloated over it, toyed with it, rolled it about their tongues and tasted the full flavor of it before it slid drippingly from their lips with an amazing clarity of pronunciation. Usually they accompanied it with a doleful sigh. I thought then that the sigh was from excess of piety, and I thought that their eyes shone and their breath came a little faster from the same cause, that these things were possibly manifestations of God, and I was greatly impressed. But I am older now and I know better.
When I became old enough to understand what was meant by virginity, and to understand that it was something more than a badge of the angels, I understood also many other things that had hitherto been mysteries. I knew then what was in the mind of one of the Brothers, an extraordinarily devout man with an astounding knowledge of the wishes of God and the manners and customs of Heaven, when he stopped me on the street one day and asked me what, if anything, had happened on a recent hay ride to Blumeyer’s Ford and back by members of our social set.
“Did the boys and girls sit close together?” he asked.
“Yes, sir. We had to. We were on a hay wagon.”
“Did you boys sit right up against them?”
I told him we did, and in my youthful innocence I remarked that I had been compelled to sit so close to one girl that we could hardly tell our legs apart. The old man drew a sharp breath, sighed and his eyes glistened. He repeated the word “legs” with gusto, he gloated over it, and then he said:
“You sat so close to her that your legs touched? Your leg touched hers? Your leg was right up against her?”
“Yes, sir. I had to.”
“The leg of a young virgin!” mused the old devil. “That was wicked. It is wicked to think of the legs of a virgin. God will punish you.”
He went away muttering to himself. I was disgusted, not at his ideas, because I had practically the same thought about virgins that he did, and so did most of the other boys of the town, but at his manner. Here was an old man who had set himself up as a mundane representative of the Lord, who told me whom to worship and how to worship Him, who held daily communion with God and received messages from Him touching on my conduct, gloating and trembling because a boy had sat with his leg against the leg of a girl in the forced confinement of a hay ride. God knows what is happening to him if he is alive in these days of short skirts and silk stockings.
Another of our Brothers, a very prominent member ofone of our Protestant churches, kept a store in the business district not far from the Court House. He was waiting on a customer the day that the first woman to ride astride in our town cantered down Columbia Street, and his performance was a town scandal for many years. He caught a glimpse of the girl through the window, and he abandoned his customer and rushed to the street, in company with half the county officials who had been dozing with their feet on their desks, and all of the town loafers. The Brother followed her for several blocks, missing no detail of her costume, which was rather bizarre and daring for those days, and then he went back to his store and his customer.
He stood for a while wrapped in contemplation.
“She was riding like a man!” he said. “Her legs—her legs——”
My experiences in these matters, of course, were principally with Preachers and Brothers, but I had occasional contacts with the Sisters. They, too, described God and Heaven, but they did not conceive God as being quite so old and feeble as the Being worshipped by the Brothers, and for the most part they populated Heaven with handsome, stalwart young men, presumably virgins. I recall one exceedingly devout Sister who expressed the belief that there were no female angels in Heaven, and I have heard her praying with extraordinary fervor to God, in effect, to make an exception in her case.Whether she was justified in this optimistic opinion of herself I never knew, but I assume that she and the other Sisters, in their discussion of the virginity of angels, experienced the same sort of vicarious pleasure that seemed to mean so much to the Preachers and the Brothers.
I did not go to many camp meetings; ours was not a camp-meeting country. We went in more for protracted meetings, and for the stirring revivals of professional evangelists, held in comfortable church buildings. Usually I went to camp meeting only because some girl in whom I was interested had to go. But they were very popular with a certain type of young man about Farmington, who knew that religious emotion is very akin to secular emotion; the line of demarcation is very thin, and most men who have been around religious women very much know that one emotion can quickly be transformed into the other. Young girls are much easier prey after they have been overwhelmed by religion, their nerves upset and their brains whirling with emotion, and they are then easily persuaded that the Lord will forgive, even though His earthly agents will not. Of course such a statement could not be proven, but it is quite likely that more seductions have occurred at campmeetings, anden routeto and from them, than on all the front porches and lawn swings that were ever manufactured, although in Farmington for many years a lawn swing was regarded as a lure of Hell. Even while the service was in progress the buggies around the meeting tent were filled with men and women petting, or, as we called it then, spooning.
Strange things happened at these camp meetings, and at the other gatherings as well, when a forthright religionist saw the light. At one such holy conclave an old woman, for many years a thorn in the flesh of the godly, suddenly bounced to her feet and shouted:
“Praise the Lord! My corn hurts! Praise the Lord!”
And this, because it embodied physical suffering and a great deal of mental torture as well, was accepted as an infallible sign that God had at last entered her soul. She had been converted, and all the rest of her life she was a prying, sanctimonious old pest. She used to stop me on the street and inquire as to the condition of my soul, and ask me whether I said my prayers at night, and whether I read the Bible, and she would grab me by the arm and pinch me and demand the Golden Text of the last Sunday-school lesson. And if by any chance I had forgotten or did not know, she scolded me and predicted dire things for me in the life to come. Incidentally, she knew all about the life to come; it seemsthat God had appeared to her in a vision, and had described Heaven to her.
At all of these meetings extraordinary efforts were made to ensnare the children and convert them to Christianity; the workers for the Lord were not at all concerned with the fact that the children did not know what it was all about, that they had no opportunity to choose their own religion, and with the further and obvious fact that they succumbed to nothing but fright and a great surge of emotion. That method persists. The Church still obtains its converts by noise and appeals to primitive emotion, and by threats, rather than by intelligently implanting a true and deep-seated conception of God and the heavenly wonders. But to the religionists a convert is a convert, no matter how obtained; I have known boys to be thrashed because they would not profess religion.
As with the Catholic Church, the unspoken and always denied slogan of the Methodists and of the other Protestant sects is “Catch ’em while they’re young,” but unlike the Catholics the Protestants cannot hold them. For one thing, they do not put on a good enough show; they do not understand lighting, and they have no uniforms and no Latin chanters. A Catholic priest covered by a surplice or what not, and his voice rising and falling sonorously in the chanting of a bit of Latin, is a very impressive spectacle, and his appearance lendsdignity to his words. The gentle stare that most of them wear is also effective. As soon as an embryo Methodist becomes intelligent enough to visualize the sort of Heaven that the Brothers are preparing for him, he shudders and forthwith goes to the Devil, while the Catholics fill their converts with such fear of God and the Pope, or the Pope and God, to put them in the order of their importance, that very few get away. A renegade Catholic is almost as rare as a Methodist Preacher who does not think he is sprouting wings, and that his voice is truly the Voice of God.