A Circuit Rider's Wife

by Corra Harris

I had my doubts, my sniffing Canterbury doubts, but the bland light upon his face, an incandescence that he managed from somewhere within, silenced me. I never meddled with the coals on William's altar. And not long after the shriving of the infidel I had an unexpected opportunity to observe how easy he made it for his people to "die in the faith."

We were living a perfectly human day among the roses and sagebushes and bumblebees in our little garden when word came that Mrs. Salter had been suddenly stricken and was about to die "without the witness of the Spirit." There was a row of dahlias behind the blue-belled sagebushes requiring attention, and we had been so normally earth-happy digging about their roots. William had been so like other young men in his digressions that I could not help being depressed at the interruption. It seemed that some shadow of the other world was forever falling between us.

We came up out of our garden; William harnessed his horse, put on his longest-tailed black coat, changed his expression, and we drove away on our sad mission. For custom required that the pastor's wife should accompany him upon such occasions. Her care was to look after the stricken surviving members of the family while he gave his attention more particularly to the passing one. She must be ready to do anything from cooking the next meal to shrouding the corpse. The latter is a particularly garrulous business, and I was horrified to discover that it was so gruesomely entertaining to the women of the church and neighbors who helped. My first corpse was the young wife of a farmer, who had died of "the fever," as usual. Sister Fleming and Sister Glory White had helped me "lay her out." And each vied with the other as to the number and condition of the bodies they had prepared for burial, incidentally comparing points between them and the present one. The grand dignity of the dead woman's face did not appall them, but it frightened me.

"O Sister White," I whispered, trembling and covering my eyes from the sight of them cackling about the awfully disheveled bed and its burden, "don't talk so before her. She looks so much above us!"

"Lor', child, you'll git used to it. They all have it, that grand look, when they air dead. It don't mean nothin'. Once I 'laid out' a bad woman; there wasn't another person in the settlement that would touch her, so I done it, and of all the corpses I ever put away she had the grandest look. It sorter staggered me till I thought at last it was maybe the rest that come to her after the pain of sinnin' had gone out of her body. But you'll not be so squeamish about the way folks look when they air dead after a while. We had one pastor's wife that helped lay out fourteen bodies. But that was the year of the epidemic," she concluded, leaning over to stretch the shroud sheet. Little did I think then that I was already upon the eve of an experience that would far eclipse the record of that other preacher's wife.

We found Sister Salter lying dim and white upon her bed, surrounded by her family and friends. And the supreme tragedy of the hour for them was not her approaching dissolution, but it was that one who had testified so often and so victoriously of her faith had lost it at the crucial moment.

What followed is impossible to describe. It was not the terrible silence in the crowded room, not the battling breath and the shriveling features of the woman in the bed, not by contrast the green and happy calm of the world outside, but it was the awful voice of authority with which William spoke of things that no man knows, that frightened and thrilled us. If he had called me so from a grave where I had lain a thousand years I should have had to put on my dust, rise and answer him. He sat beside the bed and looked as Peter must have looked at Dorcas as she lay dead in the upper chamber of her house at Joppa. It was not the text he quoted, nor the hymns he chanted, but it was the way he did it. Clearly he was adding his faith to her forlorn hope. We saw her face change as if she had risen and was treading the waters in her spirit to meet an invisible presence. The fading light of the summer day showed the same rapt look on it that was there when she shouted that first Sunday at Redwine, and she passed like a sudden gleam into the darkness of the coming night.

William's joy was beautiful to see, but I had a sense of intrusion as if I had parted the wings of some archangel and had seen more brightness than it was lawful for a mortal to behold. So long as we are on this earth it seems to me better to follow the example of Moses and turn our backs when the Lord passes by, so that we shall see only the glory of His hinder parts.

The death of Sister Salter marked the beginning of an epidemic, or rather the return of the same one they had had some years before. It swept through the community with such deadly results that not a family escaped. And I had another view of the ministerial character. William spent all his time in the stricken homes of his people. It was not a sense of duty or conscience or courage that caused him to face the deadly disease with such fortitude, but it was the instinct of the shepherd for his flock. And he readily permitted me to accompany him with the curious indifference to consequences shown by those who have had their heads grandly turned by Heavenly thoughts. Life meant little to him, immortality meant everything. He risked his own life and the life of his wife because it is the nature of the true priest to care more for his people than he does for himself or his wife, just as it is the nature of the good shepherd to lay down his life for his sheep.

At the end of three weeks we had buried half the membership of Redwine Church and had received the secrets of many passing souls. For a man cannot die with his secret in him. It belongs to history and will not be buried. One old woman, Sister Fanny Claris, who had been a faithful member of our church for years, confessed to William at the very last that she had always wanted to be a Baptist, but that her husband had been a Methodist and she had "gone with him."