HOME LIFE OF A BOY DESTINED FOR HEAVEN
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On my father’s side, according to my family belief, I am related to Cotton Mather; on my mother’s side to Roger Williams. My great-great-uncle was Francis Asbury, the first Bishop of the Methodist Church to be ordained in America; his elder half-brother was my great-great-grandfather, Thomas Asbury, who, disowned by his father for various sins, ran away from the family cottage in England and went to sea. Later he kidnapped Susan Jennings and married her, and then settled in Virginia and so escaped the fate of the Bishop, who doubtless went to the Methodist Heaven.
My great-grandfather was the Rev. Daniel Asbury of Fairfax County, Va., an early pillar of Methodism and one of the great organizers of the Church in the South. When a young man he went to North Carolina, and in 1791 founded, in Lincoln County, the first Methodist church west of the Catawba River. Later he was a Presiding Elder and labored valiantly for the Wesleyan God. When but a boy he was captured by the Indians and kept a prisoner for several years, and is said to have converted the entire tribe to Christianity. Throughout his whole life Sunday was his great day—he was born on Sunday, converted on Sunday, captured by the Indians on Sunday, released on Sunday, reached home on Sunday, was ordained as a minister on Sunday, and on a Sunday married Nancy Morris in Brunswick County, Va. His first child was born on Sunday and he died on Sunday.
My grandfather was the Rev. William Asbury of North Carolina, a local preacher who, for some reason that I have never known, quit raising souls to Heaven and moved over into Mississippi, where he had equally poor success raising coons and cotton. He married Susan Lester Marks, member of an equally religious family. Several of his seven sons were Methodist preachers, and my father, too, would have assumed the cloth had not the Civil War come along. He enlisted in the Confederate Army and became an officer of infantry, and infantrymen do not make good preachers. At the close of the War he studied Civil Engineering and then moved to Missouri, and settled in Farmington, where I was born. He was county Surveyor of my home county of St. Francois for more than thirty years, and City Clerk of Farmington for twenty years. The exigencies of local politics compelled him to attend services and take an active part in church work, but I have no recollection of him as a religious man, although he imposed religion upon his home and impressed upon his family the necessity of Christian salvation.
I first suspected that he might not be as religious as reported when I whacked him across the shins with a broomstick as he sat in the yard one day nursing his rheumatism. He did not turn the other shin. This was not long after we had moved from the cottage across the street from the Masonic and Catholic cemeteries to our new house on the other side of the town, near the mansions of our first families, the Webers and the Cayces. Curiously enough, these graveyards were side by side, although their occupants presumably went to different Heavens. There was a high fence between them, and it was not easy to dispose of the border-line burial plots; the Protestants felt that a few Catholic demons might be able to crawl through or under the fence, and the Catholics did not wish to have their mortal remains so close to those of such benighted heathen as the Methodists and the Presbyterians.
My mother’s people, the Prichards and the Blues, came originally from North Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee, and were for the most part devout Baptists, believing that in immersion alone was true salvation. The strength of their religious convictions may be seen in the fact that many of them never forgave my mother for marrying a Methodist and transferring her letter to my father’s Church, forsaking the austerities of her family faith. They considered the Methodists too liberal! The true Baptist of those days was in a constant emotional upheaval; his religion was a canker that ate deeper and deeper, and he was able to find no relief; the more religious he became, the more miserable he was. On the other hand, the Methodist enjoyed terrific and periodical emotional explosions, and thereafter was generally able to live for a few days in comparative calm. But the Baptist was wrapped in gloom from the moment of his conversion until he was called home to Jesus.
When my mother’s forbears came up from the South they settled within a radius of twenty miles of Farmington, many of them in the vicinity of Hazel Run and French Village. They were farmers, with a sprinkling of small storekeepers, preachers and country doctors. My mother’s father, Joseph Prichard, was a farmer, but he was very religious and was renowned throughout the countryside around French Village for his exploits as a faith healer; he could cure toothache, remove warts and stop the flow of blood. His method was merely to say: “It will be gone by the time you get home,” and generally it was. He frequently removed warts from my own hands; at least they vanished within a reasonable time after he had looked at them and pronounced his incantations, and I regarded him with awe.
There was a tradition in our family that my grandfather boasted Indian blood in his veins, and although I do not think it was true, at the time it gave me great pride and satisfaction; it invested me with authority at such times as we played Indian and Wild West games. He made a two-year trip overland to California during the 1849 gold rush, without conspicuous success, and brought back with him the musket with which we were given to understand he had slain innumerable Indians. Two or three times a year his children and his grandchildren, a vast horde all told, held family reunions at his French Village farm, and the big moment of the day came in the afternoon when all of the grandchildren trooped into the woods behind the barn to watch Grandpa kill a squirrel. We stood in a half-circle, almost overcome by awe, while my grandfather loaded his gun with great care, pouring the correct amount of powder from his powder horn and dumping the bullets from his pouch into the palm of his hand, where he counted them carefully. And then he killed the squirrel, while we stood behind him and marveled. He never failed; he was an excellent rifle shot; in his ninety-first year, three years before he died, he knocked a squirrel from a tree as easily as Davy Crockett could have done it.
As a young man in Georgia and later in Missouri my grandfather Prichard was famous as a leader of Baptist sing-songs. His favorite hymn was “The Prodigal Son,” which he was wont to bellow with fanatical fervor as he sat bolt upright in an uncomfortable, straight-backed chair and directed the singing with a stick. He sang from an old hymn book which had been in his family for many years, a curious volume with the music printed in square notes. Many of the hymns expressed sentiments that to-day, even in religious circles, would be considered obscene. I recall one that said: “Oh, sinners! My bowels do move with desire!”