A Chance to Serve
A Chance to Serve
When a person feels bright and cheerful, she hardly needs further cheering. And when she feels morbidly, grindingly melancholy, the last thing in the world she wants to hear is some grinning cricket chirping, “Cheer up!” in her ear.
Sam the cricket was coming. She could hear his horse cantering from five doors up the street and knew it was he without looking. She thought briefly of the day when she identified the post horse, her link then to the man of her dreams.
She pushed out through the garden gate—it ought to be repainted, for it had blistered in the fire—and shifted baby Kezia from one hip to the other. She stepped across broken bricks and bats, around the accoutrements of construction so carelessly scattered through her yard, and barely glanced at the old oak tree. After all those centuries of survival it had succumbed to the heat of a senseless fire; the very thought made her sadder still. She met Sam as he dismounted out front.
He flashed her one of his ceaseless smiles and squeezed her shoulders. “Made a purchase today. A surprise for you.”
“Really.” This would be a perfect opportunity to mention their indebtedness, but she would refrain. Such nagging did no good; Sam would always be a spendthrift whether she threw it up to him or not.
Sam cranked his head upward to watch the masons at their trade capping the new chimney. “Beautiful! Just beautiful, isn’t it! All brick. No more half-timbered tinderbox. Future rectors will thank us.”
Perhaps she’d mention indebtedness after all. “It’d better be beautiful, to sink us four hundred pounds deeper in the mire.”
“Eh, no, luv!” Sam gave her another squeeze. “More surprises for you. You remember John Sheffield.”
“Marquis of Normanby. Of course.” Bitter memories concerning their differences over the unfortunate widow came flooding back.
“He’s Duke of Buckingham now. And he just contributed a hefty sum toward the four hundred it’s costing to replace this manse. We’re not nearly as deep in the mire as you thought.” He guided her by the shoulders back to the blistered garden gate. They stood a few moments. She wished they’d go elsewhere. The garden no longer lifted her spirits.
He studied brown patches and green. “You were right. We lost some of the herbs closest the house. I’m glad to see your sweetbrier came through all green and healthy.”
“That gnarled oak is gone, though. And I doubt the one apple tree will live—this one that the fire forced into bloom so early. Look at the leaves. All brown around the edges. And no apples this year. Not one.”
“We have the other apple trees, and the pears. And also—” Sam took a deep breath. “No, I’ll wait.”
“My surprise.” Why didn’t she feel more anticipation? She didn’t care, that’s why. She didn’t care about anything lately.
“Yes. And I’ve hired the Grimes boy—not the little one, the older one—as a sort of yard hand around the place. He’ll keep the gardening up, tend the animals, handle all the outside work. We’ve long needed someone for that.”
There went the prospect of another inside maid. They couldn’t afford one domestic, let alone three.
Jackie came boiling into the yard at a dead run. He wrapped himself around his Papa—his standard greeting—and opened up with uncharacteristic enthusiasm. “Ye shoulda seen old Sweeney just now! He was riding that new gelding of his up Side Street—his real antsy little horse, y’know—and one of Jase Hooker’s brothers whistled. I mean loud! That horse jumped straight up and come down running, and old Sweeney went straight up with it but when he came straight down the horse weren’t under him anymore, and you shoulda seen him light in the dirt! It was funny! Jase and me, we laughed till—” and the eager soprano trailed away to silence. Jackie was staring at his mother.
Susanna stared aghast at him.
Jackie shrugged self-consciously. “Well, it was kind of funny. If you were there and saw it.”
Shocked, Susanna held her tongue a few moments to marshal her complaints into some sort of order. “You know the difference between good English and careless English, and you will not use careless speech. Never! You do not refer to that gentleman as ‘old’ Sweeney. You address him respectfully and refer to him respectfully. And most of all, you never ever laugh at such a painful misfortune in another soul. There is and was nothing funny about it.” Her voice rose. “Do you understand?”
“Yes’m.” Jackie looked near tears, and well he should! Where had he dumped the politeness and good deportment she had drilled into him since infancy?
“Well, now, perhaps it’s not as bad as all that.” Sam was going to let the boy off again. Susanna would have none of it.
She cut him off. “It’s worse than all that! Not only is the boy being corrupted, I don’t even have a room to send him to as punishment! Sam, we must get that house finished and get these children back under our roof! We must! All the good manners and civility I’ve tried to instill in them have disappeared just as surely as if they’d burned in the fire as well!”
Sam dipped his head toward Jackie. “Go to your place, lad.”
Jackie scampered off toward the Hookers’.
“Unlettered, uncultured bumpkins with filthy mouths and the manners of a plow ox. Sam—your children—” She sagged against him, utterly spent.
“It was an unlettered, uncultured bumpkin who served as God’s instrument in saving him from the fire, you know.” But Sam didn’t sound chiding. “I’ll talk to the builder about putting on extra men—get the house done quicker. I worry about you, Sukey. Every misfortune past, you bounced back, so to speak. This latest one seems to have buried you. It’s as if you never quite recovered from either the fire or the childbirth.” His voice dropped. “And I don’t know how to help you.”
“I don’t know how to help me either. Nothing matters anymore. I don’t care if I eat or starve, live or die, nothing. I can’t even seem to warm up my feelings toward you, but you certainly haven’t changed in any way. It’s all so—” Words, so long her friends, failed her utterly. Her tongue stumbled momentarily and gave up. The bitter, empty feeling that dragged down her heart and soul refused to reduce itself to spoken words.
His huge warm hand pressed her head against his shoulder, the blunt fingertips gently massaging her temple. She had petitioned God for respite and nothing had happened. Where was God when you needed Him?
Even before the new brick house was complete, Susanna began moving in. She purchased a small dining table, then traded with the Grimeses for their long one. With their boys leaving home one by one, they didn’t need a long board anymore, and, counting tiny Kezzy, Susanna now served nine children at table. She obtained simple slab bedframes to serve until they could afford more substantial furniture. She ordered bookshelves built in what would eventually be the library although not a single book had survived the fire. Not one musty old book. The empty shelves depressed her further every time she looked at them.
She wrote long sad letters to Sammy in London, describing progress and lack of it. She bemoaned the loss of the papers that she had so carefully accumulated and of the little manual she had been compiling for years to help the children in their walk with God. One of her cows came fresh out of season, and a stoat got at their chickens with disastrous consequences.
And then, on some day or other that Susanna didn’t really notice, life turned around again. Perhaps it was Sam’s surprise for her that arrived one pleasant September afternoon. From Lincoln came a nurseryman in a sturdy wagon. Without so much as by-your-leave he parked his wagon by the garden gate, dragged his shovel out from under the seat, and unceremoniously planted mulberry trees!
Mulberry trees. For decades Susanna had dreamed of owning mulberry trees. Now here they stood, their leaves just a wee bit droopy, along the sunny side of her garden wall. The nurseryman warned her against expecting much fruit for a few years until, the trees had established themselves, climbed over his wagon wheel, and drove away. Even more precious to Susanna than her lovely mulberry trees was the fact that Sam would remember her wish so many years after she had voiced it. How can you long remain upset with a spendthrift who spends to make you happy, in ways you would never have guessed?
The day finally came when she could again assemble her brood in a single nest. Sukey and Hetty, farmed out to their Uncle Matthew in London, returned home—gratefully, they said, but Susanna could clearly tell that they had enjoyed living the city life. Even those two girls, ages fourteen and twelve and (one should think) fairly responsible, had picked up irritating habits and mannerisms. Uncle Matthew was a much looser disciplinarian than Susanna had thought a doctor would be.
And the rest of her flock! Coarse jokes, silly stories, bad English, uncivil attitudes and behavior—the world had sown many weeds in Susanna’s carefully nurtured garden, and it would surely cause her considerable difficulty to root them out. But reform her children she would.
As soon as the children had learned which new bed was theirs she gathered them in their new kitchen. She looked from face to uncertain face. “Most of you are too tender of years to recognize good from bad and better from good. It’s my province to teach you the difference, and I shall.
“So that no one is slighted, we’ll arrange the day according to a method, a schedule. Most of our rules you already know, but you seem to have forgotten them. If you confess a fault freely and don’t try to cover it up you’ll” not be beaten for it. Once you are punished for a fault it will not be mentioned again; our Lord fully forgives trespass and so shall I.
“No sinful actions, and you know what they are—lying, pilfering, and such. You’ll keep any promise you make, even it it’s to little Kezzy here, and you’ll respect each others’ property. No borrowing without permission, do you hear, Emilia? And if you give a gift, it’s given forever, not until you want it back—unless you made that condition, of course.”
She drew a long breath and looked about. What lovely children she had! They were worth every effort to raise well. She would assign a chapter of Old Testament in the morning and New in the evening, and psalms twice daily. Nothing equaled Scripture for teaching children—or adults, for that matter.
From then on each child from Jackie on up applied himself or herself to studies six hours daily. Older children helped tutor the younger ones. They sang psalms at the beginning and end of each school day. They began bedtime preparations at five, ate at six, held devotions privately at seven and were tucked away by eight. The household began to march to the stable routine Susanna so preferred.
“There is nothing I desire to live for but to do some small service to my children,” she wrote to Sammy, “that as I’ve brought them into the world, I may, if it please God, be an instrument of doing good to their souls.”
Either working the winter convocation or escaping routine—Susanna was never quite sure which—Sam went back to London. His occasional letters seemed as much concerned with finding sponsors for his poetry as for matters of convocation business. After a long dry spell of not caring, Susanna began to miss him.
The year 1710 came and went with no new baby. No objection there—Kezzy was babe enough, and for the first winter in years, Susanna was not bedridden. The new year brought other problems, though.
It started so innocently. The curate assigned to handle services in Sam’s absence was paid forty pounds annually of the eighty pounds to which the living had shrunk. Curate Inman, with no family to support, generally preached on the necessity of paying one’s debts. Rarely did two dozen people show up on a Sunday morning to listen to him.
Susanna as usual included the Grimes boy and her maid in the private Sunday evening service she held for her own children. The servant boy began bringing his parents. One thing led to another and before Susanna quite realized it, thirty or forty people crowded into her new brick home to hear Scripture and the short, simple message she prepared for her children.
The months ticked off, marching relentlessly in their expected formation. Spring brought smallpox. Jackie and four of his sisters nearly died. Sam came home for the summer and hied himself right back to London come winter.
With Sam gone and Pastor Inman preaching empty words to an empty house, Susanna took up her Sunday evening service again. She spent more time this year on preparation of prayers and messages, for her simple service for her children was, quite frankly, getting out of hand. Two hundred people crowded into the ground floor of the manse each Sunday night! And the maid turned uncounted others away.
“I really should refuse all these people admittance,” she confided to Jackie, “but I don’t feel I dare. They can’t even read, most of them, and the curate never dwells at any length on Scripture. The only place they’re likely to hear the pure Word is here.”
But her arguments were not for Jackie’s benefit; they were for her. Properly, only ordained men should offer up to God the prayers of the people, and she was neither. She had entered the province of men, usurping the duties of men. They were the pastors, preachers, lay readers. Women were instructed by Scripture to keep silence in the churches.
And yet, perversely, she felt a heady joy in this accidental role as leader of a service. Flocks of people, illiterate people unable to read Scripture for themselves, were hungry for the Word, and she could feed them. They looked up to her. They needed her. She could help them.
Sam wrote her a letter; he’d heard rumors about unseemly actions on her part that looked most peculiar. They weren’t true, were they?
She remembered well the bitter fruit of that business with the marquis’s widow, and frankly she was still convinced that Sam had been in the wrong. And that business with the Prince of Orange; again, Sam had taken a most obstreperous position. She had learned a thing or two from them. It would be very, very easy to tip Sam off into one of his adamant snits again. She must frame her response extremely carefully.
She pointed out that the responsibility for the children’s spiritual instruction was Sam’s, but since he wasn’t home she must be the one to discharge it. She was merely attending to the same sort of evening devotions Sam had led. The other people coming was accidental, but how could she turn them away, after all?
She mentioned in passing that it wasn’t really a party or social thing; they stuck to the business at hand, then went home. She couldn’t see why anyone should’object to all those people being drawn to Scripture instead of profaning the Lord’s day as so many do.
He wrote back with the sort of half-in-water-half-on-land equivocal reply he made so well. If she would continue, at least find a male to do the reading. Obviously Sam had missed the crux of the whole problem. There were no men who could read well enough! The best male reader at the service was Jackie, and his soft soprano would never carry through the two rooms full of listeners.
A scant week later another letter arrived from Sam forbidding her to hold services. Curate Inman was worried, he said, because she was scandalously turning the house into a conventicle, and certain other parishioners agreed. She knew what was really worrying the curate: ten times more people attended her evening devotions than were showing up at church! Were she the inept curate, she’d be worried, too.
She must be very careful in her answer this time. If Sam maintained his position, as well he might, it would all be over. Why did she want so much to continue these Sunday evening sessions? Was it concern for her neighbors, whose unmannerly ways she tried so hard to erase from her children’s behavior? Or was it Susanna Annesley Wesley’s self, her ugly Adamic self, rearing its nasty head? She enjoyed it so—the respect of adults, being the center of quiet attention. She could command that sort of thing from her children just by the sheer force of being their mother. From the outside world, though, such respect came only when you earned it, and it pleased her immensely that these people thought enough of her devotionals to come. The more she explored her motives during meditation and devotions, the more confused she got.
Very well, motives aside, teaching Scripture to the village folk was a good thing—a thing God must surely approve under any circumstance. She would not let a good thing slip away easily just because a frightened and jealous curate wrote letters to a rector who didn’t really know what was happening.
She took pen in hand and began to write.
”I shall not inquire,” she began, “how it was possible that you should be prevailed on by the senseless clamors of two or three of the worst of your parish to condemn what you so lately approved.”
So far, so good. She had best list next the good that came from these meetings. Constant attention to public worship, for example, because many of those attending never set foot inside the steeple-building. She also mentioned in detail the way these meetings had altered people’s attitudes toward the Tory rector and his ministry: “We live in the greatest amity imaginable," she wrote. That was not far from the truth, for she had not for years fooled herself into imagining any good feelings at all from the locals.
She took the bull by the horns, so to speak, in her ending. She asked for his positive command if he still insisted she quit, for no weaker expression of his wishes would satisfy her conscience. Was that too strong? She rewrote it several times and ended up with her original wording. With some trepidation and much prayer she sent it off by post.
Whatever she said worked. No positive command came thundering into Lincolnshire Wolds from London. Susanna put her mounting doubts behind her, and gradually they ebbed. If God decreed that she, a lowly female, should by happenstance find herself in this position, she would fill it. Her services continued successfully all through the winter as the nervous curate fidgeted and fussed.