Ella Maud Page 8

  On the basis of his “off-color” and “unchaste” language, an Asheville newspaper called for his censure by the Methodist conference. In Chattanooga a judge swore out a warrant for his arrest, so he might face the consequences of asserting, in front of three thousand voters, that the public servants of their city were in the pockets of saloon-keepers. Stuart skipped town before the sheriff could fetch him.

  As much as appreciation for his eloquence, there was a thrilling sense that Stuart might say anything, no matter how sensational, to win souls for Christ. This proved to be an irresistible draw for the citizens of Elizabeth City—except for Jim Wilcox.

  “No matter how long I know him, I’ll never understand him,” Nell complained after Jim had turned her down.

  “Never mind. I’ll go with you,” said Ollie.

  The Baptist sanctuary on Main Street was the biggest church in town. It was already full to bursting when the sisters arrived. The attendees were almost entirely gentlemen, and they courteously cleared a path for the young ladies to come forward to a section near the pulpit.

  Within moments of sitting down, Ollie felt unwell. The commotion of the audience, which seemed to press in and buzz like a crowd at a racecourse, gave her a headache; the smoke from hundreds of cigars and cigarettes made it hard to breathe. Worst of all, the building’s new electric lights were not working that day, so the place was lit by combustion. The smoke from the Church’s two kerosene chandeliers collected among the rafters like a bank of sickly blue clouds.

  “Why don’t you untie your hat?” Nell said.

  Figuring this would be inappropriate in a church—even a Baptist one—Ollie shook her head.

  “Well if you won’t I will…” declared Nell, who not only untied her hat but removed it. The appearance of her uncovered head, and her chestnut hair tied in a chignon at the nape of her neck, drew whistles behind her.

  “You shouldn’t have done that.” said Ollie.

  “Tell Mother and she’ll find out about a certain novel under your pillow.”

  “You are evil. You don’t belong in a church.”

  There were no formalities when the program began—no introductions or trifling announcements. A tall man in a black suit and tie simply strode to the pulpit and commenced to speak.

  Stuart’s face was narrow, with deep, angular features and a spray of laugh lines at the corners of his eyes. His brown hair, parted on his right side and breaking in wave-like abundance to his left, made him tower still higher. Ollie noticed his hands: they were large, with spindly knuckles and fingers long enough to envelop her whole head. They found their way around the edges of the lectern with complete ease, as if he had preached from that spot every Sunday.

  “I hold in my hand the Word of God,” he declared, and held up a Bible clad in well-limbered leather. “It is the source of the Wisdom of God and all subjects: moral, social, business and political. I shall take from this book tonight the statements of God concerning our nation…”

  He read some Old Testament verses, which Ollie did not hear because she was so compelled by the sound of his voice. The weight of it sank into her as if she was made of mere smoke. And yet it was not frightening or portentous—there was an ease about it that evoked the prayer before a quiet Sunday dinner with family. Nell, too, was affected: she reached for Ollie’s hand and clenched it.

  “Now I like to think I am a godly man, but not a smarter man that any of my brothers and sisters assembled here in this holy place. It doesn’t take much to put something by me, trusting as I am in the grace of the Lord. Shoot—the first time I read the good book I did it with God’s Word in one hand and a dictionary in the other, so few of the words did I know!”

  With that word, “shoot”, a tremor went through the audience. It was not an exclamation Ollie had ever heard from a pulpit. And yet, with that vernacular eruption, Stuart’s audience relaxed. Here, they thought, was a man who spoke their language. Here was the edgy, dangerous preacher they had heard so much about. And when he smiled, and unfurled teeth of unblemished white, it was with the assurance of a veteran performer—an actor who knew he had his audience where he wanted them.

  “And so, when I speak to you tonight about the scourge of liquor, it is not because I have any special insight, any pretensions to sagacity. I say what I say because I am enlightened by the Word of God, and have eyes to see. I have a mind to judge, and a mouth to proclaim the truth. No more, and no less.”

  From there, Stuart’s talk went in a direction Ollie would never have expected. Instead of denouncing the liquor trade solely in moral terms, he made a hard detour into the economic:

  “Now I am going to show you that money spent on liquor is not just ‘commerce’, but burned up as surely as if it were thrown in an oven. I do not ask that you have a first-class mind to see it. I can show it to a fellow with half-sense…”

  He paused to let the audience laugh at this, and went on, “Do you know how much it costs to make a gallon of liquor? Some of you ought to, you have drunk enough of it!” [More laughter.] “It costs about twenty cents a gallon to manufacture. They used to sell it in my State for twenty-five cents a gallon. Do you know what it sells for over the saloon counter at ten cents a drink? It sells for about four dollars a gallon, not taking into account the licorice and tobacco and other devilment put in it. Now let us see where this four dollars comes from, and where it goes. If you would see where it comes from, stand at the door of the saloon and watch the men come and go. They are the laboring men, the mechanics, the wage-earners, whose families need every cent of their wages.

  “Now let us see where it goes. Twenty cents of the four dollars goes for apples and corn and rye and other materials out of which the stuff is made, and to pay the few men used in the manufacture of the stuff. This goes back into the legitimate channels of trade. Five cents on the dollar, then, you see, goes back into legitimate trade.

  “Where does the rest of it go? One large bulk of it goes to the United States Government to pay the great army of officers to look after this business and pay the other expenses of running this murderous and expensive traffic. I believe the United States Government ought to be supported from the luxuries of the rich and not by the bread and meat and clothing of the families of the poor!” And he paused again for an outburst of applause. “Another bulk of the money goes into our big city corporations to pay extra policemen to take care of drunks and brawls and fights and to quell the mobs created by this traffic and to lay the streets in front of the palaces of the rich. The poor rascal out there who cannot build a front gate to the cottage of his home is plunking down his money upon the counter of the saloon to pave the streets of the great cities!

  “Another bulk of it goes into the hands of the brewers and distillers of this country to make up the millions of dollars which are used by the great liquor organizations of this country to buy our politicians and law-making bodies, to subsidize the American ballot, and to dig down the very pillars of American liberty. The meat and bread and comforts of the poor drunkard’s cottage turned into the corrupting fund of our country! Another bulk of it goes into the hands of the thousands of diamond-studded gamblers, who, with velvet hands and elegantly clothed bodies, have their rooms in the saloon buildings of this country, who do not work, but gather up the money of the saloon crowd and buy their clothes, their diamonds and their fine horses, with the bread and meat of the poor. No wonder the middle classes of this country are in such a distressed condition today!”

  Stuart displayed a coin in his slender fingers.

  “I hold in my hand a silver dollar. That you may see clearly what I mean, I will spend this money before your eyes. I drop it on this pulpit and—Lord help me—I call it a saloon counter…”

  He dropped the dollar on his hymnal with a hollow thunk that was audible throughout the hall.

  “That dollar buys a quart of liquor. Now I will take the saloon end of that dollar, and then I will take the home end of it, and see what becomes of the dollar. As
I have shown you, five cents of it goes back into legitimate trade; and the ninety-five cents remaining is distributed to the United State Government and to the big city corporations and big brewers and the diamond-studded gamblers, and nearly all of it, as you see, is drawn out of the hands of the common people, and does not come back. So far as the masses of the people are concerned, that money is gone.

  “Now let us take the home end of it. I drink the quart of liquor and start home to the drunkard’s cottage. My wife, Sallie, meets me at the door, surrounded by her hungry, wretched children, and says ‘John, what did you bring home?’ ‘I brought you a quart.’ Now if the ladies in the audience will pardon me, I wish to ask what the quart of liquor in the poor drunkard’s stomach is worth? I say that the dollar is burned up at the home end; not only is the liquor worth nothing to the poor old drunkard’s home, but it burns up his body, burns up his mind, burns up his soul, destroys the happiness of his wife and children, ruins his business or trade, disqualifies him from making another dollar, hurts the community, hurts everything. Do you see where the saloon dollar goes?”

  He paused again as a thousand men leapt to their feet. Ollie turned to the faces behind her; intoxicated by sanctimony, they pulled hard on their cigars as they spewed smoke and acclaim. Many of them, she noticed, bore the blotchy redness of the habitual drunk. Some even stank of liquor. Yet the men stood and cheered for Stuart, who stood back and nodded into the crowd.

  “I’d think the government bureaucrat buys some bread with money from those liquor taxes,” she remarked to Nell.

  Nell was in no mood for petty cynicism. She sat silent for a moment, as if to let Ollie’s objection dissolve, and then declared “I’ve never heard the liquor question treated that way. This is modern. This is scientific preaching.”

  “While Sam Jones and I were in Houston a few months ago, I made this argument with reference to rents,” Stuart continued. “The pastor of the Methodist Church said: ‘O George, your speech about rents called to the minds and hearts of these people that we have just had it sadly illustrated. The daughter of one of our preachers married a good man, who, after his marriage, began to drink…’”

  “Maybe she gave him good reason to drink,” Ollie whispered in Nell’s ear. With that remark, Nell stopped holding Ollie’s hand.

  “‘…He lost his business, and walked the streets a drunkard. His wife was a member of my Church. I often visited her. I saw the blue veins on her face and her tearful eyes as she said: ‘O brother, the rent-paying haunts me like a nightmare. I have to sew till nearly midnight to make the rent and pay for the little that my half-starved children eat. My husband came in and found me sewing the other night, and he said if he caught me working for a wage again he would kill me. But, O brother, I am obliged to sew.’ The preacher told me that he had seen the little woman at one of the early meetings at the tabernacle. And the last song they sang was We’ll Never Say Goodbye in Heaven. That very night, possibly making up the hour she had spent in worship, she was found by her husband stitching away at midnight, thinking of rent! Rent! RENT!!! Staggering into the room, wild with drink, he said: ‘I told you I would kill you if I found you working!’ Bang! Bang!! Bang!!! Three balls tore their way through her quivering flesh. As her little children came screaming around her, she sent her little boy of the preacher. ‘And,’ said the preacher to me, ‘as I stooped over her dying body, she whispered, as her life-blood ebbed away: ‘We’ll never say good-bye in heaven, and thank God! There will be no rent to pay up there.’

  “This is but one of the almost daily occurrences throughout the land. Shall we men, who hold the ballot of our country and the destinies of these poor women in our hands, suffer such cruelties year after year? God Almighty help us come to the rescue of our suffering women!”

  It seemed hardly possible, but the ensuing applause was even more thunderous. Men bobbed their heads in assent and stamped their feet. But Ollie suspected it was that story that really thrilled them—the image of the “three balls” that “tore their way through quivering flesh.” Such erotica, deftly juxtaposed with sentiment! Here was language hardly ever heard outside of trash novels. The kind of novels, in fact, that few of these men would let their daughters read. Ollie knew to never ask permission to read hers.

  Stuart was rounding for home now. “Every person who has a handkerchief get it ready,” he said. “I will tell you a handkerchief story. The day my dear wife told me Bowling Green carried for prohibition, I took my handkerchief from my pocket, and, waving it, while tears of gratitude ran down my cheeks, I said: ‘Wife, the day is coming when the pure white banner of temperance will wave its graceful folds over the downfall of every saloon in glorious old America.’ Those of you who will enter the battle of the white flag, work for victory, and shout in triumph, let us hail the oncoming victory by waving our handkerchiefs!”

  A thousand hands waved, white cotton handkerchiefs flying in the lamp smoke. Reaching into the bag that was chained to her waist, Nell came out with one of her own. It was silk, and it was scarlet, but duly did it wave.

  Nothing Ollie had heard convinced her that Stuart was anything more than a clever manipulator. But even she would have been compelled to admit the truth: the spectacle of all those white cloths flying, and Nell’s solitary red one in the midst of them all, was one of the damnedest things she had ever seen in a church.

  The newspapers said Stuart would be leading revivals in Elizabeth City all week. At home, Nell could not stop singing his praises. For the first time in her young life, she felt the exhilaration of discovering a cause beyond herself. Stuart’s crusade had elevated her to a height where the air was cleaner and clearer. She talked of his “evangelical rationalism” at the dinner table, and at the wash tub, and in their bed at night. She spoke of throwing their father’s liquor stash in the river. She kept Ollie up so late she begged her to stop.

  When Jim next came over, Nell sat him down in the dining room and gave him the Full Stuart. Jim listened with a weak smile on his face, as if determined to humor her. But Nell never took well to being patronized.

  “Is that all you have to say?” she asked. “Nothing?”

  He tossed his head. “Well, I’m sure happy you enjoyed yourself. Not sure what it has to do with me. I’m not a drunkard.”

  “Look at your britches, Jim Wilcox. If you saved all the money you spend on rot-gut, you wouldn’t need those patches.”

  “My mama didn’t raise no prodigal. I’d wear these patches even if I had a million!”

  “He is the first preacher of the modern era.”

  “I don’t doubt it. But I’d rather spend my time with you going out, doing gay things. Not in a church.”

  “Ollie, he’s impossible!” Nell cried. “Tell him for me.”

  Ollie looked up from her sewing. When she fixed him with her eye, Jim’s face went white, and he became fidgety.

  “Can’t you spare an hour on this, Jim? Just for your girl?”

  “It’s the Lord’s own truth, Ollie—I don’t have an hour to spare this week. Four boats have to come out of the water, and there’s the devil’s own amount of tarring to do, and Hayman is already on me for the time I spend away…”

  Nell was staring at the opposite wall, as if not hearing him. Her eyes were indigo now, blazing and burning holes in the wallpaper. After a few moments of excruciating silence, Ollie said, “Jim, I think it’s best you go.”

  “Is that what you think, Nellie? Should I leave?”

  She did not answer.

  The following Wednesday Stuart spoke at the Methodist Church. Nell tried to convince the whole family to go, but the elder Cropseys were too tired, and the young professed no interest. Nell declared she would indeed attend, alone and without permission if necessary. Ollie forestalled that conflict by volunteering to go with her.

  The theme of the night’s talk was On Strong Womanhood. Stuart appeared at the lectern in the same suit, lofting the same pliant Bible. He began again with Scripture: Proverbs
31:10, "Who can find a virtuous woman? For her price is far above rubies.”

  He said: “How insincere, how full of shame, how full of deception, is the female character of today. There sits a woman with the appearance of luxuriant hair falling in flowing bangs about her forehead, but I do not know whether it is confined to her head by nature, or pinned on by hairpins. Over there sits a lady with beautiful rosy cheeks, but I don’t know whether they came from a ruddy blood careering through her healthful system, or whether she got it out of a little box on the bureau. A woman’s hair, teeth, lips and cheeks are not more treacherous than her tongue. I touch the subject with a degree of hesitation. I handle a woman’s mouth like I handle a loaded pistol. You never know when it is going off.”

  “O, the insincerity of society’s tongue! The insincere praise and flattery and condemnation. But an honest woman—a sincere woman. It is safe to buy a candle from her…”

  When he said “there sits a lady with beautiful rosy cheeks…” she thought his eyes flitted in the direction of her and Nell. She wasn’t sure, but the suspicion made her burn with self-consciousness. For she had indeed opened a little box on her bureau before going out for the evening, and her hair was not innocent of hairpins.

  “The strong woman industriously looks after her children. She knows where her children go, how long they stay, and what they do. It was not her girl you saw out on the street with that dude after midnight, the other night, returning from the opera. It was not her girl that you saw taking a moonlight buggy ride with that young man. It was not her girl that you saw encircled in the arms of that lecherous youth, whirling on the ballroom floor. It was not her boy you saw on the streets at night. It was not her boy you saw in the club room at the card table. The curse of our land today is that our mothers do not look to the ways of their children.”