Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

In prayer-meeting one Friday the minister called for new members, and asked some of those who had joined the church lately to speak. Art Tinkham stood up. He talked of God’s goodness to him for a long time, and said that now he felt happy all the time. He had felt so happy when he was doing his fall ploughing that he had kept singing, and at the end of every furrow he’d said a Bible verse.

After a while the minister called on Lucy to give a prayer. She did it, quite a long one, but at last her voice began to tremble. She could scarcely say the Amen, and sat down very quickly. Afterwards her sisters said it had been a very pretty prayer, but she couldn’t remember a word of it.

Emma and Lucy liked the dreamy hymns best, with vague references in them to gardens, glassy seas, high hills, etc. Flora liked militant hymns; almost her favourite was “A Mighty Fortress.”

Lucy’s was: “Sometimes a light surprises the Christian while he sings.” Emma’s: “There is a green hill far away without a city wall.”

Lucy was not yet a church member. Emma and Flora were, but Lucy had been too young to join when they had. She sometimes asked her sisters if she were good enough.

“You are too good for us, Lucy.”

“That’s not what I mean,” Lucy said.

At night she felt that Emma’s prayers were over all too quickly. Her own sometimes lasted almost an hour, and even then did not seem quite long enough. She felt very guilty about something. She worried about this so much that one day she almost convinced Flora that she must have been guilty of the gravest misdemeanour as a young girl. But it was not so.

It got to be Christmas-time. The snow was up to the window-sills, practically over, as if they inhabited a sinking ship. Lucy’s feeling of guilt grew heavier and heavier. She talked constantly about whether she should join the church or not.

At Christmas an elderly missionary, Miss Gillespie, young Mr. Gillespie’s aunt, came home from India on furlough. The Ladies’ Aid had special meetings for her. At them this tall, dark-brown, moustached woman of sixty-four talked, almost shouted, for hours about her life work. Photographs were handed around. They represented gentle-faced boys and young men, dressed in pure white loin-cloths and earrings. Next, the same boys and young men were shown, in soiled striped trousers and shirts worn with the tails outside. There were a few photographs of women, blurred as they raised a hand to hide their faces, or backed away from the camera’s Christian eye.

Emma and Flora disliked Miss Gillespie. Flora even said she was “bossy.” But Lucy liked her very much and went to see her several times. Then for three weeks she talked about nothing but going as a missionary. She went through all the travel books again.

Flora and Emma did not really think she would ever go, but the thought of living without her sometimes horrified one or the other of them. At the end of the third week she stopped speaking of it and, in fact, became very untalkative.

Lucy was growing thinner. The skin of her forehead seemed stretched too tightly, and although she had never had a temper in her life, Flora and Emma could see that it was sometimes an effort for her not to speak crossly to them.

She moved very slowly. At supper she would eat half a slice of bread and put the other half back in the bread dish.

Flora, who was bolder to say things than Emma, said: “She makes me feel that I’m not as good as she is.”

Once when Lucy went out to get wood from the woodshed she didn’t come back for fifteen minutes. Emma, suddenly realising how long it had been, ran outside. Lucy, with no coat or shawl, stood holding on to the side of the house. She was staring at the blinding dazzle the sun made on the ice-glaze over the next field. She seemed to be humming a little, and the glaring strip made her half shut her eyes. Emma had to take hold of her hand before she would pay any attention. Speaking wasn’t enough.

It was the night of the day after this that the strange things began to happen.

Lucy kept a diary. It was written in pencil in a book that said “Jumbo Scribbler” in red letters on a tan cover. It was really a record of spiritual progress.

“ January 3rd. This morning was clear again so Flora did some of the wash and we hung it in the garden, although it was hard to with the wind. For dinner we had a nice stew with the rest of the lamb and the carrots Mr. Jonson brought in. I say a nice stew, but I could not touch a bite. The Lord seems very far away. I kept asking the girls about my joining but they did not help me at all.”

Here Lucy copied out three Bible verses. Sometimes for several days the diary was made up of nothing but such quotations.

“ January 16th. It was eighteen below zero last night. We had to get father’s old buffalo robe from the spare-room. I didn’t like the smell, but Emma didn’t mind it. When the lamp was out I prayed for a long time, and a little while after I got into bed I felt that face moving towards me again. I can’t make it out, but it is very large and close to mine. It seemed to be moving its lips. Is it reproachful?”

Four days after this Lucy began crying in the afternoon and cried almost all evening. Emma finally cried a little, too. Flora shook her by the shoulder, but left Lucy alone.

Emma wished that she and Flora slept together instead of she and Lucy, so that they could talk about Lucy together privately.

Flora said: “What has she ever done wrong, Emma? Why should she weep about her soul?”

Emma said: “She’s always been as good as gold.”

“ January 20th. At last, at last, I know my own mind,” she began, “or rather I have given it up completely. Now I am going to join the church as soon as I can. But I am going to join the Baptist church, and I must not tell Flora and Emma beforehand. I cannot eat, I am so happy. Last night at four o’clock a terrible wind began to blow. I thought all the trees were breaking, I could hear the branches crashing against the house. I thought the chimney would come down. The house shook, and I thought about the House founded on the Rock. I was terribly frightened. Emma did not wake up. It went on for hours in the dark and I prayed that we would all be safely delivered. Then there was a lull. It was very black and my heart pounded so I thought I was dying. I couldn’t think of a prayer. Then suddenly a low voice began to talk right over the head of the bed. I couldn’t make out the words, they weren’t exactly words I knew, but I seemed to understand them. What a load dropped from my mind! Then I was so happy I woke Emma and said: ‘Emma, Emma, Christ is here. He was here just now, in this room. Get up and pray with me.’ Emma got out of bed and knelt, then she said the floor was cold and wanted to pull the rug over under our knees. I said: ‘No, Emma. Why do we need rugs when we have all Christ’s love to warm our hearts?’ She did not demur after that, and I prayed a long time, for Flora, too. When we got back in bed I told Emma about the voice I had heard.”

The next day Lucy called on the Baptist minister and told him she had decided to join his church. He was very severe, older than the Presbyterian minister, and Lucy felt at once that he was a much better man.

But a problem came up that she had not considered. She now believed ardently in the use of total immersion as practised by the Baptists, according to their conception of the methods of John the Baptist. She could not join without that, and the river, of course, was frozen over. She would have to wait until the ice went out.

She could scarcely bear it. In her eagerness to be baptised and her disappointment she forgot she had intended not to tell her sisters of her change of faith. They did not seem to mind so much, but when she asked them, they would not consider changing with her.