Mrs. Garvey, Ed’s wife and the schoolteacher for as long as anyone could remember, beamed as the new benches were put in place. She had taught Nickerly students in the back of Tilden’s dry goods store for seven years, or as long as it took to get Ed Jr. through at least the ninth and tenth grades, and into his father’s business. She had intended to quit teaching after Ed Jr.’s schooling ended, but she stayed on a few more years. Now she stood at the front door of the new schoolhouse, arms crossed, overseeing every ounce of activity; directing the location of the benches; seeing that the shutters were level on the windows; and hanging the yellowed roll-down chart of the alphabet, the first building block of a Nickerly education.
Margaret, even at age eleven the tallest girl among her friends, stood in a circle of her schoolmates to watch these final touches being applied to a school that would be hers, with a name, Sunny-side, that she could call her own. The new school gave a feeling of independence to Margaret. It was a separate building, almost like a home, that she would share with other children away from the adult world. It was also the private domain of Margaret’s idol, Mrs. Garvey, a figure of fortress-like qualities. She was a strong woman who knew the strange world of adults and thrived in it. She was independent. Margaret could never imagine Mrs. Garvey crying, as her mother often did. Margaret wanted to be just like Mrs. Garvey, and at age eleven she knew that this school would be the ticket. And that’s what Margaret made of it. Often she walked home with Mrs. Garvey after school. They talked of distant places. After Margaret discovered that the Garveys had been to Wichita, she started asking her teacher about other cities. Her schoolbooks pictured a vastly different life in places like New York and Washington, where business, wealth and political power had created a class of people that Margaret’s father called, simply, “the rich.” Mrs. Garvey had also been to Kansas City, and she told Margaret about hospitals and schools where thousands of people lived in small areas. It was Mrs. Garvey who first mentioned college, and Margaret took to the idea immediately.
In all those years of dreaming about getting away from Nickerly, it never dawned on Margaret that after going away, she might want to come back. But now she was doing just that. Mrs. Garvey had written to Margaret at the College of Emporia, informing her of her plans to leave Sunnyside and stay home with Ed and Ed Jr., who was just taking over the mill. Mrs. Garvey suggested to Margaret that she might want to come home and teach at Sunnyside. After the school board wrote to formally offer Margaret Mrs. Garvey’s position, Margaret wrote her mother that she was coming home to teach. She had not seen the world, but she had met new friends from other towns in Kansas, and teaching would allow her to visit them in the summer and on holidays. She would actually have a job and earn her own money, money that could be used for all sorts of new plans. Going home seemed like the logical next step.
Chapter Two
Jay Langston poked his brother, Ray, winked, jerked his thumb over his shoulder to signal a departure, then slid out of the last row of the Nickerly First Presbyterian Church with Ray following close behind. They knew their father could see them, but they also knew he was too wound up to stop his sermon. He would never disrupt the service to reprimand the boys.
It was spring and the front door of the church had been left wide open, an invitation to the fresh honeysuckle scents of the yard and the yellow splashes of forsythia along the side of the building. The boys slipped practically unnoticed out the front door as their father’s voice rose in anxious pleading: “Oh, Lord, stop us from our worldly sins. Let our eyes rise to the golden glow of the sun and recognize the warmth of God’s love. For while He forgives us, He will be a harsh judge of our sins. God will take his vengeance on those who dwell on worldly goods. He lifts our spirit and accepts our faith. He gives us hope and kindness. He leadeth us down the paths of righteousness. And I beseech you, do not turn away from these gifts. Do not seek pleasure in the here and now, but seek your rewards in heaven. Live according to the gospel, a life of work and sacrifice that is its own reward.”
Aaron’s voice was warming to the task, rising but deep in tone, coming from his plentiful belly and emerging with a raspy tinge as the syllables passed through the long white beard that seemed to hang from various points on his face, as if stuck on by a schoolgirl using paste and cotton balls. When the Reverend Aaron was in full throat, the beard seemed to fill out, to puff up and take on a certain gravity as he continued, “Just as God punished the enemies of righteousness, so will He punish us, for all things are unto God, and He will take the measure of our lives.”
Aaron talked of love, but his God was a fearful force that measured and punished, and manifested himself more often in lightning and thunder than in the shasta daisies that swayed easily among the rye grass outside the church. Ray and Jay stood under a window, where they could hear their father as clearly as if they were inside. The sun brightened their faces and felt especially warm on the scar that creased Jay’s chin.
The First Presbyterian was their home church, but they didn’t go there often because the Reverend Aaron only preached there when the regular minister was out of town. Usually, Aaron preached where there were no walls, in a farmer’s yard or along the banks of the Saline River, where the “sacred waters flow, and the Spirit of the Lord receives all those who accept Him as their personal Lord and Savior.” He had been raised a Quaker by his immigrant parents in West Virginia, but after service in the Civil War, he migrated to Kansas and adopted the church known as Church of the Brethren. Aaron had grown into the ministry, working on various farms, attending church regularly, and eventually being coaxed into giving sermons or Bible readings when his family hosted a church service. He had watched Stonewall Jackson ride through the ranks of his troops, beaten, tired, and torn by the ravages of defeat and hunger. But the general’s head was always high and proud. That’s the way Aaron preached. And soon he was in great demand throughout the county.
Like many Church of the Brethren ministers, the Reverend Aaron was a dunkard. He baptized new members into the church by “dunking” them in the Saline River, a quite literal translation from the Bible’s rite of baptism. Aaron’s baptismal services were widely attended, often by non-parishioners who just came to see the spectacle.
In the image of Saint Peter himself, Aaron would walk from his carriage at the appointed time, fling his black overcoat to a nearby member of his family, and stride into the Saline River in a white robe, his arms outstretched, palms upward, preaching as he went. People crowded down to the water’s edge. As Aaron reached the middle of the stream, he would turn and shout out his greeting: “Gather all ye sinners, for we are here to praise the Lord.” And so the sermon would begin, winding its way through the Bible, into the wheat fields of Lincoln County, through the hearts and heathen souls of all those gathered, and leading to but one conclusion: the need for redemption through baptism.
After about an hour, Aaron would announce that on this Sunday, the children of at least one family in the community had reached the age of thirteen and had accepted Jesus Christ as their personal Savior. The children, usually two or three in number, would be led to the center of the river where the water was about three feet deep, shallow enough that Aaron could always keep his balance and his composure, but the children were gurgling in waves up to their chins and scared to death that drowning might be their first taste of eternal damnation.
Ray and Jay had only witnessed one disastrous baptism. Old John Finger was a brute of a farmer who was dying of internal forces widely believed to be whiskey-related. Old John saw his last days as a fearful reckoning and went about the county paying off debts and apologizing to a neighbor whose dog he had killed years before for eating chicken eggs. When he stopped the Reverend Aaron in his corn field and asked if he could be baptized, the Reverend was delighted, seizing this opportunity to capture a soul long considered lost to the saving arms of Christ. Aaron arranged for a baptismal ceremony that very Sunday and waded into the muddy waters of the Saline fully expecting t
o emerge with another dweller in the house of the Lord. But when Aaron put his right hand behind Farmer Finger’s back, and his left hand, with a towel, over Mr. Finger’s nose, and began to lower him into the saving waters of the Saline, he failed to account for Mr. Finger’s sizable posterior, which shifted the combined weight of their bodily twosome much lower than expected. As Aaron shouted, “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, I baptize thee, John, . . .” Old John Finger, so overwhelmed by all this transformation in his life, decided to actually give himself to the Lord, so he simply dropped his behind, let his legs float free, and began blissfully slipping into the loving arms of God, if not the supporting arms of Reverend Aaron. Aaron shouted, “God,” in a not entirely godly way. His front foot, which was braced for the lowering, slowly slid along the bottom of the Saline, and Aaron was suddenly on top of old John Finger in four feet of water. Old John soon realized that some snag had occurred in the process and began kicking wildly, just as three members of the congregation, including Ray and Jay, rushed into the water to help right the fallen angels.
Aaron, ever the trooper and always protective of the dignity of the Lord, struggled to his feet, pulled down his muddied robes, and prepared to perform the dunking again, presumably following the rule that a baptismal opportunity should never be allowed to slip away. But Old John Finger was coughing, and sputtering, and scrambling directly for the bank. He reached the shore, stomped to his team of horses, climbed up on the buckboard, and headed for home. The Reverend Aaron, not wanting to shortchange either John Finger or the Lord, proclaimed that the baptism would be repeated next Sunday. Unfortunately, John Finger died that week. The Reverend Aaron preached wildly at his funeral of the great and benevolent life of this humble man, repeating several times that the baptismal performed the previous week, in spite of its somewhat abrupt execution, was nevertheless valid and that Mr. John Finger could expect all the heavenly rewards to which he was entitled.
Being a preacher in those years before World War I was not a particularly profitable pastime. The First Presbyterian minister, for example, was actually a circuit minister from Ellsworth who went from church to church according to a monthly schedule. He depended on the “love offerings” of the morning congregation for his cash rewards and the benevolence of individual parishioners for food and clothing. Farm families accepted many general obligations of life, among them the care and feeding of their minister. Every week at least one family was designated by the church to prepare a dinner for the minister. Most ministers ate pretty well, if not to their own taste. But their lives belonged to their flock, which set all the rules. The first rule was: A preacher could not live better than the poorest of his congregation. If a home was provided for the minister, it was usually a humble house, positioned close to the church, and seen by the community as theirs, not the minister’s. It was a life beholden to the community, at a time when any luxury was an extravagance not to be tolerated by a minister of God.
The Reverend Aaron Langston avoided this servitude, and gave himself and his family a high degree of independence, by also being a farmer. He owned land just a few miles outside Nickerly, and raised his two sons and four daughters as farmers, as God-fearing members of the community, and as righteous observants of the societal restrictions of the church, not necessarily in that order. This combination of evangelism and farming resulted in a rather exalted position for the Reverend Aaron because he had his own source of income, and therefore in the minds of many, a special stature with the Lord. It was also true that baptisms and weddings—the two great acts in Aaron’s repertoire—were genuine crowd pleasers. So the Langstons were a part of everybody’s celebration, and they were well liked, in spite of the fact that Jay had once burned a neighbor’s barn and was generally thought to be touched by the devil.
In addition, Aaron’s wife, Ivy, was revered as the embodiment of her faith. She was a plain and sober woman, with a moon face that carried the farm wife’s insignia—red cheeks and a sunburned chin underneath a bright white forehead protected by a bonnet. Always a bonnet. Black for church, calico with light blue flowers for working in the garden or the fields. Ivy’s hair was pulled back, twisted in a tight bob, and knotted in place with a small black ribbon and a stick pin. Her shoes were plain with eight eyes for laces, one black pair for Sunday, and one brown pair for working in the fields. Both pairs had served long and well in the limited vineyards of her life.
Ivy Langston didn’t smile much because she did not recognize or appreciate the ironies of life. When she did chance upon a humorous comment, she usually mistook it for derision or irreverence, two qualities she had worked hard to eliminate from her life. Her four daughters made her smile, for they were taller and prettier than their mother and it made Ivy proud. Her sons, on the other hand, tormented her. They always seemed on the verge of bringing shame to the family. Sneaking out of church, for example, was a mortal shame to her. But since Ray and Jay were in their twenties, and since they had been escaping their father’s sermons for years, Ivy had just about determined that their souls were already lost to God’s high standards.
When Ray and Jay were boys, she had sent Aaron for a switch several times to “tan their behinds” for disobeying the commands of the house. The boys soon learned to avoid her presence except in the most benign of circumstances. Sometimes Ray wished he could lay his head in his mother’s lap, the way the girls did, but he had long since concluded that the accompanying lecture on the rightness of God’s teachings was too high a price.
As Ray and Jay ambled away from the Presbyterian church that Sunday to investigate several Model As parked under a pair of cottonwood trees, Ray wondered why Jay had such a streak of orneriness in him. It was Jay who always wanted to sneak out of church during their father’s sermon. It was Jay who always got them in trouble. When they were younger, their father would warn the boys to sit down in the hay wagon in case the horses became skittish. Jay always stood up. Or he would wait beside the road, pretending to be preoccupied with a flower until the team was moving, and then he would run and jump on the wagon. It was just such a move that gave Jay his slightly sinister physical appearance in later life. He had jumped for the wagon, misjudged the speed of the horses, and hit the ground, cutting a deep gash on his chin.
“I hear they hired Margaret Chambers to be the new schoolteacher,” Jay said. “She was just behind us in school.” Ray didn’t respond.
“Three or four years,” Jay continued. “I’m twenty-two and you’re twenty-four. She can’t be more than eighteen. Not much of a job anyway.” Ray was quiet.
“She’s a college girl now,” Jay said, letting the scorn sound in his voice. College was too expensive, too far away, and too frivolous for serious people. Hard work provides the currency of life, and college was a detour, even a dodge from the reality of raising a family, life’s most important endeavor. That’s why so many girls around Nickerly started their families with a marriage at age thirteen or fourteen, hopefully to a young man about to take over his father’s farm. It was not unusual for the boys of Nickerly to turn thirty-five, still unmarried, still working on their father’s farm, and probably still virginal as well.
“You know, Ray, I think it’s time for me to leave the farm,” Jay said, switching subjects. “I don’t like it. You’re the farmer in the family. And Dad’s got four girls to marry off. I’m going to Salina and get a job . . . maybe not ’til after the summer.”
But Ray was still focused on Jay’s earlier comments. “Well, I may just call on Margaret Chambers,” he said quietly.
Jay was startled and stole a questioning look at his brother.
“Go ahead,” Jay said, “but just remember her mother.”
“What about her mother?”
“I hear that Margaret is hard to get along with,” Jay said. “Independent. She once talked back to Judd Sexton. Refused to step aside for him in the general store, and then announced that she was first in line.”
“What about her mo
ther?” Ray asked again.
“Something happened over at the Haney place during their shivaree,” Jay said. “You weren’t there. Must have been ten years ago.”
“What happened?” Ray asked. “I’m sure I was there.”
“No, you weren’t there, or you would remember,” Jay said.
“Nobody ever talked about it afterward, but I remember. While we were standing out in the yard, waiting for the Haneys to come out, Mary Chambers was in the bushes with Johnny Harwood. I don’t know what they were doing. But Mary was married to John Chambers. And John Chambers caught them, grabbed Mary by the arm, and marched her right out of there. I was sort of hanging back in the crowd, beating my dishpan with that big ladling spoon Mom has, when the Chambers came charging through the dark. I saw Johnny Harwood head into the shrubs down by the barn, and I figured he hightailed it for home. He was just lucky that it was a wedding celebration and John Chambers didn’t have a gun.”
“I never heard that story before,” Ray said.
Everyone liked a shivaree because it was a little daring, and one of the few community events with sexual overtones, not that they were ever talked about, of course. Ray didn’t really know how shivarees got started, or what set of traditions they were based on. But the rituals were prescribed, and seldom varied, making a community shivaree almost as anticipated as the wedding itself.
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