Читать книгу Mary Queen of Bees - Diane Glancy - Страница 5

I still wake as a child at the head of the stairs in the servant’s arms who miss-stepped and we fell down the stairs. Turning my feet under. At my mother’s insistence, we were not allowed to cry out. I was quiet as the servant started to fall, unable to catch herself and stop our fall. The servant herself falling over me turning both my feet inward never to walk again without a crutch or a sister on either side. I cried when the pain hit at the bottom of the stairs. Unable to stop my howling.

We weren’t allowed to do anything that wasn’t church. We were his lambs as he was Lamb. The wool of the Lord was a fire to me.

Our mother taught us to read and write so we could study scripture, but what could we do with it? Teach it to our own daughters who themselves would be a garden surrounded by a wall, shut up with no outlet as we had none? Or as a governess, providing others with knowledge they too could hold inside?

Why this learning if all we were to do was to have children? Our mother, Susanna, held church services for us when our father was in debtor’s prison. She didn’t like the locum he hired to preach in his place. Soon others came to her services. Crowds gathered in our house on Sunday afternoons to hear Susanna Wesley read her husband’s old sermons. During the week, she taught our school lessons. It always felt like Sunday.

I put salt grains on my tongue to sting it. For words not spoken that I wanted to speak. In-between the conjugation of verbs, I wanted to by-pass them and not give them thought.

What did I want to give voice? Not the hymns my mother insisted upon. I did not feel like singing. I hated the sound of my voice. It had no song in it. Why force it? Why make a tongue to sing? It brought me humbly before the Lord. I would not be a song-bird on the branch of a tree that constantly sang to Him. To give praise and thanksgiving. My scrawny voice thin as the blanket that covered us at night.

Her stomach big with another child. Why so many? Couldn’t we do with less? I think they heard me. As many infants died as lived. I cried in misery, quietly to myself. I wished them dead so I could have a corner of the bed. A piece of the quilt. So I could have a chair at the table. So I could have bread. And what would we do as women? Marry and have children.

If the dead ones had names I didn’t know them. They were born. They cried. They stopped crying. Sometimes they were born without crying. Jedidiah was one of the names.

My body jumped in bed before I slept. I was in the servant’s arms at the top of the stairs about to fall. My sisters mocked me. You would think children would have mercy, but they do not. They continued to taunt.

Sometimes there was thunder.

We heard rain. If you cover your head it is warmer. If you leave your stockings on in bed.

The smell of sickness. Vomiting. Running bowels. Brothers and sisters everywhere. It was our job to clean them. The servant could only do so much. IF YOU’RE GETTING SICK, GET OUT OF BED SO WE DON’T HAVE TO PULL OFF SHEETS AND COVERS AND CLEAN THE WHOLE BED. Pulling the mattress out to air. Dragging it down and up the stairs.

THROW UP ON THE FLOOR. Not in the middle of the bed.

I pinched Hetty when she made her body jump, making fun of me. As we were not allowed to cry, I pinched her again. She hit back on the sore places on my feet and I cried out.

STOP. STOP. I’LL COME WITH THE ROD.

I stifled my voice in the covers.

Everlasting children. Nineteen of Samuel and Susanna Wesley. Nine died in infancy.

Samuel b 1690

Emilia (Emily) b 1692

Annesley b 1694 (died)

Jedediah b 1694 (died)

Susanna (Sukey) b 1695

Mary (Molly) b 1696

Mehetabel (Hetty) b 1697

Infant b 1698 (stillborn)

Infant b 1698 (stillborn)

John b 1699 (died)

Benjamin b 1700 (died)

Infant b 1701 (died)

Infant b 1701 (died)

Anne b 1702

John b 1703

Infant b 1705 (accidentally smothered)

Martha (Patty) b 1706

Charles b 1707

Kezzia (Kezzie) b 1709

At times, I was almost warm between Emily and Hetty. Sukey had her own cot at the foot of the bed. On the coldest nights, she got in bed with us. We hardly could move or one of us would fall out. Often they put me at the open edge of the bed. More than once, I was pushed out, and laid shivering on the floor until I climbed onto the cot at the foot of the bed, and thought of the burning wool of the Lord,

We played with the thistle-heads the women used to card the wool after the sheep were sheared. Once Emily ripped the thistle from my hand and left splinters. My mother soaked my hand in water and removed them with a sewing needle.

I would have made a doll from twigs and scraps of old material. Or twigs and leaves. But we weren’t allowed. I would have made an apron for the doll from a page in one of my father’s books. Tied with thread loose from a binding. He wouldn’t have known.

The rod was frequent in the house with so many children full of unmet needs. To do without and not complain, even as small children with fretting always in the eyes, running down the nose.

Conquer the will and bring them to an obedient broken spirit.

When the will of a child is totally subdued, and it is brought to revere and stand in awe of the parents, then a great many childish follies, and faults may be past over.

I insist upon conquering the will of children early because this is the only strong and rational foundation of a religious education. Without this both precept and example will be ineffectual. But when this is thoroughly done, then a child is capable of being governed by the reason and piety of the parents.

They were quickly made to understand they might have nothing they cried for.

—From the Writings of Susanna Wesley

We could not ask for anything. We ate what was given to us. Even if we gagged. We were regimented. Orderly. Stifled. I wanted to scream out. I kept the screams in the barn inside my head. Between my ears. Oh, they were fondly there. Until I could in the woods by myself cry out, holding along the fence. Until a farmer arrived wondering who was hollering. What was happening? Nothing, sir. I’m just letting out the screams pent up in me. Wild beasts they are. Trampling me at night. I cannot run from them. I cannot walk without my crutch. It isn’t a proper crutch. Just a stick a neighbor found and gave to me when he saw me hobbling along the road.

Was there anyone who walked on a crutch in the Bible?

Yes, there were many cripples that Jesus healed.

Any of the disciples or close followers? I asked my mother.

No, but I would learn to walk without help, she said. Or I could lean forever on my sisters.

Jesus hasn’t healed me.

Have patience, she said.

There was nothing. Nothing I could do. They laughed at me. Made fun. I was held in derision. A word I heard my father use when he talked of the way neighbors held his views. Because they didn’t accept my father’s political views. Because he was a zealot. Because he didn’t know how to run a farm. Because he didn’t pay his bills. Because we were poor. Because his judgement was in want. Because his wife would not let their children play with others.

It is the word, frustration, I ponder. Frustrated. What does it teach me? How to conjugate? No, frustration is more of an object that will not move. It has rooted itself in my being. It is a brilliant needle sparkling in the sun as I sit by the window and sew another patch on my ragged dress. The thread is a line. I could swallow it and choke. I could die and my mother would sweep my shadow from the corner.

A list of what I like—

A corner of our small pasture when no one is there.

The cows because they don’t concern themselves with anything but grass. Though sometimes they stare when I pass and share with them the gospel.

The barn. When I am alone there. After milking when my fingers cramp.

The stars when they are bees in the hive of the night sky.

My feet hurt when it rains. They hurt in frost. They know they might become frozen. They do not fit into shoes. They are susceptible to blisters and little rebellions. I would leave my feet in the slaughter pen. Maybe then I could walk.

It is a sin to be morbid. It is a sin not to walk.

Our parents. A mismatched pair. Mother should have been father, and father, mother.

There is a list of what not to do. It is long as forever. All flogged by longings.

She teaches us to read. To want. To long for, by the large writing of my hand.

Therein is the multiplicity of longing.

It is all the same. Suffering. Suffering. The God we belong to requires it. Mother sees to it. Father in his distance does also. He gives us his absence. His inability to handle what needs to be handled.

Our mother meets with all the children once a week. For an hour, she sits before us. Not altogether. But one by one. It is like talking to a cow in the field that looks solemnly at me. Why doesn’t she ask what I feel? Why doesn’t she say she will stop my sisters from mocking the way I walk? She asks only of my learning of scripture. My slowness. My unworthiness before the Lord. Did she play children when she was child?

But somewhere in the slowness, there is a spark of determination. Maybe it is anger. A pollen to go with the sting. I feel capable of learning. Of being upright before the Lord. Of walking the way others walk—even though it would not be in this lifetime.

My Letters to Paradise—

I would like to not be thwarted at every turn. Even for the most ordinary thing. I would like a soothing for the longing that is a bee sting. I would like for there to be an end to want.

My father worked continually on a commentary of the Old Testament book of Job—Dissertationes in Librum Jobi. My youngest sister, Kezzia, was named after one of the daughters of Job [Job 42:14]. Job with seven sons and three daughters. My father with seven daughters and three sons. My father’s book was in Latin and Greek, Hebrew, Chaldean and others. Why didn’t he just say in English, Job struggled to walk on two feet? To not limp through his trials. Why did my father have to make his work so laborious and ornate? Why couldn’t he meet Job where he was? And where was Uz where Job lived? My father posited. Somewhere. Somewhere. He raised more questions than he answered. I feared my father’s writing was difficult. No one else seemed to take an interest. The sale of subscriptions was not going well.

Job had to listen to his friends. Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar. I had my sisters, Emily, Sukey and Hetty. Even the younger ones sometimes taunted me.

My father read all Hebrew texts about Job. No one knows who wrote the book, but my father insisted it was Job himself, standing apart from himself, outside himself, as though he were the character he was writing about. Job knows the earth, the weather, its cycles.

We are gifted with free will, my father tells me, which includes the choice of sin. But I don’t know what he connects that thought to.

1701—In a time of prayer my parents argued. My brothers and sisters looked at them startled. She would not say amen to his prayer for King James. The parents were doing what the children could not. We all left the room. I sat on the top stair and listened. My sisters hid in the bed. Finally, the strain broke and my father left the house. The mother sent all the children to bed where we cried softly into our worn blankets.

The following year, my father returned. He was visiting a sick parishioner when the parsonage caught fire, burning all but a third of the house, including his work on the book of Job.

1702—The Fire Number One. Possibilities—[I heard my father say].

Sparks from a neighbor’s chimney on our thatch.

Sparks from our own chimney.

A broken chimney tile.

A cracked stove pipe.

A stray ember from the fireplace onto a frayed rug.

The Epworth Rectory had three stories. Made of timber and plaster. Covered with straw thatch. There were seven rooms, kitchen and parlor, hall and buttery. Three large upper rooms where we slept. The house was dim even in the day. At night, a candle hardly made a difference. Outside there was a garden with a stone wall. A barn of timber and clay walls covered with thatch. Three acres beyond the barn that bordered wildness and boredom.

Whatever the cause, the roof, on fire, fell on our bed. The sisters ran from the room. A servant came and led Hetty and me downstairs and pushed us from a window. Why didn’t she leave me upstairs? She could have let me die. I would have gone to the Lord that couldn’t possibly be worse than the Wesley house.

Our mother was burned on her hands, neck and arms, rushing through the house, trying to find what she could save until the flames would have roasted her. And she fled.

Some of us were sent to live with an uncle while the rectory was rebuilt.

When we were together again, my father took up his work on Job. My mother took up our lessons.

1705—Now our father in debtor’s prison. How could we be in debt? We had bought nothing. I never will marry a clergyman. Probably I never will marry.

My mother is overwhelmed with work. When she gives birth, she sends the infant to a neighbor to care for. In the night, the woman rolls over and smothers it. I hear the woman weeping as she comes to my mother with the dead infant in her arms.

My father was a Tory. All Wesley’s were conservatives from birth. We had no choice. We were against democratization and reform. My father’s politics did not go well. They irritated his parishioners who were illiterate. They were mainly Whigs. They opposed the succession of James, the Duke of York. The congregation also resented my father’s prayers for James.

At one point, neighbors burned our flax fields. Later, when my father continued to irritate them, they stabbed our milk cows and called us devils.

The poor pitiful beasts. What had they done?

My Letters to Paradise—

I write to You from this world where poor dumb animals are stabbed. I am haunted by the noise they made. My mother would have told them to be quiet. But I heard their helpless cries. Their misunderstanding of what was happening. The pain of the knife stabbing their thick bodies. How long it took for them to die. I am sure You are out in the universe holding the formations of the stars. Keeping them in order. But meanwhile on Your earth, there are happenings that need Your attention.

I never did want bread. But then I had so much care to get it before it was eat, and to pay for it after, as has often made it very unpleasant to me, and I think to have bread on such terms is the next degree of wretchedness to having none at all.

—From the Writings of Susanna Wesley

A Letter from the Wesley Cows in the Field—

It was us who died for them.

My Letters to Paradise—

I am sorry, O Lord, I grieve more for cows than my mother’s infants.

In church there was a girl, the only child of her parents. I often saw her walk into the church between them. She sat between her parents also. I looked at her sometimes, unless we sat in the front row, where my father sometimes put us. If I was behind her, I watched her. Once, she turned and looked at me. I didn’t look away. I still was wondering what it was like to be the only child in a house.

Once, in despair, thinking the Lord too was an only child—how could he know how I felt in the crowded house where I had to live? But in the night, my arms held tightly to my chest to make room for my sisters, the Lord said to me, you are an only child with me.

1709—The Fire Number Two

We fled the rectory again in the night. Clattering down the stairs. John cried from an upstairs window in the rectory, Help me! Our father, Samuel tried to climb the burning stairs, but could not. He gathered some of us in the garden to pray for our brother’s soul, but neighbors made a ladder of hands and shoulders, climbed up and brought him down.

The Dispersement of Children after the Fire.

Once again, we lost nearly everything except the nightclothes we wore. I was thirteen years old. Our mother walked through the flames, this time singeing her hair that stood up in jagged wisps from her head. Afterwards, Uncle Matthew Wesley, my father’s brother, a doctor in London, took Sukey and Hetty when we had no place to live. Emily stayed with our mother in the nearby house of a neighbor. I was sent to the neighbor who had smothered my infant brother. Did my mother want her to smother me?

The fire was a blessing. Afterwards, we were scattered to families and friends and talked to servants and ran and played with children.

The woman did not want to smother me after all. She let me sit warmly by the fire. She gave me an old umbrella I patched. I stood in the rain at the backdoor and listened to the clumping of the drops.

Someone showed me a picture of a rolling chair, Spain, 1595. I dreamed I had a little chair with wheels and could spin here and there. But how would it get up the stairs to the girls’ room where I slept, and sat sometimes during the day?

When the house was rebuilt after the fire, the custom of singing psalms morning and evening resumed. My mother also read a psalm for the day, and chapters in the New Testament and the Old Testament, after which we said our private prayers.

The harsh discipline returned in the rectory once again. I welcomed it. I sanctioned it. I longed for it. I hated it.

Not one child after a year old was heard to cry aloud.

—From the Writings of Susanna Wesley

Mother’s lesson.

Ahaz was a wicked king. He made his sons pass through the fire—II Kings 16:3. What did that mean? We asked our mother. Was it like our own father who prayed for John after being unable to rescue him? Did it mean we all passed through the fire when our house burned? Some questions our mother did not answer. She allowed us only to ask questions she thought we should ask. Otherwise she ignored what we said.

Did it mean we passed through fire when hungry? When sick? When crippled? When crowded with other sisters in the same bed? When burning inside with longing? When burning with more than one longing? Or with a longing that branched like a tree with leaves falling when we lay in bed at night and smelled the stench the fire left in the parsonage? But with it also, the smell of new thatch.

Ahaz saw the holy furniture of the tabernacle, my mother said—the laver, lampstand, table of bread, and other pieces. He had his priest, Urijah, made similar furniture. Only Ahaz rearranged the pieces. He made offerings to God in the wrong places. He cut off borders, and took the laver from the oxen that were under it, and put it on the pavement of stones—II Kings 16:17.

There was not a multiplicity of worlds in the Lord. He was single in heart. This is what our mother said. We were wrong to want our own way. It always would be wrong. It was humanity’s way.

Outside, the birds were screeching. It meant the cat was in the tree, or a bird not of their kind was encroaching. Maybe it was my own evil thoughts that would pervert the words of the Lord like Ahaz.

This was the pain. If I could, I would dismantle what belonged to the Lord like Ahaz, and use it in my own way. I would be like my father. He didn’t have a head for cattle. He didn’t know the fields. He was overwhelmed by the children Susanna gave him. He couldn’t handle the numbers of us. He didn’t know how to handle our lives. He had dreams that scoured him. The neighbors were against him. His own congregation. His wife. His children. The world, it seemed, where he could not fit. Or the world was more than he could dwell in. He always thought beyond it. He dreamed of other places. He couldn’t pay his bills. He had his books he bought. Nothing we could eat. Nothing we could wear. Impractical. Impractical.

In my despondence I read Psalm 22—My God why have You forsaken me? Why are You so far from helping me? O God, I cry by day, and You do not answer, and by night but find no rest.

Blessed fire. Return. Scatter us to other houses where we might play.

There is something holy about fire. It had its wicked side when it burned houses, but even when it did, there was something holy about it.

After the fire, our father bought travel books and talked of missionary work in China or the East Indies. He worked with his scorched manuscripts on Job. Every page more complicated than the last. He seemed bogged down in possibilities and interpretations. He could not let it go.

Meanwhile we could not go out in society in the shabby clothes we wore. No one would know we studied scripture on our own.

Epworth. Dear Epworth. The ground full of graves of the Wesley infants. Is there any way out of Epworth other than death?

My father planted mulberry, cherry, pear and walnut trees after the fire. It took a year to rebuild the house and left us farther in debt. My mother and a servant planted beans, peas and Brussels sprouts in the garden.

I could crawl as a bee, awkward with its heavy wings. I am silent in this wretched house filled with God. No one hears. Not even God who must be poor also, though He owns cattle, the Bible says—Psalm 50:10.

The Israelites made offerings of animal sacrifice in the Old Testament, but that was before Christ offered himself in the New Testament. Now we make our offerings with the praises of our mouth. I praise You for my bent feet. I praise You for the stiffness of my back. I praise You for prison. I praise You for our father’s debt. I praise You for parents that only meet to make more children.