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iv.

Those Waiting

IN 1840 LAMY SET ABOUT the building of a small brick church in Mt Vernon. Its substance began with his creation of a sense of community among the people there. Someone gave land, another was to take the lead in bringing timber, others worked to use the roads and canals of Ohio to gather other materials. As resident pastor of Danville, Lamy could not give all his time to Mt Vernon—or even to Danville itself—for he was charged with mission duties also in Mansfield, Ashland, Loudonville, Wooster, Canal Dover, Newark, and Massillon, in addition to even less coherent communities by the waysides.

In the hot, white, diffused mists of summer, and the cracking and often howling winters alike, he and Machebeuf both had to forward their home parishes and attend to their missions. As Lamy wrote to Purcell, “I have bought a horse, and I am now a great ‘traveller’; for I have many places to attend, and I don’t stay more than two Sundays a month in Danville.”

Machebeuf, too, had acquired a horse—”beau et excellent”—from a German priest at the exorbitant rate of one hundred dollars. His letters home were full of lively details about the life of the missioner—typical of what Lamy, too, was experiencing, and all the other young Auvergnats who had come away with them.

In their own parishes they wore their cassocks, but travelling they put on their oldest clothes, and when they came to towns they dressed more neatly in order not to invite scornful comments from entrenched Protestants. They used a long leather bag in which to carry vestments, Mass vessels, and other supplies, and the bag was thrown over the saddle. Where roads permitted, a four-wheeled wagon served the missioners and then they could carry a travelling trunk. In the very beginning, they had to “preach by their silence” but it was not long before they were able to get along in English, to the delight of their listeners. Sometimes it was so cold that the ink froze in its bottle as they wrote at night by firelight. The visitor often had to sleep next to his horse to keep warm. Coming to a house where he would spend the night, the missioner was given a bed, “sometimes very good, sometimes only passable.” In the morning, children would be sent in every direction to tell other remote homesteaders that the priest had come, and, so soon that it was amazing, the people came gathering, settlers from Germany, Ireland, France, and the eastern states, and it was time for the sacraments and the Mass and the sermon. The listeners were “not savages, but Europeans who are coming in crowds to clear off the forests of America.” And then on again to the next cluster of those waiting for what the visitor alone could bring them. It was a matter of literally keeping the faith, at whatever cost to the traveller—on one occasion Machebeuf used the frozen Toussaint River as his highway, until the ice broke and he went through into water five feet deep.

Danville and Tiffin were eighty to ninety miles apart and there were few occasions when Lamy and Machebeuf could see each other. Sometimes they would converge at Cincinnati on visits to the bishop. Now and then they were prevented by illness from visiting each other—Lamy was ill several times, once “dangerously for several days,” but when he was well enough he joined Machebeuf for a visit to the Irish canal workers on the Maumee River, and exclaimed over American enterprise which was constructing a canal forty feet wide. One day Lamy heard that Machebeuf was dead of cholera, and “heartbroken” went to bury his oldest friend. When he arrived, he found instead that Machebeuf was simply recovering from a fever. There was joy all around, and another of the French missioners referred to the invalid who had deceived death as “Monsieur Trompe-la-Mort.”

Loving all which they were overcoming in the name of what they believed, they were content. Machebeuf wrote to Riom, “I declare to you that for all the gold in the world I would not return to live in Europe,” and Lamy in one of his letters written from abroad some years later, said he was preparing himself “to return to my Beloved Ohio.” Still, the call of their early home was strong in their early days in the Middle West. They had fine plans for a visit to Auvergne. They knew how they would go—the Lake Erie steamboat from Sandusky to Buffalo, the great canal to the Hudson River and down to New York, and from there, no such antiquated an affair as a ship under canvas but a steamer, which would reach Liverpool in fourteen days. “From Liverpool to Paris by railroad and the Straits of Dover, two days would be enough,” wrote Machebeuf to his father. “Then from Paris to Riom is but a hop-step-and-a-jump for an American. This is the way Father Lamy and I have fixed up our plan.” Yet there was a condition which had to be met first. “But it cannot be carried out until we have each built two churches, [Lamy] at Mt Vernon and Newark, I, at my two Sanduskys [then known as Upper and Lower Sandusky]. So, if you can find some generous Catholic who can send us at least eighty thousand francs for each church, we can leave within a year. Merci.…”