Читать книгу Plowing On Sunday - Sterling North - Страница 13

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The basement of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Brailsford Junction rang with the shouts of children playing tag despite the scolding of their busy mothers. Flushed matrons buzzed in laden down with loaves of homemade bread, pans of biscuits ready for the oven, mason jars full of sweet, sour, and mixed pickles, bags of ground coffee, and huge pots of dressed and dismembered chickens so tender and plump that their flesh would have warranted the term "voluptuous" if stewed by a less austere generation.

Joe Whalen, town drunk, general roustabout, and janitor of the church was starting a paper fire in the furnace.

"Put in more paper," shouted Old Mrs. Crandall, mother of Temperance, who had left her room for the first time in months for this occasion. "Terrible weather for rheumatism, ain't it?"

"Terrible," shouted Joe.

"You don't need to holler at me," said Old Mrs. Crandall. "I ain't as hard of hearing as all that."

She pulled her shawl a little tighter about her rheumatic shoulders, and cocked a sly old ear for the salty gossip Sister Atwell was passing on to Sister Bailey.

Girls of high school age, whispering and giggling, twisted long streamers of red, white, and blue crêpe paper in dizzy crescents from pillar to pillar of the festive room, while over each blazing chromo the same laughing girls hung shooting stars, bluebells, anemones, and other spring flowers.

The chromos were of the unforgettable period in religious art which offered holy scenes in dazzling triads, stirring masterpieces which could not help but move saints and sinners alike, pictures which carried a message and a warning. "Rock of Ages Cleft for Me" with a courageous lady in a white nightgown hanging perilously to a granite cross amid seas which would have sunk the Titanic; an amazingly tinted "Last Supper"; Christ driving the money changers from the temple with a ferocious rawhide blacksnake which Stud Brailsford privately admitted a man would not use on a team of balky mules.

Flowers were also heaped upon the golden oak upright piano, lacking three ivories, sadly out of tune, and showing unmistakable battle scars from the militant hammering it received during every Sunday School session, no less than from the attempts of Epworth League members to "rag" such sacred selections as "Holy, Holy, Holy."

The kitchen was a mad-house. Along ten feet of glowing griddles perspiring sisters of the Ladies' Aid were stewing chickens, thickening gravy, starting great pots of coffee (two hours before suppertime with the result that church supper coffee had a wallop like 100 proof Bourbon) cutting slices of home-baked bread, quartering apple, pumpkin, and gooseberry pies, whipping half gallons of Jersey cream in wooden bowls two feet in diameter, pouring into boat-shaped cut-glass dishes jars of pickles, glass after glass of jams, jellies and preserves.

Crocks of golden butter and creamy cottage cheese made a formidable bulwark of richly laden earthenware in one corner, while a phalanx of ice cream freezers stood guard beside the kitchen door. And never except in time of war were seen such tubs of potatoes and kettles of peas.

Thirty tables for which thirty women had each brought her largest tablecloth were being set with six hundred ironware plates and as many indestructible cups and saucers, while what was smilingly known as the church silverware was lined up, knife, fork and spoon at the right of every plate.

It was the scandal of the Ladies' Aid that some of these pieces of husky serviceware were not stamped as they should have been with "Property of the Methodist Episcopal Church" but were labeled instead "Property of the First Congregational Church" or, breath of popery, heresy and damnation, "Property of the St. James Catholic Church."

A venturesome member of the Ladies' Aid who had once attended a Congregational supper came back with the juicy information that the Congregational church had hundreds of knives, forks, and spoons marked with the bold Methodist insignia. This served as an excellent palliative to Methodist consciences.

No one, of course, had ever worried about what might have been stolen from the papists.

Into this wild and frantic scene shortly before supper time came Sarah Brailsford, Early Ann, and Gus. The hired man shuffled sheepishly behind the protecting women folks loaded to the gunwales with apple pies.

"Oh, Sister Brailsford, how do you do!" chorused the sisterhood. "My, what lovely apple pies!"

They greeted Early Ann with reserved enthusiasm, insisting she must join the Epworth League, and Standard Bearers.

"So important that a girl gets the right atmosphere during her formative years," said Sister Dickenson.

Across the kitchen, however, the comments were less cordial: "Did you hear? And think of bringing her to a church supper! You mustn't breathe a word but Temperance Crandall told me in strictest confidence...."

Meanwhile Gus, red of face and almost tongue-tied with embarrassment had been put to work mashing the potatoes. Women came with milk, butter, salt, and advice while Gus mashed on. Gus thought that perhaps he would not have been embittered about women so early in life had it not been for twenty-five years of church suppers.