The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton (20 page)

“Thank you, Mrs. Fullerton,” he said, smiling and looking down at me. “I don't know when I've had such a pleasant companion at my supper!”

I changed from my best new dress, and by the time I came out of my room Chas had returned, as Tom told me, to the tavern for a game of cards with 'Tant and others.

I didn't sleep well that night; my mind kept racing back to Boston and to Chas. And I kept hearing Chas say that it was in Boston now—the Boston of the Spooners—that my “true ambitions” lay.

B
UT ON THE FIRST
of November, Tom and I boarded the 12:30 cars for Pittsfield. We sat in the ladies' car, filled with nearly thirty women, perhaps ten of them accompanied by gentlemen. I was thankful for such separation of these lumbering omnibi, for in our car nobody smoked, but on the gentlemen's car everybody did. The only oppression here was the closeness of the air due to a charcoal stove set in the center of the carriage. Yet off we went, our engine raging westward, scattering a shower of sparks in all directions from its wood fire, and screeching, hissing, panting through forest and settlement until it stopped every so often to slake its dragon-thirst beneath a covered way.

Portrait from an Outlying Farm in Groton, Massachusetts
, Artist Unknown. Published courtesy of the Fruitlands Museums, Harvard, Massachusetts.

I should confess, however, that Chas called on me frequently during my final week in Springfield, and one night just before we parted, while Tom lay asleep in the adjoining room, I slipped out and shared with Chas Sparhawk that which I had shared with no man but my husband. Suddenly there seemed to be no good reason to continue to deny every delicious caress and intimacy between a man and a woman. Perhaps Tom had been right after all about me and Chas.

Even as we parted and I watched Chas on the platform from my car, and even as Tom and I stopped to work in the villages along the line, I could think of no one but Charlie Sparhawk: the stark magnetism of his eyes, the manly scent and salt of his hair and flesh. I was alive and alert to the world again in a way I had not been for years, almost as if I had escaped another locked chamber, once more delivering myself into the world, like a child who had been kept indoors too long by some illness or harsh, unthinking restraint.

FIFTEEN

Far travels and new resolutions

I
would not flout the good-hearted reader who has followed these years of my uneven path with the incidents and patrons of every village where we did business along the way, nor with the first days of our arrival in Albany the following May.

To be brief, Tom and I tarried longest on the very border of Massachusetts and New York, taking the opportunity to enhance our purses before striking out beyond New England. We arrived ultimately at Pittsfield, near the western limit of Massachusetts, on the Housatonic—a manufacturing and farming village shut in by mountain walls. The charming churches, courthouse, academy, and four-acre mall in the town center (out of which a great elm rises to the heavens) heartened us. We had entered a central square busy with farmers in light wagons, sulkies, or on horseback; with quarry workers coming and going; with storekeepers, country squires, court people; with stages pulling up to the Berkshire Hotel, where lounged guests, stage or railway people, and idlers, some of whom assisted arrivals or departures with great trunks and bandboxes. The toddy stick bustled in the public houses and the hotel tea-gong rang punctually.

Here the sky is ever-changing, thunder frequently grumbling about the mountain ramparts with low clouds struck purple and gold. Higher clouds rise up nearer Mount Greylock's summit like Olympian mists.

We did a fair business in Pittsfield; I painted almost every day while Tom sought sitters or undercoated canvas for me. But we were advised there was business to be had in Williamstown and Adams, so we also made a short journey by the Bennington stage. We rumbled through settlements, stopping at times to bestir the nodding postmaster, who received and sent on mail in his shirt and pantaloons, our driver timing the performance of his stages with a time-watch enclosed in a small, locked wooden case.

We passed factories, heard the machinery clattering, saw the mill girls watching us from their windows as they glanced from their labors. Their boardinghouses are two stories high and twice as long. Trellises for vines run up around the doors, lending a domestic appearance. There were a number of factories in North Adams village, along the banks of a wild rivulet restrained into manufacturing cottons and woolens, and into sawing boards and marble amidst mountainous wilds. From afar, among the passes of these mountains, one hears the notes of bugle or horn announcing the coming stage from Troy or Greenfield or Pittsfield.

We put up at the North Adams House, tacking our handbills among the others on the pillars of the piazza, as well as elsewhere in town. Our business was comfortable here until the High Sheriff, one Twining, put up at the hotel in order to deliver his bundle of writs. Tom heard some jocularity among the devotees of the potatory life about the Sheriff's heartless vigor and immediately felt some fatal portent.

We had about that time also heard of an impending revival at some distance among the hills, and it occurred to Tom that in this encampment we might find a suitable retreat while Sheriff Twining completed his duties. I saw no harm in erring on the side of our liberty, so away we went, on horseback, to hide until we could quietly return to Pittsfield and get our passage across the border to Albany.

Along the road to the encampments, we finally found ourselves halted in a train of innumerable vehicles: carriages, shays, sulkies, gigs and flys, and heterogeneous farm carts and drays. We knew we had been caught in the far-flung, oceanic movements of a revival. By the time we were passing the main site, bonfires had been lit against the coming night. I had never attended such outdoor meetings, but Tom and I had grown up under the wing of Aunt Sally's earnest evangelism. I had been with her on more than one occasion when in her own home, or in the home of a neighbor, women hosted those sable-clothed preachers with mystic eyes who amble into towns to declaim their repertory of horrors and ecstasies.

Tom smiled at me. “Mightn't we also find a patron or two among this crowd?”

“Maybe, but I think their minds are attuned to other matters,” I said. “Yet these revels might make good sketch-studies.”

“Then let's take our place among the throngs!” Tom said in a good humor, and turned his horse off the road.

So we lost ourselves among the hundreds of others. Tents were still being pitched in a large semicircle about a space cleared of trees below twelve or fifteen feet. Horses and conveyances formed a second circle beyond the tents, and a grove of enormous trees formed a third, outer circle still. I saw here more permanent wooden structures as well: a preaching stand on the north side of the clearing (about six feet off the ground and before which an area of some twenty or twenty-five square feet had been completely cleared and filled with sawdust and straw); an amphitheater of rude benches forming a series of aisles leading toward the stand; a few open sheds; and, well out of the way, a few latrines.

The benches were mostly filled by the time Tom and I pushed our way into the inner circle, but we found several great logs on the side that seemed to have been laid out for additional sitters. I took out my sketchbook. At the far end of the enclosure four bonfires blazed atop mounds of heaped-up earth. On the stand near us sat the preachers who, by turns, would harangue the masses gathered below, as someone told me, for four or five days and nights. As we settled ourselves, Tom and I heard singing and lamentation coming from various areas of the crowd and some of the larger tents. When the first man in black rose up to speak, the singing ceased. The sky had grown completely dark, but for stars now, and the great cracking fires threw shadows and reflections upon the faces of the preachers and their auditors and upon the trees, lending an eerie cast to the proceedings.

His oration was vehement, incantatory, lifting at times to a kind of howl, falling at others into a low groan. His body jerked, as if he were a sort of unchecked automaton, and those gathered around responded to the nearly incomprehensible tumble of his rant with sobs, groans, and prayerful interjections: “Glory! Jesus-Jesus! Amen-Amen! Take us home, Jesus!” and the like, until I felt pain in my ears. Yet, above the din, the preacher's voice leapt like the flames.

“It is the glorious whispering of the everlasting covenant, the very bleating of the Lamb, the very welcome of the Shepherd and the essence of His love; it is the fullness of the glory of Jesus … Jesus being within us … it is the sitting ourselves down by God and it is the being called up into high places and eating and drinking and sleeping with the Lord … it is becoming a lion in the faith … and yet even kissing the hand that smites … yet scorning reproof… .”

His words were spoken with such torrential rapidity, as he stretched his arms out toward the people, his body erect, his throat and face turned upward to the night sky, that I could barely make out his message. But then, in the very heat of the ecstasies he had called forth, he grew strangely mild, soft, and then silent. And the crowd stilled about him, but for the occasional punctuation of an Amen. He changed his position, and bent slightly as if looking out through a door or window at some spectacle beyond, and then his voice began again, softly at first, as he enumerated the horrors and catastrophes he now envisioned for those unsaved. The last breath of a person's life; the slow decay of the corpse in vivid, minute detail; the dead one's terrific entry into the brimstone fires of hell where the very soul became newly enfleshed with bright quivering nerves and sinews, the better to suffer the exquisite agonies from molten metals, hot pincers, devil's teeth, and other organs of castigation.

Now his voice began to rise again like the flood tide as he described every torturous agony he had imagined over the years of his tenebrous contemplations. And with the rising and roaring of his voice the perspiration began to flow, pasting his hair to his forehead, endarkening his clothes yet more, as he cried out: “Do you want to go to Hell tonight, or will you rest with Jesus?”

Toward the end of his incredible exertions, as he seemed about to swoon in his own ecstasy, another preacher leapt up beside him and helped his brother to a seat.

Then the new preacher, amidst the wails, lamentations, and terrors of his gathered auditors, began to describe the way out of hell, a way open to all who would but turn. His voice seemed by comparison mellifluent, coaxing, even affectionate, as he called “Come! Come then!” out to the people. “Come and tell us if my dear brother hath reached your hearts, tell us so, testify the truth, sisters and brothers, and we will make you see Jesus, see Jesus,
see
Him who shall save you from the hideous pit. You must not be ashamed to come unto Him. But you must come. You must come. Come then! Come then now, come forward and we will show you Jesus and you shall demonstrate the powers of salvation unto others.”

Girls and women, who appeared to comprise much the greater portion of the actual celebrants, began to rise and call out, as the larger crowd began to sing hymns and “Amens” and “Come Jesus, dear gentle Jesus.”

Then did the ministers, perhaps a dozen of them, step down from the platform and come forth on the first evening of their saturnalia. They draped their arms about those who, still upright, had wandered forward down the aisles into the cleared pen of sawdust and straw, as if in mesmeric daze, to be welcomed gently, reasonably into the fold of Christian salvation.

Now did all the sisters and brothers sing hymns of encouragement to those who had come forward to be saved that night, there in the opening of the great forest, while moonbeams and firelight struck their upturned faces.

Those who came forward now, about a hundred and nearly all females, groaned and howled and dragged one another along to the center where the preachers moved about in their black habiliments. In postures of subjugation, the women moved forward on their knees, some crawling, some standing but falling at their arrival. As the whole gathered sisterhood began to pray, the bodies of those in the central pen began to jerk and convulse violently, limbs striking out and often brushing or hitting another, voices turning hysterical, sobbing, groaning, shrieking, screaming in a most appalling manner. Rapidly I sketched these wretches until I could no longer bear what I witnessed, such disquiet did I feel with the tumult of Bedlam voices and enthralled bodies. Yet we were pressed in on all sides so that Tom and I could not leave.

The preachers all the while moved about the writhing mass of women, many of them luminous and quite beautiful in their agonies and professions. “Sister, sister, dear sister,” the preachers were saying to them; or “There, there now”; or “You are with Jesus and the Holy Spirit and are released from your sins,” and such like consolations among the many others I could not hear that were breathed into the ears of the girls and women as if preachers were lovers murmuring seductively. Despite this appalling drama, I began to think again of Chas and to long for our simple intimacies.

For these “beloved” seemed to me wretched as they pressed into that open pen and vied with one another for ministerial attentions by the very howlings and contortions of their bodies. They fell, leapt, tore their hair and garments, cried out such pleas as “take me home Jesus,” et cetera, amidst a chorus of sharp Amens rising in the night air like the barks of dogs.

Then one of the preachers climbed up from the pen to stand again on the platform and rant for more than an hour in a voice like the peal and blast of the final trump. “We must not lose sight of the one important, great, and only object; for the Lord is mighty, his works are great, likewise wonderful, likewise wise, likewise merciful; and, moreover, we must ever keep in mind, and close to our hearts, all his precious blessings, and unspeakable mercies, and overflowing; and, moreover, we must never lose sight of, no, never lose sight of, nor ever cease to remember, nor ever let our souls forget, nor ever cease to dwell upon, and to reverence, and to welcome, and to bless, and to give thanks, and to sing hosanna, and to give praise… .”

On and on he went in such jargon that I lost all sense of his words and heard above the clamor only the searing blare of his instrument calling home the damned from the lip of Hell.

These revels continued deep into the night. I fell asleep on the ground at some point, only to be awakened near dawn by a hand on my brow and a solicitous voice asking whether I were quite well. A ministerial shadow knelt above me, as if in a dream; I pushed the hand away, mumbled that I was only sleeping and wished to be left alone. But after this shadow left me I could not return to sleep. At dawn, when many retired to their tents or campfires for breakfast, even while other preachers continued to lead groups in restful hymns, Tom and I found our horses and slipped away in the mist. We knew, even without saying it, that such an encampment was not a suitable haven, however temporary, that we would do better to take our chances on the road. I had a bag full of sketches that I hoped one day to turn to, but at the moment of our leaving, I felt only exhaustion.

F
ROM PITTSFIELD
, the next day, we gladly boarded the evening stage for Albany, via Lebanon Springs. Believing ourselves well hidden in Albany, this rather pleasant-looking seat with its Town Hall, Chamber of Representatives, and public buildings situated on a hill overlooking the mighty Hudson, Tom and I paused to consider from across the border our possibilities for travel and business. We could not agree on the best course to take from Albany, and I had begun to pine for Boston, for my friends and associates there. But while we were trying to determine our subsequent direction, we happened to discover that it was profitable to strike out on occasion among the villages and farms in this region of eastern New York.

I would mention but one adventure, another instance of succor and sisterhood that impressed me deeply during this time. Traveling on horseback south of Albany one hazy afternoon, Tom and I were between villages when the air grew exceptionally sultry and thunderclouds accumulated above us. Looking about for refuge and finding none, we pushed along through the road-dust in search of temporary shelter. Yet the rumble of thunder quickly became the boom and crack of a deluge impending above our heads.