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PatchWork
by Joyce Whitis |
Brush Arbor Meetings
Being raised in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, I find unbelievers hard to take seriously. One thing is for sure, they never sat on splintery benches at a brush arbor meeting. Even rebellious spirits such as theirs, would find it hard to
withstand the threat of hellfire and damnation which rained down on the heads of country folks at those meetings. Those preachers had voices that needed no p. a. systems, as their shouted words carried for a quarter of a mile across the wind-blown sandy land of Hardeman County. After every meeting there were multiple baptisms in the creek.
Brush for the roof of the temporary meeting place was hard to come by in west Texas but my dad, along with most of the other men, gathered up what they could find from salt cedars and mesquite trees to make a shade against the blistering afternoon sun. There were differences in belief but everybody, young and old walked up the dirt road, came in wagons or on horseback to hear the preacher and to visit with neighbors. Remembering those long summer evenings, it seems that the preacher went on for hours. With arms waving, he described the terrors of a burning hell so vividly that his audience felt the flames licking at their backs. Women in starched cotton dresses sat with their husbands in overalls and children sometimes barefoot, gathered on worn benches. Their eyes were fastened on the preacher's face, as he exhorted them to be faithful, and industrious and they fanned themselves furiously with pieces of cardboard as the fires of hell grew hotter. When the speaker got to the part where he pounded his Bible or his open palm with a fist, we children straightened our backs and stopped swinging our feet out of respect for the Word of God, and the wrath of a parent. In fact any nearby relative or any adult had the right to correct our behavior if it wasn't "Christian".
These meetings were absolutely fundamentalist in character and noises such as feet shuffling, a dropped songbook, or snickering, risked bringing down the correction of the preacher himself, who sometimes thundered reprimands from the pulpit. My parents never thumped my head for misbehaving, but I had a friend whose mother was well known for two reasons. She weighed over 200 pounds, by everybody's guess, and she was a notorious head thumper of her figity children in church meetings.
My mother always gave me "The Stare". It cut through any worshippers who might unfortunately sit between us, with no less sharpness than a double-edged sword. I could feel those black eyes boring holes in the back of my head from six rows back. Any desire I might have had to whisper a second time to a friend died in my throat when I felt "The Stare" on me. I was never allowed to sit behind my mother. But must sit either beside her, or up front where she could keep a eye on me.
Only once in my life do I remember Mama being sick and missing Sunday morning services. On that particular Sunday, an elderly preacher, long retired, was visiting and his name was called to lead us in prayer. Something about the old man's voice seemed funny to us teen agers, causing us to want to laugh out loud. The prayer was long and covered every facet of life for which to pray. Some of them were covered twice, it seemed to me and in the meantime I thought I couldn't stand it. Betty and I buried our faces in our laps, stuffed handkerchiefs in our mouths, tried to think sad thoughts, and all the while laughter was bubbling in our throats, choking us. As that prayer went on and on I began to feel real pain in trying to repress the giggles and tears rolled down my cheeks. Every muscle of my body was devoted to supressing the screams of mirth struggling to be released.
Just as I made up my mind to abandon all effort at holding the laughter in, just as I decided to stand up and laugh out loud before being banished forever from my home, the voice stopped and we stood for the closing song. Never did I sing with such a joyful heart as when I was at last free to open my mouth.
During one of those summer meetings, I stopped reading the advertisements on the back of the paper fan and began to listen hard to the words of the preacher. Gradually the message seemed to be just for me until after one such service, I found myself standing in front of the congregation as the invitation song was sung. When the preacher took my hand, I felt the fires of hell subside, but the battle to keep them banked has never ended.