Nancy stood staring at her, with words beyond saying
in her heart—words that rose in her throat
and choked her
“You believe, maybe, that you would be struck
dead if you said the things that I do; but why ain’t
I struck dead?”
“It’s my cloth! I spun it,
I wove it, every thread! It’s all we’ve
got for our clothes this winter!”
“Now you can see how it feels to have
your own husband slap you”
She had begun to wash his wound, very gently, though
she spoke so roughly, while he murmured with the pain
and with the comfort of the pain
They swarmed forward to the altar-place and flung
themselves on the ground, and heaped the pulpit-steps
with their bodies
“And he went down ag’in, and when he come
up ag’in, his face was all soakin’ wet,
like he’d been crying under the water”
Already, in the third decade of the nineteenth century,
the settlers in the valley of Leatherwood Creek had
opened the primeval forest to their fields of corn
and tobacco on the fertile slopes and rich bottom-lands.
The stream had its name from the bush growing on its
banks, which with its tough and pliable bark served
many uses of leather among the pioneers; they made
parts of their harness with it, and the thongs which
lifted their door-latches, or tied their shoes, or
held their working clothes together. The name
passed to the settlement, and then it passed to the
man, who came and went there in mystery and obloquy,
and remained lastingly famed in the annals of the
region as the Leatherwood God.
At the time he appeared the community had become a
center of influence, spiritual as well as material,
after a manner unknown to later conditions. It
was still housed, for the most part, in the log cabins
which the farmers built when they ceased to be pioneers,
but in the older clearings, and along the creek a
good many frame dwellings stood, and even some of
brick. The population, woven of the varied strains
from the North, East and South which have mixed to
form the Mid-Western people, enjoyed an ease of circumstance
not so great as to tempt their thoughts from the other
world and fix them on this. In their remoteness
from the political centers of the young republic,
they seldom spoke of the civic questions stirring
the towns of the East; the commercial and industrial
problems which vex modern society were unknown to
them. Religion was their chief interest and the
seriousness which they had inherited from their Presbyterian,
Methodist, Lutheran, and Moravian ancestry was expressed
in their orderly and diligent lives; but the general
prosperity had so far relaxed the stringency of their
several creeds that their distinctive public rite had
come to express a mutual toleration. The different
sects had their different services; their ceremonies
of public baptism, their revivals, their camp-meetings;
but they gathered as one Christian people under the
roof of the log-built edifice, thrice the size of their
largest dwelling, which they called the Temple.
