to the east, Thaddeus could see a crew of workmen excavating a small hill. They shovelled piles of earth into wagons that lumbered their loads over to the sides of the roadbed to reinforce the abutments. Half the hill had been hauled away, and the men were still digging. Thaddeus wondered if he and Small should try to pick their way through the excavation, but just then a wagon finally got itself turned around and out of the way, and one of the workers waved at Thaddeus to ride through the small gap that opened as a consequence. He was relieved. If they made good time from here, they could still arrive at their destination with a few minutes to spare.
By the time Thaddeus and James Small finally arrived at the farmer’s field, the entrance laneway was jammed with carts, horses, and pedestrians, a circumstance that boded well for the success of the meeting. There were some within the church who maintained that camp meetings were a thing of the past, that the day of the circuit-riding preacher was over, and that people were settling into a pattern of staying put and looking to their own neighbourhoods for their spiritual sustenance, but the presence of so many people so early on the first day seemed to belie these naysayers. In Thaddeus’s experience, camp meetings started slowly and gained momentum as they went on, finally reaching a crescendo on the third day.
And when he mounted the speaking platform later that afternoon, he could see knots of tents and campfires around the entire periphery of the field. Whole families had come and appeared prepared to camp out for the duration.
The response to his message was enthusiastic, a sign that the excitement would continue to build until it reached a frenzy of confession and conversion. At the end of his sermon, Thaddeus turned the meeting over to Elias Knight, who would exhort the crowd to come forward until he judged the time was ripe to lead them into a hymn.
Thaddeus’s duties for that afternoon were over. He would return to speak twice on the second day, and once more on the third, but in the meantime he was free to circulate through the campground and meet with people individually. Besides, he was hungry, and hoped that somewhere he might find a familiar face and a bowl of soup.
There was the usual mob of peddlers and vendors set up amongst the wagons. Some of them cooked food in quantity over open campfires and served it up to those disinclined to cook for themselves. Others sold trinkets and patent medicines, and, as was usual at camp meetings, prayer books and small Bibles. The scene always reminded Thaddeus of the moneychangers in the temple, and he wondered if the church shouldn’t clear these out just like Jesus had; but then he reflected that the crowd had to be fed somehow. There were always a number who needed to be physicked, he supposed, and if a sinner were brought to the Lord during the preaching, who was Thaddeus to say that they shouldn’t follow it up with the purchase of a Bible, just to help make it stick?
He walked slowly through the crowd, trying to make a rough count of the number of people in attendance. He first noticed the woman because of her dress. It was a cotton print with a blue background and a scattering of tiny pink and yellow flowers. Long ago he had been paid for a christening with a bolt of cloth that had much the same kind of pattern. At the time, he knew he should have taken it to a store and traded it for something useful like sugar or tea, but something had stopped him. He carried it home to his wife, Betsy, instead, and was rewarded when her eyes lit up. She had fashioned it into a dress for herself, and looked as pretty as a flower in it. Odd that he should remember such a detail after so many years.
Or maybe it was the slight limp that triggered the memory. Betsy had limped a little whenever a storm was coming, a relic of the dreadful bouts of fever she’d suffered. But except for the dress and the small hitch in her gait, the woman walking through the camp meeting was as unlike Betsy as it was possible to imagine. She was very fair, a knot of golden hair showing under her bonnet, and quite small, or at least she seemed so because she was so slight. She was arm in arm with a gentleman who had impressive mutton-chop whiskers and wore a silk hat. They seemed an odd couple to be at a Methodist camp meeting. Their clothes were just a little too fine-looking, their manner just a little grand. They stopped at one of the peddler’s wagons and spoke to a man who was hawking patent medicines. Whatever they said appeared to find favour, as some sort of transaction took place while Thaddeus looked on.
A knot of men standing in front of one of the campfires to Thaddeus’s right appeared to be deep in conversation, but he noticed one of them glance up at the couple, a sour expression on his face. Thaddeus edged a little closer, hoping someone in the group might mention something about the pair, but at first their talk seemed to be all about the railway.
“They’ve started work on the bridge already,” one man said. “They’ve brought in a pile driver. It’s something to see, I’ll tell you. I wasted the whole day yesterday watching them raise a post.”
The railway was to run all the way across Rice Lake to Peterborough so that timber and other products from the north could be hauled directly to Cobourg harbour. Thaddeus had his doubts about the project. No one had ever before built a trestle bridge that long. And if frost heave was a problem for a plank road, what would the ice do to the wooden poles that supported the bridge? He didn’t want to be caught eavesdropping, however, so he refrained from offering his opinion.
He was about to walk away when he heard one of the men say, “Jack Plews is pretty sour that he lost his land just when it turned out to be so valuable.”
Thaddeus knew that this wasn’t really any of his business, except that he tried to stay alert to potential sources of contention within his congregation. Generally speaking, neighbourhood issues tended to be petty little disputes that nevertheless could boil up into rancour, poisoning entire meetings and destroying the work that the church had accomplished. He needed to be ready at all times to calm the waters and suggest compromise. He took a step closer, hoping to hear more details of this land sale that was exciting comment.
“I thought he was behind on the mortgage?”
“He was. He thought it was a good deal when the Major offered to buy him out.” The speaker gestured toward the man in the silk hat. “And then it turns out that’s where they want to put the train station. If Jack had just held out a few more months, he could’ve got top dollar.”
“The Major is pretty thick with Boulton, isn’t he? He must have heard where the station was going to go and that’s why he bought it.”
The first man shrugged. “I don’t know what anybody can do about it. Jack sold it fair and square, didn’t he?”
“Yeah, he did. But it still doesn’t seem right somehow.”
“I expect when the dust settles, you’ll find that a lot of people have made good coin selling land to the railroad. And none of them will be the ordinary farmers like Jack.”
The men were slowly moving off in the direction of the platform as they talked. Thaddeus could scarcely follow them without it being obvious that he was listening, so he let them go on and walked toward the gate instead.
“Mr. Lewis!” He was hailed by a friendly-looking man who had set up a camp just inside the entrance to the grounds. As Thaddeus walked over to it he caught the aroma of cooking and noticed that steam was wafting up from the iron pot hanging from a makeshift tripod.
The man held out his hand. “Leland Gordon,” he said, “and this is my mother, Patience Gordon. We haven’t met you yet, but I’m the lay preacher at the Sully meeting. We’ll be seeing you there in a few days, I expect.”
The mother, Patience, was ancient, her back so bent that she could scarcely lift her head to greet him, but her face broke into a wreath of smiling wrinkles. “I hoped we would get a chance to hear you speak today,” she said, “to try you out a bit before we heard you at our own place.”
“And
