Aaron talked of love, but his God was a fearful force that measured and punished, and manifested himself more often in lightning and thunder than in the shasta daisies that swayed easily among the rye grass outside the church. Ray and Jay stood under a window, where they could hear their father as clearly as if they were inside. The sun brightened their faces and felt especially warm on the scar that creased Jay’s chin.
The First Presbyterian was their home church, but they didn’t go there often because the Reverend Aaron only preached there when the regular minister was out of town. Usually, Aaron preached where there were no walls, in a farmer’s yard or along the banks of the Saline River, where the “sacred waters flow, and the Spirit of the Lord receives all those who accept Him as their personal Lord and Savior.” He had been raised a Quaker by his immigrant parents in West Virginia, but after service in the Civil War, he migrated to Kansas and adopted the church known as Church of the Brethren. Aaron had grown into the ministry, working on various farms, attending church regularly, and eventually being coaxed into giving sermons or Bible readings when his family hosted a church service. He had watched Stonewall Jackson ride through the ranks of his troops, beaten, tired, and torn by the ravages of defeat and hunger. But the general’s head was always high and proud. That’s the way Aaron preached. And soon he was in great demand throughout the county.
Like many Church of the Brethren ministers, the Reverend Aaron was a dunkard. He baptized new members into the church by “dunking” them in the Saline River, a quite literal translation from the Bible’s rite of baptism. Aaron’s baptismal services were widely attended, often by non-parishioners who just came to see the spectacle.
In the image of Saint Peter himself, Aaron would walk from his carriage at the appointed time, fling his black overcoat to a nearby member of his family, and stride into the Saline River in a white robe, his arms outstretched, palms upward, preaching as he went. People crowded down to the water’s edge. As Aaron reached the middle of the stream, he would turn and shout out his greeting: “Gather all ye sinners, for we are here to praise the Lord.” And so the sermon would begin, winding its way through the Bible, into the wheat fields of Lincoln County, through the hearts and heathen souls of all those gathered, and leading to but one conclusion: the need for redemption through baptism.
After about an hour, Aaron would announce that on this Sunday, the children of at least one family in the community had reached the age of thirteen and had accepted Jesus Christ as their personal Savior. The children, usually two or three in number, would be led to the center of the river where the water was about three feet deep, shallow enough that Aaron could always keep his balance and his composure, but the children were gurgling in waves up to their chins and scared to death that drowning might be their first taste of eternal damnation.
Ray and Jay had only witnessed one disastrous baptism. Old John Finger was a brute of a farmer who was dying of internal forces widely believed to be whiskey-related. Old John saw his last days as a fearful reckoning and went about the county paying off debts and apologizing to a neighbor whose dog he had killed years before for eating chicken eggs. When he stopped the Reverend Aaron in his corn field and asked if he could be baptized, the Reverend was delighted, seizing this opportunity to capture a soul long considered lost to the saving arms of Christ. Aaron arranged for a baptismal ceremony that very Sunday and waded into the muddy waters of the Saline fully expecting to emerge with another dweller in the house of the Lord. But when Aaron put his right hand behind Farmer Finger’s back, and his left hand, with a towel, over Mr. Finger’s nose, and began to lower him into the saving waters of the Saline, he failed to account for Mr. Finger’s sizable posterior, which shifted the combined weight of their bodily twosome much lower than expected. As Aaron shouted, “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, I baptize thee, John, . . .” Old John Finger, so overwhelmed by all this transformation in his life, decided to actually give himself to the Lord, so he simply dropped his behind, let his legs float free, and began blissfully slipping into the loving arms of God, if not the supporting arms of Reverend Aaron. Aaron shouted, “God,” in a not entirely godly way. His front foot, which was braced for the lowering, slowly slid along the bottom of the Saline, and Aaron was suddenly on top of old John Finger in four feet of water. Old John soon realized that some snag had occurred in the process and began kicking wildly, just as three members of the congregation, including Ray and Jay, rushed into the water to help right the fallen angels.
Aaron, ever the trooper and always protective of the dignity of the Lord, struggled to his feet, pulled down his muddied robes, and prepared to perform the dunking again, presumably following the rule that a baptismal opportunity should never be allowed to slip away. But Old John Finger was coughing, and sputtering, and scrambling directly for the bank. He reached the shore, stomped to his team of horses, climbed up on the buckboard, and headed for home. The Reverend Aaron, not wanting to shortchange either John Finger or the Lord, proclaimed that the baptism would be repeated next Sunday. Unfortunately, John Finger died that week. The Reverend Aaron preached wildly at his funeral of the great and benevolent life of this humble man, repeating several times that the baptismal performed the previous week, in spite of its somewhat abrupt execution, was nevertheless valid and that Mr. John Finger could expect all the heavenly rewards to which he was entitled.
Being a preacher in those years before World War I was not a particularly profitable pastime. The First Presbyterian minister, for example, was actually a circuit minister from Ellsworth who went from church to church according to a monthly schedule. He depended on the “love offerings” of the morning congregation for his cash rewards and the benevolence of individual parishioners for food and clothing. Farm families accepted many general obligations of life, among them the care and feeding of their minister. Every week at least one family was designated by the church to prepare a dinner for the minister. Most ministers ate pretty well, if not to their own taste. But their lives belonged to their flock, which set all the rules. The first rule was: A preacher could not live better than the poorest of his congregation. If a home was provided for the minister, it was usually a humble house, positioned close to the church, and seen by the community as theirs, not the minister’s. It was a life beholden to the community, at a time when any luxury was an extravagance not to be tolerated by a minister of God.
The Reverend Aaron Langston avoided this servitude, and gave himself and his family a high degree of independence, by also being a farmer. He owned land just a few miles outside Nickerly, and raised his two sons and four daughters as farmers, as God-fearing members of the community, and as righteous observants of the societal restrictions of the church, not necessarily in that order. This combination of evangelism and farming resulted in a rather exalted position for the Reverend Aaron because he had his own source of income, and therefore in the minds of many, a special stature with the Lord. It was also true that baptisms and weddings—the two great acts in Aaron’s repertoire—were genuine crowd pleasers. So the Langstons were a part of everybody’s celebration, and they were well liked, in spite of the fact that Jay had once burned a neighbor’s barn and was generally thought to be touched by the devil.
In addition, Aaron’s wife, Ivy, was revered as the embodiment of her faith. She was a plain and sober woman, with a moon face that carried the farm wife’s insignia—red cheeks and a sunburned chin underneath a bright white forehead protected by a bonnet. Always a bonnet. Black for church, calico with light blue flowers for working in the garden or the fields. Ivy’s hair was pulled back, twisted in a tight bob, and knotted in place with a small black ribbon and a stick pin. Her shoes were plain with eight eyes for laces, one black pair for Sunday, and one brown pair for working in the fields. Both pairs had served long and well in the limited vineyards of her life.
Ivy Langston didn’t smile much because she did not recognize or appreciate the ironies of life. When she did chance upon a humorous comment, she usually mistook it for derision or irreverence, two qualities she had worked hard to eliminate from her life. Her four daughters made