Ma's Literary Corner

This excerpt is taken from "Nothing to Do But Stay: My Pioneer Mother," by Carrie Young, (University of Iowa Press: Iowa City, 1991) a recount of the life of a prairie woman of North Dakota in the early 1900's. (I said "woman" instead of "wife," since she homesteaded on her own for a while, acquiring land and being independent before marrying and raising a family in the more traditional sense)

And it might be appropriate for a Sunday, seeing how it concerns hospitality for the preacher...

Feeding the minister was one of the preoccupations of pioneer women. It was not as simple as it sounds. It was, in fact, a delicate procedure requiring diplomacy and exquisite timing. My mother and the other homesteaders' wives in the congregation spent a lot of time at it.....

....Because there were only a dozen families in the community, the congregation couldn't afford its own exclusive pastor, it was necessary to share him with three other rural congregations in contiguous townships.....Each of his parishes was at least ten miles apart. If he drove like a madman he could get in four sermons every Sunday. After his first service at ten A.M., a family in the congregation would invite him out to the farm for a noon dinner. He would have very little time to dally over his meal because he had another ten-mile drive to reach his next parish by one o'clock. After this service was completed, he had time only to shake a few hands as he walked down the aisle before he must leap into his automobile to careen across the prairies ten or fifteen miles to his third parish for the four P.M. service. A farm family here would invite him home for supper, and after that--logged with food and no time to digest it--he would drive to his last service at eight in the evening.

The services were staggered; we went to church at a different time every Sunday....

The first order of business at the Ladies Aid, which met once a month at the farm home of one of the members, was to work out the schedule for the following month. The president of the Aid would get out her work sheet:

"It says here we will be having the ten o'clock service on the fifteenth. Now who will take the preacher?"

Much buzzing back and forth. Taking the preacher is not a decision to be made without forethought.

"I could take him but I got relatives coming."

"I could take him if my boys get over the chicken pox. Do you think the reverend has had the pox?"

You better wait your turn until next month, Helga."

Gunilla finally decides she can take him. Then they go through it all over again for the four o'clock service. "Now who can take the preacher on the twenty-ninth?"

The matron who had elected to feed him on any particular Sunday had to stay home that day to cook, because there was no letting the minister cool his heels in the parlor; even a half hour's wait could ruin his day's schedule. So it was up to the husband to go to church and invite the pastor home for dinner. On occasion, when the husband wasn't quick enough about stepping out into the aisle to intercept him, another husband (whose wife had been absent from the Aid the previous month and had taken it into her head all on her own to take the preacher) would invite him. The first husband's life wasn't worth much when he came home that day, nor were negotiations peaceful at the next meeting of the Ladies Aid.

For the minister, of course, every matron threw out all of her cooking stops. By the time she had a Sunday meal on the table for him, this was as fancy as she was going to get. She had broken out her finest linen tablecloth and napkins, starched within an inch of their lives, and the table was laden from end to end with all the delicacies her garden, her pantry, and her considerable expertise could produce. It held her best preserves, mashed potatoes and gravy, two kinds of meat (always two kinds of meat), vegetables, homemade bread, not to mention a pie cooling in the kitchen. But when the time actually came when she would usher the minister in from the parlor and ask him to sit up to the table, she would pull out his chair, wring her hands, and say apologetically, "Now you will just have to try and make a meal out of this, Reverend!"

For several decades this same sentence was accepted silently by every minister who served the territory--and there were many of them because their average tenure was from three to five years. But one year a new minister came--a stern fire-and-brimstone man who was a veteran of many a missionary outpost and who brooked no nonsense; he was as bristly as the red mustache on his upper lip. And even he endured the sentence for many months of Sundays.

And then he must have preached a fiery sermon on hypocrisy, invoking both Old Testament and the New, pounding his fist on the pulpit, pointing a stern finger to heaven and then to hell, and shouting with such rage that the rafters shook. Then his voce dropped to a whisper, "And what about the good ladies of my parish? Their tables groan from the weight of enough food to feed a multitude, and they say, 'Now you must try to make a meal of this, Reverend!' "

For reasons that were never made clear in the minutes of the church council meeting, this particular pastor didn't last even the obligatory three years. He soon moved on to another territory--where perhaps the cooks were spartan and without guile.

(pgs 43-46)

The author's wit comes through, though not necessarily in an even manner throughout. But at just 116 pages, it's a quick read that gives an accurate glimpse of hardworking Norwegian settlers.
 

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