Mary Queen of Bees. Diane Glancy
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until the flames would have roasted her. And she fled.
Some of us were sent to live with an uncle while the rectory was rebuilt.
When we were together again, my father took up his work on Job. My mother took up our lessons.
1705—Now our father in debtor’s prison. How could we be in debt? We had bought nothing. I never will marry a clergyman. Probably I never will marry.
My mother is overwhelmed with work. When she gives birth, she sends the infant to a neighbor to care for. In the night, the woman rolls over and smothers it. I hear the woman weeping as she comes to my mother with the dead infant in her arms.
My father was a Tory. All Wesley’s were conservatives from birth. We had no choice. We were against democratization and reform. My father’s politics did not go well. They irritated his parishioners who were illiterate. They were mainly Whigs. They opposed the succession of James, the Duke of York. The congregation also resented my father’s prayers for James.
At one point, neighbors burned our flax fields. Later, when my father continued to irritate them, they stabbed our milk cows and called us devils.
The poor pitiful beasts. What had they done?
My Letters to Paradise—
I write to You from this world where poor dumb animals are stabbed. I am haunted by the noise they made. My mother would have told them to be quiet. But I heard their helpless cries. Their misunderstanding of what was happening. The pain of the knife stabbing their thick bodies. How long it took for them to die. I am sure You are out in the universe holding the formations of the stars. Keeping them in order. But meanwhile on Your earth, there are happenings that need Your attention.
I never did want bread. But then I had so much care to get it before it was eat, and to pay for it after, as has often made it very unpleasant to me, and I think to have bread on such terms is the next degree of wretchedness to having none at all.
—From the Writings of Susanna Wesley
A Letter from the Wesley Cows in the Field—
It was us who died for them.
My Letters to Paradise—
I am sorry, O Lord, I grieve more for cows than my mother’s infants.
In church there was a girl, the only child of her parents. I often saw her walk into the church between them. She sat between her parents also. I looked at her sometimes, unless we sat in the front row, where my father sometimes put us. If I was behind her, I watched her. Once, she turned and looked at me. I didn’t look away. I still was wondering what it was like to be the only child in a house.
Once, in despair, thinking the Lord too was an only child—how could he know how I felt in the crowded house where I had to live? But in the night, my arms held tightly to my chest to make room for my sisters, the Lord said to me, you are an only child with me.
1709—The Fire Number Two
We fled the rectory again in the night. Clattering down the stairs. John cried from an upstairs window in the rectory, Help me! Our father, Samuel tried to climb the burning stairs, but could not. He gathered some of us in the garden to pray for our brother’s soul, but neighbors made a ladder of hands and shoulders, climbed up and brought him down.
The Dispersement of Children after the Fire.
Once again, we lost nearly everything except the nightclothes we wore. I was thirteen years old. Our mother walked through the flames, this time singeing her hair that stood up in jagged wisps from her head. Afterwards, Uncle Matthew Wesley, my father’s brother, a doctor in London, took Sukey and Hetty when we had no place to live. Emily stayed with our mother in the nearby house of a neighbor. I was sent to the neighbor who had smothered my infant brother. Did my mother want her to smother me?
The fire was a blessing. Afterwards, we were scattered to families and friends and talked to servants and ran and played with children.
The woman did not want to smother me after all. She let me sit warmly by the fire. She gave me an old umbrella I patched. I stood in the rain at the backdoor and listened to the clumping of the drops.
Someone showed me a picture of a rolling chair, Spain, 1595. I dreamed I had a little chair with wheels and could spin here and there. But how would it get up the stairs to the girls’ room where I slept, and sat sometimes during the day?
When the house was rebuilt after the fire, the custom of singing psalms morning and evening resumed. My mother also read a psalm for the day, and chapters in the New Testament and the Old Testament, after which we said our private prayers.
The harsh discipline returned in the rectory once again. I welcomed it. I sanctioned it. I longed for it. I hated it.
Not one child after a year old was heard to cry aloud.
—From the Writings of Susanna Wesley
Mother’s lesson.
Ahaz was a wicked king. He made his sons pass through the fire—II Kings 16:3. What did that mean? We asked our mother. Was it like our own father who prayed for John after being unable to rescue him? Did it mean we all passed through the fire when our house burned? Some questions our mother did not answer. She allowed us only to ask questions she thought we should ask. Otherwise she ignored what we said.
Did it mean we passed through fire when hungry? When sick? When crippled? When crowded with other sisters in the same bed? When burning inside with longing? When burning with more than one longing? Or with a longing that branched like a tree with leaves falling when we lay in bed at night and smelled the stench the fire left in the parsonage? But with it also, the smell of new thatch.
Ahaz saw the holy furniture of the tabernacle, my mother said—the laver, lampstand, table of bread, and other pieces. He had his priest, Urijah, made similar furniture. Only Ahaz rearranged the pieces. He made offerings to God in the wrong places. He cut off borders, and took the laver from the oxen that were under it, and put it on the pavement of stones—II Kings 16:17.
There was not a multiplicity of worlds in the Lord. He was single in heart. This is what our mother said. We were wrong to want our own way. It always would be wrong. It was humanity’s way.
Outside, the birds were screeching. It meant the cat was in the tree, or a bird not of their kind was encroaching. Maybe it was my own evil thoughts that would pervert the words of the Lord like Ahaz.
This was the pain. If I could, I would dismantle what belonged to the Lord like Ahaz, and use it in my own way. I would be like my father. He didn’t have a head for cattle. He didn’t know the fields. He was overwhelmed by the children Susanna gave him. He couldn’t handle the numbers of us. He didn’t know how to handle our lives. He had dreams that scoured him. The neighbors were against him. His own congregation. His wife. His children. The world, it seemed, where he could not fit. Or the world was more than he could dwell in. He always thought beyond it. He dreamed of other places. He couldn’t pay his bills. He had his books he bought. Nothing we could eat. Nothing we could wear. Impractical. Impractical.
In my despondence I read Psalm 22—My God why have You forsaken me? Why are You so far from helping me? O God, I cry by day, and You do not answer, and by night but find no rest.
Blessed fire. Return. Scatter us to other houses where we might play.
There is something holy about fire. It had its wicked side when it burned houses, but even when it did, there was something holy about it.
After the fire, our father bought travel books and talked of missionary work in China or the East Indies. He worked with his scorched manuscripts on Job. Every page more complicated than the last. He seemed bogged down in possibilities and interpretations. He could not let it go.
Meanwhile we could not go out in society in the shabby clothes we wore. No one would know we studied scripture on our own.
Epworth. Dear Epworth. The ground full of graves of the Wesley infants. Is there any way out of Epworth other than death?
My