“I ain’t never been there. Was down along the Natchez Road, clear to the Muscle Shoals—but never got that far east.”
“A purty country, so my pappy said. He come to America back in eighty-nine. He always told folks he got here when this here country got its first president. I be full-blooded Scot, you know. A Scot I am—and most proud of that. Though I was borned this side of the east ocean, I’m a Scotsman like my pappy’s people.”
“My grandpap was a Scot his own self,” Bass announced. “You come west to the mountains from Carolina country?”
“By the heavens no,” McAfferty snorted. “I was on the Mississap when it come time to point my nose for these shining hills. Wasn’t too old when my family up and moved west from the Carolinas, clear across the Mississap to the Cape, south there from St. Louie.”
“I know of the Cape,” Scratch replied. “So you was the firstborn to your mam and pap?”
“My folks had three boys awready to bring along with ’em when they come to America. The family come in from the coastal waters, on to the deep forests where my pappy started off trading with the wild Injuns for their skins. He brung to the villages blankets and axes and mirrors and paint, goods like coffee and sugar too. It was a hard life, but a good one for my folks. After them three boys, they had ’em three girls. Then I come along there at the last.”
“If you was a young’un when you come to the Cape, it must’ve been a wild place back then.”
“Not many a white man had come across the Mississap to settle. Oh, there was folks up around St. Louie, but only a few French farmers down at the Cape. Good, rich ground that was too.”
With no school within hundreds of miles, McAfferty had come to learn his reading and writing as most did on the frontier, if they were fortunate: studying at his mother’s knee, copying words every night, following supper, from their old Scottish Bible, by the light of the limestone fireplace.
“By summer of 1810 more and more folks was coming in, so my pappy itched to move us on to a crik near the Little White River—a place more’n a week’s ride on west of St. Louie.”
“That was the fall I left home,” Bass admitted, watching his words drift away in hoarfrost. “Run off and ain’t ever been back.”
“You was sixteen then—a time when a boy figgers he’s just about done with all his growing,” Asa confided. “Likely you figgered you was man enough to set your own foot down in the world.”
Scratch turned to his partner. “You ’member the day the ground shook so terrible the rivers rolled back on themselves?”
“I do,” McAfferty said. “I was turned seventeen that fall. By the prophets, I do remember the day the earth shook under my feet. ’O Lord, be not far from me!’”
“I was working on the Ohio—a place called Owensboro. Where was you?”
“On the Little White,” Asa replied. “That first day the shaking started early off to the morning, afore the sun even thought to come up. I woke up, me pappy yelling at me, ’Asa! Asa! Get up, boy! Fetch the dogs! They under the floor after a coon, boy! Fetch them dogs out!’”
Titus inquired, “Them dogs of your’n was chasing a coon under the house that very morning the earth was shaking?”
“No—my pappy thought the rumbling and the roaring under the floor come from the dogs chasing a coon critter under our cabin. We all come right out of our beds—hearing the dogs outside the window, in the yard—all of ’em howling and yowling. Wasn’t a one of ’em under the floor!”
“You all knowed right then it weren’t the dogs?”
“Pappy hit the floor with his knees, and my mama was right beside him—and they both started praying like I ain’t ever heard ’em pray afore or since. Their eyes so big—saying they was sure the day of judgment was at hand.”
“I was up the Ohio a ways that cold day,” Titus explained. “Remember my own self how the ground rolled and shook so hard, the river come back on itself.”
“We was all on our knees—praying our hardest together,” McAfferty continued his story. “Soon as my mama went to singing ’Shall We Gather at the River,’ the might of the Holy Spirit come right over me, commanding my tongue to speak words right from the Bible: ’Thou are my hiding place; thou shalt preserve me from trouble; thou shalt compass me about with songs of deliverance.’”
“You knowed those words by heart back then?”
“I never paid me much attention to the lessons my mama gave me from the Bible,” Asa admitted. “But there I was—watching my pappy pray like he never done afore, the trees outside our window swaying this way and that, big limbs snapping off like they was fire kindling, my sisters caterwauling like painter cubs … when my mama up and tells us all she see’d it all real plain, see’d it as a sure sign that I was to preach God’s word to his wayward flocks.”
Scratch nodded, enthralled with the story. “You knowed back then you was made for speaking them Bible words.”
McAfferty snorted and rubbed the raw end of his cold nose. “No, Mr. Bass. I was a idjit nigger back in them days. This child just laughed at the notion of me taking up the Lord’s work. ’Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful.’”
“You didn’t turn to preaching then and there with that ground shaking under you?”
With a wag of his head Asa declared, “No, not till later on that year when we had us a great shooting star come burning ’cross the sky. The ground shook under my feet. But that star was something made me look right up at heaven. Something made me behold the power of the Lord. ’The God of glory thundereth.’ Maybeso the ground shook for there is the dominion of the devil hisself … but to have me a sign from above, from the realm of God!”
“That’s when you knowed you had a calling then and there?”
“That shooting star come back night after night,” he explained. “Made it plain I had the Lord’s calling.”
For the next few years Asa studied the family’s Bible, investing nearly every waking hour not spent in the McAfferty fields in reading, prayer, and long walks in the woods as he talked to his Maker.
“Wasn’t until eighteen and sixteen when I felt the burning in my heart that set me on the path to tell others of the word of our redeemer.”
It wasn’t long after that the young circuit rider took a proper wife. For more than a year his heart had been the captive of Rebekka Suell’s beauty. Finally, as the eldest in the family of nine children he visited once a month on his lonely circuit, sixteen-year-old Rebekka’s pa agreed to Asa’s marriage proposal.
McAfferty dolefully wagged his head now as darkness came down on the valley. “I can see how it weren’t no life for a woman—that riding the circuit from gathering house to gathering house. What few days a month we was home, she tried her best to keep up a li’l garden, and I done my best to bring game to our pot … but we never had much more’n my trail of the Lord’s calling and that tiny piece of ground where I scratched us a dugout from the side of a hill.”
By 1819 two interlopers came in and filed for ownership on the land where Asa had neglected to make his claim formally. Amid rumors that they accepted “donations” from rich landowners, the slick-haired government folks issued a demand that threw Asa off his place.
“‘Behold, these are the ungodly, who prosper in the world; they increase in riches.’ Losing what little we had took the circle for Rebekka,” Asa declared with bitterness. “With her gone, I put what little I had in my saddle pockets and set to drifting.”
Asa preached where he could, wheedling a meal here and there, sleeping out in the woods or slipping into some settler’s shed when the weather turned wet or cold. Those next two years were a time of sadness, loneliness, despair. Still—he had his Bible, and his faith that the Lord was testing him for something far, far bigger.