Gathering the Water Read Online Free PDF Page A

district, and I knew that the old man himself could never have met him except possibly as a very small child.
    â€˜You attended here?’ I said.
    â€˜John Wesley himself,’ he said. ‘Come all the way downfrom Hawes on horseback through a storm.’
    And if it hadn’t been Wesley then history would have fractured again and it would have been George Fox or Father Grimshaw, building chapels with their bare hands and spending a month on the conversion of a single soul.
    I had tried the chapel door and found it locked. Arrangements were already under way to exhume and remove the few dozen bodies the small burial ground still held. The place had never been licensed for baptisms or marriages.
    Wesleyans, Methodists, Independent Methodists, Quaker Methodists, Methodist Unitarians, Primitives, New Connectioners. Even Magic Methodists. It would not surprise me to have to add the odd tribe of Jumpers or Tenters to the list.
    â€˜Man is a poor, blind, fallen, wretched, miserable, helpless sinner without grace,’ he said. And if this applied to him, too, then he seemed proud to be in possession of any or all of those attributes. Or perhaps we had all already sinned away our Day of Grace without being in the slightest degree aware of it.
    â€˜Do you have relatives buried here?’ I asked him.
    The question surprised him and he considered it without answering me. ‘All truth is in the Bible,’ he said. ‘I never knew a man, woman or child to find truth outside of it.’
    Most of the graves were undistinguished, many unmarked by even the simplest stone. The few small memorials still standing bore only the necessary details of names and dates and those left behind to mourn, and most of these had been long since tilted and planed by the wind.
    â€˜You know what they say,’ he said.
    It did not matter whether or not I knew what they said.
    He went on: ‘Wesleyanism is the religion for the poor.’
    And Primitive Wesleyanism the religion of the poor.
    â€˜And?’ I prompted him.
    â€˜And Primitive Wesleyanism the religion of the poor.’ This revelation pleased him and he waited for my response to his cleverness, which is certainly what he considered it to be.
    A solitary thorn grew alongside the building; no mourning yew here.
    â€˜There was never an Israelite in this valley,’ he said, causing me to wonder if our ‘conversation’ had not taken some other course without my realizing it.
    â€˜And now never shall be,’ I said.
    â€˜That’s right.’
    â€˜So you see another benefit of the water.’
    My irony was lost on him and he turned away from me to look out over the valley bottom. I had heard it said in Halifax that one unexpected benefit of the flooding was that it would eradicate for ever poverty in the valley.
    â€˜My father said that the number of conversions at any meeting or revival could be predicted here by counting the number of fish gathered in that pool.’ He pointed to where the pool no longer stood, already lost beneath the flooded skim of meadow. But he still saw it. ‘Five fishes, five men converted.’
    After that we stood in silence for several minutes.
    Then he said, ‘And when will the dead arise?’
    â€˜On Judgement Day, surely.’
    â€˜I mean our dead.’ He indicated the burial ground.
    â€˜The diggers are contracted before the end of the year.’ It was as much as I knew. It was part of my work to visit each of the families concerned. Thus far I had found onlysix among the living who still cared for the treatment of the dead. It would have been considerably easier and cheaper merely to remove the remaining headstones and to leave the graves undisturbed. There was a new burial ground, seven miles distant, still more field than cemetery, to which all the dead of the valley were to be removed. Any compensation for whatever loss this removal entailed was absorbed in the cost of digging,