Neighborhood Stories

“That’s it,” I says, “that’s it! We’ve been whirling round and round, manufacturing the days and the nights, and we never knew we had an orbit too.”

So they come, till they begun to pass where we were – some heads up, some eyes down, women, women, marching to a tune that was being beat out by thousands of hearts all over the world. I’d never seen women like this before. I saw them like I’d never seen them – I felt I was one of ’em like I’d never known that either. And I saw what they saw and I felt what they felt more than I ever knew I done.

Then I heard Aunt Ellis making a little noise in her breath.

“The bad taste of it – the bad taste of it, Calliope!” she said. “When I was a girl we used to use the word ladylike – we used to strive to deserve it. It’s a beautiful word. But these – ”

“We’ve been ladylike,” says I, sad, “for five or ten thousand years, and where has it got us to?”

“Oh, but, Calliope, they like it – they like the publicity and the notoriety and the – ”

I kept still, but I hurt all over me. I can stand anything only hearing that they like it – the way Aunt Ellis meant. I thought to myself that I bet the folks that used to watch martyrs were heard to say that martyrs prob’ly thought flames was becoming or they wouldn’t be burnt. But when I looked at Aunt Ellis sitting in her car with her hand over her eyes, it come over me all at once the tragedy of it – of all them that watch us cast their old ideals in new forms – their old ideals.

All of a sudden I stood up in the car. The parade had got blocked for a minute, and right in front of the curb where we stood I saw a woman I knew; a little waxy-looking thing, that couldn’t look surprised or exalted or afraid or anything else, and I knew her in a minute – even to the red calico waist and the big weight of hair, just as I had seen her by the toy table in her “home” the night before. And there she was, marching. And here was Aunt Ellis and me.

I leaned over and touched Aunt Ellis.

“You mustn’t mind,” I says; “I’m going too.”

She looked at me like I’d turned into somebody else.

“I’m going out there,” I says, “with them. I see it like they do – I feel it like they do. And them that sees it and feels it and don’t help it along is holding it back. I’ll find my way home…”

I ran to them. I stepped right out in the street among them and fell in step with them, and then I saw something. While I was making my way through the crowd to them the line had passed on, and them I was with was all in caps and gowns. I stopped still in the road.

“Great land!” I says to the woman nearest, “you’re college, ain’t you? And I never even got through high school.”

She smiled and put out her hand.

“Come on,” she says.

Whatever happens to me afterward, I’ve had that hour. No woman that has ever had it will ever forget it – the fear and the courage, the pride and the dread, the hurt and the power and the glory. I don’t know whether it’s the way – but what is the way? I only know that all down the street, between the rows of watching faces, I could think of that little waxy woman going along ahead, and of the kind of place that she called home, and of the kind of a life she and her children had. And I knew then and I know now that the poverty and the dirt and some of the death in the world is our job, it’s our job too. And if they won’t let us do it ladylike, we’ll do it just plain.

When I got home, Aunt Ellis was having tea. She smiled at me kind of sad, as a prodigal guest deserved.

“Aunt Ellis,” I says, “I’ve give ’em the rest of my cook-stove money, except my fare home.”

“My poor Calliope,” she says, “that’s just the trouble. You all go to such hysterical extremes.”

I’d heard that word several times on the street. I couldn’t stand it any longer.

“Was that hysterics to-day?” I says. “I’ve often wondered what they’re like. I’ve never had the time to have them, myself. Well,” I says, tired but serene, “if that was hysterics, leave ’em make the most of it.”

I looked at her, meditative.

“Miss Markham and you and the women that marched to-day and me,” I says. “And a hundred years from now we’ll all be conservatives together. And there’ll be some big new day coming on that would startle me now, just the same as it would you. But the way I feel to-night, honest – I donno but I’m ready for that one too.”

MR. DOMBLEDON

He came to my house one afternoon when I was just starting off to get a-hold of two cakes for the next meeting of the Go-lightly club, and my mind was all trained to a peak, capped with the cakes.

Says he: “Have you got rooms to let?”

For a minute I didn’t answer him, I was so knee deep in looking at the little boy he had with him – the cutest, lovin’est little thing I’d ever seen. But though I love the human race and admire to see it took care of, I couldn’t sense my way clear to taking a boy into my house. Boys belongs to the human race, to be sure, just as whirling egg-beaters belongs to omelettes, but much as I set store by omelettes I couldn’t invite a whirling egg-beater into my home permanent.

Says I: “Not to boys.”

He laughed – kind of a pleasant laugh, fringed all round with little laughs.

“Oh,” he says, “we ain’t boys.”

“Well,” says I, “one of you is. And I don’t ever rent to ’em. They ain’t got enough silence to ’em,” I says, as delicate as I could.

Just then the little lad himself looked up innocent and took a hand without meaning to.

“Is your doggy home?” says he.

“Yes,” I says, “curled up on the back mat.” I felt kind of glad I didn’t have to tell him I didn’t have one.

“I’d like,” says he, grave, “to fluffle it till you’re through.”

“So do,” says I, hearty, and he trotted round the house like a little minister.

I kind o’ tiptoed after him, casual. All of a sudden I wanted to see what he done. His father come behind me on the boards, and we saw the little fellow bend over and pat Mac, my water spaniel, as gentle as if he’d been cut glass. The little boy looked awful cute, bending over, his short hair sticking out at the back. I can see him yet.

“How much,” says I, “would you want to pay for your room?”

“Well,” says his father, “not much. But I give a guess your price is what it’s worth – no more, no less.”

I hadn’t paid much attention to him before that, but I see now he was a wonderful, nice-spoken little man, with the kind of eyes that look like the sitting-room – and not like the parlor. I can’t bear parlor eyes.

“Come and look at the room,” says I, and rented it to him out of hand. And Mr. Dombledon – his name was – and Donnie – that was the little fellow – went off for their baggage, and I went off for my cakes; and what they was reflecting on I donno, but my own reflect was that it’s a wise minute can tell what the next one is going to pop open and let out. But I like it that way. I’m a natural-born vaudevillian. I love to see what’s coming next.

Well, the next thing was, after I got my two club cakes both provided for, that it turned out Mr. Dombledon was an agent, selling “notions, knick-knacks and anything o’ that,” he told me; and he use’ to start out at seven o’clock in the morning, with his satchel in one hand and his little boy, more or less, in the other.

“Land,” says I to him after a few days, “don’t your little boy get wore to the bone tramping around with you like that?”

“Some,” says he; “but I carry him part of the way.”

“Carry him?” says I, “and tote that heavy knick-knack notion satchel?”

“Well,” says he, “I don’t mind it. What I’m always thinking is this: What if I didn’t have him to tote.”

“True enough,” says I, and couldn’t say another word.

But of course the upstart and offshoot of that was that before the week was out, I’d invited Mr. Dombledon to leave the little fellow with me, some days, while he went off. And he done so, grateful, but making a curious provision.

“It’d be grand for him,” says he; “they’s only just one thing: Would – would you promise not to leave him hear anybody say anything anyways cross?”

“Well,” says I, judicious, “I donno’s I’m what-you-might-say cross. Not systematic. But – I might be a little crispy.”

“I ain’t afraid o’ you,” says he, real flattering. “But don’t leave him hear anybody – well, snap anybody up.”

“All right,” says I, “I won’t. I like,” I says, “to get out o’ the way of that myself.”

“Well, and then,” he says, “I guess you’ll think I’m real particular. But – would you promise not to leave him go outside the yard?”

“Sure,” says I, “only when I’m with him.”

“I guess you’ll think I’m real particular,” he says again, in his kind of gentle voice without any sizin’ to it, “but I mean not even then. Days when you’re goin’ out, I’ll take him with me.”

“Sure,” says I, wondering all over me, but not letting on all I wondered, like you can’t in society. And I actually looked forward to having the little thing around the house with me, me that has always been down on mice, moths, bats and boys.

The next thing was, Would he stay with me? And looking to this end I contrived, some skillful, to be baking cookies the first morning his pa went off. Mis’ Puppy had happened in early to get some blueing, and she was sitting at one end of my cook table when Donnie came trotting out with his father, that always preferred the back door. (“It feels more like I lived here,” says he, wishful, “if you let me come in the back door.” And I was the last one to deny him that. Once when I went visiting, I got so homesick to go in the back door that it was half my reason for leaving ’em.)

“Now then,” I says to the little fellow that morning, “you just set here with us and see me make cookies. I’ll cut you out a soldier cooky,” says I.

“Wiv buttins?” he asks, and climbed up on his knees on a chair by the table and let his father go off without him, nice as the nicest. “I likes ’em wiv buttins,” he says – and Mis’ Puppy sort of kindled up in her throat, like a laugh that wants to love somebody.

I donno as I know how to say it, but he was the kind of a little chap that, when you’re young, you always think your little chap is going to be. Then when they do come, sometimes they’re dear and all that, but they ain’t quite exactly the way you thought of them being – though you forget that they ain’t, and you forget everything but loving ’em. But it was like this little boy was the way you’d meant. It wasn’t so much the way he looked – though he was beautiful, beautiful like some of the things you think and not like a calendar – but it was the way he was, kind of close up to you, and his breath coming past, and something you couldn’t name gentling round him. His father hadn’t been gone ten minutes when the little thing let me kiss him.

“ ‘At was my last one,” he explained, sort of sorry, to Mis’ Puppy. “But you can have a bite off my soldier. That’s a better kiss.”

Mis’ Puppy watched him for a while – he was sitting close down by the oven door to hear his soldier say Hurrah the minute he was baked, if you please – and she kind of moved like her thoughts scraped by each other, and she says – and spells one word of it out:

“Where do you s’pose his m-o-t-h-e-r is?”

“My land, d-e-d,” I answers, “or she’d be setting over there kissing the back of his neck in the hollow.”

“I’ve got,” says Mis’ Puppy, “kind of an idea she ain’t. Your boarder,” she says, “don’t look to me real what you might call a widower. He ain’t the air of one that’s had things ciphered out for him,” says she. “It’s more like he was still a-browsing round the back o’ the book for the answer.”

And that was true, when you come to think of it; he did seem sort of quick-moved and hopeful, more like when you sit down to the table than when you shove back.

I told Mis’ Puppy, private, what his father had said to me about his not hearing anything spoke cross; and she nodded, like it was something she’d got all thought out, with tags on.

“I was a-wondering the other day,” she says, dreamy, “what I’d of been like if nobody had ever yipped out at me. I s’pose none of us knows.”

“Likewise,” says I, “what we’d be like if we’d never yipped out to no one else.”

“That’s so,” she says, “ain’t it? The two fits together like a covered bake-dish.”

“Ain’t you ’fraid he’ll shoot the oven door down if you don’t let him out pitty quick?” says Donnie, trying to see how near he could get his ear to the crack to hear that “Hurrah.”

Four days the little boy done that, stayed with me as contented as a kitten while his father went agenting; and then the fifth day he had to take him with him, because there come on what I’d been getting the cakes for – the quarterly meeting of the Go-lightly club.

The Go-lightly club is sixteen Red Barns ladies – and me – that’s all passed the sixty-year-old mark, and has had to begin to go lightly. We picked the name as being so literal, grievous-true as to our powers and, same time, airy and happy sounding, just like we hope we’ll be clear up to the last of the last of us. We had a funny motto and, those days, it use’ to be a secret. We’d lit on it when we was first deciding to have the club.

“What do we want a club for anyhow?” old Mis’ Lockmeyer had said, that don’t really enjoy anything that she ain’t kicked out at first.

“Why,” says little Mis’ Pettibone, kind of gentle and final, “just to kind of make life nice.”

“Well,” says Mis’ Lockmeyer, “we got to go awful light on it, our age.”

And we put both them principles into our constitution:

“Name: The name of this club shall be the Go-lightly club, account of the character of its members.

“Object: The object of this club shall be to make life nice.

“No officers. No dues. No real regular meetings.

“Picnic supper when any.”

And Mis’ Wilme had insisted on adding:

“Every-day clothes or not so much so.”

Our next meeting was going to be at Mis’ Elkhorn’s that lives out of town about two miles along the old Tote road, and we was looking forward to it considerable. We’d put it off several times; one week the ice-cream sociable was going to be, and one week the circus was to the next town, and so on – we never like to interfere with any other social going-ons.

None of us having a horse, we hired the rig – that’s the three-seat canopy-top from the livery – and was all drove out together by Jem Meddledipper. And it was real nice and festive, with our lunch baskets all piled up in the back and, as Mis’ Wilme put it: “Nothing to do till time to set the pan-cakes.” And when we got outside the City limits – we’re just a village, but we’ve got ’em marked “City Limits,” because that always seems the name of ’em – Mis’ Pettibone, that’s a regular one for entering into things – you know some just is and some just ain’t and the two never change places on no occasion whatever – she kind of pitched in and sung in her nice little voice that she calls her sopralto, because it ain’t placed much of any place. She happened on a church piece – I donno if you know it? – the one that’s got a chorus that goes first

“Loving-kindness”

all wavy, like a little stream trickling along; and then another part chimes in,

“Loving-kindness”

all wavy, like another little stream trickling along, and then everybody clamps down on

“Loving-kindness – oh, how great!”

like the whole nice sweep of the river? Well, that was the one she sung. And being it’s a terrible catchy tune, and most of us was brought up on it and has been haunted by it for days together from bed to bed, we all more or less joined in with what little vocal pans we had, and we sung it off and on all the way out.

We was singing it, I recollect, when we come in sight of the Toll Gate House. The Toll Gate House has been there for years, ever since the Tote road got made into a real road, and then it got paid for, and the toll part stopped; and now the City rents the house – there’s a place we always say “City” again – to most anybody, usually somebody poor, with a few chickens and takes in washings and ain’t much of any other claim to being thought of, as claims seem to go.

“Who lives in the Toll Gate House now, I wonder?” says Mis’ Pettibone, breaking off her song.

“Land, nobody,” says Mis’ Lockmeyer; “it’s all fell in on itself – my land,” she says, “the door’s open. Let’s stop and report ’em, so be it’s been tramps.”

So we made Jem Meddledipper stop, and somebody was just going to get out when a woman come to the door.

She was a little woman, with kind of a pindling expression, looking as if she’d started in good and strong, but life had kind of shaved her down till there wasn’t as much left of her, strictly speaking, as’d make a regular person. A person, but not one that looks well and happy the way “person” means to you, when you say the word. She had on a what-had-been navy-blue what-had-been alpaca, but both them attributes had got wore down past the nap. A little girl was standing close beside her – a nice little thing, with her hair sticking up on top like a candle-flame, and tied with a string.

“My land,” says Mis’ Lockmeyer right out, “are you livin’ here?” Mis’ Lockmeyer is like that – she always wears her face inside-out with all the expression showing.

But the woman wasn’t hurt. She smiled a little, and when she smiled I thought she looked real sweet.

“Yes,” she said, “I am. It – it don’t look real like it, does it?”

“Well,” puts in Mis’ Pettibone, “gettin’ settled so – ”

“Oh,” says the woman, “I been here a month.”

And Mis’ Lockmeyer, wishing to make amends and pull her foot out, planted the other right along side of it instead.

“Do you sell anything? Or sew anything? Or wash and iron anything?” she asks.

And the woman says: “I sew and wash and iron anything I can do home, with my little girl. But I ain’t a thing in the world to sell.”

“Of course you ain’t,” says Mis’ Lockmeyer soothing, and hoping to make it better still.

“Well,” says Mis’ Puppy hearty, “I tell you what. We’ll be out to see you in a little bit, if you want us to.”

My land, the woman’s face – I donno whether you’ve ever seen anybody’s face lit up from the inside with the light fair showing through all the pores like little windows? Hers done it. She didn’t say nothing – she just done that. And we drove on.

“Land,” says Mis’ Pettibone, thoughtful, “how like each other folks are, no matter how not-like they seem to the folks you think they ain’t one bit like.”

“Ain’t they – ain’t they?” says I, hearty. And I guess we all felt the same.

Nobody was absent to the club that afternoon, but Mis’ Elkhorn’s sitting-room was big enough so’s we could get in. None of us could bear a parlor club meeting. Our ideas always set in our heads to a parlor-meeting, called to order by rapping on something. But here at Mis’ Elkhorn’s we were out in the sitting-room, with the red table-spread on and the plants growing and the spice-cake smelling through the kitchen door. And you’d think things would of gone as smooth as glass.

Instead of which, I donno what on earth ailed us. But when we got to sitting down, sewing, it was like some kind of little fine dislocation had took place in the air.

Mis’ Puppy had brought a centre-piece to work on, big as a rug, all drawn work and hemstitching and embroidery. And somehow Mis’ Pettibone, that only embroiders useful, couldn’t stand it.

“My, Mis’ Puppy,” she says, “I shouldn’t think you could get a bit of house-work done, making that so lavish.”

Mis’ Puppy shut her lips so tight it jerked her head.

“I don’t scrub out continual, same as some,” she says.

“If you mean me,” says Mis’ Pettibone, tart, “I guess I can do house-work as easy as the most.”

“I heard there’s those that can – where it don’t show,” says Mis’ Puppy, some goaded beyond what she meant.

“Mean to say?” snaps Mis’ Pettibone.

“Oh, nothin’,” says Mis’ Puppy, “only to them that their backs the coat fits.”

“I never was called shiftless since I was born a wife and a house-keeper,” says Mis’ Pettibone, bordering on tearful.

“Oh, was you born a house-keeper, Mis’ Pettibone?” says Mis’ Puppy, sweet.

Then Mis’ Pettibone went in and set on the foot of the bed where we’d laid our things, and cried; and one or two of us went in and sort o’ poored her.

And, land, when we’d got her to come out, the first thing we heard was Mis’ Lockmeyer pitching into Mis’ Wilme.

“Anybody that can say I don’t make ice-cream as cheap as the best ain’t any of an ice-cream judge,” she was saying hot, “be they you or be they better.”

“I wasn’t saying a word about cheap,” says Mis’ Wilme, “I was talking about good.”

“Well,” says Mis’ Lockmeyer, “I thought I made it good.”

“Not with the little dab of cream you was just mentioning, you can’t,” says Mis’ Wilme, firm. “It ain’t reasonable nor chemical.”

“Don’t you think your long words is goin’ to impress me,” says Mis’ Lockmeyer, more and more het up.

“Well, ladies,” says Mis’ Elkhorn, humorous, “nobody can make it any colder’n anybody else, anyhow.”

Somebody pitched in then, hasty and peaceful, and went to talking about Cemetery; and it looked like we was launched on a real quiet subject.

“I guess we’ve all got more friends up there then we’ve got in town,” says I. “When we go up there to walk on Sundays, I declare if I had to bow to all the graves I recognize I’d be kep’ busy.”

“I know,” says Mis’ Wilme, “when my niece was here from the City she said she had eighty on her calling list. ‘Well,’ I says, ‘I’ve got that many if I count the graves I know.’ ”

“Most of my acquaintances,” says Mis’ Lockmeyer, sighing, “is in their coffins. I says to my husband when I looked over the Daily the other night: That most of the Local Items and Supper Table Jottings for me now would have to be dated Cemetery Lot.”

“I know, ladies,” says Mis’ Puppy, dreamy, “but ain’t it real aristocratic to live in a place so long that you know all the graves. We ain’t got much else to be aristocratic about. But that’s real like them county families you read about,” she says.

And up flared Mis’ Pettibone. “I donno’s there’s any need to make it so pointed to us that ain’t lived here so very long,” she said, “and that ain’t any friends at all in your Cemetery.”

“Oh, well,” says Mis’ Puppy, indulgent, “of course there’s them distinctions in any town.”

I was just feeling thankful from my bones out that they hadn’t met to my house, with Donnie staying home, when Mis’ Elkhorn come in from the kitchen to tell us supper was ready. And when she opened the door the smell of hot waffles come a dilly-nipping in, and it made me feel so kind of cozy and busy and alive and glad that I burst right out:

“Shucks, ladies!” I says. “So be we peck around for ’em I bet we could find things to fuss over right till the hearse backs up to the door.”

They all laughed a little then, but that was part from feeling embarrassed at going out to supper, like you always are. And when we did get out there, everybody scrabbled around to get away from whoever had just been her enemy. We didn’t say much while we et – like you don’t in company; and I set there thinking:

“The Go-lightly club. The Go-lightly club. To make life nice.” And I thought how we’d sung that song of ours all the way out. And I made up my mind that, after supper, when they was feeling limber from food, I’d try to say something about it.

But I didn’t. I just got started on it – introduced by telling ’em some nice little things about Donnie’s sayings and doings to my house, when Mis’ Lockmeyer broke in, sympathetic.

“Ain’t he a great care?” says she.

“Yes,” says I, “he is. And so is everything on top of this earth that’s worth having. Life thrown in.”

And then I see they was all rustling to go home – giving reasons of clothes to sprinkle or bread to set or grandchild to put to bed or plants to cover up. So I kep’ still, and mogged along home with ’em. But I did say to Mis’ Pettibone on the back seat:

“We better quit off club. If we can’t meet folks without laying awake nights over the things that’s been said to us, we better never meet. ‘To make life nice,’ ” says I. “Ain’t club a travnasty, or whatever that word is?”

“I know it,” she says awful sober, and I see she was grieving some too. And we was all pretty still, going home. So still that we could all hear Jem Meddledipper, that had caught the run o’ that tune from us in the afternoon and was driving us home by it, and the wheels went round to it —