Neighborhood Stories

Then I boiled over and sissed on the tip of the stove. “Stop that!” I says. “Chris ain’t any more illegitimate than I am. True, he’s got a illegitimate father bowing around somewheres in polite society. And Lisbeth – well, she’s bore him and she’s raised him and she’s paid his keep for four years, and I ain’t prepared to describe what kind of mother she is by any one word in the dictionary. But the minute you tack that one word on to Chris, well,” says I, “you got me to answer to.”

“But, Calliope!” cries Mis’ Sykes. “You can’t take him in without taking in the mother!”

“No,” says I, “and I’ve took her in already. Is my morals nicked any to speak of? Mind you,” I says, “I ain’t arguin’ with you to take in anybody up till they want to be took in and do right. I’ve got my own ideas on that too, but I ain’t arguing it with you here. All I say now is, Why not take in Lisbeth?”

“Why not put a premium on evil-doing and have done with it?” says Mis’ Fire-Chief Merriman, majestic and deep-toned.

“Well,” I says, “we’ve done that to the father’s evil. Maybe you can tell me why we fixed up his premium so neat?”

“Oh, well,” says Mis’ Sykes, “surely we needn’t argue it. Why, the whole of civilization is on our side and responsible for our way of thinking. You ain’t got no argument, Calliope,” she says. “Besides, it ain’t what any of us thinks that proves it. It’s what’s what that counts.”

“Civilization,” says I. “And time. They’re responsible for a good deal, ain’t they? Wars and martyrdom and burnings and – crucifixion. All done in the immortal name of what’s what. Well, me, I don’t care a cake o’ washing soap what’s what. What’s what ain’t nothing but a foot-bridge anyhow, on over to what’s-going-to-be. And if you tell me that civilization and time can keep going much longer putting a premium on a man’s wrong and putting a penalty on the woman – then I tell you to your face that I’ve got inside information that you ain’t got. Because in the end – in the end, life ain’t that sort.”

“Good for you, Calliope!” says a voice in the door. And when I’d wheeled round, there stood Eppleby Holcomb, come in to see how we were getting along with the cloth for his booth. “Good for you,” he says, grave.

We all felt stark dumb with embarrassment – I guess they hadn’t one of us ever said that much in company with a man present in our lives. In company, with man or men present, we’d talked like life was made up of the pattern of things, and like speaking of warp and woof wasn’t delicate. And we never so much as let on they was any knots – unless it was property knots or like that. But now I had to say something, being I had said something. And besides, I wanted to.

“Do you believe that too, Eppleby?” I ask’ him breathless. “Do any men believe that?”

“Some men do, thank God,” Eppleby says. And his wife, Mame, smiled over to him; and Mis’ Timothy Toplady, she booms out: “Yes, let’s thank God!” And I see that anyhow we four felt one. And “Is this stuff for my blazing booth here?” Eppleby sings out, to relieve the strain. And we all talked at once.

From that day on it seemed as if the whole town took sides about Lisbeth.

Half of ’em talked like Mis’ Sykes, often and abundant. And one-quarter didn’t say much of anything till they were pressed to. And the remaining one-quarter didn’t say anything for fear of offending the other three-fourths, here and there. But some went to see Lisbeth, and sent her in a little something. She didn’t go much of anywheres – she was shy of accepting pity where it would embarrass the givers. But oh my, how she did need friends!

Mame Holcomb was the only one that Lisbeth went to her house by invite. Mame let it be known that she had invited her, and full half of them she’d asked sent in their regrets in consequence. And of them that did go – well, honest, of all the delicate tasks the Lord has intrusted to His blundering children, I think the delicatest is talking to one of us that’s somehow stepped off the track in public.

I heard Mis’ Morgan Graves trying to talk to Lisbeth about like this: “My dear child. How do you get on?”

“Very nice, thank you, Mis’ Graves,” says Lisbeth.

“Is there anything I can do to help you?” the lady pursues, earnest.

“No, Mis’ Graves, nothing – thank you,” says Lisbeth, looking down.

“You know I’d be so willing, so very willing, to do all I could at any time. You feel that about me, don’t you?”

“Yes, ma’am,” says Lisbeth, beginning to turn fire red.

“Promise,” says Mis’ Graves, “to let me know if you ever need a friend – ”

And I couldn’t stand it a minute longer. “That’s you, Mis’ Graves,” I broke in hearty. “And it’s what I’ve been wanting to say to you for ever so long. You’re a good soul. Whenever you need a friend, just come to me. Will you?”

She looked kind of dazed, and three-fourths indignant. “Why …” she begun.

And I says: “And you’d let me come to you if I need a friend, wouldn’t you? I thought so. Well, now, here’s three of us good friends, and showing it only when it’s needed. Let’s us three go and set down together for refreshments, sha’n’t we?”

Lisbeth looked up at me like a dog that I’d patted. I donno but Mis’ Graves thought I was impertinent. I donno but I was. But I like to be – like that. Oh, anything but the “protected” women that go cooing and humming and pooring around a girl like Lisbeth, and doing it in the name of friendliness. Friendliness isn’t that. And if you don’t know what it is different from that, then go out into the crowd of the world, stripped and hungry and dumb and by yourself, and wait till it comes to you. It’ll come! God sees to that. And it’s worth everything. For if you die without finding it out, you die without knowing life.

After that day, none of us invited Lisbeth in company. We see it was kinder not to.

But the little boy – the little boy. There wasn’t any way of protecting him. And it never entered Lisbeth’s head at first that she was going to be struck at through him. She sent him to Sunday-school, and everything was all right there, except Mis’ Graves taking her little boy out of the class he was in, and Lisbeth didn’t know that. Then she sent him to day school, in the baby room. And Mis’ Sykes’s little grandchild went there – Artie Barling; and I guess he must have heard his mother and Mis’ Sykes talking – anyway at recess he shouts out when they was playing:

“Everybody that was born in the house be on my side!”

They all went rushing over to his side, Christopher too.

“Naw!” Artie says to him. “Not youse. Youse was borned outside. My gramma says so.”

So Chris went home, crying, with that. And then Lisbeth begun to understand. I went in to see her one afternoon, and found her working out in the little patch of her mother’s garden. When she see me she set down by the hollyhocks she was transplanting and looked up at me, just numb.

“Miss Marsh,” she says, “it’s God punishing me, I s’pose, but – ”

“No, Lisbeth,” I says. “No. The real punishment ain’t this. This is just folks punishing you. Don’t never mistake the one for the other, will you?”

Acceptances to the Home-coming kept flowing in like mad – all the folks we’d most wanted to come was a-coming, them and their families. I begun to get warm all through me, and to go round singing, and to wake up feeling something grand was going to happen and, when I was busy, to know there was something nice, just over the edge of my job, sitting there rosy, waiting to be thought about. It worked on us all that way. It was a good deal like being in love. I donno but it was being in love. In love with folks.

The afternoon before the Home-coming was to begin, there was to be a rehearsal of the Children’s Drill, that Mis’ Sykes had charge of for the opening night. We were all on the Market Square, working like beavers and like trojums, or whatever them other busy animals are, getting the booths set up. All the new things that the town had got and done in the last fifty years was represented, each in a booth, all round the Square… And in the middle of the Square stood the great big Cedar-of-Lebanon tree that we’d used last Christmas for the first annual Friendship Village outdoors Christmas tree. I wondered how anybody could ever have said that it was in the way! It stood there, all still, and looking like it knew us far, far better than we knew it – the way a tree does. With the wind blowing through it gentle, it made a wonderful nice center-piece, I thought.

We’d just got to tacking on to Eppleby Holcomb’s red Department Emporium booth when we heard a shout, and there, racing along the street, come the forty-fifty children that was going to be in the Children’s Drill. They all come pounding and scampering over to where we were, each with a little paper stick in their hand for the wand part, and they swarmed up to Mis’ Sykes that was showing ’em how, and they shouted:

“Mis’ Sykes! Mis’ Sykes! Can’t we rehearse now?” – for “rehearse” seems to be a word that children just loves by natural instinct same as “cave” and “den” and “secret stairway.”

I looked down in the faces all pink and eager and happy – I knew most of ’em by name. I’d be ashamed to live in a town where I didn’t know anyway fifty-sixty children by name, keeping up as fast as necessary. And with ’em I see was Lisbeth’s little boy, waving a stick of kindling for his wand, happy as a clam, but not a mum clam at all.

“Hello, Chris!” I says. “I didn’t know you could drill.”

But he stopped jumping and laughing. “I can’t,” he says, “I was just pe-tend. I can pe-tend, can’t I?” he says, looking up alarmed.

“Hush, Calliope!” says Mis’ Sykes, back of me. “No need making it any harder for him than ’tis.”

“What do you mean by that?” I ask’ her sharp.

“Why,” says she, “I couldn’t have him in the drill. How could I? The children’s mothers is coming down here to trim ’em. Lots of ’em – Mis’ Grace and Mis’ Morgan Graves and some more, said flat out they wouldn’t let their children be in it if they had to trim ’em along with her.”

“My land,” I says, “my land!”

I couldn’t say anything more. And Mis’ Sykes called the children, and they all went shouting round her over to the middle of the green. All but Chris.

I picked him up and set him on the counter of the booth, and I stood side of him. But he didn’t pay much attention to me. He was looking off after the children, forming in two lines that broke into four, and wheeled and turned, and waved their wands. He watched ’em, and he never says a word.

“Come and help me tack tacks, Chris,” I says, when I couldn’t stand it any longer.

And then he says: “When they do it, it’s going to be a band playing, won’t there?”

“Yes,” I says, “but we’ll all be hearing the music. Come and – ”

“When they do it,” he says, still looking off at the children, “they’ll all have white on ’em, won’t they?”

“Yes,” I says, “white on ’em.” And couldn’t say no more.

Then he turns and looks me right in the face: “I got my new white suit home,” he says, whispering.

“Yes, lambin’, yes,” I says, and had to pretend I didn’t understand. And when I looked back at him, he was setting there, still and watching; but two big tears was going down his cheeks.

All of a sudden something in me, something big and quiet, turned round to me and said something. I heard it – oh, I tell you, I heard it. And it wasn’t the first time. And all over me went racing the knowledge that there was something to do for what was the matter. And while I stood there, feeling the glory of knowing that I’d got to find a way to do, somehow – like you do sometimes – to make things better, I looked down the long green stretch of the Square and in the middle of the Square I saw something. Something that was like an answer. And I put my arms round Chris and hugged him. For I’d got a plan that was like a present.

But he didn’t feel like that – not then. He kind of wriggled away. “It ain’t lovin’ time,” he says. “No.”

“No,” I says, looking down that sunny Market Square toward what I’d seen. “No, it ain’t loving time – not yet. But I tell you, I tell you it’s going to be it! Mebbe I can make ’em see – mebbe I know a way to make ’em see. Come along with me,” I says, “Lisbeth’s little boy – and help!”

Toward sundown of that first great day of the Friendship Village Home-coming we was the happiest, wore-outest set of folks I about ever see. Not everybody we’d expected and hoped for had come – even Abner Dawes, he hadn’t showed up. But then he was such a big man that I donno’s any of us thought he’d come, any of the time. Only we did enjoy having it in the Daily every few nights that he’d be there. The editor of the Friendship Evening Daily got six distinct locals out of it for “Supper Table Jottings” – six nights hand-running. Thus:

1. Abner Dawes is expected to arrive from the east for the Home-coming.

2. Abner Dawes will arrive from the east the last of the week. The occasion is the Home-coming.

3. Word has been received that Abner Dawes will reach here Thursday evening to attend the Home-coming.

4. Abner Dawes will reach here to-morrow night.

5. Abner Dawes will reach here this evening on the Six fifty-nine, for a brief sojourn.

6. Abner Dawes arrived last evening and is quartered at the Opera House hotel.

Some we hadn’t thought of turned up last minute, and had to tell folks who they were and then – my, what a welcome! Every few minutes, all day long, we’d hear a little shouting, and see a little crowd, and we’d all rush over, and there’d be somebody just got there, and everybody’d be calling ’em old names, and shaking hands with the children and kissing the grand-children. It was a real day. It’d be a day I’d like to talk about even if nothing else had happened but the day being just the day.

Mis’ Sykes and I were in Eppleby’s booth, and in back of it the children was all trimmed and ready to begin their march, when I heard an unusual disturbance just outside. I looked, and I saw Lisbeth, that Eppleby had asked to come and help tend his booth that night, and she was just getting there, with Chris trotting alongside of her. But they weren’t making the disturbance. Most of that was Eppleby, shaking both the hands of a big, smooth-boned, brown-skinned man that was shouting at his lungs’ top:

“Eppleby BebblebyWooden-leg,Lost his knifePlaying mumblety-peg.”

with all the gusto of a psalm. And Eppleby was shouting back at him something about

“Abner Dawes he comes to lateThe wood was split and things was great.”

And it was Abner actually come and getting himself welcomed by Eppleby just like one of us. And Abner begun remembering us all and calling us by name.

Abner was one of them men that makes you know what men were meant to be like. His face was ruddy and wrinkled – but oh, it was deep and bright, and his eyes looked out like his soul was saying to your soul: “See me. I’m you. Oh, come on, let’s find out about living. How does anybody ever talk about anything else?” That was Abner. You couldn’t be with him without looking closer at the nature of being alive. And you saw that life is a different thing – a different thing from what most of us think. And some day we’ll find out what.

And me, seeing him, and the folks all gathered round the Square, waiting for the after-supper part of the entertainment, and knowing what I’d planned should happen right afterward, I had only one thought:

“Abner,” I says, just the same as if he hadn’t been a great man, “the children – they’re going to march. They’re in back of the booth, all ready. You must lead ’em! He must lead ’em, Mis’ Sykes, mustn’t he – and sing with ’em? Every child here knows your songs. Oh, would you come and march with ’em?”

I love to remember how deep and bright his face got. “Would I march?” he says. “With children? When is it? – now?”

I put out my hand to thank him, and he took hold of it. And all of a sudden, right down there close by our two hands I see somebody. And it was Lisbeth’s little boy, that had come running to us and was tugging at my skirt.

“Look,” Chris says, clear. “I got on this white one. Couldn’t – couldn’t I march too?”

He was looking up, same as a rose, his big eyes shining hopeful. My, my, but he was dear. And Abner Dawes looked down at him. He’d never seen him before – nor knew about his being Lisbeth’s.

“March!” Abner cries. “Of course you can march! Come along with me.”

And he swung little Christopher up on to his back. And he run out into the midst of the other children, where Mis’ Sykes was marshaling ’em before the booth.

“God bless him,” says Eppleby, behind me.

But then Mis’ Sykes looked up, and saw him. And she never hesitated a minute, not even a minute to wonder why. She just set her lips together in that thin line I knew, and she run right up to Abner.

“Oh, Mr. Dawes,” she says, “you mustn’t. The mothers won’t like it. He’s Lisbeth Note’s child. He’s – ”

Abner Dawes looked down at her, round Chris’s white legs. All the brightness was gone out of Abner’s face now – but not the deepness nor the kindness. That stayed. “Do you mean,” he said grave, “that this child is evil?”

“No – no,” says Mis’ Sykes, stumbling some. “But I thought you’d ought to know – folks feeling as they do here – ”

Abner turned and looked down the green, where the folks was gathered and the last sun was slanting. It was gold, and it was still, all except the folks chatting in groups. And up the street the half-past seven bell was ringing, like somebody saying something nice.

“Oh, God,” says Abner Dawes, kind of reverent and kind of like a sigh. “Here too. Here too.”

I’ll never forget his face when he turned to Mis’ Sykes. It wasn’t hard or cross or accusing – I guess he knew she was just at her crooked way of trying to be decent! But he made her know firm that if he led the children’s march, he’d lead it with Chris. – And it was so he done.

…Down the long green they come, side by side. And the other children fell in behind, and they circled out into a great orbit, with the Christmas tree in the middle of it. And folks begun to see who the man was at the head, and the word run round, and they all broke out and cheered and called out to him. Oh, it was a great minute. I like to think about it.

And then the murmur begun running round that it was Chris that was with him. And Mame Holcomb and Eppleby and Mis’ Toplady and me, watching from the booth, we knew how everybody was looking at everybody else to see what to think – like folks do. But they didn’t know – not yet.

Then something wonderful happened. Halfway round the Square, Abner noticed that Chris didn’t have any wand, same as the other children had. And so, when he was passing the big Cedar-of-Lebanon-looking Christmas tree, what did he do but break off a little branch and put that in Chris’s hand. And Chris come on a-waving it, a bough off that tree. I sort of sung all over when I saw that.

The children ended up round a platform, and up there went the folks that had been picked out to lead the singing. And as they went they sung:

“Oh, how lovely is the evening, is the evening, is the evening!”

And in a minute, from first one place and then another the others took it up, them that had sung it in singing school, years ago —

“When the bells are sweetly chiming, sweetly chiming, sweetly chiming”

and they sung it like a round, which it is, with a great fine booming bass of

“Ding dong, ding dong, ding dong”

all through it. Do you know that round? If you don’t, get it; and get some folks together somehow, and sing it. It lets you taste the evening. But I can’t tell you the way it seemed to us there in Friendship Village, met together after so many years, and singing together like we was all one Folk. One Folk.

They sung other songs, while the dusk came on. Abner Dawes was sitting on the platform, and he kept Chris on his knee – I loved him for that. There wasn’t a set program. First one would start a song from somewheres in the crowd, and then another… And all the time I was waiting for it to get dark enough to do what I had planned to be done – and what I’d had men working at near all the night before to get ready. And when the dark come thick enough, and just at the end, I remember of their singing “Flow Gently, Sweet Afton,” I thought it was time.

I gave the word to them that were waiting. And suddenly, right there in the midst of the Square, the great green tree, that had been the Friendship Village Christmas tree, glowed softly alight from top to bottom, all in the green branches, just like it had glowed on Christmas Eve. They’d done the work good, and as if they liked it – and the bulbs were in so deep in the green that not a soul had noticed all day. And there was the Christmas tree, come back.

“Oh…” they says, low, all over the Square. And nobody said anything else. It was as if, awake and alive in that living tree, there was the same spirit that had been there on Christmas Eve, the spirit that we’ve got to keep alive year long, year round, year through.

I’d whispered something to Abner, and he come down from the platform and went over close to the tree. And of a sudden he lifted Chris in his arms, high up among the lit branches. And in everybody’s hush he says clear:

“ ‘And He took a little child and set him in their midst.’ ”

That was all he said. And Chris looked out and smiled happy, and waved his branch off the Christmas tree. Over the whole Market Square there lay a stillness that said things to itself and to us. It said that here was the Family, come home, round the tree, big folks and little, wise and foolish, and all feeling the Christmas spirit in our hearts just like it was our hearts. It said that the Family’s judging Lisbeth Note one way or the other didn’t settle anything, nor neither did our treating her little boy mean or good…

For all of a sudden we were all of us miles deeper into life than that. And we saw how, beyond judgment and even beyond what’s what, is a spirit that has got to come and clutch hold of life before such wrongs, and more wrongs, and all the wrongs that ail us, can stop being. And that spirit will be the spirit that was in our hearts right then. We all knew it together – I think even Mis’ Sykes knew – and we stood there steeped in the knowing. And it was one of the minutes when the thing we’ve made out of living falls clean away, like a husk and a shell, and the Shining Thing inside comes close and says: “This is the way I am if you’ll let me be it.”

Away over on the edge of the Square somebody’s voice, a man’s voice – we never knew who it was – begun singing “Home Again, From a Distant Shore.” And everybody all over took it up soft. And standing there round the Christmas tree in the middle of June, with that little child in our midst, it was as true for us as ever it was on Christmas night, that glory shone around. And we had come Home in more senses than we’d thought, to a place, a Great Place, that was waiting for us.

Pretty soon I slipped away, inside Eppleby’s booth. And there, in all that scarlet bunting, Lisbeth stood, looking and crying, all alone – but crying for being glad.

“Lisbeth, Lisbeth!” I said, “right out there is the way life is —when we can get it uncovered.”

She looked up at me; and I saw the thing in her face that was in the faces of all those in the Square, like believing and like hoping, more than any of us knows how – yet.

“Honest?” she said. “Honest and truly?”

“Honest and truly,” I told her.

And I believe that. And you believe it. If only we can get it said…