Neighborhood Stories

“Shucks,” says Mis’ Toplady, short. She’d made upwards of ninety griddle cakes by then, and she was getting kind of flustered and crispy.

“Shucks?” says Mis’ Sykes, haughty and questioning, and all but in two syllables.

“If that’s all the law is,” says Mis’ Toplady, beating away at her pancake batter, “give me anar-kicky, or whatever it is they call it.”

Mis’ Sykes never said a word. She just went on making syrup, reproachful. Mis’ Sykes is one of them that acts like life was made up of the pattern of things, and like speaking of warf and woof wasn’t delicate. And she never so much as lets on they is such a thing as a knot. Yes, some folks is like that. But not me – not me.

It was ’most half-past seven o’clock when the bird-man was ready. Like a big bug the machine looked, with spidery, bent legs and wings spread ready and no head necessary. And when he finally run it off down the square and headed towards the Pump pasture, my heart sunk some. My land, I thought, it can’t be a real true one. I guess there are them, but this right here on the market square can’t be one.

Since the world begun, there ain’t a more wonderful minute for folks than the minute when they first see some kind of flying-machine leave the ground —leave the ground! It’s like seeing the future come true right in your face. The thing done it so gentle and so simple that you’d of thought it was invented when legs was. It lifted itself up in the air, like by its own boot-straps, and it went up and up and up, just like going up was its own alphabet. It went and it kept going, its motor buzzing and purring, softer and softer. And pretty soon the blue that it was going up to meet seemed to come down and meet it, and the two sort of joined, and the big, wide gold morning flowed all over them, and the first thing I knew the bird-man’s machine and him in it looked like just what I had said: an eagle of the Lord, soaring to meet the sun like a friend of its.

I couldn’t bear it any more. It seemed to me as if, if I should look any longer, I should all of a sudden have ten senses instead of five, and they’d explode me. I looked away and down. And when I done that, all at once there I was looking right into the face of all the folks in Friendship Village. Heads back, a sea of little white dabs that was faces, and hearts beating underneath where you couldn’t see ’em – all of us was standing there breathless, feeling just alike. Feeling just alike and being just alike, underneath that wonderful thing happening in the sky… And all of a sudden, while I looked at them, the faces all blurred and wiggled, and it seemed like I was looking into only one face, the face of Friendship Village, like a person…

I see it, like I’d never seen it before. While we watched, we was one person. When we was all thinking about the same thing, there was only one of us. And the more wonderful things that come into the world and took hold of everybody, the more one we was going to get and to stay. And this, all vague inside of us, I knew now was what us ladies had meant by what we’d planned. Didn’t it seem – didn’t it seem as if them that watched had ought to stay one– that decent, wondering, almost reverent one, long enough to vote decent and wondering and reverent for their town?

Right while my heart was beating with it all, the little buzzing and purring of the motor, away up there in the blue, stopped short off. My eyes flew up again, and I see the bird-man coming down. He was up so high that he was a dot, and he grew and grew like a thing being born in the sky – right down towards us and on us he come like a shot, a shot-down shot. Nobody breathed. I couldn’t see. But I looked and looked and dreaded… And not eight hundred feet from the ground he begun coming down easy, and he come the rest of the way as gentle as a bird, and lit where he rose from.

Oh, how they cheered him – like one man! Like one man. Lem Toplady and Jimmy Sturgis, Jr., and the boys that was out in the field went and shook his hand – like the servants, I thought in the middle of my head, of some great new order. And I was thinking so deep and so breathless that I ’most forgot the band till it crashed right out behind us, playing loud and fine that Marseilles French piece, like we’d told them. And when it done that, up hopped the children that it give the cue to, and there in the midst of us they struck in, singing loud and clear the words they sung in school to that old tune, with its wonderful tang to it, that slips to your heels with its music and makes you want to go start something and to start it then:

“Come, Children of To-morrow, come!New glory dawns upon the world.The ancient banners must be furled.The earth becomes our common home —The earth becomes our common home.From plain and field and town there soundThe stirring rumors of the day.Old wrongs and burdens must make wayFor men to tread the common ground.“Look up! The children win to their immortal place.March on, march on – within the ranks of all the human race.“Come, love of people, for the partInvest our willing arms with might.Mother of Liberty, shed lightAs on the land, so in the heart —As on the land, so in the heart.Divided, we have long withstoodThe love that is our common speech.The comrade cry of each to eachIs calling us to humanhood.”

Hum it to the tune of that Marseilles piece, and you’ll know how we was all feeling. By the time they got down to their last two lines, my throat was about the size of my head.

And then the bird-man got back in his little sulky seat, and he waved his hand to us, and he left his machine run down the field, and lift, and head straight for open country. His way lay, it seemed, right acrost Friendship Village; and he’d no more’n started before the band started too, playing the tune that by now was in everybody’s veins. And behind them the children fell in, singing again, and with the people streaming behind them they all marched off down Daphne Street – where the little shops lay waiting to be opened, and the polls was waiting to be voted in, and Friendship Village was waiting for us to know it was a town, like it meant.

All us ladies went to scraping up plates like fury. Excep’ Mis’ Toplady. She stood for a minute wiping her eyes on a paper napkin. And she says:

“Oh, ladies. I ain’t never felt so much like a human being since I was born one.”

And me, I stood there looking across the Market Square to the school-house. There it was, with its doors open and the new voting machine setting in the hall, – they’d took the polls out of the barber shop and the livery stable sole because the voting machine got in the way of trade. They’d put it in the school-house. And it was to the school-house that the men were going now.

“Oh,” I says to Mis’ Toplady, “would you think anybody could go in a child’s school-house, and vote for anybody that – ”

“No, no,” she says, “you wouldn’t think so, would you?”

But she didn’t look at me. She was looking over to the school-house steps. Lem Toplady stood there, and Jimmy Sturgis, Jr., and Hugh Merriman and Mis’ Uppers’s boy – watching the last of the bird-man and the air-wagon flying down the sky. When it had gone, the four boys turned and went together up the steps of the school-house. And Mis’ Toplady and Mis’ Sturgis and Mis’ Fire Chief Merriman and Mis’ Uppers stood and watched them – going in to vote now, to the place where the four mothers had seen them go ever since they were little bits of boys, with faces and clothes to be kept clean, and lessons to learn, and lunch baskets to fill. Then the mothers could either do these things for them – or anyway help along. Now they stood there doing nothing, watching, while their boys went in to do their first vote – into the school-house where they’d learned their A B C’s.

“Ain’t that – ain’t it just – ?” I says low to Mis’ Toplady; and kind of stopped.

“Ain’t it?” she says, fervent and low too. “Oh, ain’t it?”

“The time’ll come,” I says, “when you mothers, and me too, will go in there with them. And when we’ll go straight from a great public meeting – like this – to a great public business like that. And when it comes – ”

We all looked at one another – all but Mis’ Silas Sykes, that was busy with the syrup pitchers. But the thing was over the rest of us – the lift and the courage and the belief of that hour we’d all had together. And I says out:

“Oh, ladies! I believe in us. I believe in us.”

So I tell you, I wasn’t surprised at what that day done. I dunno for sure what done it. Mebbe it was just the common sense in folks that I cannot get over believing in. Mebbe it was the cores of their minds that I know is sound, no matter how many soft spots disfigures their brains. Mebbe it was the big power and the big glory that’s near us, waiting to be drawn-on-and-used as fast as we learn how to do it – no, I dunno for sure. But they put Eppleby Holcomb in for mayor. Eppleby got in, to mayor the town! And some said it was because the boys that was to cast their first vote had got out, last minute, and done some hustling, unbeknownst. And some thought it was because Threat and ’Lish couldn’t wait, but done a little private celebrating together in Threat’s hotel bar the night before election. And others said election always is some ticklish – they give that reason.

But me – I went and stood out on my side porch that election-day night, a-looking down Daphne Street to the village. There it lay, with its arc light shining blue by the Market Square, and it was being a village, with nobody looking and all its folks in its houses, just like the family around that one evening lamp. And their hearts was beating along about the same things; just like they had beat that day for the sky-wagon, and for the Marseilles French piece. Only they didn’t know it – yet.

And I says right out loud to the village – just like Friendship Village was a person, with its face turned toward me, listening:

“Why, you ain’t half of us – nor you ain’t some of us. You’re all of us! And you must of known it all the time.”

THE FLOOD

It’s “brother” now and it’s “brother” then,And it’s “brother” another day,And it’s “brother” whenever a loud doom soundsWith a terrible toll to pay…But what of the silent dooms they bearIn an inoffensive way?It’s “brother” here and it’s “brother” there,And it’s “brother” once in a while,And it’s “brother” whenever an hour hangs blackOn the face of the common dial…But what of the days that stretch betweenFor the march of the rank and file?

I don’t know how well you know villages, but I hope you know anyhow one, because if you don’t they’s things to life that you don’t know yet. Nice things.

I was thinking of that the Monday morning that all Friendship Village remembers still. I was walking down Daphne Street pretty early, seeing everybody’s breakfast fire smoke coming out of the kitchen chimney and hearing everybody’s little boy splitting wood and whistling out in the chip pile, and smelling everybody’s fried mush and warmed-up potatoes and griddle cakes come floating out sort of homely and old fashioned and comfortable, from the kitchen cook-stoves.

“Look at the Family,” I says to myself, “sitting down to breakfast, all up and down the street.”

And when the engine-house clock struck seven, and the whistle over to the brick-yard blew little and peepy and like it wasn’t sure it was seven but it thought so, and the big whistle up to the round-house blew strong and hoarse and like it knew it all and could tell you more about the time of day then you’d ever guessed if it wanted to, and the sun come shining down like the pouring out of some new thing that we’d never had before – I couldn’t help drawing a long breath, just because Now was Now.

Down the walk a little ways I met Bitty Marshall. I wondered a little at seeing him on the street way up our end o’ town. He’d lately opened a little grocery store down on the Flats, for the Folks that lived down there. Him and his wife lived overhead, with a lace curtain to one of the front windows – though they was two front windows to the room. “I’ve always hankered for a pair o’ lace curtains,” she said to me when I went up to see her one day, “but when I’d get the money together to buy ’em, it seems like somethin’ has always come and et it up – medicine or school books or the children’s shoes. So when we moved in here, I says I was goin’ to have one lace curtain to one window if I board the other up!” And she had one to one window, and a green paper shade to the other.

“Well, Bitty,” I says, “who’s keeping store to-day? Your wife?”

But he didn’t smile gay, like he usually does. He looked just regular.

“Neither of us’ll be doing it very long,” he said. “I’ve got to close down.”

“But I thought it was paying you nice?” I says.

“And so it was,” says Bitty, “till Silas Sykes took a hand. He didn’t have a mind to see me run no store down there and take away his trade from the Flats. He begun under-sellin’ me – he’s been runnin’ everything off at cost till I can’t hold out no longer.”

“So that’s what Silas Sykes has been slashin’ down everything for, from prunes upwards,” I says. “I might of known. I might of known.”

“My interest is comin’ due,” says Bitty, movin’ on; “I’ve come up this mornin’ to see about going back to work in the brick-yard.”

“Good land,” I says sorrowful. “Good land. And Silas in the Council – and on the School Board – and an elder thrown in.”

Bitty grinned a little then.

“It ain’t new,” he says, over his shoulder. And he went on up the street, holding his hands heavy, and kind of letting his feet fall instead of setting them down, like men walk that don’t care, any more.

I understood what he meant when he said it wasn’t new. There was Joe Betts that worked three years getting his strawberry bed going, and when he begun selling from the wagon instead of taking to Silas Sykes at the Post-Office store, Silas got the Council that he’s in to put up licenses, clear over Joe’s head. And Ben Dole, he’d got a little machine and begun making cement blocks for folks’s barns, and Timothy Toplady, that’s interested in the cement works over to Red Barns, got Zachariah Roper, that’s to the head of the Red Barns plant, to come over and buy Ben Dole’s house and come up on his rent – two different times he done that. It wasn’t new. But it all kind of baffled me. It seemed so legal that I couldn’t put down my finger on what was the matter. Of course when a thing’s legal, and you’re anyways patriotic, you are some put to it to find a real good term to blame it with. I walked along, thinking about it, and feeling all baffled up as to what to do. But I hadn’t gone ten steps when I thought of one thing I could do, to clear up my own i-dees if for nothing else. I turned around and called out after Bitty.

“Oh, Bitty,” I says, “would you mind me letting Silas know I know?”

He threw out his hands a little, and let ’em kind of set down side of him.

“Why sure not,” he said, “but if you’re thinkin’ of saying anything to him – best spare the breath.”

“We’ll see about that,” I thought, and I went on down Daphne Street with a Determination sitting up in the air just ahead of me, beginning to crook its finger at me to come along.

In a minute I come past Mis’ Fire Chief Merriman’s house. The Chief has been dead several years, but we always keep calling her by his title, same as we call the vacant lot by the depot the Ellsworth House, though the Ellsworth House has been burned six years and it’s real kind of confusing to strangers that we try to direct. I remember one traveling man that headed right out towards the marsh and missed his train because some of us had told him to keep straight on till he turned the corner by the Ellsworth House, and he kept hunting for it and trusting in it till he struck the swamp. But you know how it is – you get to saying one thing, and you keep on uttering it after the thing is dead and gone and another has come in its place, and when somebody takes you up on it, like as not you’ll tell him he ain’t patriotic. It was the same with the Fire Chief. Dead though he was, we always give her his official title, because we’d got headed calling her that and hated to stop. She was out in her garden that morning, and I stood still when I caught sight of her tulips. They looked like the earth had broke open and let out a leak of what’s inside it, never intending to show so much at once.

“Mis’ Merriman,” I says, “what tulips! Or,” says I, flattering, “is it a bon-fire, with lumps in the flame?”

Mis’ Merriman was bending over, setting out her peony bulbs, with her back to me. When I first spoke, she looked over her shoulder, and then she went right on setting them out, hard as she could dig. “Glad you like something that belongs to me,” says she, her words kind of punched out in places by the way she dug.

Then I remembered. Land, I’d forgot all about it. But at the last meeting of the Friendship Married Ladies’ Cemetery Improvement Sodality – we don’t work for just Cemetery any more, but we got started calling it that twenty years back, and on we go under that name, serene as a straight line – at that last meeting I’d appointed Mis’ Timothy Toplady a committee of one to go to the engine-house to get them to leave us sell garbage pails at cost in the front part; and it seems Mis’ Merriman had give out that she’d ought to be the one to do it, along of her husband having been Fire Chief for eleven years and more, and she might have influence with ’em. I’d of known that too, if I’d thought of it – but you know how it is when they pitch on to you to appoint a committee from the chair? All your i-dees and your tact and your memory and your sense takes hold of hands and exits out of you, and you’re left up there on the platform, unoccupied by any of ’em – and ten to one you’ll appoint the woman with the thing in her hat that first attracts your attention. Mebbe it ain’t that way with some, but I’ve noticed how it is with me, and that day I’d appointed Mis’ Toplady to that committee sole because she passed her cough-drops just at that second and my eye was drawed acrost to them and to her. I’d never meant to slight Mis’ Fire Chief and I felt nothing on this earth but kindness to her, and yet when I heard her speak so, all crispy and chilly and uppish, about being glad I liked something about her, all to once my veins sort of run starch, and my bones lay along in me like they was meant for extra pokers, and I flashed out back at her:

“Oh, yes, Mis’ Merriman – your tulips is all right – ” bringing my full heft down on the word “tulips.”

And then I went on up the street with something – something – something inside me, or outside me, or mebbe just with me, looking at me, simple and grave and direct and patient and – wounded again. And I felt kind of sick, along up and down my chest. And the back of my head begun to hurt. And I breathed fast and without no pleasure in taking air. And I says to myself and the world and the Something Else:

“Oh, God, creator of heaven and earth that’s still creatin’ ’em as fast as we’ll get our meannesses out of the way and let you go on —what made me do that?”

And nothing told me what – not then.

Just then I see Mis’ Holcomb-that-was-Mame Bliss come out on their side porch and hang out the canary. I waved my hand acrost to her, and she whips off her big apron and shakes it at me, and I see she was feeling the sun shine clear through her, just like I’d been.

“Come on down with me while I do an errant,” I calls to her.

“My table ain’t cleared off yet,” says she, decisive.

“Mine either,” I says back. “But ain’t you just as fond of the sun in heaven as you are of your own breakfast dishes? Come on.”

So she took off her apron and run in and put on a breastpin and come down the walk, rolling down her sleeves, and dabbing at her hair to make sure, and we went down the street together. And the first thing I done was to burst out with my thoughts all over her, and I told her about Silas and about Bitty Marshall, and about how his little store on the Flats was going to shut down.

“Well,” she says, “if that ain’t Silas all over. If it ain’t Silas. I could understand his dried fruit sales, ’long toward Spring so – it’s easy to be reasonable about dried peaches when its most strawberry time. I could even understand his sales on canned stuff he’s had in the store till the labels is all fly-specked. But when he begun to cut on new potatoes and bananas and Bermuda onions and them necessities, I says to myself that he was goin’ to get it back from somewheres. So it’s out o’ Bitty Marshall’s pocket, is it?”

“And it’s so legal, Mis’ Holcomb,” I says, “it’s so bitterly legal. Silas ain’t corporationed himself in with nobody. It ain’t as if the courts could get after him and some more and make them be fair to their little competitors, same as courts is fallin’ over themselves to get the chance to do. This is nothin’ but Silas – our leadin’ citizen.”

Mis’ Holcomb, she made her lips both thin and tight.

“Let’s us go see Silas,” says she, and I see my Determination was crooking its finger to her, same as to me.

Silas had gone down to the store, we found, but Mis’ Sykes was just coming out their gate with a plate of hot Johnny cake to take up to Miss Merriman.

“Oh, Mis’ Sykes,” I says, “is your night bloomin’ cereus goin’ to be out to-night, do you know? I heard it was.” The whole town always watches for Mis’ Sykes’s night-blooming cereus to bloom, and the night it comes out we always drop in and set till quite late.

Mis’ Sykes never looked at Mis’ Holcomb.

“Good morning, Calliope,” says she. “Yes, I think it will, Calliope. Won’t you come in to-night, Calliope, and see it?” says she.

I says I would; and when we went on,

“What struck her,” I says, puzzled, “to spread my name on to what she said like that, I wonder? I feel like I’d been planted in that sentence of hers in three hills.”

Then I see Mis’ Holcomb’s eyes was full of tears.

“Mis’ Sykes was trying to slight me,” she says. “She done that so’s to kind of try to seem to leave me out.”

“Well,” I says, “I must say, she sort of succeeded. But what for?”

“I give her potato bread receipt away,” she says miserable, “and it seems she didn’t expect it of me.”

“Is that it?” I says. “Well, of course we both know Mis’ Sykes ain’t the one to ever forgive a thing like that. I s’pose she’ll socially ostrich-egg you – or whatever it is they say?”

“I s’pose she will,” says Mis’ Holcomb forlorn. “You know how Mis’ Sykes is. From now on, if I say the sky is blue, Mis’ Sykes’ll say no, pink.”

They was often them feuds in Friendship Village – like this one, and like Mis’ Merriman’s and my new one. It hadn’t ought to be so in a village family, but then sometimes it is. I s’pose in cities it’s different – they always say it makes folks broader to live in cities, and they prob’ly get to know better. But it’s like that with us.

Well, of course the back-bone had dropped out of the morning for Mis’ Holcomb, and she didn’t take no more interest in going down street than she would in darning – I mention darning because I defy anybody to pick out anything uninterestinger. Up to the time I got to the Post-Office Hall store, I was trying to persuade her to come in with me to see Silas.

“I’d best not go in,” she says. “You know how one person’s quarrel is catching in a family. And a potato bread receipt is as good as anything else to be loyal about.”

But I made her go in, even if she shouldn’t say a word, but just act constituent-like.

Silas was alone in the store, sticking dates on to a green paste-board to make the word “Pure” to go over his confectionery counter. He had his coat off, and his hair had been brushed with a wet brush that left the print of the bristles, and his very back looked Busy.

“Hello, folks,” says he, “how’s life?”

“Selfish as ever,” I says. “Ain’t trade?”

“Well,” says Silas, “it’s every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost in most everything now, ain’t it? As the prophet said, It beats all.”

“It does that,” I says. “It beats everybody in the end. Funny they don’t find it out. That’s why,” I adds serene, “we been so moved by your generous cost sales of stuff, Silas. What you been doin’ that for anyway?” I put it to him.

“For to bait trade,” says he.

“For what else?” I ask’ him.

“Why,” he says, beginning to be irritable, which some folks uses instead of wit, “to push the store, of course. I ain’t been doin’ it for the fun of it.”