Neighborhood Stories

“Ain’t you now?” I says. “I thought it was kind of a game with you.”

“What do you mean – game?” says Silas, scowling.

“Cat and mouse,” I says brief. “You the cat and Bitty Marshall the mouse.”

Silas stood up straight and just towered at me.

“What you been hearing now?” he says, demandful.

“Well,” I answered him, “nothing that surprised me very much. Only that you’ve been underselling Bitty so’s to drive him out and keep the trade of the Flats yourself.”

Silas never squinched.

“Well,” says he, “what if I have? Ain’t I got a right to protect my own business?”

I looked him square in the eye.

“No,” I says, “not that way.”

Silas put back his head and laughed, tolerant.

“I guess,” he says, “you ain’t been following very close the business affairs of this country.”

“Following them was how I come to understand about you,” I says simple. And I might have added, “And knowing about you, I can see how it is with them.”

For all of a sudden, I see how he thought of these things, and for a minute it et up my breath. It had always seemed to me that men that done things like this to other folks’s little business was wicked men in general. That they kind of got behind being legal and grinned out at folks and said: “Do your worst. You can’t stop us.” But now I see, like a blast of light, that it was no such thing; but that most of them was probably good husbands and fathers, like Silas; industrious, frugal, members of the Common Councils and of the school boards, elders in the church, charitable, kindly, and believing simple as the day that what they was doing was for the good of business. Business.

“Well,” Silas was saying, “what you going to do about it?”

I looked back at Marne Holcomb standing, nervous, over by the cranberry barrel:

“I’ve got this to do about it,” I says, “and I know Mame Holcomb has, and between us we can get every woman in Friendship Village to do the same – unless it is your wife that can’t help herself like lots of women can’t: Unless you get your foot off Bitty’s neck, every last one of us will quit buying of you and go down to the Flats and trade with Bitty. How about it, Mame?”

She spoke up, like them little women do sometimes that you ain’t ever looked upon as particularly special when it comes to taking a stand.

“Why, yes,” she says. “They ain’t a woman in the village that would stand that kind of dealing, if they only knew. And we,” she adds tranquil, “could see to that.”

Silas give the date-word he was making a throw over on to the sugar barrel, and made a wild gesture with a handful of toothpicks.

“Women,” he says, “dum women. If it wasn’t for you women swarming over the world like different kinds of – of – of – noxious insects, it would be a regular paradise.”

“Sure it would,” I says logical, “because there wouldn’t be a man in it to mess it up.”

Silas had just opened his mouth to reply, when all of a sudden, like a letter in your box, somebody come and stood in the doorway – a man, and called out something, short and sharp and ending in “Come on – all of you,” and disappeared out again, and we heard him running down the street. Then we saw two-three more go running by the door, and we heard some shouting. And Silas, that must have guessed at what they said, he started off behind them, dragging on his sear-sucker coat and holding his soft felt hat in his mouth, it not seeming to occur to him that he could set it on his head till he was ready to use it.

“What’s the matter?” I says to Mis’ Holcomb. “They must be getting excited because nothing ever happens here. They ain’t nothing else to get excited over that I can think of.”

Then we see more men come running, and their boots clumped down on the loose board walk with that special clump and thud that boots gets to ’em when they’re running with bad news, or hurrying for help.

“What is it?” I says, getting to the door. And I see men begin to come out of the stores and get in knots and groups that you can tell mean trouble of some kind, just as plain as you can tell that some portraits of total strangers is the portraits of somebody that’s dead. They look dead. And them groups looked trouble. And then I see Timothy Toplady come tearing down the road in his spring wagon, with his horse’s check reins all dragging and him lashing out at ’em as he stood up in the box. Then I run right out in the road and yelled at him.

“Timothy,” I says, “what’s the matter? What’s happened?”

He drew up his horses, and threw out his hand, beckoning angular.

“Come on!” he says, “get in here – get in quick…”

Then he looked back over his shoulder and see Mis’ Merriman that had come out to her gate with Mis’ Sykes, and they was both out on the street, looking, and he beckoned, wild, to them; and they come running.

“Quick!” says Timothy. “The dam’s broke. They’ve just telephoned everybody. The Flats’ll be flooded. Come on and help them women load their things…”

I don’t remember any of us saying a thing. We just clomb in over the back-board of Timothy’s wagon, him reaching down to help us, courteous, and we set down on the bottom of the wagon – Mis’ Holcomb and Mis’ Sykes, them two enemies, and Mis’ Merriman and me – and we headed for the Flats.

I remember, on the ride down there, seeing the street get thick with folks – in a minute the street was black with everybody, all hurrying toward what was the matter, and all veering out and swarming into the road – somehow, folks always flows over into the road when anything happens. And men and women kept coming out of houses, and calling to know what was the matter, and everybody shouted it back at them so’s they couldn’t understand, but they come out and joined in and run anyway. And over and over, as he drove, Timothy kept shouting to us how he had just been hitching up when the news come, and how his wagon was a new one and had ought to be able to cart off five or six loads at a trip.

“It can’t hurt Friendship Village proper,” I remember his saying over and over too, “that’s built high and dry. But the whole Flats’ll be flooded out of any resemblance to what they’ve been before.”

“Friendship Village proper,” I says over to myself, when we got to the top of Elephant Hill that let us look over the Pump pasture and away across the Flats, laying idle and not really counted in the town till it come to the tax list. There was dozens of little houses – the Marshalls and the Betts’s and the Rickers’s and the Hennings and the Doles and the Haskitts, and I donno who all. All our washings was done down there – or at least the washings was of them that didn’t do them themselves. The garden truck of them that didn’t have gardens, the home grown vegetables for Silas’s store, the hired girls’ homes of them that had hired girls, the rag man, the scissors grinder, Lowry that canes chairs and was always trying to sell us tomato plants – you know how that part of a town is populationed? And then there was a few that worked in Silas’s factory, and an outlaying milkman or two – and so on. “Friendship Village proper,” I says over and looked down and wondered why the Flats was improper enough to be classed in – laying down there in the morning sun, with nice, neat little door-yards and nice, neat little wreaths of smoke coming up out of their chimneys – and the whole Mad river loose and just going to swirl down on it and lap it up, exactly as hungry for it as if it had been Friendship Village “proper.”

They was running out of their little houses, up towards us, coming with whatever they had, with children, with baskets between ’em, with little animals, with bed-quilts tied and filled with stuff. Some few we see was busy loading their things up on to the second floor, but most of ’em didn’t have any second floors, so they was either running up the hill or getting a few things on to the roof. It wasn’t a big river – we none of us or of them was afraid of any loss of life or of houses being tipped over or like that. But we knew there’d be two-three feet of water over their ground floors by noon.

“Land, land,” says Mis’ Sykes, that’s our best housekeeper, “and I ’spose it’s so late lots of ’em had their Spring cleaning done.”

“I was thinkin’ of that,” says Mis’ Holcomb, her enemy.

“But then it being so late most of ’em has got their winter vegetables et out of their sullars,” says Mis’ Merriman, trying to hunt out the bright side.

“That’s true as fate, Mis’ Merriman,” I remember I says, agreeing with her fervent.

And us two pairs of feuds talked about it, together, till we got down into the Flats and begun helping ’em load.

We filled up the wagon with what they had ready, tied up and boxed up and in baskets or thrown in loose, and Timothy started back with the first load, Mis’ Haskitt calling after him pitiful to be careful not to stomp on her best black dress that she’d started off with in her arms, and then trusted to the wagon and gone back to get some more. Timothy was going to take ’em up to the top of Elephant Hill and dump ’em there by appointment, and come back for another load, everybody sorting their own out of the pile later, as best they could. While he was gone we done things up for folks like wild and I donno but like mad, and had a regular mountain of ’em out on the walk when he come driving back; but when we got that all loaded on, out come Mis’ Ben Dole, running with a whole clothes bars full of new-ironed clothes and begged Timothy to set ’em right up on top of the load, just as they was, and representing as they did Two Dollars’ worth of washing and ironing for her, besides the value of the clothes that mustn’t be lost. And Timothy took ’em on for her, and drove off balancing ’em with one hand, and all the clothes blowing gentle in the breeze.

I looked over to Mis’ Holcomb, all frantic as she was, and it was so she looked at me.

“That was Ben Dole’s wife that Timothy done that for,” I says, to be sure we meant the same thing. “Just as if he hadn’t never harmed her husband’s cement plant.”

“I know,” says Mis’ Holcomb. “Don’t that beat the very day to a froth?” and she went on emptying Mis’ Dole’s bureau drawers into a bed-spread.

By the time the fourth load or so had gone on, and the other wagons that had come was working the same way, the water was seeping along the Lower Road, down past the wood-yard. More than one was saying we’d ought to begin to make tracks for high ground, because likely when it come, it’d come with a rush. And some of us had stepped out on the street and was asking Silas, that you kind of turn to in emergency, because he’s the only one that don’t turn to anybody else, whether we hadn’t better go, when down the street we see a man come tearing like mad.

“My land,” I says, “it’s Bitty Marshall. He wasn’t home. And where’s his wife? I ain’t laid eyes on her.”

None of us had seen her that morning. And us that stood together broke into a run, and it was Silas and Mis’ Merriman and me that run together, and rushed together up the stairs of Bitty’s little grocery, to where he lived, and into the back room. And there set Bessie Marshall in the back room, putting her baby to sleep as tranquil as the blue sky and not knowing a word of what was going on, and by the window was Bitty’s old mother, shelling pop-corn.

I never see anybody work like Silas worked them next few minutes. If he’d been a horse and a giant made one he couldn’t have got more quick, necessary things out of the way. And we done what we could, and it wasn’t any time at all till we was going down the stairs carrying what few things they’d most need for the next few days. When we stepped out in the street, the water was an inch or more all over where we stood, and when we’d got six steps from the house and Bitty had gone ahead shouting to the wagon, Bessie Marshall looked up at Silas real pitiful.

“Oh, Mr. Sykes,” she says, “there’s a coop of little chickens and their mother by the back door. Couldn’t we take ’em?”

“Sure,” says Silas, and when the wagon come he made it wait for us, and when the Marshalls and the baby and Mis’ Merriman was seated in it, and me, he come running with the coopful of little yellow scraps, and we was the last wagon to leave the Flats and to get up to Elephant Hill again.

“But, oh,” says Mis’ Merriman grieving, “it seems like us women could do such a little bit of the rescuing. Oh, when it’s a flood or a fire or a runaway, I do most question Providence as to why we wasn’t all born men.”

You know how it is, when a great big thing comes catastrophing down on you, it just eats up the edges of the thing you think with, and leaves you with nothing but the wish-bone of your brain operating, kind of flabby. But when we got up on top of Elephant Hill, where was everybody – folks from the Flats, and a good deal of what they owned put into a pile, and the folks from Friendship “proper” come to watch – there was Mis’ Timothy Toplady already planning what to do, short off. Mis’ Toplady can always connect up what’s in her head with what’s outside of it and – what’s rarer still – with what’s lacking outside of it.

“These folks has got to be fed,” she says, “for the days of the high water. Bed and breakfast of course we can manage among us, but the other two meals is going to be some of a trick. So be Silas would leave us have Post Office hall free, we could order the stuff sent in right there, and all turn in and cook it.”

“Oh, my,” says Mis’ Holcomb, soft, to me, “he’ll never do that. He’ll say it’ll set a precedent, and what he does for one he’ll have to do for all. It’s a real handy dodge.”

“Well,” says Mis’ Merriman, “leave him set a precedent for himself for floods. We won’t expect it off him other.”

“I ain’t never yet seen him,” I says, “carrying a chicken coop without he meant to sell chickens. Mebbe’s he’s got a change of heart. Let’s ask him,” I says, and I adds low to Mis’ Toplady that I’d asked Silas for so many things that he wouldn’t give or do that I could almost do it automatic, and I’d just as lives ask him again as not.

It wasn’t but a minute till him and Timothy come by, each estimating how fast the river would raise. And I spoke up right then.

“Silas,” I says, “had you thought how we’re going to feed these folks till the water goes down?”

I fully expected him to snarl out something like he usually does, about us women being frantic to assume responsibility. Instead of that he looked down at us thoughtful:

“Well,” says he, “that’s just what I’ve been studying on some. And I was thinking that if you women would cook the stuff, us men would chip in and buy the material. And wouldn’t it be some easier to cook it all in one place? I could let you have the Post Office hall, if you say so.”

“Why, Silas,” I says, “Silas …” And I couldn’t say another word. And it was the rest of ’em let him know that we’d do it. And when they’d gone on,

“Do you think Timothy sensed that?” says Mis’ Toplady, meditative.

“I donno,” says I, “but I can see to it that he does.”

“I was only thinking,” says she, “that we’ve got seven dozen fresh eggs in the house, and we’re getting six quarts of milk a day now…”

“I’ll recall ’em,” says I, “to his mind.”

But when I’d run ahead and caught up with ’em, and mentioned eggs and milk suggestive, in them quantities,

“Sure,” says Timothy, “I just been telling Silas he could count on ’em.”

And that was a wonderful thing, for we one and all knew Timothy Toplady as one of them decanter men that the glass stopper can’t hardly be got out. But it wasn’t the most wonderful – for Silas spoke up fervent – ferventer than I’d ever known him to speak:

“They can have anything we’ve got, Calliope,” he says, “in our stores or our homes. Make ’em know that,” says he.

It didn’t take me one secunt to pull Silas aside.

“Silas,” I says, “oh, Silas – is what you just said true? Because if it’s true – won’t you let it last after the water goes down? Won’t you let Bitty keep his store?”

He looked down at me, frowning a little. One of the little yellow chicks in the coop got out between the bars just then, and was just falling on its nose when he caught it – I s’pose bill is more biologic, but it don’t sound so dangerous – and he was tucking it back in, gentle, with its mother, while he answered me, testy:

“Lord, Calliope,” he says, “a flood’s a flood. Can’t you keep things separate?”

“No, sir,” I says, “I can’t. Nor I don’t believe the Lord can either.”

Ain’t it like things was arranged to happen in patterns, same as crystals? For it was just in them next two minutes that two things happened: The first was that a boy came riding over on his wheel from the telegraph office and give a telegram to Timothy. And Timothy opened it and waved it over his head, and come with it over to us:

“First contribution for the flood-suffers!” says he. “They telephoned the news over to Red Barns and listen at this: ‘Put me down for Twenty-five dollars towards the flood folks food. Zachariah Roper.’ ”

I looked over to Timothy straight.

“Zachariah Roper,” I says, “that owns the cement plant that some of the Flat folks got in the way of?”

Timothy jerked his shoulder distasteful. “The idear,” says he, “of bringin’ up business at a time like this.”

With that I looked over at Silas, and I see him with the scarcest thing in the world for him – a little pinch of a smile on his face. Just for a minute he met my eyes. Then he looked down to get his hand a little farther away from where the old hen in the coop had been picking it.

And the other thing that happened was that up in front of me come running little Mrs. Bitty Marshall, and her eyes was full of tears.

“Oh, Mis’ Marsh,” she says, “what do you s’pose I done? I come off and left my lace curtain. I took it down first thing and pinned it up in a paper to bring. And then I come off and left it.”

Before I could say a word Silas answered her:

“The water’ll never get up that far, Mis’ Marshall,” he says, “don’t you worry. Don’t you worry one bit. But,” says he, “if anything does happen to it, Mis’ Marshall, I’ll tell you now you can have as good a one as we’ve got in the store, on me. There now, you’ve had a present to-day a’ready!”

I guess she thanked him. I donno. All I remember is that pretty soon everybody begun to move towards town and I moved with ’em. And while we walked the whole thing kind of begun to take hold of me, what it meant, and things that had been coming to me all the morning came to me all together – and I wanted to chant ’em a chant, like Deborah (but pronounced Déborah when it’s a relative). And I wanted to say:

“O Lord, look down on these eighty families, old and young and real young, that we’ve lived neighbor to all our lives, and yet we don’t know half of ’em, either by name or by face, till now. Till now!

“And some of them we do know individual has showed up here to-day with a back-ground of families, wives and children they’ve got, just like anybody – Tippie that drives the dray and that’s helped moved everybody; for twelve years he’s moved my refrigerator out and my cook stove in, and vicious verses, as regular as Spring come and Autumn arrived; and there all the time he had a wife, with a cameo pin, and three little Tippies in plaid skirts and pink cheeks, asking everybody for a drink of water just like your own child, and one of ’em so nice that he might of been anybody’s instead of just Tippie’s.

“And Mamie Felt, that does up lace curtains of them that can afford to have ’em done up and dries ’em on a frame so’s they hang straight and not like a waterfall with its expression blowing sideways, same as mine do – there’s Mamie with her old mother and a cripple brother that we’ve never guessed about, and that she was doing for all the whole time.

“And Absalom Ricker’s old mother, that’s mourning bitter because she left her coral pin with a dog on behind on the Flats that her husband give it to her when they was engaged … and we knew she was married, but not one of us had thought of her as human enough ever to have been engaged. And Mis’ Haskitt with her new black dress, and Mis’ Dole with her clean-ironed clothes bars, and Mis’ Bitty Marshall with her baby and her little chickens and her lace curtain, and Bitty with his grocery store.

“Lord, we thank thee for letting us see them, and all the rest of ’em, close up to.

“We’re glad that now just because the Mad river flowed into the homes that we ain’t often been in or ever, if any, and drove up to us the folks that we’ve never thought so very much about, we’re glad to get the feeling that I had when I heard our grocery-boy knew how to hand-carve wood and our mail man was announced to sing a bass solo, that we never thought they had any regular lives, separate from milk and mail.

“And let us keep that feeling, O Lord! Amen.”

And I says right out of the fullness of the lump in my throat:

“Don’t these folks seem so much more folks than they ever did before?”

Mis’ Merriman that was near me, answered up:

“Why, of course,” she says, “they’re in trouble. Ain’t you no compassion to you?”

“Some,” says I, modest, “but where’d that compassion come from? It didn’t just grow up now, did it? – like Abraham’s gourd, or whoever it was that had one?”

“Why, no,” she says irritable. “It’s in us all, of course. But it takes trouble to bring it out.”

“Why does it take trouble to bring it out?” I says and I looked ahead at us all a-streaming down Daphne Street, just like it was some nice human doings. “Why does it? Here’s us all, and it only takes a minute to get us all going, with our hands in our pockets and lumps in our throats and our sympathy just as busy as it ever was for our little family in-four-walls affairs. Now,” I says, “that love and sympathy, and them pockets and them throats are all here, just the same, day after day. What I want to know is, what are them things doing with themselves when nobody is in active trouble?”

And then I said my creed:

“O, when we get to working as hard to keep things from happening as we work when it’s happened, won’t living be fun?”

“Well, of course we couldn’t prevent floods,” says Mis’ Merriman, “and them natural things.”

“Shucks!” I says, simple. “If we knew as much about frosts and hurricanes as we do about comets – we’d show you. And do you think it’s any harder to bank in a river than it is to build a subway —if there was the same money in it for the company?”

Just then the noon whistles blew – all of ’em together, round-house and brick-yard, so’s you couldn’t tell ’em apart; and the sun come shining down on us all, going along on Daphne Street. And all of a sudden Mis’ Merriman looked over to me and smiled, and so I done to her, and I saw that our morning together and our feeling together had made us forget whatever there’d been between us to forget about. And I ain’t ever in my life felt so kin to folks. I felt kinner than I knew I was.

That night, tired as I was, I walked over to see Mis’ Sykes’s night-blooming cereus – I don’t see enough pretty things to miss one when I can get to it. And there, sitting on Mis’ Sykes’s front porch, with her shoes slipped off to rest her feet, was Mis’ Holcomb-that-was-Mame Bliss.

“Mis’ Sykes is out getting in a few pieces she washed out and forgot,” says Mame, “and the Marshalls is all down town in a body sending a postal to say they’re safe. Silas went too.”

“The Marshalls!” says I. “Are they here?”

Mame nodded. “Silas asked ’em,” she says. “Him and Bitty’ve been looking over grocery stock catalogues. Silas’s been advising him some.”

Mame and I smiled in concert. But whether the flood done it, or whether we done it – who cared?

“But, land, you, Mame!” I says. “I thought you – I thought Mis’ Sykes…”

“I know it,” says Mame. “I was. She did. But the first thing I knew to-day, there we was peeling potatoes together in the same pan, and we done it all afternoon. I guess we kind of forgot about our bad feeling…”

I set there, smiling in the dark… I donno whether you know a village, along toward night, with the sky still pink, and folks watering their front lawns and calling to each other across the streets, and a little smell of bon-fire smoke coming from somewheres? It was like that. And when Mis’ Sykes come to tell us the flower was beginning to bloom, I says to myself that there was lots more in bloom in the world than any of us guessed.

THE PARTY