Gale Zona
Neighborhood Stories
“You won’t care,” says Mis’ Beach, “if I keep on with the leggings?”
“Leggings?” says I.
She nodded to the basket. “It’s bad pairs,” she said. “They leave me catch up the dropped stitches.”
“How much do they give you?” says I, brutal. If it had been Silas Sykes I’d never have dreamt of asking him how much anybody give him for anything. But – well, sometimes we hound folks and hang folks and ask folks questions, merely because they’re poor.
“Six cents a dozen,” she says.
I remember they had a fly-paper on the window sill, and the caught flies and the uncaught ones whirred and buzzed. I can see the room: The floor that sagged, the walls that cracked, the hot, nameless smell of it. And in it a woman with the strength and the figure of a race that hasn’t got here yet, and three children – one of them beautiful, and David, taking a clock to pieces and putting it together again, without ever having been taught. You know all about it – and so did I. And while I set there talking with her, I couldn’t keep my mind on anything else but that hole of a home, and the three splendid beings chained there, like folks in a bad dream. Someway I never get used to it, and I know I never shall. It makes me feel as if I was looking on the inside of a table spoon and seeing things twisted, and saying: “Already such things can’t be. Already they sound old and false – like thumbscrews!”
And the worst of it was, David’s mother was so used to it. She was so bitter used to it. And oh – don’t things turn round in the world? A few years before if somebody like me had gone to see her, I’d of been telling her to be resigned, and to make the best of her lot, and trying to give her to understand that the Lord had meant it personal. And instead, when she said she was doing nice, I longed to say to her:
“No, no, Mis’ Beach! Don’t you make that mistake. You ain’t doing nice. As long as you think you are, this world is being held back. It’s you that’s got to help folks to know that you aren’t doing nice. And to make folks wonder why.”
But I didn’t say it to her. I s’pose I haven’t got that far – yet.
She said she’d like to come to the club that Silas proposed, and Mary, she said she’d come. They didn’t question much about it – they merely accepted it and said they’d come. And I went out into the April after-supper light, with a bird or two twittering sleepy, and an orange and lemon and water-melon sunset doing its best to attract my attention, and I says out loud to April in general:
“A club. A club. So we’re going to help that house with a club.”
Then I stopped to Mis’ Cripps’s boarding house. Mis’ Cripps’s boarding house faces the railroad tracks, and I never went by there without seeing her milk bottles all set out on her porch, indelicate, like some of the kitchen lining showing. Bettie Forkaw and Libbie Collins and Rose Miller and Lizzie Lane, pickle factory girls, lived there. They were all home, out on the smoky porch, among the milk bottles, laughing and talking and having a grand time. They had sleeves above their elbows and waists turned in at the throat with ruffles of cheap lace, and hair braided in bunches over their ears and dragged low on their foreheads, and they had long, shiney beads round their necks, and square, shiney buckles on their low shoes. Betty was pretty and laughed loud and had uncovered-looking eyes. Libbie was big and strong and still. Rose was thin, and she had less blood and more bones than anybody I ever see. And Lizzie – Lizzie might have been a freshman in any college you might name. She’d have done just as good work in figures as she did in pickles – only cucumbers come her way and class-rooms didn’t.
“Hello, girls,” I says, “how are you to-night? Do you want to be a club?”
“To do what?” says they.
“Have a good time,” says I. “Have music – eat a little something – dance – read a little, maybe. And ask your friends there. A club, you know.”
After we’d talked it over, all four of ’em said yes, they wished they had some place to go evenings and wouldn’t it be fine to have some place give to ’em where they could go. I didn’t discuss it over with ’em at all – but I done the same thing I’d done before, and that I cannot believe anybody has the right to ask, no matter how rich the questioner or how poor the questionee.
“Girls,” I says, “you all work for Silas Sykes, don’t you? How much do you get a week?”
They told me ready enough: Five and Six Dollars apiece, it was.
“Gracious,” I says, “how can you use up so much?” And they laughed and thought it was a joke. And I went along to the next place – and my thoughts come slowly gathering in from the edges of my head and formed here and there in kind of clots, that got acted on by things I begun to see was happening in my town, just as casual as meat bills and grocery bills – just as casual as school bells and church bells.
For the next two days I went to see them on my list. And then nights I’d go back and sit on my porch and look over to Red Barns that was posting itself as a nice, hustling, up-to-date little town, with plenty of business opportunities. And then I’d look up and down Friendship Village that was getting ready for its Business meeting in Post-Office Hall on Friday night, and trying its best to keep up with its “business reputation.” And then I’d go on to some more homes of the workers that was keeping up their share in the commercial life of Friendship Village. And then my thoughts would bring up at Silas’s club house, with the necessary old furniture and magazines and games laid out somewheres, tasty. And the little clots of thought in my brain somehow stuck there. And I couldn’t think through them, on to what was what.
Then something happened that put a little window in the side of what was the matter with Silas’s plan. And I begun to see light.
The second night I was sitting on my porch when I heard my back gate slam. My back gate has a chain for a spring, weighted with a pail of stones, and when it slams the earth trembles, and I have time to get my hands out of the suds or dough or whatever; and it’s real handy and practical. This time there come trotting round my house David Beach. My, my but he was a nice little soul. He had bright eyes, that looked up quick as a rabbit’s. And a smile that slipped on and off, swift as a frisking squirrel. And he had little darting movements, like a chipmunk’s. There was something wild about him, like the wind. Silas’s pickle factory did seem a queer place for us to have put him.
“Look, Miss Marsh!” he says. And he was holding out his clock. “I got it all together,” he says, “and it’ll go. And it’ll go right.”
“Did you now?” I says. And it was true. He had. It did. That little alarm clock was ticking away like a jeweller-done job… Yes, Silas’s pickle factory did seem a queer place for us to have put him.
When the little lad had gone off through the dusk, with his clock under his arm, I looked down the street after him. And I thought of this skill of his. And then I thought of the $2.50 a week Silas was giving him for shelling corn. And then I thought of this club that was to keep him and the rest of ’em contented. And I begun to see, dim, just the particular kinds of fools we was making of ourselves.
There was yet one thing more happened that wasn’t so much a window as a door. The next night was to be the Business Men’s meeting, and just before supper I went to pay my last visit on my list. It was out to the County House to see the superintendent’s niece that had just resigned from Eppleby’s store, and that they were afraid was going to Red Barns to work.
The County House. Ain’t that a magnificent name? Don’t we love to drape over our bones and our corpses some flying banner of a word like sarcophagus? The County House sets on a hill. A hill is a grand place for a County House. “Look at me,” the County House can say, “I’m what a beneficent and merciful people can do for its unfit.” And I never go by one that I don’t want to shout back at it: “Yes. Look at you. You’re our biggest confession of our biggest sham. What right have we, in Nineteen Hundred Anything, to have any unfit left?”
Right in front of the County House is a cannon. I never figured out the fitness of having a cannon there – in fact, I never can figure out the fitness of having a cannon anywhere. But one thing I’ve always noticed: When public buildings and such do have cannon out in front of them, they’re always pointing away from the house. Never toward the house. Always going to shoot somebody else. That don’t seem to me etiquette. If we must keep cannon for ornament, aren’t we almost civilized enough to turn ’em around?
Seems the superintendent’s niece wasn’t going to Red Barns at all – she’d merely resigned to be married and had gone to town to buy things – a part of being married which competes with the ceremony, neck and neck, for importance. In the passageway, the matron called me in the office. She was a tall, thick woman with a way of putting her hand on your back to marshal you, as mothers do little children in getting them down an aisle. Yes, she was a marshaling woman.
“Look here,” says the matron, proud.
They’d put a glass case up in the office and it was all hung with work – crocheted things, knit and embroidered things, fringed things. “Did by the inmates,” says she, proud. That word “inmates” is to the word “people” what the word “support” is to the word “share.” It’s a word we could spare.
I looked at the things in the case – hours and hours and hours the fingers of the women upstairs had worked on ’em – intricate counting, difficult stitches, pretty patterns. And each of them was marked with a price tag. The County House inmates had got ’em hung out there in the hope of earning a little money. One was a bed-spread – a whole crocheted bed-spread. And one – one was a dress crocheted from collar to hem, and hung on with all sorts of crazy crocheted ends and tassels so – I knew – to make the job last a little longer. And when I saw that, I grabbed the tall, thick matron by the arm and I shook her a little.
“What was we doing,” I says, “that these folks wasn’t taught to do some kind of work so’s they could have kept out of the poor house?”
She looked at me odd and cool.
“Why,” she said, “my dear Miss Marsh, it’s being in here that gives ’em the leisure to make the things at all!”
What was the use of talking to her? And besides being unreasonable, she was one of them that you’re awful put to it to keep from being able not to right down dislike. And I went along the passage thinking: “She acts like the way things are is the way things ought to be. But it always seems to me that the way things ought to be is the best way things could be. For the earth ain’t so full of the fulness thereof but that we could all do something to make it a little more so.”
And then the thing happened that opened the door to all I’d been thinking about, and let me slip through inside.
Being I was there, I dropped in a minute to see old Grandma Stuart. She was one of the eighty “inmates.” Up in the ward where she was sitting, there were twenty beds. And between each two beds was a shelf and a washbasin, and over it a hook. And old Grandma Stuart sat there by her bed and her shelf and her hook. She was old and white, and she had fine wrinkles, like a dead flower. She drew me down to her, with her cold hands.
“Miss Marsh,” she said, “I got two-three things.”
“Yes,” I says, “well, that’s nice,” I says. And wondered if that was the right thing to say to her.
“But I ain’t got any box,” she says. “They keep the things and bring ’em to us clean every time. And I ain’t got any box.”
“That’s so, you ain’t,” says I, looking at her shelf.
“I put my things in my dress,” she says, “but they always fall out. And I’ve got to stop to pick ’em up. And she don’t like it.”
No. The matron wouldn’t like it. I knew that. She was one of them that the thing was the thing even if it was something else.
“And so I thought,” says Grandma Stuart, “that if I had a pocket, I could put my things in that. I thought they wouldn’t fall out if I had a pocket. She says she can’t be making pockets for every one. But I keep thinking if I had a pocket… It’s these things I’ve got,” she says.
She took from her dress three things: A man’s knife, a child’s ring, and a door-key.
“It was the extry key to my house,” she said. “I – brought it along. And I thought if I had a pocket…”
…I sat there with her till the lights come out. I promised to come next day and bring her a little calico pocket. And then I set and let her talk to me – about how things use’ to be. When at last the matron come to take ’em away to be fed, I went out, and I ran down the road in the dark. And it was one of the times when the world of life is right close up, and you can all but touch it, and you can almost hear what it says, and you know that it can hear you – yes, and you almost know that it’s waiting, eager, to hear what you are going to say to it. For one force breathes through things, trying to let us know it’s there. It was speaking to me through that wrecked home of Grandma Stuart’s – through the man’s knife, the child’s ring, the door-key; and through the pitiful, clever, crocheted stuff in the glass case in the County House; and through David, and through all them that we were trying to fix up a club for – like a pleasant plaster for something that couldn’t be touched by the remedy.
Out there in the soft night, the world looked different. I donno if you’ll know what I mean, but it was like the world I knew had suddenly slipped inside another world – like a shell; and the other one was bigger and better and cut in a pattern that we haven’t grown to – yet. In the west a little new moon was showing inside the gold circle of the big coming full moon. And it seemed to me as if the world that I was in must be just the little thin promise of the world that could be – if we knew. Sometimes we do know. Sometimes, for just a minute, we see it. That night was a night when I know that I saw. After you see, you never forget.
“Life is something else than what we think it is,” I says to myself as I ran along the road in the dark. “It’s something better than we think it is.”
As I ran, I stopped in to Mis’ Beach’s house and asked for something. “Oh, Mis’ Beach,” I says, “Oh, David! Will you let me take something? Will you let me borrow the clock you put together without anybody telling you how? Just for this evening?”
They said they would and they didn’t question that, particular, either. And I took the clock. And being David was going for the yeast, he came out with me, and we went on together. He ran beside me, the little lad, with his hand in mine. And as I ran, it seemed to me that I wasn’t Calliope Marsh any more, but that I was the immemorial woman, running with the immemorial child, toward the hope of the better thing, always the better thing.
Past the Post-Office Hall I went, already lighted for the Business Meeting, and on to Abigail Arnold’s Home Bakery.
Abigail was sitting, dressed and ready, with her list in her hand. But when she saw me she burst out with some strange excitement in her face:
“Calliope!” she says. “Silas has been here. He said you hadn’t handed in your report. I – I don’t think he expects you to go to the meeting. I know he didn’t expect me.”
“Didn’t he now?” I says. “Very well then, he didn’t. Are you ready?”
“But, Calliope – ” says she.
“Are you a business woman in this town, or are you not?” I asked her.
Abigail has had her Bakery for twenty years now, and has paid off its mortgage that her husband bequeathed her.
“Come,” says I. And she did.
We went down the street to the Post-Office store building, all lighted up. We went up the stairs, and slipped into some seats by the door. I don’t think Silas, the chairman, see us come in. He can’t of, because he failed to explode. He just kept on conducting the meeting called to consider the future prosperity of Friendship Village and balancing on his toes.
While they talked, I set there, looking at them. Sixty men or so they were – the men that had made Friendship Village. Yes, such as it was, these men had made it. It was Silas that had built up his business and added to it, till he employed forty-two folks. Timothy Toplady had done the same and had encouraged three-four others to come in to open up new things for the town. It was Timothy stood back of Zittelhof when he added furniture to his undertaking business, and that started the agitation for the cheese factory out in the hills, and that got the whole county excited about having good roads. And it was these men and Eppleby Holcomb and some others that had got the new bridge and the water works and more than these. And while I set there looking at them, it come flooding over me the skill and the energy and the patience and the dogged hard work that it had meant for them sixty men to get us where we were, and from my heart I was thankful to ’em. And then I put my mind on what they were a-saying:
“An up-to-date, hustling little town,” I kept hearing. “The newer business methods.” “Good openings.” “Opportunities for hustlers.” “Need of live wires.” “Encourage industry.” “Advance the town, advance the town, advance the town.” And the thoughts that had been formed in no account clots in my head suddenly took shape in one thought, with the whole of day-light turned on to it.
So, as quick as the business part seemed to me to be done, I rose up and told Silas we had our reports to make, Abigail and me, about the Evening Club.
“Well,” says Silas, “this whole thing is being done irregular. Most irregular. But you go on ahead, and we’ll be glad to listen if you think you have anything to say, bearing on to – er – what we’re up to.”
And that was all right, and I took it so, because it was meant right.
I donno what there was to be afraid of. All of those men we’d known for years. We’d worked with ’em shoulder to shoulder in church affairs. We’d stood equal to ’em in school affairs, and often agreed with ’em. We’d even repeatedly paid one of ’em our taxes. And yet because it was a Business Men’s meeting, we felt kind of abashed or askant or something, Abigail and me.
Abigail reported first, about the thirty odd she’d been to see. “But,” she winds up, “Calliope’s got something to say that I agree to, over and above the report. We’ve talked it over, her and me, and – ” she adds with her nice dignity, “as a Friendship Village business woman, I’m going to leave her speak for me.”
So I said what I had to say about them I’d been to see, and what they had said about the club. And then I come to the heart of it, and I held up David’s little clock. I told ’em about it, and about him. I suppose everybody else has stories to tell like David’s, about the folks, young or old, that is living graves, little or big, of the kind of skill and energy and patience that they’ve never had the chance or the courage or the little will-power inside ’em – to develop. And there it stays in ’em, undeveloped, till they die. I believe it’s truer of all of us – of you and me – than we’ve any idea of. And this is what I tried to say to ’em that night, when I showed ’em David’s little clock. I didn’t say anything about the girls to Mis’ Cripps’s boarding house – I kept them, and the rest of ’em, in my heart, along with that crocheted dress up to the County House, and Grandma Stuart’s wreck of a home – the man’s knife, the child’s ring, the door-key. And I says:
“Now, we’ve visited all these folks that the Evening Club was thought of for. And we’ve found most of ’em in favor of having the club. I’m free to confess that I hoped some of ’em wouldn’t be. I hoped some of ’em would say they’d rather be paid better wages than to be give a club. But perhaps it’s all right. Mebbe the club is one step more we’ve got to take before we can get down to the big thing underneath it all. But it ain’t the last step – and I’d almost rather not bother with it – I’d almost rather get on to the big thing right away.”
“May I ask,” snaps out Silas, clean forgetting his chairmanshipping and acting like he was talking to me in the Post-Office store beside the cheese, “may I ask what you mean by the ‘big thing’?”
“Oh,” I says, “that’s what I’ve been thinking about while I set here. Oh,” I says, “you men – you’ve made the town. You’ve done everything once. Do it again – now when the next thing is here to do. You’ve done your best with your own property and your own homes. Now do your best with folks!”
“Ain’t that the purpose of this here club we’re a-talking about?” says Silas. “Ain’t that what I been a-saying? What do you mean – folks?” Silas winds up, irritable. Silas knows customers, agents, correspondents, partners, clients, colleagues, opponents, plaintiffs, defendants and competitors. But he don’t know folks.
“Folks,” I says. “Why, folks, Silas. Why, here in this room with you that we say have made Friendship Village, are setting them sixty-one employees of yours that have helped make it too. And all the tens that will come afterward, and that have come before to help to make the village by the work of their hands. They belong – they’re the village. They’re us. Oh, let’s not do things for them – let’s do things with them. Let’s meet all together, employers and employees, men and women, and let’s take up together the job of being a town. Let’s not any of us have more than our share, and then deal out little clubs, and old furniture, and magazines, and games to the rest of us. You men are finding out that all your old catch words about advancing the town and making business opportunities, have got something lacking in them, after all. And us women are beginning to see that twenty houses to a block, each keeping clean and orderly and planted on its own hook, each handing out old clothes and toys down to the Flats, each living its own life of cleanliness and home and victual-giving-at-Christmas, that that ain’t being a town after all. It isn’t enough. Oh, deep inside us all ain’t there something that says, I ain’t you, nor you, nor you, nor five thousand of you. I’m all of you. I’m one. ‘When,’ it says, ‘are you going to understand, that not till I can act like one, one united one, can I give any glimpse whatever of what people might be?’ Don’t let’s us go on advancing business and multiplying our little clubs and philanthropies. Instead, let’s get together – in the kind of meetings they use’ to have in the old first days in America – and let’s just talk over the next step in what’s to become of us. Let’s dream – real far. Let’s dream farther than gift-giving – and on up to wages – and mebbe a good deal farther than that. Let’s dream the farthest that folks could go…”
I didn’t know but they’d think I was crazy. But I’d be glad to be that kind of crazy. And the glory is that more folks and more folks are getting crazy the same way.
But they didn’t think so – I know they didn’t. Because when I got through, they clapped their hands, hard and hearty – all but Silas, that don’t think a chairman had ought to show any pleased emotion. And times now when I’m lonesome, I like to remember the rest of the talk, and it warms my heart to remember it, and I like to think about it.
For we give up having the club. Nobody said much of anything more about it, after we got Silas silenced. And this was the notice we put the next night in the Friendship Evening Daily. Nobody knows better than I the long road that there is to travel before we can really do what we dreamed out a little bit about. Nobody better than I knows how slow it is going to be. But I tell you, it is going to be. And the notice we put in the paper was the first little step we took. And I believe that notice holds the heart of to-day.
It said:
“Will all them that’s interested in seeing Friendship Village made as much a town as it could be, for all of us and for the children of all of us, meet together in Post-Office Hall to-morrow night, at 7 o’clock, to talk over if we’re doing it as good as we could.”
For there was business. And then there was big business. But the biggest business is taking employers and employees, and all men and women – yes, and inmates too – and turning them into folks.
