Gale Zona
Peace in Friendship Village
"Ladies!" she says. "It was me that was talking about beginning to knit for another war. Why didn't you shut me up and bolt the door?"
THE STORY OF JEFFRO 3
When I have told this story of Jeffro, the alien, some one has always said:
"Yes, but there's another side to that. They aren't all Jeffros."
When stories are told of American gentleness, childlike faith, sensitiveness to duty, love of freedom, I do not remember to have heard any one rejoin:
"Yes, but Americans are not all like that."
So I wonder why this comment should be made about Jeffro.
I
When Jeffro first came knocking at my door that Spring morning, he said that which surprised me more than anything that had been said to me in years. He said:
"Madam, if you have a house for rent – a house for rent. Have you?"
For years nobody had said that to me; and the little house which I own on the Red Barns road, not far from the schoolhouse, was falling in pieces because I never could get enough ahead to mend it up. In the road in front of it there was a big hole that had never been filled in. And the house only had two rooms anyway – and a piece of ground about as big as a rug; and the house was pretty near as old as the ground was.
"Land," I says, "man, you don't want to rent that house?"
He smiled, nice and wrinkled and gentle, and said yes, he did; and nothing that I, as my own real estate agent, could say discouraged him. Even when I'd whipped off my kitchen apron and found the key to the little house in my button-box, and had gone down the road with him to look the house over, and let him see what it was like, he insisted that he wanted to rent it. And so in the end he done: at four dollars a month, which wasn't much more than, by rights, the sale price should have been.
"I do little things to this house," said Jeffro. "I make little change for good. I have some handy with a hammer."
I remember turning back a ways from the house, and seeing him standing there, with his hands behind him, looking at the house as if it was something, and something of his.
When I got home and was up in the garret hunting up the three green paper shades for his windows, it come to me that I hadn't asked him for any references, and that for all I knew he might be going to counterfeit money or whisky or something there on the premises. But anybody'd known better than that just to look at Jeffro's face. A wonderful surprised face he had; surprised, but believing it all too, and trusting the good. A brown face, with big, brown eyes, and that wrinkled smile of his. I like to think about him.
After a few days I went over with the shades, and he'd got a few pieces of furniture there, setting round, loose and unattached. And on a big basket of stuff was sitting a little boy, about eight years old.
"That's Joseph," says Jeffro, simple. "We are the two that came."
Then he told me. In "the old country" his wife and two little ones were waiting till he could earn money to send back for them.
"I thought when I had thes' little follow here," he said, "I could work then more easy. He don't eat but little," he added.
"But how," says I, "are you expecting to earn all that money out of Friendship Village – where folks saves for years to put on a new stoop?"
At this he smiled, sort of knowing. And he pointed to a poster over his wood-box. It was printed in Yiddish, all but the words "United States"; but the picture – that was plain enough. It showed a mill on one side of the street, and a bank on the other. And from the mill a stream of workingmen, with bags of money on their backs, were streaming over toward the bank.
"That was put up on my cow-shed at home," said Jeffro. "I have brought it. But I have no trade – I can not earn money fast like those. I make the toys."
He threw open the door into the only other room of the house. In it was piled dozens of boxes, and some broad shelves to be put up, and a table was covered with colored stuff. "Then I go up to the city and sell," said he. "It is only five miles. But I can not live there – not with thes' boy. I say, 'I vill find some little cheap place out in the country for us two.' So then I come here. I am now in America five weeks," he added, proud.
"Five weeks!" says I. "Then where'd you learn to talk American?"
"I have study and save' for six-seven years, to be ready," said Jeffro, simple. "Now I come. Next year I think I send for them."
All day long those words of his kept coming and ringing in my ears. And it kind of seemed to me that in them was a great chorus – a chorus of thousands going up that minute, and this minute, and all the time, all over America:
"Now I come. Next year I think I send for them."
And I says to myself: "What's America going to do for him? What's America going to do to him? What are we going to do to him? And what is he going to do for us?"
Well, the story of the first few weeks of Jeffro's in Friendship Village is for me a kind of window set in the side-wall of the way things are.
One morning, a little before nine o'clock, I had to go to the schoolhouse to see Miss Mayhew. When I went by Jeffro's I didn't see anything of him, but when I got along by the schoolhouse grounds, there I saw him, leaning on the fence under the locust-tree.
"Good morning, Mr. Jeffro," I says. "Do the children bother you down to your house with their noise? That's one reason my house used to be so hard to rent, it was so close by the schoolhouse."
His face, when he turned to me, startled me.
"Bother me!" he said, slow. "Every day I come across to look at them near. To see them – it is a vonder. Thes' big building, thes' big yard, thes' children that do no vork, only learn, learn. And see – Joseph is there. Over by the swing – you see him? He learn, too – my Joseph – I do not even buy his books. It is free – all free. I am always vatching them in thes' place. It is a vonder."
Then one night, when he had been there about two weeks, Jeffro's house caught fire. A candle that he used for melting his wax tipped over on his toy shavings and blazed up. Timothy Toplady, driving by, heard him shout, and galloped into town for the department, and they went tearing out Red Barns way soon after Jeffro had the fire put out. He was making toys again when the fire-engine drew up at his gate, and the men came trampling up to his porch, wanting the blaze pointed out to them. Bud Miles, that's in the department, told me how Jeffro stood in the door bowing to them and regretting the trouble he'd made, and apologizing to them for not having any fire ready for them to put out.
And the next day Jeffro walked into the engine house and asked the men sitting round with their heels up how much he owed them.
"For what?" says they.
"For putting down my fire," Jeffro says. "That is, for coming to put it down if I had one."
The men stared at him and burst out laughing. "Why nothing," they said. "That don't cost anything. That's free."
Jeffro just stood and looked at them. "Free?" he said. "But the big engine and the wagons and the men and the horses – does nobody pay them to come and put down fires?"
"Why, the town does," they told him. "The town pays them."
He said eagerly: "No, no – you have not understood. I pay no taxes – I do not help that way with taxes. Then I must pay instead – no?"
They could hardly make him understand. All these big things put at his service, even the town fire-bell rung, and nothing to pay for it. His experience with cities was slight, in any case. He went off, looking all dazed, and left the men shouting. It seemed such a joke to the men that it shouldn't be all free. It seemed so wonderful to Jeffro that it should.
He hadn't gone half a block from the engine-house when he turned round and went back.
"The gentlemen have not understood," he said. "I am not yet a citizen. I have apply for my first papers, but I am not yet a citizen. Whoever is not citizen must pay for this fire attention. Is it not so?"
Then they shouted again. Think of stopping to find out whether a man was a citizen before they put his fire out! Everybody in Friendship Village was telling that to each other for weeks, and splitting their sides over it.
Less than a couple of weeks afterward Jeffro got a letter from home, from his wife. Postmaster Silas Sykes handed it out to him when Jeffro come in the post-office store for some groceries, and when he started to pay for the groceries Jeffro says:
"How much on the letter?"
"Why, they's nothing due on that," says Silas, squinting at it over the sugar-barrel.
"But thes' is only old country stamp on here," said Jeffro. "It is not enough for all this way in America too?"
Silas waved his hand at him like the representative of the gover'ment he was. "Your Uncle Sam pays for all that," says he.
Jeffro looks at him a minute, then he says: "Uncle Sam – is that, then, a person? I see the pictures – "
"Sure, sure," says Silas, winking to Timothy Toplady that stood by. "Uncle Sam takes grand care of us, you bet."
"I am not yet a citizen," Jeffro insisted. "I have apply for my first papers – "
"Go 'long," says Silas, magnificent. "Do you s'pose Uncle Sam bothers himself about that? You belong to his family as soon as you strike shore."
Timothy Toplady told me about it. "And," says he, "do you know that man went out of the store looking perfectly queer! And kind of solemn."
All these things begun to open my eyes. Here, all my life, I'd been taking things for granted. My school-days, the fire-engine, postage-stamps, and all the rest, I'd took for granted, just like this generation is taking for granted aëroplanes. And all of a sudden now, I see how they were: not gifts to me, but powers of the big land. I'd always thought of a village as a person. But a Big Land – that had powers too! And was developing more as fast as its folks would let it.
And it was wonderful consoling. It helped me over more than I can tell. When Silas Sykes give light measure on my sugar and oatmeal, thinks I:
"Well, you're just a little piece of the Big Land's power of business – and it ain't grown yet. It's only just growing."
And when the Friendship Village Married Ladies' Cemetery Improvement Sodality – that's just the name of it and it works at more things than just cemetery – when it had spent five years studying our gover'ment, and then turned around and created an executive board whose reports to the Society of Forty had to be made unanimous – I says to myself:
"Well, the club's just a little piece of the Big Land's power of democracy, and it ain't grown yet. It's only just growing."
And when the Friendship Village chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to leave us ladies borrow their copy of the American flag because they reverenced it so hard they were afraid it would get tore, I says to myself:
"But it's just a little scrap of the Big Land's power of patriotism to the universe, and it ain't grown yet only just to one country – and not entirely to that."
And it made me see things intimate and tender. And it was Jeffro that did that for me.
That summer he come to kind of belong to the town, the way a hill or a tree does, only lots more so. At first, folks used to call him "that Jew peddler," and circus day I heard Mis' Sykes saying we better lock up our doors during the parade, because we didn't know what "that foreigner" might take it in his head to do.
"Mis' Sykes," says I, "where were your mother and father born?"
"New York state," says she, like the right answer.
"And their folks?" I went on.
"Massachusetts," says she, like she was going to the head now sure.
"And their folks?" I continued, smooth. "Where'd they come from?"
Mis' Sykes began to wobble. "Well," says she, "there was three brothers come over together – "
"Yes," I says, "I know. There always is. Well, where'd they come from? And where'd their folks come from? Were they immigrants to America, too? Or did they just stay foreigners in England or Germany or Scandinavia or Russia, maybe?" says I. "Which was it?"
Mis' Sykes put on her most ancestral look. "You can ask the most personal questions, Calliope," she began.
"Personal," says I. "Why, I dunno. I thought that question was real universal. For all we know, it takes in a dozen nations with their blood flowing, sociable, in with yours. It's awful hard for any of us," I says, "to find a real race to be foreign to. I wouldn't bet I was foreign to no one," says I, "nor that no one was foreign, for certain, to me."
"I shall lock my door circus day, just the same," says Mis' Sykes.
"Do," says I. "Circuses is likely to be followed up by hoodlums. And I've known them to be native-born, now and again."
But after a while, in spite of his being a foreigner, most everybody got to like Jeffro. You couldn't help it – he was so patient and ready to believe. And the children – the children that like your heart – they all loved him. They would follow him along the curb, and he'd set down and show them his pack – time and again I've come on him in a shady side-street opening his pack for them. And sometimes when he had a new toy made, he'd walk up to the schoolhouse a-purpose to show it to them, and they'd all crowd round him, at recess.
On account of that, the children's folks took to noticing him and speaking to him. And folks done little things for him and for Joseph. Abigail Arnold, that keeps the home bakery, she had him make a wooden bridal pair for the top of the wedding-cake she keeps permanent in her show window; Mis' Timothy Toplady had him do little odd jobs around their place, and she'd pay him with a cooked chicken. He'd show most all of us the picture of his little young wife and the two children —
"I declare," says Mis' Toplady, kind of wondering, "since I've seen the picture of his wife and babies he don't seem to me much more foreign than anybody else."
I happened over to Jeffro's one morning with a loaf of my brown bread and a half a johnny-cake. He seemed to know how to cook pretty well, but still I felt more or less sorry for him and the little boy, and I used to take them in a thing or two less than half occasionally. When I stepped up to the door that night I heard him singing – he used to sing low, funny songs while he worked. And when he opened the door for me, all of a sudden he blushed to the top of his face. And he bowed his funny, stiff way, and says:
"Vell, I see I blush like boys. It is because I was singing a little – vat-you-call, lull'by. Ven I make the toys I am always thinking how little children vill go to sleep holding vat I make, and sometimes I put in lull'bies, in case there is no mother to sing them."
That was like Jeffro. I mention it because Jeffro was just like that.
I'd set down the bread and the johnny-cake, and he'd thanked me – Jeffro always thanked folks like he'd just been give a piece of new life with every kindness – and I dunno but he had – I dunno but we all have; and I'd started to go, when he says hesitating:
"I have vanted to ask you thes': If I vork at that bad place in the road in front – if I bring sand from the hill behind, what I can, and fill in that hole, slow, you know – but some every day – you would not mind?"
"Mind?" says I. "Why, my, no. But it's part the village's business to do that. You're in the village limits, you know. It'd ought to been done long ago."
"The village?" said he. "But it is your place. Why should the village fix that hole?"
"It's the village's business," I told him, "to keep the streets good. Most of them do it pretty lackadaisical, but it's their business to do it."
His face lit up like turning up the wick. "Nu!" he cried. "So I vill do. I thought it vould be you I am doing it for, and I vas glad. But if it is the village, then I am many times more glad of that."
It wasn't much of a compliment to a lady, but I thought I see what he meant.
"Why are you glad, Mr. Jeffro," I says, to make sure, "that it's the village?"
"It does all the things for me," he says, simple. "The fire-engine, the post-office – even the telephone is free to me in the village. So it is America doing this for me; for thes' village, it belongs to America. There is no army that I go in or pay to keep out of – there are no soldiers that are jostling me in the streets – they do not even make me buy and put up any flag. And my little Joseph, all day long he is learning. And the people – here they call me 'Mr.' All is free – free. For all thes' I pay nothing. And now you tell me here is a hole that it is the village business to fill up. It is the business of America to fill up that hole! Vell, I can make that my business, for a little – what-you-say —pay-back."
It was awful hard to know what to say. I wonder what you'd have said? I just stood still and kept still. Because, if I'd known what to say, it would have been pretty hard, just then, to say it anyway.
"It is a luck for the folks," he said, "that their own vork lets them make some paying back. My toys, they don't pay back, not very much. I must find another vay."
He followed me out on the stoop.
"There is von thing they vill let me do after a vile, though," he said, with a smile. "In America, I hear everybody make von long, strong groaning about their taxes. Those taxes, ven vill they come? And are they so very big, then? They must be very big to pay for all the free things."
"Why, Mr. Jeffro," I said, "but you won't have any taxes."
"But I am to be a citizen!" he cried. "Every citizen pays his taxes."
"No," I told him. "No, they don't. And unless you own property or – or something," says I, stumbling as delicate as I could, "you don't pay any taxes at all, Mr. Jeffro."
When I made him know that sure, he lifted his arms and let them drop; and he come on down the path with me, and he stood there by the syringa bush at the gate, looking off down the little swelling hill to where the village nestled at the foot. School was just out, and the children were flooding down the road, and the whole time was peaceful and spacious and close-up-to, like a friend. We stood still for a minute, while I was thinking that; and when I turned to Jeffro, he stood with the tears running down his cheeks.
"To think there is such a place," he said reverently. "And me in it. And them going to be here." Then he looked at me like he was seeing more than his words were saying. "I keep thinking," he said, "how hard God is vorking, all over the earth – and how good He's succeeded here."
Up to the gate run little Joseph, his school-books in his arms. Jeffro put both hands on the boy.
"Little citizen, little citizen," his father said. And it was like one way of being baptized.
II
When I was a little girl, a cardinal bird came one summer and nested in our yard. They almost never come so far north, and I loved him like a friend. When autumn came, the other birds all went, but he didn't go. And one day, in the first snow and high wind, he was storm-beaten into our little porch, and we caught him. We dare not let him go, in the cold. So we kept him until he died. I shall never forget the change that the days made. I cannot bear to tell or to think about the change in him that the days made. That is why I will never have about me a caged thing, bird or beast or spirit. The cardinal helped me to understand. I wonder if the death of any beauty or any life is as much Nature's will as we still think it is…
This is why I shrink from telling what next happened to Jeffro – what I knew must happen to him if he came here and lived the life of his kind – of my kind. Lived it, I mean, with his eyes open. There are plenty who live it and never know anything about it, after all. But Jeffro would know. He had seeing eyes, and his heart was the heart of a child, and his face was always surprised – surprised, but believing it all too, and trusting the good. He trusted the good just as you and I did, in the beginning. Just as you and I do, in the end. But in between the two trusts there comes a black time; and if it hasn't come to you, then you don't know the Big Land; and you don't see what's going on in it; and you haven't questioned where it's all going to lead. As, after a while, Jeffro questioned it.
All summer he worked at his toys, and all the autumn. But when winter began to come, the little house was hard to heat. The roof was decayed, the windows were shrunken, the floor was in a draft from all four directions; and I didn't have the money to make the house over – which was just about what it needed. I offered to rent him and the little boy a room in my house, and to let him do his work there; but it was far for the little fellow to go to school. And just then came the Offer.
A man from a mining town in the next state gave Jeffro a chance to go there with him, and he'd give him work in the mines all winter. Jeffro listened, and heard about the good pay, and the plain, hearty food, and the chance to get ahead; and Miss Mayhew said she'd keep the little boy; and Jeffro thought about the cold little house, and feeding himself all winter, and about standing on street corners with his pack; and there was Miss Mayhew's nice, warm house and woman-care for the little boy. And in the end Jeffro went. I told him to leave his things in the little house and I wouldn't charge him rent, which it wasn't worth it.
The night before he started he come round to my house to say good-by. He thanked me, so nice, for what I'd done, off and on. And then he pulled something out of his pocket.
"Look!" he said. "It is from the National Bank. It is my bank-book – the proofs that I have money there. Here is my checker book," said he. "You know how these things go. See that!" His eyes got big and deep. "They give me credit – and thes' two books," he said. "And they vill give me interest on thes' little money. It vill make money for me vile I am gone. It is a vonder. I ask' them vat there is to pay for this chance, and the man laughed. And see – all the vile I am gone, Joseph vill be learning free. I pay no more than his little board. It is a vonder."
He showed me the entry, thirty-seven dollars, his summer's savings. He had had to keep back the amount of his fare.
"The ticket is much," he said, "but thes' vay I can save enough by spring so they can come. They can live in your little house – oh, it is a plenty room. Ve shall have a little garden – as big as Joseph's plate! She vill keep a little coop of chickens – "
So he ran on with his happy planning. I remember how he looked when he left my house that night – his two books tightly clasped, his shoulders back, his head full of dreams, his face sort of held up to the stars. I never saw him that way again.
It was a long winter. It's strange how the calendar sets down winter as just being three months when everybody that's lived through one knows how it's either long or short and never, never clipped right off at the three months, same as the almanac would have you believe. This one was long, and it was white, and it was deep. It kept me shoveling coal and splitting kindling and paying for stove-wood and warming my feet, and it seemed to me that was pretty near all I did do those months. It's surprising and it's discouraging how much of our lives goes along just doing the little fussy things necessary to keep a-going, that you can't count in on just pure, sheer living.
"Eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, and eight hours for exercise," they used to tell me; and I used to think: "Yes, but what about just messing-round?" That don't get itself counted in at all, and that just eats up time by the dialful. And I think, if you look close, that one of the things we've got to learn is how to do less of the little hectoring, wearing messing-round, and to do more of the big, plain, real, true, unvarnished living – like real work, and real play, and real talk, and real thinking. And fewer little jobs – fewer little jobs.
But after a while the winter got done, and early April came – a little faint green down below, a little fine gold up above, and a great wide wash of pale blue at the top; Spring in three layers.
I'd been often to see Joseph, and he was well, and in the reader ahead of the reader a boy of his age would naturally have been in. He had had several short letters from his father, and I was looking to have one of them say when we might expect him, but none of them did.
Then in April no letter came. We thought it meant that he'd be home. I'd been over and cleaned the little house. And then when April was almost to a close, and he hadn't come yet, I saw it would be too late for his garden, so I planted that – a few vegetables, and a few flowers, and a morning-glory or two over the stoop. And I laid in a few canned things in his cupboard, so's he would have something to start in on.
May came, and we wondered. Then one day there was a letter in a strange writing. Jeffro was in the hospital, it said, and he wanted to send word that he was all right and would send a letter himself in a little while. That was all that it told us.
Everybody in Friendship Village remembers that spring, because it was the year the bank closed down. Nobody knew the reason. Some day, when the world gets really to going, one of the things they'll read about in musty books and marvel over will be the things we call panics. They'll know then that, put simple, it's just another name for somebody's greed, dressed up becoming as Conditions. We're beginning now to look at the quality of the clothes Conditions dress in, and we're finding them pretty poor quality sometimes, and cut awful old-fashioned, and the dye rubs off. But in those days, all we knew was that the bank had "suspended payment."
"But what's that mean – 'suspended payment?'" I says to Silas Sykes that told me. "You can't suspend your debts, can you? I never could."
"It means," Silas says, "that they'll never pay a cent on the dollar. That's what it means."
"But," I says, "I don't understand. If I owe you ten dollars, I can't put down my curtain and suspend that payment, can I?"
"Well, you ain't banks," says Silas. "And banks is."
I was walking away and thinking it over, when I stopped stock-still in the street. The National Bank – it was the National Bank that Jeffro had his thirty-seven dollars in.
I felt as if I had to do something for him, then and there. And that afternoon I took my trowel and went up to his little place, and thought I'd dig round some in the garden that was coming up, gay as a button.
When I stepped inside the gate, I looked up at the house, and I saw the front door was open. "Land," I thought, "I hope they haven't stole what little he had in there, too." And I stepped up to the door.
In the wooden chair in the middle of the floor sat Jeffro. His hat was pulled down over his eyes, his legs were thrust out in front of him, one of his arms was hanging down, and the other one was in a white sling.
"Mr. Jeffro – Mr. Jeffro!" I says. "Oh – what's the matter?"
He looked up, and his face never changed at sight of me, nor he never got up or moved. And his look – well, it wasn't the look of Jeffro any more than feathers have the look of a bird. But one thing I knew about that look – he was hungry. I could tell that look anywhere, because I've been hungry myself, with no food coming from anywheres.
I flew to the cupboard where I'd put in the few things, and in a jiffy I had some soup heating and a box of crackers opened. I brought the bowl to the table, all steaming and good-smelling, and he drew up there without a word and ate with his hat on – ate like I never saw a man eat before.
When he got through: "Tell me about it, Mr. Jeffro," I says. And he told me.
It wasn't anything very new. Jeffro had been in the mines since the first of November, and the first of January the strike had begun – the strike against a situation that Jeffro drew for me that afternoon, telling it without any particular heat, but just plain and quiet. He told me how he had gone with some of the men to the house of one of the owners to talk of settlement.
"I spoke out to him once," said Jeffro. "I said: 'Will you tell me how this is? They can not make me understand. America gives me free all the things that I did not expect: The fire-engine, it takes no pay. My little boy's school costs me not anything. When I come to this state I have no passport to get, and they did not search me at the frontier. All this is very free. But when we want more bread, and we are willing to work for it all day long with our hands, you will not let us have more, even then. Even when we pay with work. Will you tell me how this is?'"
Of all that the man had said to him, kindly enough, Jeffro understood nothing. And he could speak the language, while many of the men in the mines could not say one word of English.
"But they could strike in Russian and Polish and Lithuanian," Jeffro said, "and they did."
Then came the soldiers. Jeffro told me about that.
"Ve vere standing there outside the Angel mine," he said, "to see that nobody vent to vork and spoiled our hopes, ven somebody cried out: 'The soldiers!' Many of the men ran – I did not know vy. Here was some of the United States army. I had never seen any of the army before. I hurried toward them, my cap in my hand. I saw their fine uniforms, their fine horses, this army that was kept to protect me, a citizen, and vich I did not have to pay. I stood bowing. My heart felt good. They had come to help us then – free! And then somebody cried. 'He's one of the damned, disorderly picketers. Arrest him!' And they did; and nothing I could say vould make them understand. I vas in jail four days, but all those days I thought it vas a mistake. I smiled to think how sorry they vould be ven they found out they had arrested von they were paid to protect – free."
He told me how there went on the days, the weeks, of the strike; hunger, cold; the militia everywhere. The little that Jeffro had earned was spent, dime by dime. He stayed on, hoping for the settlement, certain that it would all be right as soon as everybody "understood."
