Part 7
“Pshaw,” says Mis’ Sykes, “you ladies don’t understand politics. In politics you can’t fly up this way and imagine out vain things. You got to do ’em like they’ve been done. As I understand it, they’s two parties. One is for the good of the country and one ain’t. And anything you dicker up outside them two gets the public all upset and steps on the Constitution. And Silas says you’ve got to handle the Constitution like so many eggs, or else where does the United States come in?”
“It don’t seem to me that all makes real good sense,” says Mis’ Toplady, troubled.
“No,” says Mis’ Sykes, serene, “the people as a whole never do see sense. It’s always a few that has to do the seeing.”
“I know,” says Mis’ Toplady, “I know. But what I think is this: _Which few?_”
“Why, them that best supports the party measures,” says Mis’ Sykes, superior.
But Mis’ Toplady, she shook her head.
“It don’t follow out,” she says, firm. “Legs ain’t the only things they is to a chair.”
Nor, as us ladies saw it, the polls ain’t all there is to election day. And we done what we could, steadfast and quick and together, up to the very night before the day that was the day.
On election-day morning, I woke up before daylight and tried to tell if the sun was going to shine. The sky wasn’t up there yet--nothing was but the airful of dark. But acrost the street I see a light in a kitchen--it was at the station agent’s that had come home to the hot breakfast his wife had been up getting for him. One of ’em come out to the well for a bucket of water, and the pulleys squeaked, and somebody’s dog woke up and barked. Back on the trail road somebody’s baby was crying. Down acrost the draw the way-freight whistled and come rumbling in. And there was Friendship Village, laying still, being a town in the dark with nobody looking, just like it was being one all day long, with people looking on but never sensing what they saw.
It seemed, though, as if they must get it through their heads that day that the town was being a town right before their face and eyes--having a kind of a performance to do, like digestion, or thinking, or working; and having something anxious and fluttered inside of it, waiting to know what was going to become of it. I could almost sense this at six o’clock, when Mis’ Toplady and I hurried down to the market square. Yes, sir, six o’clock in the morning it was. We had engineered it that the flight of the flying-machine should be at seven o’clock, so’s everybody could have a chance to see it on their way to work, and so’s they should be at the market-square doings before they went to the polls.
The sun _was_ shining like mad, and the place looked all expectant and with that ready-to-nod look that anything got ready beforehand will always put on. Only this seemed sort of a special nod. We’d had a few board seats put up, and a platform that ’most everybody had the idea the airship was going up from. The machine itself was over in the corner of the square near the wood-yard under a wagon-shed they’d made over for it. And to a stand near the platform the Friendship Married Ladies’ Cemetery Improvement Sodality had advertised to serve hot coffee and hot griddle-cakes and sausages. And we begun on the coffee and the sausages long enough ahead so’s by the time folks was in the high midst of arriving, the place smelled like a kitchen with savory things a-doing on the cook-stove.
And I tell you, folks done some arriving. Us ladies had seen to it to have the flight advertised big them two nights. The paper done it willing enough, being the bird-man was so generous and all. Then everybody’s little boy had been posted off as far as the city limits with hand-bills and posters, advertising the flight, and the breakfast on election day. And it seemed to me that outside the place we’d roped off, and in wagons in the streets, was ’most everybody in Friendship Village that I ever knew or saw. The folks from the little city-limit farms, the folks that ordinarily didn’t have time to vote nor to take a holiday, even folks from the country and from other towns, “best” people and all--they was all there to see the sky-wagon.
The bird-man had to dicker away quite a little at his machine. A man had run out from the city to help him, and out there with them was Lem Toplady and Jimmy Sturgis and Hugh Merriman, and two-three more of those boys, that had got acquainted with the bird-man. And while they was getting ready, the band was playing gay over in the bandstand, and we was serving breakfasts as fast as we could hand them out. Mis’ Sturgis was doing the coffee, I was sizzling sausages that the smell floated up and down Daphne Street delicious, and Mis’ Toplady was frying the pancakes because she’s had such a big family to fry for she’s lightning in the right wrist.
Everybody was talking and laughing and waiting their turn, and acting as if they liked it. Them that was up around the breakfast stand didn’t seem to be saying much about politics. Us ladies mentioned to one another that Threat nor ’Lish didn’t seem to be anywhere around. But we was mostly all thinking just about the flying-machine, and how nice it was to be having it, and about the socialness of it all--like the family was having breakfast....
Just as the big, bass seven-o’clock whistle trailed out from the round-house--the brick-yard one didn’t blow because the men was all at the market square--the thing happened that we’d arranged for. Down Daphne Street, hurrying some because they was late, with irregular marching and a good deal of laughing, come the public-school teachers with the school children. We’d give out that they’d be easier managed so, and not so much under foot; but what we really wanted was that they should come in just like this, together, and set together, because we wanted something of them after a while.
They sat down on the place we’d left for ’em, on the seats and the grass in front of everybody, and them that could sing we put on the platform, lots of rows deep, so’s they all covered it. They was big boys and little, and little girls and big, good-dressed and poor-dressed; with honest fathers, and with them that didn’t know honest when they see it nor miss it when they didn’t--and all of them was the Friendship Village that’s going to be some time, when the market square is emptied of us others, for good and all.
“Where’s Threat and ’Lish?” I says to Eppleby, that was helping keep the children in order.
“Dustin’ the mayor’s office out ready, I s’pose,” he says, wrinkling his eyes at the corners.
“Mebbe they’ve abducted each other,” Mis’ Toplady suggests, soothing.
Mis’ Sykes looked over from filling the syrup pitchers--she’d boiled the brown sugar down for that, and it added its thick, golden smell unto the general inviting mixture.
“I don’t think,” she says serious, “that you’d ought to speak disrespectful of _any_body that’s going to be your mayor. Public officials,” said she, “had ought to be paid respect to, or else the law won’t be carried out.”
“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 sound_ _The stirring rumors of the day._ _Old wrongs and burdens must make way_ _For 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 part_ _Invest our willing arms with might._ _Mother of Liberty, shed light_ _As on the land, so in the heart--_ _As on the land, so in the heart._ _Divided, we have long withstood_ _The love that is our common speech._ _The comrade cry of each to each_ _Is 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 can_not_ 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 sounds_ _With a terrible toll to pay...._ _But what of the silent dooms they bear_ _In 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 black_ _On the face of the common dial...._ _But what of the days that stretch between_ _For 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?”