Part 8

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

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

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

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

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

And nothing told me what--not then.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mis’ Sykes never looked at Mis’ Holcomb.

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

I says I would; and when we went on,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“For to bait trade,” says he.

“For what else?” I ask’ him.

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

“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?”