Peace in Friendship Village

"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."

"It vas this vay," he said laboriously. "Mine-owners and money and militia vere here. Over here vere the men. Vrong vas done on both sides – different kinds of vrong. The sides could not speak together clear. No von understood no von."

Then a miner had resisted an officer who tried to arrest him, the officer fired, and Jeffro had the bullet in his shoulder, and had been locked up for being "implicated" – "I don't know yet vat they mean by that long vord," Jeffro said – and had been taken to the courthouse and later to the hospital. On his discharge, eight days ago, he had started to walk home to Friendship Village.

"To-morrow," Jeffro said, "I vill get out from the bank my money – I have not touched that – and send to her vat I have. It may be she has saved a little bit. Somehow she vill come. To-morrow I vill get it, as soon as the bank is open."

I knew I had to tell him – I knew I had to tell him right then. "Mr. Jeffro – Mr. Jeffro," I said, "you can't. You can't get your money. The bank's failed."

He looked at me, not understanding.

"Vat is that?" he said. "'Failed' – for a bank?"

"I don't know what it is," I told him. "It's something banks can do. You never can tell when. And this one has done it."

"But," he cried, "vat do you mean? It vas the National Bank! This nation can not fail!"

"This much of it has," I says. "The bank's shut up tight. Everybody that had money in it has lost it – unless maybe they pay back to each one just a little bit."

He stood up then and looked at me as if I were strange. "Then this too," he says, "can happen in America. And the things I see all winter – the soldiers to shoot you down?"

"No, no," I says. "You mustn't think – "

"I do not think," says Jeffro. "I know. I have seen. I am there ven it happens. And more that I did not tell. In March a man came to me ven I was hungry, and tried to buy my vote. Ven I understood, I struck him in his face, just the same as if I have von. But I saw men sell their vote, and laugh at it. And now I understand. You throw dust in our eyes, free fire-engines, free letter-carriers, free this and free that, and all the time somebody must be laughing somewhere at how it makes us fools. I hate America. Being free here, it is a lie!"

And me, I set still, trying to think. I set looking at the bright-colored poster that Jeffro had found on his cow-shed in the old country, and I was trying to think. I knew that a great deal of what he'd said was true. I knew that folks all over the country were waking up and getting to know that it was true. And yet I knew that it wasn't all the truth. That there was more, and that something had got to make him know. But what was going to do that?

Faint and high and quite a ways off, I heard a little call. It wasn't much of a call, but when another came and then another, it set my heart to beating and the blood to rushing through me as though it was trying to tell me something.

I stood up and looked. And up the street I saw them – running and jumping, shouting little songs and laughing all the way – the children, coming out of the Friendship Village schoolhouse, there at the top of the hill. And in a minute it came over me that even if I couldn't help him, there was something to do that mebbe might comfort him some, just now, when he was needing it.

I stepped to the door, and up by the locust-tree I see Joseph coming. I could pick out his little black head and his bobbed hair and his red cheeks. And I called to him.

"Joseph, Joseph!" I says. "You come over here – and have the rest come too!"

He came running, his eyes beginning to shine. And the others came running and followed him, eager to know what was what. And up the road a piece I see some more coming, and they all begun to run too.

Joseph ran in the gate ahead of everybody, and past me, and in at the door that was close to the road. And he threw away his book, and ran to his father, and flung both arms around his neck. And the rest all came pressing up around the door, and when they see inside, they set up a shout:

"It's the Present-man! It's the Present-man! He's back a'ready!"

Because I guess 'most every one of them there had had something or other of Jeffro's making for Christmas. But I'd never known till that minute, and neither had he, that they'd ever called him that. When he heard it, he looked up from Joseph, where he stood holding him in his arms almost fierce, and he come over to the door. And the children pressed up close to the door, shouting like children will, and the nearest ones shook his hand over Joseph's shoulder.

And me, all of a sudden I shouted louder'n they did: "Who you glad to see come home?"

And they all shouted together, loud as their lungs: "The Present-man! The Present-man!"

And then they caught sight of Miss Mayhew, coming from the school, and they all ran for her, to tell her the news. And she came in the gate to shake hands with him. And then in a minute they all trooped off down the road together, around Miss Mayhew, one or two of them waving back at him.

Then I turned round and looked at Jeffro.

"Why, they have felt – felt glad to see me!" he says, breathless. And back to his face came creeping some of the old Jeffro look.

"Why, they are glad," says I. "We all are. We've missed you like everything – trudging along with your toys."

Joseph wasn't saying a word. He was just snuggling up, nosing his father's elbow, like a young puppy. Jeffro stood patting him with his cracked, chapped hand. And Jeffro was looking down the road, far as he could watch, after the children.

"I've got a little canned stuff there in the cupboard for your suppers," I says, not knowing what else to say. "And I stuck a few things in the ground for you out there, that are coming up real nice – potatoes and onions and a cabbage or two. And they's a little patch of corn that'll be along by and by."

All of a sudden Jeffro turned his back to me and walked a few steps away. "A garden?" he says, not looking round. "A little garden?"

"Kind of a one," I told him. "Such as it is, it's all right – what there is of it. And Abigail Arnold," I says, "wants you should make her another wooden bridal pair for the cake in the window – the groom to the other one is all specked up. And I heard her say you could set some of your toys there in her front case. Oh yes, and Mis' Timothy Toplady's got a clucking hen she's been trying to hold back for you, and she says you can pay her in eggs – "

I stopped, because Jeffro frightened me. He wheeled round and stood looking out the door across the pasture opposite, and his lips were moving. I thought maybe he was figuring something with them, and I kept still. But he wasn't – he was thinking with them. In a minute he straightened up. And his face – it wasn't brave or confident the way it had been once, but it was saying a thing for him – a nice thing, even before he spoke.

He came and put out his hand to me, round Joseph. "My friend," he says, "I vill tell you what it is. Thes' is what I thought America was like."

Wasn't that queer, when I understood all he had hoped from America, and all he hadn't found? A lump come in my throat – not a sad one though! But a glad one. And oh, the difference in them lumps!

He went back to work at his toys again, and he began at the bottom, a whole year after his first coming, to save up money to bring over his wife and the little ones. And it wasn't two weeks later that I went there one night and saw him out working on the hole in the road again.

"I work for you this time, though," he said, when he see I noticed. "Thes' I do not for America – no! I do it for you and for thes' village. No one else."

And I thought, while I watched him pounding away at the dirt:

"Anybody might think Friendship Village knows things America hasn't found out yet – but of course that can't be so."