Neighborhood Stories

I guess she thanked him. I donno. All I remember is that pretty soon everybody begun to move towards town and I moved with ’em. And while we walked the whole thing kind of begun to take hold of me, what it meant, and things that had been coming to me all the morning came to me all together – and I wanted to chant ’em a chant, like Deborah (but pronounced Déborah when it’s a relative). And I wanted to say:

“O Lord, look down on these eighty families, old and young and real young, that we’ve lived neighbor to all our lives, and yet we don’t know half of ’em, either by name or by face, till now. Till now!

“And some of them we do know individual has showed up here to-day with a back-ground of families, wives and children they’ve got, just like anybody – Tippie that drives the dray and that’s helped moved everybody; for twelve years he’s moved my refrigerator out and my cook stove in, and vicious verses, as regular as Spring come and Autumn arrived; and there all the time he had a wife, with a cameo pin, and three little Tippies in plaid skirts and pink cheeks, asking everybody for a drink of water just like your own child, and one of ’em so nice that he might of been anybody’s instead of just Tippie’s.

“And Mamie Felt, that does up lace curtains of them that can afford to have ’em done up and dries ’em on a frame so’s they hang straight and not like a waterfall with its expression blowing sideways, same as mine do – there’s Mamie with her old mother and a cripple brother that we’ve never guessed about, and that she was doing for all the whole time.

“And Absalom Ricker’s old mother, that’s mourning bitter because she left her coral pin with a dog on behind on the Flats that her husband give it to her when they was engaged … and we knew she was married, but not one of us had thought of her as human enough ever to have been engaged. And Mis’ Haskitt with her new black dress, and Mis’ Dole with her clean-ironed clothes bars, and Mis’ Bitty Marshall with her baby and her little chickens and her lace curtain, and Bitty with his grocery store.

“Lord, we thank thee for letting us see them, and all the rest of ’em, close up to.

“We’re glad that now just because the Mad river flowed into the homes that we ain’t often been in or ever, if any, and drove up to us the folks that we’ve never thought so very much about, we’re glad to get the feeling that I had when I heard our grocery-boy knew how to hand-carve wood and our mail man was announced to sing a bass solo, that we never thought they had any regular lives, separate from milk and mail.

“And let us keep that feeling, O Lord! Amen.”

And I says right out of the fullness of the lump in my throat:

“Don’t these folks seem so much more folks than they ever did before?”

Mis’ Merriman that was near me, answered up:

“Why, of course,” she says, “they’re in trouble. Ain’t you no compassion to you?”

“Some,” says I, modest, “but where’d that compassion come from? It didn’t just grow up now, did it? – like Abraham’s gourd, or whoever it was that had one?”

“Why, no,” she says irritable. “It’s in us all, of course. But it takes trouble to bring it out.”

“Why does it take trouble to bring it out?” I says and I looked ahead at us all a-streaming down Daphne Street, just like it was some nice human doings. “Why does it? Here’s us all, and it only takes a minute to get us all going, with our hands in our pockets and lumps in our throats and our sympathy just as busy as it ever was for our little family in-four-walls affairs. Now,” I says, “that love and sympathy, and them pockets and them throats are all here, just the same, day after day. What I want to know is, what are them things doing with themselves when nobody is in active trouble?”

And then I said my creed:

“O, when we get to working as hard to keep things from happening as we work when it’s happened, won’t living be fun?”

“Well, of course we couldn’t prevent floods,” says Mis’ Merriman, “and them natural things.”

“Shucks!” I says, simple. “If we knew as much about frosts and hurricanes as we do about comets – we’d show you. And do you think it’s any harder to bank in a river than it is to build a subway —if there was the same money in it for the company?”

Just then the noon whistles blew – all of ’em together, round-house and brick-yard, so’s you couldn’t tell ’em apart; and the sun come shining down on us all, going along on Daphne Street. And all of a sudden Mis’ Merriman looked over to me and smiled, and so I done to her, and I saw that our morning together and our feeling together had made us forget whatever there’d been between us to forget about. And I ain’t ever in my life felt so kin to folks. I felt kinner than I knew I was.

That night, tired as I was, I walked over to see Mis’ Sykes’s night-blooming cereus – I don’t see enough pretty things to miss one when I can get to it. And there, sitting on Mis’ Sykes’s front porch, with her shoes slipped off to rest her feet, was Mis’ Holcomb-that-was-Mame Bliss.

“Mis’ Sykes is out getting in a few pieces she washed out and forgot,” says Mame, “and the Marshalls is all down town in a body sending a postal to say they’re safe. Silas went too.”

“The Marshalls!” says I. “Are they here?”

Mame nodded. “Silas asked ’em,” she says. “Him and Bitty’ve been looking over grocery stock catalogues. Silas’s been advising him some.”

Mame and I smiled in concert. But whether the flood done it, or whether we done it – who cared?

“But, land, you, Mame!” I says. “I thought you – I thought Mis’ Sykes…”

“I know it,” says Mame. “I was. She did. But the first thing I knew to-day, there we was peeling potatoes together in the same pan, and we done it all afternoon. I guess we kind of forgot about our bad feeling…”

I set there, smiling in the dark… I donno whether you know a village, along toward night, with the sky still pink, and folks watering their front lawns and calling to each other across the streets, and a little smell of bon-fire smoke coming from somewheres? It was like that. And when Mis’ Sykes come to tell us the flower was beginning to bloom, I says to myself that there was lots more in bloom in the world than any of us guessed.

THE PARTY

Mis’ Fire Chief Merriman done her mourning like she done her house work – thorough. She was the kind of a housekeeper that looks on the week as made up of her duties, and the days not needing other names: Washday, Ironday, Mend-day, Bakeday, Freeday, Scrubday, and Sunday – that was how they went. With them nothing interfered without it was a circus or a convention or a company or the extra work on holidays. She kept house all over her, earnest; and when the Fire Chief died, that was the way she mourned.

When I say mourning I mean what you do besides the feeling bad part. She felt awful bad about her husband, but her mourning was somehow kind of separate from her grieving. Her grieving was done with her feelings, but her mourning was done more physical, like a diet. After the first year there was certain things she would and wouldn’t do, count of mourning, and nothing could change them.

Weddings and funerals Mis’ Fire Chief Merriman stayed true to. She would go to either. “Getting connect’ or getting buried,” she said, “them are both religious occasions, and they’s somethin’ so sad about either of ’em that they kind of fit in with weeds.”

But she wouldn’t go to a party if there was more than three or four to it, and not then if one of ’em was a stranger to her. And she wouldn’t go to it unless it was to a house – picnics, where you sat around on the ground, she said, was too informal for them in mourning. Church meetings she went to, but not club meetings, except the Cemetery Improvement Sodality ones. It was like keeping track of etiquette to know what to do with Mis’ Fire Chief Merriman.

“Seems though Aunt Hettie is more married now than she was when Uncle Eben was living,” her niece use’ to say.

It was on the little niece, Harriet Wells, – named for Mis’ Chief and come to live with her a while before the Fire Chief died, – it was on her that Mis’ Merriman’s mourning etiquette fell the heaviest. Harriet was twenty and woman-pretty and beau-interested; and Amos More, that worked in Eppleby’s feed store and didn’t hev no folks, he’d been shining round the Merriman house some, and Harriet had been shining back, modest and low-wicked, but lit. He was spending mebbe a couple of evenings a week there and taking Harriet to sociables and entertainments some. But when the Fire Chief died Mis’ Merriman set her foot down on Amos.

“I couldn’t stand it,” she says, “to hev a man comin’ here that wasn’t the Chief. I couldn’t stand it to hev sparkin’ an’ courtin’ goin’ on all around me. An’ if I should hev to hev a weddin’ got ready for in this house – the dressmakin’ an’ like that – I believe I should scream.”

So Amos he give up going there and just went flocking around by himself, and Harriet, she give all her time to her aunt, looking like a little lonesome candle that nothing answered back to. And Mis’ Merriman’s mourning flourished like a green bay tree.

It was into this state of affairs, more than a year after the Chief died, that Mis’ Merriman’s cousin’s letter come. Mis’ Merriman’s cousin had always been one of them myth folks that every town has – the relations and friends of each other that is talked about and known about and heard from and even asked after, but that none of us ever sees. This cousin, Maria Carpenter, was one of our most intimate myths. Next to the Fire Chief himself, Mis’ Merriman give the most of her time in conversation to her. She was real dressy – she used to send Mis’ Merriman samples of her clothes and their trimmings, and we all felt real well acquainted and interested; and she was rich and busy and from the city, and the kind of a relation it done Mis’ Merriman good to have connected with her, and her photograph with a real lace collar was on the parlor mantel. She had never been to Friendship Village, and we used to wonder why not.

And then she got the word that her cousin was actually flesh-an’-blood coming. I run in to Mis’ Merriman’s on my way home from town just after Harriet had brought her up the letter, and Mis’ Merriman was all of a heap in the big chair.

“Calliope,” she says, “the blow is down! Maria Carpenter is a-comin’ Tuesday to stay till Friday.”

“Well,” I says, “ain’t you glad, Mis’ Fire Chief? Company ain’t no great chore now the telephone is in,” I says to calm her.

She looked up at me, sad, over her glasses.

“What good is it to have her come?” she says. “I can’t show her off. There won’t be a livin’ place I can take her to. Nobody’ll see her nor none of her clothes.”

“It’s too bad,” I says absent, “it didn’t happen so’s you could give a company for Miss Carpenter.”

Mis’ Fire Chief burst out like her feelings overflowed themselves.

“It’s what I’ve always planned,” she says. “Many a night I’ve laid awake an’ thought about the company I’d give when Maria come. An’ Maria never could come. An’ now here is Maria all but upon me, an’ the company can’t be. I know she’ll bring a dress, expectin’ it. She knows it’s past the first year, an’ she’ll think I’ll feel free to entertain. I donno but I ought to telegraph her: Pleased to see you but don’t you expect a company. Wouldn’t that be more open an’ aboveboard? Oh, dear!” Mis’ Fire Chief says, rockin’ in her chair that wouldn’t rock, “I’m well an’ the house is all in order an’ I could afford a company if I didn’t go in deep. But I couldn’t bear to be to it. That’s it, Calliope; I couldn’t bear to be to it.”

I remember Mis’ Fire Chief kind of stopped then, like she thought of something; but I wasn’t looking at her. I was watching Harriet Wells that was standing by the window a little to one side. And I see her lift her hand and give it a little wave and lay it on the glass like a signal to somebody. And all of a sudden I knew it was half past ’leven and that Amos More went home early to his dinner at the boarding house so’s to get back at twelve-thirty, when Eppleby went for his, and that nine to ten it was Amos that Harriet was waving at. I knew it special and sure when Harriet turned back to the room with a nice little guilty look and a pink spot up high on both her cheeks. And something sort o’ shut up in my throat. It seems so easy for folks to get married in this world, and here was these two not doing it.

All of a sudden Mis’ Fire Chief Merriman jumped up on to her feet.

“Calliope Marsh,” says she, “I’ve got a plan. I can do it, if you’ll help me. Why can’t I give a company,” she says, “an’ not come in the room? A hostess has to be in the kitchen most of the time anyway. Why can’t I just stay there, an’ leave Maria be in the parlor, an’ me not be to the company at all?”

We talked it over, and neither of us see why not. Mis’ Sykes, when she gives her series of companies, three in three days running, she often don’t set foot in the parlor till after the refreshments are served. I remember once she was so faint she had to go back to the kitchen and eat her own supper, and we didn’t say good-by to her at all, except as some of us that knew her best went and stuck our heads out the kitchen door. So with all us ladies – we done the same way when we entertained, so be we give ’em any kind of a lay-out.