Neighborhood Stories

And then the murmur begun running round that it was Chris that was with him. And Mame Holcomb and Eppleby and Mis’ Toplady and me, watching from the booth, we knew how everybody was looking at everybody else to see what to think – like folks do. But they didn’t know – not yet.

Then something wonderful happened. Halfway round the Square, Abner noticed that Chris didn’t have any wand, same as the other children had. And so, when he was passing the big Cedar-of-Lebanon-looking Christmas tree, what did he do but break off a little branch and put that in Chris’s hand. And Chris come on a-waving it, a bough off that tree. I sort of sung all over when I saw that.

The children ended up round a platform, and up there went the folks that had been picked out to lead the singing. And as they went they sung:

“Oh, how lovely is the evening, is the evening, is the evening!”

And in a minute, from first one place and then another the others took it up, them that had sung it in singing school, years ago —

“When the bells are sweetly chiming, sweetly chiming, sweetly chiming”

and they sung it like a round, which it is, with a great fine booming bass of

“Ding dong, ding dong, ding dong”

all through it. Do you know that round? If you don’t, get it; and get some folks together somehow, and sing it. It lets you taste the evening. But I can’t tell you the way it seemed to us there in Friendship Village, met together after so many years, and singing together like we was all one Folk. One Folk.

They sung other songs, while the dusk came on. Abner Dawes was sitting on the platform, and he kept Chris on his knee – I loved him for that. There wasn’t a set program. First one would start a song from somewheres in the crowd, and then another… And all the time I was waiting for it to get dark enough to do what I had planned to be done – and what I’d had men working at near all the night before to get ready. And when the dark come thick enough, and just at the end, I remember of their singing “Flow Gently, Sweet Afton,” I thought it was time.

I gave the word to them that were waiting. And suddenly, right there in the midst of the Square, the great green tree, that had been the Friendship Village Christmas tree, glowed softly alight from top to bottom, all in the green branches, just like it had glowed on Christmas Eve. They’d done the work good, and as if they liked it – and the bulbs were in so deep in the green that not a soul had noticed all day. And there was the Christmas tree, come back.

“Oh…” they says, low, all over the Square. And nobody said anything else. It was as if, awake and alive in that living tree, there was the same spirit that had been there on Christmas Eve, the spirit that we’ve got to keep alive year long, year round, year through.

I’d whispered something to Abner, and he come down from the platform and went over close to the tree. And of a sudden he lifted Chris in his arms, high up among the lit branches. And in everybody’s hush he says clear:

“ ‘And He took a little child and set him in their midst.’ ”

That was all he said. And Chris looked out and smiled happy, and waved his branch off the Christmas tree. Over the whole Market Square there lay a stillness that said things to itself and to us. It said that here was the Family, come home, round the tree, big folks and little, wise and foolish, and all feeling the Christmas spirit in our hearts just like it was our hearts. It said that the Family’s judging Lisbeth Note one way or the other didn’t settle anything, nor neither did our treating her little boy mean or good…

For all of a sudden we were all of us miles deeper into life than that. And we saw how, beyond judgment and even beyond what’s what, is a spirit that has got to come and clutch hold of life before such wrongs, and more wrongs, and all the wrongs that ail us, can stop being. And that spirit will be the spirit that was in our hearts right then. We all knew it together – I think even Mis’ Sykes knew – and we stood there steeped in the knowing. And it was one of the minutes when the thing we’ve made out of living falls clean away, like a husk and a shell, and the Shining Thing inside comes close and says: “This is the way I am if you’ll let me be it.”

Away over on the edge of the Square somebody’s voice, a man’s voice – we never knew who it was – begun singing “Home Again, From a Distant Shore.” And everybody all over took it up soft. And standing there round the Christmas tree in the middle of June, with that little child in our midst, it was as true for us as ever it was on Christmas night, that glory shone around. And we had come Home in more senses than we’d thought, to a place, a Great Place, that was waiting for us.

Pretty soon I slipped away, inside Eppleby’s booth. And there, in all that scarlet bunting, Lisbeth stood, looking and crying, all alone – but crying for being glad.

“Lisbeth, Lisbeth!” I said, “right out there is the way life is —when we can get it uncovered.”

She looked up at me; and I saw the thing in her face that was in the faces of all those in the Square, like believing and like hoping, more than any of us knows how – yet.

“Honest?” she said. “Honest and truly?”

“Honest and truly,” I told her.

And I believe that. And you believe it. If only we can get it said…