Peace in Friendship Village

But while we were a-staring at each other, the Switzerland maid come a-racing back. Seems she'd been up to the depot, a block away, and Copper, the baggageman, had noticed a queer-looking kid on the platform when some folks got off Number 16 that had gone through west an hour or so back. Copper thought the kid was with them, but he didn't notice it special. Where the folks went to, nobody knew.

"Down on the Flats somewhere, that's where its folks went," says Mis' Sykes. "Sure to. Well, then, they'll be looking for it. We must get it in the papers."

We raced around and advertised that little boy in the Daily. The Friendship Village Evening Daily goes to press almost any time, so if you happen to hit it right, you can get things in most up to seven o'clock. Quite often the Evening Daily comes after we're all in bed, and we get up and read it to go to sleep by. We told the sheriff, and he come up that evening and clucked at the little boy, without getting a word out of him, no more than we could. The news flew round town, and lots of folks come up to see him. It was more exciting than a night-blooming cereus night.

But not a soul come to claim him. He might have dropped down from inside the air.

"Well," says Mis' Sykes, "if some of them foreigners down on the Flats has lost him, it'll be us that'll have to find him. They ain't capable of nothing."

That was how Mis' Sykes, and Mis' Toplady, and Mame Holcomb and I hitched up and went down to the Flats and took the baby with us, right after breakfast next morning, to try our best to locate him.

The Flats are where the Friendship Village ex-foreigners live – ain't it scandalous the way we keep on calling ex-foreigners foreigners? And then, of course, nobody's so very foreign after you get acquainted. Americans, even, ain't so very foreign to Europeans after they get to know us, they say. I'd been down there often enough to see my wash-woman, or dicker for a load of wood, or buy new garden truck, or get somebody to houseclean, but I didn't know anybody down there to visit – and none of us ladies did. The Flats were like that. The Flats didn't seem ever to count real regular in real Friendship Village doings. For instance, the town was just getting in sewerage, but it wasn't to go in down on the Flats, and nobody seemed surprised. The only share the Flats seemed to have in sewerage was to house the long, red line of bunk cars, where the men lived, drawn up on a spur of track by the gas house.

It was a heavenly day, warm and cool and bright, with a little whiff of wind, like a sachet bag, thrown in. We had the Sykeses' surrey and old white horse, and Mis' Toplady and Mame and me squoze on the back seat so's to let Mis' Sykes, that was driving, have sitting beside her in plain sight that little boy in his blazing red dress.

We went first to see some folks named Amachi – her husband was up in the pineries, she said, and so she run their little home-made rug business. She was a wonderful, motherly soul, and she poored the little boy with her big, thick hand and listened, with her face up and her hair low in her neck like some kind of a picture with big, sad eyes. But she hadn't heard of anybody lost.

"One trouble with these folks," Mis' Sykes says as we drove away, "they never know anything but their own affairs."

Then we went to some folks named Cardell. They tended the bridge and let the gypsies camp in their pasture whenever they wanted. She was cutting the grass with a blunt pair of shears; and she had lots of flowers and vines and the nicest way of talking off the tip of her tongue. She give the little boy a cup of warm milk, but she hadn't heard anything about anybody being lost anywheres.

"Real superior for a foreigner," says Mis' Sykes, so quick after she'd clucked to her horse I was afraid Mis' Cardell heard her.

Then we saw an old lady named Marchant, that her ancestors had settled up Friendship Village, but she was so poor now that everybody had kind of forgot about that, and some folks named Swenson that lived in the toll-gate house and had a regular hennery of homeless cats. And though they give the little boy a flower or two and left him stroke a kitty or more, they hadn't any of them either seen or heard of anybody that was out trying to locate a son.

It was just a little while after we started that Mis' Sykes had her great idea. I remember we were just coming out at Mis' Swenson's when she thought of it, and all the homeless cats were following along behind us with all their tails sticking up straight.

"Ladies," says Mis' Sykes, "why in under the canopy don't we get some work out of some of these folks for the peace meeting to-morrow night?"

"I was thinking of that," says Mame Holcomb.

"Some of them would wash the dishes and not charge anything, being it's for the peace."

"And help clean up next day," says Mis' Sykes. "That's when the backaching, feet-burning work comes in."

"Costs a sight to pay by the hour," says Mame, "and this way we could get the whole thing free, for patriotism."

"Mop the hall floor, too," says Mis' Sykes. "Land," she adds, only about half soft enough, "look at them children! Did you ever see such skinny sights?"

Awful pindling-looking children, the Swensons were, and there were most as many of them as there were cats.

When she got to the gate, Mis' Sykes turned round in her grand-lady way, and she says, "Mis' Swenson, why don't you and your husband come up to the peace meetin' to-morrow night and help us?"

Mis' Swenson was a peaked little thing, with too much throat in length and not enough in thickness. "I never heard of it," she says.

Mis' Sykes explained in her commanding way. "Peace, you know," she says, "is to be celebrated between the different countries. And, of course, this is your country, too," Mis' Sykes assured her, "and we'd like to hev you come up and help with the dishes, or like that."

"Is it dress-up?" says Mis' Swenson, not very loud.

"My, no!" we told her, and decided to stick to the usual hooks in our closets.

"I'd like to," says Mis' Swenson, "if I can get Pete to change his clothes."

"So do," says Mis' Sykes gracious and clucked her horse along. "My goodness," she says, "what awful stuff these folks must feed their children! And how they must bungle 'em when they're sick. And they won't hardly any of 'em come to-morrow night," she says. "You can not," she says, "get these folks to take part in nothing."

We went to twenty or thirty houses, and every one of them Mis' Sykes invited to come and help. But not one of the twenty or thirty houses had heard of any foreigner whatever having just arrived in Friendship Village, nor had ever seen or heard of that little boy before. He was awful good, the little soul, waving his hands so nice that I begun to be afraid everybody we met would claim foreign and ask for him.

By noon we begun to get pretty excited. And the sheriff, he was excited too, and he was hunting just as wild as any of us, being arrests was light. He was hanging on the canal bridge when we crossed it, going home along toward noon.

"They never had a case of lost child in Friendship Village in twenty years," he said. "I looked it up."

"Lost child nothing!" I told him. "The child ain't lost. Here he is. It's the parents," I said, "that's lost on us."

The noon whistle blew just then, and the men that were working on the sewer threw down their shovels.

"Look at their faces," says Mis' Sykes. "Did you ever see anything so terrible foreign?"

"Foreign ain't poison," says Mis' Toplady on the back seat.

"I'm going to have Silas put a button on the cellar window," says Mis' Sykes.

"Shucks, they ain't shaved, that's all," says Mis' Toplady.

Mis' Sykes leaned over to the sheriff. "You better be up around the peace celebration to-morrow night," she says. "We've been giving out invitations pretty miscellaneous, and we might need you."

"I'll drop up," says the sheriff. "But I like to watch them bunk cars pretty close, where the men live."

"Is there much lawlessness?" Mis' Sykes asks, fearful.

Mis' Toplady sings out, laughing, that there would be if she didn't get home to get Timothy's dinner, and Mis' Sykes come to herself and groaned.

"But oh, my land," she says, "we ain't found no ma nor pa for this child. What in time are we going to do? I'm too stiff," she says, "to adopt one personally."

But the little boy, he just smelled of the flowers the folks on the Flats had give him, and waved his hand to the sheriff, cute.

Late the next afternoon, us ladies that weren't tending to the supper were trying to get the Foreign booth to look like something. The Foreign booth looked kind of slimpsey. We hadn't got enough in it. We just had a few dishes that come from the old country, and a Swiss dress of Berta's mother's and a Japanese dress, and like that. But we couldn't seem to connect up much of Europe with Friendship Village.

At five o'clock the door opened, and in walked Mis' Amachi and Mis' Swenson from the Flats, with nice black dresses on and big aprons pinned up in newspapers. Pretty soon in come old Mis' Marchant, that had rode up on a grocery delivery wagon, she said. Close behind these come some more of them we had asked. And Mis' Sykes, acting like the personal hostess to everything, took them around and showed them things, the Friendship Village booth that was loaded with stuff, and the Foreign booth that wasn't.

And Mis' Poulaki, one of the Greek women, she looked for a while and then she says, "We got two nice musics from old country."

She made her hands go like playing strings, and we made out that she meant two musical instruments.

"Good land!" says Mis' Sykes. "Post right straight home and get them. Got anything else?"

"A little boy's suit from Norway," says Mis' Swenson. "And my marriage dress."

"Get it up here!" cries Mis' Sykes. "Ladies, why do you s'pose we never thought of this before?"