Peace in Friendship Village

I'd set down the bread and the johnny-cake, and he'd thanked me – Jeffro always thanked folks like he'd just been give a piece of new life with every kindness – and I dunno but he had – I dunno but we all have; and I'd started to go, when he says hesitating:

"I have vanted to ask you thes': If I vork at that bad place in the road in front – if I bring sand from the hill behind, what I can, and fill in that hole, slow, you know – but some every day – you would not mind?"

"Mind?" says I. "Why, my, no. But it's part the village's business to do that. You're in the village limits, you know. It'd ought to been done long ago."

"The village?" said he. "But it is your place. Why should the village fix that hole?"

"It's the village's business," I told him, "to keep the streets good. Most of them do it pretty lackadaisical, but it's their business to do it."

His face lit up like turning up the wick. "Nu!" he cried. "So I vill do. I thought it vould be you I am doing it for, and I vas glad. But if it is the village, then I am many times more glad of that."

It wasn't much of a compliment to a lady, but I thought I see what he meant.

"Why are you glad, Mr. Jeffro," I says, to make sure, "that it's the village?"

"It does all the things for me," he says, simple. "The fire-engine, the post-office – even the telephone is free to me in the village. So it is America doing this for me; for thes' village, it belongs to America. There is no army that I go in or pay to keep out of – there are no soldiers that are jostling me in the streets – they do not even make me buy and put up any flag. And my little Joseph, all day long he is learning. And the people – here they call me 'Mr.' All is free – free. For all thes' I pay nothing. And now you tell me here is a hole that it is the village business to fill up. It is the business of America to fill up that hole! Vell, I can make that my business, for a little – what-you-say —pay-back."

It was awful hard to know what to say. I wonder what you'd have said? I just stood still and kept still. Because, if I'd known what to say, it would have been pretty hard, just then, to say it anyway.

"It is a luck for the folks," he said, "that their own vork lets them make some paying back. My toys, they don't pay back, not very much. I must find another vay."

He followed me out on the stoop.

"There is von thing they vill let me do after a vile, though," he said, with a smile. "In America, I hear everybody make von long, strong groaning about their taxes. Those taxes, ven vill they come? And are they so very big, then? They must be very big to pay for all the free things."

"Why, Mr. Jeffro," I said, "but you won't have any taxes."

"But I am to be a citizen!" he cried. "Every citizen pays his taxes."

"No," I told him. "No, they don't. And unless you own property or – or something," says I, stumbling as delicate as I could, "you don't pay any taxes at all, Mr. Jeffro."

When I made him know that sure, he lifted his arms and let them drop; and he come on down the path with me, and he stood there by the syringa bush at the gate, looking off down the little swelling hill to where the village nestled at the foot. School was just out, and the children were flooding down the road, and the whole time was peaceful and spacious and close-up-to, like a friend. We stood still for a minute, while I was thinking that; and when I turned to Jeffro, he stood with the tears running down his cheeks.

"To think there is such a place," he said reverently. "And me in it. And them going to be here." Then he looked at me like he was seeing more than his words were saying. "I keep thinking," he said, "how hard God is vorking, all over the earth – and how good He's succeeded here."

Up to the gate run little Joseph, his school-books in his arms. Jeffro put both hands on the boy.

"Little citizen, little citizen," his father said. And it was like one way of being baptized.

II

When I was a little girl, a cardinal bird came one summer and nested in our yard. They almost never come so far north, and I loved him like a friend. When autumn came, the other birds all went, but he didn't go. And one day, in the first snow and high wind, he was storm-beaten into our little porch, and we caught him. We dare not let him go, in the cold. So we kept him until he died. I shall never forget the change that the days made. I cannot bear to tell or to think about the change in him that the days made. That is why I will never have about me a caged thing, bird or beast or spirit. The cardinal helped me to understand. I wonder if the death of any beauty or any life is as much Nature's will as we still think it is…

This is why I shrink from telling what next happened to Jeffro – what I knew must happen to him if he came here and lived the life of his kind – of my kind. Lived it, I mean, with his eyes open. There are plenty who live it and never know anything about it, after all. But Jeffro would know. He had seeing eyes, and his heart was the heart of a child, and his face was always surprised – surprised, but believing it all too, and trusting the good. He trusted the good just as you and I did, in the beginning. Just as you and I do, in the end. But in between the two trusts there comes a black time; and if it hasn't come to you, then you don't know the Big Land; and you don't see what's going on in it; and you haven't questioned where it's all going to lead. As, after a while, Jeffro questioned it.

All summer he worked at his toys, and all the autumn. But when winter began to come, the little house was hard to heat. The roof was decayed, the windows were shrunken, the floor was in a draft from all four directions; and I didn't have the money to make the house over – which was just about what it needed. I offered to rent him and the little boy a room in my house, and to let him do his work there; but it was far for the little fellow to go to school. And just then came the Offer.

A man from a mining town in the next state gave Jeffro a chance to go there with him, and he'd give him work in the mines all winter. Jeffro listened, and heard about the good pay, and the plain, hearty food, and the chance to get ahead; and Miss Mayhew said she'd keep the little boy; and Jeffro thought about the cold little house, and feeding himself all winter, and about standing on street corners with his pack; and there was Miss Mayhew's nice, warm house and woman-care for the little boy. And in the end Jeffro went. I told him to leave his things in the little house and I wouldn't charge him rent, which it wasn't worth it.

The night before he started he come round to my house to say good-by. He thanked me, so nice, for what I'd done, off and on. And then he pulled something out of his pocket.

"Look!" he said. "It is from the National Bank. It is my bank-book – the proofs that I have money there. Here is my checker book," said he. "You know how these things go. See that!" His eyes got big and deep. "They give me credit – and thes' two books," he said. "And they vill give me interest on thes' little money. It vill make money for me vile I am gone. It is a vonder. I ask' them vat there is to pay for this chance, and the man laughed. And see – all the vile I am gone, Joseph vill be learning free. I pay no more than his little board. It is a vonder."

He showed me the entry, thirty-seven dollars, his summer's savings. He had had to keep back the amount of his fare.

"The ticket is much," he said, "but thes' vay I can save enough by spring so they can come. They can live in your little house – oh, it is a plenty room. Ve shall have a little garden – as big as Joseph's plate! She vill keep a little coop of chickens – "

So he ran on with his happy planning. I remember how he looked when he left my house that night – his two books tightly clasped, his shoulders back, his head full of dreams, his face sort of held up to the stars. I never saw him that way again.

It was a long winter. It's strange how the calendar sets down winter as just being three months when everybody that's lived through one knows how it's either long or short and never, never clipped right off at the three months, same as the almanac would have you believe. This one was long, and it was white, and it was deep. It kept me shoveling coal and splitting kindling and paying for stove-wood and warming my feet, and it seemed to me that was pretty near all I did do those months. It's surprising and it's discouraging how much of our lives goes along just doing the little fussy things necessary to keep a-going, that you can't count in on just pure, sheer living.

"Eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, and eight hours for exercise," they used to tell me; and I used to think: "Yes, but what about just messing-round?" That don't get itself counted in at all, and that just eats up time by the dialful. And I think, if you look close, that one of the things we've got to learn is how to do less of the little hectoring, wearing messing-round, and to do more of the big, plain, real, true, unvarnished living – like real work, and real play, and real talk, and real thinking. And fewer little jobs – fewer little jobs.

But after a while the winter got done, and early April came – a little faint green down below, a little fine gold up above, and a great wide wash of pale blue at the top; Spring in three layers.

I'd been often to see Joseph, and he was well, and in the reader ahead of the reader a boy of his age would naturally have been in. He had had several short letters from his father, and I was looking to have one of them say when we might expect him, but none of them did.

Then in April no letter came. We thought it meant that he'd be home. I'd been over and cleaned the little house. And then when April was almost to a close, and he hadn't come yet, I saw it would be too late for his garden, so I planted that – a few vegetables, and a few flowers, and a morning-glory or two over the stoop. And I laid in a few canned things in his cupboard, so's he would have something to start in on.

May came, and we wondered. Then one day there was a letter in a strange writing. Jeffro was in the hospital, it said, and he wanted to send word that he was all right and would send a letter himself in a little while. That was all that it told us.

Everybody in Friendship Village remembers that spring, because it was the year the bank closed down. Nobody knew the reason. Some day, when the world gets really to going, one of the things they'll read about in musty books and marvel over will be the things we call panics. They'll know then that, put simple, it's just another name for somebody's greed, dressed up becoming as Conditions. We're beginning now to look at the quality of the clothes Conditions dress in, and we're finding them pretty poor quality sometimes, and cut awful old-fashioned, and the dye rubs off. But in those days, all we knew was that the bank had "suspended payment."

"But what's that mean – 'suspended payment?'" I says to Silas Sykes that told me. "You can't suspend your debts, can you? I never could."

"It means," Silas says, "that they'll never pay a cent on the dollar. That's what it means."

"But," I says, "I don't understand. If I owe you ten dollars, I can't put down my curtain and suspend that payment, can I?"

"Well, you ain't banks," says Silas. "And banks is."

I was walking away and thinking it over, when I stopped stock-still in the street. The National Bank – it was the National Bank that Jeffro had his thirty-seven dollars in.

I felt as if I had to do something for him, then and there. And that afternoon I took my trowel and went up to his little place, and thought I'd dig round some in the garden that was coming up, gay as a button.

When I stepped inside the gate, I looked up at the house, and I saw the front door was open. "Land," I thought, "I hope they haven't stole what little he had in there, too." And I stepped up to the door.

In the wooden chair in the middle of the floor sat Jeffro. His hat was pulled down over his eyes, his legs were thrust out in front of him, one of his arms was hanging down, and the other one was in a white sling.

"Mr. Jeffro – Mr. Jeffro!" I says. "Oh – what's the matter?"

He looked up, and his face never changed at sight of me, nor he never got up or moved. And his look – well, it wasn't the look of Jeffro any more than feathers have the look of a bird. But one thing I knew about that look – he was hungry. I could tell that look anywhere, because I've been hungry myself, with no food coming from anywheres.

I flew to the cupboard where I'd put in the few things, and in a jiffy I had some soup heating and a box of crackers opened. I brought the bowl to the table, all steaming and good-smelling, and he drew up there without a word and ate with his hat on – ate like I never saw a man eat before.

When he got through: "Tell me about it, Mr. Jeffro," I says. And he told me.

It wasn't anything very new. Jeffro had been in the mines since the first of November, and the first of January the strike had begun – the strike against a situation that Jeffro drew for me that afternoon, telling it without any particular heat, but just plain and quiet. He told me how he had gone with some of the men to the house of one of the owners to talk of settlement.