Neighborhood Stories

“I give her potato bread receipt away,” she says miserable, “and it seems she didn’t expect it of me.”

“Is that it?” I says. “Well, of course we both know Mis’ Sykes ain’t the one to ever forgive a thing like that. I s’pose she’ll socially ostrich-egg you – or whatever it is they say?”

“I s’pose she will,” says Mis’ Holcomb forlorn. “You know how Mis’ Sykes is. From now on, if I say the sky is blue, Mis’ Sykes’ll say no, pink.”

They was often them feuds in Friendship Village – like this one, and like Mis’ Merriman’s and my new one. It hadn’t ought to be so in a village family, but then sometimes it is. I s’pose in cities it’s different – they always say it makes folks broader to live in cities, and they prob’ly get to know better. But it’s like that with us.

Well, of course the back-bone had dropped out of the morning for Mis’ Holcomb, and she didn’t take no more interest in going down street than she would in darning – I mention darning because I defy anybody to pick out anything uninterestinger. Up to the time I got to the Post-Office Hall store, I was trying to persuade her to come in with me to see Silas.

“I’d best not go in,” she says. “You know how one person’s quarrel is catching in a family. And a potato bread receipt is as good as anything else to be loyal about.”

But I made her go in, even if she shouldn’t say a word, but just act constituent-like.

Silas was alone in the store, sticking dates on to a green paste-board to make the word “Pure” to go over his confectionery counter. He had his coat off, and his hair had been brushed with a wet brush that left the print of the bristles, and his very back looked Busy.

“Hello, folks,” says he, “how’s life?”

“Selfish as ever,” I says. “Ain’t trade?”

“Well,” says Silas, “it’s every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost in most everything now, ain’t it? As the prophet said, It beats all.”

“It does that,” I says. “It beats everybody in the end. Funny they don’t find it out. That’s why,” I adds serene, “we been so moved by your generous cost sales of stuff, Silas. What you been doin’ that for anyway?” I put it to him.

“For to bait trade,” says he.

“For what else?” I ask’ him.

“Why,” he says, beginning to be irritable, which some folks uses instead of wit, “to push the store, of course. I ain’t been doin’ it for the fun of it.”

“Ain’t you now?” I says. “I thought it was kind of a game with you.”

“What do you mean – game?” says Silas, scowling.

“Cat and mouse,” I says brief. “You the cat and Bitty Marshall the mouse.”

Silas stood up straight and just towered at me.

“What you been hearing now?” he says, demandful.

“Well,” I answered him, “nothing that surprised me very much. Only that you’ve been underselling Bitty so’s to drive him out and keep the trade of the Flats yourself.”

Silas never squinched.

“Well,” says he, “what if I have? Ain’t I got a right to protect my own business?”

I looked him square in the eye.

“No,” I says, “not that way.”

Silas put back his head and laughed, tolerant.

“I guess,” he says, “you ain’t been following very close the business affairs of this country.”

“Following them was how I come to understand about you,” I says simple. And I might have added, “And knowing about you, I can see how it is with them.”

For all of a sudden, I see how he thought of these things, and for a minute it et up my breath. It had always seemed to me that men that done things like this to other folks’s little business was wicked men in general. That they kind of got behind being legal and grinned out at folks and said: “Do your worst. You can’t stop us.” But now I see, like a blast of light, that it was no such thing; but that most of them was probably good husbands and fathers, like Silas; industrious, frugal, members of the Common Councils and of the school boards, elders in the church, charitable, kindly, and believing simple as the day that what they was doing was for the good of business. Business.

“Well,” Silas was saying, “what you going to do about it?”

I looked back at Marne Holcomb standing, nervous, over by the cranberry barrel:

“I’ve got this to do about it,” I says, “and I know Mame Holcomb has, and between us we can get every woman in Friendship Village to do the same – unless it is your wife that can’t help herself like lots of women can’t: Unless you get your foot off Bitty’s neck, every last one of us will quit buying of you and go down to the Flats and trade with Bitty. How about it, Mame?”

She spoke up, like them little women do sometimes that you ain’t ever looked upon as particularly special when it comes to taking a stand.

“Why, yes,” she says. “They ain’t a woman in the village that would stand that kind of dealing, if they only knew. And we,” she adds tranquil, “could see to that.”

Silas give the date-word he was making a throw over on to the sugar barrel, and made a wild gesture with a handful of toothpicks.

“Women,” he says, “dum women. If it wasn’t for you women swarming over the world like different kinds of – of – of – noxious insects, it would be a regular paradise.”

“Sure it would,” I says logical, “because there wouldn’t be a man in it to mess it up.”

Silas had just opened his mouth to reply, when all of a sudden, like a letter in your box, somebody come and stood in the doorway – a man, and called out something, short and sharp and ending in “Come on – all of you,” and disappeared out again, and we heard him running down the street. Then we saw two-three more go running by the door, and we heard some shouting. And Silas, that must have guessed at what they said, he started off behind them, dragging on his sear-sucker coat and holding his soft felt hat in his mouth, it not seeming to occur to him that he could set it on his head till he was ready to use it.

“What’s the matter?” I says to Mis’ Holcomb. “They must be getting excited because nothing ever happens here. They ain’t nothing else to get excited over that I can think of.”

Then we see more men come running, and their boots clumped down on the loose board walk with that special clump and thud that boots gets to ’em when they’re running with bad news, or hurrying for help.

“What is it?” I says, getting to the door. And I see men begin to come out of the stores and get in knots and groups that you can tell mean trouble of some kind, just as plain as you can tell that some portraits of total strangers is the portraits of somebody that’s dead. They look dead. And them groups looked trouble. And then I see Timothy Toplady come tearing down the road in his spring wagon, with his horse’s check reins all dragging and him lashing out at ’em as he stood up in the box. Then I run right out in the road and yelled at him.

“Timothy,” I says, “what’s the matter? What’s happened?”

He drew up his horses, and threw out his hand, beckoning angular.

“Come on!” he says, “get in here – get in quick…”

Then he looked back over his shoulder and see Mis’ Merriman that had come out to her gate with Mis’ Sykes, and they was both out on the street, looking, and he beckoned, wild, to them; and they come running.

“Quick!” says Timothy. “The dam’s broke. They’ve just telephoned everybody. The Flats’ll be flooded. Come on and help them women load their things…”

I don’t remember any of us saying a thing. We just clomb in over the back-board of Timothy’s wagon, him reaching down to help us, courteous, and we set down on the bottom of the wagon – Mis’ Holcomb and Mis’ Sykes, them two enemies, and Mis’ Merriman and me – and we headed for the Flats.

I remember, on the ride down there, seeing the street get thick with folks – in a minute the street was black with everybody, all hurrying toward what was the matter, and all veering out and swarming into the road – somehow, folks always flows over into the road when anything happens. And men and women kept coming out of houses, and calling to know what was the matter, and everybody shouted it back at them so’s they couldn’t understand, but they come out and joined in and run anyway. And over and over, as he drove, Timothy kept shouting to us how he had just been hitching up when the news come, and how his wagon was a new one and had ought to be able to cart off five or six loads at a trip.

“It can’t hurt Friendship Village proper,” I remember his saying over and over too, “that’s built high and dry. But the whole Flats’ll be flooded out of any resemblance to what they’ve been before.”

“Friendship Village proper,” I says over to myself, when we got to the top of Elephant Hill that let us look over the Pump pasture and away across the Flats, laying idle and not really counted in the town till it come to the tax list. There was dozens of little houses – the Marshalls and the Betts’s and the Rickers’s and the Hennings and the Doles and the Haskitts, and I donno who all. All our washings was done down there – or at least the washings was of them that didn’t do them themselves. The garden truck of them that didn’t have gardens, the home grown vegetables for Silas’s store, the hired girls’ homes of them that had hired girls, the rag man, the scissors grinder, Lowry that canes chairs and was always trying to sell us tomato plants – you know how that part of a town is populationed? And then there was a few that worked in Silas’s factory, and an outlaying milkman or two – and so on. “Friendship Village proper,” I says over and looked down and wondered why the Flats was improper enough to be classed in – laying down there in the morning sun, with nice, neat little door-yards and nice, neat little wreaths of smoke coming up out of their chimneys – and the whole Mad river loose and just going to swirl down on it and lap it up, exactly as hungry for it as if it had been Friendship Village “proper.”