Peace in Friendship Village

There wasn't hardly one of them that couldn't think of something – a dish, or a candlestick, or wooden shoes, or an old box, or a kerchief. Old Mis' Marchant had come wearing a shoulder shawl that come from Lombardy years back, and we jerked it off her and hung it up, hole and all.

It made quite some fun for all of us. And all the time our little strange boy was running around the floor, playing with papers, and when we weren't talking of anything else, we were talking about him.

"Say," says Mis' Sykes, that never means to say "say" but gets it said unbeknownst when excited, "I guess he's the foreignest thing we've got."

But by six o'clock she was ready to take that back, about him being the foreignest. The women from the Flats had all come back, bringing all they had, and by the time we put it up the Foreign booth looked like Europe personified. And that wasn't all. Full three quarters of the folks that we'd asked from down there had showed up, and most of them says they'd got their husbands to come too. So we held off the supper a little bit for them – a fifteen-cent supper it was, coffee and sandwiches and baked beans and doughnuts – and it was funny, when you think of it, for us to be waiting for them, for most of us had never spoken to any of these folks before. The women weren't planning to eat, they said; they'd help, but their men would buy the fifteen-cent supper, they added, proud. Isn't it kind of sad and dear and motherly, the way, whenever there isn't food enough, it's always the woman who manages to go without and not let on, just exactly like her husband was her little boy?

By and by in they all come, dressed up clean but awful heavy-handed and big-footed and kind of wishing they hadn't come. But I liked to see them with our little lost red boy. They all picked him up and played with him like here was something they knew how to do.

The supper was to come first, and the peace part afterward, in some set speeches by the town orators; and we were just ready to pour out the coffee, I recollect, when the fire-bell rang. Us ladies didn't think much of that. Compared with getting supper onto the table, what was a fire? But the men all jumped up excitable, being fires are more in their line.

Then there was a scramble and rush and push outside, and the door of the hall was shoved open, and there stood a man I'd never seen before, white and shaking and shouting.

"The bunk cars!" he cried. "They're burning. Come!"

The bunk cars – the ten or twelve cars drawn up on a spur track below the gas house…

All of us ran out of the hall. It didn't occur to us till afterward that of course the man at the door was calling the men from the Flats, some of whom worked on the sewer too. I don't suppose it would ever have entered his head to come up to call us if the Flat folks hadn't been there. And it was they who rushed to the door first, and then the rest of us followed.

It was still dusk, with a smell of the ground in the air. And a little new moon was dropping down to bed. It didn't seem as if there ought to be a fire on such a night. Everything seemed too usual and casual.

But there was. When we got in sight of the gas house, we could see the red glare on the round wall. When we got nearer, we could see the raggedy flames eating up into the black air.

The men that lived in the cars were trying to scrabble out their poor belongings. They were shouting queer, throaty cries that we didn't understand, but some of the folks from the Flats were answering them. I think that it seemed queer to some of us that those men of the bunk cars should be having a fire right there in our town.

"Don't let's get too near," says somebody. "They might have small-pox or something."

It was Mis' Sykes, with Silas, her husband, and him carrying that bright red little boy. And the baby, kind of scared at all the noise and the difference, was beginning to straighten out and cry words in that heathen tongue of his.

"Mercy," says Mis' Sykes, "I can't find Berta. He's going," she says, "to yell."

Just then I saw something that excited me more than the baby. There was one car near the middle that was burning hard when the stream of water struck it. And I saw that car had a little rag of lace curtain at its window, and a tin can with a flower in it. And when the blaze died for a minute, and the roof showed all burned, but not the lower part of the car or the steps, I saw somebody in blue overalls jump up the steps, and then an arm tearing down that rag of lace curtain and catching up the tin can.

"Well," I says pitiful, "ain't that funny? Some man down there in a bunk car, with a lace curtain and a posy."

I started down that way, and Mis' Toplady, Mis' Holcomb and the Sykeses come too, the Sykeses more to see if walking wouldn't keep the baby still. It wouldn't. That baby yelled louder than I'd ever heard one, which is saying lots but not too much.

When we all got down nearer, we came on Mis' Swenson and Mis' Amachi, counting up.

"We can take in two," says Mis' Swenson, "by four of the children sleeping on the floor that'll never wake up to know it."

"One can sleep on our lounge," says Mis' Amachi.

"We can put a couple or two in our barn," says a Flats man. "Oh, we'll find 'em room – no trouble to that."

Mis' Toplady and me looked at each other. Always before, in a Friendship Village catastrophe, her and me had been among the planners. But here we were, it seemed, left out, and the whole thing being seen to by the Flats.

"Say," says Mis' Toplady all of a sudden, "it's a woman!"

We were down in front by now, and I saw her too. The blue overalls, as I had called them, were a blue dress. And the woman, a little dark thing with earrings, stood there with her poor, torn lace curtain and her tin can with a geranium all wilted down.

"Mercy!" says Mis' Sykes, shuddering. "A woman down here!"

But I was looking at that woman. And I saw she wasn't listening to what some of the Flat women were saying to her. She had her head up and back as if she was listening to something else. And now she began moving through the crowd, and now she began running, straight to where all of us stood and Mis' Sykes was trying to hush the crying child.

The next second Mis' Sykes was near knocked down by the wildness and the strength of that little dark thing who threw herself on her and grabbed the baby.

Speaking Greek, speaking Hebrew, and Hittite, and Amalekite, and the tongues of Babylon at the confusion and the last day – for all we knew, these were what that woman was speaking. We couldn't make more head nor tail out of what she was saying than we had of the baby. But we could understand without understanding. It was in her throat, it was in her tears, it was in her heart. She cried, she sunk down to the ground, kissing that baby. He put out his hands and went right to her, laughing in the midst of the crying – oh, I've heard a baby laugh in its tears when it saw its mother, but this one was the best. And he snuggled up close, while she poured all over him them barbarous accents. But he knew what she said, and he said them back. Like before our eyes the alphabet of vermicelli had begun spelling words.

Then a man come running – I can see now that open collar, that face covered with stubble, those great eyes under their mass of tangled hair, the huge, rough hands that he laid about the baby's shoulders. And they both began talking to us, first one and then both, asking, looking, waiting for us to reply. Nobody replied. We all looked to Mis' Sykes to see what she could think of, as we always do in a village emergency.

But it wasn't Mis' Sykes that could help us now. It was the Flat folks. It was them that could understand. Half a dozen of them began telling us what it was they said. It seemed so wonderful to see the folks that we had never paid attention to, or thought they knew anything, take those tangled sounds and unravel them for us, easy, into regular, right-down words.

It seems the family had got to Friendship Village night before last, him to work on the sewer and his wife to cook for the men in the bunk cars. There were five other little folks with them – sure enough, there they were now, all flocking about her – and the oldest girl had somehow lost the baby. Poor souls, they had tried to ask. But he knew that he must dig and she must cook, and there was not much time for asking, and eight weeks in this country was all that they had and hardly three words of English. As for asking the law, they knew the law only as something that arrests you.

We were all there in a bunch by that time, everybody making signs to everybody, whether anybody could understand or not. There was something about those two, with our little chap in the midst of them, that sort of loosened us all up. We all of us understood so thorough that we pretty near forgot the fire.

By then it had most died down anyhow, and somebody started to move back up-town.

"The hall, the hall!" says Mis' Toplady to us. "Have 'em all go up to the Post-office Hall. Spread it, spread it!"

We did spread it, to go up there and see what we could do for the burned-out folks, and incidentally finish the peace celebration.

Up there in Post-office Hall the lights were all on, just as we'd left them, and there was kind of a cozy feel of supper in the air.

"Look here," says Mis' Toplady, "there's quarts of coffee hot on the back of the stove and a whole mountain of sandwiches – "

"Let's," I says. And we all begun to do so.

We all begun to do so, and I begun to do something more. I'd learned quite a little from seeing them there in the hall and kitchen that afternoon, the Swensons and Poulakis and Amachis and the rest. And now here were these others, from the bunk cars, – big, beautiful eyes they had, and patient looks, and little bobbing curtsies, and white teeth when they smiled. I saw them now, trying to eat and behave the best they knew how, and back of them the Foreign booth, under the Foreign flag. And what I begun to have to do, was to get in over behind that Foreign Booth and wipe up my eyes a little.

Once I peeked out. And I happened to see the sheriff going by. He was needed, like Mis' Sykes told him he might be, but not the same, either. He was passing the sugar and cream.

What brought me out finally was what I heard Mis' Sykes saying:

"Ladies," says she, "let's us set her up there in the middle of the Foreign Booth, with her little boy in her lap. That'll be just the finishing foreign touch," says she, "to our booth."

So we covered a chair with foreign flags, promiscuous, and set her there. Awful pretty and serious she looked.

"If only we could talk to her," says Mis' Sykes, grieving. "Ladies, any of you know any foreign sentences?"

All any of us could get together was terra cotton and delirium tremens. So we left it go, and just stood and looked at her, and smiled at her, and clucked at the little boy, and at all her little folks that come around her in the booth, under the different flags.

"We'll call her Democracy!" says Marne Holcomb, that often blazes up before the match is lit. "Why not call her the Spirit of Democracy, in the newspaper write-up?"

With that Mis' Sykes kind of stopped winking and breathing, in a way she has.

"My land," she says, "but s'pose he's an enemy baby and she's his enemy ma?"