Neighborhood Stories

“Eppleby,” I says, “why don’t you run against Threat, and mayor this town like it ought to be?”

“Because,” Silas spoke up for him, “Eppleby belongs to the party.”

“You do?” says I to Eppleby. “Well, if Threat, that would like to see the world run backwards, and you, that’s a-pushing some on the west side like the Lord meant – if you two belongs to the same party, I bet the party’s about ready to come in two pieces anyhow. Why don’t you leave it go, and get denominated on your own hook, Eppleby?” I ask’ him.

“I’m going to if ’Lish gets put up,” he says low, to me. But out loud he says, careless: “I couldn’t beat the saloon folks. They’re solid for Threat.”

“But ain’t we more folks to this town than them?” Mame asks.

“Yes,” says Eppleby, “but they don’t vote. Half the best men won’t touch the city hall with a clothes prop. The business men can’t vote much – they’ve got too mixed a trade, both sides eatin’ groceries and wearin’ clothes. And election time comes when them out towards the city limits is doing Spring plowin’ and won’t bother to come in town. (We’d took in most of the surrounding country in our efforts to beat out Red Barns in population.) And the Evening Daily was give to understand six months ago that the brewery ad. would come out if Threat wa’n’t their ticket. Anybody that runs against him is beat before the polls open.”

“Among ’em all, what about the town?” says I.

Mis’ Sykes spoke up, majestic. “The town,” says she, “is as good as any town. I’m sure we’ve got as many nice residences and well-kep’ yards, and as many modern improvements as most towns our size. My part, I’m too patriotic to be all the time askin’ for more.”

“I wonder, Mis’ Sykes,” I couldn’t help saying, “you ain’t too religious ever to pray about yourself.”

The band always plays “America” to go home on, not so much out of patriotism, I guess, as to let folks know it’s time to go home. And just as they was tuning up, Mis’ Toplady leaned over to me, brooding.

“I wouldn’t care so much,” she says, “if it wasn’t Lem’s first vote. Lem was twenty-one in the spring, and it’s his first vote. I just can’t bear to think of his voting for Threat or ’Lish, to cut his voting teeth on.”

“I know,” I says. “So it is Hugh Merriman’s first vote – and Mis’ Uppers’s boy and Jimmy Sturgis’s, Jr. Don’t it seem too bad?”

Mis’ Toplady looked at the men. “Couldn’t you do something to your election day that you own so personal?” she snaps. “Couldn’t you make it a day that is a day? A day that would make folks want to vote decent, and be some kitterin’-minded about votin’ bad?”

“Like what?” says Timothy, blank.

“Oh – I dunno,” says Mis’ Toplady, restless. “Somethin’ that’ll roust folks up and give ’em to see their town like a wagon to be pulled and not one to be rode in. Exercises, mebbe – ”

“Exercises!” says Silas Sykes, explosive. “You’ll be wantin’ the stores closed election day, next thing.”

“I mean that now,” says Mis’ Toplady. “Exercises,” she went on, “that’ll show ’em what’s being done for ’em in the world – and the universe – and I dunno but other places. Exercises that’ll make ’em think ahead and out, and up and in the air instead of just down into their pocketbooks. I dunno. Exercises that’ll make ’em see the state like a state, their state – ”

“My dum, woman,” says Silas, “election day ain’t no Fourth of July proceedings.”

“Ain’t it?” says Mis’ Toplady. “That’s what I dunno. It kind of seems to me as if it was.”

Then the band jabbed into “America” abundant, and the men took off their hats, patriotic as pictures. And I stood there, kind of looking at us all while we listened. I see all them hundreds of us out of the stores and houses of Friendship Village that was laying over behind us there in the dark, waiting for us to keep on a-making it; and I see Lem Toplady and the rest of ’em going to do their first move public towards the making. And while the band was playing and everybody humming their country’s air, negligent in their throats, I started to slip off – I couldn’t help it – and to go home by the back street, like I didn’t want to meet the village face to face.

But I hadn’t got very far when the band done a thing it’s been doing lately – ever since the new leader come that’s some kind of a foreigner up to the round-house. It run off into some kind of a French piece with a wonderful tang to it. The children have been singing it in school, with some different words to it, and when the band begun it now, they all kind of hummed it, all over the square. The Marseilles, I think they call it – like a kind of cloth. When I hear it, it always makes me want to go and start something. It done that now. And I says to myself:

“What you slinkin’ off home for, actin’ like the ‘best’ people that can’t look their town in the face at election time? Go on down Daphne Street like a citizen, that you are one.”

And I did, and walked along the little watching streets with all the rest of us, and that march music in my heels. And listening to it, and seeing us all streaming to our homes, I could ’most have felt like we was real folks living in a real town, like towns was meant to be.

But I lost the feeling two days after, when ’Lish got the other denomination, and begun swaggering around similar to Threat, peddling promises. When ’Lish done that, though, Eppleby done like he said and come out to run interdependent; only he done it real halfhearted, and them that signed his petition was mostly out of business or retired or working for the Government or ministers or like that, and everybody thought they was about the only ones that would be to the polls for him. Because the rest was already engaged in uttering the same old fear that voting for Eppleby now would be throwing their vote away. And they allowed that Threat was a little better than ’Lish, or that ’Lish was a little nobler than Threat, and they laid to vote according.

“If only the town could get rousted up somehow,” Mis’ Toplady kep’ saying, grieving. “It seems as if, if there was something to roust folks, they’d do something. And if they’d only do something, they’d get rousted. It’s like a snake with its tail in its mouth. It seems as if, if we could have some doin’s on election day – oh, I wish’t we was a real human being,” she says, again and again, “I wish’t we was. I bet we’d wind this town up, and we wouldn’t set it by Threat’s watch nor by ’Lish’s, either. We’d set it by the sun.”

But we see we couldn’t take no part. And the town settled down on its oars restful, waiting for election day that looked like it wasn’t going to do nothing but shake up the town feather-bed and lay it back on springs that sagged in the same old place.

Three days before election it happened I was up early to mix my bread. The clock showed half-past six just as I got through with my breakfast, and the sun come in so nice and slanting acrost my kitchen floor that I stepped to the open door to get the smell of it. All outside lay sweet and surprised, like the first notes of something being played. Before I knew it, I went out and down the path, between the things that hadn’t come up yet – ain’t it like all outdoors was friendly and elbow near, the way it keeps pulling at you to be out there with it? Before I knew it I was out my back gate and acrost the vacant lot and off down the old trail road, my hands wrapped up in my apron and me being just selfish glad I was alive.

With outdoors all around you, just waiting to be paid attention to; with friends set here and there in the world, near like planets, high and single like stars, or grouped like constellations; and with a spirit inside us – the same spirit – trying to say something – and trying to say the same thing – ain’t life rich? Ain’t it rich?

Sometimes I try to think what could make it richer. And I can never get any farther than the growing of those three foundation things: Outdoors and friends and the spirit. For life will be richer when the outdoors gets done – the floods tamed, the roads built, the forests tended, the deserts risen from the dead and the cities and towns and villages tamed and built and trained and tended and risen from the dead of dirt and ugliness to be real bodies for the souls stirring and beating in them now – and trying to speak. And life will be richer when friends come true – not just this planet, and that star, and these constellations, – but when the whole great company of friends, in homes, in churches, in mines, in prisons, in factories, in brothels, shall be known to us, and set free to be real bodies for the souls stirring and beating in them now – and trying to speak. And not till then will that spirit in outdoors and in cities and in us – the same spirit, trying to say the same thing – not till then can that spirit ever get it said.

“Oh,” I thought, “on a morning like this, if somebody could only think of the right word, maybe the whole thing might come true.”

And almost I knew what that word was – like you do.

I remember I wasn’t thinking of anything but wonder, when away acrost the Pump pasture I see a thing. It wasn’t a tent or it wasn’t a wagon or it wasn’t a farm machine of any kind. I looked at it a minute and I couldn’t formulate nothing. And as you could drive through the Pump pasture fence ’most anywheres, I went through and started right over to whatever was there.

’Most anybody can tell you how it looked, for by nine o’clock the whole village was out to it. But I’ll never be able to tell much about the feel of the minute when I see the two great silk wings and the airy wire, and knew I was coming close up to a flying-machine, setting there on the ground, like a god that had stopped on a knoll to tie his shoe.

A man was down on his hands and knees, doing something to an underneath part of it, but I guess at first I hardly see him. The machine was the thing, the machine that could go up in the air, the machine that had done it at last!

“Good morning,” says the man, all of a sudden. “Am I trespassing?”

He stood there with his cap in his hand, clean-muscled, youngish, easy-acting, and as casual as if he’d just come out of a doorway instead of out of the sky.

I says, “Ain’t it wonderful? Ain’t it wonderful?” Which is just exactly what I’d said about Mis’ Toplady’s crocheted bed-spread. It’s terrible to try to talk with nothing but the dictionary back of you.

“Yes,” he says, “it is. Then I’m not trespassing?”

“No more’n the eagles of the Lord,” I says to him. “Are you broke down?”

“There’s a little something wrong with the balance,” he says. “I’m going to lie over here a day or so, providing the eagle of the Lord figure holds for the town. What place will this be?” he asks.

“Friendship Village,” I says.

“Friendship Village,” he says it after me, and looked off at it. And I stood for a minute looking at it, too.

Beyond the trees north of the pasture it lay, with little lifts of smoke curling up from folks’s cook-stoves. There was a look to it of breakfasts a-getting and stores being opened and the day rousting up. Right while we looked, the big, bass seven o’clock whistle blew over to the round-house, and the little peepy one chimed in up at the brick-yard, and I could hear the town clock in the engine-house striking, kind of old-fashioned and sweet-toned. And all around the country lay quiet-seeming, down to the flats and out acrost the tracks and clear to the city limits that we couldn’t see, where the life of the little fields was going on. And in that nice, cozy, seven-o’clock minute I see it all as I do sometimes, almost like a person sitting there, with its face turned towards me, expectant, waiting to see what I’m going to do for it.

“Jove,” says the man, “look at it! Look at it. It looks like the family sitting down to breakfast.”

I glanced up at him quick. Not many sees villages that way. The most sees them like cats asleep in the sun. But I always like to think of ’em like a room – a little room in the house, full of its family, real busy getting the room-work done up in time.

“From here,” I says, “it does most look like a real town.”

“More folks live in the little towns of the United States than in the big cities of it,” he said, absent.

“They do?” I says.

“By count,” he answers, nodding, and stood a minute looking over at the roofs and the water tower. “You feel that,” he says, “when you see them the way I do. From up high. I keep seeing them skimming under me, little places whose names don’t show. And it always seems that way – like the family at breakfast – or working – or sitting around the arc lamp. You’re splendid – you little towns. What you do is what the world does.”

A kind of shiver took me in the back of my head.

“It looks as if such nice things were going on over there – in Friendship Village,” he says, his voice sort of wrapping about the name.

“Election day is going on,” I says, “day after to-morrow. But it won’t be so very nice.”

“No,” he says, “they aren’t very nice – yet.”

That made me think of something. “Have you been in many cities and dropped down into many towns?” I ask’ him.

“Several,” says he, – sort of rueful.

“On election day?” I says.

“Sometimes,” he answered.

“Well, then,” I says, “maybe you can tell me what they do on election day in cities. Don’t they ever have exercises?”

“Exercises?” he says over, blank.

“Why, yes,” I says, “though I dunno just how I mean that. But don’t they ever open up the city hall and have singing and speeches – not political speeches, but ones about folks and about living? I should think they must do that somewheres – ‘most anybody would of thought of that. And have the young folks there, and have them that’s going to vote sort of – well, commenced, like college. Don’t they do that, places?”

When he shook his head I was worried for fear he’d think I was crazy.

“No,” he says, “I never heard of their doing that anywhere – yet.”

But when he says that “yet” I wasn’t worried any more. And I burst right out and told him about our trouble in Friendship Village, and about the “best” people never voting, and the city limits folks not coming in for it, and about our two candidates, and about Eppleby, that hadn’t a ghost of a show.

“Us ladies,” I wound up, “wanted to have a kind of an all-together campaign – with mass meetings of folks to kind of talk over the town, mutual. And we wanted to get up some exercises to make election day a real true day, and to roust folks up to being not so very far from the way things was meant to be. But the men folks said it wasn’t never done so. They give us that reason.”

The bird-man looked at me, and nodded. “I fancy it isn’t,” he says, “ – yet.”

But he didn’t say anything else, and I thought he thought I was woman-foolish; so to cover up, I says, hasty:

“Could you leave me hear you talk a little about it? I mean about flying. It’s old to you, but it’s after-I-die to me. I never shall do it. So far I’ve never seen it. But oh, I like to hear about it. It seems the freest-feeling thing we’ve ever done.”

“To do,” he says, “it’s coldish. And it’s largely acrobatics – yet. But to see – yes, I fancy it is about the freest-feeling thing we’ve ever done. A thing,” he says my words over, smiling a little, “that makes you think you’re a step nearer to the way things were meant to be.” Then he stood still a minute, looking down at me meditative. “Has there ever been a flying-machine in Friendship Village?” he ask’ me.

“Never,” I says – and my heart stood still at what it thought of.

“And day after to-morrow is your election day?” he says over.

“Yes,” I says – and my head begun to beat like my heart wasn’t.

“The machine will be in shape by then,” he said. “Would – would you care to have me make a flight on election-day morning? Free, you know. It wouldn’t be much; but it might,” he says, with his little smile, “it might pull in a few votes from the edge of town.”

“Oh, my land – oh, my land a-living!” I says – and couldn’t say another word.

But I knew he knew what I meant. It was a dream like I hadn’t ever dreamed of dreaming. It seems it was his own machine – he was on his own hook, a-pleasuring. And it seemed as if he just had come like an eagle of the Lord, same as I said.

We settled where I was to let him know, and then I headed for Mis’ Toplady’s, walking some on the ground and some in the air. For I sensed the thing, whole and clear, so be we could get enough to pitch in. And Mis’ Toplady left her breakfast dishes setting, like I had mine, and away we went. And I see Mis’ Toplady’s ideas was occupying her whole face.

We went straight to the mothers – Mis’ Uppers and Mis’ Merriman and Mis’ Sturgis and the others that had sons that was going to vote, this year or in ten years or in twenty years. I dunno whether it was the mother in them, or just the straight human being in them – but they see, the most of ’em, what it was we meant. Of course some of them just see the lark, and some of them just didn’t want to refuse us, and some of them just joined in because they’re the joining-in kind. But oh, some of them see what we see – and it was something shining and real and far off, and it made us willing to go ahead like wild, and I dunno but like mad. Ain’t it wonderful how when a plan is born into the world, it grows on air? On air – and a little pitching in to work?

All but Mis’ Silas Sykes. When we went to see her, Mis’ Sykes was like that much adamant.

“Pshaw,” says Mis’ Sykes, “you ladies don’t understand politics. In politics you can’t fly up this way and imagine out vain things. You got to do ’em like they’ve been done. As I understand it, they’s two parties. One is for the good of the country and one ain’t. And anything you dicker up outside them two gets the public all upset and steps on the Constitution. And Silas says you’ve got to handle the Constitution like so many eggs, or else where does the United States come in?”

“It don’t seem to me that all makes real good sense,” says Mis’ Toplady, troubled.

“No,” says Mis’ Sykes, serene, “the people as a whole never do see sense. It’s always a few that has to do the seeing.”

“I know,” says Mis’ Toplady, “I know. But what I think is this: Which few?”

“Why, them that best supports the party measures,” says Mis’ Sykes, superior.

But Mis’ Toplady, she shook her head.

“It don’t follow out,” she says, firm. “Legs ain’t the only things they is to a chair.”

Nor, as us ladies saw it, the polls ain’t all there is to election day. And we done what we could, steadfast and quick and together, up to the very night before the day that was the day.

On election-day morning, I woke up before daylight and tried to tell if the sun was going to shine. The sky wasn’t up there yet – nothing was but the airful of dark. But acrost the street I see a light in a kitchen – it was at the station agent’s that had come home to the hot breakfast his wife had been up getting for him. One of ’em come out to the well for a bucket of water, and the pulleys squeaked, and somebody’s dog woke up and barked. Back on the trail road somebody’s baby was crying. Down acrost the draw the way-freight whistled and come rumbling in. And there was Friendship Village, laying still, being a town in the dark with nobody looking, just like it was being one all day long, with people looking on but never sensing what they saw.

It seemed, though, as if they must get it through their heads that day that the town was being a town right before their face and eyes – having a kind of a performance to do, like digestion, or thinking, or working; and having something anxious and fluttered inside of it, waiting to know what was going to become of it. I could almost sense this at six o’clock, when Mis’ Toplady and I hurried down to the market square. Yes, sir, six o’clock in the morning it was. We had engineered it that the flight of the flying-machine should be at seven o’clock, so’s everybody could have a chance to see it on their way to work, and so’s they should be at the market-square doings before they went to the polls.

The sun was shining like mad, and the place looked all expectant and with that ready-to-nod look that anything got ready beforehand will always put on. Only this seemed sort of a special nod. We’d had a few board seats put up, and a platform that ’most everybody had the idea the airship was going up from. The machine itself was over in the corner of the square near the wood-yard under a wagon-shed they’d made over for it. And to a stand near the platform the Friendship Married Ladies’ Cemetery Improvement Sodality had advertised to serve hot coffee and hot griddle-cakes and sausages. And we begun on the coffee and the sausages long enough ahead so’s by the time folks was in the high midst of arriving, the place smelled like a kitchen with savory things a-doing on the cook-stove.

And I tell you, folks done some arriving. Us ladies had seen to it to have the flight advertised big them two nights. The paper done it willing enough, being the bird-man was so generous and all. Then everybody’s little boy had been posted off as far as the city limits with hand-bills and posters, advertising the flight, and the breakfast on election day. And it seemed to me that outside the place we’d roped off, and in wagons in the streets, was ’most everybody in Friendship Village that I ever knew or saw. The folks from the little city-limit farms, the folks that ordinarily didn’t have time to vote nor to take a holiday, even folks from the country and from other towns, “best” people and all – they was all there to see the sky-wagon.

The bird-man had to dicker away quite a little at his machine. A man had run out from the city to help him, and out there with them was Lem Toplady and Jimmy Sturgis and Hugh Merriman, and two-three more of those boys, that had got acquainted with the bird-man. And while they was getting ready, the band was playing gay over in the bandstand, and we was serving breakfasts as fast as we could hand them out. Mis’ Sturgis was doing the coffee, I was sizzling sausages that the smell floated up and down Daphne Street delicious, and Mis’ Toplady was frying the pancakes because she’s had such a big family to fry for she’s lightning in the right wrist.

Everybody was talking and laughing and waiting their turn, and acting as if they liked it. Them that was up around the breakfast stand didn’t seem to be saying much about politics. Us ladies mentioned to one another that Threat nor ’Lish didn’t seem to be anywhere around. But we was mostly all thinking just about the flying-machine, and how nice it was to be having it, and about the socialness of it all – like the family was having breakfast…

Just as the big, bass seven-o’clock whistle trailed out from the round-house – the brick-yard one didn’t blow because the men was all at the market square – the thing happened that we’d arranged for. Down Daphne Street, hurrying some because they was late, with irregular marching and a good deal of laughing, come the public-school teachers with the school children. We’d give out that they’d be easier managed so, and not so much under foot; but what we really wanted was that they should come in just like this, together, and set together, because we wanted something of them after a while.

They sat down on the place we’d left for ’em, on the seats and the grass in front of everybody, and them that could sing we put on the platform, lots of rows deep, so’s they all covered it. They was big boys and little, and little girls and big, good-dressed and poor-dressed; with honest fathers, and with them that didn’t know honest when they see it nor miss it when they didn’t – and all of them was the Friendship Village that’s going to be some time, when the market square is emptied of us others, for good and all.

“Where’s Threat and ’Lish?” I says to Eppleby, that was helping keep the children in order.

“Dustin’ the mayor’s office out ready, I s’pose,” he says, wrinkling his eyes at the corners.

“Mebbe they’ve abducted each other,” Mis’ Toplady suggests, soothing.

Mis’ Sykes looked over from filling the syrup pitchers – she’d boiled the brown sugar down for that, and it added its thick, golden smell unto the general inviting mixture.

“I don’t think,” she says serious, “that you’d ought to speak disrespectful of anybody that’s going to be your mayor. Public officials,” said she, “had ought to be paid respect to, or else the law won’t be carried out.”