Peace in Friendship Village

When I have told this story of Jeffro, the alien, some one has always said:

"Yes, but there's another side to that. They aren't all Jeffros."

When stories are told of American gentleness, childlike faith, sensitiveness to duty, love of freedom, I do not remember to have heard any one rejoin:

"Yes, but Americans are not all like that."

So I wonder why this comment should be made about Jeffro.

I

When Jeffro first came knocking at my door that Spring morning, he said that which surprised me more than anything that had been said to me in years. He said:

"Madam, if you have a house for rent – a house for rent. Have you?"

For years nobody had said that to me; and the little house which I own on the Red Barns road, not far from the schoolhouse, was falling in pieces because I never could get enough ahead to mend it up. In the road in front of it there was a big hole that had never been filled in. And the house only had two rooms anyway – and a piece of ground about as big as a rug; and the house was pretty near as old as the ground was.

"Land," I says, "man, you don't want to rent that house?"

He smiled, nice and wrinkled and gentle, and said yes, he did; and nothing that I, as my own real estate agent, could say discouraged him. Even when I'd whipped off my kitchen apron and found the key to the little house in my button-box, and had gone down the road with him to look the house over, and let him see what it was like, he insisted that he wanted to rent it. And so in the end he done: at four dollars a month, which wasn't much more than, by rights, the sale price should have been.

"I do little things to this house," said Jeffro. "I make little change for good. I have some handy with a hammer."

I remember turning back a ways from the house, and seeing him standing there, with his hands behind him, looking at the house as if it was something, and something of his.

When I got home and was up in the garret hunting up the three green paper shades for his windows, it come to me that I hadn't asked him for any references, and that for all I knew he might be going to counterfeit money or whisky or something there on the premises. But anybody'd known better than that just to look at Jeffro's face. A wonderful surprised face he had; surprised, but believing it all too, and trusting the good. A brown face, with big, brown eyes, and that wrinkled smile of his. I like to think about him.

After a few days I went over with the shades, and he'd got a few pieces of furniture there, setting round, loose and unattached. And on a big basket of stuff was sitting a little boy, about eight years old.

"That's Joseph," says Jeffro, simple. "We are the two that came."

Then he told me. In "the old country" his wife and two little ones were waiting till he could earn money to send back for them.

"I thought when I had thes' little follow here," he said, "I could work then more easy. He don't eat but little," he added.

"But how," says I, "are you expecting to earn all that money out of Friendship Village – where folks saves for years to put on a new stoop?"

At this he smiled, sort of knowing. And he pointed to a poster over his wood-box. It was printed in Yiddish, all but the words "United States"; but the picture – that was plain enough. It showed a mill on one side of the street, and a bank on the other. And from the mill a stream of workingmen, with bags of money on their backs, were streaming over toward the bank.

"That was put up on my cow-shed at home," said Jeffro. "I have brought it. But I have no trade – I can not earn money fast like those. I make the toys."

He threw open the door into the only other room of the house. In it was piled dozens of boxes, and some broad shelves to be put up, and a table was covered with colored stuff. "Then I go up to the city and sell," said he. "It is only five miles. But I can not live there – not with thes' boy. I say, 'I vill find some little cheap place out in the country for us two.' So then I come here. I am now in America five weeks," he added, proud.

"Five weeks!" says I. "Then where'd you learn to talk American?"

"I have study and save' for six-seven years, to be ready," said Jeffro, simple. "Now I come. Next year I think I send for them."

All day long those words of his kept coming and ringing in my ears. And it kind of seemed to me that in them was a great chorus – a chorus of thousands going up that minute, and this minute, and all the time, all over America:

"Now I come. Next year I think I send for them."

And I says to myself: "What's America going to do for him? What's America going to do to him? What are we going to do to him? And what is he going to do for us?"

Well, the story of the first few weeks of Jeffro's in Friendship Village is for me a kind of window set in the side-wall of the way things are.

One morning, a little before nine o'clock, I had to go to the schoolhouse to see Miss Mayhew. When I went by Jeffro's I didn't see anything of him, but when I got along by the schoolhouse grounds, there I saw him, leaning on the fence under the locust-tree.

"Good morning, Mr. Jeffro," I says. "Do the children bother you down to your house with their noise? That's one reason my house used to be so hard to rent, it was so close by the schoolhouse."

His face, when he turned to me, startled me.

"Bother me!" he said, slow. "Every day I come across to look at them near. To see them – it is a vonder. Thes' big building, thes' big yard, thes' children that do no vork, only learn, learn. And see – Joseph is there. Over by the swing – you see him? He learn, too – my Joseph – I do not even buy his books. It is free – all free. I am always vatching them in thes' place. It is a vonder."

Then one night, when he had been there about two weeks, Jeffro's house caught fire. A candle that he used for melting his wax tipped over on his toy shavings and blazed up. Timothy Toplady, driving by, heard him shout, and galloped into town for the department, and they went tearing out Red Barns way soon after Jeffro had the fire put out. He was making toys again when the fire-engine drew up at his gate, and the men came trampling up to his porch, wanting the blaze pointed out to them. Bud Miles, that's in the department, told me how Jeffro stood in the door bowing to them and regretting the trouble he'd made, and apologizing to them for not having any fire ready for them to put out.

And the next day Jeffro walked into the engine house and asked the men sitting round with their heels up how much he owed them.

"For what?" says they.

"For putting down my fire," Jeffro says. "That is, for coming to put it down if I had one."

The men stared at him and burst out laughing. "Why nothing," they said. "That don't cost anything. That's free."

Jeffro just stood and looked at them. "Free?" he said. "But the big engine and the wagons and the men and the horses – does nobody pay them to come and put down fires?"

"Why, the town does," they told him. "The town pays them."

He said eagerly: "No, no – you have not understood. I pay no taxes – I do not help that way with taxes. Then I must pay instead – no?"

They could hardly make him understand. All these big things put at his service, even the town fire-bell rung, and nothing to pay for it. His experience with cities was slight, in any case. He went off, looking all dazed, and left the men shouting. It seemed such a joke to the men that it shouldn't be all free. It seemed so wonderful to Jeffro that it should.

He hadn't gone half a block from the engine-house when he turned round and went back.

"The gentlemen have not understood," he said. "I am not yet a citizen. I have apply for my first papers, but I am not yet a citizen. Whoever is not citizen must pay for this fire attention. Is it not so?"

Then they shouted again. Think of stopping to find out whether a man was a citizen before they put his fire out! Everybody in Friendship Village was telling that to each other for weeks, and splitting their sides over it.

Less than a couple of weeks afterward Jeffro got a letter from home, from his wife. Postmaster Silas Sykes handed it out to him when Jeffro come in the post-office store for some groceries, and when he started to pay for the groceries Jeffro says:

"How much on the letter?"

"Why, they's nothing due on that," says Silas, squinting at it over the sugar-barrel.

"But thes' is only old country stamp on here," said Jeffro. "It is not enough for all this way in America too?"

Silas waved his hand at him like the representative of the gover'ment he was. "Your Uncle Sam pays for all that," says he.

Jeffro looks at him a minute, then he says: "Uncle Sam – is that, then, a person? I see the pictures – "

"Sure, sure," says Silas, winking to Timothy Toplady that stood by. "Uncle Sam takes grand care of us, you bet."

"I am not yet a citizen," Jeffro insisted. "I have apply for my first papers – "

"Go 'long," says Silas, magnificent. "Do you s'pose Uncle Sam bothers himself about that? You belong to his family as soon as you strike shore."

Timothy Toplady told me about it. "And," says he, "do you know that man went out of the store looking perfectly queer! And kind of solemn."

All these things begun to open my eyes. Here, all my life, I'd been taking things for granted. My school-days, the fire-engine, postage-stamps, and all the rest, I'd took for granted, just like this generation is taking for granted aëroplanes. And all of a sudden now, I see how they were: not gifts to me, but powers of the big land. I'd always thought of a village as a person. But a Big Land – that had powers too! And was developing more as fast as its folks would let it.

And it was wonderful consoling. It helped me over more than I can tell. When Silas Sykes give light measure on my sugar and oatmeal, thinks I:

"Well, you're just a little piece of the Big Land's power of business – and it ain't grown yet. It's only just growing."

And when the Friendship Village Married Ladies' Cemetery Improvement Sodality – that's just the name of it and it works at more things than just cemetery – when it had spent five years studying our gover'ment, and then turned around and created an executive board whose reports to the Society of Forty had to be made unanimous – I says to myself:

"Well, the club's just a little piece of the Big Land's power of democracy, and it ain't grown yet. It's only just growing."

And when the Friendship Village chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to leave us ladies borrow their copy of the American flag because they reverenced it so hard they were afraid it would get tore, I says to myself:

"But it's just a little scrap of the Big Land's power of patriotism to the universe, and it ain't grown yet only just to one country – and not entirely to that."

And it made me see things intimate and tender. And it was Jeffro that did that for me.

That summer he come to kind of belong to the town, the way a hill or a tree does, only lots more so. At first, folks used to call him "that Jew peddler," and circus day I heard Mis' Sykes saying we better lock up our doors during the parade, because we didn't know what "that foreigner" might take it in his head to do.

"Mis' Sykes," says I, "where were your mother and father born?"

"New York state," says she, like the right answer.

"And their folks?" I went on.

"Massachusetts," says she, like she was going to the head now sure.

"And their folks?" I continued, smooth. "Where'd they come from?"

Mis' Sykes began to wobble. "Well," says she, "there was three brothers come over together – "

"Yes," I says, "I know. There always is. Well, where'd they come from? And where'd their folks come from? Were they immigrants to America, too? Or did they just stay foreigners in England or Germany or Scandinavia or Russia, maybe?" says I. "Which was it?"

Mis' Sykes put on her most ancestral look. "You can ask the most personal questions, Calliope," she began.

"Personal," says I. "Why, I dunno. I thought that question was real universal. For all we know, it takes in a dozen nations with their blood flowing, sociable, in with yours. It's awful hard for any of us," I says, "to find a real race to be foreign to. I wouldn't bet I was foreign to no one," says I, "nor that no one was foreign, for certain, to me."

"I shall lock my door circus day, just the same," says Mis' Sykes.

"Do," says I. "Circuses is likely to be followed up by hoodlums. And I've known them to be native-born, now and again."

But after a while, in spite of his being a foreigner, most everybody got to like Jeffro. You couldn't help it – he was so patient and ready to believe. And the children – the children that like your heart – they all loved him. They would follow him along the curb, and he'd set down and show them his pack – time and again I've come on him in a shady side-street opening his pack for them. And sometimes when he had a new toy made, he'd walk up to the schoolhouse a-purpose to show it to them, and they'd all crowd round him, at recess.

On account of that, the children's folks took to noticing him and speaking to him. And folks done little things for him and for Joseph. Abigail Arnold, that keeps the home bakery, she had him make a wooden bridal pair for the top of the wedding-cake she keeps permanent in her show window; Mis' Timothy Toplady had him do little odd jobs around their place, and she'd pay him with a cooked chicken. He'd show most all of us the picture of his little young wife and the two children —

"I declare," says Mis' Toplady, kind of wondering, "since I've seen the picture of his wife and babies he don't seem to me much more foreign than anybody else."

I happened over to Jeffro's one morning with a loaf of my brown bread and a half a johnny-cake. He seemed to know how to cook pretty well, but still I felt more or less sorry for him and the little boy, and I used to take them in a thing or two less than half occasionally. When I stepped up to the door that night I heard him singing – he used to sing low, funny songs while he worked. And when he opened the door for me, all of a sudden he blushed to the top of his face. And he bowed his funny, stiff way, and says:

"Vell, I see I blush like boys. It is because I was singing a little – vat-you-call, lull'by. Ven I make the toys I am always thinking how little children vill go to sleep holding vat I make, and sometimes I put in lull'bies, in case there is no mother to sing them."

That was like Jeffro. I mention it because Jeffro was just like that.

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."