Peace in Friendship Village. Gale Zona
they all shouted together, loud as their lungs: "The Present-man! The Present-man!"
And then they caught sight of Miss Mayhew, coming from the school, and they all ran for her, to tell her the news. And she came in the gate to shake hands with him. And then in a minute they all trooped off down the road together, around Miss Mayhew, one or two of them waving back at him.
Then I turned round and looked at Jeffro.
"Why, they have felt – felt glad to see me!" he says, breathless. And back to his face came creeping some of the old Jeffro look.
"Why, they are glad," says I. "We all are. We've missed you like everything – trudging along with your toys."
Joseph wasn't saying a word. He was just snuggling up, nosing his father's elbow, like a young puppy. Jeffro stood patting him with his cracked, chapped hand. And Jeffro was looking down the road, far as he could watch, after the children.
"I've got a little canned stuff there in the cupboard for your suppers," I says, not knowing what else to say. "And I stuck a few things in the ground for you out there, that are coming up real nice – potatoes and onions and a cabbage or two. And they's a little patch of corn that'll be along by and by."
All of a sudden Jeffro turned his back to me and walked a few steps away. "A garden?" he says, not looking round. "A little garden?"
"Kind of a one," I told him. "Such as it is, it's all right – what there is of it. And Abigail Arnold," I says, "wants you should make her another wooden bridal pair for the cake in the window – the groom to the other one is all specked up. And I heard her say you could set some of your toys there in her front case. Oh yes, and Mis' Timothy Toplady's got a clucking hen she's been trying to hold back for you, and she says you can pay her in eggs – "
I stopped, because Jeffro frightened me. He wheeled round and stood looking out the door across the pasture opposite, and his lips were moving. I thought maybe he was figuring something with them, and I kept still. But he wasn't – he was thinking with them. In a minute he straightened up. And his face – it wasn't brave or confident the way it had been once, but it was saying a thing for him – a nice thing, even before he spoke.
He came and put out his hand to me, round Joseph. "My friend," he says, "I vill tell you what it is. Thes' is what I thought America was like."
Wasn't that queer, when I understood all he had hoped from America, and all he hadn't found? A lump come in my throat – not a sad one though! But a glad one. And oh, the difference in them lumps!
He went back to work at his toys again, and he began at the bottom, a whole year after his first coming, to save up money to bring over his wife and the little ones. And it wasn't two weeks later that I went there one night and saw him out working on the hole in the road again.
"I work for you this time, though," he said, when he see I noticed. "Thes' I do not for America – no! I do it for you and for thes' village. No one else."
And I thought, while I watched him pounding away at the dirt:
"Anybody might think Friendship Village knows things America hasn't found out yet – but of course that can't be so."
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