Peace in Friendship Village. Gale Zona
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.