Green Valley. Katharine Yirsa Reynolds
to do with books and small print.
Like Madam Howe, Joshua Stillman comes from the Revolutionary War district and has great family traditions to uphold. He upholds them with great humor. Not only is he full of old war and family lore, but he has been mixed up with things literary. He has known men such as Lowell and tells yarns about Emerson and Oliver Wendell Holmes.
He too came West in a prairie schooner and remembers all its wildness, its uncouthness, its railroadless state. And he tells marvellous stories about snakes, Indians and the little Chicago town built out on the mudflats. He remembers very well indeed the steady stream of ox-teams toiling over the few crude state roads. And he has in his house rare volumes, valuable editions of famous works. He lets you examine these if he thinks you are trustworthy and have a gentle way with books.
There is another rare soul, the Reverend Alexander Campbell, who must be introduced this rainy spring day. He is a retired Green Valley minister and is full of humor and wisdom. He is an easily traced descendant of the Scottish Stuarts. On a rainy day you will always find him busy writing up the history of his family. Not that he himself cares a fig for his genealogy. He is writing the book because it gives him something to do and earns him a little peace from the women folks.
He is a man whom the Lord has seen fit to try with a host of female relatives, all family proud. He can fight the Devil and has done so quite gallantly in four or five volumes of really good old-fashioned sermons, "books," as he will tell you with a twinkle in his eye, "that nobody could or would read nowadays." But he can not fight the women of his family, so with a mournful chuckle he sits down every rainy day and labors mightily on this great "historical work."
On sunny days he goes about his grounds, petting his trees and his chickens, and working in his garden. He has several ingenious methods of fighting weeds and raises the earliest, best and latest sweet corn in Green Valley.
But men like the Colonel and Joshua Stillman and the Reverend Alexander Campbell are representatives of Green Valley's leisure class. They give Green Valley its high peace, its aristocratic flavor. But they are a little remote from the town's workday life, being given to dreams and memories and scholarly pursuits. They know little of the doings and talks that go on in Billy Evans' livery barn, or the hotel. They do, of course, go to the barber shop, the bank and the postoffice, and always when abroad give courteous greeting to every townsman. But they have never sat in the smoky, red-painted blacksmith shop or among the patriarchs and town wits who in summer keep open-air sessions on the wide, inviting platform in front of Uncle Tony's hardware store, and in winter hold profound meetings around the store's big, glowing stove.
Uncle Tony's is the most social spot in town and is from a news-gathering point of view most ideally situated. Sitting in one of the smooth-worn old armchairs that Uncle Tony always keeps handy, you can view the very heart of Green Valley's business life. Without turning your head scarcely you can keep an eye on Martin's drug store, keep tab on the comings and goings of the town's two doctors, and the hotel's arriving and departing guests. If a commotion of any kind occurs in front of Robert Hill's general store you see all the details without losing count of the various parties who go in and out of Green Valley's new bank.
Twice a day the active part of Green Valley dribbles into the post-office where friends instantly pair off and mere acquaintances stand idly by and discuss the weather. Besides its mail, Green Valley usually buys two cents' worth of yeast and a dozen of baker's buns and then goes down the street and orders its regular groceries at Jessup's.
Jessup's has been the one Green Valley grocery store ever since the flood or thereabout, so venerable an establishment is it. Green Valley would as soon think of changing its name as permitting a new grocer to open up a rival store. And nobody dreams of disloyalty when buying trifles at the post-office. In fact housewives are openly glad that Dick, the postmaster, has taken to keeping strictly fresh yeast for their leisure days and nice bakery things for times of stress and unexpected company.
Dick Richards is a small, smiling, curly-headed man who looks older than he should. This is because he wears a big man's mustache and is a self-made boy. His parents died when he was barely old enough to realize his loss and since then he has fought the world without a single weapon unless cheerfulness and a giant patience can be called weapons. Small, ungifted, he early learned to be content with little. But side by side with this cheerful content is always the giant hope of great things to come. And so though Green Valley buys only its yeast and buns over his little counter he is happy and wraps each purchase up carefully. And all the time he is thoughtfully, carefully setting out other handy things and aids to the harassed housewife. For with his giant patience Dick is waiting—waiting and planning for a time that is coming, that he knows must come. He talks these matters over with no one except Joe Baldwin. He and Joe are great friends. Joe's little shop is such a restful, hopeful place and Joe himself a gentle rather than a loud and swearing man. One can talk things over joyfully with Joe and feel sure of having one's confidence understood and kept. Like Joe, Dick shrinks a little from the noisy, wholly earthy atmosphere of the livery barn and blacksmith shop. He and Joe often go together of a Saturday to the barber shop. They usually stay after closing hours for the barber is their mutual friend.
This barber, John Gans, is a talker, a somewhat fierce and vehement little man who lectures on many subjects but mostly on human rights and politics. Joe and Dick, both silent men, look with awe at John's great mental and discoursive powers. And because his views are theirs they listen with something like joyful gratitude to hear their own thoughts so clearly and fearlessly expressed.
The fiery little barber is thought by some to be a German anarchist and by others a Russian socialist. Joe and Dick have been repeatedly warned against him. But they are his loyal friends at all times. This three-cornered friendship is little understood by the town and ridiculed as a childish thing by the great minds that foregather at Uncle Tony's.
But Grandma Wentworth remarked one Saturday afternoon, right in the heart of town too, when Main Street was so crowded that everything that was said aloud would be told and retold at church the next moraine and repeated through the countryside the week following—pointing to Joe, Dick and John who all three happened to be going to the bank for change—"There go Green Valley's three good little men. And that makes me think. I have another letter from Nanny Ainslee from Italy enclosing foreign stamps for John."
Now until then nobody knew that John Gans was collecting stamps. But that's Grandma Wentworth. She always knows things about people that nobody else knows. And when any Green Valley folks go a-traveling they sooner or later write to Grandma Wentworth. Sooner or later they get homesick for Green Valley and they write for news to the one person who, they know, will not fail to answer.
Of course some of them, like Jamie Danby, get into trouble. Jamie ran away from home with a third-rate show. The show got stranded somewhere in the western desert and Jamie wanted to come home. He knew that his mother would be glad to see him but he wasn't at all sure of his father. So he wrote to Grandma Wentworth, begging her to fix things up. And she did.
And there was Tommy Dudley who went away home-steading somewhere out West and who writes regularly to Grandma Wentworth in this fashion:
" … for heaven's sake send me your baking-powder biscuit recipe and how do you make buckwheat pancakes, and send me all kinds of vegetable seeds and what's good for chicken lice and a sore throat, and tell Carrie Bailey I ain't forgot her and that as soon as I've got things going half-way straight here I'll come back and get her. Just now the dog, the mules and chickens and a family of mice and I are all living peacefully together in the one room but we're awful healthy if a good appetite is any kind of a sign. I can't write to Carrie because her folks open all her letters and they'd nag her into marrying that old knock-kneed, squint-eyed, fat-necked son-of-a-gun of an Andrew Langly, if they thought she was having anything to do with a worthless heathen cuss like me. And say, Grandma, throw in some of your flower seeds, those right out of your own garden, you know, the tall ones along the fence and the little ones with the blue eyes and the still white ones that smell so sweet. You don't know how lonesome I get off here. I've got that picture of you in the sunbonnet right where it's handy, but how I wish I had a picture of you without the sunbonnet so's I could see your face, and say, Grandma, since I've been alone out here