Peace in Friendship Village. Gale Zona
to hev you come up and help with the dishes, or like that."
"Is it dress-up?" says Mis' Swenson, not very loud.
"My, no!" we told her, and decided to stick to the usual hooks in our closets.
"I'd like to," says Mis' Swenson, "if I can get Pete to change his clothes."
"So do," says Mis' Sykes gracious and clucked her horse along. "My goodness," she says, "what awful stuff these folks must feed their children! And how they must bungle 'em when they're sick. And they won't hardly any of 'em come to-morrow night," she says. "You can not," she says, "get these folks to take part in nothing."
We went to twenty or thirty houses, and every one of them Mis' Sykes invited to come and help. But not one of the twenty or thirty houses had heard of any foreigner whatever having just arrived in Friendship Village, nor had ever seen or heard of that little boy before. He was awful good, the little soul, waving his hands so nice that I begun to be afraid everybody we met would claim foreign and ask for him.
By noon we begun to get pretty excited. And the sheriff, he was excited too, and he was hunting just as wild as any of us, being arrests was light. He was hanging on the canal bridge when we crossed it, going home along toward noon.
"They never had a case of lost child in Friendship Village in twenty years," he said. "I looked it up."
"Lost child nothing!" I told him. "The child ain't lost. Here he is. It's the parents," I said, "that's lost on us."
The noon whistle blew just then, and the men that were working on the sewer threw down their shovels.
"Look at their faces," says Mis' Sykes. "Did you ever see anything so terrible foreign?"
"Foreign ain't poison," says Mis' Toplady on the back seat.
"I'm going to have Silas put a button on the cellar window," says Mis' Sykes.
"Shucks, they ain't shaved, that's all," says Mis' Toplady.
Mis' Sykes leaned over to the sheriff. "You better be up around the peace celebration to-morrow night," she says. "We've been giving out invitations pretty miscellaneous, and we might need you."
"I'll drop up," says the sheriff. "But I like to watch them bunk cars pretty close, where the men live."
"Is there much lawlessness?" Mis' Sykes asks, fearful.
Mis' Toplady sings out, laughing, that there would be if she didn't get home to get Timothy's dinner, and Mis' Sykes come to herself and groaned.
"But oh, my land," she says, "we ain't found no ma nor pa for this child. What in time are we going to do? I'm too stiff," she says, "to adopt one personally."
But the little boy, he just smelled of the flowers the folks on the Flats had give him, and waved his hand to the sheriff, cute.
Late the next afternoon, us ladies that weren't tending to the supper were trying to get the Foreign booth to look like something. The Foreign booth looked kind of slimpsey. We hadn't got enough in it. We just had a few dishes that come from the old country, and a Swiss dress of Berta's mother's and a Japanese dress, and like that. But we couldn't seem to connect up much of Europe with Friendship Village.
At five o'clock the door opened, and in walked Mis' Amachi and Mis' Swenson from the Flats, with nice black dresses on and big aprons pinned up in newspapers. Pretty soon in come old Mis' Marchant, that had rode up on a grocery delivery wagon, she said. Close behind these come some more of them we had asked. And Mis' Sykes, acting like the personal hostess to everything, took them around and showed them things, the Friendship Village booth that was loaded with stuff, and the Foreign booth that wasn't.
And Mis' Poulaki, one of the Greek women, she looked for a while and then she says, "We got two nice musics from old country."
She made her hands go like playing strings, and we made out that she meant two musical instruments.
"Good land!" says Mis' Sykes. "Post right straight home and get them. Got anything else?"
"A little boy's suit from Norway," says Mis' Swenson. "And my marriage dress."
"Get it up here!" cries Mis' Sykes. "Ladies, why do you s'pose we never thought of this before?"
There wasn't hardly one of them that couldn't think of something—a dish, or a candlestick, or wooden shoes, or an old box, or a kerchief. Old Mis' Marchant had come wearing a shoulder shawl that come from Lombardy years back, and we jerked it off her and hung it up, hole and all.
It made quite some fun for all of us. And all the time our little strange boy was running around the floor, playing with papers, and when we weren't talking of anything else, we were talking about him.
"Say," says Mis' Sykes, that never means to say "say" but gets it said unbeknownst when excited, "I guess he's the foreignest thing we've got."
But by six o'clock she was ready to take that back, about him being the foreignest. The women from the Flats had all come back, bringing all they had, and by the time we put it up the Foreign booth looked like Europe personified. And that wasn't all. Full three quarters of the folks that we'd asked from down there had showed up, and most of them says they'd got their husbands to come too. So we held off the supper a little bit for them—a fifteen-cent supper it was, coffee and sandwiches and baked beans and doughnuts—and it was funny, when you think of it, for us to be waiting for them, for most of us had never spoken to any of these folks before. The women weren't planning to eat, they said; they'd help, but their men would buy the fifteen-cent supper, they added, proud. Isn't it kind of sad and dear and motherly, the way, whenever there isn't food enough, it's always the woman who manages to go without and not let on, just exactly like her husband was her little boy?
By and by in they all come, dressed up clean but awful heavy-handed and big-footed and kind of wishing they hadn't come. But I liked to see them with our little lost red boy. They all picked him up and played with him like here was something they knew how to do.
The supper was to come first, and the peace part afterward, in some set speeches by the town orators; and we were just ready to pour out the coffee, I recollect, when the fire-bell rang. Us ladies didn't think much of that. Compared with getting supper onto the table, what was a fire? But the men all jumped up excitable, being fires are more in their line.
Then there was a scramble and rush and push outside, and the door of the hall was shoved open, and there stood a man I'd never seen before, white and shaking and shouting.
"The bunk cars!" he cried. "They're burning. Come!"
The bunk cars—the ten or twelve cars drawn up on a spur track below the gas house. …
All of us ran out of the hall. It didn't occur to us till afterward that of course the man at the door was calling the men from the Flats, some of whom worked on the sewer too. I don't suppose it would ever have entered his head to come up to call us if the Flat folks hadn't been there. And it was they who rushed to the door first, and then the rest of us followed.
It was still dusk, with a smell of the ground in the air. And a little new moon was dropping down to bed. It didn't seem as if there ought to be a fire on such a night. Everything seemed too usual and casual.
But there was. When we got in sight of the gas house, we could see the red glare on the round wall. When we got nearer, we could see the raggedy flames eating up into the black air.
The men that lived in the cars were trying to scrabble out their poor belongings. They were shouting queer, throaty cries that we didn't understand, but some of the folks from the Flats were answering them. I think that it seemed queer to some of us that those men of the bunk cars should be having a fire right there in our town.
"Don't let's get too near," says somebody. "They might have small-pox or something."
It was Mis' Sykes, with Silas, her husband, and him carrying that bright red little boy. And the baby, kind of scared at all the noise and the difference, was beginning to straighten out