GREEN VALLEY MEN
Close on the heels of Lilac Sunday comes Decoration Day. And nowhere is it observed so thoroughly as in Green Valley.
The whole week preceding the day there is heard everywhere the whir of sewing machines. New dresses are feverishly cut and made; old ones ripped and remade. Hats are bought, old ones are retrimmed. Buggies are repainted and baby carriages oiled. Dick does a thriving business in lemons, picnic baskets, flags, peanuts and palm-leaf fans, these being things that Jessup's chronically forget to carry, regarding them as trifles and rather scornfully leaving them to Dick, who makes a point of having on hand a very choice supply.
This fury of work gradually dies down, to be followed by such an epidemic of baking that the old town smells like a sweet old bakery shop with its doors and windows wide open. There is then every evening a careful survey of the flower beds in the garden, a rigid economy of blossoms and even much skilful forcing of belated favorites.
The last day is generally given over to hat buying, the purchasing of the last forgotten fixings and clothes inspections. From one end of the town to the other clotheslines, dining-room chairs, porch rockers and upstairs bedrooms are overflowing with silk foulards, frilled dimities, beribboned and belaced organdies, not to mention the billows of dotted swiss and muslin.
On short clotheslines, stretched across corners of back and side porches or in the tree-shaded nooks of back yards, may be seen hanging the holiday garments of Green Valley men. But what most catches the eye are the old suits of army blue flapping gently in the spring breeze with here and there a brass button glinting. There are a surprising number of these suits of army blue just as there are a surprising number of graves in the little Green Valley cemetery over which, the long year through, flutters the small flag set there by loving hands each Decoration Day.
There are all manner of cleaning operations going on in full view of anybody and everybody who might be interested enough to look. For there is no streak of mean secretiveness in Green Valley folks.
This is the one time in the year when Widow Green takes off and "does up" the yellow silk tidy that drapes the upper right-hand corner of her deceased husband's portrait which stands on an easel in the darkest corner of her parlor. This little service is not the tender attention of a loving and grieving wife for a sadly missed husband but rather a patriotic woman's tribute to a man, who, worthless and cruel as a husband, had yet been a gallant and an honorable soldier.
As the widow sits on the back steps carefully washing the tidy in a hand basin and with a bar of special soap highly recommended by Dick, she looks over into the next yard and calls to Jimmy Rand and asks him whether he's going to march with the rest of the school children and will there be anything special on the programme this year. And he tells her sure he's going to march. Ain't he got a new pair of pants, a blouse, a navy blue tie and a new stickpin? And as for the programme, he warns her to watch out "fur us kids because we're going to be fixed up for something, but I dassent tell because it's a surprise the teachers got up."
This is the one day in the year when Jimmy Rand polishes his grandfather's shoes with scrupulous care and without demanding the usual nickel. He takes his payment in watching the blue army suit swaying on the line under the tall poplars and in hearing the crowds on Decoration Day shout themselves hoarse for old Major Rand.