There is one little thing more to tell. When the congratulations was most over, the dining-room door creaked a little bit, and Amos, that was standing by it, whirled around and see Mis’ Fire Chief Merriman peeking through the crack to her guests. And Amos swung open the door wide, and he grabbed her by the arm, and though she hung back with all her strength Amos pulled her right straight into the room and kissed her, there before them all.
“Aunt Hettie,” he says to her, ringing, “Uncle—Hettie’s uncle an’ mine an’ your husband,—wouldn’t want you stayin’ out there in the dinin’-room to-day on account o’ him!”
And when we all crowded around her, greeting her like guests should greet a hostess and like dear friends should greet dear friends, Mis’ Fire Chief she wipes her eyes, and she left ’em shake her hands; and though she wasn’t all converted, it was her and not me that ask’ ’em please to walk out into the dining-room and eat the lunch that was part wedding and part in memory of the Chief.
THE BIGGEST BUSINESS
I donno whether you’ve ever lived in a town that’s having a boom? That’s being a boom town, as they call it? There ain’t any more boom to Friendship Village than there is to a robin building a nest. There ain’t any more boom to Friendship Village than there is to growth. We just go along and go along, and behave ourselves like the year does: Little spurt of Spring now and then, when two-three folks build new houses and we get a new side-walk or two or buy a new sprinkling cart. Little dead time, here and there, when the tobacco or pickle factory closes down to wait for more to grow, and when somebody gets most built and boards up the windows till something else comes in to go on with. But most of the time Friendship Village keeps on pretty even, like the year, or the potato patch, or any of them common, growing things.
But now over to Red Barns it ain’t so. Red Barns is eight miles away, and from the beginning the two towns sort of set with their backs to each other, and each give out promiscuous that the other didn’t have a future. But, same time, the two towns looked out of the corners of their eyes enough to set quite a few things going for each other unconscious: Red Barns got a new depot, and Friendship Village instantly petitioned for one. Friendship Village set aside a little park, and Red Barns immediately appropriated for one, with a little edge more ground. Red Barns got a new post office, and Friendship Village started out for a new library. And so on. Just like a couple of boys seeing which could swim out farthest.
Then all of a sudden the Interurban come through Red Barns and left Friendship Village setting quiet out in the meadows eight miles from the track. And of course after that Red Barns shot ahead—Eppleby Holcomb said that on a still night you could hear Red Barns chuckle. Pretty soon a little knitting factory started up there, and then a big tobacco factory. And being as they had three motion-picture houses to our one, and band concerts all Summer instead of just through July, the folks in Silas Sykes’s Friendship Village Corn Canning Industry and in Timothy Toplady’s Enterprise Pickle Manufactory began to want to go over to Red Barns to work. Two left from Eppleby Holcomb’s Dry Goods Emporium. Even the kitchens of the few sparse ones that kept hired help begun to suffer. And the men begun to see that what was what had got to be helped to be something else—same as often happens in commercial circles.
Things was about to this degree when Spring come on. I donno how it is with other people, but with me Spring used to be the signal to run as far as I could from the place I was in, in the hopes, I guess, of getting close up to all outdoors. I used to want to run along country paths all squshy with water, and hang over a fence to try to tell whether it’s a little quail or a big meadowlark in the sedge; I wanted to smell the sweet, soft-water smell that Spring rain has. I wanted to watch the crust of the earth move because May was coming up through the mold. I wanted to climb a tree and be a bud. And one morning I got up early bent on doing all these things, and ended by poking round my garden with a stick to see what was coming up—like you do. It was real early in the morning—not much after six—and Outdoors looked surprised—you know that surprised look of early morning, as if the day had never thought of being born again till it up and happened to it? And I had got to the stage of hanging over the alley fence, doing nothing, when little David Beach come by. He was eating a piece of bread, and hurrying.
“Morning, David,” I sings out. “Where’s your fish-pole?”
He stopped running and stopped biting and looked up at me. And then he laughed, sharp and high up.