“How’re you?”
“Oh, me!” he says. “I’m rosy.”
“Your arm,” says I; “will it let you go to work yet?”
“Not yet,” he says, “the thermometer actin’ up zero, so. But still, I’m rosy—rosy.”
“Well,” says I, “bein’ you’re more rosy than busy, I wonder if you couldn’t do something for us ladies. You know,” I says, “that nice, new, galvanized iron garbage tank us ladies bought and run one season, collectin’ up garbage? Well, I dunno but what we’ve got to sell it, the Council refusin’ to run it, ’count of economy. And I wondered if you’d go and hev a look at it, and tell us what we’d ought to get for it, and where.”
“Why, sure I will,” says Absalom. “I’d be glad,” says he, kind of pleasant and important, “to accommodate.”
He went off down the street, walking sidewise, like he does, his coat and beard blowing out the same side, his pockets sagging till they looked like mouths smiling, and his hat trained up to a peak. Everybody liked Absalom—he had such a nice, one-sided smile and he seemed to be so afraid he was going to hurt your feelings. He’d broke his right arm in Silas’s canning factory that fall, and he’d been laying off ever since. His wife done washings, and his mother finished vests from the city, and the children stuffed up cracks in the walls and thought it was a game.
They was others in the town, come lately, and mostly in the factory, that was the same way: the Bettses and the Doles and the Haskitts and the Hennings. They lived in little shacks around, and the men worked in the canning factory and the gas-works and on the tracks, and the women helped out. And one or two of ’em had took down ill; and so it was Silas, that likes to think of things first, that up and said “do something.” And it was him put the notice in the papers a few nights later to all citizens—and women—that’s interested in forming a Charity Society to meet in Post-Office Hall, that he has the renting of.
I was turning in the stairway to the hall that night when I heard somebody singing. And coming down the walk, with her hat on crooked and its feather broke, was old Bess Bones. Bess has lived in Friendship Village for years—and I always thought it was real good for the town that she done so. For she is the only woman I ever knew of that ain’t respectable, and ain’t rich or famous either, and yet that goes to everybody’s house.
She does cleaning and scrubbing, and we all like to get her to do it, she does it so thoroughly conscientious. She brings us in little remedies she knows about, and vegetables from her own garden, and eggs. Sometimes some of us asks her to set down to a meal. Once she brought me a picked chicken of hers. And it’s good for Friendship Village because we all see she’s human, and mostly with women like that we build a thick wall and don’t give ’em a chance to even knock out a brick ever after.