Neighborhood Stories

by Zona Gale

But oh, that first September Sabbath morning. It was one of them days that is still all deep Summer, but with just a little light mantel of Autumn—more like a lace boa than a mantel, though—thrown round over things. It was Summer by the leaves, by the air it was Summer, by the gay gardens and the face of the sky; and yet somewhere, hiding inside, was a little hint of yellow, a look of brown, a smell in the wind maybe—that let you know it was something else besides. It wasn’t that the time was any less Summer. It was just that it was Summer and a little Autumn too. But I always say that you can’t think Autumn without thinking Winter; and you can’t think Winter without thinking Spring; and Spring and Summer are not really two, but just one. And so there you have the whole year made one and nothing divided.... What if God were intelligence and spirit harmonized and made one? What if all that is the matter with us is just that we intelligences and spirits have not yet been harmonized and made one?

I’ve got a little old piano that the keys rattle, and Sunday mornings, for years now, I always go to that after breakfast, and sit down in my apron, and play some anthems that I remember: “As Pants the Hart,” and “Glory Be to God in the Highest,” and like that. I did it that first Autumn Sunday morning, with my windows open and the muslin curtains blowing and the sun slanting in, and a little smell of wild mint from the bed by the gate. And I knew all over me that it was Sunday morning—I’d have known it no matter if I hadn’t known.

For all I took as long as I could doing my dishes and brushing up the floor and making my bed and feeding my chickens, it was only half past nine when I was all through. Then I got my vegetables ready for dinner, and made me a little dessert, and still it was not quite ten o’clock. So then I give it up and went in, and sat down where I could see them go past to church. I had wanted to keep busy till after half past ten, when they’d all be in their pews.

Already they were going by, folks from up the street and round the corner: some that didn’t usually go and that I couldn’t tell which of the churches they’d be going to, and I wondered how they could tell themselves; and then some that sat near me in church, and that I usually walked along with.

“No,” I thought, “no such nonsense as this for me. Ever. Nor no red, white and blue banquet, either.”

Then, all of a sudden, the first bells began to ring. All the little churches in the village have bells and steeples—they were in debt for them for years. But the bells ... all my life long I’d been hearing them rung Sunday morning. All my life I had answered to them—to our special one because, as I said, my father had been janitor there, and he had rung the bell; but just the same, I had answered, always. The bells had meant something to me. They meant something now. I loved to hear them. Pretty soon they stopped, and there was just the tramp of feet on the board walk. I sat there where I was, without moving, the quarter of an hour until the bells began again. And when the bells began again it seemed as if they rang right there in the room with me, but soft and distant too,—from a long way off where I wasn’t any more. Always it had been then, at the second bell, that mother had stood in the hall and asked me if I was ready.... I sat there where I was, the quarter of an hour until the bells began again, and I knew this was the last bell, that would end in the five strokes—rung slow, and that when they stopped, all the organs would begin together. And then I could have cried aloud the thing that had been going in me and through me since the first bell had begun to ring:

“Oh, God. It’s the invisible church of the living God—it’s the place that has grown out of the relation of men to you, out of the striving of men to find you, and out of their longing to draw together in search of you. It is our invisible church from the old time. Why then—when men read things into the visible church that never belonged there, when there has crept into and clung there much that is false, why is it that we who know this must be the ones to withdraw? It is your church and the church of all those who try to know you. What shall we do to make it whole?”

Before I knew what I was doing, I was slipping my long cloak on over my work-dress, and then I was out on the street. And I remember that as I went, the thing that kept pouring through my mind was that I wasn’t the only one. But that all over, in other towns at that very hour, there were those whose hearts were aching as mine had ached, and who had nowhere to go. I don’t know yet what I meant to do; but over and over in my head the words kept going:

“What shall we do to make it whole?”

The last bell had stopped when I came to the little grassy triangle where the three churches faced. And usually, on Sunday mornings, by the time the last bell has rung, the triangle is still except for a few hurrying late-comers. But now, when I turned the corner and faced it, I saw people everywhere. Before each little church the steps, the side-walk, and out in the street, were thronged with people, and people were flowing out into the open spaces. And in a minute I sensed it: There wasn’t room. There wasn’t room—for there were fifteen hundred people living in Friendship Village, and all the little churches of the town together wouldn’t hold that many, nor even as many of them as were assembled there that day. But instead of thinking what to do, and how not to waste the time when so many had got together, all that kept going through my head was those same words that I had been saying: