They sat down on the place we’d left for ’em, on the seats and the grass in front of everybody, and them that could sing we put on the platform, lots of rows deep, so’s they all covered it. They was big boys and little, and little girls and big, good-dressed and poor-dressed; with honest fathers, and with them that didn’t know honest when they see it nor miss it when they didn’t—and all of them was the Friendship Village that’s going to be some time, when the market square is emptied of us others, for good and all.
“Where’s Threat and ’Lish?” I says to Eppleby, that was helping keep the children in order.
“Dustin’ the mayor’s office out ready, I s’pose,” he says, wrinkling his eyes at the corners.
“Mebbe they’ve abducted each other,” Mis’ Toplady suggests, soothing.
Mis’ Sykes looked over from filling the syrup pitchers—she’d boiled the brown sugar down for that, and it added its thick, golden smell unto the general inviting mixture.
“I don’t think,” she says serious, “that you’d ought to speak disrespectful of anybody that’s going to be your mayor. Public officials,” said she, “had ought to be paid respect to, or else the law won’t be carried out.”
“Shucks,” says Mis’ Toplady, short. She’d made upwards of ninety griddle cakes by then, and she was getting kind of flustered and crispy.
“Shucks?” says Mis’ Sykes, haughty and questioning, and all but in two syllables.
“If that’s all the law is,” says Mis’ Toplady, beating away at her pancake batter, “give me anar-kicky, or whatever it is they call it.”
Mis’ Sykes never said a word. She just went on making syrup, reproachful. Mis’ Sykes is one of them that acts like life was made up of the pattern of things, and like speaking of warf and woof wasn’t delicate. And she never so much as lets on they is such a thing as a knot. Yes, some folks is like that. But not me—not me.