“My interest is comin’ due,” says Bitty, movin’ on; “I’ve come up this mornin’ to see about going back to work in the brick-yard.”
“Good land,” I says sorrowful. “Good land. And Silas in the Council—and on the School Board—and an elder thrown in.”
Bitty grinned a little then.
“It ain’t new,” he says, over his shoulder. And he went on up the street, holding his hands heavy, and kind of letting his feet fall instead of setting them down, like men walk that don’t care, any more.
I understood what he meant when he said it wasn’t new. There was Joe Betts that worked three years getting his strawberry bed going, and when he begun selling from the wagon instead of taking to Silas Sykes at the Post-Office store, Silas got the Council that he’s in to put up licenses, clear over Joe’s head. And Ben Dole, he’d got a little machine and begun making cement blocks for folks’s barns, and Timothy Toplady, that’s interested in the cement works over to Red Barns, got Zachariah Roper, that’s to the head of the Red Barns plant, to come over and buy Ben Dole’s house and come up on his rent—two different times he done that. It wasn’t new. But it all kind of baffled me. It seemed so legal that I couldn’t put down my finger on what was the matter. Of course when a thing’s legal, and you’re anyways patriotic, you are some put to it to find a real good term to blame it with. I walked along, thinking about it, and feeling all baffled up as to what to do. But I hadn’t gone ten steps when I thought of one thing I could do, to clear up my own i-dees if for nothing else. I turned around and called out after Bitty.
“Oh, Bitty,” I says, “would you mind me letting Silas know I know?”
He threw out his hands a little, and let ’em kind of set down side of him.
“Why sure not,” he said, “but if you’re thinkin’ of saying anything to him—best spare the breath.”
“We’ll see about that,” I thought, and I went on down Daphne Street with a Determination sitting up in the air just ahead of me, beginning to crook its finger at me to come along.
In a minute I come past Mis’ Fire Chief Merriman’s house. The Chief has been dead several years, but we always keep calling her by his title, same as we call the vacant lot by the depot the Ellsworth House, though the Ellsworth House has been burned six years and it’s real kind of confusing to strangers that we try to direct. I remember one traveling man that headed right out towards the marsh and missed his train because some of us had told him to keep straight on till he turned the corner by the Ellsworth House, and he kept hunting for it and trusting in it till he struck the swamp. But you know how it is—you get to saying one thing, and you keep on uttering it after the thing is dead and gone and another has come in its place, and when somebody takes you up on it, like as not you’ll tell him he ain’t patriotic. It was the same with the Fire Chief. Dead though he was, we always give her his official title, because we’d got headed calling her that and hated to stop. She was out in her garden that morning, and I stood still when I caught sight of her tulips. They looked like the earth had broke open and let out a leak of what’s inside it, never intending to show so much at once.