Across the Fruited Plain | Page 2

few places the government has set up comfortable camps
and part-time farms such as this story describes. The church has tried to
do something, also.
About twenty years ago, the Council of Women for Home Missions,
made up of groups of women from the different churches, began to
make plans for helping. They opened some friendly rooms where they
took care of the children who were left alone while their parents
worked. The rooms were often no more than a made-over barn, but in
these "Christian Centers," as they were called, the children were given
cleanliness, food, happiness and the care of a nurse, and were taught
something about a loving Father God. The children who worked in the
fields and the older people were also helped. From the seven with
which a beginning was made, the number of Centers has grown to
nearly sixty.
There is a great deal more to do in starting more Centers, and in
equipping those we have, and we can do part of it. With our church
school classes, we can give CleanUp and Kindergarten Kits like Cissy's
and Jimmie's and our leaders will tell us other things we can do, such as
collecting bedding and clothing and toys and money. Best of all, we
can give our friendship to these homeless people.
For they're just children like you. When you grow up, perhaps you may
help our country become a place where no single child need be
homeless.
Florence Crannell Means Denver, Colorado

ACROSS THE FRUITED PLAIN
1: THE HOUSE OF BEECHAM
"Oh, Rose-Ellen!" Grandma called.
Rose-Ellen slowly put down her library book and skipped into the
kitchen. Grandma peppered the fried potatoes, sliced some wrinkled
tomatoes into nests of wilting lettuce, and wiped her dripping face with
the hem of her clean gingham apron. The kitchen was even hotter than
the half-darkened sitting room where crippled Jimmie sprawled on the
floor listlessly wheeling a toy automobile, the pale little baby on a quilt
beside him.
Grandma squinted through the door at the old Seth Thomas dock in the
sitting room. "Half after six! Rose-Ellen, you run down to the shop and
tell Grandpa supper's spoiling. Why he's got to hang round that shop till
supper's spoilt when he could fix up all the shoes he's got in two-three
hours, I don't understand. 'Twould be different if he had anything to
do. . . ."
Rose-Ellen said, "O.K., Gramma!" and ran through the hall. She'd
rather get away before Grandma talked any more about the shop. Day
after day she had heard about it. Grandma talked to her, though she was
only ten, because she and Grandma were the only women in the family,
since last winter when Mother died.
As Rose-Ellen let the front door slam behind her, she saw Daddy
coming slowly up the street. The way his broad shoulders drooped and
the way he took off his hat and pushed back his thick, dark hair told her
as plainly as words that he hadn't found work that day. Even though
you were a child, you got so tired--so tired--of the grown folks'
worrying about where the next quart of milk would come from. So
Rose-Ellen patted him on the arm as they passed, saying, "Hi, Daddy,
I'm after Grampa!" and hop-skipped on toward the old cobbler shop.
Before Rose-Ellen was born, when Daddy was a boy, even, Grandpa

had had his shop at that corner of the city street.
There he was, standing behind the counter in the shadowy shop, his
shoulders drooping like Daddy's. He was a big, kind-looking old man,
his gray hair waving round a bald dome, his eyes bright blue. He was
looking at a newspaper. It was a crumpled old paper that had been
wrapped around someone's shoes; the Beechams didn't spend pennies
for newspapers nowadays.
The long brushes were quiet from their whirling. On the rack of
finished shoes two pairs awaited their owners; on the other rack were a
few that had evidently just come in. Yet Grandpa looked as tired as if
he had mended a hundred pairs.
He looked up when the bell tinkled. "Oh, Ellen-girl! Anything wrong?"
"Only Gramma says please come to supper. Everything's getting
spoiled."
Grandpa glanced at his old clock. It said half-past five. "I keep
tinkering with it, but it's seen its best days. Like me."
He took off his denim apron, rolled down his sleeves, put on his hat and
coat, and locked the door behind them. But not before he had looked
wistfully around the little place, with its smell of beeswax, leather and
dye, where he had worked so long. Its walls were papered with his
favorite calendars: country scenes that reminded him of his farm
boyhood; roly-poly babies in bathtubs; a pretty girl who