No Greater Love

ON A long-ago day, a new family moved into the depression-ridden village where I walked the paths of my childhood. Their name was Jones, and if they were poorer than some of us, it did not matter, for there was no class consciousness in that town in those desperate times. There were five boys in the family, and the two oldest soon joined us in the exquisite joys that sleepy little place offered to its children. We swam in the swift-flowing river, hiked the low brown hills, caught horny toads, and knew in our hearts that there was not any place, any where, so satisfying as Friant, California.

The Jones family took up residence in that section of town known as The Pit, so called because that was what it was. In the past, some mineral or raw material must have been mined or taken from the earth there, but commercial activity had long since ceased, leaving only this enormous hole in the ground. Shanties perched on the brink of the hole, and entire families lived in these shacks. Nowadays these folks would surely be "underprivileged" or "economically deprived," but in those days they were just the people who live at The Pit. We did not pity nor ridicule them, but unquestioningly accepted them as our friends.

The Jones boys were sometimes .hungry at school, and more than once we shared our own slim lunches with them. A half sandwich from Betty, two bites of an apple from Bob, a broken cooky from June—bit by bit the little boys collected enough fuel to take them through the day.

With the passing of time the memory of Mr. Jones has faded. I recall only a tall man in overalls, faceless to me now. But Mrs. Jones is still bright and warm in my memories, though more than thirty years have passed since she last smiled in my direction. She was gaunt and big boned. In better times she might have put on weight and fussed a bit about get ting fat, but that was no problem with Pit families in the thirties. Invariably her lips were curved in a sweet smile that caught our attention far more than her shabby dress. The younger boys were usually clustered around her knees, but occasionally she would come to a Mother's Club meeting without them, walking the mile and a half from their shack to the two-room schoolhouse on the hill.

The Jones family had just be gun to add their own particular design to the fabric of my life when their shanty caught fire. Mrs. Jones' last desperate gift to her children left a vivid mark on me— on all of us in the town, and we talked about it afterward—small groups huddled over the drinking fountain, or three or four girls drawn together in the outlying area of the ball field, where we had been banished by an unfeeling captain to "watch for flys" during the noon ball game.

On that awful night two of the little boys had somehow been left inside when the overheated chimney turned the house into a bonfire. The older three and the parents were safely outdoors when Mrs. Jones realized that her babies were not with her. Neighbors grabbed for her as she started to ward the crumbling, fire-lit door way. She struck them with her big hands and raced on. As one man said soberly afterward, "Warn't nothin' er nobody coulda held her."

And by the water fountain and in the ball field children talked about it in hushed tones. We had never thought of a mother dying like that for her children. Would my mother try to save me if I were being burned up? I thought of her small neat figure speculatively. Probably the neighbors would be able to hold her back and I would be abandoned to the heat and smoke. Would I ever be brave enough to go after someone else, if they were in a burning building? I didn't know, and it made me un comfortable, so I—and my friends —soon dropped the subject.

But intermittently the pictures of that fiery death scene would flash upon my mind, made even more fiery and fearful by my imagination. On one such occasion, when the terror of it all nearly over whelmed me, I confronted my mother. "Mamma, would you go into a burning building to try to get me out, if I were burning up?"

She looked up from the stack of English papers she was marking. "I love you more than life itself," she said simply. "I would give my life for you."

So that was that. I still could not understand it, but I went about my play a little more secure, a bit more confident. My mother had said she loved me more than her life. And I began to have a dim comprehension—oh, very dim, but a beginning knowledge —of that other Person who loved me and gave Himself for me.