"Well, they went over it and over it and tried to think of some other way, and tried to hatch up some other speaker without eating up the whole Fifty Dollars in telephone tolls, and tried most other things. And then we told them what we'd thought of different times, amongst us as being features fit for a Fourth in the sight of the Lord and the sight of men. And they hemmed and they hawed and they give in about as graceful as a clothes-line winds up when you've left it out in the sleet, but they did give in and see reason. Timothy last—that's quite vain of being firm.
"'If we come out with a one-horse doin's, seems like it'd be worse than sittin' down flat-foot failed,' he mourns, grieving.
"Amanda, his wife, give him one of her looks. 'Timothy,' says she, 'when, since you was married to me, did I ever fail to stodge up a company dinner or a spare bed or a shroud when it was needed sudden? When did any of us ladies ever fail that's here? Do you sp'ose we're any more scant of idees about our own nation?'
"And Timothy had to keep his silence. He knew what she said was the Old Testament truth. But I think what really swung them all round was the thought of Red Barns and Indian Mound. Imagination of what them two weekly papers would say, so be we petered out on our speech and didn't offer nothing else, was too much for flesh and blood to bear. And the men ended by agreeing to seeing to shutting every business house in Friendship Village and they went off to do it,—resolved, but groaning some, like men will.
"Mis' Sykes, she made some excuse and went, too. 'I'll run the garden party part,' says she. 'My niece an' I'll do that, an' try our best to get some novelty into your Fourth. An' we'll preside on the marquee, like we'd agreed. More I don't say.'
"But the rest of us, we stayed on there at Abagail's, and we planned like mad.
"We didn't look in no journal nor on no woman's page for something new. We didn't rush to our City relations for novelties. We didn't try for this and that nor grasp at no agony whatever. We just went down deep into the inside of our understanding and thought what the Fourth was and how them that made it would of wanted it kept. No fingers blowed off nor clothes scorched up, no houses burned down, no ear-drums busted out—none of them would of been in their programme, and they wan't in ours. Some of the things that was in ours we'd got by hearing Insley tell what they was doin' other places. Some o' the things he suggested to us. Some o' the things we got by just going back and back down the years an' remembering—not so much what we'd done as the way we use' to feel, long ago, when the Fourth was the Fourth and acted like it knew it. Some of the things we got by just reaching forward and forward, and seeing what the Fourth is going to mean to them a hundred years from now—so be we do our part. And some of the things we got through sheer make-shift woman intelligence, that put its heads together and used everything it had, that had anything to do with the nation, or the town, or with really living at all the way that first Fourth of July meant about, 'way down inside.
"Before it was light on the morning of the Fourth, I woke up, feeling all happy and like I wanted to hurry. I was up and dressed before the sun was up, and when I opened my front door, I declare it was just like the glory of the Lord was out there waiting for me. The street was laying all still and simple, like it was ready and waiting for the light. Early as it was, Mis' Holcomb was just shaking her breakfast table-cloth on her side stoop, and she waved it to me, big and billowy and white, like a banner. And I offs with my apron and waved it back, and it couldn't of meant no more to either of us if we had been shaking out the folds of flags. It was too early for the country wagons to be rattling in yet, and they wan't no other sounds—except a little bit of a pop now and then over to where Bennie Uppers and little Nick Toplady was up and out, throwing torpedoes onto the bricks; and then the birds that was trilling an' shouting like mad, till every tree all up and down Daphne Street and all up and down the town and the valley was just one living singing. And all over everything, like a kind of a weave to it, was that something that makes a Sunday morning and some holiday mornings better and sweeter and goldener than any other day. I ain't got much of a garden, not having any real time to fuss in it, but I walked out into the middle of the little patch of pinks and parsley that I have got, and I says 'way deep in me, deeper than thinking: 'It don't make no manner of differ'nce how much of a fizzle the day ends up with, this, here and now, is the way it had ought to start.'
"Never, not if I live till beyond always, will I forget how us ladies' hearts was in our mouths when, along about 'leven o'clock, we heard the Friendship Village Stonehenge band coming fifing along, and we knew the parade was begun. We was all on the market square—hundreds of us, seems though. Red Barns and Indian Mound had turned out from side to side of themselves, mingling the same as though ploughshares was pruning-hooks—or whatever that quotation time is—both towns looking for flaws in the day, like enough, but both shutting up about it, biblical. Even the marquee, with its red and white stripes, showing through the trees, made me feel good. 'Land, land,' Mis' Toplady says, 'it looks kind of homey and old-fashioned, after all, don't it? I mean the—tent,' she says—she would not say the other word; but then I guess it made her kind of mad seeing Mis' Sykes bobbing around in there in white duck an' white shoes—her that ain't a grandmother sole because of Nature and not at all through any lack of her own years. Everything was all seeming light and confident—but I tell you we didn't feel so confident as we'd meant to when we heard the band a-coming to the tune o' 'Hail, Columbia! Happy Land.' And yet now, when I look back on that Independence Day procession, it seems like regular floats is no more than toy doings beside of it.