“Like what?” says Timothy, blank.
“Oh—I dunno,” says Mis’ Toplady, restless. “Somethin’ that’ll roust folks up and give ’em to see their town like a wagon to be pulled and not one to be rode in. Exercises, mebbe——”
“Exercises!” says Silas Sykes, explosive. “You’ll be wantin’ the stores closed election day, next thing.”
“I mean that now,” says Mis’ Toplady. “Exercises,” she went on, “that’ll show ’em what’s being done for ’em in the world—and the universe—and I dunno but other places. Exercises that’ll make ’em think ahead and out, and up and in the air instead of just down into their pocketbooks. I dunno. Exercises that’ll make ’em see the state like a state, their state——”
“My dum, woman,” says Silas, “election day ain’t no Fourth of July proceedings.”
“Ain’t it?” says Mis’ Toplady. “That’s what I dunno. It kind of seems to me as if it was.”
Then the band jabbed into “America” abundant, and the men took off their hats, patriotic as pictures. And I stood there, kind of looking at us all while we listened. I see all them hundreds of us out of the stores and houses of Friendship Village that was laying over behind us there in the dark, waiting for us to keep on a-making it; and I see Lem Toplady and the rest of ’em going to do their first move public towards the making. And while the band was playing and everybody humming their country’s air, negligent in their throats, I started to slip off—I couldn’t help it—and to go home by the back street, like I didn’t want to meet the village face to face.
But I hadn’t got very far when the band done a thing it’s been doing lately—ever since the new leader come that’s some kind of a foreigner up to the round-house. It run off into some kind of a French piece with a wonderful tang to it. The children have been singing it in school, with some different words to it, and when the band begun it now, they all kind of hummed it, all over the square. The Marseilles, I think they call it—like a kind of cloth. When I hear it, it always makes me want to go and start something. It done that now. And I says to myself:
“What you slinkin’ off home for, actin’ like the ‘best’ people that can’t look their town in the face at election time? Go on down Daphne Street like a citizen, that you are one.”
And I did, and walked along the little watching streets with all the rest of us, and that march music in my heels. And listening to it, and seeing us all streaming to our homes, I could ’most have felt like we was real folks living in a real town, like towns was meant to be.