It was ’most half-past seven o’clock when the bird-man was ready. Like a big bug the machine looked, with spidery, bent legs and wings spread ready and no head necessary. And when he finally run it off down the square and headed towards the Pump pasture, my heart sunk some. My land, I thought, it can’t be a real true one. I guess there are them, but this right here on the market square can’t be one.
Since the world begun, there ain’t a more wonderful minute for folks than the minute when they first see some kind of flying-machine leave the ground—leave the ground! It’s like seeing the future come true right in your face. The thing done it so gentle and so simple that you’d of thought it was invented when legs was. It lifted itself up in the air, like by its own boot-straps, and it went up and up and up, just like going up was its own alphabet. It went and it kept going, its motor buzzing and purring, softer and softer. And pretty soon the blue that it was going up to meet seemed to come down and meet it, and the two sort of joined, and the big, wide gold morning flowed all over them, and the first thing I knew the bird-man’s machine and him in it looked like just what I had said: an eagle of the Lord, soaring to meet the sun like a friend of its.
I couldn’t bear it any more. It seemed to me as if, if I should look any longer, I should all of a sudden have ten senses instead of five, and they’d explode me. I looked away and down. And when I done that, all at once there I was looking right into the face of all the folks in Friendship Village. Heads back, a sea of little white dabs that was faces, and hearts beating underneath where you couldn’t see ’em—all of us was standing there breathless, feeling just alike. Feeling just alike and being just alike, underneath that wonderful thing happening in the sky.... And all of a sudden, while I looked at them, the faces all blurred and wiggled, and it seemed like I was looking into only one face, the face of Friendship Village, like a person....
I see it, like I’d never seen it before. While we watched, we was one person. When we was all thinking about the same thing, there was only one of us. And the more wonderful things that come into the world and took hold of everybody, the more one we was going to get and to stay. And this, all vague inside of us, I knew now was what us ladies had meant by what we’d planned. Didn’t it seem—didn’t it seem as if them that watched had ought to stay one—that decent, wondering, almost reverent one, long enough to vote decent and wondering and reverent for their town?
Right while my heart was beating with it all, the little buzzing and purring of the motor, away up there in the blue, stopped short off. My eyes flew up again, and I see the bird-man coming down. He was up so high that he was a dot, and he grew and grew like a thing being born in the sky—right down towards us and on us he come like a shot, a shot-down shot. Nobody breathed. I couldn’t see. But I looked and looked and dreaded.... And not eight hundred feet from the ground he begun coming down easy, and he come the rest of the way as gentle as a bird, and lit where he rose from.
Oh, how they cheered him—like one man! Like one man. Lem Toplady and Jimmy Sturgis, Jr., and the boys that was out in the field went and shook his hand—like the servants, I thought in the middle of my head, of some great new order. And I was thinking so deep and so breathless that I ’most forgot the band till it crashed right out behind us, playing loud and fine that Marseilles French piece, like we’d told them. And when it done that, up hopped the children that it give the cue to, and there in the midst of us they struck in, singing loud and clear the words they sung in school to that old tune, with its wonderful tang to it, that slips to your heels with its music and makes you want to go start something and to start it then:
“Come, Children of To-morrow, come!
New glory dawns upon the world.
The ancient banners must be furled.
The earth becomes our common home—
The earth becomes our common home.
From plain and field and town there sound
The stirring rumors of the day.
Old wrongs and burdens must make way
For men to tread the common ground.
“Look up! The children win to their immortal place.
March on, march on—within the ranks of all the human race.
“Come, love of people, for the part
Invest our willing arms with might.
Mother of Liberty, shed light
As on the land, so in the heart—
As on the land, so in the heart.
Divided, we have long withstood
The love that is our common speech.
The comrade cry of each to each
Is calling us to humanhood.”
Hum it to the tune of that Marseilles piece, and you’ll know how we was all feeling. By the time they got down to their last two lines, my throat was about the size of my head.