Twelve Minutes Down Main Street

The chairs go out on the evening of the third. Somebody carries a folding chair down to Main Street and sets it on the curb, nudges it level with the toe of a boot, and leaves it there. Not tied to anything. Hardly in the way of anything. Just a chair facing the empty street, waiting through the dark, and in the morning it is still exactly where it was put.

That is the first thing the Fourth of July does in a small town. It does not begin with a shot or a speech or a flag going up. It begins with an act of faith — that a chair left out overnight will be there at dawn, that its owner has intentions, and that the whole town understands without a word.

By nine o'clock the chair has neighbors. A row of them. Lawn chairs and camp chairs and a kitchen chair somebody painted red, white, and blue years ago and has touched up since. They line the curb on both sides of Main Street, facing each other across the hot asphalt, patient as a congregation.

The Eve of the Fourth

The night before is not quiet. Out in the backyards, kids are lighting the fireworks they were told not to light until the fourth, and the pops come up out of the neighborhoods the way July thunder comes up out of the west. A dog barks at every one for a while, then gives up. By ten o'clock the light is finally leaving — in July, the days are long, and the Fourth falls just past the hinge of the year, when every evening is quietly losing a minute.

The air has weight in July. It presses down, holds the smell of cut grass and fresh tar, and carries it all down the street past the waiting chairs. Out past the edge of town the corn is high — there used to be a saying about knee-high by the Fourth, but in a good year it is past a man's hip, standing green and dense, breathing the way corn breathes on a July night, and the whole county smells faintly of it.

Around midnight the chairs wait alone under the streetlights. Nothing moves on Main Street but paper.

The Order of the Morning

The parade forms up at the implement lot on the edge of town, and the assembly is the better show. Nobody is on the clock. The police chief is working his holiday. The high school band has been drilling since June, and the trombonists are in wool uniforms because that is what they own — wool uniforms bought from a catalog years ago and patched where the wool goes thin.

The parade comes down Main Street in the same order it has always come. First a police car, lights turning, rolling slow, the radio muttering through the open window. Then the color guard and the veterans — riding in folding chairs on a flatbed, or walking the curb line, and the crowd goes quiet in the middle of the racket for a moment, the way it always does. Then the floats, which is a generous word. A trailer with a plywood fence painted like a barn. A church group. The Cub Scouts, who spent the week picking up litter along the county road. Then the whole high school band in the July sun, cheeks red, and the bass drum arrives a heartbeat after the sound of it, felt through the soles of the feet. They play Sousa, because on the Fourth of July every small-town band in the country is playing the same hundred-year-old tunes, and it works.

Then the fire trucks. The town's own, then the neighboring town's, then the one from over the hill — the departments trade visits the way churches trade preachers — and each one comes through with the siren full and the lights going, drowning out the world for a glorious, impossible minute. Kids under five stand on their toes; kids over sixty cover their ears and grin.

Candy comes next, in waves. The floats throw it, the tractors throw it, the antique car throws it. Tootsie Rolls and peppermints and bubble gum, arcing into the gutters, and the small children are released from the curb like birds. Somebody's grandmother, who has watched from the same parking meter spot for longer than anyone can remember, catches a piece of candy out of the air without looking.

Then the tractors — twenty or thirty of them, polished until the chrome throws the sun at the crowd, old red Farmalls and new green diesels, and the men driving them do not smile much, because rolling several tons of tractor past a crowd at walking speed is serious work. Then the politicians, because there is an election coming, walking the curb with their sleeves rolled and their handshakes. Then the horses. Then the bicycles with playing cards clothespinned to the frame, and the cheap riffle of the spokes, and then the last empty trailer, and the parade is done. Twelve minutes. Fifteen, if the horses balk. The whole of it takes less time than the chairs spent waiting.

The Long White Afternoon

By midday the street is empty again and the heat has come down on Main Street like a lid. The candy is ground into the tar. The chairs are gone. A few kids hunt the gutters for unspent bottle rockets, and the diesel smoke hangs in the air a while and then moves off. The town has the washed-out look of two in the afternoon, the deadest hour of the whole year.

The town goes to water. To the river and the lake and the relatives with the pool. Hamburgers off a rusty grill. Watermelon. A long, heavy nap in a cool room. This is the part of the Fourth that belongs to the body; the parade belongs to the town.

And later, at dusk, the fairgrounds fill, and the first star shells go up over the corn, and the whole sky hammers. But the parade lives in the morning. The secret every small-town kid learns early is that the parade is mostly waiting — chairs set out the night before, a band that spent June in the parking lot, a whole town lined up early to stand in the sun. The reward for all that waiting is over in the time it takes a watermelon to get cut.

Next Year, Same Time

On the fifth, Main Street is just a street. The flags come down from the light poles, the heat lifts or doesn't, and the town goes back to whatever it was doing. But somebody keeps the list. The woman who has organized the lineup for as long as anyone can remember keeps her cardboard box of plans. The man who runs the feed store has driven the same tractor for twenty years. The fire chief, whose department does half the work of the morning, will say only that it is a good day for the kids, and that is treated as the final word.

The parade does not change, and that is its job. In the other eleven months, something is always changing — a business closes, a road gets rerouted, the school tears down the old gym. The Fourth is the exception. The same chairs in the same spot. The same tune. The same heat, more or less. A town that cannot hold most things steady can hold this, and does, and the holding is the point.

So the chairs are folded and carried inside, and the candy is washed into the storm drains with the first rain, and July goes on being July — hot, long, already shrinking a minute each evening. Somewhere, on a shelf in a back room, the red, white, and blue lawn chair waits with everything else. It will be back on the curb next year, put there in the evening to wait through the dark, exactly where it was this time.

Photos: Kenneth C. Zirkel (CC BY-SA 4.0); Dwight Burdette (CC BY 3.0)