Excerpt:

On the wall above the teacher’s head, the big wall clock‘s hour hand was pointing at the number three, and the minute hand was slowly advancing toward twelve. The sweep second hand seemed to be hovering, just standing there. It was as if the chill that had descended upon the room when the last coal in the fireplace burned out a few minutes before had frozen time solidly in place. Now five minutes, only five minutes; five minutes more and class would end, and school would be out for the day. It was Friday, and he and Cecil would have time to work almost two full hours till he had to bring the cows into the cow lot behind the new barn and do the milking. He was sure there were only twenty to twenty five hours work remaining to do on the flying machine. Twenty five hours: wow! At this rate it wouldn’t take but two, or at the outside, three more weeks to get the ship ready to fly. Earl’s breath caught in his throat then, and he found himself struggling to get out of his seat and into his bulky, Scotch-Plaid Mackinaw after the bell had rung.
It was three and a half miles from the village of Salvisa to the family farm on the Kentucky River. Now if he could just catch a ride with someone driving toward McCoun’sFerry. He really didn’t mind the walk that much, but he just didn’t want to lose any precious daylight. As he cut across the schoolyard and headed for the gravel road as fast as his legs would carry him without breaking into an all out run for the ferry pike, he tried to whistle a mournful tune out of some forgotten movie he’d seen from one of the showboats that tied up weekends at the sand bar below his home on the Kentucky River. And all this time he kept picking up his feet faster, and faster, and quickening his pace. He knew already he didn’t have to even think about Cecil. Cecil was probably already there waiting. Heck, he thought, he might even already be working on the machine.
Cecil Merryman, was already pulling the tarpaulin off the glider. He knew Earl didn’t like him calling it a glider. Earl just knew they’d get an engine somewhere by the time the machine was ready to fly, but Cecil had his doubts. What else was he to think? Cecil was a full year ahead of Earl in school and he knew his math a lot better, and he knew he knew too. “It’s a glider, that’s all it is,” he told himself now and again, without bothering to say so to his cousin Earl. If Earl found an engine, and found some way to pay for it, well, well then he’d reconsider. But for now it was a glider. He pulled the rest of the heavy muslin covering down over the empennage, or the tail feathers as he liked to call that part of the flying machine. And after folding the heavy cloth carefully, he sat down on the stack of lumber piled up against the horse stall doors and admired their handiwork.
Not bad, he thought, not bad for a couple of boys like the two of us.
Earl was almost done with the eighth grade, and Cecil was a few weeks away from completing the first year of high school. No one they knew would be calling them kids any longer, not after they flew the first glider in Mercer County. And from the looks of it they would have it done before the school year ended. And there were only three weeks left in the school year. He leaned back, his hands behind his head and admired their handiwork.
She was twelve feet exactly from the tip of the aircraft’s nose to the aft end of the fuselage. Okay, he thought, the empennage. They’d left room to install an engine, and the firewall was thirty inches, or two and a half feet behind the true forward end of the fuselage; but he still had his doubts they’d ever put anything into that space but ballast. And Cecil had filled a half dozen ten pound flour sacks with clean, fine grained sand from sand bar at the river’s edge.
The wings weren’t attached, but they were completely formed and all the elements, the ribs and stringers and supporting pieces, all glued into place, the clamps already removed. He’d read about the Airliner being built currently by Boeing in Seattle, and was glad their own design didn’t have to complete with it. Gosh, he thought, 33,000 individual pieces, just in the wings! We don’t have two percent of that, and he looked up then at the wings hanging from wooden pegs on the wall of the barn’s side shed. They were not yet covered with fabric and dope, but were the mere skeletons of what they’d be by this time a week or two from now. He considered their remaining supplies. They’d have to go into Harrodsburg tomorrow, Saturday, to procure the remainder of the wing assemblies. Salvisa was so provincial farmers could hardly buy their flour or sugar, much less secure the necessary hardware for building an aero plane. He forgot for the moment just how much of the flying machine had been ordered out of the Sears and Roebuck, and even the Montgomery Ward catalogs. Instead, he turned his mind to the manager of Wilson’s Lumber Yard, and thought for a moment on old man Springer. I sure hope Mister Springer’s got all the items on the list we gave him. If he leaves off even one thing, it’ll set us back a week or more. Cecil’s mind emptied itself of thoughts of Johnson Springer and as his concentration continued to slip off the machine they were building and the perception of unknown problems to be faced, his mind drifted toward some dark oblivion he had yet to imagine.
He had his eyes closed now and was uttering some semblance of a private prayer under his breath. Grandpa wouldn’t like it even a little bit if he found out he and Earl had gone into town to pick up parts at the hardware store or the lumber yard. In the morning, if he didn’t drie them to town, he’d surely think they were going to attend services at the church. Even though there had to be exceptions now and then, the family always tried consistently to keep the Sabbath. They’d have to leave the church before services actually started, just go to Sabbath School, or skip Sabbath School and the preacher’s sermon and go straight to one of the suppliers. He’d count on Earl to help him figure it out. But before he could ask Providence in advance for understanding or forgiveness, his eyelids were not only blinking often, but growing heavy to the point that momentarily he’d be sound asleep.
But before slumber could take him fully, his revere was broken as Earl came bounding around the opened barn door, his small packet of books bobbing and jerking at the end of the belt he had tied around them. And almost immediately, the books were lying on the ground directly in front of him.
“Hey Snooks,” Cecil said, shaking off his lethargy, “you’re all out of breath. What ‘d you do: run all the way from Salvisa?”
“No, I didn’t. I hitched a ride with old man Robinson in his Plymouth sedan. He dropped me off at the end of the lane. And quit calling me Snooks. I’m getting just a little tired of it.”
“Sure Snooks, I know,” Cecil said, without meaning a word of it. “But you know Alvin and Jesse aren’t about to drop their Snooks routine. That’s what you get for being the baby of the family. And if Calvert was still at home he’d keep on saying Snooks too. As I recall, that was his favorite amusement to pester you with it. Wasn’t it?”
“I’m not the baby. Eunice and Naomi are both younger than I am, so knock off the Snooks stuff. You like using Snooks, you just call Eunice or Naomi Snooks from here on out—but not me. Just drop it, will you?”
The two boys, growing weary of exchanging mere lackadaisical chitchat, began to work together then in earnest. Stooping and lifting together they got the fuselage up onto the sturdy saw horses they’d built just for this particular operation. And each boy began to work on a different side of the main airframe.
As they worked at getting the wheel struts attached to the airframe, each working methodically at tasks they had ironed out on paper beforehand, they still considered all that lay ahead of them for the remainder of the weekend.
“You got to milk don’t you, Earl? Grandpa’ll be callng you in about an hour. I’ll keep working on the wheel assemblies. I know you wish I’d mastered those old Guernsey teats, but I just don’t think it’ll ever happen—do you?”
Earl, remembering how the milk had refused to flow for Cecil, or else gotten squirted all over his shoes agreed: “You city boys ain’t mastered much of anything when it comes to farming. But you better master building an aero plane or one of us just might get our necks broke Cecil. So while I do the milking, you get these wheels mounted and don’t forget anything, okay?”
“Before Grandpa calls you to milking, would you set out that cup of grease and lay those wheel bearings on a nice clean rag over on the work bench? I don’t want to forget to lube these bearings up now do I?”
“I don’t want you to forget anything Cecil. I might wind up being the first pilot,” replied Earl, looking askew at his cousin.
Cecil’s grandfather was Earl’s father, and his mother was Earl’s oldest sister, Ethel. Ethel Wiley Merryman had been born in 1898, but Earl, since there were a total of eight children, with four boys and four girls in the family, had not come into the household till 1913. The boys had been born within a year of each other. And at the time Ethel and Emory Merryman, Cecil’s parents, were living in a very small, very white, except for where the paint had completely peeled away, sharecropper’s house on his grandfather’s farm. It wasn’t a huge farm, being barely three hundred acres. But “Bud,” Wiley knew how to manage and how to make the farm produce and he listed whenever he could his and the farm’s accomplishments like a who’s who of the local newspaper’s society pages: The sales of mules to the US Army, the sale of good, fresh milk to Carshalton’s diary, several acres of corn and tobacco, and truck loads of watermelons in season. He’d about gotten out of the standard bred business, which was already being reduced to smaller levels when his daddy Joel died in 1911. It was a new age, a new time, and now that people were flying all over the world, well, Cecil and Earl—or at least they thought—just might be able to convert a few acres of grandpa’s watermelon patch in the bottom land by the river to a runway, make them an aerodrome out of an old unused tobacco shed, and with the accomplishment of this, their first aero plane, add Wiley Flying Machines to the pages of that next newspaper article in which the county’s citizens sometimes read to keep up with the farm’s accomplishments. All they had to do was finish constructing the flying machine, and then to make just one successful flight. Nothing to it, they thought. Why, they carefully considered, those Van Allen boys up near Salvisa were taking off and landing with great regularity—and safely too. And all they had was a middling sized cow pasture to land in. And even if it was true that they were running Canadian Liquor day and night, just because of prohibition, well, what difference did it make. The roaring twenties were on their last legs, but nothing better had come along to replace them and with just a little luck Earl Wiley and his cousin Cecil Merryman would be flying before the winter months and the nineteen hundred and thirties arrived.