A GATHERING OF MEN – eXCERPT

PROLOGUE

“Mark my word,” Saul Levitt said when news of the Wright brothers’ twelve-second flight at Kitty Hawk reached the town of Candor nestled in the great swath of North Carolina’s piedmont region. Saul, the town’s full-time barber and part-time dentist, had called the idea “hair-brained,” adding, “The one thing those flying contraptions will do is break a few necks.”
A quarter-century later, long enough for Saul to forget his early skepticism, he repeated his warning. This time, however, he held a copy of the May 22, 1927, Charlotte Observer with its black and white rendering of Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis on the front page. “Mark my word,” Saul said to Paul Warner who occupied the barber’s chair, his cheeks and neck slathered in shaving lotion. “This is the start of something big.” Saul nodded, thumped his copy of the Observer, and then returned the paper to the shelf below his jars of scissors, combs, and brushes and a bottle of Brilliantine hair tonic.
Each evening for the next week, Saul carefully folded the newspaper, tucked it inside his leather briefcase, and carried it home, returning with his prized possession the following morning. On Wednesday he stopped at the dry goods store on Main where he brandished the headlines in front of Dorothea Durang, the store’s clerk. Minutes later, Dorothea pulled aside Betty June Hardman, her first customer of the morning, to say she had seen the news from Paris. At lunch, Betty June passed the Lindbergh story to her neighbor Hilda Whitaker and repeated what Dorothea said Saul said.
By the time the news reached Sam Roth at his tobacco farm fifteen miles outside Candor, a blend of faulty recollection, conjecture, and imagination had so distorted the image and the content of the article, Sam merely shook his head and returned to the fields. Lindbergh’s cross-Atlantic flight might not have received a fair reception from Sam, but the same could not be said for boys between the ages of seven and seventeen in Candor and towns across America. To fly like Lucky Lindy was their wish, their be-all, their end-all.
At day’s end, when released from their chores, they fastened earmuffs under their chins, stole their mothers’ scarves to wind around their necks, and boarded wheeled vehicles they had fashioned from crates and boxes. Without engines or wings, the contraptions were earthbound, but, as they bumped their way downhill, the summer air breezed past the boys’ sky-angled faces, and if they dared close their eyes, they swore the crates took flight. Lake Roth was one of them. He had taken his turn in Roger Perry’s boxcar, felt the rush of excitement as the car gained speed, and, consumed by the image he saw on the back of his clenched eyelids, he rose from the cart’s wooden slat of a seat out of sheer joy. He came to his senses on the ground. Beside him lay what remained of the car after colliding with a black gum. Ten feet away stood his friend Jim Caulfield, doubled over in laughter.
Weeks later, something miraculous occurred, although more miraculous to Lake than to his father, Sam. As the two hung sticks of tobacco leaves in the curing barn, a distant but clearly audible hum caught their attention. They paused and cocked their heads in the same quarter turn to locate the source. The hum grew and soon filled the barn. Quizzical, father and son stepped outside as a biplane passed overhead, its engine coughing and sputtering as it slowed.
“One of them stunt men, I guess,” Sam said. He turned back to the barn.
Lake tracked the plane, watching as it dipped a wing and then dropped a packet that spiraled slowly to the ground. Then, after leveling off, the plane resumed its course toward Asheville, or Charlotte, or New York, or Paris, or any city he could conjure. He watched, cupping his hands at his forehead, squinting until nothing more than a dark speck remained in the sky.
“Lake?” Sam called from the barn, but his father’s words were lost in the air.
Lake ran faster than he knew he could to the far end of the tobacco field. There, he found what to anyone else would be a few sheets of paper inside a weighted paper sack. To Lake, the pages and the letters on them were the Magna Carta, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the map of Edward Teach’s buried treasure rolled into one. Without wasting a second, he folded the pages in half and then in half again and then again until they slipped easily into his back pocket.
“Son?” Lake’s father’s voice urged. Arms akimbo and eyebrows bunched and knotted over his square chin, Sam stood outside the barn beside a rough-hewn cart stacked with cut tobacco. “Did you hear me calling?”
“Yes, sir. I mean, no, sir. I was just . . .”
That night, long after the cicadas had sung themselves out, Lake slid the folded pages from under his pillow and tiptoed to the window. He had not taken three steps when his sister, Nell, awoke.
“What are you doing?”
“Shush,” he said, cupping the pages in the curve of his shoulder. “Go back to sleep.”
In the scant light of the moon high above his window, Lake read the words that would change the direction of his life and of those most dear to him. Sam had been right. There was to be an air show on Sunday.
Those were the days and nights when young men’s dreams were born. When they could envision having the power to leave the earth behind and look down on that orb as if they were superhuman, gods even, and able to accomplish wonderous things, things unimaginable a few years earlier. Lindbergh had done it, brought it home to America and dropped it in the lap of every boy. Now, those boys yearned to follow in his footsteps and soar through the sky on his wings—Lake Roth, Roger Perry, and Jim Caulfield among them. And this is their story. One of boys becoming men and waking to the prospects of life. One of flight. Of breaking ties to the earth and gliding over the hills of western North Carolina and over cities with unfamiliar names, like Schweinfurt and Regensburg, and through skies thick with flak. Of touching the clouds, the moon, and the stars. One of enduring friendship, duty, and honor.
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