The Weight of Air

The Loop

I have been falling out of the sky for thirty-six years, and I have never once hit the ground the way they said I would.

I am at the kitchen window when I write this in my head, which is the only place I write anything now that the doctor has taken my logbook the way they took my license — gently, with both hands, as if I might break it or it might break me. The window faces north over the Platte. It is the last week of October and the river is low and braided, the sandbars showing their backs like a herd lying down, and the cranes are coming through. Not the spring thunder, when they blacken the channels and you cannot hear yourself pray. This is the ragged going-south of them, a few thousand at a time, strung out in lines that bend and tear and mend themselves a mile up where the light is still good though the ground has already gone blue. I watch them. My heart, which is the thing that finally grounded me, knocks along in its bad rhythm like a magneto with one wire loose. The girl who taught me to listen to engines is the only one of them all still living, and she is two hundred miles east and cannot come, and so I sit here and listen to my own bad engine and watch the birds go where I cannot, the way I did the first time, when I was sixteen and broke and full of exactly nothing.

That is where it started, so that is where I will start. Late summer of 1919. The county fair outside Pell, on the south bank, where the Lincoln highway was still mostly a rumor and a man with a Ford could charge you a dime to be pulled out of the mud he had himself watered down the night before.

You have to understand what we were that year. We were a hole in the ground with people standing around the edge of it. My father had gone in the fall of '18, and my brother Carl ten days behind him — the one to the war by way of a fever in a Kansas camp he never shipped out of, the other to the same flu that took the fever to him when he came home in a box and we opened it against the doctor's word. Two graves up on the rise behind the church, the dirt on them not yet grassed over good. My mother had laid them in herself, near enough, and she did not speak of it, and she did not let us speak of it, because in my mother's book grief was a kind of wanting and wanting was the door the devil came in by. She had buried half of what she had and she meant to keep the other half close to the ground where the wind couldn't get it. That was Ruth Kessler. She loved us like a woman bailing a boat — furiously, without looking up.

We went to the fair because Pearl had cried for it and because there was butter to sell. My mother counted the egg money into a snap purse on the wagon seat, her lips moving, and what she counted came to a dollar and forty cents and the price of nothing. Pearl was twelve and walked between us holding the butter crock against her stomach like a baby. I was sixteen and tall for it and wearing my brother's shirt because it was the best whole thing in the house, and I had taken in the collar with my mother's small ugly stitches, and I smelled, the way we all smelled, of woodsmoke and the cow and the long dust of the road in.

The fairground was the most of anything I had ever seen in one place. Hogs the size of hassocks asleep in their own stink. A man selling tonic off the tailgate of a wagon, his voice gone to gravel. Children with their faces sticky and their feet bare and quick. A girl my age in a yellow dress that had cost somebody a week, and I looked at the dress the way you look at a thing in a window, knowing the glass is there and always will be. The dust came up off the trampled grass and hung at the height of a tall man's hat, gold where the sun got into it, and through it everybody moved slow and shouting, and my mother held the snap purse with both hands and her face said we should not have come.

Then a man at the rope line near the cattle barns put two fingers in his mouth and whistled and pointed, and the whole churning yard of people turned at once and went quiet in a wave, the way a field goes quiet before weather. I turned with them. I did not know what I was turning toward. That is the part I have never been able to give anybody, and I have tried, in lecture halls, to ladies who paid a dollar to hear me — that I did not know the thing existed until I saw it, and that the not-knowing makes it worse, makes it a kind of conversion, because there is no preparing for a god you have not been warned of.

It came up over the willows along the river, low, and the sound came first and separate, a flat tearing buzz that I felt in the wall of my chest before I placed it in the sky. A biplane. A Jenny, I would learn to say later, a Curtiss with a war surplus on it and a man named — but I won't give him to you yet; he comes later and he matters too much to spend here. It was the color of nothing, doped linen gone the brown of a grasshopper, and it came across the fairground at the height of the elm tops with the wires singing between the wings, and a thousand faces went up under it like plates.

He climbed. He stood it on its tail and climbed straight into the white sky until it was the size of a thumbnail and the engine note thinned to a whine, and people around me said oh, the one sound, all together, and I did not say anything because my throat had shut. At the top of the climb the engine cut. The silence where it had been was the loudest thing I have ever heard. The little brown shape hung there, stalled, falling, and a woman behind me started to scream and bit it off, and then the nose came over and down and the engine caught with a bark and he was diving, diving at the river, and he pulled.

He pulled the loop.

I want to tell you what I understood in that second, because it is the whole of my life and it happened in a second. He went up the inside of a circle that was not there. He drew it. The plane drew it — a clean round line in the empty air over the Platte, up and over and back and down, and at the top of it he was upside down with the river above his head and the dust of us below, and the wires screamed, and I saw — I saw it, I have never not seen it since — that the air was not empty. That it was a thing. That it had a top and a bottom and a grain to it like timber, that it pushed back, that it held him up the way water holds a hand you lay flat on it, that he was not falling through nothing, he was leaning on something, climbing something, riding the back of something huge and invisible that had been pressing down on the top of my head every day of my life and I had never once felt the weight of it until I watched a man stand on it.

The air had weight. I had been living at the bottom of it like a stone at the bottom of a pond, and a man had just gone and walked on the surface, and I had seen the surface bend under his foot.

Something tore loose in me. I felt it go. Not a feeling — a fact, like a button off a strained seam, a small definite letting-go low down under the breastbone, and after it a draft, a cold pull, as if a door I had not known was a door had come open onto weather. I have heard preachers describe being saved and they describe less than that and call it more.

He came down the far side of the loop and leveled and dragged the wheels through the top of the willows for the showing-off of it and climbed away to do it again, and the crowd let its breath out and began to clap, that loose country clapping that doesn't trust itself, and Pearl was pulling my sleeve and saying my name, Del, Del, did you see, and I could not answer her. I had my head all the way back. I was looking past him.

Because behind him, higher, much higher, where the sky was already the deeper blue of the coming evening, the cranes were crossing.

A long ragged line of them, going south, the way they go, that gargle and trill of them coming down so faint it was almost the memory of a sound. They did not care about the man or the loop or the thousand upturned plates of our faces. They were a mile up on the road they had always used, the old gray highway in the air that runs over our heads from the top of the world to the bottom of it and touches down nowhere it doesn't choose to, and they were on it, and we were under it, every one of us, the hog men and the tonic man and the girl in the yellow dress and my mother with her dollar forty in a snap purse and her two new graves, all of us pinned to the dirt by the same weight the flier had just made me see, and the birds went over us free in the one direction I had never once in my life imagined a person could go.

I stood between the two of them, the man and the birds, the loop and the line, and I understood the thing that has cost me everyone I ever loved. I understood that I was on the wrong side of the ground.

That is not how a person is supposed to feel at a county fair with butter to sell. I knew it even then. I looked at the flat land going out from the fairground in every direction to where it stopped — and where I came from the world stops, it does not curve away gentle, it ends, a hard line all the way around you at the rim of the table you are standing on, and you grow up believing the edge is the edge, that out there past the section roads the floor simply quits — and I looked at that line where the world ended and I thought: he goes over it. The line is nothing to him. He leans on the air and steps over the edge of the world and comes back when he pleases, and the birds do not even slow down for it, and I am standing here in a dead boy's shirt counting other people's pennies and I will die without ever once getting off the floor.

I did not say it to anybody. You learn early in a house like mine not to say what you want out loud, because wanting names a thing for the devil to take, and my mother could read a wish on you across a dark room the way you read weather, and she would set herself against it the way she set herself against everything that might lift one of her children up where the wind could reach. So I shut my mouth on it. But I made the vow standing there. Sixteen years old in the gold dust with the engine tearing the sky open over and over and the cranes already gone small and southerly — I made it the way you make the only true promises, silently, to no one, against everyone. I am going up. I do not know how and I have got nothing and I am going up if it takes me the rest of my life and every dollar I will never have and every person who tries to keep me. I am going up.

We sold the butter. We did not sell all of it. My mother got a nickel less than she'd counted on and her mouth made the line it made. We walked the wagon home in the dark, the horse knowing the road better than we did, and the flat land lay out under the first stars black and enormous and for the first time in my life I did not feel held by it. I felt held down by it. There is all the difference in the world in those two words and I had just learned it from a man in a brown machine and a thread of birds.

Pearl slept against my arm. My mother sat with the empty crock between her feet and the reins loose and she looked at nothing, the way she did, the way I would come to understand only at the end was not nothing at all but a room she had locked a long time ago and stood outside of. She said one thing on the whole road home. She said, "That man'll be dead inside a year, doing that." And she was very nearly right, about that kind of man, about all of us. But she said it the way you'd note frost coming, and I heard under it — I swear I heard it even then, sixteen and selfish and lit up like a struck match — I heard that she had once stood at a rope line of her own somewhere and felt a door come open and had let it shut again, and had spent the rest of her life keeping the rest of us inside with her where it was safe and small and the wind could not get in.

I climbed up into the loft that night and lay down in my clothes. Through the gable end I could see a piece of sky, three stars in it, and the dark below them. And the dark was not empty anymore. That was the change, and it was permanent, and it has never once reversed in thirty-six years and it will not reverse now with my bad heart and my taken license at this window. The dark over the rafters had weight in it now. It pressed and it pulled, both at once, the way I had watched it hold a man up and try the whole time to bring him down. It leaned on me through the roof and it pulled at the torn place under my breastbone, and I lay there feeling the whole black ocean of air standing on top of the house, standing on top of the world, miles of it, and somewhere up in it the cranes still going and a man folding his loop away into a cow pasture for the night.

I did not sleep. I had found out what I was for, and you do not sleep through that.

What Wanting Costs

Winter on the flats is a long argument with God about whether you deserve to live, and that year He was winning.

The snow came in November and did not so much fall as arrive, sideways, off a Dakota that I had never seen and could not stop sending us its weather. It packed against the north wall of the sod house until the wall was just a paler part of the white, and it crusted on the windowpanes in feathers that I scraped off with a thumbnail so I could watch nothing happen outside. The Platte froze loud. At night the ice cracked like a rifle going off in the next county, and Pearl would startle in the bed beside me, and I would lie still and count the seconds the way Pa had taught me to count thunder, though there was no storm to measure, only the river complaining about the cold.

Pa was two years dead by then, and Walt with him, the both of them taken in the same gray fortnight of 1918 when the flu walked into our house and walked out heavier. So the barn was mine. Nobody decided it. There was simply the stock and there was me, and the arithmetic of a farm winter does not care that you are sixteen and a girl. The arithmetic is brutal and it is honest, which is more than I can say for most things. So many head of cattle, so much hay in the loft, so many weeks until the grass came back, and if the first number was too big for the last two, then something died, and you prayed it was not you.

I did a man's work because there was a man's work to do. I forked hay down from the loft in the blue dark before the light came, and the cold up there got into my chest and stayed. I broke the ice on the trough with the flat of the axe, two-handed, and the shock of it ran up the helve into my shoulders and sat there all day. I learned the things a body learns when there is no man to do them for her — that a heifer in trouble does not care about your modesty, that a frozen pump will give if you pour your last warm water down its throat and beg, that you can splint a calf's leg with a barrel stave if you are quick and you do not let yourself feel sorry. I learned to make do. That is the whole religion of a poor farm: make do, make do, the engine of it grinding day and night, and when there is nothing left to make do with, you do without.

It was in January, mending the hay rake by lantern, that I found the wire. A coil of baling wire, soft iron, gone the dull color of weather, hanging on a nail where Pa had left it the last winter of his life. I had passed it a hundred times. That night I took it down and turned it in my hands and saw what it was — not trash, not leftovers, but the most honest thing in the barn. Wire bends where you tell it. Wire holds where you twist it. A man with a coil of wire and his two hands can fix near anything that is broke, at least enough to limp it home, and a girl can too. I cut a length and bound the rake tine that had sprung, twisting the ends down tight with the pliers so they would not catch a glove, and the rake worked. Then I cut another length and wound it around my fist, loose, and dropped it in my coat pocket, and I do not know to this day why, except that a thing that useful ought to be kept close. I have kept a coil of baling wire close ever since. I had it in my pocket the day I first sat in an aeroplane, and I had it in my pocket over Texas in the war, and I have it in the kitchen drawer this minute, an old woman's drawer, soft iron gone the color of weather. It is the one inheritance I took from that farm that never once let me down.

My mother let me down, but I have stopped holding it against her. She was doing her own arithmetic, and hers was crueler than the cattle's.

I told her in February. I had not meant to. We were at the sink, the two of us, she washing and me drying, and outside the wind was doing its work and inside the lamp was doing its little circle of yellow, and she was singing, the way she did over dishwater, low and grudging, like the song was a debt she had not asked to owe. Shall we gather at the river, she sang, where bright angel feet have trod, and her hands moved in the gray water and her face gave away nothing, and I do not know what came over me. The barnstormer's machine was still in me from the fall — the noise of it, the way it had stood the whole sky on end over our heads — and it had been growing in me all winter in the cold loft like a thing planted, and it came up out of me before I could stop it.

"Ma," I said. "I want to fly."

She did not stop singing right away. She finished the line. The beautiful, the beautiful river. Then she set down the plate she was holding, careful, not a sound, and she dried her hands on her apron one finger at a time, and she looked at me, and I have never been looked at like that since, not by any man, not by any judge of any air race, not by the war.

I had braced for rage. Rage I knew. Rage I could have stood against, the way you lean into a wind. What she gave me was worse. She was quiet, and she was afraid, and the fear was old in her, older than me, and she spent it on me like a woman counting out coins she cannot spare.

"Your grandfather wanted things," she said. "Emmett Kessler. He wanted to be more than a sodbuster. He had ideas. He wanted, and he wanted, and you know where wanting put him? In the ground out by the cottonwoods with a stone his own son had to carve because there was no money for a bought one. Wanting hollowed him out from the inside. It is a sickness, Adelaide. It eats the wanter."

"Ma—"

"Your brother wanted to see the world." Her voice did not rise. That was the terrible part. It stayed level, level as the land. "The Army was glad to oblige him. They showed him France from the bottom of a trench and then they sent him home to die in his own bed, coughing, with his sister holding the basin. That is what the world gives a Kessler who reaches for it. It reaches back. It takes the hand and then it takes the arm and then it takes you whole."

The river-song was still in the room somehow, hanging in it. Out the black window I could not see the cottonwoods but I knew where they stood.

"The sky," she said, and now at last something moved in her face, a crack in the level land, "the sky is the worst of all of them, because it does not even pretend. The ground will at least feed you while it kills you. The sky just kills you. I saw that man's machine same as you did. I saw the people clap. And I thought, there is a coffin with the lid off, and the whole county come to admire it. A woman who climbs into a thing like that is asking the air to keep her, and the air keeps nothing, Adelaide. The air weighs more than you do. It will hold you up just long enough to drop you."

She picked the plate back up. She went on washing. Gather with the saints at the river. And that was the end of it, as far as she was concerned. She had said the truest thing she knew, and she believed she had saved my life by saying it.

She had not saved my life. She had only taught me to lie.

Because here is what wanting costs, the first installment of it: it costs you your mother's face. After that night I could not show her what I was. So I hid it, and hiding a thing that big teaches you a hundred small crafts you are not proud of. I learned to keep two faces. I learned that a girl who says yes, Ma and looks at the floor can be believed to be docile right up to the morning she is gone.

I began with the eggs. We sold what we could spare in town, and Ma kept the count in her head, but I learned the hens better than she did, and I found the nests she did not know about, the ones the smart old biddies hid in the chaff and under the corncrib, and those eggs were mine. I sold them off the back of Hollis Dunn's wagon when he went in to Grand Island, two cents and three cents at a time, and I told my mother I was at the Schroeders' helping with their sick girl, and I told the Schroeders nothing because I never went. I kept the coins in a tobacco tin wrapped in a rag inside a flour sack in the corner of the loft, where the cold was, where she never climbed anymore because her hip would not let her. Every coin in that tin was a small lie, and the tin got heavy with them, and I want to tell you I felt the weight of it on my conscience, but I would be lying again. I felt it the way a starving man feels bread. I would lie down in the hay beside that flour sack and I would think: this is the road. I am building the road two cents at a time.

Pearl saw the other road, and she walked toward it, and I loved her for it even as I knew I could never follow her down it.

That winter Aldous Reint started coming around. A Reint, from the good half-section across the slough, steady as a fence post and about as quick, but kind — I will give him kind. He would sit in our front room with his hat on his knee and his ears red from the cold and from us, and he would say a sentence every ten minutes or so, and Pearl would laugh at it like it was worth the wait. I watched them. I watched my sister learn the shape of the life that was on offer to a girl like us, the only life there was: a steady boy, a near farm, your mother close, children, the same river, the same hymn at the same sink until the sink was yours and then your daughter's. It was a good life. I want to be plain about that, because it would be easy, telling it from here, to make it small so that my leaving looks large. It was not small. It was warm and it was whole and it would have held me my whole life long the way the air would not.

And every cell in me refused it. I would watch Pearl with Aldous and feel my own future settle over me like the snow settled on the north wall, packing, packing, until I was just a paler part of the white, and something in me would rear up and say no so loud I was afraid they would hear it across the room. Not no to Pearl. Not no to kindness. No to the smallness of the sky over that front room, which was a ceiling, which was a lid. I had stood under the real one in the fall and felt it pulling, and you cannot, after that, agree to live under a lower one. You cannot un-know the weight of the open air once you have felt it lean down and choose you.

So when the word came, I was ready for it the way dry grass is ready for a spark.

It came from Hollis Dunn, of all the unlikely angels, leaning off his wagon with my egg-money in his fist. He said there was a flying outfit wintering over east of here, toward Lincoln, on a man named Cy Mott's pasture. Said they had two machines and a tent hangar and they were waiting out the cold same as everybody, doing repairs, and come spring they would go barnstorming the fairs. He said it like gossip, like weather, and he did not know he was handing me my life. Two days' walk, he reckoned, maybe a little more in this snow, if a body was fool enough to walk it.

A body was fool enough.

I waited for a thaw, a false spring in the last of March, when the snow went rotten and the Platte began to talk in a different voice, breaking up, and the first ragged vee of sandhill cranes came down the gray sky toward the river to rest and feed and gather their numbers before they went on north to wherever it is they cannot help but go. I stood in the yard with the egg basket and watched them come down, and they were not envy to me that day. They were a map. They were going, and so was I.

That last night I did the chores the same as always so Ma would not wonder. I forked the hay, I broke the ice, I made do. I lay in the loft and did not sleep, the way I had not slept the night the barnstormer flew, and before light I took the tobacco tin and the coil of baling wire from my coat pocket and Walt's old coat off the peg — it was too big and it smelled of him still, faintly, smoke and the inside of a barn, and I have wondered since whether I took it for the warmth or whether I needed a dead man's arms around me for the leaving. Both, I expect. A poor girl does not get to choose between her reasons. She takes the coat that fits the weather.

I left a note under the sugar tin where Ma would find it making the morning coffee. I will not tell you what it said because it was a coward's note and I have spent a long life being braver than it. Then I went out into the dark before the dark gives up, and the wind that met me in the yard was so flat and so wide and came from so far across so much nothing that it had nowhere to come from but the future, and it pushed against me, and I leaned into it and walked east.

I told myself I'd be back by harvest. I was lying, and the wind knew it.