The three of us and a few other members traveled by rail to larger gatherings, too—once south to an enormous revival in Indianapolis and again the same summer to a meeting in Chicago. That’s where Victoria met her match.
Robert Clutterbuck. An earnest young lawyer from Los Angeles, who himself had witnessed the famous Azusa Street Revival a few years previously. He was far more reserved than Victoria, as I suppose befitted his profession—his cup did not runneth over with the more obvious gifts but he did have a scholar’s grasp of the Word, and the ability to share that knowledge with others in a way that seemed almost like an elixir. I think that quiet conviction, so contrasting to her own youthful fervor, may be exactly what drew Victoria to him. Two sides of a coin.
We traveled back home and Robert to his own out West when the revival adjourned, but their very spirits seemed to have meshed during those days of rejoicing. It seemed a letter came for her every day from California. And yet again, Victoria had my envy.
Twenty-odd years in the interim, and how can it be? At one moment it seems only a breath ago, and in another as though an entire biblical age has passed.
By then we had heard plenty of Sister’s tours through the East and the South, of the power of her preaching and nearly unheard-of crowds she’d begun to draw. Her ability to inspire healing, though—crutches cast aside, blindness cured, hearing restored—the amazing frequency of such was even making the regular newspapers, as though to document for the wider world that there was more to this age than politics and fashion, or the pretty distractions of modern times. Eternity was upon us. Take heed.
The most recent reports had her burning up the Sawdust Trail in her Gospel Car across Georgia and Florida. Her power nevertheless reached us, in one of those mysterious ways the Lord uses from time to time, to startle even the faithful with His abiding presence.
Now ordinarily we might go weeks without any sort of mail, but ever since Chicago I’d come to expect the daily sputter of the rural delivery driver and his gasoline runabout coming up the drive. I couldn’t imagine what my sister and her faraway beau could find that was new to say on a daily basis, and I guess maybe Robert ran out of ideas himself, for one particular day his missive arrived not in an envelope but inside a box.
Curiously enough, the only other item in the post came from Georgia—a copy of the very first edition of Sister Aimee McPherson’s brand-new periodical.
Victoria was of course totally distracted, tearing into her package. I leafed through the magazine, tried to feign more interest in the pages than I had in Victoria’s mail. I had never received so much as a card before, let alone a mysterious box. Then again, in the absence of anything from Robert, Victoria would have claimed first dibs on the magazine, undoubtedly. I looked at the cover, tried to tamp down that awful green feeling that seemed to rise up from the pit of my stomach, like a frog trying to eject through my throat. But I could not restrain my human tongue.
Oh look, Victoria. Sister Aimee has titled it Bridal Call.
Victoria in that moment defeated the binding on her package. What did you just say?
I said, Bridal Call.
When I looked up, Victoria held a diamond ring. Signs and wonders.
I’d begun to wonder if I really was damaged beyond hope. Did boys notice me at all? Had word gotten out? Victoria had been the one to tell me—maybe the secret was not for my ears alone? Whatever the case, I did not draw the suitors my sister always had, did not seem to catch the attention of a single one.
I knew I was sanctified in the eyes of the Lord, and in fact actually innocent of anything that should have truly damaged a girl’s reputation. The troubles with my hips and back and of course those infernal headaches had returned—the other members of our little congregation laid hands on me and prayed over me once again, and we knew that not every healing could be considered permanent anyway. The Lord wanted us to supplicate to Him not one time, but always and forever.
I remained unsure of my maidenhood and certainly did not know how to check for myself. Neither Mother nor Victoria brought it up. I truly wished I could believe, but each new tightening in my spine, each painful throb in my temple, inched me further into doubt.
By the time of my birthday, I’d become quite concerned I might end up an old maid. That was not the cross I wished to bear.
Within six months Victoria was married to Robert and living out in that exotic place herself. I loved my sister, truly I did. And I missed her, too. But should all the signs and wonders have been hers? All the gifts?
I myself should not have cared to live in the city, anyway. Chicago had been alarming enough, with its teeming streets and taverns and dance halls unabashedly in view. Surely Los Angeles must be all of that and more, churning out its glamorous movies with which to deceive the world. Victoria’s first letter home described the great crashing Pacific Ocean, however, and I must admit, I wish I had even once gotten a look at that.
But, oh, those mysterious ways. Sometimes He withholds what you anguish over in prayer in one season, only to grant what you need in His own perfect time.
Early the following summer, Mama and I took a train west, to meet up with the newlyweds and to have a time together. An adventure, really, at Yellowstone National Park, which I had read a little about but never imagined I might one day visit in person. Robert paid our fare and also secured lodging for us. We were to spend several weeks in the mountains of Montana, at a place called a dude ranch.
Never had I witnessed such spectacular scenery. I remember it as though it were yesterday—Mama and I practically pasted to the glass in the passenger car, two creatures who’d never known much beyond cornfields and flatlands suddenly faced with the grandeur of what people understandably call God’s Country.
Three mornings into our stay, Victoria announced that she and Robert would be going on a trail ride, and would I care to join them. I looked at her, fairly certain I understood, but a little incredulous, too.
A trail ride?
Yes! Robert and I have gone a few times, out in California . . . It’s more and more common. For ladies, I mean. I have my own riding habit, in fact.
You are talking about horses?
Of course! Trust me, Gloria. It’s the spirit of the West.
Mama to my surprise did not seem particularly shocked. These days, she pointed out, hardly anyone even batted an eye at the lady cyclists.
And we are to ride like the English ladies? Sideways?
Not in this day and age. And you can thank those lady bicyclers, I guess. Nowadays we use split skirts and a regular saddle.
I looked at my plate, at the steam still rising off the eggs. Victoria read my mind.
Don’t worry. They have them on loan here at the ranch. Along with proper riding boots. It is not at all uncommon, Gloria.
I looked again at Mama.
She and Victoria exchanged a glance, and I realized they had already conversed. She shrugged. Goodness, even the Virgin Mary rode to Bethlehem on a donkey. What is the expression? “When in Rome”?
Later it occurred to me that she and my sister were both relieved—the age had gotten beyond the trappings of propriety, in a way that might provide me with some second chance. He does work in mysterious ways.
When we showed up at the stables that day, Victoria in her jaunty riding attire from California and I in my awkward borrowed skirts, we learned that the usual trail guide had taken ill. We were not to worry as paying guests, however, for the ranch blacksmith had been called away from his bellows to assist.
And that is how I met my husband.
I understand why Gilroy finally did what he did, when he took Houston off the ranch and into town all those years later. The world marches along and, so long as He tarries, we must march in time with it. Much as I worry over some of the blasphemy taught in the schools these days, I could never deny that Houston has a clever enough mind
to deserve an education, beyond what he could ever acquire on the ranch. I guess a part of me truly hoped Jesus would come first and save me the strife of having to give my own only begotten over to that fallen old world, out beyond the fence line . . .
But the truth of it is, the day they headed down that long lane without me, the truck diminishing into the distance until finally the land simply swallowed it altogether—that day remains the most forlorn of my life, the night that followed my longest and most despairing. It was as though the Rapture of the believers did in fact occur, only it was I who’d been left behind.
I suppose my sister saw the error of her own ways when she sent Annelise here to be with me.
Victoria did not of course say so directly, caught up as she was with the original indignity of the thing, but surely she had her reckoning. I know she thought of Montana in the long golden hue of memory, cast by that first trip she and Robert made all those years ago. I know she imagined Big Coulee to be more the sedate farming village of our own young lives than it actually is, with liquor sales restored and the obligatory den of ill repute out across the tracks. And I have always led her to believe things were less hardscrabble here than they truly are. My pride, again. My secret rivalry, against my own luck-charmed sister.
So I am not without faults. Not without cunning, not without lies. What is the expression, lies of omission?
When Victoria appealed to me to keep Annelise here, to get her away from the fast city and from whatever boy she’d dallied with, my sister was of the belief that I had already moved into town from the ranch as well. Because that is what I led her to believe. She believed that I would be right there on hand to manage the tiller of her wayward daughter. My wayward niece. And so that is what I let her believe.
She was a panther indeed, and what felled her spirit, I could not have predicted.
But I recognized the symptoms. I’d sunk to my own depths, in a not-unfamiliar circumstance. Sister Aimee had also vanished into an ocean. I prayed hard, and that prayer was answered when she walked like Lazarus out of the hot Mexican desert. And I pray for Miss Earhart, as a matter of course.
But the Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away, and He will indeed use a tragedy for a greater good. If the U.S. Navy had found her safe and sound, washed up on an island or maybe floating about on the sea, Annelise would almost certainly never have returned to me. Which has become, I must admit, its own answered prayer.
And it’s true that my spine’s murderous tightening has begun to relax, my longest relief from those crippling headaches in many a year. For all my faults, all my omissions, I have nonetheless been an instrument of His will. Even my deceit has led to some roundabout version of truth, for here was my sister’s wayward daughter after all, in my care, and perhaps even my friend.
Does He not work in mysterious ways?
Rapture
Pop had a couple of bags of sand left over from some concrete project or other, and Huck sifted out the bigger aggregate and got a supply of straight silica. They mixed it three to one with the bentonite, plus an almost imperceptible amount of water. Packed into the square halves of the flasks, the green sand had just enough stick to hold a perfect impression of the wooden patterns.
They formed sprues and risers out of chunks of three-quarter pipe and, with the patterns eased back out of the mold, carved a run into each blank cavity. Huck fired the forge out back and dumped an assortment of scrap aluminum pieces and a couple of virgin ingots into the crucible, and in the waves of swelter off the furnace, they watched a mound of cold solid metal melt into fuming silver soup.
“Don’t breathe this crap,” McKee told him, “it’s pure poison,” and he grabbed the crucible with a pair of tongs and moved to the first flask, tilting hot burping aluminum down through the sprue. The excess ran up out of the riser and pooled like giddy mercury. He moved to the next flask.
Ten minutes later they snapped the hasps and pulled the still-warm blanks for three pulleys out of cooked crumbling sand. They headed for the lathe.
By noon the next day they had three gleaming pulley-wheels milled out and turned down and ready to install. Two mornings after that, with the charger bolted on and the gas line rerouted through what had previously served as nothing more than a dust-sucking carpet cleaner, Huck flung the prop and fired the engine out on the runway.
They watched everything work for a while with the cowling removed. Watched and listened.
Huck let out a holler. “You hear it?”
The motor roared with a whole new hum, this hopped-up howl from gasoline and oxygen whipping rather than trickling into firing cylinders. They let her run up to temp and idle a bit, watching while everything appeared otherwise normal.
Finally Huck went to the cockpit and killed the switch. Blank summer silence, shocking as ever.
McKee leaned in. “You like it?”
Huck was already heading for the cowling. “You know, I think I may be in love.”
Ten in the morning and already shimmering out toward the Bulls in the high summer air. Huck throttled up on the strip, and the ship lunged like a racehorse out of the gate, the sudden flex of the wings like a leap of streaming mane. He throttled higher and felt the rush at his face, felt the drag of the gravel drop away in forty feet of travel.
She climbed like gravity in reverse. A plummet for the sky. He let her rise a bit from velocity alone, and before he knew it, she was way out over the sage flat and already at five hundred feet, and he pulled back on the stick and pressed into the seatback. He watched the altimeter gain five hundred more in seconds.
He’d gained the Bulls already, too, or nearly so. The acceleration was beyond belief. He banked her in a wide sweep to the north, came around again, and straightened her out with the airfield back in view.
He was higher now than he ever had been on an actual approach, although farther out, too, and the long, straight hash of unpaved strip looked from this vantage like some eerie linear feature scribed upon the earth in the far-off past. Just dun-colored line against dun-colored terrain. He had a flash of the first time Pop showed him the figures in the face of the buffalo jump on the ranch, how even as a mumblety-peg tyke he’d done a double-take to see those scrapes in the stone become a picture in his mind.
Hard to believe any of it could possibly be real, when he thought about it. Not the symbols left behind by whoever had left them all those eons ago, and not this outrageous exercise in the here and now, all these eons later. He was already at an altitude to make McKee’s Studebaker and the little tin shed appear no more discernible than the receding past itself, yet indisputably fragments of endeavors beyond the unassuming turn of the earth.
The white panel truck gleamed like a polished pearl. The shed even at this height formed a perfectly minuscule gunmetal square. He thought maybe—maybe—he could pick out Yak himself down there. Maybe. Leaning against the front fender of the Stude. Couldn’t say for sure, though. He was at a distance in the air to reduce a man on the ground to little more than a speck in the dust.
He banked around again and watched the Bulls reel back into view. Even the mountains appeared to have shrunk during the brief time he’d had his back to them. From the corner of his eye he saw the clouds.
They were building a good way to the east, maybe as far off as Rosebud County, but stacking in billows with all the brilliant glare of an explosion inside heaven itself. He had a moment of doubt.
On the one hand, he wanted to test the ship on its own new merits, without the aid of anything other than straight mechanical advantage. On the other, flying, true flying, meant identifying whatever advantage presented itself and using it. He could test mechanical basis any old time, under whatever conditions prevailed. For now, he tilted the stick and flew toward the clouds.
He could perceive the lack of resistance to forward travel but didn’t know for sure whether this was a matter of tailwind or the add
itional jump in the engine’s performance. Some of both, probably. He pushed the throttle up yet again and watched his speed climb beyond seventy, then on past seventy-five.
She cruised at nearly eighty an hour with no real strain, his throttle knob still shy of the three-quarter mark and the engine’s revs barely up beyond the operating specs for the original conversion. With the tach steady at 1,600 there still remained, in Mr. Pietenpol’s words, plenty of soup in the old gal yet.
He edged the throttle up again and took his speed past ninety in a heartbeat, leaned back on the stick and let her climb. He was already at nearly seven thousand feet, singing along smooth as glass. The verdant corridor of the river bottom wound like loose green yarn. He could practically feel himself chortle, a-flood with the rush of success. He had thunder in his heart, lightning in the tips of his nimble fingers. He felt like some mythical hero, galloping across the ether on his silver winged steed.
He could see the rail bridge across the Musselshell up ahead at the county line, also the black belch of a chugging, toylike train. A bump jarred him back.
He’d hit the updraft, farther out from the cloud mass than he would have expected but undeniable in its giddy lift. He watched the needle climb in response, as though the clouds were drawing him into some magnetic field. He pushed the throttle forward and leaned the stick back and gave the eternal rhythms of nature all the help he could.
He shot simultaneously up and ahead, could feel the accelerating climb right in the seat of his pants. So far he’d deliberately avoided any sort of extreme pitch to an ascent, for fear of hitting the wing’s stall-off point—that crucial angle in which the cant of the wing lost its airfoil and gravity again took over—and not knowing how to deal with it.
He didn’t intend to find out firsthand, at least not on this jaunt. Just crossed his fingers he’d recognize the warning shimmy and bogging power in time to correct, and otherwise held as steep a rake as he dared. He throttled up as far as he could, felt his speed surge again in spite of the incline.
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