I had long imagined my actual body rising, victorious over the manacles of the earth and over the prince of the power of the air, with the other faithful right around me as far as the eye might see, all of us rising and rising, and the angels coming down. I imagined our earthly attire simply falling away, shedding like the old and brittle skin of a snake. It had crossed my mind that we might sail heavenward in a state of innocent nakedness, the way Adam and Eve wandered without shame in that pure original state.
What I did not see in those other visions was the roar of the passage now upon me, the rough and hazy terror of the transport itself. Mysterious ways indeed. Where is Gilroy? Where is Houston? Where is anybody? What is that howl in my ears, and why am I bound within this cocoon? Where are the magnificent trumpets?
The chariot itself feels as though it might blow apart into bits and pieces around me, its strange canopy humming and vibrating above my head like the wing of a giant moth. Somehow we’ve passed from light unto dark—did we leave the sun behind while I slept? Are we far, far into the firmament, beyond a place where the sky appears blue? Where is everyone, and why is a journey toward Paradise, of all places, so fraught with this violent, abusive battering?
A streak of light shoots out of the roaring air and surely it must be Him, for the blinding flash of the thing cannot even be looked upon, as though a star has been fired into existence out of the finger of the Father Himself. I feel a leap in my heart and at once an awesome terror—what must be a true manifestation of the fear of the Lord, and I wait for that moment in which the flare itself subsides and the holy figure I have counted upon finally, finally appears.
The next shock strikes not my vision but my hearing, in the form of a tremendous boom, as though a stick of dynamite has exploded in each ear to leave me ringing with deafness, the puzzling roar of the air now fully drowned by the persisting gong.
I am not hearing and I’m not seeing the streak of light, either—not the way I thought I would. What I am is simply blinded by that first searing glimpse, the way the apostle Paul was stricken on the road to Damascus. Eyes open, eyes shuttered, no matter. The white strobe remains. I am only hurtling along, seeing and hearing nothing, as senseless and as helpless as an embryo.
Except for that pain in my middle, recurring in faint waves at the tremors and turbulence, not constant and not even necessarily there but perhaps a memory? A lingering sense of a pain that once was . . .
I could not sort the real from the ethereal in 1918 either, when the greenish man led me through the hot jungle of the Spanish fever. I remember seeing Gilroy and then losing him in the green dappled light, and feeling so sad for him because we had only just started and now here I was already departing, but when I opened my eyes a long time later, or maybe only a few seconds along, I saw him again, no clearer than an apparition, but his voice soughing through the wet heavy air, saying my name, saying Gloria, and though the greenish man beckoned whenever I closed my eyes I tried with all my might to keep them open, and sometimes when I thought I had been with Gilroy all along, I would come up out of the addled depths once again and find him anew and have to start all over again, try to stay with him all over again and make the greenish man go on without me, which finally he did.
When I came back to myself, out from that hot green jungle, my hair had turned white as the garb of an angel. I was eighteen years old. No older than Annelise, and already married.
When Roy came out to the ranch that day, I knew he’d come to take her away again. I saw them talking in the yard, and I knew. She did not talk to me about it, and she did not have to. I should have known anyway, for she had already told me she did not wish to travel home to my sister but to continue on here awhile, even with her schooling behind her. She said maybe she could handle the office at the smithy for Gilroy, take calls and keep the books. Which meant eventually she would return to town, and in my imagination and, yes, in my pride, I saw myself there as well. But in the end, she never did ask.
So again I was left behind. Alone in my separation to puzzle over the times of grace and the times of trial, alone under that roof, which felt in that hour like it might well come down on top of me. Barely were they down the lane before the tightening began in my back, the racing in my heart.
By nightfall another sensation entirely. The region behind my left eye throbbing away and a sear in my navel as well, making me think at first that my moon had arrived earlier than it ought.
By midnight however the sear had become more like a twisting skewer, or a devil’s pitchfork rending my insides. I considered in flashes and waves all of these things, began to experience in flashes and waves both the boiling of my blood beneath my skin and trembling icy chills to make the down on my arms stand aloft. I saw again the greenish man, recognized him as though my time in that fevered Spanish jungle happened only yesterday.
But was it just last night? Or the night before? Or am I now in a place where the passage of time means nothing at all?
My eyes have been closed, or perhaps my mind’s been asleep, but the turbulent passage shoots another stab through my center like a Roman’s piercing lance, and I return to some stunted form of awareness to observe again the fiery beam above my head, my chariot now a cross, and in this now I am not, I believe, the one left behind.
But this lightning storm of Rapture is not what I expected. There is pain and there is fear, and that old haunting abandonment. Why, O Lord, hast Thou forsaken me this way?
Wherever is Mama? Where is Gilroy and where is Houston? Where is Annelise now, and why did she leave me when all I’d wanted was to save her, and so save myself?
Signs and Wonders
II
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
—But who is that on the other side of you?
—T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land
The blast from the lightning hit the depths of one ear and also the starboard side of the fuselage with the same concussive force, and she shrieked in reaction and felt the ship roll sideways.
The concussion traveled past. She got the ship level again. Even with the roar of the engine and competing roil of the air she could hear the ringing inside her helmet, her right ear feeling like somebody had jammed down with an ice pick.
Lightning flared and flared again, but farther off this time, cloud to cloud, like a pulsing filament inside a flickering bulb. The noise when it came rolled in a delayed series of receding booms, nowhere near as deafening as the last explosion that seemed to detonate right off the wing.
What would A.E. do? She had asked herself so many times for so many reasons, and always she could conjure some useful way forward.
A crisis with her mother, a row with a classmate, ogre behavior from a boy—in every case, the question had proved useful. Only now, when it truly mattered, airborne in an open plane at the heart of an actual maelstrom, nothing came to her at all.
Then that other irony. Six months in drought-parched Montana with barely so much as a drizzle and now here she was, flying a life-and-death mission through what amounted to a hurricane. As Yak might say, you couldn’t make it up.
The first real drops were coming at her, huge beads of water splattering on the windscreen and sailing by like bees. Another flash lit up to port, and she saw the glint of a million diamonds hurtling down.
The land and the river below were completely lost to view. Even in the lowered light she could see the gauges well enough to know she was still tacking west, but the wind out of the north had to be pushing her sideways, too, and at what rate she had no idea. Her chest was tight as a drum, her heart hammering like a timpani, but ev
en so she saw in another flash that the one thing Amelia Earhart would not do was freeze under pressure.
She remembered Houston that night of the meteor shower, his story about taking Katie up and getting into a jam. He’d thought his way through it, and with less than a week’s piloting experience, flew his way out of it. Big Coulee Lindbergh.
She couldn’t save her aunt if she herself died in the process. That much was obvious. And if she was going to die, she was going to die trying. That’s exactly what A.E. would do.
Her altimeter showed nearly 1,500 feet AGL, which meant she’d climbed a bit on the air currents. Still, she’d have to climb yet again to clear the pass into Bozeman, assuming she made it that far. But here she was, barely back in the game and already getting ahead of herself.
She needed her bearings. That was the first thing. She needed to drop below the clouds and orient herself to the river. Bumps or not, she was still somehow clipping along at nearly eighty-five miles an hour—no wonder the raindrops appeared to be flying past sideways. She dropped the throttle back and moved the stick forward. The altimeter crept back down.
She couldn’t see a single land feature through the rain and fog. No way to judge where any of the mountain ranges were, and though her rational mind tried to tell her she couldn’t possibly have blown or traveled far enough in any direction to cause one of them suddenly to loom up out of the mist, the inability to confirm this had dread at her nape like a coiling snake. She told herself that if she did manage to get below the clouds and spot a reasonable place to land, she might well have to try for it. She tried not to think about what this would mean for her aunt.
The ship hit another patch of tooth-jarring air and she worked the stick around to keep more or less level, and somewhere in all the thudding and battering she caught a glimpse of the ground below. She came back again with the throttle knob and dropped through the floor of the clouds.
The turbulence did not diminish. Rain fell in curtains but she could see the river again, maybe a half mile to port now, which meant she had indeed blown off course. She thought she could see the base of the Gallatins well ahead, beneath the wet bank of clouds, though not the turn of the river toward the south.
She banked back toward the river bottom, brought her speed down to seventy. She still had half a mind to ditch the whole effort if she could find a place to land, and the highway made more sense than anything else. The rain came down like the deluge in Genesis, blasting in a weird aureole off the prop. Despite the circumstances she found this a little mesmerizing. Interestingly most of the downpour went well around the cockpit, so even her goggles remained fairly clear.
Another jagged bolt streaked down just ahead and to the side, connected with something on the ground in a burst of sparks and white-blue light. The ship jolted again in the concussive boom. Another streak reached behind the first, and she glimpsed the cottonwoods along the river bending and writhing. She knew she was stuck.
The wind in the corridor whipped even harder than it did up here. She was over the highway now, the river already behind her, lightning flashing like cannon fire in the clouds. The ship bounced like a rodeo bronc and she knew she had to bank west, had to keep herself on course at the least. She didn’t know what to do otherwise, only that she couldn’t go down into that wall of wind below. Couldn’t sit here in this wretched turbulence, either.
She went back up. Ran the throttle forward, leaned back on the stick. The plane settled immediately, speed indicator and altimeter both steadily rising. She climbed up out of the chop and let the mist of the clouds again blot her view of the land. She took the ship back to eighty and climbed above 4,500 feet, her brain scrambling at the math of it all.
The land below couldn’t deviate much from the field elevation at Big Coulee—three thousand above sea level, give or take a few hundred feet. The pass into Bozeman in the great wall of the Gallatin Mountains was higher yet, and in short order she was going to have to start climbing to clear it, assuming she could find it to begin with. But she still couldn’t rule out the possibility of an emergency landing, somewhere between where she was now and the very same mountains she would otherwise have to top.
The devil, and the deep blue sea. The longer she waited to climb, the less likely she was to get the necessary altitude, but once she committed, an emergency landing became out of the question. Whatever the case, she was still tacking north from the effort to get back across river to the roadway. She put the ship into a shallow bank, watched the compass rotate inside its bubble.
She came around due west. By the time she leveled, she just about had herself convinced to descend one more time, make one last assessment of the landing conditions, when another blinding arc shrieked out of the clouds overhead and blazed on by to starboard. She felt the scorching blast of it like steam out of a boiler and she veered to port, and this time the instantaneous boom of thunder seemed to detonate beneath the ship rather than right in her ear. She felt the shock wave like a swell on the ocean, watched the altimeter needle jump with the sudden lift.
She could smell static in the air, smell the ozone scorch of agitated particles. Scared as she was, she could only watch in disbelief as a purple ball pulsed to life out on the wing tip and traveled in a line along the trailing edge, like the ports of an oblong burner in a gas range, flaring and flaring one at a time, until the entire perimeter rose up in flames.
She watched the luminous shimmer move toward her along the wing and then right over her head and away from her down the starboard edge. Out ahead the whirl of the prop and the top of the radiator were also aglow. The panel had a lavender shimmer, right before her eyes. Even her hands and arms danced with it, though she could feel nothing.
Saint Elmo’s fire. Blix had described it and she’d read other pilots’ accounts too, and Roy told her he’d once observed it dancing on the horns of a herd of cattle, hopping from cow to cow. Supposedly it couldn’t hurt a plane, and that was all well and good, but at the moment it was as though the very cockpit had come alive with phantoms, just one more thing she wished weren’t happening.
She looked through the purple specter at her gauges and tried to make a decision. She was clipping along again at nearly ninety, rain slinging and the ship bouncing through another patch of chop. She considered with still more certainty that she should just point the ship down and try again to land. If she pulled it off, she would probably doom her aunt entirely and lay a lifetime’s second-guessed guilt upon herself. But how on earth was she supposed to fly across a mountain range when she couldn’t see where it was? And even that assumed the ship didn’t get knocked out of the air by lightning in the first place.
Guilt or death. Those were the options. Of all the times to have that cursed biblical drought break—you just couldn’t help but see the irony as some form of cosmic punishment, some mockery of human folly. Only this morning she’d been jolted out of bed, seized by that same old fear of getting caught, getting punished.
Maybe that’s exactly what was happening now, in some cruelly reverse way nobody but God could have contrived. She’d spent weeks with her aunt and nothing, not even a headache, then gone to town to get her ashes hauled one time, and now all this. As though she’d been judged and sentenced, simply for returning to earth. She understood why God might want to forsake her, but Aunt Gloria? Why on earth would He put her in this terrifying position?
She realized that somewhere within the twisting maze of her consciousness, she’d been praying. Pleading, actually, begging God to give her one more try at this thing called life, to save her aunt, and so save herself. Had Amelia prayed too, out there in her own dire straits?
She’d behave herself, as best she could. She’d deny temptation, as best she could. Please, God, please. Just show her some sign, an opening in the clouds or a shaft of light to follow, or best of all, wake her just one more time from this petrifying, hopeless dream.
But those thing
s weren’t going to happen, and she knew it as surely as she knew the chrome taste of fear behind the edge of her teeth. Was it all a parable, visited in real time upon her? Like Abraham, raising the knife above his own son, at God’s behest?
She was being tested. That must be the answer. God had put her aunt’s life in her uncertain hands, to force her own salvation. Maybe that’s what this was. She couldn’t save Gloria and maybe wasn’t expected to, because Gloria was certain of where she was going when she departed this sad old painful world. So where could that possibly leave Annelise, except with a duty at least to save herself?
The entire ship was engulfed in lavender shimmer, even the wisps of her aunt’s fluttering hair dancing with eerie blue light. Annelise saw her aunt’s head shift slightly and wondered how long the effects of the morphine would last. She thought, I am so, so sorry, and with that, she reached over and came back with the throttle knob.
She feathered the stick forward to begin a descent and as though on cue an entire barrage of lightning came down across the span of sky, bolt after bolt snaking and dancing, forking and forking across and within the interior of the clouds, and she squinted against this frenetic voltage even while she found herself unable to take her eyes from a sight that, despite its sheer menace, she could regard only as beautiful.
She felt the waves of thunder before she actually heard them, felt the plane jump and thud in the epileptic air, and finally a branching charge of berserk energy went off so close and with such overwhelming flash and heat that her eyes clamped fully closed by sheer reflex.
The sonic blast punched again to the depths of her ear, the other one this time. She was stricken both deaf and blind, rocketing along in a sort of sensory stasis while the rolling shock tossed the plane like a windblown leaf. For all she knew the sky itself was splitting around her, and it crossed her mind that maybe she’d actually been lightning-struck, that maybe when she again opened her eyes she would find she’d passed through some cosmic portal, shuffled off this coil into another plane altogether.
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