by Josh Weil
In the last year, he had become taller than her.
When summer came she stole away to Asbury Park. Walked to the train station, bought a seat east, saw the ocean for the first time, the boardwalk, the beach, slept on sand, discovered the effect her shoulders, her smile had on men, snapped up a ride, a ticket, was there on the field when Brookins crashed into the crowd, when Prince plummeted six thousand feet, watched with all the others the failure of his parachute, felt the communal shudder when he hit, would sometimes feel it again, back home, alone in the kitchen cracking the back of a bird she’d serve to her brother or sewing a split in her father’s yellowed long johns or stepping off the train onto the platform of her small Ohio town the day that she returned. But for one August night, near the air show’s close, standing at the edge of the Atlantic, looking up, she had been struck by a sudden sureness that it would be alright. The moon. The Milky Way. The Stardust Twins swooping through. That was what the papers called them after that first night flight, Johnstone and Hoxsey circling each other in the lunar glow, their pale-winged biplanes soaring smooth as owls. And her, beneath them, swept by the peace of certainty. Neck stretched back, face flat to the sky, she knew it: she was not meant to be up there; she was meant to be down here, here like a cairn seen from above, a landmark, her.
Let Bessica Raiche climb behind the controls that October.
Let Harriet Quimby claim her license from the Aero Club.
Here is Clara Purdy, standing far out in her father’s field, surrounded by electric lamps. All these months she has collected them, repaired ones given to her for free, purchased others with earnings made from sewing piecemeal, stolen the rest from her own home. Here is the cord she’s spliced, snaking away to the windmill her brother installed just this past September. It is November now, cold and clear and night. No snow on the ground, the fields crisp and brown with a fall drought. She stands in the high grass, waiting for wind. Behind her the turbine is still, the generator asleep. Above, the sky is breathtaking. What is the chance someone flies over tonight? What does it matter? For the first time she understands what she felt in August: it doesn’t. The wind will gust, the turbine will whir, the charge will shoot through the cord, the lamps will all light up, and she will know how it would look from high above—the concentric circles, bright bulbs swirling inwards to her here at the center—and that will be enough. The grass heads stir against her shins, dry as tinder. The filaments await the spark. Here it comes.
After the fire, they lived in a fourth-floor flat in Dayton, the three of them cramped close, her father and brother away all day in the old bicycle building, assembling engines for the new Model B. The intricacy of understanding, the advanced industry, the demands of such a task: the Wrights wouldn’t hire her. Instead, she spent her sixty-hour weeks on the National Cash Register line, setting small round buttons—red number five, red number five, red number five—in their place on the machine. At home, her father ate whatever she cooked in his usual silence. Her brother, chewing, wouldn’t even look her way, ever unforgiving of conflagration she had caused. That spring, when flames consumed a shirtwaist factory in New York, he slid the Daily News across to her (a hundred and a half dead—jabbing his finger at the newsprint—most of them women). Beside it, her eyes took in a different headline: in India, a Sommer biplane had delivered the first airmail. What, she thought, flushed with excitement. What would come next? Her father, reading aloud one night, his voice aghast: a ship, an iceberg … He couldn’t stand it, handed her the paper. She drew in breath. Was it true? Quimby had piloted across the Channel? Alone, a woman! Eight thousand suffragists, her brother announced, slapping the paper, shaking his head, marching on the capital like a bunch of Albanians trying to overthrow the Turks.
Nearly a thousand days went by before the flood of 1913 gave her a whole week off. Alone with herself for the first time in years, she climbed the stairs to the roof, thunked down a satchel bulging with buttons. Every shift she’d swiped one round red number five and now, crouched high above streets deep with water, she lay them out with a typesetter’s care. Above, surveying aeroplanes circled. She wrote them notes in big red letters: COME CLOSER! LOWER A ROPE!
In Austria-Hungary an airship floated, testing photographic tools. An army aviator tried out his loop-de-loops. Biplane, dirigible: ball of fire erupting in the summer sky. A few days later Archduke Ferdinand took a bullet to the throat. A few weeks after that, half of Europe was at war. In a few years, her brother too.
Mid-September, 1918: two thousand planes aswarm over Saint-Mihiel, blasting thick as scattershot across the sky. It was the biggest air battle the world had ever seen, and the next night, while her new husband finalized what that afternoon had wrought, Clara stared up past the strange shoulders (later, she couldn’t recall if he’d removed his undershirt, if he’d still worn his glasses), at the ceiling of water-stain clouds and watched the dogfight in her mind: a welkin of dark specs swirling, the opposite of stars. If Abner Lowell noticed (later she would know of course he had) he said nothing (of course he wouldn’t), just as the few guests—his family, his friends—had looked at her drained face and silently assumed it must be grief (her fallen brother, her heart-felled dad). A few whispered she must have married out of desperation (her new husband’s bony chest, his paltry schoolteacher’s wage), but they were wrong. Clara had married the man for his location.
“Near Toledo,” he’d told her, shelling a hot peanut, slipping it into her palm. “A little town you wouldn’t know.”
She’d chewed, flashed him a look of try me.
“Maumee,” he’d said.
“On the Maumee River?”
Laughing, he’d coughed out, “You!” It was what he would later say was their first date. “You’ve got to be a bargeman’s daughter!”
Smiling, she’d swallowed, held out her empty hand.
“A little land,” she told him, a few months later, after they’d moved up north. “A little place of our own out in the country.”
“But dear”—he called her dear and sweets and Mrs. Lowell—“we have a house already. Right here, right around the corner from the school.”
“Abner,” she said, “I grew up on a farm.”
“But why so far?”
“I want our children—”
“Why pick a place near precisely nothing?”
It was true: the plot she’d found sat equally far from even the tiniest of towns. Grand Rapids, Whitehouse, Waterville. It wasn’t even on the routes between them. But it was beneath the one she wanted, right below the one up there.
Mornings, she made him hot cornmeal muffins, liver and onions the way he loved, helped carry his schoolbooks out to the car, stood in the dirt drive waving. She kept the bills in order, the mousetraps empty, the dust down, herself up, a wife he’d want to come home to, a home he’d be happy to find her in. Except he wouldn’t.
Afternoons, after everything else was done, she’d change into her coveralls, head for the tractor shed. Alone in all the horse-worked county, the Allis-Chalmers had cost her every cent of life savings her father had left, and every day before dusk she would crank its engine over, hitch its thresher on, rumble out into her field. Or, as Abner called it, her canvas. The tractor he called her Big Bad Brush. In the summer, she painted with it, mowed her pictures into high grass. In the fall, she ploughed pen lines, the overturned topsoil dark as ink. Winter found her bundled in the aviator’s coat and hat her husband gave her, long leather earflaps whipping in the wind while she made her etchings on the earth, her shovel a chisel, snow peeling away like curls of wood. She planted daffodils. Dug up the bulbs each fall, stitched them back into the dirt like needlework, watched her embroidery bloom sun bright each spring.
From the sky, the airmail pilots watched it too. Twice a day they flew the route, eastward in morning, westward late afternoon. Perched atop the Allis-Chalmers, or kneeling in the new-turned dirt, or simply standing still in a swirl of snow, she would listen to the hum, scan the sky
, smile up, wait for the dip of a wing, the tiny stick arm flung back and forth in a far-off wave. She would watch them dwindle away to Cleveland, morning awhirl in their propeller blades, watch them disappear towards Chicago, sunset on their struts.
And home from his day at the Maumee Secondary School, hunched over the kitchen table doing his preparatory work, her husband would catch a flutter in the corner of his eye, look out the window: his wife in that distant field of daffodils, her breeze-swept hair all auburn fire in the late light, her cap lifted into the last of the sun, waving, waving. She always left his supper warming in the oven. He always let it warm till she was done, would come clomping in, shuck her boots, sit down to eat beside him. Sometimes, he’d go out to her. In winter storms, if visibility was bad, the pilots, searching for landmarks along the route, might fly so low their wheels seemed close enough to grab, the silver belly suddenly there tearing through the all-white sky, the aviator’s face a flash of goggles, the airplane roaring by. He’d stand behind her, arms around her, feel the gust, the rush, the thrumming of the engine in the air.
“What’s it this time?” Abner would ask.
She’d tell him: President Roosevelt on his first flight, von Richthofen shot down over the Somme, the new airmail stamp. “See there’s the biplane, there’s the ‘24’, over there the ‘CENTS.’”
And Abner would gaze at the indecipherable arcs in the grass, the random squiggles in the snow, the mystifying daffodils, and fill his face with what he hoped conveyed belief in her, faith that from above it would all be clear. Until she began digging portraiture in dirt. Eddie Rickenbacker. Bert Acosta. Jack Knight. Airmail pilots that might right then fly over on the Chicago-Cleveland route. “Do you think,” Abner said, his voice very level, his eyes somewhere off in the field, “that they might … I mean, that they really … That they could actually really recognize themselves?”
She meant to nod, but instead found herself starting to shake inside his arms. Against her back, his chest shook too. Their laughter filled the field.
Once, after a fight:
Him: Weren’t kids the entire reason they’d moved out there?
Her: That’s just the way people without meaning in their lives try to make some.
Him: And didn’t she want that, too?
Her: What did he think she did all afternoon?
She’d asked him, “Why did you marry me?” Because, he said, he loved her. “What does that mean?” He’d told her then he’d never seen someone so consumed by what most moved them, never been that close to such a burning need, wanted to assuage it or be burned up in it, to feel even a little of it in the warmth of what he felt for her.
Abner was the one who brought her art books—Klee, Kandinsky, Mondrian—who suggested they drive four hours to Cleveland just to see a room bedeviled by Kazimir Malevich’s strange blocks and bars. She didn’t understand what stirred behind it, no more than she understood what stirred in her. But dragging the thresher in wild swaths, plowing scattered squares of earth, planting bulbs in shapes that seemed to suggest themselves, she was sure of this: it was a style that far better fit her tools. A tool itself that let her grasp at last at what she had begun to conceive of as a gift. A gift Abner had wrapped for her. The way he wrapped himself around her the night the postal service flew its first transcontinental flight.
That night in February of ’21 the snow spilled down as if to douse their fire. They had lit it in the middle of her field, at dusk, no telling when—or if—the plane would hurtle overhead. All day she’d waited for news, pulled open the Ford’s door to retrieve the evening paper from her husband’s outstretched hand: the last heard from the airmail pilot, he was headed straight into a storm above Cheyenne. Cheyenne to North Platte to Omaha to Iowa City to Chicago to right overhead: at night the only thing to guide him would be a few post office workers’ flares, nothing to mark the path between but what bonfires a few farmers might keep alight. Abner helped her haul out the half-rotted boards, pour on the gasoline. They brought blankets, a bottle of bootleg, sat close to the fire. All around her: Abner’s enfolding coat, his enveloping arms, the warmth of his breath on her cheek, of his cheek against her ear, of him waiting all the long night with her. Sometime after midnight, they lay down together between the blankets. Sometime before dawn, he fell asleep. Sometime after first light she woke her husband, straddling him with her heat, tenting him with her body, the bottom blanket rough on her knees, the top blanket blocking his view of the sky, her own eyes focused only on his face. “I hear it,” he said. “Darling, I hear it.” She shook her head, rocked on his hips, kissed him quiet.
So why did she still daydream pilots down? That they would see her wave, circle round, land in her field, take her up. In a de Havilland with a scooped-out second seat? Or curled on her knees in the bin behind the engine, the mail hatch sprung? A gloved hand on her cheek (she could smell the leather), the twist of her neck as she turned to see (she could feel her whipping hair) his goggled eyes, his chapped lips, her first kiss at five hundred feet, six, seven, a thousand…. Why, when she first heard of the postal service beacons—fifty-foot towers erected all across the country, a trail of landlocked lighthouses flashing their specific signal (me, me, me) to pilots plying a sea of stars—did she feel betrayed? They built one five miles away. At night she could see its blinking flare (here, here, here). Why when all those women (only one aviatrix shy of a hundred) came together in Curtiss Field to make their mark in the history of flight did Clara turn with even more determination to her own canvas?
Now, she worked at night. She spent all the allowance Abner gave her on a single headlight for her Big Bad Brush, ate her suppers sitting on the tractor’s seat, stayed out past the last window gone dark in her house. What sent her to the shed to sharpen thresher blades at the news of Earhart’s first Atlantic flight? What about word of the woman’s solo crossing kept Clara up till dawn mapping out her next work of art? Each one, each season, outdid the last, pushed her abilities to new feats of skill, scaled the atmosphere of her imagination. She clipped grass by hand, cut staggered banks in sweeping slopes, accomplished tricks of shading by varying stalk heights. She incorporated color in the spring, in winter watered carefully considered ditches to show the sky fleeting paintings made of glinting ice.
And when, one summer morning in ’37, the kitchen radio reported that the Queen of the Air had gone down over the ocean, was feared drowned, she found she couldn’t breathe. She stood up from the table. It was a school day. The house was empty. The news announcer’s voice seemed to cinch her throat. And, even before she heard the airplane’s purring approach, she was fleeing into the field. Maybe it was her frantic waving, maybe the desperation in her face: this time the pilot swung around, returned, roared down to her.
A Boeing Monomail, army drab, no room to sit anywhere but in his lap. The leather of his jumpsuit creaked. He had to reach between her legs to take hold of the controls. The noise was deafening, the tree line rushing. The earth dropped.
There was her world: the house, the empty driveway, the field where she did her work. The flesh on the back of her neck urged her look at the sky, the giddy slide of her stomach told her you’re flying. But she couldn’t take her eyes off the small, and smaller, square of landscape that was her canvas below.
At her cheek, the aviator was saying something. His chapped lips brushed her ear. For a second, she pulled her stare away, glanced at him: his goggles were so smeared with engine grease she couldn’t see his eyes, just the rawness of his sunburned nose, the wetness of his grin.
“Take me back,” she said.
“Down?” he shouted.
She shook her head. “Back around, back over, I want to see it again.”
It was the first time that she ever had. Till then, it had all existed solely in her mind. There, there, if she concentrated hard enough she could forget the feeling of his hand creeping across her chest, if she fought the wind in her eyes and focused hard enough, she could imagine that ther
e was nothing around her but air, that she was up there, flying, looking down, alone.
Maybe it was the Depression. Early on she’d offered to plow her canvas under, grow vegetables instead, but Abner insisted no: even when parents lost their jobs, students still needed teachers. Though when, that autumn after her first flight, Lucas County consolidated its schools and proved him wrong, her homebound husband spent his days gazing at her field, his nights commenting on her progress, his energy in coming up with ways that he could help—Observe you from the roof, shout when you’re about to lose the line. I know: a business in balloon rides! Listen, I’ll write a letter to Life magazine, to ARTnews, get you noticed!—his whole self seeming to clutch at her work as if it could become in some way his. Maybe it was the fact that all his attempts to garner her attention finally did. Late in ’41 rumors began to go around: her flowers sprouted in secret patterns; her tractor furrowed code; Mrs. Lowell was planting messages for Japs. That winter, at Abner’s urging, she undertook a radical revision of her aesthetic. He brought home images of Far Eastern art, read her haikus. And in the fresh snow of the new year’s first storm, helped her shovel a field full of brushstrokes:
There it was, black shovel lines in white, giant characters carved beneath the January sky. Two days later an army corporal showed up at their door, watched them while, with the Big Bad Brush, Clara plowed their work away. Afterwards, Abner admitted it was probably time to stop. He looked so sad, sitting there in his coat, his pants wet to the knees, his head hanging forward, his hands hiding his face. His fingers were all knuckles and loose skin. He was going bald. How had her husband become a man of fifty? How had she become a wife of forty-five?
And maybe it was simply that: so much time together, so many years gone by.
At first, she didn’t think of the separation as something that might last. Just a few months away from each other, Abner working at his new job in Bowling Green, she in Toledo, working thirty miles from him, doing her part to keep the country stocked in B-17s, apart only until the war was over, maybe a year at most. But it was four. Four years living in her own room in a single-sex boardinghouse, four years in which she found she liked working alongside other women, liked earning enough on her own, liked the feeling of finishing the nose cone of a behemoth bomber, assembling the canopy of something that would one day soar over Hamburg, Dresden, Mainz. She was the oldest woman working at Libbey-Owens-Ford. Gran Gunner the others called her, smoking cigarettes, snapping gum. On their lunch breaks they laughed about messages for airmen slipped into secret cracks, read aloud the Blade’s dispatches from the fronts, passed around pamphlets by the old BCFA, debated its new milquetoast moniker—Planned Parenthood—and whether General Spaatz was right to bomb Jerry’s oil before his rails, and if it made sense to join a dying WTUL, shared home-canned pickles, packs of cigarettes, wondered what they would do after all this was done.