by Nick Arvin
“Yes, yes, that’s exactly it. That has been the entire history of aeronautics. It makes me chafe, nothing to do but stand around here confabulating.” Then, suddenly, Lowe’s attention shifted—a man stood at one of the gas generator wagons with a hatch door open, and whatever he was doing was apparently suspicious or incorrect, because Lowe barked at him and hurried over. George turned and discovered that the peddler, Nathan, had moved on as well—he was headed toward the men at the tents. He favored his left leg, and with each awkward step the contents of his knapsack rattled. Something about talking with him had reminded George of Madeline, his twin sister, who had died many years before.
George found a seat on a horsehair trunk that had been abandoned a short distance from the camp. In the south, erratic white puffs of smoke rose until they reached a certain altitude where the wind shredded them. The noise of muskets quarreling was so far away and small it seemed deceptively trivial.
Presently Nathan returned. He set his knapsack on the ground and sat beside George. His shoes, though polished, were indisputably battered; the soles appeared worn to the thinness of a pig’s ear. They sat in a comfortable silence for two or three minutes before Nathan asked, “Maybe you would like to purchase some tobacco?”
“I have a plug with me.”
Nathan nodded. He glanced around, then looked at George and offered his gap-toothed smile again. “Well,” he said, “perhaps you need matches? Or a candlestick? A pencil? Needles or buttons? Handkerchiefs? I have handkerchiefs of the best quality silk. Whiskey?”
“No whiskey. Why would I want any of those things?”
“Maybe something else? Sardines? Blacking, violin string—”
“You carry all that in that bag.”
“It is a little heavy. I thought bringing a great variety of things, one or two each, would be wise.” Nathan shook his head wearily. “Now I wish I had brought nothing but canned milk. It’s all they want, canned milk.”
“And, surely, coffee, tobacco, and whiskey.”
“Yes, but it’s the canned milk that’s truly rare. I can hardly take a profit on the tobacco and whiskey. Canned milk is the thing. If I had brought nothing but canned milk, they would have hailed me for a hero. And, I would be rich.”
“Well, next time you can bring canned milk.”
“Next time?” Nathan hesitated on this. “I don’t know. Probably by then someone else will have brought the canned milk, and they will want sauerkraut or some such thing.”
A sudden, shrieking scream was followed by an enormous crashing noise in the woods. George jumped, and everyone in the camp stopped what they were doing. Dozens of birds scattered up into the sky, calling loudly. A stray artillery shot, George realized. No more followed, but he needed a minute for his nerves and heart to settle again. Nathan, like the others, looked at the place where a worm of gray smoke emerged from the trees, but he rubbed his fingers through his beard in a sleepy, unconcerned way.
Partly to distract himself, George renewed the conversation. “Well,” he said, “I am seventy-eight years old. I remember a time before anyone discovered how to preserve food in bottles and jars. We certainly didn’t have anything like canned milk.”
Nathan opened his bag and extracted from it an odd, vaguely threatening metal object. He said, “Have you seen one of these before?”
George took it. It had a knifelike handle, but at the other end was a strange arrangement: a short, sharp point with a pivoting length of metal pinned to it, and beside this a longer, curved blade. George said, “It looks like an apparatus for skinning rats.”
“Not at all.”
“Well then?”
“This is a device for opening cans. See, you puncture the top with the short point. This guard swivels and prevents it from going too far inside. Then you work around with the longer blade. It keeps the contents of the can from going all over when you break it open.”
“A contrivance for opening cans,” George said. He handed it back. “What a funny idea.”
“Would you like to buy it?”
“We don’t need a special tool. My daughter-in-law already has her own means for opening cans, with a hammer and chisel. She’s very good at it.”
“Everyone says that. I thought it was quite clever.”
“It is clever. But I don’t think that means anyone needs it.”
Nathan put the tool away. Behind him, a soldier was hanging laundry on a line strung between tents. Professor Lowe’s head and shoulders had disappeared into the interior of a gas generator wagon. A pair of sparrows perched on the rope between the two poles in the center of the clearing. In the distance, beyond the trees, sheets of brown haze squirreled upward while elsewhere runnels of ink-black smoke scored the horizon. From this position the war might have been mistaken for the hissing, spitting, and steaming effects of some vast soup cauldron boiling over.
Nathan said, “Why did you come here? Forgive me, but you don’t look like a soldier.”
“Oh—” George laughed. “I came because Professor Lowe asked me to, and I said yes. The moment I did I knew it was a mistake, at my age, but—pride, you understand. But now I am glad I’m here. I look forward to seeing the balloon. It will mean a great deal to me to see the balloon.”
“Professor Lowe is very famous.”
“He is. I think he would rather be flying a balloon across the Atlantic right now, if the war had not intervened.”
“It would be nice to be able to fly away from this, wouldn’t it?” Nathan looked at George and smiled. “If it were me going up to take a look at the rebels, I would cut the rope. Just drift away on the wind.”
George liked this boy. “Yes,” he said. “I think I might be tempted by that as well.” An artillery battery somewhere not far behind them could be heard cannonading in a hopeful, methodical rhythm. George said, “I saw your limp. How did it happen?”
“Wounded at the beginning of it, at Bull Run.” Nathan took off his bruised hat, looked at it, then replaced it to his head. “I swear to you, for three weeks my parts were swollen up as big as two cantaloupes. But I kept them.”
“You’re fortunate.”
“I am.” Nathan nodded. “Now, however, it’s difficult for me to be out of the war. Many of these soldiers assume I’m faking my injury, or exaggerating its severity. They tell me the prices for my wares are too high. But I cannot charge what a merchant in a city would charge, because that’s where I bought them. I must take a profit. This Balloon Corps doesn’t have a commissioned sutler, like the regular regiments do, and I thought they would appreciate a peddler to come around and offer them what they need.”
Nathan looked at the ground and seemed to dwell on this. He was fair-haired like Madeline, and possibly there was a similarity around the eyes. But, more strikingly, it was his habit of suddenly smiling that reminded George of Madeline, and also something in the calm, languorous dignity of how he presented himself. George said, “I wonder if you have any family from Philadelphia? What is your family name?”
Nathan deliberated. After a moment he said, “No, I don’t believe I have any family from Philadelphia.”
“Your family name?”
“Stiles.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to pry. You remind me of my sister, and I wondered if there might be some relationship between us. Probably it is only coincidence.”
Nathan nodded. Behind him, the sounds of fighting seemed to have slowed somewhat. The sun was sagging in the sky and the men were lighting cooking fires. Nathan picked up his sack and stood. He said, “I had best try to sell something.” He limped away.
George watched him moving among the soldiers. Despite his tattered appearance he approached the men quietly, very much erect and without apparent servility or shame. Perhaps this was the reason the men disliked him—at the bottom of the army hierarchy, they wanted at least to be able to look down on this peddler mongering tobacco and buttons.
George joined a couple of soldiers at their fire. They gr
eeted him, then fell to talking between themselves again. They cooked potatoes on the ends of their bayonets and roasted green coffee beans in a kettle over the fire until the beans began to smoke, then set the kettle on the ground and smashed the beans with the butt of a rifle. The fragments were boiled with water in a tin can, and they crumbled hardtack into the steaming black liquid. The weevils that floated to the surface were skimmed off with a spoon. They offered a cup of this concoction to George. It tasted like hot turpentine, and most of it he poured into the grass behind him. He had a little salted meat and some hard biscuits in his pockets, and he nibbled on the meat, but the day’s journey seemed to have beaten hunger out of him.
A few clouds had arrived in the sky and these were patterned with sunset’s orange, gold, and crimson. George stood and walked to where Nathan sat by himself on the grass, gazing at the gas generator wagons. George leaned over and said, “What are you thinking of?”
Nathan jerked and glanced around. “Oh,” he said. He hesitated, then smiled. “I guess I wonder about all this.” With a circling gesture he indicated the tents and wagons. “Why weren’t we born birds? Blackbirds or sparrows, maybe—I mean, if we are to fly.”
George laughed and clapped Nathan on the shoulder. He saw Professor Lowe at his tent, beckoning to him. He nodded in that direction. “I had better go speak to the great aeronaut.”
Lowe shook George’s hand. He said, again, what a tremendous honor and pleasure it was for him to meet a man who had been witness to the first manned flight, the very inception of aeronautics, in the United States. He added, “I am sorry about this. The balloon we need has been in New York for repairs. It should have arrived here before us, but it was to be moved by a military train, transferred to a second train, then moved by an army wagon, and it could be stuck anywhere along that route. I only hope there hasn’t been some accidental injury to the balloon. We have no funds to build more. In any event, it will be a full moon tonight. With luck, the balloon will continue to travel after sunset and reach us before sunrise.”
A couple of the army officers were sitting with Lowe, and George sat with them. While it grew dark they smoked pipes and disputed over the facts and rumors of the day’s fighting. George, unfamiliar with the terrain and the units mentioned, had trouble following the conversation. Soon he gave up.
He observed that the men in the camp did not gather together but instead sat at their small fires alone or in pairs, some in somber trios, but no groups larger than that. Well, George thought, it remained a war—even if your task in it was to launch a balloon. Nathan, the peddler, seemed to have disappeared. Where did someone like that go at night? Perhaps he just wrapped himself in a blanket on the open ground somewhere. He might wake with dew on his nose, but the weather looked clear. As Lowe had predicted, the rising moon was large and bright in the sky.
Arrangements were made for George to go back down along the road with one of the horses and sleep in the barn there. He borrowed a wool blanket and a soldier accompanied him through the darkling woods to the barn, stabled the horse, then left him alone with the animals. An enormous pile of hay in one corner offered a better bed than any of the soldiers were likely to rest on tonight. And indeed, when he took off his hat and lay down, the hay engulfed him in a pleasant softness. Yet he discovered he could not sleep. He had felt utterly exhausted while the men talked outside Lowe’s tent, had fought the sinking of his eyelids, but now he lay awake, carried up from sleep by memories as if by a rising tide. He crossed his hands over his chest and thought of Madeline. The horses shuffled in their stalls, a breeze pressed and soughed against the side of the barn. Small, faraway events of sporadic musketry could be heard.
His first sight of the balloon had come as he entered the prison yard with his father. Madeline—his dear sister, his twin—was being towed along behind them in a little wooden wagon his father had built to carry her during her illness. George could just see the top of the balloon over the heads of the well-dressed ladies and gentlemen milling about. Hung from a rope suspended between two tall wooden poles, yellow and waxy, only partially inflated and draped with a net of rope, it dangled like some queer exotic beast gutted and strung up for public examination.
It was January 9, 1793, and unseasonably warm. Earlier in the morning, as they ate breakfast by the light of three fat-oil lamps on the dining table, George’s father had said that this was a day George would eventually describe to his own children and grandchildren. George had stared hard into the lamp flames trying to get his imagination around that idea—his own children and grandchildren. As they walked through town to the Walnut Street Prison there were thousands already out, claiming places on roofs, in trees, in windows and balconies, on the grass of Potter’s Field. His father said the hotels were full of visitors from New York, Baltimore, and parts even more distant. He pulled the wagon with one hand and held several of George’s fingers in the other. At a side gate into the prison yard a man took their tickets. George’s father was a man of significant girth and breadth and once they had entered the prison yard he shouldered his way into the crowd, excusing himself, calling out, “This little girl is ill! Please make way for her to see the balloon and Monsieur Blanchard!” The ladies in their swishing flounced skirts and their starched fichus upon the shoulders, and the gentlemen in their high, stiff hats and woolen coats with buttons of bright brass glanced severely at George’s father, but when they saw the pale blond girl in the wagon they parted quietly before the small family.
Madeline held in her arms a little black lapdog, and she ignored the adults around her, attentive only to the dog, petting him, cooing in his ear. The dog rested his head contentedly on her shoulder. There were actually only about a hundred people altogether here in the prison yard, and the noise of the multitude in the streets, shouting to one another and laughing, created a collective roar that welled over the gray stone walls of the prison yard and obscured the more sober conversations between those here who had paid for tickets. A battery of artillery had been assembled across from the prison in Potter’s Field and since six in the morning a pair of cannons had fired every quarter hour. George was counting, so he always knew the time. Just before they arrived at the prison the nine o’clock firing had gone off—a smear of white smoke still wallowed in the dead air. The balloon was to launch at ten.
The tickets had been expensive, five dollars for George’s father, two dollars each for the children. But Madeline, on hearing of the planned balloon flight, had only to ask in passing and George’s father had gone that very day to Oeller’s Hotel and purchased the tickets from Blanchard’s secretary. This unsettled George more than any other sign of his twin sister’s deteriorating condition. His father did not spend such money without good reason, and George doubted the tickets would have been purchased if his father thought Madeline would be well soon. The dog—Madeline had named him Tad—had been another indulgence, purchased for her a couple of weeks ago. Tad was all black with large glossy black eyes, a quiet, seemingly imperturbable puppy. Sometimes when distressed he made gentle yips of sound in his throat, but no one had yet heard him utter a proper bark. He rarely left Madeline’s arms.
A few rows of benches had been laid out, but everyone stood. A nauseating, sulfurous odor permeated the air. A small brass band to one side played patriotic music. The gaunt faces of prisoners could be seen gazing from the barred windows of the prison. The walls of the yard were a gray stone irregularly stained by the spoiled food thrown and chamber pots emptied upon them. George’s mother had thought it scandalous that such a historic event was to be held in the prison, but his father had laughed and said no, it wasn’t scandalous, it was ironic. And, as a practical matter, the prison yard provided the only available space with both an adequate area for Blanchard’s equipment and walls to exclude those without tickets. But, he noted, everyone would be able to see the balloon as soon as it rose over the walls—assuming it did so—which was probably the reason that the number of participants in Blanchard’s subsc
ription had been quite disappointing.
From the front of the crowd George could see the full height of the balloon and the little French aeronaut Blanchard below, reaching up to adjust the net of ropes that hung over the balloon. He wore blue knee breeches, a blue waistcoat, and a hat with a long white plume that bobbed gaily as he moved about. A boat-shaped gondola sat to one side, painted blue with white spangles. And all around were barrels, roughly arranged into two large clusters of a dozen each. At the center of each cluster stood an oversized, sealed tub which was joined, octopus-like, by metal pipes to the multiple surrounding barrels, while from the top of each tub ran a thick hose that fed into the neck of the balloon. One of these two clusters lay just a few feet from George and the stink rising from it burned in his nostrils. A young man moved from barrel to barrel with a long stave, opening a plug in the top of each barrel and inserting the stave to stir the mysterious contents with a motion that reminded George of churning butter.
His father stooped and picked a stone off the ground. “Do you know what this is?” he said, presenting it between his thumb and forefinger for George and Madeline to see. It was smooth and round, the size of a musket ball.
“It’s a rock,” George said. “A little one.”
“I can’t see,” Madeline said. She took it and scrutinized it, then handed it back. “It’s granite.”
“You’re both wrong,” their father said, grinning. He bounced the stone in his palm. “This is a precisely calibrated apparatus of scientific inquiry—” he held the stone at arm’s length “—a device for the detection of the force of gravity.” He let go and the stone fell to earth, bounced once. “The device appears to verify normal gravity force.”
Madeline rolled her eyes, but giggled. George crouched and found the stone. It was gray with flecks of black, irregularly shaped but silky under his fingers. It seemed to warm as he held it in his pocket.