After crashing into a cornfield, an Air Mail
pilot asked the surprised farmer, “Where’s Cleveland?”
The farmer replied, “Cleveland’s dead!”
THEY LOOKED AT the stringy, high cirrus clouds in the western sky. Henry rested his hands on Ruth’s hips, standing behind her, and he leaned in to smell her hair, fresh from the air and musky from work and sleep and love. He could smell the bread she’d baked for supper, her pillow. He turned her toward him and then slipped his hand in between their bodies, onto her not-yet-rounded belly. Ruth’s hands went to his arms, across his shoulder blades, down his spine. She closed her eyes for a moment.
“I’m sorry you aren’t coming with me,” he said. “I’ll be lonely up there.”
“You must be able to fly to Chicago blind by now,” she said. “I’m not sure what I’ll do with myself.”
“You can start knitting booties,” he said.
Ruth grinned and looked away. She said, “I don’t like to knit.” A breeze raised goose pimples on her arm. She shivered and Henry pulled her in, wrapped his arms around her. It was unusually warm for November but she should’ve worn more than a sweater. On either side of the narrow landing strip, the cornstalks were matted down and moldy with the rain and frosts they’d had; everywhere, the soil was a concerning mixture of freeze and mud. Ruth shut her mind’s eye against the picture of a hunk of mud or rock flying into the propeller and breaking or jamming it, even though they’d walked the length of field already, together, to check for such things.
The Jenny stood ready behind them. Her tan wings and body stood out against the cool blue fall horizon, the spurts of brashly colored maples and oaks and chestnuts, and the white farmhouse and red barn and silvery grain silo down at Ruth’s parents’. The ground would go white with snow and ice, then melt to a black sticky mess before tendrils of crop would start anew on the farm, but Ruth’s belly would begin its rounding long before that, with their first, who would be called John Henry.
“Safe flight,” Ruth said into his neck.
“Safe week,” he replied.
She nodded and pulled away from him and wrapped her arms around herself, chilled as much by the air as by the fact that she would not be getting in the plane with her husband.
“Take care of the little one,” Henry said as he tugged his helmet and goggles out of his flight suit pocket. He kissed her once more and then turned, walked to the Jenny, and hoisted himself into the front cockpit. She watched him get settled in, then walked to the front of the plane and reached up to the top of the propeller. “Contact?” she said.
“Contact.”
And Ruth heaved her weight down and the propeller stuttered, caught, and whirled to life. She stepped back, back, sixty feet back, and she shaded her eyes as the plane turned to face south and Henry raised the throttle. In another minute, he started bumping down the field, finally lifting off and turning to head due east. By the time Ruth turned to cross the field to home, he was a large fly on her horizon.
As she fell away behind him, vanishing into the wide-open, empty field, Henry settled into his flight back to Checker-board Field, Chicago. He looked at his compass and peeked over the side of the plane to be sure he had the railroad in sight. He would arrive just after sundown, the familiar beacon swinging out to greet him and bear him down from the star-spangled, wind-blown heights of an autumn midwestern night, 1928.
THREE YEARS EARLIER, Ruth’s father had told her she was crazy to marry him. He’d questioned her at the dinner table: “You gonna be my full partner in the farm, all eighteen-odd years and a hundred pounds of you? You gonna sleep well at night without him next to you? What if there’s trouble?” Next he shook his head and scowled: “Marrying a man who’s gone five days a week, and flying around in an aeroplane every one of those five days—idiocy, Ruthie, craziness! You read in the papers about these Air Mail men dying by the dozen.” He stopped to take a bite of food, swallowed slowly, and continued: “A man flying is the craziest thing I ever heard of. If God meant us to fly, he would have given us wings.”
“If God meant us not to fly, he wouldn’t have given us the brain to invent the airplane,” Ruth said before she could stop herself. “And besides, we’ve seen the barnstormers at the county fair together—remember Ruth Law?—and you said, I remember, ‘Now, that’s something, Ruthie. Isn’t that something?’ I remember. Now, suddenly, you’re so shifty. You simply want me to marry one of these awful boys from town.”
As she reached for her water glass, her hands were shaking, and she caught her mother’s eyes flashing toward her, urging, Don’t talk to your father like that.
Ruth sighed. “He won’t always be gone so much, Daddy.” She got up, retrieved the pot of coffee from the stove, and set it on the table in front of him. “Pretty soon there’ll be enough business that he’ll come to Iowa City every night.” She poured coffee into his cup and continued. “Besides, flying is not that crazy. You should let Henry take you up sometime. You would love it, Daddy. I know you would. You can see for miles and miles. You can see to the Mississippi from up there—almost all the way down to Davenport!”
“How would you know?” he said, his faint Irish brogue more distinct whenever he was agitated—“How d’ya know, eh?”—setting his coffee cup back down after he’d started to lift it.
Ruth smiled.
“Ruthie?”
SHE WAS AN only child of the first order to her father—and a girl. With seven miscarriages before her, Elizabeth had almost died delivering Ruth and was not able to have any more children, which meant no boys. Paul Sheehan never expressed disappointment in this, and maybe he didn’t allow himself to feel it, but he was, accordingly, devastated by his son-in-law’s disinterest in farming. He didn’t oppose the marriage, however, because Henry was basically a good man and Ruth loved him.
Paul loved chess and in the spring when it was bet-hedging time as to when to plant, he always wanted to play. “Ruthie,” he’d call into the house. “Ruthie, chess.” He’d pull the wooden board out from next to the icebox—hand-painted red and blue with leftover paint from the wagon he’d made for her fourth birthday.
As he made a show of dusting off the porch table where they played, he said, always, “It’s the most important decision a farmer can make each year. Can’t yield more than you plant. You can’t.”
Paul Sheehan played chess because there wasn’t much else for him to do and if he was unoccupied he was likely to end up in the kitchen, trying to do something but incapable of most everything there except puzzling over the speed of his wife Elizabeth’s hands with a knife. She hated being watched, and besides, the kitchen wasn’t so big—he would bump her for sure, eventually, and then one of them would get hurt or mad or both.
They drank lemonade out of blue Mason jars whose lids had gone off, and until Ruth was nine or ten, he explained his every move. “This puts me within two moves of checkmate,” he said. “Unless you sacrifice your queen. See it?” He wanted her to see two moves ahead of each turn. “There’s always a most certain move,” he said. “The key is to find it out and then to answer it.”
At the end of three games—they never played more than three, it was some facet of his Irish superstition—Paul would lean back, extend his legs, crossing them at the ankles, and dig his finger at the wet pile of sugar in the bottom of the jar. He would scoop up as much as he could in his first knuckle, then raise it to his mouth. He chewed the lemon slice, too, and watched his curly-haired daughter across from him on the porch swing, her feet planted on a leg of the table, gently rocking herself back and forth like the almost-waves of a river. Even the horses, a few dozen yards to the left, turned their attention to him.
“It’s all a careful dance, Ruthie,” he told her. “Chess, farming, life. It’s all a dance and there’s always something leading you. Always.”
Her father repeated this adage to her whenever she was “being headstrong,” and by the time she was thirteen, she could mouth the words along with him. And she thought about how he lived. She couldn’t see that her father was always following something or someone else. No, it seemed to her that aside from waiting to plant, trying to anticipate nature’s next move, and then trying to get out of check when a too-heavy rain or a drought or an insect visitation ruined the crop, Ruth could not see that her father was a follower in the dance he lived. Not when, some thirty years before, he had picked up his mother, his two younger brothers, and all their belongings and moved them to Cedar Bluff from Mason City, where his grandfather and grandmother had settled after moving from Ireland in 1833. Two consecutive grasshopper plagues and then a major flood ruined that land three years running around 1880. Paul’s father, who was known to be a little mad anyway, took to believing there was a curse on the land. He became obsessed with the plagues of locusts and frogs that the Israelites had suffered before Moses led them back to Israel. It was the same thing, he said. God was testing their strength. Finally, he decided he wasn’t strong enough and so he propped up his rifle beneath his chin and pulled the trigger with his toe. Fifteen-year-old Paul buried him, then packed up the house and moved the family south, to Johnson County, where the soil was supposed to be richer. Those weren’t the actions of a follower, Ruth thought.
The only clue that remained in Paul as a testament to his early life, besides his refusal to attend church—and the only thing close to fear that Ruth knew in him—was his hatred of grasshoppers. The sight of just one would set him cursing; the sole of his boot would flatten the thing with a sick crackle before Ruth could cup her hands around it. As he would then scold her for feeling defensive of the bugs, for going against her own father, she tried to imagine the peaceful eye of a swarm of the large, celery-green insects, with them swirling around her, stilled unto themselves, without their legs or antennae moving, yet moving in thousands, maybe even millions, as a whole.
HENRY HAD ONE clear visual memory of riding the coal-powered paddle-wheel ferry with his father, Captain John; he remembered standing on the top deck and watching the murky waters of the Mississippi sliding under the boat. He had a clear image of the sharp hills of McGregor as they approached, and the hotel, post office, store, and saloon nestled into the side of one of those hills; and if he turned to look behind him, he would see the flat marshy lands where the Fox River met the Mississippi, wetlands that rose and fell through the year, with rainfall and snow and drought. He remembered the timbre of his father’s voice—it seemed chestnut-hued, not too deep but resonant.
Henry would’ve been on the ferry with his father when lightning struck it if he hadn’t been in bed with typhoid. A fire killed Captain John before he could reach shore. Henry lay in bed and watched the lightning make the dark bedroom shades glow, felt the thunder rattle the roof. He knew his father was on the boat and he heard his mother’s sighs and the twins’ frightened whimpers coming from the kitchen every time a new blast of light and noise came through. Henry kept counting between the lightning and thunder.
He was asleep when Ed and Dorothea Ferrer came in with the bad news, but he awoke, hungry and damp with sweat, when he heard his mother’s sobs in the living room.
“You should sell the boat, Anne. Let Ed sell it and why don’t you and the children go up to Plain for a while. Spend some time with your folks. Do you some good. You need rest after the typhoid, or you’ll come down with it yourself.”
“We’ll stay right here, thank you, Dorothea. Can’t haul Henry a hundred miles right now. Besides,” she said, “maybe I’ll run the boat myself.” She began to sob again, lower, quieter, like she was wearing out, and someone pushed a chair back and went to the stove and put a log on.
Henry stayed in bed until the shades had a certain, constant slant of light on them. Then he slipped out, for the first time in weeks, hoping maybe he’d dreamed it all, found his mother asleep in her rocking chair, and he climbed into her lap as the first true sunlight in days touched her face.
By the time Henry and the twins arrived at their grandparents’ dairy farm in Plain, just a touch west of Madison, Anne had died of the typhoid Henry had given her and she was buried next to her husband. Henry was seven years old and, besides his parents, he missed the river, his canoe, the ferry, as if they, too, had been blood relations. Grandmère and Grandpère were quiet, devout French Catholics and they had to let the hired hands go in order to afford three hungry, growing mouths—which meant the hands that went with those mouths had to pitch in. Henry loved herding the cows into the barn at night. Although he was no taller than the smallest calf, the cows would warily watch his stomping approach across the pasture and as he circled around behind them, they would all turn, their eyes wide and fixed with alertness, their ears straight out, only their tails and their nostrils moving. When Henry raised his hands and started running at them, screaming, “Ya, ya,” their hooves scrambled and they ran away thirty paces before turning to see him again, still coming, and ran thirty more paces. In this manner, seven-year-old Henry got them all the way back to the barn. He had a dog to help, a little collie that only ran at the cows when Henry did, and then eventually a Shetland pony as uninspired as the dog.
Henry liked the cows and he loved his grandparents, yet he never imagined growing up to be a farmer. When he thought of farming, he thought of Uncle George, his father’s brother, who was the reason Henry’s parents met. “George didn’t want anything to do with the fur or ferries over in Prairie du Chien, so he went up to Plain to farm,” Captain John once explained to his son. “And when I went to visit George the first time, I saw your mother in church, and knew I had to marry her. I’d never seen a face like hers—an angel, except”—he laughed, pinching her arm playfully as she passed nearby them— “you couldn’t exactly be sure whose ranks she broke with in the big battle. Beezlebub or Michael.”
As for George, he was a terrible farmer, although everyone insisted it was just bad luck. Henry learned this part as he grew up in Plain. George’s hogs got sick, his cows gave bad milk, and his chickens killed each other. Finally, George just farmed what he needed for himself, cut down and burned his own trees, and locked himself up in the cabin for a good year. People talked, because no one knew what he did in that year and one of the larger cows took up residence on the porch, lying down—she wasn’t even sick—and eventually a few of those floorboards gave way. When people went to see him—stepping around this cow and knocking on the front door—he did not answer, even though there was smoke coming from the chimney and footsteps could be heard inside. Then one day he was just gone. It was later believed that he went to St. Louis first and then Texas, where Plain people said folks were crazier and George would fit right in. He was never in touch with his nephews and nieces after his brother John died. But Henry thought a lot about this uncle during his own time in Plain and came to believe George was an oilman, and he believed that his own attempts at farming might end like George’s.
Henry’s decision to join the Army as soon as he could, just after the Armistice, had nothing to do with wanting to be any part of a war, but it did have to do with stories of this uncle he’d never met, seeing the world, and, to his mind anyway, the farm having one less mouth to feed. His grandparents were quietly angry at his departure but they still gave him a St. Christopher medal for safe passage.
A captain in Chicago, faced with this Wisconsin farmboy, still too fresh to shave, needing a new hole in the smallest belt they could find, first asked to see his birth certificate three times and then made him a stable keeper at a major Allied air base near Lyon, France. He spent several cheerful if lonely months there, leaving the base and wandering about the city and the French countryside in total silence since he was only starting to learn the language, loving the strangeness of it all, and, of course, the beauty. He met his first real friend, a Frenchman, Philippe, while sitting on a bench outside his quarters, listening to a record by a young George Gershwin on his prized Victrola, and watching an enormous plane—with three tailwings and a wingspan broader than any hangar Henry had ever seen—come in for a landing.
“That’s marvelous,” Philippe said. “Can I listen with you?”
“Sure,” Henry said, and they listened in silence for several minutes, while the bomber came to a stop within their line of sight. “Do you know what that huge airplane is? I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“A Caproni Ca-36,” Philippe said. “Italian, a bomber.”
Henry nodded and watched the behemoth rumble around the airport. Planes like that—it both strained the credulity of flight and reinforced that credulity. If that thing could fly, then flight was real.
“You are not a pilot,” Philippe said, mostly sure.
“No, oh no,” Henry said. “I’m not so lucky as that. I tend the horses.”
Philippe nodded.
They listened to the entire record twice, and then Philippe said he wanted to buy it.
Henry said it wasn’t for sale but then Philippe said, “I’ll take you flying.” And Henry was sold, as Philippe knew he would be.
The first trip, in a fast, exhilarating Nieuport 28, which still had its Vickers guns attached and the Allied roundel on its wings, was freezing, unnerving, and wonderful. Henry, who finally hit a growth spurt that first year in France, kept sticking his head as far out of the cockpit as he could and looking at France, green and brown and white and gray and jagged, with pools of undulation, then of smooth flat, far below them. His stomach felt inverted, inside out, something, and he thought, once, that he might vomit. But when they finally landed, Henry told Philippe that he could keep the record, and Philippe responded, “Would you like to learn to fly yourself? I can teach you.” Henry said he’d give him every record he owned, which was not so many.
Lesson one took place the following afternoon, and Philippe said that Henry was a natural. “Think that the stick is an extension of your arm,” he said as they removed the chocks from the wheels. Philippe wore a great white silk scarf when he flew, just like the famous aviators in the newsreels and papers. He guided Henry through takeoffs, landings, great wide sloping turns; fast climbs and gradual descents; one engine fire and several sputtering stalls. They went up in bad weather so that Henry could know what it felt like to fly when you weren’t sure of the horizon or your altitude or the direction of the wind or the location of a good field for landing. The rides were frequently so bumpy and jarring that Henry left Philippe’s Nieuport with a headache; other times, however, it was as if they floated on one breeze alone. Although Henry’s French could barely get a meal ordered or directions asked, he became very proficient at describing the wonders and calamities of flight: Ça me stupéfie. Elle s’est écrasée au sol. Elle est en perte de vitesse.
There were all sorts of pilot heroes around Henry on the Allied base, urging his passion forward. They seemed to have done everything—fighting in the war, flying mail to Casablanca and over the Pyrenees, and setting new distance records. They talked about the legends—Pequet, Dal Mistro, Saint-Exupéry—as their friends. They made Henry almost wish he’d cracked up a plane in cotton-ball-thick fog in Tangiers, Casablanca, Nice, anywhere. Just so he would have a good story to share. He couldn’t help but dream of running down a German Fokker in a SPAD or a Sopwith Camel. He tried to imagine the rush of air and the smell of gasoline and oil and mortar rounds. He imagined diving down on the German, gathering speed while staying invisible, obscured by the enemy’s wing with the hated black and white cross-pattée at each wing end and on the tailwing. Yet Henry never imagined—never wanted to know—the exact moment that so many pilots talked about on the base—the moment when the enemy turned to look at you, when you saw fear wash over his face, a split second before you pulled the trigger back and held it there, when you knew you’d won.
Henry, he was captivated by the diving and the furious, precise cowering in the enemy’s blind spot, climbing into the sun so that the enemy was blinded and lost sight of you—all the daredevil flying over the jungles and deserts of Africa, or the mountains, rivers, cities, and farms of France, Germany, Turkey, Russia. It seemed graceful and magical. The violence with which many pilots met their end terrified him—whether they were shot down by the Germans or slammed into the ground by weather or the plane itself. But Henry knew such violence was the price a real pilot had to be willing to pay.
Once, Philippe nearly killed them both by putting the plane down at the edge of an avalanche field near Grenoble. It was better than hitting the side of the mountain, Philippe pointed out, which would certainly have killed them. Instead, on their nearly blind landing in a mountain meadow that was edged by boulders of all sizes, the wingtip caught on one of the rocks and spun the plane around and over, onto its back. They both sat still and quiet for a minute, held in place, upside down, by their seat straps. “Tu es là?” Philippe said tentatively.
Henry was terrified but also thrilled and amused. “Oui,” he responded in the deepest, most serious voice he could muster. “Je suis ici.”
WHEN SHE WAS LITTLE, Ruth didn’t play house, and as she grew up, she didn’t think much about the boys in town and whether or not they’d be good husbands someday, although some of her friends at school did. It wasn’t that there was a principle at stake—she simply wasn’t interested. Instead, whenever she could, she went to the pine grove on the south edge of the farm, where the ground was soft and the dense pine needles hushed and mellowed the whole world, making her feel far away, yet safe. There, she pretended she was someone famous—Betsy Ross or Pocahontas; Joan of Arc or Queen Victoria.
There were also the letters. She had written them for nearly as long as she could remember. At some point, yes, early on, it had been a diary, Dear Ruth, in a leather-bound book that had been the last present her father’s mother, Margaret, had given her. She was six, just learning to write in cursive, and Grandmother had died the previous year. When the book ran out of pages, it was a drought and there was no money for extravagances. It was exceptional that year, even, when her mother bought her some paper and ink and her own pen. But somehow Ruth couldn’t write a diary if she didn’t have a book for it. Clean white paper was for letters, she decided, not a diary, and her mother suggested she write to her cousin Beatrice, the same age, in Minnesota but Ruth couldn’t even put a face to that cousin. So she invented a pen pal, Ingrid, who lived in Sweden and rode a bicycle to her school on the sea. After school, she fished for herring and braided her hair and wrote letters back to Ruth.
In the first grade, Ruth’s teacher assigned them to write letters to President Wilson and then to an important person of their choice. Ruth first chose Alexander Graham Bell but then changed her mind and wrote to the first lady doctor, Elizabeth Blackwell, and the teacher, charmed that Ruth remembered a lady whom she’d mentioned to Ruth once, did not tell the child that Dr. Blackwell had been dead a few years. In the sixth grade, given the same assignment, Ruth chose a lady barnstormer, Ruth Law, whom she’d seen at the state fair over the summer. It had taken them three days to get to Des Moines in the Model T, as it took a flat tire outside little What Cheer and there was a day lost to fixing it. But they got there in time to see Ruth Law, who went up in an old plane that sounded like a congested four-cylinder, or so Paul Sheehan said, and she outflew her teammate named Bob something. Bob couldn’t fly as low as Miss Law, nor could he corkscrew his plane over their heads. Ruth didn’t even know why Bob was there, actually, besides to prop the stool next to the plane when Miss Law needed to step out of it.
And Ruth couldn’t believe it when, six weeks after she sent her letter, Miss Law sent her a signed picture postcard of herself. After that, Ruth told Ingrid she didn’t have time to write anymore. She had new letters to write, new people to meet.
August 1920
Ruth Law
Ruth Law’s Flying Circus
c/o: Iowa State Fair
Des Moines
Dear Ruth,
I saw your performance at the State Fair last week and it was splendid! Your loop-the-loop, so big, so close to the other planes, and I almost fainted there at the top of the loop, I was so sure you would simply fall to the earth, but there you stuck, magnetized to the sky I don’t know how, and down you swooped like you’d planned all the while, more graceful than a hummingbird, surer than a hawk. You made me feel like I could fly, too, and maybe I’ll get a chance to try it someday. We can be the Ruth and Ruth Flying Circus!
I’ll be thirteen years old in about a month, and I would very much like to be a nurse or a doctor. I live in Cedar Bluff, which is just about 100 miles east from Des Moines. Maybe you’ve flown over sometime, as we’re not too far north of the railroad tracks and route 6. I wonder where you are from and how you got into a plane for the first time. My father says he’d never let a woman drive an automobile he was riding in, so I don’t think he’d like it if I went up in a plane. He jumps barrels on ice skates when the neighbor’s pond freezes over, my father does, three at a time once, but he took my skates away after I jumped over just one barrel two winters ago. He said it wasn’t ladylike.
My friend Mary Hitchens says she saw you fly at the Muscatine County Fair in just your skivvies. She likes to stretch the truth a bit, Mary does, and I told her I didn’t believe her. But she still insists. Wouldn’t it be too windy and cold to fly without any clothes on?
I hope to see you when you come through Iowa again.
Sincerely,
Ruth Sheehan
Cedar Bluff, Iowa
She was dazzled by Ruth Law’s show and still more so by the postcard the aviatrix sent to her, but it was medicine, nursing, on which Ruth set her real sights. It was reasonable, after all, and increasingly commonplace, that women would learn medicine to take care of people; barnstorming, meanwhile, wasn’t really something to be serious about doing. Watching, loving, yes; doing, no. Besides the Blackwells and Clara Barton and Florence Nightingale, it was wartime—or war posters, anyway—that showed Ruth how important nurses were. And they got to see Europe’s real gingerbread houses, the leaning Tower of Pisa, the Eiffel Tower, and maybe even the Sphinx! The distinguished and affable (and, alas, dead, as she eventually discovered) Elizabeth Blackwell gave Ruth her first genuine heroine; the nurses “over there” showed Ruth where she could go.
In the pine grove, Ruth would collect giant sycamore leaves for blankets, corn silks for bandages, and corn kernels and acorns for medicine, and then she cured the kitten she’d brought with her, usually of leprosy or influenza. She pretended to visit people’s houses in the middle of the night to save them or their children; she imagined her own office in town with a lock on the door and on the medicine cabinet, and a big rolltop desk, like old Dr. Fischer’s. Back inside her house, when her mother or father had a real splinter, Ruth had the softest touch of anyone, and loved the ritual of warming some water, getting the clean tweezers and maybe a needle.
As she advanced through the school’s upper grades and continued to focus on the idea of nursing, she thought of going far away from Cedar Bluff, if only temporarily, and then decided she liked this thought. She would go to an orphanage in Chicago, she decided, or a hospital in New York or Boston—or California, even, simply because it was said to be beautiful. The wagon trains used to pass just south of Cedar Bluff and a whole pile of Mormons who decided not to continue on had settled one town over, in West Branch, and some Mennonites had settled Amana and Kalona, twenty miles to the west. She’d take a train, she decided—the wagons were both tedious and a little dangerous, people dying under the wheels all the time, and such weather and mountains, eventually, and thieves and marauders. Or, when her father retired the Model T and bought a new car, maybe she’d take the old Ford and drive herself, though she’d have to run away with it in the dead of night. Her father didn’t believe women should be driving. His wife, he said, was too frail. Ruth, thinking of how much more strength it took to do the laundry than it did to steer a wheel, always chuckled when he asserted this, and he always pretended not to notice his daughter’s chuckle.
Or maybe Ruth Law would come back through and young Ruth could hitch a ride on her way west. That would be something.
Ultimately, she imagined, after a brief spell away, she’d work in the hospital in Iowa City, helping with the babies, maybe—wouldn’t that be safe and close to home? She might take up practice later on with a doctor like Dr. Fischer, or whoever was coming to relieve the old man, who walked with a cane but still seemed to know just about everything there was to know. Even right there in Cedar Bluff—she’d still be doing what she loved. A lifetime on the farm as a wife and mother, on the other hand, terrified her. She imagined she’d expire from boredom. There was a nursing school right in Iowa City, just ten miles away, and she first wrote to them in 1923, when she turned sixteen and had one more year left before school in Cedar Bluff was exhausted.
When they wrote back, accepting her but asking for some money, or some statement of how she planned to pay for school, Ruth took the letter to her mother. Elizabeth was a quiet, kind woman, not without her own will and temper, and yet she was far more subdued than Ruth, at any age. They were one another’s physical doppelgänger, however, the honey-brown hair, slightly curly, and rich, pooling brown eyes. “You should talk to your father about it,” Elizabeth Sheehan advised her daughter.
“But he’ll say no. Can’t you talk to him first?”
Elizabeth said she’d do what she could.
“College is not for girls and most absolutely not for farm girls—you’re lucky to have as much schooling as you do,” her father said a few nights later. “I didn’t finish grammar school and I turned out all right, didn’t I?”
Ruth didn’t move, but her chin trembled, barely, and her stomach shimmied and twisted.
“Where did you think we were going to get the money?” he continued.
Ruth stared at her mother, begging for help, but getting none. “It’s a nurses’ college, and it’s full of women,” Ruth said. “Maybe I’ll just pay for it all myself.” She knew his face would be darkening, tightening, and he would be wondering how he had raised such an unruly, ungrateful daughter. Her mother looked at her quickly, once, her eyes saying, Don’t do this, not like this, he’s your father, be respectful. Then the dogs howled and her father stood up to see if there were coyotes near the chickens. Left alone with her daughter, Elizabeth still said nothing, offered no condolence. Ruth reached for a piece of bread and then carefully, slowly, sopped up gravy off her plate, imagining it as blood, which sickened her but felt better than this disappointment, this anger.
July 1923
Dear Ruth Law,
I don’t think I want to be married, not like my mother and father anyway, and not to any one of these boys in town. My friend Anna talks about how kind and hardworking George Klemman is, and my friend Mary is sweet on Tom Hitchens because he says he’s going to study the law and Mary’s father is a lawyer. Those boys are nice enough, but they’re about the only nice ones, who don’t smell like a farm anyway, and the rest of them can’t add two and two if it’s not swine or cattle they’re counting. Oh, I know my father would be ashamed, and he’d wonder what makes me think I’m so good, but the fact is, I don’t know really what’s wrong with the boys in Cedar Bluff, just that none of them make me laugh or smile.
I was sweet once on Gus, Mr. Cilek’s nephew from Chicago who came out for a few summers when I was terribly small. He told me about the streetcars and a big fire that nearly burned the whole city down, even with so much water right nearby. And he told me about some of the dances and music he hears there, and about the trains right through the city, and the lake—it just sounds so beautiful. My father told me Gus was a troublemaker back home and that he got sent to Cedar Bluff so he wouldn’t go to jail, but I wouldn’t believe him. My father’s afraid of boys that come around me, just like he’s afraid of grasshoppers. Mary and Anna, too, were afraid of Gus, they said they’d heard what city boys were like, but I didn’t listen to them, either. And Gus was grateful for my faithfulness. He never once held my hand, but he did give me a cricket at the end of the summer, and told me if I listened carefully I’d hear the song it was cricketing for me. That was kind, I thought, even though I was only 10 years old and he was close to 16 and I think he liked me like a little sister. He called me Pip.
The Cileks, unfortunately, are a little strange—even my mother, who does her best never to judge anyone, says so. They raised their oldest son Dean as a girl for nearly four years until Dr. Fischer finally said that if they tried to enter him in school that way, he’d be forced to tell the teacher. Dean lost most of his hearing sometime when he was born and he hated being out in the fields to boot, which made Mr. Cilek think he’d just be better off as a girl, and why not try it? They put him in dresses and called him Deanie and let his hair grow long until it could be braided. My mother told me she thought it was the cruelest thing she’d ever seen anyone do and I could tell she’d like to have nothing at all to do with the Cileks except then Dean wouldn’t have any friends at all. I’m three years or so older than Dean and we would look after him sometimes when his parents were in church—they didn’t like to take him out much, like they knew there’d be problems if all of Cedar Bluff found out. Instead, we were about the only ones to know, I think, and Sheehans aren’t the type to spread gossip, that’s what my father says, anyway, although I told Anna and Mary and made them promise not to tell. I don’t think they’ve told to this day, actually. Now the Cileks have Charlie, too, who’s all boy, one hundred percent.
My mother told me once she didn’t think Dean would stay around these parts, and just a few nights ago, he proved her right, hopping a train out of here, and I don’t think we’ll ever see him again. He’s only 12, too young to be living with hoboes, but maybe he’ll make it all the way to California and find a good job and be happy. Mr. and Mrs. Cilek expect him back any day, but I think they’re wrong, and so does my mother. My father, who is probably Tom Cilek’s best friend, was glad to see Dean leave. Even though he’s just 12, and deaf and a little strange to boot, my father thinks he’ll be all right. “Tom burned that boy’s bridges around here years ago,” he says. “He’s better off anywhere else.”
There’s so much to do before I can get married, I can hardly think about it. I’d rather be a nurse than a wife anyway. You get to do more. Or, best of all, I could be a barnstormer, like you!
Sincerely,
Ruth Sheehan
IT WAS A warmish day the following spring, 1924, and thick clouds hovered low all across the sky, as if each one were hung on a string that at any moment might snap, letting the cloud crash down, smack open and flood the earth.
Henry had been threading his plane through these clouds. The ceiling was low, just six hundred feet or so, and sometimes he would be lifted right back into gray blindness. He missed the first pass at Iowa City, circled back, and the second time was enough of a charm. He got water, fuel, and then went back up. But then the engine was funny, too high-pitched, without any burps or hiccups, and there came an abrupt stall. Henry put her into a little dive to see if he couldn’t get enough oxygen to start her up again, but she was adamant and there wasn’t much diving space, so he leveled out as best he could and lined up with the first field he saw without any cows in it. The de Havilland floated down as if she’d planned it all along. The field was bumpy as any spring-plowed field is apt to be, and she came to a stop several hundred yards from a barn and house. Henry got out and looked around but no one approached. No sign of Paul Sheehan. When the engine was cool enough, he discovered the cracked cylinder, and knew there was no getting on to Chicago just then.
Paul Sheehan started out of the barn toward the house in time to see the pilot, wearing the bulky flight suit and goggles around his neck, walking toward him. He looked up the field, where the airplane was parked. When Henry was within hand-shaking range, Paul extended his, and said, smiling, “I can’t say you’re welcome anytime—there’ll be corn in that field before long. I just seeded a week back.”
Henry laughed, expressed his appreciation, and explained the problem, looking up at the darkening sky once or twice.
“I guess my hearing must really be going,” Paul said. “Even though I was tending some loud milking cows, I’d think I’d have heard you.”
“Not likely,” Henry replied, “since my engine was stalled. Nothing to hear.” He asked Paul for a phone and as they walked to the house together, Henry answered the man’s questions about the plane, starting with how she ran on an eight-cylinder engine just like any other. The farmer seemed incredulous. “So I suppose someone can make my new tractor fly,” he joked.
“Depends how big a lady she is,” Henry replied. “Although you’d never believe the size of some of the things I’ve seen flying. Man-made elephants with wings. Enormous.”
On the phone, the field manager in Iowa City said the truck would take a half hour and it would drive the mail to a train first, then come back and help him. Henry was to go meet it on the road, at the end of the farm drive. Paul took Henry to the kitchen and introduced him to Elizabeth, who offered him a glass of water, which Henry accepted. Elizabeth smiled at him politely, but without much interest, said she hoped the water was cold enough.
“It’s perfect,” he said, handing the empty glass back to her. “You’ll have to excuse me now—I’ve got to go gather the mail and meet my truck.” Then he headed out to the end of the driveway.
Ruth came along, walking home from town, deep in her own misery. She wasn’t to be a doctor or nurse, she wasn’t even to leave Cedar Bluff—the exhaustion of her last resort, of a year’s efforts, confirmed by final letters in her pocket from the college in Iowa City and from a girl’s college in Minnesota, St. Catherine’s, where her teacher Miss Jenkins had attended, saying, there was simply no arrangement available to her without her parents’ permission; it just wasn’t their policy. She had been shocked when the Minnesota college wouldn’t help her—it was for girls, after all—but now, with these two closing their doors, there was no one. She wept as she walked, kicking a rock or mud clod when she happened upon one. Why couldn’t her parents understand—why were they being so unkind? She was nearly seventeen, but she felt the world was closing in around her.
But what about that lady pilot she’d seen at the state fair, Ruth Law? Could she help, if Ruth wrote to her and asked, begged? No, she supposed not. And as she kicked a few more rocks, she wondered, Why do I want to go so badly, anyway, and can I change enough, can I let this go?
A QUARTER MILE ON, nearly home, she smelled Henry before she saw him—the oil and gasoline on him; it wasn’t like her father smelled, not even after crawling around a broken-down tractor all day, and what disgusting annoyance, she wondered, would she encounter now? She braced herself for the odd, semi-leering Charlie Cilek, their youngest, or the stinky Billy Luhrman, who helped her father. As she got closer, however, and heard him whistling “Pop Goes the Weasel,” she discerned his flight suit and helmet—not Tom or Billy or some other local, but a pilot! Right there before her. Was this a joke or a mirage? Where was his plane? She looked toward the fields but saw nothing—since the barn hid the DH-4. She tried not to stare, in case he was real, and as she got closer, ten feet away, she saw he was not only real, but as handsome as anyone she had ever seen—green eyes and dark brown hair beneath whatever coating of dust and grease and gasoline she smelled, which, coming from the plane, made him all the more attractive. And he seemed a bit awkward himself, or maybe he hadn’t seen her, not boldly calling out hello or teasing her like other boys.
Could this be true, or was she still walking along, kicking dirt, imagining things? She feared all of a sudden that her face looked like she’d been weeping, and she quickly tried to dry her eyes with the sleeves of her dress. She knew it wouldn’t help enough and thus she hoped that she’d be able to get by him without drawing attention to herself. Anyway, she’d never see him again—some fluke, anomaly, must’ve brought him there, to miserable Cedar Bluff, and thus what was the point in speaking him today, whyever? She kept her face down as she reached the driveway, nodding hello without looking at him, and turned toward home.
Henry had been looking up and down the road for the truck when pretty young Ruth strode and kicked her way into his vision. He enjoyed watching her from a comfortable distance—she was mad—but when she got closer, turned her face out of sight, and walked very fast and surely right past him, without a word, he almost let her go. He felt certain she was barely fifteen and that her father would nearly kill him for talking to her; yet he needn’t say anything forward, he told himself. And what if she just looked young? Say something, his brain commanded. And before he could stop himself, he’d spoken up to her small back not yet too far past him, two arm’s lengths, maybe. “I’ve landed my plane in your father’s cornfield up there,” he blurted. “She’s got a cracked cylinder and I’m waiting for the truck to come fetch the mail and help me fix her. I mean, I’m not just loitering here at the end of your driveway trying to embarrass you. Some day, isn’t it? On your way home from school?”
Ruth stopped, although she wanted to keep walking. Still, it felt impolite not to answer. “Sure is,” she said, half turned, looking at the sky instead of him. “It keeps wanting to rain.” There was a silence long enough then that Ruth thought she’d head on. “Well,” she said. “I hope the clouds stay sealed for you. If you’re flying again today.”
“Sure am,” he said quickly, trying to keep her there. “Got to get the de Havilland back to Chicago. I started the morning in Omaha.” He showed her his filthy hand as he extended it, showing her he meant to shake, but wouldn’t. “I’m Henry Gutterson. From Wisconsin. Prairie du Chien first and then a little town called Plain.”
Ruth turned to face him, giving up on her tear-streaked face. “Ruth,” she said, pretending to shake his hand in the air. “Ruth Sheehan. I think I’ve heard you fly overhead sometimes. Seen you, too. Is that possible? Or would it be another pilot?”
He was hopeful. She talked like a young woman, not a girl. “It’s likely that it was me,” he said, letting himself smile all the way.
She asked more questions about the Air Mail Service, then, and set her books on the fence post and leaned back against it to listen. Might as well talk to this handsome pilot she’d never have the good fortune to see again.
“We’re slow and we crash a lot,” Henry told her, “and President Harding was always wanting to shut us down. Unless we figured out a way to fly at night.” Then came the thirty-six-hour marathon flight, he explained, connecting San Francisco and New York with two planes meeting in Chicago. “In March, for God’s sake. Two of the four men starting out crashed—one in the Wyoming Tetons and one in the Alleghe-nies, Pennsylvania.”
As he talked, explaining how a man named Jack Knight single-handedly saved the Air Mail by flying the whole way from North Platte to Chicago even though he was suppposed to trade off in Omaha, Henry wasn’t quite sure if she was listening and found it interesting, or if she was just being polite. She was looking at him dead-on, carefully, her brown eyes taking everything in, but still, he didn’t feel sure.
Of course, Ruth was utterly captivated—this Jack Knight flying over her in the pitch-black of a snowy February night, farmers below lighting fires to help him trace a path, to pray for him, and where was she? She would’ve helped, if she’d known. And now here was Henry, a real live pilot, standing before her, about to take off again from her cornfield. She would tell him about seeing Ruth Law and her magnificent stunts, but she didn’t want to seem impolite by interrupting him.
“They say some pilots die because they just go crazy and can’t help but drive their planes into the nearest mountainside or even straight into the ground,” Henry continued. “One fellow once—not on the cross-country marathon—jumped out without his parachute. The plane crashed a mile away, and they couldn’t find anything wrong with it apart from the crunched-up mess of the entire body of the thing.” When he finally stopped talking, listened to his last words lingering between them, he was suddenly embarassed that he’d told her this story—it was so dark and awful. A cold breeze blew and it felt like it might, at last, rain. He couldn’t think of another thing to say now. He flushed and prayed she’d say something instead.
Ruth turned and looked upfield. “Your plane’s behind the barn?”
“Couple hundred yards, yes,” Henry replied.
“That’s why I can’t see it,” Ruth noted.
“I can show you,” Henry offered.
“You’ve got the truck coming.”
“Right.”
Ruth loved that he was awkward; he was sweet. She looked around them. The grass was clumpy and only newly thawed—the usual for early April—and although it was only fifty degrees, it felt balmy after a screaming subzero winter. Snow and ice still clung to the tallest grass along the fence. It started to rain gently—soft, cool, misty bits. “I saw Ruth Law’s Flying Circus once at the state fair,” she said.
“Oh? When was that? Did you like it?”
Ruth nodded, a broad smile taking over her face. “Yeah. It was beautiful. It was, let me think. I was about twelve, maybe thirteen. About four years back, I guess.”
“Right,” Henry said, looking at her full-on now, taking in her beauty and the spark in her eyes, her face, as well as the fact that she came up to about his shoulder, and he was short. Her mother had been tiny, too, he recalled.
Then Ruth asked a question: “What’s it like, flying?”
Henry thought about this. “Maybe a little like diving off something into water, a little like spinning around and around, and a little like being shaken upside down and backwards.”
None of these descriptions told her much. She tucked the hair behind her ear that had come loose from its comb in the wind. “I’d go now with you, if you’d take me,” Ruth said. “Flying, that is. I would’ve gone with Ruth Law, if she’d ever come back. We could’ve been the Two Ruths Flying Circus.”
He laughed gently. “Yes, I suppose you could’ve.”
In the last few minutes before the truck from Iowa City arrived, they both enjoyed the warmth of this last gentle laugh. They looked up the road to see if the truck was yet coming, hoping it was not. “Well,” Ruth asked, “what other stories can you tell me before you leave? I don’t expect I’ll ever meet an Air Mail pilot again—”
“I hope that’s not true,” Henry interjected.
“Well.” She looked down, felt her neck warm with color.
“I’ll tell you how I learned to fly. How about that?”
“Lovely.” Ruth shifted in her lean against the fence.
And Henry began the story of meeting Philippe, the Gershwin records, the crack-up in the Alps. She listened, wishing she could close her eyes to memorize his face, his voice, so that when she lay awake that night in bed, miserable once again with disappointment from the schools, she could remember that this Henry was out there, that men like this were out there, all she had to do was find them, since marriage seemed the only progress her life could next make. She would very likely never see the perfect blue Mediterranean beaches and white sand he described, or the craggy Alps, but with someone like Henry, she could have them through him. He could tell her what the farthest horizon looked like, how to recognize it. Could he really fly in clouds? She didn’t particularly think he was brave so much as lucky. He seemed different from the men in town, including her father and his friends, because he looked at her the entire time she was talking, waited for her to finish, and then said something else, or asked a question. She liked the smile that always seemed to rest in the corners of his mouth. Even when his mouth was downturned, he seemed on the verge of smiling. He had a heavy watch on his wrist, silver metal with a black face and a couple extra dials on it.
And then, all of a sudden, as they heard the truck rumbling up the road, and as Henry curtailed his story in order to say a brief and proper goodbye, saying indeed he hoped to see her again, she was overwhelmed with anger and resentment for his landing there at all. Damn him for coming and going as he pleased, she thought; damn him for coming at all. He would leave, and she would stay, and why in the world would he ever return to her?
It was a flurry then. He hopped in the truck and went up to the barn for the mail. Then he was at the plane, working on her, getting her set just as night fell, and Ruth was upstairs in her bedroom, feeling sorrier for herself than ever, pulling a pillow over her ears when she heard Henry’s voice on the porch, saying farewell and thank you, and her father’s voice saying, “Come back anytime. We’ll feed you dinner.”
As Henry strode toward his plane, he wondered the same thing, except it wasn’t why, it was how. In France, he had lain awake, thinking of a moment somewhat like this—going to his plane, a woman he loved waiting behind him, this woman wanting, willing, to go up there with him, to see the world, the farm, from above, to fly low over his beloved Mississippi. He dreamed of teaching this woman how to fly, if she wanted to learn, as Philippe had taught him, and then their children. This Ruth, she would want something like this, too, he felt sure of it.
Yet he had nearly stayed in France with Philippe, who believed they should fly in Africa for Latécoère. “I can’t land a plane on a tennis court,” Henry told him one day at a café, not looking up from a news story about a Latécoère pilot landing in Spain only to find the strip was two thousand square feet—roughly the size of a tennis court—instead of two thousand feet long as had been requested.
“Nor I. You will not need to. Conditions are getting better all the time.”
“I’m not French. I’m American and I want to go home. My French is terrible, among other things.”
“Bah,” Philippe said with a dismissive hand flick. “But you are nearly French. You speak better French than most Americans, and in Africa, every place you go has someone who speaks French or English. And,” he said, thinking of something new and wagging his finger at Henry, “you speak of flying and airplanes in French, and that’s the most important.”
“Like I said, I don’t speak French.” Then he slowly looked around him in the café, at the beautiful lipsticked and perfectly hatted women gazing languidly across tables at men with starched shirts and close haircuts. He looked down the crooked brick street at another café, a bakery, a butcher, and at children squatting, playing jacks on the sidewalk. He looked back at Philippe, who was smoking with his eyes squinted, watching Henry look around.
“You love it here, no?” he said. “What’s there for you in America?”
That day in Cedar Bluff, three years after Philippe’s question, he thought he might know, at last: Ruth.