Night flying. At first, thrown into a bowl of darkness,
starred top and bottom, the same consistency all around.
Stars over and under you. Gradually two darknesses appear.
A black bowl of velvet, brightly spangled below—the earth; a dark
blue bowl, lightly pricked with stars above. . . . Reaching for one
beacon as you let go of the one behind—stepping stones,
signals just for us as the lighted cities were, too. The sense
that the whole world was made for us, for flying.

—Anne Morrow Lindbergh, April 4, 1933

HENRY WAS VERY handsome when he was young and first married, sugar-cane-brown hair that stayed straight against his head, green eyes, light skin, broad shoulders, and a square, deliberate chin and jaw. As he became a husband, a father, and a good pilot for the United States Army and then for the Boeing Company, he only seemed to grow more distinguished-looking and gentlemanly. He noticed women on the streets of Chicago and Omaha watching him, catching his eye, and then looking away. Sometimes, with a new, vague curiosity, but no true desire, he wondered what it might be like to have one of them in his arms. Mostly, however, when he closed his eyes and was lonely, it was the feeling of Ruth’s fine hair at his neck that he imagined, her hair that fell all around her face in lovely honey warbles. He imagined his eyes opening in the middle of the night to see her long, sleeping eyelashes bathed in the brassy streetlight flooding over his cot. Ruth was beautiful, to him, to everyone, he assumed. He liked the way she smelled; and he liked looking forward to, craving, both her touch and his touch on her, at week’s end, and he wished he could do it every day, although he did not consider how these everyday things might ever happen. There was his mail work and there was his wife.

He didn’t tell Ruth half of the things that happened to him on a weekly basis: how much blind flying there was; how many times in five days he thought, Well, I might not make it home this week; how many accidents the company logged per day; how he had tried to buy life insurance but was laughed all the way out of the office by the agent. She didn’t know that Henry himself had already cracked up ten different planes, in rain and mud and ice and snow and in the clearest of blue skies and green grass; or that he’d watched two people who flew the Chicago–Cleveland route burn to death in the Junkers that they called Flying Coffins for good reason; or that he watched two other pilots crash into each other during takeoff, the impact killing both.

These things were a regular part of flying the mail and Ruth didn’t need to know, not when she was home alone. But there was also no question of “too dangerous” for him; flying was his life—it was who he was, what he did.

With his pilot friends, he freely argued over who had the most forced landings in a single flight—Otis won, with twenty-nine between Chicago and St. Louis during a spring hail and electrical storm. They argued about who had bailed out the most times—Slim Lindbergh had the record among all pilots with five, but Henry’d bailed twice—and they argued about who’d walked the farthest to a phone after coming down in a dark, snowy place. Jackie O’Hara said he walked twenty-seven miles once and they all laughed themselves to tears—Jackie flew Chicago–Cleveland and there wasn’t anywhere along there that you could walk more than ten or fifteen miles—let alone twenty-seven—and not run into somebody or something. Unless, of course, you were walking in circles, of which they all admitted Jackie was capable.

Generally, Henry flew home Friday evenings in time for dinner. Ruth had gotten so that she could feel his plane humming and popping through the air before she could hear it, no matter what she was doing—getting supper ready, tending the garden, helping her parents, or walking home from town in the late afternoon sun. By the time she walked to a place where she could see the landing strip that her father still hoped would entice Henry to farm for work and fly for fun, there was her husband, the OX-5 engine sputtering for water since the radiator always was less forthcoming than it needed to be. He landed, coasted to a stop, and staked the plane, and she would be there waiting for a sooty, gritty kiss. She took his elbow and they walked slowly home, Henry’s body still shuddering in time to flight.

He bathed and she sat next to him, telling him of her week, asking him questions about his flights, about Chicago, the other pilots. She soaped his back for him and warmed more water when the tub ran cold. The sun was down by the time he climbed up out of the tub, weary, clean, relaxed, and Ruth looked down, away, demurely, as she handed him his towel. They were physically similar in slightness and proportion. Ruth’s hips were not much bigger than Henry’s, although that would surely change in time. Both were powerful and lean as athletes. She loved the spot on Henry just inside his hipbone, where there was no hair, no roughness, just a perfect porcelain smoothness—yet she could not get her eyes to settle there in the broad light of the bathroom. Henry put on some clean slacks and a shirt and shoes and Ruth splashed her face with some of the warm water from the kettle. She dabbed perfume behind her ears and lower on her neck, in the slight gully behind her collarbone. She neatened the front of her dress and tied back a few renegade hairs. They sat down to properly eat their dinner, if they didn’t find their way to their bed, to the beautiful and affectionate other, first.

Saturday or Sunday mornings, Ruth would beg to go up in the Jenny. They’d fly east to the Mississippi and Ruth would hang over the side with her new camera. She took pictures of the chessboard Iowa countryside, the great sweeping green or brown or blue river, the marshlands and Fox River swamplands that marked the west coast of Wisconsin, and the riverboats of Henry’s childhood. She looked so hard sometimes, for so long, at all these things, trying to imprint them on her brain as if she held a photographic plate there, that her eyes would be sore for a day afterward.

Though he did love to watch pieces of Ruth’s hair escape from her helmet and dance in the wind, sometimes Henry pounded on the cowling and pointed to something that wasn’t there—just to get her to look back him, smile, even in question or confusion or concern. Otherwise, Ruth loved flying so much, she might not show Henry her smile once, as she would be so engrossed in looking, seeing, watching everything that went on around her. Henry loved her passion—and he thought, sometimes, that flying was how they best understood each other. Because they shared this passion, in all its isolation, they were ultimately together, there, in the air. Although Henry felt somewhat jealous when Ruth seemed to forget him while they were flying, this forgetting also told him that they were cut from perfectly matched cloth.

Once, they both squeezed into the pilot’s seat so that Ruth could have a chance at holding on to the stick. They took off on a sunny day and did one nice circle over town with Ruth’s hands over Henry’s, feeling how firmly he had to steer and hold to keep the plane steady. Eventually, he slipped his hands out from under hers and Ruth held the plane even all by herself, which impressed Henry, since the Jenny was only naturally as sturdy as a small shell in the surf. Henry controlled the pedals but Ruth held on to the stick with two leather-gloved hands and every move she made was careful and calculated. This was life for her; it was life the way she had always hoped to live it. She could feel the whole world spread before her. Horizons were infinite and in their wondrous, beautiful spread of infinity, she could steer and float and swim in it. She found a certain religion there, a certain nourishing faith.

She loved this whole procedure, having him drift down to her from the heavens every Friday, giving him up Sunday evenings; and in between, the giddy weekends of flying and fishing and eating and coupling—at night, in the morning, after lunch if they could be sure Ruth’s parents weren’t coming around. It was all so new, so wonderful; she was only thankful, never greedy.

June 1926

Dear Ruth Law Oliver,

For nearly a year now, I have been Ruth Sheehan Gutterson, and it suits me better than I once would’ve guessed. Henry is still flying the mail—he goes up to Checkerboard Sunday evenings and returns to me on Friday as soon as he can. In the summertime, it’s dusk; in the winter, it’s nighttime and I must go meet him in Iowa City, as, without any lights, he’d be a dead man to try and land in a pasture or on one of the roads around here.

We have supper and sometimes see a picture after he comes in. After he cleans himself up, that is! Wash off as much oil and dirt and gasoline as he can and get him in a fresh shirt and pants. Although he’s probably craving home-cooked food by Friday, he’s also just out and out hungry, and it’s nice for me to get out some. There’s one place right on Clinton Street that serves a good pork chop at a fair price and we tend to go there. He’s even taught me to drive and we have a little Ford.

A few weeks back, I took a job at the post office two days a week. It’s funny to see the occasional letter stamped AIR MAIL and to imagine that Henry might have carried it in his plane, right beneath or behind him. Mr. Johansen is the postmaster in Cedar Bluff, and he does most everything, but he’s been ailing, his back, and it’s nice for him to have the rest. Mary Hitchens calls me Air Mail Ruth, or ARM for short, somehow, because of first Henry and now this work. She comes to see me both days I’m there, when it’s slow, after three o’clock when most folks have gotten their mail and the outgoing sack has been picked up. She likes to do impressions of Cedar Bluff people—like our friend and classmate, ever so serious Alice Jaczys, who’s smiled about twice in her life, stooped Mr. Gray at the grocery who can’t help but say “Yep” and nod his head, all the time, whether he’s in a conversation or not, and even Mrs. Cilek, with the giant, meaty mole on the side of her cheek, which Mary pretends—too meanly, I think, Mrs. Cilek has never had it easy—weighs that whole side of her head down. Sometimes I wonder if Mary never dreamed of being an actress in the theater, but she’s always seems perfectly content with her life—she’s never one to complain, which I must say I envy.

I’m trying to convince Henry to take me up flying with him more—I do love it so—I tell him he should just pack me away in the second seat—I can hardly weigh more than an extra bag of mail—but he just laughs and promises to take me the next day. Sometimes he tells me stories that I think are meant to scare me—like landing in a complete cloud of fog, never being sure when or how soon the ground would come up to meet him. He told me how hard he has to pull on the stick sometimes. “Your arms feel like they’re breaking,” he says, and once, for real, wrists did break, on a very hard landing. In another bad storm, his altimeter said 3500 feet, but he ripped some of the linen on the Jenny’s belly when it brushed across the tops of some trees! Once he put a DH-4b upside down in the mud along the Mississippi. In France, he crashed upside down in the Alps!

Still, I’m not afraid. Every day, it seems, I want to be up there more, with him, where the world is bigger, sharper, and full of power. And every time he takes me up there, I’m not sure I can bear to come back down. Henry’s been lucky, but he’s also a good pilot and I pray to God every day that neither his luck nor his skills change. I don’t think he could give it up and I don’t want him to. If someone asked me to stay grounded, I couldn’t do it, either, I’d be—like a rabbit caught in a trap, trying to chew my leg off, to get up, away, up there.

And you? Where have you been flying?

Sincerely,

Ruth Sheehan Gutterson

Cedar Bluff, Iowa

Barely a year in, something changed, the novelty of marriage wore off maybe, and Ruth found herself thinking her father was right—that she had been crazy to marry the pilot. It was September, and one of the first truly cold winds had worked itself up to blasting the windows so hard they rattled. She was lying in the dark, having just read about one of Henry’s colleagues crashing in a lightning storm in Ohio, and she imagined being alone when someone from Mr. Boeing’s office came to tell her. Her father had meant “trouble” as coyotes or running out of coal or her falling someplace and having no one there to find her. That sort of trouble she did not fear, could not even imagine; but her sort—the fantastical, wicked sort, Henry’s possible death, every day—perfectly stunned her. It was too cold to get up and ring the phone downstairs; and she didn’t know how to find Henry, anyway, even if she needed to, even if it was an emergency.

Although she had willingly forfeited her nursing college dreams when Henry proposed to her, she still longed to see the world—more of it than Iowa, even Iowa from the air—and hadn’t he promised to show her? He was home so little she couldn’t even get enough of the world through him. Well, she told herself, she would become more accustomed to it, to all of it, and life was constantly changing. So much was still possible with Henry. As for her fear—she had never before been afraid of him flying, maybe this was simply overdue, and worse for it. One look from her mother when Ruth spoke to her told her this. You made your bed, the look said. You made it.

Henry gave her phone numbers in Chicago and Omaha, promising to call when he could, even if it was expensive—and this, plus her work at the post office, and Mary Hitchens, maybe it all helped a little. Yet still, more often all the time, in the darkest hour of the night, even if she was exhausted, with another busy day ahead, she thought constantly about flying, as if it were music playing too quietly somewhere that she couldn’t make louder so as to hear properly, nor could she turn it off. And so she feared the future, relentless and urgent, and a nescience of joy returning from the days before Henry. Again, the maws of time were so wide, descending, and she couldn’t put a mark on them, couldn’t anticipate them; she couldn’t begin to mold a life as she wished, couldn’t decide what it was she wished for anyway. She felt absence—Henry’s, her own—like a needle at the base of her spine in the billowing black night. She was nearly nineteen years old—or still only eighteen, depending on her mood—and a wife already, and she felt fifty years old and she felt eight years old. Weary. Afraid and unconfident. Nothing was light to her anymore. Nothing charming. Except Henry, whom she didn’t get enough of, and flying, though she was not a pilot. But she was not a farmer, either; she was hardly even a wife and she didn’t want yet to be a mother. That left Ruth. Just Ruth. And what was Ruth?

MARY HITCHENS WAS always talking about her diary, but Ruth felt awkward when she tried to keep one. “Dear me,” she’d begin, but she’d get no further. She liked the letters, though, and started writing to some of the pilots she’d been reading of in the Chicago and Omaha newspapers. Amelia Earhart and Jacqueline Cochran and Mr. Wiley Post and so many other pilots, men and women alike, although she preferred the women. She read the articles, clipped them, reread them, maybe twice again, and saved them, folding them up and stacking them under the laundry table on the back porch. Gradually, these famous people were real to Ruth and she wrote to them as if they knew her as well as anyone. No one wrote back, of course, at least not after a preliminary autographed picture or something of the sort. Still, the stack of her copies of the letters grew in an old stationery box, and the clippings reached near the top of one milk crate.

Then the clippings blew away one day in a summer storm, which had seemed so apt to spawn a tornado that Ruth moved a chair by the cellar door and sat and watched. When the news- papers began to tumble and float out from under the table, over the porch railing, and into the backyard wind, she had first dashed out, into the rain and curious, amber gray light with her hands outstretched, as if the papers were twenty-dollar bills, to gather them in to her, to take them back inside to shelter and possession. She got three, before so many of the others blew out into the cornfield, and the hail started, a splutter of rocks on her head, and she ran inside, her face a mess of rain and tears and total, vacuous panic. She held three sopping newspapers in her hand and sat down in the chair, and it hailed and blew like hell, but no tornado came, and it was a good thing because Ruth might not have moved.

Afterward, she laughed at herself. How could she have cared so much about the silly newspapers? Oh, it wasn’t the papers, she told herself, it was just being so afraid of the storm, afraid of being alone there, who would find her in time if the house blew in?

Thereafter, she carefully cut each article out of the paper with scissors and she kept them in a folder in a drawer, and then in a crate in the attic, where no wind could reach.

“HENRY,” SHE SAID to him one late fall weekend when they were fishing from a flat-bottomed boat on a little lake north of town.

He looked up from the spot in the water where he had sunk his line. “Yeah?”

“I get scared sometimes now, at night.”

“What of, sweetheart?”

“Oh, I don’t know. It’s silly. Criminals, maybe. I’m lonely.”

He laughed gently. “I thought there weren’t any criminals in Cedar Bluff.”

She shrugged, embarrassed, and adjusted the brim of her hat so that the sun wasn’t in her eyes. She wouldn’t tell him how she was worrying, about him, and how she wanted to be in whatever plane might take him down. She reeled in her line and cast again, trying a different spot, the little wooden flat-bottomed boat rocking with her movement. The previous week’s rain and an unusual warmth had inspired a strange, very late batch of mosquitoes. So they wore their long-sleeved shirts and stockings or socks, no matter how nice it would be to feel the fresh air on their arms for the last time before winter took hold. “How much longer are you going to have to be away like this?”

“Ruth, it’s my job.”

“I know, but—I—”

“What would we do for money?” Henry asked

Before she could think, Ruth had blurted, “Can’t I come with you sometimes? The de Havilland has two seats, just like the Jenny.”

“They put mail in the second seat, you know that, not wives.” He attempted a smile.

“I’m serious. This time, Henry. Honestly.”

Henry did not show surprise by dropping his jaw or turning his head quickly or starting forward. Instead it was his silence and his curious stare that told Ruth that he was very surprised. “Why?”

“The post office—well, Mr. Johansen—needs me, that’s true, and it’s nice to help, but that’s not doing anything—that doesn’t make me anything,” she said quickly, looking down and smoothing her skirt across her lap with one hand. “I need something to do,” Ruth continued. “Something to learn or be.”

Henry considered this. “Your father would hunt me down,” he said, laughing.

“But he stopped being in charge of my life when I married you.”

“He hates me, doesn’t he?”

“No. ‘Henry’s a good man,’ he said on our wedding day. ‘Good-hearted, intelligent,’ he said. He just thinks you’re crazy for flying.”

“And for leaving you all alone at home.”

“That, he blames me for. It was I who chose to marry you, not my father.”

“He thinks I’m going to quit and farm with him.”

“Well,” Ruth said. “He has ideas that have nothing to do with you.”

Henry reeled in his line. He took the worm off the hook and laid the pole in the bottom of the boat. He said he’d talk to Oswald, ask him, but he wasn’t very confident. He feared, frankly, that Oswald would say he was crazy. “Don’t get too hopeful, now, please, Ruthie,” he said. “Please don’t get too hopeful.”

“But you’re going to ask? You’ll try?”

“Sure.”

Ruth dropped her fishing pole into the water and lurched across the boat to hug him. Henry met her halfway, held her, as he reached into the water and snatched the pole out. The boat rocked so much that the pail with two fish in it spilled into the lake and so, almost, did they. As they rode out the tumult, Henry imagined asking Oswald—prayed that he wouldn’t be laughed out of the hangar. No other mail pilot that Henry had ever heard of, anyway, needed any sort of copilot, and no one else flew with his wife. Still, it seemed to matter a whole lot to Ruth and he would enjoy seeing more of her. She was already a very good navigator, with a jar-tight memory, good care for detail, and perfect math. She was curious and fearless and confident and strong and she loved to lean out the side of the plane and look way out. He was thankful, at least, for the mail’s and thus his recent transposition from the military to private contractors, via the Kelly Bill. Uncle Sam would never have let Ruth onto any field; Henry’d find out soon enough if William Boeing was any different.

Oswald did nearly laugh him out of the hangar. But then he said yes, on condition that they would, indeed, start a family before too long and her flying would end there, and on condition that Henry never said Oswald okayed it—Boeing would fire him for sure, he said—and on condition that if Ruth ever delayed them, she’d have to stay back. Henry did not thank his boss for this because he knew the man—who had burned his neck and back badly in a fiery crash over German lines in 1917, and who persisted nevertheless in smoking cigars near linen wings doped with gasoline—would assert that he hadn’t done or given Henry anything.

On her birthday a few weeks later, a Saturday, he set a box on her chair.

“What’s in the box?” she said as she handed Henry a piece of pie and sat down. She took the box on her lap, staring at it without untying the cherry-red ribbon.

“Well?” Henry said with his fork poised over the pie. “Aren’t you going to open it?”

She smiled and tugged on one end of the bow.

“There,” he said as the ribbon fell away.

The brown leather jacket, thick and tough and official with a sheepskin lining, was folded as perfectly as possible and the helmet lay neatly on top of it.

“I don’t know your numbers well enough for a flight suit,” he said. “But I wanted to surprise you, so I got the jacket. It’s the smallest they come. There’s no customizing.”

She didn’t say anything, just stood up and set the box on her chair and tried it all on. She touched her arms, patted her front and her head. The coat felt thick and heavy, reassuring, like a hand on her shoulder, and the helmet was snug and warm. She put her arms out and twirled around for Henry to see.

“It’s perfect,” he said.

“Yes,” she agreed, wondering if she’d ever received a better present, hoping it meant what she thought it meant.

“We’ll have to wait for spring,” he said. “It’ll come fast.”

She stepped slowly toward him, leaned down, as he was still sitting at the table with his pie, took his face in her two hands, and kissed him.

March 1927

Dear Jacqueline Cochran,

I’ve just returned from my first trip as a navigator with my husband, flying for the Boeing Company. Henry listened to me, at long last, and for my 19th birthday, surprised me with a flight jacket, custom-made in my size. I don’t know how he got it right—his own clothes barely fit him half the time, before me and my ungainly stitches get to them, anyway! But he did get it right. It’s beautiful.

Most of the time, Henry picks me up and drops me off in Iowa City, so at least the boys in Chicago don’t know, because Oswald, our boss up there, says they can’t know, even though they’re going to figure it out sooner or later. All these boys talk. Sit around the fields and talk. In Omaha, I slip out of the plane right away, so that I’m out of sight by the time the line boys come to refuel and the mail is retrieved. I never knew how big Omaha was. Bigger than Des Moines, even, and different! More cattle there and not as much corn, and trains everywhere. There are cowboys walking around, which you really don’t see in Des Moines. To think, just the other side of the Missouri, just the other side of Iowa, and that much different, a gateway to the whole West. How much different, then, someplace as far away as California or Paris must be!

I am alive, reborn, even. Henry and I, up there, together, a king and queen of the air. Soon, I’ll be good enough that they’ll hire me, and we won’t have to sneak around, and I’ll be the first female employee for Mr. Boeing’s airmail!

Sincerely,

Ruth Gutterson

Cedar Bluff, Iowa

Henry had been right about navigation coming easy for her—she was good. His trips became very efficient because he could focus on how the plane felt, with only half an eye to their course, as he could count on Ruth to point one direction or another when necessary. She always knew where precisely they were going and how—she even saw through storms and cloud cover better than Henry did. Perhaps best of all, she was never afraid. Henry had been certain that their first storm—when the plane shook and jumped so much that he left the cockpit bruised and achy—would make Ruth a fair-weather flyer. But she wasn’t even fazed by one real doozy of a thunderstorm with driving rain and pitch-blackness and strong winds, which sent them down to land, to try and wait it out, about six times between Iowa City and Omaha. The trip took more than twice as long as usual and they arrived soaked to the bone; even Henry was a little rattled. Yet Ruth was fine. She did not complain.

Over about fourteen months, they got to know Omaha and a bit of Chicago—the times when Ruth begged, successfully, not to be left in Iowa City, which she knew to do both rarely and well. They had their favorite restaurants and hotels; they listened to music and walked along the lakeshore or the river. Much as Ruth loved what she saw and experienced in those cities, she also came to appreciate the beauty and good fortune of Cedar Bluff and her family. She told her parents about music and the food, but about the dirty streets, too, and children playing in them; about the great billows of smoke coughed out of the factories and the noise of streetcars and buses and car horns. “Although they are fascinating, and alive to me, because they are different,” she told her father, “I cannot imagine hearing that, breathing that, all my life. I would miss the Iowa air too much.”

Paul, who resented greatly what Henry was doing with Ruth and considered it in violation of the promise his son-in-law made to him not so long ago, took her words, at least, as a good sign. “So we shouldn’t be looking to rent that house out again soon?” he said, looking at Henry.

“No, sir,” Henry said, shutting his mind against Oswald’s recent proposal that they live in Chicago, so that Henry could take on more responsibility. He hadn’t planned on taking the offer—there was, after all, the promise to live in Cedar Bluff and he meant to stand by it the best he could. But he was surprised to hear Ruth say the things she was saying about the cities. Whenever they had free hours, which was very rare, she wanted to go downtown and shop or eat or simply look around. She seemed to come alive in a city—her whole face widened and lit—with all the people and noise and energy. Yet she was professing the opposite to her father, probably to reassure him that they weren’t leaving Iowa on any permanent basis. Henry understood the gesture, but wondered whom she was deceiving.

The men at the airfields gradually figured out what Ruth and Henry were doing, and whatever teasing they began stopped as word of Ruth’s abilities and their perfect, fast record together spread. She began flying to Chicago with him Sunday nights, and flying whole months, not just two weeks at a time, as earlier. She was still paid nothing, but was treated with respect. After they landed, chocked the plane, and gathered their delivery, they walked to the field offices together to sign in. Ruth was never allowed to sign her name, but often Henry allowed her to sign his. One young pilot in Chicago looking for a permanent job asked her if she knew a faster way to get to Cleveland, and she had to tell him she’d never been there. “I just heard you were a good navigator,” he said. “That’s all.”

Ruth blushed deeply and felt the compliment in her toes. “Just between here and Omaha,” she said. “Illinois and Iowa.”

Even Oswald acknowledged privately to Henry that Ruth was “a very smart girl,” but he still disliked the arrangement and wondered aloud to Henry when “Juniors” would be about. “We’re coming up on a year,” he said. “Remember what I said? She’s good, I know. She’s a novelty, too. And you’re still fine without her.”

Henry heard all this, but didn’t exactly listen. After all, imagining a way to stop Ruth from flying with him now felt like imagining a catastrophe. What in the world could he say to her?

But he didn’t have to think of anything, because in October 1928, a year and a half into their flying together, when Oswald was genuinely displeased in part because Boeing had become United Air Transport and there was talk of bigger planes and passengers and Ruth, then, would simply have to stop—in October 1928, Ruth, nearly twenty-one, discovered she was pregnant. Neither one of them had meant for it to be, but they hadn’t not meant it, either. There was no discounting the doctor’s advice that flying might not be good for the baby. She only needed to think of the bounce she sometimes had to endure on landing, or in a good gust of wind, to realize that no pregnancy should be carried during flight.

Now she lay awake, feeling the spreading of her abdomen, the pressure of a life there. Or maybe she was imagining it, the baby had to be so small yet. She wondered how much she would like being a mother, how good a mother she could possibly be, and what it would be like, now, to stay home alone, if she would be better at it than she was before. Once, she turned onto her shoulder, propped herself up on an elbow, and watched Henry sleep. There was moonlight coming in the window and his face looked pale and so relaxed, dead, even, that she found herself putting her head on his chest to be sure of his heartbeat. When she had told him of the baby, he looked all over her, face, shoulders, body, face again. He had touched his fingers to her collarbone and probed the dip there; then he ran his hand behind her neck and pulled her toward him, his eyes watching her face all the while. He whispered, “It’s wonderful, Ruth. It is.” And it seemed, for one fleeting moment, that he was trying to persuade her of this.

That Henry was happy about the baby she did not doubt. But then again, Henry was happy about most things. Hot biscuits, good fishing, sunny weather, rain, too; sleeping and waking and walking to the plane across a warm, soft field. He was easy. She needed this ease; it was the quality she loved most in him, but also the one she hated most. She wondered how to upset him, how to frustrate him, how to move his face into anything more or less than careful, controlled, and understanding. He slept soundly as she touched his face, pulled his lip and cheek all the way back until she saw his back molars, exposed them like an animal’s teeth. He couldn’t possibly know what it felt like to be her.

June 1929

Dear Mrs. Lindbergh,

I must say that I am delighted by, proud, and envious of you! Congratulations on your marriage to the great Colonel Lindbergh, and I read that you are navigating for him, which is impressive, indeed. My husband started as an Air Mail pilot, just as the Colonel used to be. (Since the Kelly Bill, he’s been with UAT.) And until last fall, when I discovered I was pregnant with our first child, I navigated for my husband as you navigate for yours. When this baby is born and then grown reasonably, I’ll climb back into the seat with Henry. Who knows—maybe someday I’d be good enough—a pilot—to enter one of those contests like the Bendix.

We live in Cedar Bluff, Iowa, which falls about fifty miles west of lady Mississippi. I know the Colonel is from Little Falls, Minnesota, which isn’t too far from here. North, certainly. But with Little Falls and his years of flying the Chicago–St. Louis route, surely he’s never been too far from Cedar Bluff. I think the Colonel’s dignity and humility tells a lot about where he’s from. My Henry was born just across the river from the Colonel—near Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin.

Henry is sure he met “Slim” Lindbergh a couple of times in Chicago before ’26. But they weren’t close acquaintances. Henry sure is proud of your husband, though. Maybe someday they can sit down and swap stories of those old Liberty engines on the Jennys which liked to quit as they pleased. Henry told me that once when his plane stalled, the Colonel bailed out without fully cutting the engine so that as he sailed down through the clouds with his parachute, he could hear the plane sputter back to life and circle around near him before it finally sputtered into the ground about a hundred yards from a barn full of sheep and cattle!!

I do worry that these new planes are not getting safer, just shinier and faster. Especially with these passenger planes crashing and sixteen or twenty people being killed in one fell swoop, like that TAT plane downed in California. And they say that pilot crashed simply because he got confused about what was the ground and what was the horizon! Henry says there’s no excuse for being out in weather like that. None at all. Mail pilots can be stupid, but then it’s just his own life and a bag of letters he’s risking.

If Henry hadn’t gotten a job with Mr. Boeing for the Chicago–Omaha leg of the Chicago to San Francisco route, he might’ve flown for Transcontinental Western Airways, as you do. Can you believe all these coincidences? Maybe it could’ve been me and Henry that were the great Lindbergh duo, and you could be us! Of course, not really, because Henry isn’t interested in setting any records or anything. He just loves being up there, hearing the wind “whistling through the wires,” like they say.

If you two ever come through Iowa, you must stay with us and have supper. We won’t tell anyone you’re here—we’ll keep those newspapermen away. Just a couple of pilots and their navigators having some supper together! Imagine that!

It was very nice to meet you, Mrs. Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Perhaps you’ll even reply to me.

Sincerely,

Ruth Gutterson

Cedar Bluff, Iowa

The nine months passed in a flash, aided in part by Ruth’s sleeping about fourteen hours of every day. There were things to do, too, preparations. Her parents were thrilled and her mother relaxed with each passing month that the pregnancy proceeded without problem or incident. It would be a healthy baby, she said. And indeed, John Henry was born in July 1929, beautiful and pudgy, and he was hers, she had done this. The first three months, she could not imagine being anywhere else and she watched him with an intensity that suggested a fear of his disappearing if she looked away. In the nights, she was always listening for his cries, for his steady breathing. Time disappeared before and behind her like a fog burning off at noon. Awake nursing him in the middle of the night, rocking in the ash chair that had been Henry’s mother’s, she looked over the top of the dogwood tree and into the yard, where she imagined John Henry would be chasing a ball before she knew it. She imagined the two dogs—Henry’d gotten them back in the winter, for company—sleeping, stretched out like fallen dinosaurs, in the sunshine. The baby sucked on her breast in even rhythms without any of the desperate, luxuriant squeaking and grunting of the little girls who would follow him. Once full and tired, he gradually let go of Ruth’s nipple, his mouth still shaped to suck but his tongue stilled, his eyes closed, his body motionless in the utter abandonment of sleep. The moonlight came into the window and Ruth looked at her breast, the color of beeswax, and at John Henry’s pinker face, pure and forthright as water in a stream. From time to time his hand, flung out at his side, hanging over Ruth’s supporting arm, would flutter, his fingers moving one by one as if waving through water, through memory.

Gradually, during some of these dead-of-night feedings, Ruth could feel her whole heart and stomach turn on itself as she contemplated, feared, her love and attachment to this child, who would take his first language, balance, and confidence from her; this child who needed her beyond expression and comprehension. She would lay him back into his crib, cover him carefully with the thick blanket her grandmother had knit for Ruth when she was a baby, and she would slip downstairs, lighting only a candle, to write a few letters, telling them about the Gypsy Moth Henry was thinking of buying and where their first flight would be when the baby was old enough to be left alone for the day. Canada, maybe? They’d never been so far before, but they should celebrate, shouldn’t they? They had a son!, she wrote.

ON SUNNY, WARM DAYS toward the end of that first summer, Ruth walked all over the fields with the baby in her arms. She watched the sky, pointed out cloud formations and weather patterns, and explained how crosswinds would make Daddy’s landing difficult. She licked her finger, held it up, and announced where the wind was coming from. And she told him that Grandma and Grandpa’s house was south, the Cileks’ farm was east, and that north and west were the opposite directions.

They always stood and listened, then watched Henry’s approach. “Just a mile north-northwest now,” she said to John Henry. “Pull back a bit, Daddy.” Then she took his tiny hand and pointed it up at the plane. “See?” And when Henry flew right over them, as he did sometimes just for fun or because he overshot the runway, he rocked his wings back and forth in a giant wave and Ruth leaned far back and held the baby up to feel the wind and noise.

But one afternoon, tiny, wordless John Henry got a terrible sunburn. Elizabeth scolded Ruth, shaking her head slightly. “The baby’s got to come first, for a while, Ruth. Children are a miracle. If you don’t think so, you don’t deserve to have them. What were you doing out there?”

Ruth knew about her mother’s miscarriages, something close to a dozen of them, and herself the only “miracle.” Still, Ruth said what she said: “I don’t think deserving has a whole lot to do with it.” She gingerly took John Henry from Elizabeth. The baby smiled up at both of them as he passed from one to the other, as if they were two planets that shared a moon. Ruth shrugged, looked at her mother, who had begun peeling apples, and said, “Anyway. John Henry likes it outside. Don’t you like to walk with Mommy?” and he laughed a short, piccolo laugh.

“I get antsy, Mother,” Ruth said.

Elizabeth nodded, and Ruth thought maybe, maybe she might have something, some reason, some comfort, from her mother.

Elizabeth said, “You’ll learn. You’ll get used to it.”

And Ruth looked at her, wanting more, recalling the one memory she had always kept to herself like the shame of her first bleeding—the memory of her mother gone missing two days and nights one summer when Ruth was nearly nine. Elizabeth had kept her tongue that time and never said another word about the coyotes or a lock for the defenseless chickens, her prized chickens; she had swallowed the fury at her husband, though this fury drove her from her home and family for two whole days; she had swallowed it, come back, picked up where she had left off.

Then, as now, with Ruth grown up and tiny John Henry between them as they dabbed calomine lotion on his cheeks to ease his sunburn, Ruth wished her mother would say something, tell her what was going on inside, tell Ruth that she knew this feeling of going crazy, with the house and the trappedness and the long, straight, flat life that spread out ahead of her, every morning without end. Ruth didn’t understand it, plain and simple, didn’t understand why she felt this way and how it would end, and she would have given anything, anything, to hear her mother, someone, say, Me, too, Ruth, me, too.

October 1929

Dear Mrs. Lindbergh,

Do you ever wish your mother would speak to you honestly—have you ever felt like her holding her tongue has made things more confusing for you, when they don’t have to be, when you don’t have to be alone, feeling such a way, because you know she’s felt the same way, only she won’t say so, and why?—there’s no good reason.

She scolds me for being antsy, as she calls it, for my wanting to fly with Henry, for wanting to do things besides mothering John and keeping the house clean and perfect. But she understands, I know she does. She used to take great pride in her chickens—they were about the only thing that was hers on the whole farm, besides the kitchen and the washing machine. She loved them, but once when I was about nine, we had some coyotes get in to them, twice, and the second time, as my father had refused to listen to her and buy a lock, mother was furious. So furious that she left us, for two whole days and nights, and to this day I have no idea where she went. And I was the one who first saw bloody feathers in the dirt on my way to milk the cows.

At suppertime, she told my father, “A lock would have cost nothing compared to those dead chickens.” “Since when are you tracking figures,” was his reply. “I’m the one figuring the farm here, Elizabeth. Who told you to put your head to it?”

A little bit later, she told me she was going to town to buy fabric, since I was outgrowing my dresses at the time faster than corn was coming up. “Don’t worry yourself about the chickens and the coyote, Ruthie,” she told me. Then she walked out of the backyard, around the house, and down the road. And we didn’t see her for the next two days. At first, my father suggested she’d gone to visit her sick aunt in West Liberty. And when the bread ran out, he made jokes about how hungry we were getting. Mostly, we played a lot of chess and didn’t talk much. She finally came back just after breakfast on the third morning, as I was leaving the barn with the first two pails of milk.

When it was all happening, I just wanted it to be over and it was enough that she came back. Now, ten years later and a mother myself, I can’t help but think of that time, especially when she counsels me to “Settle down, give in to being a good wife, and you’ll find you enjoy it.” “Settling down” seemed like it nearly killed her, if you ask me.

Have you read this essay Mrs. Sanger published in the newspaper a few years back? Don’t mistake me—I don’t support her “procedure,” but she has some interesting things to say. “Women should not have children until they’re 23.” “Couples should be married for two years before having children.” We did the latter, but not the former. I wonder what my mother would say, if she read it. Though I suppose I can guess. It’s Mary Hitchens who gave me a copy, although she had her first one before her first wedding anniversary even hit!

I don’t think that being a good wife means that the person you were before you were a wife goes away. And before I was a wife, I had hopes and dreams about going places and doing things besides staying on this farm forever. I love this farm, I love Iowa, don’t mistake me, and I’m grateful for all the advantages I have—a healthy son and a good husband who loves me, my parents, too, and good, prosperous land all around us—but those hopes and dreams are still there. My mother must understand this, she must know the feeling, but she’ll never say so. I feel sure your mother must be different—she couldn’t possibly have raised three such smart, talented girls otherwise.

I’ll be up there again. If not, I may just turn into a plane. Sometimes I feel my head spin around like a propeller and my arms stretch and go broad and flat. My ribs are wires and my belly is soft and greasy and warm, from the engine and the friction of the air. My feet are rudders and there I go. I try not to be too anxious for that sky, that feeling again, the sound of Henry’s voice trying to get over the hum, the creak and moan of the wings, the sheer scream of wind up there, but I’ll admit, it’s very difficult sometimes. I do love it so.

Sincerely,

Ruth Gutterson

Cedar Bluff, Iowa

The letters, the blessed letters, for which no one could scold her. Because no one, not even Henry, knew. The pilots and aviatrixes knew, of course, though they might as well as not know—they never wrote back and probably threw her letters out. Still, she wrote. And she read more and more about this Anne Morrow Lindbergh, the Colonel’s wonderful girl and his navigator, too, Ruth found herself writing nearly every day. Mrs. Lindbergh was a pilot’s wife like Ruth and she was small and looked so kind that Ruth dreamed about what good friends they could be. She felt such kinship toward Mrs. Lindbergh and she thought of her all the time, wrote to her almost as much. She’d put John Henry down for his first nap, take a clean sheet of paper and her best pen, and, with clean hands and forearms lest they smudge the page, she wrote. She wrote to Mrs. Lindbergh and she flew high above Cedar Bluff, high above the farm, her life; she flew away.

She devised a system so that perhaps Mrs. Lindbergh might write her back. First, Ruth restricted herself to mailing one letter a month. She’d write as many as she liked, decide which one to send at the end of the month, copy that one until it was perfect—keeping one of the marred copies for herself—and stack all the rest to be burned. When she had time, she went to the incinerator in the backyard and ignited the letters one by one, watched them curl up at the edges and dissolve into bits that floated away, up into the air. Whole, pleasant mornings were spent this way. Burning the letters meant she didn’t care too much, she wasn’t losing herself, or reality; writing the letters and she was finding, had found herself, all along, all all along. Dear Mrs. Lindbergh: it sang like a whipporwill, sometimes like a lullaby, and sometimes like a breeze, in her head. Absent the cockpit and Henry’s strong, guiding hands, and the rush of air and oil fumes and cold against her face, she was transported by these simple words, this incantation: Dear Mrs. Lindbergh.