On the morning of the first frost of winter, Jesse walks to the barn with the ground crackling beneath his feet. In one hand he holds a spokeshave, in the other a bucket of varnish. His breath glazes the air. The sun has barely risen, outlining the high clouds in gold. Jesse can hear that the neighbors’ children are awake. They live down the long hill, but their flutelike voices carry on the breeze. He hears them arguing and slamming the car door; presumably they are getting ready for school. Jesse has rarely seen them in person, but he knows the tones of each member of the family. They speak in English and some foreign tongue, maybe Russian. This bothers him. The great wave of immigrants has crashed against American shores and washed inland, casting its dross into every crevice, even here, in rural Maine. People ought to stay put. They ought to stay where their ancestors are planted like bulbs in the dark ground.
Jesse tugs open the door to the barn and stands for a while, looking at his creation in the half-light. The airplane is a glorious thing, almost finished, lurking beneath the rafters like an insectoid relic from the dinosaur age. It smells of sawdust and oil. One long amber wing nearly brushes the wall; the other sags slightly, since Jesse has not yet put in the struts to support it. For a year he has been building his own version of the Wright brothers’ plane, the first ever to complete a successful flight. He is making it from scratch, with hand tools and a series of diagrams laid out on the worktable. The sun pokes its fingers through one window, catching the dusty beams of the ceiling. Jesse picks up a brush and begins to varnish the exposed flank of a propeller. One of the angles in the fuselage needs to be realigned. He checks the rudders too, which will allow him to change the yaw while airborne.
Presently the sun rises high, and the room brims with light like the interior of a wood stove. Jesse works until his right hand goes numb, and he drops the spokeshave he is holding. This is the cue to break for lunch.
Around noon the doctor calls. Jesse is eating cold beans from a can in the kitchen. He knows how to cook—women taught him long ago—but he rarely bothers. It seems pointless to cook for one, especially when the one in question has lost his sense of taste completely and never cared much for fancy food to begin with. Besides, in a house like this, where frost decorates the windows, where Jesse has had to break the ice on his bath now and then, washing dishes would be tricky—waiting for the water to get hot, trying to thaw out the liquid soap. The telephone rings beneath a heap of newspapers and Jesse eyes it for a while, deciding whether he ought to answer.
It turns out to be his neurologist, just as he expected. That ripe, genial voice, slightly clinical. Jesse sets his can of beans aside, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. The doctor is worried about him. Jesse missed his appointment this morning, though the MRI was all ready for him. Is Jesse all right? Has he been suffering from mental confusion? Seizures? Any more weakness in that right hand? He needs to come in right away. He must have his blood, electrolytes, liver function, and coagulation tested. All these things were lined up for him hours ago.
“I plumb forgot,” Jesse says untruthfully. “I’m sorry, doc.”
“That’s all right, Mr. Miller,” says the neurologist. “But you’ve got to come in this week. How about tomorrow?”
“Well, now.” Jesse scratches his cheek with one dirty fingernail. “I’m just not sure. How about I take a look at my schedule and call you back?”
“That’s fine. That’ll be fine.”
Jesse spends the afternoon in the barn, adjusting the tensile strength of the cables. He measures out the pieces of wood he will need for the elevators at the front of the plane. The motor will arrive by airmail one of these days. From the house, across the cold, pine-scented air, he hears the telephone ringing again. The doctor, no doubt, or one of his nurses, dispatched to nail Jesse down for another appointment.
There is a tumor as big as a lemon in his brain. It makes him smile, the way they think of some nice, friendly object to give you a sense of the size—he now pictures a yellow piece of fruit nestled in the meat of his head. Too deep in for surgery. All they can do now is watch it and try to palliate some of the symptoms. Jesse knows how it will progress. The doctor laid it all out for him. The weakness in his hand will spread. He will have clumsiness, maybe difficulty walking. His ability to taste has been taken from him—he may lose more, smell, touch. The headaches have already begun, with occasional bouts of vomiting. Eventually he will be unable to concentrate. His memory will go, his alertness. He will become stupid, or “numb,” as his father, a Maine native, used to say. Then he will die.
There was a time when Jesse had family. He was born in this place, but after his mother passed away—a car accident, black ice on the roads—he was sent for a while to stay with her people, a million miles away in Alabama. Jesse was just a boy then, a tiny thing with flakes of white-blond hair. That period of his childhood sits at a remove from him now, as though he can look down at it only through a pane of glass.
Most of what he remembers is the noise. There were so many people living in one sprawling home—aunts, cousins, and grandparents. Jesse was not always clear on how everyone was related. At the time, the family seemed like an unbreakable thing, a many-headed, many-armed creature that could not be separated into its component parts. You were never alone in that house. Jesse would sit beneath the table and watch the feet of his aunts, listening to the chaotic song of their voices, the thousand-and-one topics they seemed to discuss simultaneously. He shared a room with his four male cousins. He suffered through hours of shopping with his grandmother, passing through stall after stall in the market, overwhelmed by the vast catalogue of necessary items she seemed to have stored in her mind. He watched television in the lap of his grandfather, hearing the watery rumble of the old man’s breath, which at the time seemed like an engine of comfort.
After a while Jesse grew accustomed to their brand of closeness—he learned to accept it, if not quite to reciprocate in kind. His aunts hugged him and wept over the loss of his mother. His uncle obligingly took him aside and taught him to draw. The boys included him in all their games, so that he spent hours outside in the wealth of the Alabama sunlight, boundless and golden. Together they threw stones at crows, set up traps for the vampire that lived in the pear tree, and stalked snakes in the corn. At mealtimes everyone would talk at once, passing dishes of food willy-nilly and shouting about the local football games or the behavior of the teenagers at the church social. Jesse watched it all with open eyes, drinking it in, as though trying to understand the behavior of some foreign species.
He has not seen any of those people since he was a child. Eventually his father came and took him back home. Though Jesse knows they have moved on, growing up, some of them having babies, some of them dying, in his mind they are frozen in time, unchanging, like a photograph.
The next morning is palpably colder. Jesse stokes up the wood-stove, blowing on the embers and feeding twigs into the roaring red maw. He has taken to sleeping on the living room couch, near the fire, where the big picture window lets in the first bare glow of dawn. He hates to waste any time at all in sleeping. He has only so many hours left.
During the early part of the day, he works on the airplane. He places struts beneath the wing and varnishes the propellers. The cables hover between the planks like the waiting strands of a spider web. Now and then, Jesse will clamber up and take his place in the pilot’s seat, lying down, his hands in the correct position, his feet dangling in space. He imagines what it will be like to fly, closing his eyes and trying to feel the wind. He cannot wait to be done, and yet there is something wonderful in the agonized slowness of the process itself. He knows that he could expedite matters with a nail gun and electric saw, but that is not his way. He wants each piece to be birthed painstakingly from his own two hands. He likes cutting the wood, making inevitable mistakes, tossing the scrap out back. He likes taking endless trips to the hardware store to buy pliers, screws, and clamps.
Today he climbs into his pickup truck and drives the bumpy road into town. At the store, he strolls through the aisles, examining packets of brads, testing lengths of wire beneath his fingertips, checking the notebook in his pocket for measurements. The clerk is always pleasantly incurious about what Jesse may be building for himself. When approached at the cash register, the man glances up blearily from beneath his baseball cap and folds away the sports page of the paper.
“Back again?” he says.
“A-yup,” Jesse replies.
The clerk nods and hands him his change. This is the only conversation Jesse has with anyone all day.
He knows that a life in this place is not for everyone. Though he has few memories of his mother—he was a toddler when she passed away, and his prevailing impression is one of gaudy red hair and a weary, lilting voice—he has been told certain things about her. She laughed easily. She played the piano well. She was a social sort of person, and she used to complain that she had lived in Maine for ten years and was still treated as an interloper. No one invited her to the quilting bees. No one saw fit to buy her cupcakes at the library bake sale. Even at her funeral, Jesse was aware that the people who attended, dressed soberly in black, were there more for his father’s sake than anything else. His father had been born in the small town. For this reason, though Jesse himself lived away for a few years, he too has always been accepted as a part of the community.
After his return from Alabama, Jesse remembers driving down the winding roads with his father. He was still a little disoriented from the suddenness of his transition, the loss of the constant presence of his southern cousins, the chill in the fog-soaked air. Now and then, his father’s pickup truck would pass another car on the road. Toby Miller knew each face and explained who each person was.
“That’s Amy Johnson. Decent woman. That there is Billy Hogg. Don’t never go hunting with him.”
“Why don’t they wave?” Jesse asked eventually.
His father looked amused.
“They are waving,” he said.
And then Jesse noticed it. The next car approached, and he saw the flat, bearded face, both hands on the steering wheel. The man recognized his father and lifted one forefinger slightly. Toby did the same.
“That’s George Wilson,” he said. “Known him for years.”
A week later the doctor calls again. Jesse is annoyed. He does not intend to go back to the hospital, not ever. He is uninterested in monitoring the progress of his tumor. He believes in spirits. When he dies, he wants his ghost to end up here, on the hillside, wandering among the pines, visiting the old house, witnessing the ice storms that come in midwinter and coat the trees in light. He does not want to die in a hospital. It makes his flesh crawl to think of his spirit trapped indoors forever, shuffling through rooms of sick people with IVs strapped into their arms.
He didn’t really expect the doctor to understand this—but he had hoped the man would have enough sense to let the matter drop when Jesse did not call for another appointment. Now it seems they will have to talk the thing out.
“Mr. Miller,” the doctor says. “We’re all quite concerned. You understand that the cancer can progress very rapidly. We need to get a handle on what’s happening in your brain.”
Jesse leans wearily against the wall. For an instant he weakens. There have been a few scares—yesterday morning he vomited blood into the sink, and then there was the moment when he forgot how to lace up his boots and sat staring at them dully for the longest time. The headaches, too, have grown increasingly unbearable. They come on like a supernova exploding behind his eyes, too severe to be checked by a little thing like aspirin from a bottle. Jesse knows that he may not have very long.
“You want to run some tests on me?” he asks.
“Yes, exactly,” the doctor says, relieved. “The tests we discussed earlier, on your blood and liver. In addition, we have to get an MRI. As the tumor grows, the inflammation will begin to press on the surrounding tissue. Then, of course, you have to know that—”
Jesse’s mind wanders a long way from the conversation. His father, too, had died of cancer. Toby Miller had hated doctors; he was worse than Jesse, almost phobic. Jesse had been a teenager then, living under his father’s roof, watching the symptoms coming on. Pain in the stomach. Inability to keep anything down. As it got worse—as the cancer spread, Jesse learned later, carried in the blood, organ to organ, like dandelion seeds on the wind—Toby’s breathing became labored. A lump swelled in his neck. He fell ill too often. First the pain affected his moods, and then he began to suffer lapses of memory. Jesse would find him trying to feed wood into the cushions of the couch, rather than the stove. He got a few calls from neighbors saying that Toby had been seen wandering in his bare feet down the road. Still the old man refused to go to the hospital. Once Jesse actually drove him there in the pickup, but his father would not get out of the car, sitting hunched in the passenger’s seat as Jesse glared at him in frustration through the window.
The doctor is still talking, explaining why it will take a few days or even weeks to get results back on all the tests. Jesse interrupts him.
“Doc, I plan to die at home,” he says. “I think you know from my file that I have a bit of experience with this disease. My dad passed out one night at the bar and ended up in the E.R., stuck full of tubes. I don’t want to be kept on a respirator. That won’t work for me.”
The doctor begins to speak, but Jesse continues, talking over him.
“You’ve done your bit for me, and I appreciate it. But you don’t need to call again. We’re square. There’s nothing else you can do here.”
After hanging up, he regrets having confessed so much to a virtual stranger. His father could have done it with half as many words.
On Sunday he goes to church. The preacher drones on, gesturing with his big flabby hands. Jesse sits in the back pew, gazing up at the stained-glass window, tree branches just visible through the tinted panes. He is thinking about the soul. The first time he knew he had a soul of his own was when his father came to Alabama to bring him home again.
It happened quite suddenly. Toby Miller was not one to announce his plans. Jesse had been living with the family for five years when his father stepped out of a taxi in front of the house, looking small and stooped and out of place. An hour later, Jesse was packing his bags. Through the floor he could hear the argument brewing in the kitchen, his aunts fighting to keep him, his father’s firm voice drifting on the air. Jesse, folding up his shirts, had been quite sure how that quarrel would play out.
Evening found him on the sidewalk, his duffel bag slung over one shoulder. His father was already climbing into the taxi. The family collected in the front yard, the cousins looking embarrassed, the aunts bravely brushing away their tears. His grandmother darted forward to hug him, her feathery arms closing around him like a blanket, and as she pulled away, Jesse felt something rip out of his chest. He gasped at the sensation. Then his grandfather, wheezing but determined, limped forward and embraced him. When their bodies separated, Jesse felt another small piece of himself rip free. The feeling was not painful, but it was entirely alien—he was losing a thing he had not known could be lost.
The aunts came toward him, one by one, and Jesse stood like a statue under the weight of their meaty arms. He did not understand what was happening. When each woman straightened up, smiling sadly, a fragment of Jesse went with her. He put a hand to his chest, half expecting his heart to go out like a candle.
At last only the young boys were left. Their faces wore bewildered grins. Jesse stared at them dumbly.
“Say goodbye,” one of the aunts prompted in a whisper, and the boys flung themselves at him, their hot hands gripping his back. Then they raced away. Together they ripped out such a big piece of him that Jesse lost his balance. He stumbled against the door of the taxi. He did not cry, but his breath came in shuddering waves.
In the airplane, Jesse and his father sat without speaking. Toby was flipping through a magazine, quite at his ease. The plane coasted down the runway, and Jesse pressed his cheek to the window. He felt he had been halved, and halved again, until he was in such a state of shock that if his father had told him that it was time to walk over a cliff and, by falling, come to Maine, he would have done it without complaint. When the plane took off, Jesse did not feel amazed to watch the houses grow small, to see the land fall away like a carpet. As he gazed at the familiar black forests and the cloudy river, the last piece tore out of his body. He felt it go, and as the plane lifted higher, he became an empty bowl.
One day there are deer in the backyard. Winter has arrived in earnest, the ground perpetually dusted with arabesques of snow. The earth has hardened painfully. Sipping his coffee, Jesse watches through the kitchen curtains as the buck steps gracefully over a fallen log, rotating his latticework of antlers. His doe follows him. Timid animals they may be, but their faces are curiously impassive. The doe nibbles at the last spare shoots of grass that thrust up through the snow.
Jesse’s cancer has taken a turn for the worse. He has begun to have seizures—or so he thinks, since they manifest as gaps in his memory. The first time it happened, he was hurrying through the front door, his saw in one hand, and then he was lying on the floor, gazing at the ceiling fan. For an instant he was sure that he had crashed his beloved airplane—launched it and landed badly. It took awhile to understand that he had lost consciousness. A few days afterward, he was preparing his lunch at the kitchen sink and a moment later found himself on the tile, with an entirely different quality of light in the room. Maybe an hour had passed. There was a spattering of vomit on the floor, and a bloody wound on the back of his head where he had smacked the table.
He has been thinking about his father’s battle with cancer. He remembers how they cut open Toby’s body, so many years ago, and found him fairly riddled with it. The tumors had begun in the gut and traveled to the lungs, the liver, the base of the skull. Something about all this had made sense to Jesse. His father had been tight-lipped by nature, never admitting that he missed his wife, that he had loved her, that he was lonely. He had never once spoken of his reasons for sending Jesse away, much less for bringing him back. Jesse, remembering the openness of his Alabama kin, had wondered if Toby’s illness could have come from a certain repression. In the old days, people used to check the dead to see if they had “purged”—if a froth had gathered around the corners of their mouths, indicating that they had unspoken things to share, bubbling up in the wake of their demise. After his father had finally succumbed, lying in that hospital bed, Jesse had checked the mouth, but of course Toby hadn’t purged. Even in death, he had kept his thoughts to himself.
Jesse’s own diagnosis—cancer again, coming on in middle age—had not really surprised him either. Over the years, he has become such a carbon copy of Toby Miller that now and then, catching sight in the bathroom mirror of a lean shoulder and stubbled cheek, Jesse will turn around and glance behind him, looking for his father.
At last the plane is ready. Jesse finishes it one evening and stands in awe, staring through the haze of waning sunlight. He is as proud as though he had invented it himself, brought it fully formed from his own head, rather than following somebody else’s plan. The plane is beautiful, airy and light. Its appearance is deceptive. It looks kite-like, as though Jesse could heft it up on one shoulder and carry it—as though it could trick the wind itself. Jesse has always been a little disappointed in modern airplanes. They have nothing to do with man’s age-old dream of flight. For thousands of years the human species has looked to the heavens, and yet this is what they have been able to come up with: a metal tube, carpeted aisles, stinking bathrooms, and a scratched, three-inch-thick window that gives no greater impression of the vastness of the sky than a television set.
Jesse does not know what first made him dream of building his own plane. His Alabama uncle, so many years ago, used to show him picture books about Orville and Wilbur Wright. He was pleased to have a new audience in Jesse; his own children were sick of hearing about his obsession with the Wright brothers’ bicycle shop, the endless experiments with models and mock-ups, and the way that Orville had answered, whenever someone asked how he had concocted his marvelous invention: “Like a bird.” After Jesse’s exile, the notion of flight had stayed in his mind. Perhaps it had something to do with the geese. Every autumn they would wing above the house in Maine, straggling across the sky in delicate V’s. Jesse often woke at night to their melancholy calls. They soared across the miles to their dwelling places, their warm southern nests, as Jesse himself could never do.
It is too late to launch tonight. He heads into the house, stumbling in his weariness. One of his headaches is coming on. He can feel it gathering strength, pooling upward from the base of the neck. Today he lost sensation in his right arm completely. He can still use the appendage well enough, but he feels nothing—it is like watching somebody else’s fingers at work. To test it, he laid his palm on a hot kettle and watched the flesh sear as though from a great distance. He could smell his blistering skin, but he didn’t feel a thing.
He does not want to sleep. After a chilly bath, he curls up on the couch like a boy, gazing out the window. The stars are fiery tonight. The moon wafts between the branches like a shaving of ice. Jesse wonders whether he ever grew a new soul—after his old one was torn out in Alabama. Maybe he did not. Maybe it was just this place that filled that empty gap. He has come to love the land here as he has never loved anyone, not his aunts and cousins, not his father. He knows every corner of the hillside, the stream that churns frantically in the summer and freezes in the winter, the tiny white flowers that bloom like mist for a few days in the fall. Sometimes he will hear a wolf give an aching cry. Sometimes an owl takes up residence in the barn. Jesse has learned to determine the day’s weather by sniffing the wind. He can tell whether a morning rain will burn off or settle in for the duration. In the spring he has walked over the melting ground, feeling the frost loosen and give way beneath his feet.
The sun rises slowly, fighting through a bank of cloud. Jesse is uncertain for a while whether he is really awake. For an instant he even wonders if he has died during the night. There is a strange thickness in the air. He rises, feeling almost weightless. When was the last time he ate? He does not remember. He fumbles with the buttons of his jeans and kicks on his boots.
Today is the day. The plane is finished. He built the track ages ago, leading down a steep hill and opening onto a wide, flat field, now patterned with ice. The rails are firmly embedded in the frost. The plane will ride the wheeled tray, which will catch at the bottom and launch the thing airborne. Jesse has gamed it out hundreds of times. He has had to make a few adjustments—the Wright brothers had a crew, not to mention each other, whereas Jesse has only himself. He is not afraid of failure. He finds his coat on the floor and wraps some gauze around the injured palm of his hand.
Snow has begun to fall as he hurries to the barn; the air is hung with fat, downy flakes, snagging in his eyelashes and landing cold on his tongue. Jesse throws open both doors and begins to elbow his creation out into the daylight. The plane grinds forward, its wings bouncing. In the distance, a crow makes its raucous call. One wheel catches in a hollow, and by the time Jesse gets it loose, he is damp with sweat, his heart hammering. He pushes the plane across the hilltop, conscious of the sheer spectacle of it—his golden achievement, the cables twanging, the propeller rotating by tiny increments. At last he has it poised on the top of the hill.
There is a moment of silence. With a childlike glee, Jesse lifts both hands to placate an imaginary audience. He used to toboggan on this hillside as a boy, in one of his few memories of being cupped in his father’s lap and hearing Toby’s unfettered laughter. From this angle, the track appears steep and uneven, dipping sharply downward. Jesse guns the motor, which rattles into life with a puff of smoke. The propeller begins to spin. He gives the plane a shove, and it lurches away from him, faster than he had anticipated; he flings out a hand and barely catches hold, dragging himself on board. The trees slip by in a rolling blur. The passage is rough, the wind icy—Jesse wishes he had thought to bring goggles. Jolting and groaning, the plane plummets down the slope. The cables shudder in his hands. Unable to restrain himself, he lets out a whoop of pure delight. At the bottom of the hill the plane pauses for a moment, as though taking one last look at its mundane, earthly surroundings. Then the powerful wings catch against the air, and Jesse takes flight.