The first exhibition of the catapult happened at the Tooele County Fair in 1901. The committee tried to create some mystique by saying it was an extraterrestrial gadget excavated from the Kennecott mine, and then a man from the academy said it had been left behind as a gift from the Goshute natives when the pioneers ran them off their lands, while anybody with common sense knew it was just some crazy Mormon with a couple of tools and plenty of screws loose trying to build a contraption capable of reuniting man with the heavens.
Lorenzo R. Snow, the Mormon prophet at the turn of the century, attempted to discourage the more zealous among his flock who had dreams of a modern-day Tower of Babel by turning the event into a farce and agreeing to preside over the catapult’s virgin launch. He vaulted a sheep into Stansbury Bay.
It was quite the scene. Mormons from all across the state came to the fairgrounds to watch, because how many times are you going to see a prophet of the Lord catapulting live-stock into the sky? Put that in the Bible and I guarantee you more people would read it and believe it.
There is a photograph in the Tooele Transcript commemorating Mormonism’s first and only adventure in aerospace engineering. It is difficult to see the sheep floating away in the background, what with all the clouds in the sky and the hats being tossed in celebration. But it happened.
There are, of course, the usual skeptics. I’ve even heard people say the whole thing is a hoax and the picture is a forgery created by the Mormons with the help of J. Edgar Hoover. But I know better. A girl I used to date had a cousin who was friends with a polygamous family who read in their grandmother’s journal that the sheep was launched only to reappear eleven months later, more than one hundred miles north in Tremonton, exhibiting no visible signs of trauma. They knew it was the same sheep because its ear had been tagged by the prophet himself. Under orders from the local bishop the animal was promptly roasted for the Sabbath meal.
The catapult remained in Stansbury Bay for about four decades where it acquired quite a reputation. Children used it to launch bad Christmas gifts and homework. Newlywed husbands reluctantly launched their collections of pornography. An entire shipment of a Coca-Cola truck disappeared thanks to the catapult. People were not spared. A congregation launched a dogmatic bishop. Boyfriends, girlfriends, teachers, union representatives, senators, and businessmen all suffered the ignominious fate. There is even a rumor that the mob launched Jimmy Hoffa in a pair of concrete shoes.
Then one day the catapult appeared in the marshes outside of Plain City. Its ropes were frayed and the nails holding the splintered wood in place were rusted by salted breeze. There had not been news of a launch in more than a decade. When I was growing up it was considered bad luck to touch the thing.
People say, well, that’s a nice story, Red, but isn’t it a little too much to believe? Isn’t it a bit irrational to say the good people of the state of Utah were launching all their fears off some catapult into the bottom of the Great Salt Lake? Hmph, rational. Everyone untouched by the insanities of love still believes in reason.
Let me be clear. This is not some wackadoodle history. This is serious stuff. That nobody takes it seriously is hardly my fault. Not even my own daughter, my Lizzie—who had heard my stories about the catapult more than a hundred times, twice that if you count all the times I told it when she was in diapers—not even Lizzie took it seriously the night she joined the college boys on their way to Bear River Bay to launch a dozen chickens off the Catapult of Tooele. I tried to warn her. I told her if she went near that thing nothing would be the same. I tried to get her to stay home in front of the television and celebrate Ronald Reagan and the end of communism.
“It’s Tom Brokaw,” I said, turning up the volume. “He’s your favorite reporter.”
I watched old Tommy on the television as the Wall came down. He looked respectable in his hooded green coat and purple tie, his neatly combed hair, wearing gloves like some lumberjack and comforting us with that smooth voice that made you want to drink a bourbon without ice. He was just the man you wanted to tell you the world you know is ending and another one beginning.
For more years than I remember I have had a dream about meeting my dead wife. Men with headphones lead me out of the dressing room where I’ve been sprayed with cologne and given a bouquet of flowers. They’ve cut my hair and I look ten years younger. They push me through some curtains and into a room filled with bright lights and rolling applause. Tom Brokaw is the one to welcome me. He offers a rugged, Midwestern handshake and leads me over to the sofa where my wife is waiting. She is wearing a blue dress, blue as the sky, and is as beautiful as the day we married. We hug. We kiss. There are tears. I hug Tom Brokaw, too. A big man-hug that makes him chuckle with that Midwestern drawl. My dead wife and I start to catch up on lost times and old Tommy, turning to face the camera, gives the viewers at home a report of our love story in this brief moment in history.
I tried to get Lizzie to watch the Wall come down. Berlin suddenly looked like the place to be. People were dancing in the street. There was a clinking sound of hammers chipping away at the Wall. Other people perched on top of it with their hands in their pockets, like they didn’t know what else to do but stand there and look surprised at what Reagan had made possible.
“It’s a show for old people,” Lizzie said, changing her earrings for the fifth time. “It’s Thursday night. I’m going out.”
“You’ll regret it. Communism only ends once.”
“But I need a boy who will love me forever,” she said, kissing me on the cheek and racing out the door. She was like her mother—always quick with words. Not like me who stumbles to get a sentence out of his mouth.
So, she left me there in the quiet of our house. Suddenly, I did feel old. I felt old because I remembered when the Wall went up. I remembered thinking that behind that Wall the Russians would launch all kinds of Sputniks that would ruin this great country before I ever had a chance to get married and have children. That was the threat of communism—interfering with my nonexistent sex life. Now it was coming down and the naked truth was it did not happen the way I imagined. My dead wife was dead, and my little girl was off finding love. I felt old because suddenly I was one of those middle-aged men who believed a lot of things would happen only they never did. I wondered if Tom Brokaw had a daughter and if she took the night off to go out with friends, or if she was watching her father make history. I would never make history. Not even one of those faceless people in the crowd, tinkering away at the Wall, breaking off chips of history bit by bit. I was an antique, safe inside my own walls, whether I believed it or not.
I had to blame somebody for feeling the way I did so I blamed Grady. He had been around the house a few times. I had seen him and Lizzie talking in the driveway. It was easy to see she was smitten, but the boy, like most fools, was undecided about his feelings.
This business of launching the chickens with the catapult was Grady’s idea. He was researching an article about the many wonders of Sanpete chickens and how they compared with the Vernal breed. Grady said the Vernal chickens were natural aviators. Lizzie said chickens don’t fly. They were going to settle the matter once and for all.
They were almost ready for the first launch when Lizzie, always the adrenaline junkie, decided to place a bet.
“If that bird flies we’ll get married one year from today,” she said.
Grady looked at the Vernal chicken and then at Lizzie. They had known each other about two months.
“Done,” he said.
Grady cranked the wheel until the rope went taut. Then he checked all the springs, making sure they were secure before a final inspection of the pivots and counterweights and barrel bucket tension.
The chicken screeched as it lifted into the evening sky. They lost sight of it in the fog, then shouted in disbelief as the wings unfolded, flapped twice, and the bird floated awkwardly toward Highway 83.
They launched six more Vernal chickens that night—two that plummeted into the lake, three aviators, and one that misfired into the sand and exploded on impact in a cloud of feathers. None of the Sanpete chickens even tried to fly.
Lizzie returned home late with the surviving chickens. They made a ruckus in the yard and sat at the back door clucking as if wanting to be let inside. I ignored them and watched Tom Brokaw assure us communism was dead and the world had less worries now than two hours and fifteen minutes earlier.
Before heading to bed Lizzie announced: “By the way, Dad, I’m getting married.”
My dead wife liked to say that Lizzie had inherited her obnoxious habit of falling into things. It started as a little girl when she fell through the ice on the pond and almost died of hypothermia. I remember the look on her face in the hospital, with all the doctors and nurses wrapping her in special sheets and her poor mother a pale mess of tears. Lizzie’s lips were blue but she smiled at it all in amazement, like she would jump in the pond all over again because the circus had come to town just for her. Later, she fell into ditches and wells and sand traps and got stuck in a number of places: boxes, drawers, cabinets, air ducts, industrial plumber pipe, and once at the top of the tallest tree in Box Elder County. We called the fire department so often they got to know her on a first name basis. When asked how it happened she would shrug and say she remembered falling but not much else.
After her mother died she had lots of boyfriends at school. She tried them out the way other people go through shoes. When she got tired of boys she took up a new job, and when a job got boring she found a boy to love for a while. She had a dozen jobs before she was eighteen: cake decorating, phlebotomy, fireworks design, even zymology, but eventually she fell in love with being a perruquierist. That’s a wig-maker, for the uneducated. Her grandmother was excited because with so many wigs it was like she could have a different head for every day of the week.
The wedding was the first time I had ever seen Lizzie anxious to settle down. It was like she had fallen into things so often she figured this was as good a time as any to come to rest. Or maybe she just wanted to be a boil in my ass.
No, I did not approve of Grady. He was one of those intelligent idiots, a leftist who read a little Marx in a college class and felt the need to use fancy words like bourgeois or dialectical unitarianism and protest every damn thing in town. For a while Grady sold leaflets outside the Plain City rec center. For a nickel you could read all about class struggle and the exploitation happening at the Kuhni & Sons meat-packing plant down in Nephi. The boy was helpless.
Lizzie was quite pleased with herself that she had fallen in love with a radical. They got the funny idea that marriage is some social invention so it would be better if they didn’t fall in love like normal people. Grady, who had graduated by then and was halfway across the world working for some newspaper, said what could be more romantic than writing love letters?
Grady’s letters usually arrived on Wednesdays, so that became a kind of religious holiday in our home. Lizzie would primp herself all morning and emerge just as the mail boy made his delivery. The mail boy, who was more naïve than intentional idiot, got wise to what was happening and started playing a joke with her every Wednesday, pretending there was never any mail for her. Nope, he would say, then watch her head back up the porch steps, all dolled up with those long legs of hers, and then suddenly he found the letter and she came over and thanked him with a kiss on the cheek. The boy was lucky she never killed him.
Lizzie read the letters with a sacramental silence. When she finished she tore them up and threw them in the fireplace.
“Well, that was something,” she always said. What something? I wanted to know. Was it something he said? Something he did? Something he wanted? It’s a terrible word, something. It ruins your mind with anticipation. But I was never invited into Lizzie’s heart. It only had so much room and I knew she had always blamed me for her mother dying and turning me into an overprotective father.
I tried to pry out of her what plans Grady had for the future but she told me not to worry. He was flying over this country or the other, taking photographs of disasters and writing about the beauty of this thing we call living.
“Not many career prospects in beauty,” I mumbled, trying to cast doubt in her mind.
“I don’t see why you’re so upset,” she told me one afternoon. We had been out all day looking at cakes and ribbons and what color of trim to put on the wedding announcement cards. Now that we were home she was reading a stack of bridal magazines for the fiftieth time. The corpse of communism was not yet cold but somehow we had all overlooked the other great evil of our time: wedding planning. When the social history of wedding planning is written, my name will be buried in the footnotes as one of its many casualties.
“Can’t you just be happy that I’m in love?” she said. “You’re the one who said love is the only tyranny worth keeping, and all the other pinko ideas can get dumped on a deserted island with Jimmy Carter.”
Just like a daughter to listen when you least expect it and turn your own words against you.
I said I had read the collected works of Moses Gomberg and Grady was not the kind of free radical you want to be exposed to. But there is no arguing with a young girl in love. They don’t understand chemistry. Lizzie didn’t understand that marriage is a lot like trying to fit an elephant into a shoebox—it’s painful for both of you, no matter how much you laugh trying. It’s like this granite temple they have in downtown Salt Lake. Pretty on the outside, but God only knows what’s waiting on the inside. Marriage is a slippery sand that runs out between your fingers.
“That’s okay,” Lizzie said, ignoring the best wisdom I had to offer. “When I go to the beach there is nothing better than warm sand between my toes.”
It came time for the wedding. The night before we had the awkward gathering of the two families. Grady’s family didn’t look like radicals. In fact, they seemed downright boring, all of them dressed in polo shirts and khakis like something out of a JCPenney commercial. Nobody said anything outrageous. Nobody got drunk and made a scene. Leonard Bernstein had died and the towel heads were blowing themselves up near the Holy Land, but nobody had connected the dots. Everyone was too busy laughing and eating Sanpete chicken. Everybody was in love with the idea of Grady and Lizzie in love, but nobody could see the writing on the wall.
The next morning, the morning of the wedding, there was a letter for Lizzie on the porch. It was from Grady. I found her on the couch in tears.
“Well, isn’t that something. That sonfabitch,” she said. “He got cold feet.”
There is a pain that twists through you when you see your child in pain. I remember feeling it the first time Lizzie skinned her knee. We patched her up but she kept looking at her knee and then at us, as if to say, Why did you let this happen? It got worse as she grew older. There were no more skinned knees. Now it was bruised hearts and crushed dreams. We’ve erased polio and can swap out a human heart for a baboon one, but there is no cure for the pain I’m talking about. It is the pain of helplessness. It is the pain whose scientific name can only be I told you so, why didn’t you listen? It is a naked pain. It starts small in the center and then radiates out, until it feels like a hot knife under your fingertips exploding into a thousand points of light.
Before I could put my arm around her she was out the door. “Nobody cancel anything,” Lizzie said. “If I’m not back in an hour get rid of the priest and call a mortician.”
She found him where we all knew she would—at Bear River Bay getting ready to launch himself on the catapult. It was a lousy escape plan. He had the wedding cake on his lap. He wore his tuxedo but was missing the shoes. He sat there with a hangdog look on his face, like he was both happy and ashamed he had been caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
Lizzie didn’t scold him. She didn’t cause a scene. In fact, she climbed into the barrel bucket and sat next to him. She held his hand.
“We’ll do it together,” she said, believing this was romance.
Before he could protest she had pulled the lever and launched the two of them.
At this point in the story people usually call me an idiot. Come on, Red, they say. You don’t really mean they launched themselves from that catapult? That’s just an urban legend. You can’t really believe that, right? What you mean is the catapult is a metaphor for their broken engagement. What you mean is to corroborate the story that ran in the Standard-Examiner the next day saying more or less LOCAL GROOM DROWNS IN BEAR RIVER BAY. Nope. No, that is not what I mean at all. I am not a literary man. I metaphorize nothing. The drowning of a local groom and the grief of his heartbroken fiancée is a history too easy to be true.
The Standard-Examiner says that what happened next never actually happened. True, I didn’t see it. Nobody saw it except Lizzie and Grady. But if you believe in love you have to respect the absurd. And that is just what happened.
Lizzie launched them both. They were still holding hands two hundred feet over the lake when it became clear Lizzie was experiencing gravity in a different way than Grady. Lizzie was falling, but Grady was beginning to drift. When she splashed into the water—the cake followed a half-second later—he was rising head over heels in a kind of awkward flying, but mostly he tumbled higher and higher into the sky like a trapeze artist.
Why did she fall and he float? Why did he not take her with him? Well, communists make lousy husbands.
We arrived just as Lizzie swam back to shore. We helped her out of the water and she was pointing to where Grady was drifting in and out of the clouds. We tried to look but couldn’t see him. She tried calling to him but it was no use. He was caught in the jet stream and seemed to have no plans of leaving it.
Lizzie stood knee-deep in the marshes for a few hours. She was still wearing the sopping wet wedding dress, her hand cupped to her eyes staring toward the sun. The girl did not blink.
“Well,” she said, wriggling her toes in the sand. “That was something.”
She did not say it then but I could tell she wished it had been her. I think she resented him, not for the embarrassment he caused, but because he hadn’t done enough to take her with him. I grabbed her hand in mine.
“You got more sense than that,” I told her. “You got the ground beneath your feet.”
“Dad,” she said. “Just this once I didn’t want to fall.”
There were various sightings of Grady throughout the years. Strangers from halfway across the world sent photographs to our house demanding authentication. He was spotted in the jet stream over Greenland and a suburb of Hattiesburg. Passengers on jumbo jets regularly claimed to have seen him floating about. At weddings all over the state, grooms and brides checked the skies before making their vows. During the peak summer marriage months, local weather reporting included a “Grady Forecast.” There were at least a dozen instances of couples separating because one spouse or another saw Grady and took it as an ominous sign. Within a decade the Grady Clause became standard grounds for divorce. People were obsessed. Once we were walking the streets downtown and saw a woman wearing a T-shirt that said, I ♥ Grady. I wanted to punch her in the lip.
Lizzie received letters from all sorts of strangers. Quite a few were from delusional wives. My husband fell down a well and refuses to come out. My husband fell into his secretary’s bed. My husband fell out of the window but I never pushed him. My husband fell into the gorilla exhibit at the zoo and went all reverse evolution. Some wrote to Lizzie asking what to do now that they had fallen out of love.
She told them all the same thing: go read a book on Marx. Love is a communist. It’s the tyrant you can’t live with or without.
At first Lizzie was sensitive to all these sightings. For the first few years she studied atmospheric charts from the National Weather Service. She visited all the towns in Europe they had agreed to see on their honeymoon. She crumpled up postcards and let them get blown away by the breeze, always hopeful one would find its way to Grady in the jet stream.
It took a few years before she wasn’t so sensitive to things floating in the sky. Oh, that’s just a satellite burning up in the atmosphere, she said. It’s just a small twin-engine plane. It’s just a meteor shower.
It’s easy to be unamazed. It happens to the best marriages.
On the five-year anniversary, a local millionaire sponsored an exhibition to see if it was scientifically possible for a man to launch himself into the jet stream. More than one hundred people signed up. Lizzie agreed to make an appearance. She told me she needed the closure, but I think she was hoping one of these other people would find Grady and pull him out of the sky.
One hundred and forty-two people. That’s how many launched themselves into the Great Salt Lake. No casualties. No disappearances. All swam back uninjured. Nobody flew. Nobody floated into the jet stream. As a consolation prize for their contribution to science they received a plate of pit smoked lamb, compliments of a farmer from Tooele.
When it was just the two of us with the catapult I asked Lizzie if she had any thoughts on why things were different for Grady.
“It was a leap,” she said. In that split second before their feet left the catapult bucket Grady leapt. “Maybe you have to want to fall as much as you want to fly,” she said.
“It could have been worse,” I said, doing my best to comfort her.
“Not likely.”
“It could have been normal. He could have just drowned and there wouldn’t be any hope.”
Then she told me that life without Grady all these years was just that, a kind of drowning.
Lizzie married the idiot mail boy. Spencer or Albert, I think his name is. I’ve never learned it exactly. They live down the street. She kisses him goodbye each morning. He gets in his mail truck and delivers news of the world while she’s Henny Penny waiting at home for something to fall out of the sky. I’ve seen the look on her face every day for ten years. She’s never lost hope. She still believes one day her doorbell will ring and there will be a man in a tuxedo ripped to shreds with poufy hair blown back by the wind and a little bit of wedding cake on his lips. If walls can fall down why the hell can’t a man float away in the jet stream? All the unbelievers can’t seem to answer that.
Which brings me to last night. Get ready. Here it comes.
I was up late listening on the radio to SDI with Errol Bruce-Knapp. When you’re a man with a heartsick daughter and a dead wife you have plenty of sleepless nights. Out of nowhere I had the urge to walk down to Bear River Bay in my pajamas where I found Lizzie sitting in the barrel bucket of the Catapult of Tooele.
It looked like some mythical creature there on the sand, worn away by years of rain and salted breeze. I wasn’t sure if it would still work.
Lizzie was wearing her wedding dress. She looked pretty in a sad way. She didn’t look at me. She focused on the lake, refusing to break her concentration, refusing even a glimpse out of the corner of her eye because in a situation like this so much depends on a glimpse. Looking this way or that is the difference between fact and fiction.
Without looking at me she said, “Are you going to ask me not to do it?”
“No,” I said, thinking this was the first reasonable thing she had done in a long time. “But you should know you’ll ruin the dress.”
What else could I do? I cranked the wheel and inspected the pivots and counterweights. The sun was just coming up over the Wasatch Front. There was nothing left to say. We had exhausted all the words between us.
I looked over my shoulder to see if Tom Brokaw was coming through the marshes. This is one small moment in history he wouldn’t want to miss.
I released the safety, pulled the lever, and let her go.
It sure wasn’t flying and not quite falling. It was, well, it was something, something strange and something alien—and after that nothing was the same.