The sky. The cerulean sky.
What sort of word was that—cerulean? How did it come to mind as he lay on the grass? Had he read it somewhere, this way of describing the sky? It was his aunt’s influence, he knew. She, who would consider him a writer. Her confidence in him pushed him to comb through his vocabulary this morning, plucking words that might please her. He would soon see her, and that alone made him think this way, dredging up words usually reserved for the poets.
Frank was thinking too much, eyeing the sky, his mind in the clouds. That’s what she would tell him, his mind always in the clouds. Anticipating the conversation he would have with her, knowing what she wanted of him. Happiness. Nothing more. He would finally tell her about his airplane that was in the shed, remind her that she was to join him at the air show in Croydon in two weeks. She would meet up with friends for lunch, she’d told him, they would have a lovely time.
Yes, the sky was quite stunning this morning. Cerulean.
He’d drifted off, allowing the sleep that had evaded him in the early morning hours to take him away, a hazy dreamworld that placed him in his shed, pasting the fabric onto the wing, only to have it fall off, drooping like drapery that weighed too heavily on the rod no matter how much glue he used. The frantic repasting, repeated over and again, was like a scene from the silent pictures he’d seen as a boy. She’d introduced them to him, his aunt Audrey, brutal comedies where the laughter was contingent on someone’s failing. Even as a young boy he saw the imbalance of it.
An airplane. Awake now, but the sound of the engine further confused him. He’d never heard one fly over Brackley Wood before. He sat up, wiping his hands over his heat-flushed face, brushing a leaf from his hair, then closed his eyes, focussing on the sound of the engine he immediately knew to be faltering. Jumping to his feet he scanned the sky but saw nothing. He closed his eyes again, concentrating so he could determine the direction. East.
Abandoning the picnic basket under the tree where he’d left it to stay cool, he ran to the road, slipping on dew-stained grass as he went.
A flash in the sky at the top of the downs, the sun glinting off the frame as if the plane itself were sending messages. A biplane. Frank slowed his pace, made calculations on speed, trajectory, trying to determine where the plane would land, the engine coughing, wavering as it descended. He assumed the fear of the pilot, put himself in the cockpit, imagining the landscape before him, the need to determine a place to crash land increasingly urgent. There were too many trees, too many hedges. Frank was running now, past the flax field recently harvested, which appeared level but he knew was lined with irrigation troughs that might sink the plane. Past the grazing field, the land uneven there as well. He was nearly at the road that separated the two fields, the plane now dropping so that it appeared to barely miss the trees.
Frank flapped his arms and pointed to the road with no idea if the pilot could see him. He felt an exhilaration as if he really were both in the cockpit and on the ground. His body feeling large and commanding as he waved him in, knowing the road was narrow, a lane really, but also knowing the grade was solid, and as long as the pilot kept a cool head, he could lay it down between the hedges.
The plane swooped over him, propelling him forward with a whoosh of air so that he scrambled toward it as it touched earth, bumping along with great precision until it hit a pothole, which tousled its wings and tossed it into the ditch.
The propeller jammed, and the silence that remained brought Frank to a stop. Above, a crow flew by, squawking, as if to reclaim the airspace.
“Hello?” Frank called out as he walked to the plane. He feared what he would find in the cockpit. He looked for movement, for the gentle rise of shoulders or an intake of breath.
“Hello.” His voice quieter this time. He held his hand out to the airplane to steady himself, the ache in his foot now noticeable, already beginning to shoot up his leg, and he was limping.
He looked in at the body slumped over the controls, and his mind flipped back to when he was a boy, out in the field alone, waiting for the return of his brother, who had taken one of the horses for a ride. His brother had sneaked out when the stable boy had gone to eat his midday meal, because he was a good rider, if a bit cocky, and yearned for some act of independence. Frank had trailed after him that day and saw him saddle the horse and disappear into the field. He knew that his brother’s constant bravery would forever leave him behind. He’d walked as far as he could and waited until he could wait no longer, finally trudging across the field until he came upon the horse, riderless. Frank knew enough to get help before looking for his brother, knew there were rules of logic that he should follow, so even though he could not ride, he mounted the horse and returned home to fetch the stable boy. The search party found his brother face down in the bush near a stream, his body lifeless, or so it seemed to young Frank, whose own breathing caught in his throat, just as it did now as he looked for life in this pilot. The idea that accidents could happen, that they could kill you, hardly a thought that had entered his mind in those early years when his own deformed body seemed to define all conditions possible.
He stumbled around to the propeller that was nose-down in the ditch, trying to free it enough that he could get at the man, who was now enmeshed in the shrubbery that had fallen over on him in the open cockpit. But no part of the plane would budge, and Frank cursed it as though it were willfully stubborn, as though it were actively working against him. He heard a sound from down the road and looked to a woman approaching on bicycle.
“Is he alive?” she asked.