The Age of Perpetual Light

by Josh Weil

  In the last light, the cloth at her face is so white it is nearly glowing. It flaps behind her like a strange sail unfurled alongside her cheek.

  “Away from there,” I tell her.

  “Shimel,” she says.

  I wait for her to go on. But that is all.

  The crickets are relentless in the roadsides. The fireflies are so thick—all across the fields, above the high weeds, filling the open road around the plodding mule—that it seems as if there is a light for every cricket, that their blinks are timed to each throbbing rasp, as if the sound is the cranking of a thousand tiny dynamos and the blips are the electricity leaping to the tiny bulbs. But what then lights the stars? There they come.

  There they are.

  “Shimel,” she says again, a long time later, “you know I have to go back.”

  “I brought you a gift,” I tell her. I can tell she looks at me by the change in the sound of the cloth flapping at her face.

  “I want to go back,” she says.

  “A battery,” I tell her. “For when I’m not there. To crank the dynamo. So you don’t have to. It stores—”

  “Ura broke it,” she says.

  The fireflies flash and disappear, flash and disappear.

  “We can get a new bulb,” I tell her.

  “The generator, too,” she says. “He took a splitter shaft to it. The bulb and the lamp and the whole thing.”

  And I can hear his voice—Covetous and greed and blasphemy and modernity and displeasure of God—like a lapping in the darkness that appears each time a firefly’s blip is snuffed out. I watch the spots where the lights had been and look for the next and watch that spot, and it is only when my eyes hold on a spot that doesn’t disappear, a blip that holds, that I realize where I am taking us. There is another, nearby the first, and another and another, as still and permanent and glimmering as water’s reflection of stars, the darkness unable to smother them any more than ripples could on the surface of a lake.

  I point them out to her as if she has never seen a town. “Reading,” I say. She does not say anything, does not even nod. She does not look away from my face to them. I point again. Again, I say the name of the town.

  “Yankel,” she says.

  “Shimel.”

  “Take me back.”

  “Do you see them?” I say.

  “Yankel,” she says, “I want to go back.”

  “Isn’t it beautiful?”

  “My baby is there. My children.”

  “They stay just like that,” I tell her. “Lit all night.”

  “My husband is there,” she says. And then she says, “Mr. Yushrov—”

  I make a sound in my mouth that quiets her. Or maybe it is the fact that the click of my tongue catches the mule’s ear: the clopping quickens, the wagon jerks forward, the wheels speed up their groans.

  “Mr. Yushrov,” she says again.

  And this time I use the whip.

  Old Reba breaks into a trot. We sit there, jolting on the board, Esther’s free hand gripping the seat, her other holding the starlit cloth where it flutters at her cheek, and I try to tell her over the noise what it will be like to gallop out of the dark fields we have ridden through and into the first light of the city’s streets, under the first lamps, the sudden brightness that hurts the eyes, that makes them water and ache, and still how you can’t help but gaze at the bulbs burning away, steady, unflickering, unwavering, through the night, but she only shouts at me that she wants to go back.

  On her face there is a thing I have never seen before, not from her or any other. It is as if she is afraid of me, or of the answer to her question that she has somehow seen, that I have always known, that has all these years frightened me. What man who takes a chance simply because it is held out to him has ever made it farther than the next gate in the road? Who among us ever has no choice? In her face I see she knows it now, what my breuder must have seen when he gave to me his chance at life, when I took it from him: the wanting, the ruthlessness of wanting that in this world is the only kind of wanting that survives.

  “I want to go home!” she shouts.

  I whip the mule into a gallop.

  “I want to go home!”

  And I shout it at the mule, too—“Home! Home!”—until the sound of the hooves is like a team of horses gone wild in fright and the night behind us is filled with the crashing of my wares shaken loose and falling to the road and my flasch is smacking against my chest, over and over, so hard that I know either it or my breastbone will break.

  Beside me, she is crying.

  “Look!” I demand. “Look!” And I try with my shaking finger, with all that I can put into my eyes, to make her see how it was coming off of the ocean at night, the wind in your face and the waves rolling the ship beneath you and the salt crusting in your eyes and the first glimpse of the lights—there!—the island—there!—rising out of the darkness of the water, breaking the horizon, so many lights, so wondrous, bright, new.

  LONG BRIGHT

  LINE

  Through the window Clara could see the men: dark still hats huddled together. The only thing moving was their pipe smoke. It curled in lamp-lit clouds. Then—a whoop!—the clouds blew, the huddle burst, the hats were flying.

  Out in the street the gaslights seemed to feel her father’s cheer; on her mother’s face she watched them gutter.

  “Look at him.” The woman’s grip was strong as any man’s. “How happy!” But the fingers were bonier, worn to hooks. “Look,” she commanded. “And tell me where he sets his heart.” Then the grip became a shove. Her mother’s fetch your father and that damn club.

  The Society for Aeronautical Enthusiasm. Sometimes, when she was sad, or scared, or simply felt the overwhelming weight of her own being, she would intone the strange words like an incantation: Aeronautical enthusiasm, aeronautical enthusiasm, aeronautical … She said it now … enthusiasm … starting up the station steps … aeronautical … shoe-clacking through the empty lobby … enthusiasm … to the shut door … aeronautical enthusiasm. She knocked.

  Inside it was all smoke and suit backs, elbows at her head level, her father bending down, face flush as drunk, but eyes clear, grin pure, whoop a straight shot of glee. He scooped her up.

  “Fifty-nine seconds!”

  How long had it been since her father had held her like that?

  “Eight hundred and fifty feet!”

  Lifted her so high? With each hoist and drop she felt her years shake off, seven, six, five—her brother’s age—Larry in the corner watching, this is what it’s like to be him.

  Before her face: a piece of paper, some smiling stranger lifting and lowering it for her to read. At the top, the station master’s name. At the bottom, that of the man her father called their father: Bishop M. Wright.

  “The Flyer!” Her father raised her high again. Near the ceiling the air made her eyes water. “The Flyer!” He lifted her into the pipe-smoke clouds.

  But she wasn’t, wouldn’t be. The balloon ride he’d won—best guess at time and distance of the first flight—was a prize he unwrapped on the cold walk home: how they would scale the sunset, skim beneath the stars, a Christmas present more miracle than gift. Just not for her. Why? The basket size, the limits on weight. Besides, he said, ascending so high would surely swell that head of yours. He tugged her braid. No doubt big as the balloon itself. Laughed. While around them little Larry ran in circles, whooping.

  On Christmas Eve all she wanted was to stay up late enough to watch them float by above. But if she did, her mother told her, putting her heavy shoulders into the rolling pin, how could Saint Nick bring her her gifts? She spoke in sentences choppy with work: What did Clara think they were doing up there, her father, her brother, in that balloon? Airborne beside the sleigh, pointing out good children’s houses, steering the reindeer towards the right roofs. Why else would they have had to do it on Christmas Eve? The last word pressed out by a hard push. Why else leave their women alone this one night a
year she liked to share a little brandy with her husband, squeeze beside him on the chair, sing carols, hear that sweetness in your father’s voice, let her own loose just a little …

  “But what about Larry? He won’t be asleep.”

  Her mother set the pin down, crouched: her face suddenly level with her daughter’s, her eyes strangely soft, her brow smooth as the dough she’d rolled, her hand ice-cold on Clara’s cheek. From her forearm flour fell like snow. “You know,” she said, “they won’t see anything. Going up at night. Sweetie, out there it’ll just be cold and dark and not one damn thing to see.”

  There was the whole world. Edge to edge. Lit by the stark stare of a full Yule moon. And, out in the white-bright yard, at the verge of the snow-glowing fields, a seven-year-old girl illumined, looking up. Behind her: the sleeping house. Above: the starry sky. In it: nothing moving. She watched until her eyes stung. No teardrop silhouette slipped across the luminescent globe. Would the men up there have lit a lantern? Would she see its wink? The stars had fled the moon for the rest of the sky, piled so thick upon each other she had no hope of picking out the one she wanted…. But there! Could it move so fast? Careen across like that? Disappear in a blink before … and she was running, running in the direction the light had shot, running for the place on the horizon where she was sure she’d seen it come to earth.

  Sometime in the night her father found her. She woke to his hands unclamping her huddled curl, hauling her up. In his arms she shook so much the stars seemed to rattle. The moon was down. His stumbling, his breath: he was drunk.

  “Did you see us?” His quaking grin. “We went right over.”

  “No you didn’t.”

  “Yes!” His teeth a pale tremulous strip. “Your brother waved! I showed the house to Saint Nick. His sleigh landed right there!”

  “No it didn’t.”

  “You missed it? All that commotion? The hooves on the roof? Us caroling while we circled above? You truly missed it, truly?”

  Had she? His breath fluttered against her face, or her face shuddered beneath it. Had she? Inside they waited for her: the presents, lurking beneath the tree, irrefutable.

  Papa, what did it look like?

  Oh, magnificent! The white balloon, the light of the

  moon, the stars so close!

  No, Papa, what did it look like down here?

  Oh, so vast, so small, so strange to think we all live out

  our lives down there!

  No, Papa.

  The world! Astounding!

  What did I look like? Papa, what was it like to look down

  and see me?

  Like this, the way it might have looked to him had he been ballooning again the following Christmas Eve: a small girl sneaking out after supper, away from the dwindling singing, the laughter—mother, father, brother, home. His eight-year-old daughter slipping past the last light of the candle-lit windows, beyond the hay barn, the snow-blown fields, disappearing in the blackness beneath the sky. And then: a spark. A golden bloom. Like this, Clara: a little fiery face looking up out of all the darkness of the fields, your little face flickering with the light of the oil lamp you brought, your breath a sunset’s clouds, your eyes two glittering stars.

  Aeronautical enthusiasm, aeronautical enthusiasm …

  All the winter of ’05 she chanted it, silently, to herself, a spell to melt the snow, a wish for the rush of spring, and had he looked for her that March, that April, May, on the days when she skipped school, shirked chores, left her brother to play their well-house echo game alone, her mother on her knees wringing out the wash, had he looked, her father would have found her here: in the Scotch broom behind the split rail fence that bordered the cattle paddock they called Huffman Prairie, here, on her belly, behind a scrim of reeds, watching him.

  Watching him watch them. Two men in tweed coats and flat caps obsessed with some giant machine. Day after day, they worked on it, trained it like a horse, except—when one at last would mount it, and the other, joined by a helper, would give it a mighty running push—it flew. Its muslin wings stock still, its engine roaring like a mud-stuck truck, its driver clinging to the controls, and yet it flew surely as any bird. A bird aloft with a man on its back. Its shadow swept the stampeding cows, the whooping men. Her father too. (Tell me where he sets his heart.) He seemed to shiver in his clothes. Here, Clara thought. Rose on tiptoe, raised a hand to his eyes. Here.

  Sometimes he would join the others running down the field after the roaring bird. Sometimes he would help push it off the earth. If they were far away, she might not manage to tell him from the rest. She might imagine it was him up there guiding that flying machine. How she wanted to ask him! What did it feel like? What would it: that wind in her hair, that sudden lift below her belly? But all June she lay flat on the ground, behind the weeds, keeping quiet.

  Until, one day in mid-July, she screamed. How he heard her over the crash, she didn’t know. But when she peeled her palms from her eyes, there was the wreckage slammed against the ground, and two far figures running: one towards the crumpled machine, the other towards her.

  “No, no, no, no,” her father said, and, “can’t” and “daughter” and “not how the world works. Don’t you ever think of anyone but yourself? How could you make her do your work, your mother worry, poor sick woman!”

  She was? How had Clara not noticed it till now? She would have crouched beside the bed and shut her eyes and said the incantation, but learning what the words meant had leeched the magic from them. Enthusiasm: merely eagerness. Aeronautical: only relevant to things that lifted off the earth, took to the air, soared for the heavens.

  This was the last thing her mother said to her, one word: selfish, or selfless. She wasn’t sure. She only knew her mother had turned in bed, clutched her daughter’s face, held her gaze, said the word with such vehemence Clara flinched at the flecks of spit. Her mother’s fingers gripped her skull, eyes bore into hers. But did she mean herself or Clara? Was it an apology or reprimand? Warning or wish?

  She was at Huffman Prairie the day her mother died. September, windless. No figures in the field, no Flyer for them to push. She walked out there alone. At the end of the narrow track, a launching dolly lay overturned. Behind it, in the wet green grass, the bleached board looked white as bone. She lay down on it, aligned her spine with the rail. Stared up at the sky. Spread her arms.

  That evening, returning to her father’s stricken silence, her brother’s sobs, a home whose walls had become more thin, she would wonder if it was something you could see: the soul ascending. If that day she had simply been watching the wrong place in the firmament.

  Fall had come by the time her father brought her back to the field. He told her it was her mother’s dying wish.

  “To see the Flyer?” she asked.

  “For you to see it,” he said.

  Huffman’s was crowded. Farmers and friends, the entire Society, even the old man her father called their father, come out to watch the flight. That day, the machine made it above the windbreak and kept on, became a hawk, a kite, a sparrow, a spec, was gone. But she could hear the sound somewhere, coming back around, circling her, homing in.

  Her father seemed to have forgotten how to steer. She would hear his foot scuffs wandering the house, floor to floor, gliding room to room, his tail rudder busted, blown by winds only he could feel. Her brother: a brooding boy, so serious—seven years old and up first to fry the bacon, last in from the barns—so careful cleaning the plow horse’s hooves, so watchful over the hung tobacco for the slightest sign of rot. He spent his eighth birthday on the back of a cart, alone in the cold, forking fresh hay to the shivering Jerseys, worry frozen on his face.

  While Clara spent her tenth in her room writing a letter to a woman she’d never met: Dear Mrs. Miller, Can you please describe your ride in the dirigible? How long before you will go up again? Would you consider taking along a girl? I’m still quite small, and very light. By the time she was a teen the walls around her
were plastered with clippings, posters, photographs: Lieutenant Lahm alighting from his balloon in the field at Flyingdales Moor, the Wright brothers on the racetrack at Le Mans, the note she got back from Hart O. Berg (You never know … I’ll ask Orville … Maybe one day you’ll pilot your own!), the first woman ever lifted off the earth inside an aeroplane signing her name with an O bold as a daredevil’s loop. And the daredevils themselves! Glenn Curtiss of that lush mustache, sly-eyed Arch Hoxsey with his wry smile. Her first pack of cigarettes she purchased solely for the Ralph Johnstone card inside: goggles raised, chin strap sharpening his jaw, that slight swerve she so loved in the cock of an eyebrow above his steady gaze. At school, the girls talked of which boys they’d like to date. She smoked her Meccas, kept quiet. The boys discussed their options for careers, mocked her when she mentioned Raymonde de Laroche. (Her license! she shouted. That’s France! they jeered.) Why do you even bother? her few friends asked, when, already fourteen, she fought for a seat in the science class. You know this is your last year, anyway.

  Still, the day her father sat her down it was a shock. She had tried her best to bring him back, curled beside him on the couch reading aloud the news (Blériot across the English Channel! Latham breaks a thousand meters!). She brought him to her room to show him each poster she put up—the Los Angeles expo, the Grande Faime d’Aviation de la Champagne: skies aswirl with aviators thick as bees—hoping to rekindle the heart her mother had heard in his whoop that long-ago first flight. All spring she’d tutored boys in science class, saved just enough: two tickets to the aero meet in Indianapolis that June!

  But here was her father shaking his head. “You’re a woman now,” he told her.

  Her brother, across the table: “We need you here.”

  “And what,” she demanded, “if I go anyway?” To Indianapolis that June, or back to school that fall, or away forever.

  “This isn’t New York,” her brother said.

  “This is your home,” her father told her.

  “Sis”—Larry reached over, touched her arm—“can’t you see this is your job?”