by Nick Arvin
“They’re manufacturing flammable gas,” his father said, indicating the barrels and tubs. “They fill the balloon with flammable gas so it will float on the air, like cork on water.”
George examined the equipment for several minutes before growing bored. The concussion of the 9:15 cannonade sounded beyond the wall. A friend of George’s father’s came up and began speaking to him, and George was given charge of the rope handle that pulled Madeline’s wagon. Although George’s father now worked a busy trade in the woolens, cottons, silks, and furs that moved over Philadelphia’s docks, in his youth he had apprenticed to a spinning wheel maker and he was still an adept woodworker. He had done all he could to make Madeline’s wagon comfortable, padding it thickly and putting on large wheels. It still did not ride very smoothly in the deeply rutted streets, but Madeline was too big now to be carried in the arms like a babe and too weak to walk very far. George pointed out to her the oars and the four-fluked anchor that hung over the side of the balloon’s gondola. She nodded. She stroked Tad absently between the ears and watched the aeronaut, who was talking to people in French, which George did not understand.
When George glanced at Madeline again, she was watching him. She said, “Can I go in the balloon?”
“I don’t think so,” he said. He had overheard others at the gate asking about riding in the balloon. Impossible, they had been told.
Madeline looked up, as if imagining the balloon already overhead. It had been hazy, but now the sky presented a clean field of blue.
By the time the 9:30 cannons fired, the balloon was lemon-shaped and swaying lightly between the two wooden poles. From moment to moment George could see no change in it. He fidgeted. His socks itched.
Madeline had fallen into a doze in her little wagon seat, mouth open, eyes closed, head crooked sideways against her shoulder. Tad looked around curiously from his position within her arms. Adults conversing nearby paused to look at her. She seemed pale. Without waking her, George touched her hair, felt gently between his fingers the thin light silken strands. Realizing he was for the moment her protector, her guard, on duty, he put his feet together, locked his knees, and stiffened his shoulders. All his earliest memories involved Madeline, and among their several siblings the two of them, the twins, had always been closest. When he had fallen ill with scarlet fever a year before, Madeline had been the one at his bedside every day, the face he saw when he woke from the hot fearful dreams. He was determined to be equally as good to her now.
At 9:45 a tremendous crash and roar of cannon fire sounded from Potter’s Field—they had fired more than two guns this time, perhaps a dozen—and Madeline started slightly then looked blearily around. George took her hand. A cheering rose from the streets just beyond the wall and gained volume, passion. George’s father appeared beside him. “That will be your namesake,” he said.
Two soldiers entered bearing long-barreled muskets made longer by gleaming bayonets; President George Washington followed, carrying himself with military bearing. He wore a black velvet coat with knee-length tails, and the buckles on his knee breeches and shoes shone in the sun. The brass band sounded a fanfare and the crowd parted before the president and the entourage of diplomats and adjutants that trailed behind him. George had seen the president before, riding the streets in his white carriage, but the sight of him now thrilled a certain nerve. It made him want to laugh although he knew this was inappropriate. When he looked at Madeline, however, he saw that she seemed not to notice or recognize the president—her attention was fixed on the swelling yellow balloon.
“I want to go in the balloon,” she said to George. He shook his head.
Blanchard came forward and bowed before the American president. Next to the president the French aeronaut looked small and awkward—his head and his joints were too large, his eyes and forehead bulged, his nose protruded, his chin was weak. George wondered if all the men in France looked like this. He wondered if all aeronauts must be small men.
President Washington drew forth a parchment scroll. He turned to the assembled crowd and announced it was a passport for safe passage wherever Monsieur Blanchard’s balloon might carry him in the United States of America. Madeline tugged the hem of their father’s coat. “Can I go in the balloon?” Their father shook his head at her, put his finger to his lips. Washington was reading from the parchment: “—receive and aid him with that humanity and goodwill which may render honor to their country and to an individual so distinguished by his efforts to establish and advance an art, in order to make it useful to mankind in general.” Blanchard accepted the passport with another bow, then hurried away. He ordered the gondola moved into position beneath the balloon, which buoyed with force now against its tethers. “Why?” Madeline insisted, looking vexedly up from her wagon seat.
“Dear child, I’m sorry, it’s impossible,” their father said, his voice now low and pleading. “We’ll get you some sweets when we get home.” Around the aerostat things were happening quickly: ropes were tied, knots were checked and checked again, the two large hoses were extracted from the neck of the balloon. A couple of tethers were released and the balloon rose, then jerked to a stop. A lady in the crowd swooned, causing a minor uproar as a dozen gentlemen gathered around her to offer help. The ropes between the balloon and the gondola were taut. There seemed to be no wind at all. Madeline pressed her face into Tad’s fur and began to cry. Their father sighed and knelt beside her. George felt miserable watching them.
Blanchard held up a barometer and a lodestone, put these into the gondola. He checked several knots again. Two cannons in Potter’s Field fired ten o’clock and the crowds in the street grew noisy, calling for the balloon. Some began to hiss. George’s father held Madeline by the shoulders and whispered to her, but she was shaking her head, and George’s father looked near tears himself. Madeline said again, half choking, “I want to go in the balloon!” George put a hand out, but did not quite touch her, wishing he could do something, but it seemed nothing could be done. Blanchard came forward to address the crowd. He spoke in French and the language sounded peculiar and impenetrable to George. Why, George wondered, couldn’t she ride in the balloon? Why should this ugly little Frenchman, of all people, get to go into the sky? But such things were decided by adults.
Blanchard finished his speech and the crowd cheered and he waved his hat. Suddenly an idea struck George and without thinking further he seized Tad from his sister—who stared at him in surprise—and he darted away. As he pushed through the crowd the little dog in his arms twisted to peer back over his shoulder. He heard his father calling behind him but did not catch the words. He escaped the crowd, ran straight to Blanchard, and thrust—nearly threw—Tad toward him, so Blanchard had no choice but to take the dog or let it fall. Blanchard, gaping, held the dog awkwardly and blinked at it, then looked up at George. But George had already ducked into the crowd and disappeared behind a lady’s broad hoop skirt. The Frenchman called after him, but the crowd was laughing and many of them cheered jubilantly for the dog. Some called out encouragements in French. The brass band played. When George looked back again he saw Blanchard setting the dog gently in the gondola. Then the Frenchman tipped his hat to the crowd and clambered in himself.
George circled around to rejoin his sister. His father examined him narrowly, as if he suspected his son had been replaced by some other boy, and Madeline stared at him with a blank, cool anger that struck George with horror. Suddenly, however, she laughed and seized his hand.
Blanchard waved. The brass band sounded a flamboyant fanfare. As the last three tethers were loosed, George felt he could not have breathed had he wanted to, and although Madeline was smiling she gripped his hand fiercely. With ropes dangling the balloon hovered, motionless, and it seemed this was all it could do. But then, very slowly, it began to move upward, and the hundred or so spectators in the prison yard released a loud hurrah! As the balloon lifted itself over the prison walls, a thunderous volley of the artillery on Potter’s Fi
eld greeted its appearance and cheers and screams spread rapidly in the streets until a great clamor and tumult of noise resounded from every road and building and the bells rang in all the steeples—to George the extraordinary, reverberating pandemonium seemed like the swollen noise of his own soaring elation, his sense of a broadening, of wonder, of worlds unfolding. The balloon shook faintly in the sky, an effect that startled and worried George until he discovered it was caused by the trembling of his own excitement. Madeline let go of his hand to applaud, and when he glanced at her, she seemed perfectly radiant with joy. Blanchard waved a flag displaying the French tricolor on one side and the American ensign on the other while in the crook of his arm he held Tad, who appeared quite calm in his ascendancy. The balloon continued straight upward, rising precisely like an element from myth or dream, until Tad could no longer be made out, and soon Blanchard himself was a mere dot beneath the orb of the balloon, which looked like an amber moon in the daytime sky. Its position in the firmament was so peculiar that it seemed to mark an extraordinary disjunction, a topsy-turvy world. The hard shell of the impossible had been cracked, and who could say what might appear next?
Soon, however, the aerostat wafted to the southeast, then drifted out of sight behind the roof of a building. Everyone in the prison yard looked there a moment longer before, with sighs, they turned their attention back to earthly concerns. A man was rubbing his neck, and George realized his hurt too.
At some point during the launch President Washington and his entourage had slipped away. Now others began to leave. The young man who had been stirring the contents of the barrels gathered the hoses and disassembled the gas-making equipment. The brass band broke apart. George’s father said a few words to some friends, then took the rope of Madeline’s wagon in one hand, George’s fingers in the other, and pulled them toward the street. “I hope,” he said, squeezing George’s fingers hard, “that Tad will make it back to us. Madeline would be heartbroken.”
George felt a chill of panic. He had not even thought the dog might not somehow return. But Madeline’s happy smile and lack of concern was contagious. Either the dog would return, or he would lift onward directly into the heavens: nothing evil could happen to that balloon.
The roads were still crowded with hordes calling and cheering, and now drinking too. His father added, “I must say, I have never seen anything of the sort. So many thousands concentrating their eyes and thoughts at the same instant upon the same object, and all of them made happy by it.” He laughed. “To think, Tad, the aero-dog.” Then he exclaimed, “A flying man! A flying dog!”
But by the time Tad had been returned, several days later, Madeline was dead, and when she died a knot of sorrow had tied itself inside George’s chest. All through the years since that knot had remained. He could feel it still, a small hard point of agony and mourning which would live as long as he did. The entire world had changed—the railroads, the paved and gaslit streets, the cans, the factories, the steamboats, the telegraph—and yet, George wondered, will not a thing leave a man during an entire lifetime? Can nothing ever be put behind? Must the past always be before his eyes?
The eldritch odor. The muted hubbub of the crowd on the other side of the prison wall. The brush of his hands against Blanchard’s as he gave him Tad. The light feel of Madeline’s hair in his fingers. Her luminous expression as the balloon ascended—he was the only person still alive who remembered her.
Now his feet ached dully with gout. Everyone he had once known was dead—his parents, his siblings, his wife. Why of all these dead did he return now to Madeline? He felt a pulse of guilt. But the others had lived lives and had children, created their legacies and made their mistakes, while Madeline had none of that, had died while still, in a sense, perfect. Also, she was his twin and closest to him in profound ways. He had loved her with a strange instinct.
The blue light of the moon pressed into cracks between the planks of the barn walls. George lay with things coursing invisibly in him, like winds, shifting. He moved through memories and perhaps dreams as well. He thought of Mme Blanchard, Monsieur Blanchard’s second wife, who continued ballooning for many years after his death and became a favorite of Napoleon’s. She said the only place she could sleep well was aloft at night in the peace of the sky, curled in a gently swaying gondola, a stone’s throw from the stars. George had read of her and had imagined Madeline dreaming and sleeping in the sky. He thought of Madeline and again of the peddler, Nathan, who reminded him of Madeline, and he thought how strange it was, how people he thought were gone could resurface, altered but recognizable.
Madeline had been his twin—and it occurred now to George that Nathan perhaps also reminded him a little of himself, when he had been young, a great many years ago.
Somewhere a rooster began to crow, and in answer a dog howled. The horses stirred and stamped their hooves. Something, probably mice, rustled in the hay. A distant bugle sounded reveille. Already muskets were snapping peevishly back and forth.
George thought perhaps he had lived too long. He was not eager for death, could not find that in himself, but neither would he regret or fear it when it came. He wished his last years, for likely these were his last, had not coincided with this war and its confusion and ubiquitous tragedy. He was now the only man in a house of women, all the other men dead or gone west or to the war. And, however he felt about the war, to be left behind was shameful and piercing and hard to a degree he had not expected. Those who went to war might find their lives stupidly bullied about and wasted upon the bullet-sown fields, but at least they had lives to be wasted.
When George stepped outside the barn, his eyes watered in the chill of the air, and it took several minutes for them to clear so he could see again. He brushed the hay off his coat. The sky of this new day was built in shades from black to blue to violet to a rose blush. It was perfectly clear and vast beyond human comprehension: to go up into it seemed a giddy madness.
He walked alone to the grassy sward of the balloon launch site. Some of the men held blankets around themselves against the morning chill. Others stood rocking from foot to foot and smoking. It appeared the balloon still had not arrived. The fires had been revived and were generating odors of coffee and of frying potatoes and onions and emitting lines of smoke that rose long and straight, like pillars upholding the firmament. Soon, in the east, an artillery gun began firing, followed shortly by another, and everyone stopped to listen. Then the rebel retorts could be heard, and as if this were a signal that all things were well, the soldiers began to move again, perhaps more hastily now, consuming their hardtack, potatoes, and canned milk, their tobacco and coffee. Between the wheel spokes of the gas generator wagons stretched spiderwebs glinting with dew. Breath could be seen clouding very faintly. George’s hands and feet were cold, but he was so used to this sensation that he hardly noticed. The aching of his body had subsided, and he felt a renewed enthusiasm at the idea of seeing the balloon, and he fretted over the possibility that it had somehow been damaged or indefinitely delayed. He saw Lowe glowering at his pocket watch. Some of the men were already sipping whiskey. The moon was still in the sky, looking wan. In front of Lowe was a crude table, assembled from logs and a few boards, across which several maps were spread, weighted down by a couple of stones, an inkwell, and a Colt revolver. George spotted Nathan standing off to one side and walked over to him. “Good morning,” he said.
Nathan nodded. “Morning.”
“Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll buy that can tool from you.”
“You will?” Nathan looked as if he thought George might be joking. “Why?”
“It will be a gift to my daughter-in-law. A souvenir of the trip.”
“All right. Let me find it.”
George gave him three dollars for it without haggling. He took the thing and chuckled at it, flipped the swiveling metal bit, and dropped it into his pocket. Nathan said, “I’m sure your daughter-in-law will find it a real improvement on her hammer and chisel. Bet
ter than—”
He stopped, his attention drawn to a noise over George’s shoulder. Someone was shouting wildly and incomprehensibly. George turned and saw a rapidly approaching wagon pulled by two galloping horses. With cries and shouts and the noise of hooves it rolled into the middle of the field and halted. All around men shoved the last of their breakfasts into their mouths and kicked dirt or threw water over their cooking fires. Professor Lowe was yelling to get the gas generators and tether lines into position. Soon the balloon had been laid out on the ground, then attached in its netting to the rope suspended between the two tall poles. The soldiers worked in coordinated, practiced fashion to set up the wagons and feed them with chemicals, to connect the balloon to hoses from the gas generators, to lay out various tether lines and windlasses. A man moved between the fire pits with a bucket of water, dousing thoroughly to ensure every ember was extinguished. George began circling round the balloon. He felt extraordinarily youthful and jubilant.
Slowly the balloon began to inflate. It was an autumnal shade of orange, and its name hung within the netting in large letters: CONSTITUTION. The men now stood around in clusters and paused in their conversations every so often to look at the balloon. George felt a warm pleasure—he seemed almost to rise off the earth himself, as if the balloon’s mere presence made all things lighter. Not far away Nathan sat on a log with a piece of paper on an overturned iron skillet balanced on his knees, sketching with rapid strokes, glancing up occasionally at the balloon.
This too reminded George of Madeline. Even at her very young age, Madeline had shown skill, did ink studies of plants and human figures with a breezy, precocious confidence. At the time George had resented her talent—the memory of that resentment now slid into him like a blade.
After some minutes Lowe strode over to George. “Come,” he said, taking George by the elbow. George gently pulled himself out of his grip while they walked across the clearing toward the balloon. Lowe pushed his hand into the side of it, testing the pressure. He said, “This one carries twenty-five thousand cubic feet of gas. The Great Western, the balloon I intended to ride across the Atlantic, before the war upset all plans, had a capacity of over seven hundred thousand cubic feet.” He shook his head sadly. “The Constitution is a fine craft, but the Great Western was a glorious one.”
