Archangel Page 2

  Before he could go anywhere, though, the cows had to be milked, the milk weighed and the data charted, his duties pulsing steadily through each day. Less steadily, but still several times a week, Miss Atkins came by to see a new flower or some freshly hatched chicks, or to show them a bat or a fossil she’d found in the Glen. Always she ended her visits by shedding her shoes and stockings, slipping on pants, and checking the trap she left in the pond for the blind white fish. Constantine, wanting to help, swept the water regularly with a dip net in her absence, but he brought up only the same minnows, catfish, frogs, and snails that made their way into the traps: never the Amblyopsis. Equally elusive were answers to his simplest questions about this place and its people. What, for instance, kept the farm afloat financially?

  He could see money coming in from Ed, who in addition to his duties at the farm worked as the agricultural reporter for a Syracuse newspaper and paid Taggart room and board—but then it went out again to Beryl, paid to keep house. He himself worked for free, but he ate enormously and Taggart provided all his food, along with his work clothes, barn boots, and clean linen. Milk and eggs and vegetables were their own, but Taggart had to buy beef and grain and other supplies. The experiments they did in the orchard weren’t aimed at increasing their yield of apples or pears but at developing new breeds; the same was true in the vegetable garden; they sold much of their milk to a local cheese maker but the point of all the weighing and measuring didn’t seem to make the herd more productive.

  One afternoon, when Ed and Taggart were busy with something in the village, Beryl emerged from the kitchen with a basket of laundry and caught him staring over the terraced vineyards below as he pondered these mysteries. “Are you homesick?” she asked.

  “I’m not a child,” he said, startled to have her ask something personal. Although she was there when he came in for breakfast and stayed until the supper dishes were done, they talked only about the tasks that needed doing each day. “I’ve worked away from home the last three summers.”

  “Your uncle mentioned that,” she said. “And also said that your father …” She stopped, smoothed a creased shirt, began again. “Was it Taggart’s older brother you visited?”

  “Harry,” he said, pausing to consider all the hours she and the men spent without him. “Do you know him?”

  She shrugged. “Not really; I was a baby when he left, and not much older when your mother ran off with your father. I was wondering if he was like Taggart. Or if your mother was, for that matter.” She prodded the heap of damp clothes with one foot. “You don’t talk much about the rest of your life.”

  “Neither do you,” he said, more sharply than he meant.

  She carried the basket to the clothesline and pinned a shirt that might have been his. Ran off—what did she know?His mother said she’d met his father, a stranger to the area, at the county fair and gone happily with him to Detroit when he found work. It was back there that he felt, not homesick but … some other thing. Wedged into a small flat with his three sisters and his parents, he longed for Uncle Harry’s farm—as, he imagined, he would long for this place someday. Clean sheets on a bed his own, a room with no one else in it. Good food, time to himself, and a property that, although modest in size, continued to surprise him.

  The dips and rises broke it into small fields and pastures; the trees pressed close and so did the neighboring vineyards; in sheds and outbuildings, benches bore tubs of peculiar substances. Balsam, he guessed of one, sniffing closely; lint, cottonseed, some kind of oil. Yesterday he’d discovered a room packed with wood, metal rods, glinting shavings, wires, lathes, chisels. Elsewhere chicks warmed beneath lamps, beans fermented, seeds slept in paper bags. Some days Taggart and Ed disappeared into one or another building after breakfast and didn’t emerge until it was time for the evening milking; other days they sat on the porch for hours, arguing and drawing plans. Everything about the way they lived was new to him, including the neighbors who, on bicycles made by a local mechanic at the edge of the village, zipped past him as he walked down to the lake to swim. At home, his family was so far from being able to afford a bicycle that he’d never let himself want one. Here—maybe someone had an old one, a very old one, that he could have in exchange for work?

  The mechanic, he soon learned, also built motorcycles: staggeringly fast, endlessly fascinating. Once, as he walked past the pharmacist’s store, he was nearly run down by a thin man with a dark mustache, crouched low over the handlebars of a model with a particularly raucous engine. Other days, as he watched motorcycles dart past loaded wagons, annoying even the drivers of the automobiles already annoying the horses, he imagined himself as one of the goggled drivers. On the afternoon that Ed and Taggart tore out of the driveway on a pair of motorcycles he hadn’t seen before, only his mother’s orders not to ask for anything kept him from begging for a ride.

  He did the milking and the data tabulation by himself that evening, finishing up before he heard the pair of engines tracing their way along the west shore road, through the village, up the hill to the house. Both men were talking happily as they made their way toward the barn and then, once they saw all the work was done, into the house.

  “That,” Taggart said, taking in the freshly washed pails and completed charts, “was very thoughtful.” He swung his goggles from his thumb, white-rimmed eyes shining in a face caked everywhere else with dirt.

  Two days later, Ed rode a used bicycle up the hill and offered it to Constantine for the rest of the summer. He learned how to ride it in an hour, and then—suddenly he could reach so many places! He pedaled for several miles along the same shore road Taggart and Ed had taken. He rode up and down the hills along the road toward Bath. He explored the Pleasant Valley, a stretch of bottom land extending back from the lake, and he found the farm owned by one of his uncle’s friends, who bred and raced trotting horses. The oval track was sometimes loaned out for bicycle races, and he dreamed of being old enough to enter one.

  He was sharpening a knife on the porch, a few days later, when he looked up to see a giant dragonfly rising from that same valley. Or not a dragonfly, but a mechanical version of one, guided by a man seated between its golden double wings. He dropped the knife, leapt the rail, and ran toward it across the field. The sound attached to the sight—tik-a, tik-a, tik-a, tik-a. Tika tika tika—brought his uncle to the door of one of the sheds.

  “Do you see?” Taggart called.

  The thing moved steadily, casting a slim shadow. As it sank, Constantine saw another figure watching from halfway down the hill, a girl with curly dark hair resting her hand on a wooden stake in the vines.

  “That’s one of G.H.’s aeroplanes,” Taggart said. Tik … a, and it touched unsteadily down. “He and some friends have been experimenting with a double-wing design, using his lightest motorcycle engine.”

  “I, I, I,” Constantine stuttered. “I want—can we go see?”

  “Of course,” Taggart said easily, and the next day brought him right inside the little factory he’d only walked past before. Bicycles and motorcycles, motors and frames, shelves and benches and then, in a separate shed, parts of a flying machine. The man who’d nearly run him down in the village—this was G.H.—showed him bamboo struts guyed with piano wire, a three-wheeled landing gear, hinged tips at the end of wings and the shoulder yoke that controlled them. An elderly man wearing a fez walked in holding a model helicopter, which was powered by rubber bands; over the winter he’d gotten a full-sized version three feet off the ground. A young mechanic suspended a model wing inside a long box with a fan at one end and then invited them to view the swirling threads of red silk. Everywhere Constantine saw another marvel. He had no desire to emulate his father, who worked, when he worked at all, at a tool-and-die shop, but he loved the machines. The biplane he’d glimpsed was called the June Bug; it was kept in a tent near the racetrack he’d seen, and had already flown several times. Two other models had been tested earlier in the year and the light, powerful engines G.H. b
uilt, which had first powered motorcycles and then dirigibles, had meanwhile lured to the area other men interested in building flying machines.

  As Constantine listened to the men talk, he understood for the first time that his uncle wasn’t just a tinkerer or an amateur animal breeder: he made things. Something that helped bind the bamboo into a sturdy frame; a refinement of the varnish spread on the wings to seal the cloth. The little crook in the tubing controlling the rudder was his design as well. In the same way that Taggart tinkered with cows and fowl, cross-breeding and selecting until he’d improved some aspect, he joined inanimate objects—screws, oil, guncotton, rubber, parts from those tubs and bins at home—until something new emerged.

  SO THE VILLAGE, which had looked so quiet, turned out to be just as mysterious as the farm. Now that Constantine knew to look, he found dirigibles parked in a hangar on the flats and others corralled, like whales in a narrow bay, in the same glen where Miss Atkins found her fossils. Beryl revealed, while serving dinner, that last summer she’d seen several of the strange, lumpy shapes moving slowly between the hills. And in the spring, she said, a few months before Constantine had joined them, she’d stood on the swimming dock as a dirigible bumbled past like a gigantic fat bee, the pilot pointing the nose up or down by scuttling across the matchstick frame of the gondola suspended below. If she’d had a ladder, she said, she could have grabbed the pilot’s foot. Constantine gaped, he envied her furiously; why had she kept this secret?

  The nights were short now, as they neared the end of June; they milked a bit later but still it was light when they ate, light when they cleared their plates, light enough for a bicycle ride after supper, when the air finally began to cool. Unremarkable-looking strangers he’d earlier ignored were now revealed to be aerialists, drawn here by G.H.’s presence, many acquainted with his uncle. One experimented with a full-sized version of a helicopter, one had built a flapping-winged thing called an ornithopter, another worked on an experimental monoplane. He met stuntmen, engineers, an Army officer interested in dropping bombs from the air. Each gave him a different sense of Taggart but didn’t help him understand more about Ed.

  One night he rode down to the beach and stayed longer than usual with the splashing boys, looking up for a shape in the air each time his head broke the surface. By the time he dressed the sun was nearly gone, and the last part of his ride home was dark enough to be difficult. He steered by the light from the kitchen window, found the house empty when he entered, and padded barefoot across the floor, imagining Taggart and Ed working in one of the sheds and Beryl long since headed for home. A noise from the porch drew him across the parlor toward the open door. In the dim light he saw someone—Ed, he realized, when his eyes adjusted more fully—standing very close to Beryl.

  Both seemed to be looking at the sky above the lake. He backed up a few steps and then moved forward again, this time purposefully banging the doorframe as he passed. Smoothly the pair slid apart, greeting him with neither embarrassment nor explanation.

  “Did you have a good swim?” Beryl asked.

  “Excellent,” Constantine replied. Were they … courting, then? That was the word his mother would have used. But if they were, where did this leave Taggart?

  Ed began to fan her with a magazine he picked up from one of the chairs. Beryl lived with her father, Constantine knew by then, along with her brothers and sisters and a maiden aunt in a house not half a mile away. Her father worked with G.H. as a mechanic at the little factory but spent much of his pay packet on new gadgets; her wages supported the household. He’d begun to feel guilty for the extra work he caused her.

  “Tomorrow,” Ed said, swirling the pages enthusiastically, “we’ll have a chance to see an eclipse, if it doesn’t cloud up. Look.” He held the magazine out to Constantine.

  Popular Astronomy: what was he supposed to do with this? An eclipse was … he thought he remembered from school that it had something to do with the moon, but the article marked by a long piece of grass was no use at all, dense text framing an array of maps covered with curved lines and numbers. As he let the magazine fall to the chair, Taggart stepped onto the porch. Beryl seemed perfectly glad to see him.

  “I was showing him Phoebe’s calculations for the eclipse,” Ed said, adding to Constantine, “We knew the person who made those tables when we were all at Cornell. Phoebe Wells, she was then.”

  “What time does our Phoebe predict?” Taggart asked.

  Ed retrieved the magazine, found the right table, and ran a finger along one of the curved lines. “Just before ten,” he said, and then, ignoring both Constantine and Beryl, began planning with Taggart what they’d need for the following morning. A few minutes later, Beryl left. The men were still talking intently when Constantine went to bed: and talking, still—had they even slept?—when he rose and found them in the kitchen, eating crescent-shaped pancakes that Beryl, who called them “partial-eclipse cakes,” flipped on the griddle.

  He ate three himself and they all scurried to finish the chores before gathering on the porch. Taggart produced pieces of smoked glass through which, he said, they could watch what was happening without damaging their eyes, and Constantine peered astonished through his as the moon’s shadow bit its first curve from the sun. So this was an eclipse! Ten forty-five, eleven o’clock; the sun was a chubby crescent pointing toward the lake, then a slimmer crescent pointing down. In Florida, Taggart said, those lucky enough to be in the shadow’s direct path would see an annular eclipse, a brilliant ring around the darkened sun. Here, as the eclipse peaked, a little more than half the sun was covered.

  After a few minutes, Ed tapped his arm and pointed at the fluttering pattern of light and shadow under the big maple tree. “Take a look,” Ed said. “An indirect view’s as useful as a direct one—you can see the changing shape of the sun just as clearly there, on the ground. Each little hole between the overlapping leaves acts like a pinhole camera to project an image.”

  What was a pinhole camera? Later he’d ask for an explanation but for now he trotted over to the tree and saw what Ed meant; light filtered through the canopy and cast bright crescents onto the ground, each the exact shape of the sun at that moment and all of them trembling with the breeze. On the porch, the adults had set down their bits of smoked glass and, leaning over the railing with outstretched arms, had made themselves into trees. Ed, in the middle, held his left hand angled left, fingers spread, with Taggart’s right hand lying perpendicularly across it. Beryl’s left hand, angled left, similarly crossed Ed’s right. Each set of intersecting fingers formed a cross-hatched pattern, which focused light like the leaves. On the ground bright slivers danced beneath their joined hands and the three of them laughed and laughed.

  ON THE THURSDAY after the eclipse, Constantine heard the sound of the aeroplane’s engine while he was wading in the pond with his dip net, and again while he was tending the calves, but he missed seeing it. On Friday, while he was weeding the eggplants, he leapt up as soon as he heard the clattering whirr and ran to the rise, where he was rewarded with a glimpse of the varnished golden wings through the trees. On Saturday, the Fourth of July, the aeroplane was to fly in public, as part of the holiday celebration, and he planned to be as close as possible when it took off.

  That night he was too excited to sleep and he rose and dressed in thick darkness the instant he heard his uncle stir. But although he and Taggart and Ed finished the chores before it was fully light, and Beryl packed a picnic basket before they’d even finished breakfast, everyone else had the same idea and they arrived at the Pleasant Valley field to find a crowd already there. Tromping the grounds of the Stony Brook Farm, pressing up near the tent where the June Bug sheltered, or grouped with blankets and baskets along the embankment, were hundreds of people who lived in the area and hundreds more who’d come from far away. Reporters and amateur aerialists and curious families, staff from the Scientific American come to assess the flight—this wasn’t just an exhibition, Constantine learned. The ma
gazine had offered a trophy for the first aeroplane flight of one kilometer—3,281 feet, Taggart said—measured in a straight line. Packed around the magazine men were a movie crew, hoping to film either the flight or an exciting disaster, and members of the Aero Club from New York.

  All the best spots were already taken, and they would have ended up on the far side of the potato patch if Taggart hadn’t spotted Miss Atkins waving at them from a prime spot under a tree just north of the red barn. As they crossed the damp field she rose to greet them and then introduced Constantine to the girls sprouting around her feet.

  “Marion, Caroline, Elaine,” she said: a girl nearly grown, one about his own age, and an elfin one with beautiful eyes who might have been seven or eight. Perhaps because there were so many strangers around, Miss Atkins was wearing an ordinary dress; two toddlers, chubby-legged and dark-haired and impossible to tell apart, clutched fistfuls of the sprigged cloth. “And these are the twins,” she added. “Agnes and Alice.”

  “Your nieces?” Constantine guessed, remembering their first meeting. Her sister must be a good deal younger.

  She nodded. “Their mother loaned them to me for the day.”

  But everything else seemed more important. The men from the city, with their fancy hats; the pair mounting movie cameras, which he’d never seen before, atop heavy wooden tripods; visitors on motorcycles or in unusual automobiles, many carrying umbrellas and all focused on the white tent sheltering the June Bug. Through an open flap, he could see one man doing something to the propeller while another fiddled with the tail section, and he began to inch closer. Beryl had headed off toward some friends her age, and Taggart was watching her rather than him, but he’d barely begun his move when Taggart gestured and said, “Stay here, for now. This is serious business.”