Robert Butler - Mr. Spaceman

Maybe I got a little of Papa’s caution. Maybe that was the difference in how my life went. I don’t know. But there’s only so much you can do to control your fate. Look at Mama. She never went near the boats and she ended up drowning. That was in the great hurricane of 1899. I was eighteen and she was barely twice that. I can see now how young she was, looking back. The water came in and we went up in the attic and Mama looked down and her Singer sewing machine was just disappearing under the water and something took her. She only said a few words, like ‘My Singer,’ and she went on down, I guess to try to drag it up the stairs. Though of course that was impossible. It was a big thing bolted to its own table with wrought-iron legs. Papa was over in the other side of the attic and by the time he came across and down the stairs to follow her, she’d disappeared.

After that, Maidie got married and I’d help around the house. I’d go out with the women of Kitty Hawk and we’d make and mend the nets. I’d tend our garden. Some young men of the town courted me. But something wasn’t right. I’d go out when I could on my own, to walk. The dunes above Kitty Hawk Bay had growths of all kinds of trees, trying to make a go of it. Cedar and oak and sassafras and locust and sycamore and persimmon. And in the damp places between the dunes there were gums and cypresses and some old, fat-trunked pines. But there was such wind. All the time. The sands would roll in and blow the trees down and cover them over in big, crescent dunes. Whaleheads, we’d call them.

The day I’m thinking of was in December of 1903. I was in a bad mood. Some young man or other was pressing me to get serious. Papa was pressing me to listen to the young man. I just walked off that morning. It was the middle of the week and the wind was fierce, coming in from the north. For the better part of the year the wind blew from a little west of south, but in the winter it came straight down from the north pole, which nobody’d ever been to, at that time. I could’ve gone off and just hid in the trees, like I usually did. But sometimes you feel like going ahead and making things worse. A little bit of homeopathy. And if it didn’t work like that as a cure, then at least you could wallow in things and feel sorry for yourself.

So I struck off to the south, toward the Kill Devil Hills. Things down there would be about as gloomy as I could make them. I even passed a place where the winds had laid bare a cemetery. There were bones of dead people scattered all about, as cheap and naked as fish bones. I don’t know if that made me think of my mother. I can’t remember now, all these years later. It should have. And if it did, maybe I was reminded how your life wasn’t really your own. Which would be an answer of sorts to the question that has always blown around and around in my head: Why did my life go on as it did?

Anyway, I kept walking, and after about four miles, I got tired and I lay down in some beach heather on the westward slope of a little hill. I’d come up to it from the Albemarle side and I could hear the ocean crashing in the distance, though I hadn’t seen it yet. It seemed very far away from where I lay, and I may have dozed for a little while.

And then I awoke to a remarkable sound. I sat up straight and quick. It was a metallic rumble, full of pops and sputters. I knew it was an engine of some sort. I’d been to the mainland the year before and seen a couple of the new motorcars, which I loved. But this sound was coming from over the peak of the hill and I figured it wouldn’t be there for long. I scrambled to the top and I stood up, and there it was. At first I didn’t understand what it would do. It was laid out on a long track and for a moment I thought it must be a strange sort of railroad engine.

But it had wings. Sweet Jesus in heaven, it had wings. I could not name the parts at the time or recognize the things of the earth that they were made of, but I was taking them in like the features of the face of the man you’d just fallen in love with at first sight: the two great braced main wings, the twin horizontal elevators in front, the twin vertical rudders behind, all made of ash and spruce and muslin, and those engines, also at the rear, crying out to me, the two pusher propellers spinning into invisibility. And at that precise moment no human being had yet ever made a powered flight into the air and I saw the man lying prone in the center of the great lower wing and instantly I wished to be there in his place. Already, I wanted this act for myself. I stood there with the wind pounding at me, the same wind that was even then gathering beneath these wings, ready to lift them, I stood there and my dress was billowing and whipping around my legs and my hair had come undone and was unfurled from my head like a wind sock and I watched this wonderful thing that I loved instantly as it moved along its track gathering speed and my heart beat wildly and then this thing made of trees and cloth lifted up. It flew.

There would come an age, not too many years later, when there would be women who flew airplanes. I had the heart of any of them. I had the yearning. But I left the Kill Devil Hills that afternoon in December in 1903 with a desperate desire and no hope of ever fulfilling it. None. I was who I was. I cried out to myself some few words of this desire and I went down the steps and into the water and I was overwhelmed. I married the next year. I made a home for my husband who chose not to fish but to become a lumberman instead and he took us to Virginia and gave me three fine babies who became three fine sons who went off to do what they wished with their lives. But in the dark nights, with my husband sleeping beside me and the wind blowing the trees outside, I was unfaithful to him, again and again. I lay down with a great wing and there was the sound of its engine inside me and its propellers pressed me forward and into the sky.

Minnie’s voice disappears now from inside me. It flies off into one of those dark nights of hers, fifty years ago or more. But still remaining is the first night that Minnie Butterworth was on a spaceship and I found her awake and wandering our corridors. I arranged for her to speak to me then. I made the wind to blow for her and made her feel lifted up, and these words flowed out of her mouth and into me like a Big Gulp, like a Mondo Thirst Quencher.

But I knew that Minnie thirsted still.

So I said to her, “You are on a spaceship now.”

“I figured,” she said. “I was listening for your engines, but I couldn’t hear them.”

“They make no audible sound,” I said. “We are near to your home, though many miles above. Would you like to take us somewhere else?”

I could hear Minnie’s breath catch in her chest. But she narrowed her eyes at me, a gesture that even in that early stage of my research I understood to betoken suspicion.

I stood and took her by the arm, very gently, and I walked her from the interview room, down the corridor, and into the command center. I placed her in the first commander chair and I sat in the second. Even the nearly obsolete model of our basic vessel that we flew in mid-century could easily have been commanded by one, but, fortunately, there were still two places, mostly for wormhole navigation.

I moved my hand over the panels and the great screen before Minnie Butterworth flashed into a vast image of her home planet as seen from our ventral eye. It was at this moment that Minnie let herself understand and believe what it was that I offered. Instantly her eyes filled with tears.

I make a connection now, late in my present night, alone before my New and Improved panels. I have always felt a tender thing for the quickness of the tears of my wife Edna Bradshaw. I realize that this trait in her has inevitably stirred — in the deep, singing part of me, the wordless true part of me — a memory of Minnie Butterworth on the night that she flew.