Mark Dunn - American Decameron

“I’m only saying,” resumed Salley, whose youthful earnestness betrayed his appreciation for being treated as an equal to these more established and seasoned men of the American press, “that Langley’s well-attended aeronautical debacle is probably the reason that nobody paid much attention to the reports coming out of this little patch of sandy wilderness. After all, the brothers’ first flight took place hardly a week after Langley’s flying machine received its well-financed bath.”

“ If , that is, you are among those who believe that such a flight ever took place here,” qualified Ruhl through his muffled hacks.

Unfortunately for the newsmen, each hoping for the scoop of the century, that first day was a bust. All the sand and the stealth and the New York Herald correspondent Byron Newton’s near-death encounter with a slithering, dauntless copperhead had been for naught. At the other camp — the one under surveillance — there had been activity of a sort. The machine was brought out of its shed and there followed hours of tinkering, and then the twin propellers were made to turn, each glistening tauntingly in the bright sunshine, and as the five men of the press waited eagerly in their minimally concealing blind, the machine sat decidedly immobile upon its wooden skids and its specially built monorail and nothing else of note occurred. Before the onset of dusk and the hampering darkness, the quintet gathered up their supplies and made their long, laborious, grumble-inflected trek to the boat that would return them to their inn at Manteo.

The next day: a virtual reenactment of the day before.

The third day seemed equally unpromising. By midmorning, with the prospect of continued aeronautical stasis, Salley was lambasted by his colleagues for what surely must have been faulty eyesight and then excoriated over what surely must have been faulty memory and finally condemned for having been catalytically responsible for all of their present tribulations by virtue of his very birth. Each of the newsmen wondered to himself if the brothers who had invented the fantastical machine had been made well aware of the newsmen’s interloping presence and were therefore waiting until their permanent departure before perpetrating anything historical upon these windy dunes. Or was all of this exactly as the world press had snidely surmised? Was it not the Paris edition of the American paper, the Herald (to which Bruce Salley had earlier sent his fervent eyewitness dispatches), that said in early 1906, “They are in fact either flyers or liars. It is difficult to fly. It’s easy to say, ‘We have flown.’”

The answer to all of these questions came in the form of a sound — that of spinning propellers. Rather than the clanking clatter redolent of a grain reaper, being the sound that had earlier broadcast itself from the vicinity of the rotating blades, there now came a crisp rat-a-tat-tat — the rataplan becoming sharper in tone as the blades spun faster and with greater assurance. Now, as Salley’s companions looked on, first with spiritless half-curiosity, and then, suddenly, with full, unbridled anticipation, the men witnessed exactly what the youngest and least experienced among them had already seen with his own eyes several days earlier and had tried to convey, had tried to put forth with the same convincing detail that characterized the accounts of that select handful of privileged men and women who had seen it, too — had seen that which Orville and Wilbur had done and done repeatedly ever since that first blustery day in December of 1903, when history was made and then promptly and roundly ignored. This newly privileged crop of correspondents watched as the Wright Brothers’ flying machine glided smoothly and quickly down its monorail track. They heard shouts of encouragement as it lifted itself up into the air, as its white wings caught the angled light of the morning sun and shimmered, as Wright Flyer III defied the gusting wind and rose thirty, forty, then fifty feet into the air. And then Jimmy Hare, in his thickest, most theatrical cockney brogue, cried “My Gawd!” and snapped a picture that all the world would later see and take as proof.

It was the kind of proof necessary to convince a doubting world. For man was never meant to fly. That was axiomatic. It was an impossibility that ranked with equal weight alongside the concept of terrestrial immortality and the absurdity of amity between the Russians and the Japanese.

It had taken only five years, and numerous flights both from the lofty dunes of Kill Devil Hills and the flat, grassy fields of Huffman Prairie in the brothers’ home state of Ohio for the world to come to a settled acknowledgement of their accomplishment. In the first decade of the twentieth century, faith and belief were largely reserved for the ethereal, and not for those who would puncture the ether with their corporeal flying machines.

Late that night at the inn in Manteo, after the men had virtually commandeered the telegraph office of the United States Weather Bureau to wire their own breathless-cum-deathless accounts back to New York, the newsmen reiterated their apologies to their string-man colleague over a second round of beers. The evening adjourned with Mr. Hoster’s pronouncement that “history was made today, and we are its witnesses.”

Bruce Salley shook his head in rebuttal. “History was made in all actuality on December 17, 1903. The Wright Brothers flew through the air while we were all looking in the opposite direction. Let us not congratulate ourselves too effusively for having simply and belatedly turned our heads.”

The cottage looks less like a cottage and more like a railroad depot. This was the first thought that entered Ruth’s head.

The structure’s situation upon the small island wasn’t quite as Ruth had presumed either. She had imagined the small bungalow to be nestled in a sylvan grove, perhaps adjoined by a motley cutting garden. Instead, the house sat exposed and unadorned next to a church, only a few hundred yards from the East River. Its previous occupant, the superintendent of nurses, may have enjoyed the view from its riverside windows, but was perhaps otherwise ambivalent about giving it up to its notorious current resident.

The bungalow’s present occupant had lived there for over two years. She lived alone, as was required, but was permitted to keep a small mongrel dog for compensatory companionship.

Ruth had wondered at first if the woman would even permit an interview. Ruth’s letter seeking permission to write about her for one of the magazines for which Ruth worked had been answered, but not in the way that she expected. The request had provoked a long and vituperative attack upon all those who had conspired to imprison this woman on the island, and an equally impassioned defense against all the charges that had been hurled at her.

Ruth smoothed down a rumpled pleat in her skirt and patted a rimple in her salmon-colored shirtwaist. She straightened her modestly trimmed hat, knowing that the riot of flowers and feathers that characterized the millinery of most of her contemporaries would certainly have elicited contempt from the object of Ruth’s visit — a poor Irish immigrant given to simple tastes in accordance with her diminished means.

Ruth St. Croix knocked and then waited. She waited for so long, in fact, that she began to wonder if the woman she had come to see — the woman whom she had taken extraordinary measures to interview — had, with the arrival of that mutually appointed hour, changed her mind. Had Ruth come all the way over from Manhattan Island this breezy summer day, the East River nearly claiming her hat when a gust pinched it (hat pins and all), simply to be mischievously jilted?