CLIMBING THE SKY

The wind is vicious today. It fills the air with dust so thick that you choke and wheeze without your mask. Not that anyone, including a senile old hick like myself, is dumb enough to go out without a mask on, or his glasses, for that matter, or his "Skin in a Tube." Still, the shrieking the wind makes unsettles my nerves a bit. I think I'll ask the nurse for another happy pill when she comes around again.

Until then, I've a story I just have to tell. It's been rustling around inside of me ever since the aliens came, and left again. Of course, it was all over by then, really, all that was going to happen had happened. But ever since the aliens left their message and moved on, for some forty years now it's been rustling around down there, stuck in my craw. Maybe that's why I got the cancer in my guts, maybe it's just that everyone's got the cancer these days. But it just may be, too, that what I’m about to tell you might also be the reason why it might all still turn out fine in the end.

Old Joe Reeser was a terrible farmer. His daddy bought the land back before the Depression, 1919 it was, and he bought a lot of it seeing as how it was so cheap. When the Midwest dried up and blew away in the 30's, it seemed like he'd done just about right, made quite a nice living off 300 acres of corn and beans and potatoes and the like. Kenneth Reeser was a good farmer, and for the twenty or so years until his death in 1939, that land turned a tidy profit at harvest time. His son Joe, however, just did not have the knack. He moved back to Pearson Falls to take over the land and, for years, before he gave it up entirely and sold the land to the government, 1953, that was, he never made more than just enough to keep from starving or getting run out by the bank. Between what he managed to farm and what his daddy had left him, I guess he hung on until after I'd gone for good from Pearson Falls, Vermont.

The first time I remember meeting Joe Reeser, he wasn't old, but by the end of my knowing him, everyone called him Old, like it was part of his name, like Sir. He was only forty-eight, which in those days was a lot older than it is now. At first, I thought it had something to do with his daddy having just passed on less’n a year ago, kind of a way to honor Joe, and maybe it did at first. After that, though, it just stuck.

I met Mr. Reeser because I, at the age of fifteen, had the job of delivering groceries to the farm, mostly because my pony could make it up the muddy one-lane track to the house with the least problems. This was in 1940, which is more’n three score years ago, and the world then was as different from the world now as apples and oranges. If you wanted to drive an automobile up to the Reeser place, you could do so from June through September, October if you were lucky. I think, in those days, there were maybe five automobiles in Pearson Falls, and the kind of people what owned them wouldn’t think of getting them muddy or of possibly busting an axle driving up the rugged dirt tracks to the far-flung farmhouses which spread out around the center of town. If you wanted to get up that steep, narrow lane the rest of the year, you either hiked or rode a horse. If the electricity was on and the phones were working, if you called first, the dooryard light would be on and Joe Reeser would meet you halfway down the hill on his own big farm horse, sometimes with the haywagon or plough, and take the groceries or mail or whatever you were coming up there for. He was still relatively new in town, so he was a novelty. I think every boy, certainly myself, went up hoping for a look at his wife, Claire; She was much more of a mystery, and us teenagers were just busting out of our dungarees to see what she looked like. Joe would stop and chat for a while, and he was nice to the kids, but neither I nor any of my friends had yet seen Claire. Joe always gave us strange toys that he claimed he made himself, little wooden flying saucers that spun into the air when you pulled a string, or model gliders that did stunts in the air if you threw them. I still have a small wooden top he made me. It's old, now, and worn as smooth as the finest mahogany, though when I got it you could see where he'd carved it out of a piece of knotty pine. Spins real smooth, does that top...

That day, though, the day I met Joe Reeser for the first time, I remember that he didn't come down the hill to meet me. It was mid February, still deep winter in northern Vermont. I had a new pony, which I'd named Conan. Those days, I'd been reading too much of authors like Ambrose Bierce and H.P. Lovecraft. When my roommate here at the nursing home catches me reading something, he invariably asks “Oh, Trevor, not more of that science fiction crap again! It'll give you nightmares!” Which, by the way, is the same thing my mother would say about bacon and onion sandwiches before bedtime. I have never had any such affliction, however, so I just smile and go right on reading. They say bacon is bad for my health and do not serve it here at Cedar Lake. It's for my own good.

When I got to the Reeser farmhouse, which overlooked the valley in which the Reeser farm lay, Conan was blowing a bit, so I patted him and stroked his mane and let him walk at an easy pace into the dooryard. Joe Reeser was waiting there, and when I dismounted and tethered Conan, he helped me rub the pony down and gave him some feed and, taking half the contents of the saddlebags, slung an arm about my shoulders and escorted me into the kitchen. Plunking his share of the heavy sacks down on the large, hand-hewn table in the center of the big room, he slapped me on the back and said, “Wait here, I’ll get us both a root beer.” I nodded and grinned, plunking my heavy bags right down next to his. As Joe turned and left for the pantry, I suddenly realize that I was actually inside the house! I glanced around, then, as I got braver, frankly stared. I felt like some spy for the Foreign Legion or something.

Farmhouses in those days were mostly built out of slate and stone, with rough-sawn boards put down to keep some of the heat in. This farmhouse was no exception, and no matter how close together you put those boards, there were always cracks and drafts that snuck in. Hell, in my house, some of the cracks in the floor were so wide that my father had lost pennies in between the boards. The result, no matter how you cozied it up with a rug or with decorations, was a large, drafty room that people were always walking through with their boots still on. You didn’t take your boots off for fear of getting a sliver. Some of the fancier houses had parlors, but neither my family nor the Reesers were that kind of people. So you sat around the big slab of maple or pine or oak that served for a table with your boots on, and sometimes you didn’t’ even take off your coat, and there were some nights so cold you wanted to eat with your mittens on. Not a place you’d go to relax in an intimate atmosphere.

After I’d caught my breath and gotten over the shocking fact that I was just standing there, all alone inside the Reeser place, as I say, I began to look around. Not to put too fine a point on it, I began to scrutinize the place. At fifteen, I had a raging curiosity and hardly any manners. Most of what was there wasn’t worth looking at—I could see a woman’s touch in the place, what with the knickknacks lined up on the small table in the corner, and the star-shaped arrangement of candles in a brass holder which adorned the center of that large, austere table. If you kept your boots on, you could wade through that hostile, wooden sea where the slivers and the drafts waited to bite your feet and nip your toes, to one of those little, round Persian rugs that rested like a friendly island in the middle of all that tempestuous wood. Like a drowning sailor, I was pulled toward that friendly, warm-looking carpet. It was all soft, muted reds and blues, an intricate and obviously hand-woven pattern, shot through with startling threads of bright green and gold. Hell, it even looked like a friendly tropical island. That’s how I found myself standing at its edge, my boots still on, not wanting to track mud and cow shit and whatever else might be on my boots onto that beautiful, hand-woven island. Kind of like swearing in church, I remember thinking.

On a sudden impulse, I bent down and unlaced my boots, stepping out of them and carefully onto that soft oasis of carpet. It was just as warm and inviting as promised, and I remember wiggling my toes, which protruded from the large holes in my socks. I might have even made a small “Mmm,” sound as I drifted out into the middle of all that vivid color. It was like stepping into another world.

It took me a few seconds to notice the paintings. From my Persian rug island, I had a full view of the room, and I turned a slow circle, letting my eyes take it in in minute detail. Joe’d disappeared into the pantry, which was through a small door to the right of the front door. I knew from experience that the pantry would also be a root cellar, and would be down a few steps and under the house. Most of the south-facing wall was taken up by a floor to ceiling window. This was quite an extravagance, both because of the amount of glass needed to make it, and because of the heating and cooling problem it would cause. Even with all the sunlight it let in, it didn’t totally rid the corners of shadows, nor make the room any more like somewhere you would feel truly at home. Here, though, standing in the center of the large room, on this soft, warm carpet, you forgot that the rest of the room existed. Even that day, in the dead of winter, in the afternoon nearing sundown, feeble warmth and light bathed my face. As I turned slowly around in a wonder-struck circle, I forgot all about Joe Reeser and root beer, or that I was standing virtually barefoot in a stranger’s kitchen. My father would’ve beat the crap out of me, had he known I was embarrassing myself and him with so little manners, but I had forgotten all about him, too. Then, when I saw the paintings, I even forgot just how good that carpet felt, and all about my uncouth, dirty, bare feet.

Even now, reclining in this hospital bed, in this place that smells like medicine, like death delayed but cozily close, the memory of those paintings takes me out of here. Those paintings are what started me growing from a boy into a man. There were three of them. As a young and ignorant village boy, they confused me and fired something deep inside my soul. The first one, the one on the left, seemed to depict a single drop of water, but like you might see if it you were looking at it under a microscope. We had one microscope in my high school, and in science class, we’d all line up to peer through the lens at whatever was on the slide. It always fascinated me, but most kids didn’t seem to get it. As I gazed at that painting of a single drop of water, I remembered a similar drop on a glass slide in science class. Whoever’d painted this, they’d captured startling detail, and I remember wondering how they’d gotten that opalescent shimmer, marveling at how the artist had made it seem like the droplet was suspended in mid-air. I didn’t have words for the things I was seeing, didn’t know how to describe the cascade of swirling color that made me think the drop surely must burst apart and fall to the floor, wetting my bare toes. I couldn’t figure out how to think about the liquid iridescence of that single droplet, nor the creatures that it contained. They crawled, swam, climbed over one another. They were all tangled up, but somehow you could tell that each one was a separate entity, and your eye couldn’t count them all. Dimly, I knew there was no way the artist had painted all the millions of little creatures that I knew lived in a single drop of water, and yet it seemed like they were all there, all moving and alive.

If the first painting on that rough board wall made my eyes go wide with wonder, the middle painting made my mouth gape wide with astonishment. The painting in the middle was that of a naked woman. She was tall, statuesque even. One long, beautifully tapered bare leg was raised, as if completing a dance step, or a graceful leap. Her arms were flung out and up in an exuberant gesture, which seemed to thrust her breasts right out of the painting at you. The odd thing was that, even though her legs and arms were spread wide apart, though her body was bare of clothing, it wasn’t a dirty picture. Her hair tumbled down over her shoulders, all the way down to her bottom, so it wasn’t like she was posing nude, like the women I’d seen in my daddy’s “gentleman’s magazines.” You could tell she was naked, even beautiful, but all that tumbling hair just barely concealed her. Through some trick of the artist’s, the hair seemed at once to be thick, waving tresses, and at the same time itresembled falling, wind-blown leaves. Then, if you looked at it just right, it seemed like thickly falling snow. And, at the center of it all, dancing for joy, a naked woman, proud and sensual and brimming with vitality. I wouldn’t lose my virginity for another two and some years; not till I joined up and went to war. Of course, my eyes were hungry for her nakedness, and I could feel myself getting a boner, at least at first, anyway. Then, when I realized that it wasn’t a dirty picture of a cheap whore, my hunger changed just a bit. I didn’t lose my erection, but somehow the rest of me got hard, too. I know that probably doesn’t make much sense, but that’s as best I can put it. Seeing that woman dancing made me want to dance with her, not just to fuck her. She made Daddy’s magazines look sinful and blasphemous. And the way her face seemed both sad and ecstatic at the same time … She had an expression of such bliss, and yet a small, sad smile played crookedly about that full, sensual mouth. Her eyes, like the drop of water in the first painting, jumped right out and caught my eyes, held them until I was no longer looking at her body, just staring into those happy-sad, liquid blue-grey eyes. Her eyes seemed to have storms in them, and gentle rain, and midnight stillness. Funny thing; I was just as aroused looking at her face as I was looking at her naked body.

Well, you can imagine that it took me a long, long time to tear my eyes away from that middle painting. By the time I did manage to look at the last painting, I could feel a hot warmth in my face and neck, and it wasn’t just from the sun, I can tell you! On reflection, I think it was a sound from below—some rattling of bottles, or maybe a muffled footstep—that made me spook a bit and broke my fascination with her, with those paradoxical eyes. But when I glanced over at the third painting, I grew confused and unsure.

It obviously wasn’t finished yet, that third painting. It sat on an easel, and there were brushes and a paint box below it. Being lower down on the wall than the other two, it was still bathed by the yellow-orange rays of the sinking sun, but, due to its position, it was also partly in shadow. I didn’t understand what I was seeing. It looked somewhat like the painting of the water droplet, but as if you took that droplet and shrouded it in a curtain of white-streaked blues and purples, and limbed the whole thing in a deep, inky black. The center of the picture, where the water drop should have been, seemed to show an even larger drop of water; one that seemed to have snow-capped mountains and deep, blue-green patches. As I gazed at it, I began to feel dizzy, as if I was falling, spinning, slowly tumbling through the sky. You have to understand, no one’d seen the Earth from orbit yet, and all the science fiction I was reading didn’t really get it right, so it took me a while to realize that I was looking at the whole world, but just like it was that one little drop of water. From this great distance, it seemed itself to be alive, as if it were breathing and laughing, as if it were dancing through Heaven like the naked woman was dancing. I might have made a small gasping noise when I realized that what I was looking at embodied the idea that the whole Earth was one great, living creature, and that we were like those microbes in the water droplet. We danced and laughed and loved and died, just as those little creatures did. The Earth danced and rejoiced and wept, just as the dancing woman did.

“Gaia,” said a gentle voice from just over my right shoulder.

I think I might have yelped, that’s how surprised I was. I do know that I jumped literally off the floor, and spun full round in mid air. I landed clumsily on one stockinged foot, then took one shaky step backward in a grotesque parody of the dancing woman. I stumbled off that beautiful Persian carpet and out into all that rough, cold wood. Sure enough, I got a sliver the size of a toothpick right in my left big toe, which was poking out of one of the huge holes in my socks. I yelped again, hopping reflexively back onto the carpet. I couldn’t keep my balance, and sat down in a heap.

There is nothing so comical or so poignant as a teenaged boy who has been surprised by a beautiful woman in what he is dreadfully afraid might be an act of voyeurism or an invasion of privacy. The time me and some boys had gone up to stare into Bonnie Grout’s window while she undressed, when she’d caught us, Bonnie had sicked her father and his dogs on us. I didn’t know then that the best and most feminine women realize that these are not acts of violation, but rather clumsy attempts at worship.

The woman standing before me was trying desperately not to laugh. Her lips quivered and her eyes danced, but she maintained enough control not to laugh out loud. I think if she’d have done that, I’d have fled, maybe even cried for shame. She reached down, barely containing her mirth, and gently helped me to my feet. When she saw me gingerly putting weight on the foot with the giant sliver in it, she clucked her tongue and, in a strange, lilting accent I could barely understand, let alone place, she said, “Ah, poor love, you’ve gotten a sliver; well, come on then, sit down and we’ll have it out straightaway."

That’s when I became conscious of my bare feet, of where I was standing and what I’d been doing. I felt like I’d been caught choking my chicken in church; by the priest, no less, in the middle of Sunday service, and with a nun staring over his shoulder. I stammered out an apology, and then she did laugh at me and slung one strong arm about my shoulders. “But that’s what they’re there for, silly boy! Do you like my painting, then?"

Her paintings? That thought crashed into me like a runaway truck. The following thought was more like a runaway train. Because, I thought, if those were her paintings, then the woman in the middle picture … Was it her? Had I just been staring at another man’swife, naked? Old man Pritchard’d shot both barrels at Crawford Brown when he’d caught him with Judy Pritchard, I remembered vividly. I had images of Joe Reeser pursuing me down the hill, blasting away at me, the reports rolling across the mountains, masking my cries for mercy.

Somehow I found myself sitting at the table, having crossed that forbidding ocean of floorboards without getting another sliver. Somehow, I found myself with my dirty, bare foot in Claire Reeser’s warm, strong hands, propped between her thighs, as she deftly removed that monstrous sliver. “Hang on, love,” she said, “just stay there and don’t move, I’ll get something to put on it so it doesn’t get infected.” She placed my foot on the chair she’d been sitting in and, patting my leg as if to glue it into place, she crossed to a tall cabinet in the corner. She took down a small jar of ointment and had my foot in her lap again before I’d gotten a word out of my mouth.

As she coated my wounded toe in something that smelled green and felt sticky, she talked to me in that lilting, strangely accented voice. I felt myself soothed, listening more to the music in the words than the words themselves, which I could not always understand. It seemed like she wove another language into her English, but on looking back, I’m sure that’s not true. I lost myself in her voice and the feel of those warm, strong fingers on my foot, until I was abruptly brought back to the present by her repeated question, “So, how do you like my paintings, then?"

When she asked me the question again, I finally looked at her. I’d been so ashamed and embarrassed at making a fool out of myself and peeking at strangers’ private stuff that I’d kept my eyes pretty much on the floor up until then. When she gently insisted on knowing what I thought, I had to look up. Hers was a thin face stretched over strong bones. Her jaw was square and blunt, not tapered and feminine. Her nose was a high, thin blade supported by regal but wide-boned cheeks; in fact, her whole face did not make you think beautiful, so much as it made you think … Safety? Strength? Ancient wisdom? To this day, I still can’t come up with the words, though the face stays fresh and haunting in my mind. Whatever the face lacked in classical beauty, though, it didn’t matter because her eyes were so warm and brown, like her thick hair, that you never looked anywhere but into them. Even though she was wearing a cotton blouse that outlined her high, full breasts nicely. Swooping with waist and flaring with hips, flowing down her long, strong legs, her long skirt accentuated her very inviting figure, while adhering to standards of modesty which were strong in small New England towns in those days. The longer you held her gaze, the less you wanted to undress her with your eyes, and instead just gaze into hers. What saved me from another bout of blushing and stammering was the realization that Claire’s eyes were brown, and the eyes of the woman dancing in the painting were blue. Then, I realized that the woman in the painting did not have the same type of beauty that Claire had. Oh she was striking, was Claire, but her beauty came from within and radiated outward to enfold you, where the woman in the painting drew you into her dance. Their shapes were subtly different. I guess that’s why I was finally able to relax enough to ask, “What was it you said when you come in the room, Ma’am?"

“First off, you’re to call me Claire.” The smile took the hardness out of her words, but left no doubt that she was to be obeyed. I nodded and could feel the color rushing through my face. “And, I said, Gaia. It’s an old name for Mother Earth."

“Mother Earth?” I didn’t know anything about this. About all the religious background I had was straight out of the Bible and the fire and brimstone kind of sermons that Reverend Boyce gave every Sunday in church. I knew about God the Father, but I’d never heard of a Mother Earth.

Claire nodded. “Sure enough. It’s an old, old concept, really; that the Earth gives birth to us all, nurtures us, and is Herself alive, our Great Mother. I believe your Indians had a similar belief."

Your Indians? As I say, my mouth was just too big for me, and I blurted, “Where’re you from, then?” I snapped my jaw shut with a click when I realized how rude the question must sound.

“Darendale, Yorkshire. It’s in England.” Claire didn’t seem put out by the question. “It’s a lot like Vermont, really, right down to the sheep. Maybe there’s a bit less forest than in Vermont, but really, they’re quite similar. Tis a bit colder here, perhaps. There’s your foot, right as rain, and hand me those socks and I’ll darn them for you before you’re on your way; it’s the least I can do for you bringing up the things from town.” I was getting used to her broad-sounding A’s, the way she seemed sometimes to leave the ends off words, or put new vowels in where you didn’t think there ought to be a vowel. I wanted to protest that she didn’t have to darn my socks, that my mother’d do that soon enough, but I couldn’t get the words out.

Just then, Joe popped his head around the pantry door. “Young man, have you seen my wife—ah! Hello darling. I can’t for the life of me find the damned root beer."

“Silly man,” Claire’s voice changed just a bit, resonated the smile in her eyes out to enfold her husband. “It’s right where it always is, to the left on the bottom, so it stays cold.” She turned to me with a chuckle. “For the life of me, if I didn’t know better, I’d swear he had naught in his head for brains but sheep dung.” That caused me to start laughing, and that laughter was the best feeling, all bound up as it was with relief and letting go of all my fears that I’d been doing something wrong.

The contrast between Claire and Joe Reeser was what finally gave me back my sense of normality. What with the strangeness of the last ten minutes, I was feeling a little bit like you do when you’ve smoked a joint, or when you’ve lost a lot of blood. Though I grew to love Joe, in a quirky sort of way, I’ll never understand how a skinny, tousled-looking dreamer managed to marry a woman like Claire. Joe, always with grease in his uncombed hair, his jacket worn and too large. Joe looked like a crazy tinkerer and half-assed farmer; which is what he was. You knew what you were looking at when you looked at Joe Reeser. But Claire? Claire Reeser? I remember thinking, in that first dazzled instant, that she should be queen of some kingdom somewhere. When I found my foot, free of its sliver, resting gingerly on the floor, as I watched her bustle about getting needles and thread, observing the grace in even the most commonplace of her movements, I couldn’t get over how different they were. And, when I remembered the genuine love in her voice when she’d gently scolded him about the root beer, that difference made their love all the more real and true. My mamma and daddy had grown up together and gone to school together, married when they were just eighteen; they were as alike as you can imagine. But for all that similarity, even though they’d known one another all their lives, there wasn’t as much love in my home in a month as there’d been in that one brief exchange between the Reesers. And that was just over something as trivial as root beer.

I shoved my feet, still bare, back into my boots; my toes were getting cold and I didn’t want more slivers. Actually, I almost thought it would be worth getting another sliver just to feel her hands on my foot, her strong, warm thighs beneath my leg. Even then, though, I knew better.

Bringing two cold bottles of root beer to the table, Joe Reeser managed to swing by the stove, where Claire was brewing herself some tea, and give her a kiss that seemed to linger just a bit. His eyes soften as he opened the sweating bottles and set one down before me. Claire returned to the table with a cup of tea that smelled strange and exotic. I concentrated on my root beer, feeling very young and very awkward. Finally, Claire said, “You’re Trevor, right? Trevor Grogin?"

“Yes Ma—Claire. My daddy’s Dan Grogin, he’s the police chief.” She nodded and seemed to be looking at me very carefully.

Joe spoke up excitedly. “Darling, you should see the latest one. It looks like it really might fly.” My ears perked up, and I think Claire noticed. I didn’t understand much that Joe said after that; something about airflow and acceleration. Claire, however, seemed to speak that language, too, and several times Joe would stop short in response to something she’d said and look as if he was re-thinking things. Sometimes, he’d admit that she was right, and once they got into a fierce argumwent, right there at the table with me. She started quoting mathematical equations at him and he started telling her about structural stress and … something else; I never learned all the ins and outs of the thing.

Finally, Mr. Reeser chuckled and took pity on me, and led me out to the barn. Farms back then in Vermont still kept working horses in addition to the new tractor Joe's father had bought before he died. While the Reeser farm was not a dairy farm, the barn was still mostly used for the horses and a few chickens, and the cats, of course. The other side, however, was Mr. Reeser's workshop, and this was a fascinating place. Junk of all descriptions littered the corners and various rough wooden tables. In the center, however, was what looked like a rocket ship from a comic book. I stared for a second, then walked over to investigate. I could feel the big grin on my face, but couldn't move it, like it was cemented there. I don't know if I was feeling awe and wonder at seeing such a nice likeness, or laughing at Joe Reeser for building it. After a while, I asked, "What's it do?"

"Do?" Joe Reeser seemed nonplused. "It flies! Or, at least, it's supposed to. Give me a hand." He'd put the machine on a wooden pallt, and the two of us were able to lift it and carry it outside. "I was just about to shoot it off," he explained, gasping a bit under the surprisingly heavy load. With him being a skinny man even then, and I being only fifteen, a late bloomer and not yet into my man's growth, it was a tough thing for us to carry it through the snow of the dooryard. Finally, after we'd gone maybe a hundred yards from the barn and were at the edge of the first open field, Joe motioned to put the palet down in a relatively level spot. The land sloped away to the north, gradually at first but quite steeply toward the bottom of the valley, which was overgrown with scrub brush and first growth saplings. The field began again on the north-facing slope. In the summer it was a long but fairly easy hike, or tractor ride, across from one field to the other. Now, in the winter, there was no easy way across. We stopped on the edge of the slope, white snow descending away from us, our shadows stretching before us like children sliding down the hill. The glare from the opposite side of the valley, catching the last afternoon sun, was almost blinding. Already the nip of a cold, Vermont winter night was in the air; I could smell the fresh, clean scent of coming snow.

After a minute of puffing and getting my breath back, I walked around the thing on the wood palet again. It had four fins on the bottom, just like a comic-book rocket ship did. These fins were tipped with crazily angled wings of some sort. It was obviously homemade, even a bit amateurish. The piece of sheet metal that made up the body of the rocket ship was crudely welded at the seams, and seemed a bit dented in a few places. It tapered to a point. The name "Claire," had been painted on the side. A sort of string seemed to snake from under the thing. "Mr. Reeser," I said uncertainly. "No offense, but I don't think it's gonna fly.” I stared at the name, Claire, which had been painted in swooping letters along the body.

Joe Reeser stood back, shoved his long, bony hands into the pockets of his too-large wool jacket and chuckled. "Well, it's as close as I can get to Mr. Goddard's models," he shrugged and brought his hands out to dangle by his sides. "Let's see what it does do." For a minute, he seemed frightened, and I almost turned away and pleaded some excuse about having more errands to run for the grocery store. After a long time of thinking, I know that I'm glad I didn't do that, but it will never rest entirely easy with me.

Mr. Reeser took of all unlikely things, a kitchen match from his pocket. He popped it with a thumbnail, which is a trick I never learned and burnt my thumb hundreds of times practicing. He picked up the string from the bottom of the rocket ship and lit it. Now I could see that it was a fuse. Reeser beckoned and we trotted away from the thing standing on its wooden launch pad. After we'd gone about a hundred yards, we turned and watched.

"Fuse lights the solid fuel," explained Mr. Reeser hurriedly, "which is not much more than a stick of dynamite, really. Causes an explosive reaction and propels the rocket into the air. Fins keep it stable and start it spinning, and off it goes!" I gazed at him dubiously, and he must have seen my expression. "Goddard says these things could make it to the moon!" He seemed almost defensive.

He was saved from further explanation by a growling roar, which made me jerk my head up and stare in amazement. Sure enough, the thing was slowly lifting off the wooden palate it had been set on, which was starting to smolder. I hoped vaguely that the snow would put out any fire. Mr. Reeser's contraption, made of old sheet metal and carved wood, threw itself at the sky and started to climb. It seemed to me that Joe Reeser went with it--his mouth opened wide and stayed that way, his eyes followed it up until his head strained against the back of his neck and I thought he was going to fall over. Sure enough, the thing did seem to be spinning and actually flew for a few seconds. When it blew apart, I instinctively threw myself flat on the ground and covered my head. I looked up from the ground hesitantly when at last the echoes of the rocket's fiery demise had stopped rolling across the hills, which was a long time, or so it seemed. What fell on the back of my hand, which was covering my head, was not a stinging piece of hot metal or splintered wooden tail fin. It was a drop of oddly warm water. When I looked up to see where it had come from, I saw that Joe Reeser was crying silently. When he saw me looking, he wiped his eyes and laughed shakily.

"Did you see that? Almost one, maybe two hundred feet up, I'd say!"

He seemed so overjoyed that I dismissed his tears as not being real. He started down the slope of the snow-covered field, looking for bits of wreckage. "Looked like the fuel tank blew apart," he muttered. "Need to use something stronger than an oil drum next time..."

He went on in this way for a time, and when he got far enough away that I couldn't hear him any longer, I followed at some distance, even handing him a twisted bit of metal. Despite my confusion and the intimidating display, I was fascinated by what had just happened. I looked up to where the Moon would be that night. Reeser must have seen me looking at the sky, because he started talking to me again, instead of to himself. "No air in outer space, you see. Need to carry your oxygen with you, otherwise your engine fuel won't burn. That's why it's a rocket engine, it's self-contained you see." He went on like this, and when my confusion got too great, I looked away and he saw.

He sat down on a stump, and I could see that he was shaking. I didn’t quite understand at that time why he was shaking; the explosion hadn’t been that close, or that loud. I understand now that he was spent and exhausted after this latest attempt. As I became infected with his dream, I began to use the dream itself as my way of escaping my lonely adolescent life. Just then, though, I was a bit concerned, and a bit embarrassed to be standing there watching a grown man shake and cry. I didn’t appreciate then how both Joe and Claire treated me like an adult the minute I walked into their dooryard—or maybe the minute Claire sat me down at that table—so to Joe, I was okay to come apart in front of. For me, this was new, and I was scared shitless.

Finally, Joe took a battered pack of Camels from his pocket. “Do you smoke yet, son?"

I gaped for a second, then recovered myself. The last thing I was going to do was admit that I’d only smoked three cigarettes in my life, and my daddy’d beaten the bejesus out of me when he’d caught me. “Oh, ayeh,” I said, “course I do.” He nodded, lit one for himself and passed me the pack. I think I managed to light it competently enough, but I remember I coughed a bit on the smoke.

Joe and I sat and smoked solemnly. I held the cigarette away from me, my nose in the wind, letting the burning tobacco odor mingle with the odors of the sleeping earth and the coming snow. Suddenly, Joe looked at me. “You saw the paintings?” I nodded. “What did you think?"

I froze up again, all clenched and anxious. “I don’t know,” I looked down. “I don’t really understand …"

“It was her paintings that made me fall in love with her,” said Joe, in a musing, half-not-there tone. “I was passing through Yorkshire, fixing broken farm equipment and household stuff. There she was, out in the middle of her garden, painting…” He trailed off. “She’d just started that painting of Gaia, and that was what got my attention. You know, Trevor, the Earth would look just like that, from way up in space? It’s true. I think, if we could just see it that way, like it was all one big creature, maybe there wouldn’t be all this war …” He trailed off again. “You know about the war, son?"

“Yessir. Mr. Dukette has a radio and my parents and me, sometimes we go down to listen to it, and I heard the news about the Krauts and the Japs invading everybody.”

Joe nodded thoughtfully. “Claire says that’s a symptom of the fact that it’s time to go.”

“Go?"

“Yes, go. Somewhere … else.” His hands spread in a vague gesture. “Even I don’t know where, but there’s no where to go down here, so it’s got to be …” He thrust a hand above his head. “Up there. I’m scared that she’s right, that it’s time to go."

I felt like laughing, when I heard Joe talk. The whole town knew he was a nut, and now, here I had my proof. But, maybe, just then, I was a bit older than when I’d came in the Reeser’s dooryard, because I managed to just nod and keep my face blank.

Claire Reeser's voice drifted to us from the house. When he heard it, Mr. Reeser started trotting toward it, and I had to scramble to keep up. Even as he came up to the stoop, he was telling her how far his strange machine had flown, how it had performed in the air. She smiled and embraced him, right there in front of me, and kissed him on the lips, leading him back into the warmth of the kitchen, where baking bread was starting to smell wonderful. She didn't say a word while Joe rattled on for more than five minutes, finally coming abruptly to a halt with a sheepish grin at me.

"You'll stay a bit, won't you, Trevor," she asked me. "I'll have a loaf for you to take to your Mamma, providing you don't eat it all on the way down to town."

I assured her with a grin that I wouldn't, and that Mamma'd be glad to have it; we all would, judging by how good it smelled in the oven.

When I looked back at Joe, however, his head was down in his hands, and he seemed lost in his own thoughts. I thought I'd cheer him up with a joke. "Well sir," I declared, "If you keep building' them rockets, and one day one of them works, we can go to Mars and see the martians like in Mr. Wells' book."

His head snapped up and he stared at me like he was trying to count the number of hairs on my head. "You've read H.G. Wells?" He asked.

"Yes sir," I replied.

"Well," he said slowly. "Well, Trevor, there’s hope for you, then. Yes, that's exactly what I want to do. And that is exactly why I keep building rockets. Just like I told you out there. Have you heard of a man named Percival Lowell?"

“No, sir."

“Well, lad, you should read up on him, if there’s anything available in that meager excuse for a library …” He trailed off.

Claire came to the table with cups of hot tea for everybody, and I honestly don’t remember what we talked about for the hour or so I remained at the Reeser table. I remember that Claire and Joe sat next to one another, and I remember how they seemed to just fit together, like day and night fit together.

As I walked Conan, the barbarian pony, down the steep lane and onto the highway that passed through the center of town, the still-warm loaf of bread tucked under my coat, that strange, detached feeling stole over me again. When I got back to our house that night, when my father yelled at me for being late, when I found myself alone in my small room, I kept hearing those words over and over again in my head: “It’s time to go … It’s time to go …” I thought about the Axis powers and the war, which everyone still thought the United States would stay neutral in. I looked out my window, at the stars stabbing through the bitter cold of a February night in northern Vermont. Nowadays, you can’t see the stars for the haze of pollution that hangs over just about everywhere, and for the lights both on Earth and in the sky. Back then, even with the snow starting to sift down, they looked so close that you felt you should be warmed by those distant, twinkling lights. At that moment, my head whirling with pictures of water-drop worlds falling through vast heavens, with the snow-muffled silence shrinking my tiny existence down to a fragile pinpoint, everything around me seemed shabby and polluted. Up there, among the stars, there was room for everything, and everything could be as new as the falling snow. It’s time to go … It’s time to go.

I didn't see Joe again for almost four weeks. The time I've just told you about was mid February, as I remember, and even though the weather didn't know it, spring was a busy time in Pearson Falls, what with sugaring to get done and spring planting and winter harvest drawing near. Mr. Grear's store found other uses for me and Conan, which kept me away from the Reeser farm. At least in body. I doubled my reading of all the science fiction I could get my hands on, which was precious little. I reread Berne and Wells, found and became fascinated with Lowell’s martian canal system and Carter’s martian princess. At night, I thought about Claire, and I’m not ashamed to admit that I had a pretty big crush on her. I even found an entry on Robert H. Goddard in the library's encyclopedia. It didn't tell me more than his name and his life's work, which was rocketry.

I heard about the Reesers, though. They were still considered, as we said it back then, “from away,” and as such, they were the only thing the town gossips talked about. They'd only moved onto that farm a few years ago, when Joe’s Daddy died, and nobody had yet really gotten to know him. They knew less about Claire, just that she was from England, and was only now starting to get invited to ladies' meetings in the town. Joe himself was even less known. So when Jerry Pelky, who was by nature a dull-spirited and mean child, cornered me in the play yard at school one blustery March day, I was a bit surprised. I was shy, and didn't talk much, but the kids mostly left me alone. This time, though, I found myself chest to chest with Jerry Pelky, biggest bully our high school had, my back to the wall of the schoolhouse. "Kites!" Jerry hissed into my face. "He's flying kites!"

"What?" I managed to get my voice back, though it was not a brave or even confident question. "What are you talking about?"

"Reeser! He's out there in his fields flying' kites in the snow! You was up there. Why's he doin' that?"

"How should I know?" My voice was a bit stronger now. I’d kept my encounter with Joe and Claire, especially Claire, as much of a secret as I could; I couldn’t bring myself to talk about Claire the way adolescent boys talk about women.

"You been up there, ain't ya?" He poked a finger into my chest. "You been up there bringin' stuff."

"Yeah? So?"

"So, why's he out there flyin' kites? Is he loopy or something?"

I didn't know. That was the strange thing. When confronted by the question, and after seeing a woman who should have been a queen—or maybe a Martian princess—and her love for and loyalty to a man who hurled an old tin can at the stars, paint the name of his wife on its side and set it spinning in the sky? After hearing him talk about going to Mars, and now he was flying kites? And even then, those four haunting words kept tolling like a bell deep inside my soul. “It’s time to go… It’s time to go …”

"Maybe," I shrugged. "I don't know. He did seem a bit strange when I was there, but I didn't see him for more'n a few hours..." I trailed off. "Kites?"

"Yeah! Strange kites, up pretty high, and him runnin' through the fields with the string. Man's gotta be crazy."

Pelky, content in his half-assessment, punched me hard in the stomach, making me double over and wretch. He shrugged, then, and turned away from me and trotted off to join the kickball game. I sagged to my knees, wheezing, until my breath came back and my lunch stayed put. I think I was more afraid of the answer than of Jerry himself.

Thing is, Jerry Pelky was right. Not more than a week after that conversation, I was on my way up that steep muddy road with another load of sundries for the Reeser place. I’d forgotten all about Jerry Pelky, and to tell the truth, I was excited as hell to think that I might see Claire again. Joe was, while interesting, not foremost in my mind, as anyone who’s ever been a fifteen-year-old boy will understand. And, damned if I'm lying, there he was, out in his field, flying a kite. It was about a hundred feet up, on the end of a stout line. The kite itself was maybe five feet across and strangely shaped. When Mr. Reeser noticed me staring, he waved and smiled.

"I remember you!" he called, and seemed glad to see me.

I threw the reins over my horse's head and left him foraging under the snow while I walked over to stand by Joe's side. I felt the big grin on my face, and couldn’t wipe it off. "What're you doing?"

The question sounded stupid to me, but it was all I could think of that wasn't offensive. A man doesn't like being asked if he's crazy.

"Testing out a type of wing," he told me. “The higher we can get before lighting our rocket, the less fuel we’ll have to carry. Let the air do our work for us.”

Then he handed me the line to his kite. As I held it and looked up at what I had ahold of, I started to notice more oddities about the kite. It wasn't flapping around, like most kites do; it was rigid. It was also oddly shaped, being in the most part a large triangular surface that seemed to be curved in some way, like somebody'd bent a piece of pie over backwards. What got my attention, though, was the strong and steady tugging on the line. In fact, that tug was so strong as to nearly tip me off my feet! I could imagine myself being towed up into the sky, dangling at the end of a line like a trout reeled up from the bottom of the creek.

I started shifting and dancing around below that strange wing in the sky, trying to find a better balance against its pull. Mr. Reeser saw, and clapped his hands and laughed. "More lift with less surface area!” He crowed with delight. “Bring it down, son, before you go up!" Indeed, I needed him to help me gather in the line and take the air out of that kite, so reluctant was it to come back to Earth. When we had it down and Mr. Reeser'd taken it apart enough to carry, he put an arm around my shoulder. "This was a success," he declared. It seemed the sky still pulled him onward as we brought the groceries into the kitchen.

Was it then, the second time I was in Joe Reeser's kitchen, that I noticed Claire was thinner? Had the sickness that whittled her down to a tombstone and a memory started even then, before the War? In my mind, it seemed a shadow troubled me, something to do with the beautiful, exotic woman, but I couldn't pin it down. A child of fifteen back then knew more than a child of fifteen does now, it seems to me, but the child I was couldn't put a name to the difference in Claire. The child I was didn’t know terms like breast cancer or metastasis. I hadn’t come face to face with just how ugly the world can be, even to those who have Her best interests at heart.

Any shadow of unease I had was soon overridden by Joe's exuberant chatter about his kite. He praised it for stability and lifting power and used a bunch of terms and equations I wouldn't understand even now. Claire simply smiled, and served us both some stew. Now and again she'd insert something, seemingly in the same language Joe was speaking, and sometimes he'd stop and stare off into space. Once he was brought up short in mid-sentence at a comment from Claire, and sat, stunned, with his mouth open. “That’s so simple,” he finally said in a low, awestruck voice. “I didn’t think of it, and it’s so damned simple! You’re right!” He jumped up and ran over to kiss Claire for a long, exuberant minute. I felt myself squirm and go red in the face. It was obvious she could keep up with him, even get ahead, but I surely couldn't. It was also quite obvious that Joe worshipped her completely, and she returned his love in equal part.

One day in hot July of that same year, just after my sixteenth birthday, I got curious about Joe Reeser, and what he was up to. I was starting to grow, then, and had even kissed a girl! I still remember, it was Lucy Grout, Bonnie’s sister, and she later married Jerry Pelky, of all people, and to my knowledge she still lives in Pearson Falls.

That summer, though, I'd done just about all there is to do in a small Vermont town in the summer, and I was bored. I decided I'd just go up and have a look around, not bother anybody. I didn't exactly sneak into the dooryard, even if I was a bit quieter than was needed. Didn't matter, though, as once I got near enough, I heard the singing. Claire singing, to be precise, carried downwind and made fragile with the distance. I was like one of those Greek sailors, lured onto the rocks by that lilting, otherworldly voice, and I followed the music around the side of the house. Just before I got to that first field, where Joe’d tested his rocket, I found Claire, kneeling in what must have been her personal garden. Her hands were deep in the soil and, though her back was to me, something about the line of her shoulders, the tilt of her head, the way her face was turned up to drink in the warm July sun, these things all spoke of ecstasy. She hadn’t heard me come up, and even as the shame burned hot in my face, I stood and listened to her sing, watched the long, supple muscles of her back ripple as she dug and planted. I watched the curves of her body shift and flex and, though I couldn’t see her from the front, she was still just as beautiful as I remembered, as beautiful as she’d grown in my mind after countless remembering and fantasies. Her song didn’t have a word in it that I could understand, but the melody was haunting, and had an ancient flavor to it.

Maybe I made a noise when her song finally came to an end, or maybe she knew I was there all along. At any rate, she lifted her head and saw me after a while. I was ready to run; it seemed I was always spying on these poor folks, and even at sixteen, I knew that wasn’t right. She just smiled at me and said, “Hello, Trevor, good to see you again. Come with the groceries then, have you?”

Since I didn’t actually have any groceries, and in fact I had no excuse at all for being there, other than boyish curiosity and the onset of puberty, I just blushed and looked down. “Well…” I stammered. “I just … I mean …”

She laughed. “No matter, I’m glad you’re here; come, sit.” She patted the earth next to her, and I found myself sitting crosslegged next to her where she knelt. The ground had soaked up the summer heat, and for one instant, I imagined warm, soft, living flesh under my butt as I sat next to Claire.

“Bit late for beans.” I spoke up bravely. That’s what she was planting, string beans, mostly, and some other things I didn’t recognize. “My mamma puts them in around late spring.”

“Aye, probably true,” she agreed. “But I’m new to this part of the Earth, and I’m just learning how She lives around here.” I nodded. There it was again, that fascinating and slippery-large concept of the living mother Earth. That, too, had been rattling around in my brain for the past few months, and it had been growing and taking root.

Claire sang the song again, then, and I found myself with my mouth wide and tears in my eyes when she was done. She looked over at me and nodded. “It’s an old Gaelic song,” she explained. “It’s about our great Mother, and the strength she lends us, and the pains she takes from us and returns as new life.” She stopped and buried her hands in the soil, working her fingers in until she was up to her wrists. A smile crept across her face. That face seemed even more gaunt than I remembered, and I looked more closely. Were those the tracks of tears on her cheeks? Had those furrows about her eyes and the corners of her mouth been there a month ago?

She turned to me then, hand still deep in the Earth. “When I’m out here, Trevor, there’s no pain. These days, seems like all me bones ache. And there’s all these wee pebbles, seems like, in here,” she freed one hand from the soil and raised it to her left breast and cupped it gently, wincing just a bit. I felt a blush take fire in my face, and Claire saw my eyes follow her hand. She laughed shakily, and the moment was gone. I felt like I’d done something intimate with her, not dirty but still far too adult for my mind to get full around. She had taken her hand from her breast and, placing that arm about my shoulders, said, “Aye, well, no matter about that then. Help me up, there’s a strong lad.” Indeed, she leaned on me heavily as we climbed to her feet, and my arm automatically circled her waist. When she’d made it all the way up, I expected her to pull away, maybe even push me away. Instead, one short, vicious spasm of coughing wracked her, and she swayed toward me. As she seemed about to topple over, I turned into her and raised my other arm to hold her steady. For one instant, and for all the wrong reasons, I held Claire Reeser in my arms, close against me, and she leaned into me; she was as fragile as a spider’s web, and as strong. Then she did pull away, though gently, and with a gentle touch of fingers to my cheek which left a smudge of garden soil that I didn’t find till later. Her eyes grew hard then, and she trapped my gaze and held it. “You’ll not be telling Joe about me feeling poorly, then.” It was a command, and I felt my head drop to my chest.

“No, Ma’m—I mean, No, Miz …” I raised my head and stared into her eyes. “No, Claire. I won’t tell.” I grew a hell of a long way in those last five words.

Joe’s voice from the north field made us both stand apart a ways and Claire visibly gathered herself. He came trotting around the house, hair tangled and T-shirt sweat-stained and grease-smeared. He saw me and his face broke into a wide smile. "I remember you," he declared. "You read science fiction."

"Yes sir," I replied. "And you build rockets and fly kites in the snow."

I immediately blushed at what my mouth had gotten away with. Often even today it seems I say things my brain didn't sign the order for. It was okay, though, because he just laughed and clapped me on the back.

"Well, come on round the back, son, and I'll show you something else."

Out the back, where the ravine ran straight across Joe's field, all the corn was growing tall. A path led down the hill to a pair of logs that forded the creek at the bottom. Joe Reeser led me down this path, to where the creek was sluggishly making its way through the dense underbrush. He's built a sort of shack down there, using canvas and uprights and some planks. It was open facing the creek, and right at its edges. The ground underneath the lean-to was spread with a tarp, and on this was placed several large tanks of some sort, and a few tractor batteries, connected, it seemed, to the creek itself. Mr. Reeser gestured around at the odd assortment of junk, as if it was the finest treasure.

"Hydrogen and oxygen, Trevor. It's all about hydrogen and oxygen."

I pondered for a moment, then shook my head. "I don't understand, sir."

"Quit with the sir, Trevor! I thought Claire’d talked to you about that. She’s Claire, and I’m Joe.” He gestured at the apparatus before us. Electricity to split water into its constituent parts," he elaborated. "Hydrogen and oxygen. Collect them both and you can do many things."

"Like blow yourself up," I quipped. There went my damned mouth again. "Like the Hindenberg."

Joe chuckled and ran his hands through his short hair. "Yes, that's a danger," he allowed. "But this is what I have to work with, and it's primitive ..." He trailed off.

His mood seemed to change like a summer squall speeding through the river valley. "Primitive," he repeated, and went to sit on a log of the bridge. After a moment, I joined him.

Joe didn't say anything for almost two minutes. He just sat there, staring off into the underbrush and I just sat there listening to the creek and wondering about hydrogen and oxygen. He startled me a bit when he turned to me and stated, "Claire's sick."

"Sick?" My promise to Claire clawed at my guts.

The expression on Joe’s face was torture to look at and yet keep silent. “She doesn’t want me to know, I think. She spends time in her garden, or walking in the fields and woods, and that seems to make her better, but …” He stopped for a moment, looked away from my eyes. “It’s like something’s eating her slowly. Sometimes, at night, next to her-” He closed his mouth and looked at me. “Don’t suppose you know much about that yet, though,” he mumbled, and it was his turn to look down, embarrassed.

“I need to get help for her. Somewhere there has to be someone who knows how to cure her. She'll die if she's left in this primitive place.” He jumped to his feet and kicked savagely at rocks along the path, cratering the sluggish trickle of the creek with transient artillery. “She'll die because we're still too primitive to save her! We're too damned savage! We're still living in the stone age, compared to what's possible.”

He stalked into the underbrush. Frankly he was scaring me, so I stayed put for a moment, then got up and started to head for the road to town, thinking it might be safer to leave him to himself.

Claire stopped me when I’d gotten up the hill and around to the dooryard. “Trevor,” she called, “Won't you come in for a snack? I've got fresh muffins.” She beckoned me in, and because I was too speechless and rattled, I went. Next thing I knew, I was sitting at the table with Claire across from me and a hot biscuit in my hand.

“He's down there,” I said, when my mouth was empty. “He's ...”

Clair patted my hand across the table, which made me blush. Her hands were clean, now, all traces of dirt gone, even from under the nails. “He takes things too hard,” she replied. “He's far too smart for his own good, and he thinks he's got to save the world. But don't worry,” she must have seen my expression. “He'd never harm a fly, even if he is a bit hard for people around here to take.” She chuckled quietly.

“No, he ain’t trying to save the world; just you. He … He knows, Claire.”

She nodded. “Aye, well, I was afraid of that,” she sighed and then coughed just a bit as the breath left her. “He's down there electrolyzing water to make fuel to go to the Moon, did he tell you?” Her chuckle turned into a fond but resigned smile. “It'll never work, of course. Maybe in a hundred years, but not before.”

“He wants to go to Mars and bring back someone to save you.” I was babbling, and I couldn’t stop. “He says we’re too primitive and backward, and he wants to find a Martian doctor to fix you.”

That made her laugh, and she took my hand. “Sure’n that’s not all of the reason,” she said with the laughter still in her voice. “Trevor, have you ever seen a mamma bird toss her babies out of the nest?” I blink, thrown by the unexpected turn of the conversation. When I nodded, she continued. “Most times they learn to fly, and sometimes the foxes eat them. Either way, someone benefits by that mamma bird’s actions, even though it has to be the hardest thing mamma bird ever does, to push her wee ones away like that.” She gazed into my eyes, and I fell helplessly into her calm, warm, brown-eyed beauty. “I think Mamma Gaia just might be pushing us all out of the nest,” she said finally, after a few seconds. “There’s war everywhere now, and it’s eating up the whole human world. And if we are being pushed from the nest, then we’ve got to learn to fly, don’t you think?”

“But you just said …” I was confused. I wanted to tell her that there was nothing up there, and I wanted to tell her about the canal system Lowell saw on Mars through his telescope. I wanted to tell her that if I had someone as beautiful as Claire, I’d never stir from her side. Then I felt a tremor pass through our linked hands, and she took a deep breath I saw a shadow pass through those Earth-brown eyes, and I caught just the barest hint of Joe’s desperate, driving, urgent need to save her. I started to understand that this need would consume him, just as the cancer ate her up from within. Just as the War ate its human victims and raged stronger and stronger. Claire squeezed my hand, then slowly let it go. “Trevor,” she said quietly. “It’s time to go. One way or the other … It’s time to go …”

In the winter of 1942, I joined up to fight where my country needed me. Since the fighting was almost everywhere at that point, my country needed most anyone young and willing to serve, and if I was a few months under eighteen at the time, I looked tall and strong, and no one paid much attention. That was a dark time, indeed. I was stationed in Germany, until I got my knee shot off in 1944, right near the end of the fighting.

I only ever killed one person during the war. I wasn’t any coward, don’t get me wrong, but the only person I ever killed for sure, no matter how many times I shot at the enemy, was the one person left in the German rocket base my platoon stormed. We didn’t get there in time to prevent the launch of the last V2 rocket. We watched as it leapt from its concrete bunker and climbed the sky in an arc which would bring it, not to the stars, but down in a deadly curve on some sleepy English town. In my mind was a vivid picture of a rocket made of an old oil drum and hand-carved wooden tail fins, bursting into flame over a farmer’s field in Vermont. Also in my mind was a beautiful woman singing to the Earth in her garden, her hands buried up to the wrists in soft, living, loving soil.

The cackling from within the bunker made the intense grief burst into flames of rage. Before I knew it, I was down those steps and inside the cool, dimly lit room. The kid in there, cackling his crazy head off, must not yet have been 16, and he kept cackling even as I leveled my gun at him. His uniform was too big and torn besides, flapping around him in mad tatters. Stringy hair and demon eyes confronted me. “It’s too late,” His voice was cracked and crazy-shrill, his English broken and accented. “It’s too late! Too late! Too---”

I shot him twice in the head. Then I emptied the rest of the clip into the machinery and the walls and, as the sustained burst kicked the muzzle of my tommy gun up high, into the ceiling. When the gun was empty, when the roar had died away leaving me deaf and empty of rage or grief or anything at all, I walked up the steps and out to my squad. “Come on,” I said. “It’s time to go.”

I never lost the image of Claire Reeser, shrinking inside her skin as some disease ate her. I never stopped thinking of that lumbering wood and metal contraption, or the kite with too much spirit for its size. Some nights in my dreams, I'd hear Joe Reeser chanting, "Hydrogen and oxygen, it's all about hydrogen and oxygen." Sometimes, it was Claire’s soft, sure voice: “It’s time to go…” Oddly, the crazy Nazi I’d killed never appeared there.

By the time it was all over and I was back in Pearson Falls, I had decided that both Claire and Joe were right. We were hopelessly savage and primitive, and there was no one out there who was going to help us. Pearson Falls was tinier and shabbier than ever, in my eyes, but at least my daddy never tried to beat me. In fact, everyone seemed a bit skittish around me, and I didn’t understand why.

And Claire Reeser died in the fall of 1945.

So, when, in the summer of 1946, I hiked up the old Reeser road, now as dry and hard as bone, it was, in my own conscious mind, just a way to exercise my wounded leg. Nowadays, here in the lovely Cedar Lake rest home, where the wind shrieks between the ugly, square buildings, and where the pathetic attempt at a garden yields nothing but twigs and shrunken blossoms, I've got a prosthetic knee, and it works almost as well as the real one did. My gait's better now than it was when, at 21, I hobbled up the hill on a crutch. They say this knee's got some new, light alloy in it, what the kids call "Spacenik." I just shake my head and wonder, and pray.

So there I was, hobbling under the glaring sun up the steep hill to Joe and Claire's place, although with Claire recently passed on, it was now just Old Joe Reeser's place. No one'd seen Joe for three weeks, since Claire's death and burial in the town graveyard out on Luce road. He hadn't been down for supplies or anything, and I was hobbling up his road, just, you know, to walk the ache out of my leg. Nothing more to it than that.

Nothing was stirring when I reached the dooryard. The cats looked hungry, so I fed them. Then the big old plough horse, who was a gentle animal and getting old, looked as if he'd be happier if he could graze, so I let him out to the north pasture. While I was there, I decided to limp on into the field, just to see what I could see. My heart was pounding far too hard for such a casual walk in the sun as I was lying to myself about, and so when I didn't find anyone in the back of the house I gave up the pretense, looked for and found the path, and barely made it down the south- facing slope and into the bottom of the ravine, where the bridge was now only one log wide. The lean-to by the edge of the creek was still there, though it was leaning and looked even shabbier for five years of weather.

That's where I found Joe, sitting on an old oil drum. I'd made enough noise in my controlled slide down the hill that he had to have heard me coming. I walked up to him, unconsciously still standing at attention when I reached him.

“You,” he said, and his voice sounded slurred. “You read science friction.”

He heard himself mess up the last word, because he started giggling. The source of his merriment became evident as he raised a canning jar full of clear liquid from the ground by his feet to his mouth, and drank.

“Do you drink yet , son?” He asked, beckoning to the log next to him and holding out the jar. It was so, so long since he’d asked me, “Do you smoke yet?” My soul seemed stretched between the two moments, taut and humming on a high, sweet note. Claire Reeser was dead, and I'd come up here because I'd known them both and loved them both, in a crazy young-boy way. That was the truth, that and I couldn’t get their love and their shared dream out of my war-torn mind. I was no longer a young boy, but I still loved them, and the dream, and I ached worse’n I ever had durin the war for Claire’s passing. So I was here, and if Joe Reeser wanted to get bombed after his wife's death, I reckon I'd seen worse things in the last few years. So I simply said, “Ayeh,” and I unhinged my stiff posture and settled down on the bench, taking the jar and sipping with care. Sure enough, that was the product of old man Pritchard's still. As a boy me and four others had stolen some fresh from the pipe the night before we'd joined up. I'd come back, but I was the only one. I sipped again, this time with more recklessness, and passed back the jar. I noticed several others in a corner. “I just come up to see, you know, how you were,” I explained. “I was just out limbering up my leg ...”

I couldn't think of how to finish that. Joe handed the bottle back to me, and that was a good excuse to drink some more.

“Well," he said after a bit,” You're here anyway, so have a drink.” I did.

Then he set my head spinning.

“Hyd'gen, and ox'gen,” he slurred. “That's what it comes down to, just hy'gen ...”

And suddenly, in my mind, were nights of waking up in the mud, or in deserted farmhouses, sometimes with the war for a bedfellow, with his voice in my head. I'd carried that phrase with me for five years, from boyhood to manhood.

I turned to face him on the bench, the first heat of the moonshine reddening my cheeks.

“What does that mean?” I asked. Something in my voice made him turn to look at me, some of the drunken veil falling away.

“Mean?” He thought a moment, then held up the jar. “Hydrogen and oxygen. Well, Carbon too, but ...”

He set the jar down. It was empty.

“Rocket fuel,” he stated. “Hydrogen and oxygen's the best fuel.”

“Are you still building rockets?” I was a bit surprised, what with his wife's illness and recent death. “I'd have thought, with Mrs. .. With Claire being ...”

He jumped to his feet and turned to face me. I moved my crutch under me, purely by instinct. I seemed to hear Claire, far away, saying, “He's too smart, but he'd never harm a fly ...” So I stayed still.

“Exactly my point!” He cried. “I didn't get it done in time!”

“What're you talking about, sir?”

“Claire's why I built them, because she needed help. I thought ... “ He was crying, suddenly, hard and brutal sobs. “She needed help,” he wailed again, then turned, grabbed a full jar of liquor and stumbled out of the shack.

Lurching to my feet, though far less drunk, I followed awkwardly after. I called out to him, but he just waved and kept moving.

How either of us made it over that bridge, I'll never know. Him too drunk to walk a straight line, and me with a bum leg and a crutch. Still, there we were, finally, high up on the south-facing slope of the Reeser farm. The afternoon sun made our shadows into meekly following giants as we staggered to the top. Where the land leveled off, we stopped to catch our breath. Joe opened the new jar of moonshine and swallowed rather too deeply, coughing for a moment and merely pointing with his hand. I could smell clover, and corn, and hot Earth.

What he was pointing to was perhaps a hundred yards off into the level field. For a minute,,my half-drunk mind played a nasty trick with me, and I thought he was pointing to a gallows, with a huge hanged man in its clutch. I fancied I could see a noose of rope, a shroud, a hulking outline. Then, when the figure didn't move in the slight breeze, I looked again. The whole thing was far too stiff to be a dead man, and far too oddly shaped. When I'd finished drinking from the bottle he handed me, I turned to Joe and asked, “What is that?”

“The best I could do,” he replied, tears drying on his face in trails. “But too late, and too crude. The best I could do.”

I limped closer, and now Joe trailed me, walking behind a few steps and mumbling to himself. As I came up to the thing, the rope resolved into many individual ropes, hanging down like a skirt from a huge balloon.

“Parachutes,” Joe came up beside me and saw where I was looking. “Parachutes are cheap, since so many came back without their owners.” We both looked down, I because I'd been there and he because he'd known the same boys I'd known. “Nylon's strong stuff,” continued Joe after a moment. “Doesn't burn, and it's full of hyd'gen.” He paused for a swallow. “Bout four chutes, filling up with hyd'gen, pulls it up! Get maybe, two hun'red thousand feet if you're real lucky.”

“That's not a rocket, Mr. Reeser,” I commented. “It's longer than that up to the Moon, if your balloon doesn't blow up first.”

“Right,” agreed Joe. “Damn right. Rocket's underneath the balloon.”

I looked and saw he wasn't kidding. I went closer, and looked under the mountain of cloth, still only half-full of hydrogen gas. There seemed to be a bundle of cloth under it, and I could make out a hard shape beneath.

“Kite,” explained Reeser, poking the cloth and making a clunking sound on the metal underneath with his finger. “Kite with little rockets on the wings. Balloon tows it up and released it. Wings pop out from the body and it's a kite. Frame of the wings is filled with fuel for the rockets. ...”

I waved my arms about, now almost as drunk as Joe was. “What are you talking about!” I protested.

Joe stumbled forward and roughly pushed aside some of the balloon material. I saw the hose which was, apparently, filling it with hydrogen from the electrolysis set-up by the creek. Underneath all that nylon was a metal shape perhaps seven feet high. Wrapped in a bundle of the same parachute material as the balloon, four stubby fins peeked out from under like a knight in armor on his knees. Joe undid a fastening, and a section of the metal hull beneath swung open. I couldn't make any sense of what I saw inside. I began pointing at things.

“That's a record player,” I said. “And that's a barometer, and ... is that a ...” I shrugged and looked helplessly at him. “What the hell is this?”

“Right,” replied Joe. “Record player, barometer, a few switches and resistors and a battery ...” He frowned at the battery for a moment. “That over there is a crystal out of a radio transmitter. Piece of shit, really, won't put out much of a signal at all ...”

He turned to face me, both of us now down on our knees to look into the hull. “You heard about the flying saucers?” he asked.

“I've heard of 'em,” I admitted. “People seein' 'em all over the place, supposed to be full of green monsters; those saucers?”

“Yes, those. Wouldn't need much of a signal to raise one of those, would you?” I gaped at him. “You're going to talk to a flying saucer from a balloon in the sky?” I giggled, the alcohol taking me back six years. “Jerry Pelky was right; you are loopy,” I proclaimed. Then I started laughing. I stopped very quickly.

“It was the best I could do,” he said, and the mournful tone of his voice sent shame hot into my face. I reached out and patted him on the shoulder, which turned into leaning on his shoulder for balance.

“Aw, Joe, that was shitty of me, I'm sorry ...”

We embraced, on the point of falling either way, for a moment, and the tears were back in his eyes. He pulled away and I righted myself.

“You're right, though.” he said quietly. “And it's too late now, she's dead and I know nothing can bring her back now. And the rest of us ain’t worth saving… Still…” He gazed off into the sky. “It’s time to go …”

I looked again at the jumble of odds and ends crammed into a miniature capsule. “You weren't intending to climb in there and go up with all that, were you?”

I was beginning to marvel at the contraption, forgetting whether it was crazy or not. Joe laughed dryly. “No,” he said. “No, record player plays a message I recorded, kinda mayday. Also spins like a gyroscope for stability on the trip up. Higher it gets, the lower the pressure outside, until the balloon either bursts or reaches a level. At that point, get rid of the balloon. I hope. Wings pop out, fuel in the wings for little rockets on the tips.” He pointed to where two nozzles, now lying against the base of the craft, could be seen. “Pushes it up slowly. Not like those V2 rockets or what the Russians are doing. Pushes it up slowly until there's no more air. I hope.”

He stopped again, getting lost in his mind. Then, like a haunting refrain, “Hydrogen and oxygen,” he murmured. “It’s time to …” He sat down and put his face in his hands. “Just hydrogen and oxygen ..."

I tried to straighten to my feet, as my leg was starting to ache from kneeling. I ended up sitting on the grass next to him, then lying on my back, gazing up into the hazy blue sky. Suddenly, there in the humid August heat, I was shivering, thinking about how thin the air was, and how close we all were to airless space. It seemed the largest of miracles, at that moment, that anyone was alive at all, under this fragile sky. With the news full of flying saucers, the world's end, and scares about poisoned air and water and soil? With the Midwest blowing away in handfuls of dust? With the atom bomb newly and roughly born, and nightmares of a radioactive Earth? How could it not be fragile! If a man on a farm wanted to climb to the top of the sky and send out a message for help, Mayday, the Earth is in bad trouble, it’s too late for my beautiful, dead wife, but please assist--how could anyone blame him?

I rolled over, vertigo and moonshine starting to overwhelm me. Joe was kneeling in front of his machine, carefully replacing the cloth and checking the hose. “I guess it's worth a try,” was all I could think to say.

“Too late,” he muttered, draining the last of the moonshine from the jar. “The message I recorded asked for help for Claire. She's dead, and it's too late.”

I laughed, shakily, and the laughter seemed to burst something inside me. “Too late,” I gasped out, when I could talk again. “Too late for Claire, yeah. But look around! Look at the trouble we're in! If you ask me, the whole damned Human Race needs help!” But Joe was still muttering “Too late,” and he had foundered, for the moment, on his grief. After a while I crawled over and hugged him. Part of me still thought he was crazy. Most of me didn't care.

After a time, the drink cleared from our minds and the breeze freshened from the northeast, cool and promising rain. First I, then Joe revived enough to walk, and we didn't say a word as we trudged down the valley and across the creek. When we'd reached the lean-to at the creek's edge, Joe grabbed a few more jars of Old Man Pritchard's special batch, and we proceeded up to the kitchen.

Nothing had been changed on account of Claire's dying. I ached from a new angle when we reached it and I saw the paintings still on the wall. The droplet of water hanging suspended; the naked woman, dancing, crying, laughing and weeping. But the last painting had, it seemed, been finished. The clouds looked more like clouds, and there were storms, and even white-capped waves in the blue-green sea below them. I felt a dull rage that she didn't just pop into being, singing an old, haunting song in Gaelic, tethering Joe to the earth with her love and making me want her. So when Joe handed me a new jar of whiskey and we sat down at the table, I didn't protest. I found my mouth running away with me, and I told him, “I loved her too, you know, like a crush …” I trailed off as what I was saying penetrated the alcohol haze over my mind, and I put my head in my hands.

“Everyone did,” he said, patting my hand. “Everyone who was anyone loved Claire.” I knew it was okay then between us, and I looked up, my own tears distorting my vision of his tear-streaked face.

After a while of silent thought, Joe said, “Can't work anyway.”

“What?”

“Can't work. Too much could go wrong. Too long in the atmosphere, too slow in the cosmic ray belt ...” I nodded, though I was still catching up to his conversation. “Battery'll freeze, there's windsheer, low-pressure pockets ...”

“Right,” I was genuinely trying to help him along. “Can't possibly work, I suppose.”

Joe nodded miserably. “Nope. And it's too late anyway. Balloon's not even full yet. Not enough liquid fuel.”

“Hydrogen and oxygen,” I agreed, now totally lost in the conversation.

“That's what it boils down to,” he replied.

After a while we both got the pun and giggled for a good five minutes. I remember that moment as clear as yesterday, though it be now some sixty years gone. “That's what it all boils down to,” he says, and we both go off into fits of drunken laughter. And something changes. I remember that thing changing, like a switch being thrown. I think we both knew right then that we'd send the crazy thing up anyway.

“’Member all those others on Earth besides you and Claire," I said. “’Member us? I think the whole lot of us could use to yell Mayday.” Something incongruous occurred to me then. “Besides, how do you know the Martians speak English?”

“They wouldn't, of course,” Joe was getting into that mournful stage of drunkenness. “It'd just be noise that they'd hear, maybe, if they were listening for it, and it'd be coming from orbit, even a low orbit, so that'd prove ...”

He thought for a bit, and struck out. “Prove ... something!” He banged his fist weakly on the table. “They'd have understood, I hope. But now it's too late.”

I was out of arguments, so I just looked blearily at him and said softly, “It’s time to go …” He nodded mutely. I banged another empty canning jar of moonshine down on his kitchen table. It made a water ring, and Claire would have kicked our asses if she'd found us drinking without coasters. “Couldn't hurt,” I added. It was the best I could do.

Joe looked at me for a long time. “Balloon needs another day or two. Not much pressure behind the hydro…”

And, I swear, in mid-syllable he was asleep. He laid his head down on his arms and that was that.

I stayed with Joe for the next day and a half. About a day into that time, we ran out of Old Man Pritchard's Whiskey, and sobering up hurt. Finally, after about a gallon each of coffee and a lot of steak, we were in reasonably sound condition. Joe looked to me, again across the table, now littered with dirty dishes.

“Are you sure you…”

My sharp nod brought him up short.

Getting over the bridge sober was much harder than it had been drunk. We managed, and we managed the struggle in the dew-soaked underbrush up the other side of the valley. The balloon had grown to almost its full size, and glistened with dew in the morning sun as it rested at the top of the opposite slope. The breezed had changed to come out of the northwest overnight, and pushed into our faces as we gazed at the waiting machine.

The balloon now strained the ropes that held it to stakes in the ground, and had lifted completely clear of its payload. Wings folded neatly back along its tapered length, it poked up under the bobbing balloon like an angel suckling a cow. The image made me smile, and reminded me how ridiculous this whole thing was.

Joe came up the hill, panting under the weight of something in his arms. I went to help him, and together we lugged a heavy metal tank over to the base of the rocket. Joe opened the door in the hull again, and we wrestled the tank into a hollow space inside.

“Liquid fuel, very hard to make. Dangerous as hell, too.” He screwed in a nozzle.

Panting and already sweating, I replied a bit snappishly, “Hydrogen and oxygen?”

Joe nodded and seemed to cheer up a bit, despite my ornery tone. “Whole thing weighs about three hundred pounds, with the fuel in,” commented Joe. “Heavy for a small balloon like that. Don't want the bag too full, or it'll pop too soon. Better to go up slowly and drift south, toward the equator.” I muttered and sat down to rest. “If someone doesn't shoot it down first or something,” he finished under his breath. I just scowled.

Joe started untying ropes from the stakes, which tethered the thing down, and tying them to rings around the body of the rocket. “That tank,” he explained, “is for the last rocket engine in the tail,” he tapped a section of welded steel housing. “Last boost to get clear enough of the atmosphere for a free-fall orbit, maybe two at most. Transmitter starts up when that engine lights, if the battery's still working.” He frowned again at the battery. “Maybe get three orbits if we're lucky. Burn up coming back down. I hope.” He patted it again. “It'll never work,” he decided, and fastened the last rope from the balloon to the rocket.

Nothing happened. The balloon bobbed in the freshening morning wind, and the little metal craft jittered a bit, but it stayed firmly rooted to the earth. I noted the name, “Claire,” painted carefully on its side, and looking up I saw it was repeated in larger letters on the balloon. It still didn't move.

I got up and came over, ducking a bit even though the balloon was over my head. Underneath all that hydrogen, I started to sweat again. I inspected the whole thing, and could see nothing that was tying it down. “It’s time to go, you sonofabitch,” I whispered. Hesitantly, I pushed. With a dreamlike grace, the whole thing shifted, tilted, then rose up in front of me. For a brief moment I held the thing in my arms, then Joe was there, and we both pushed it as hard as we could, pushed it at the sky. Damned if the thing didn't begin to slowly rise, drifting toward the edge of the hillside. By the time we reached the slope, it was a few feet over our heads, rising and moving before the wind.

I tripped over the edge of the hill and went sprawling into the grass. I turned over and watched on my back as the first leg of its journey commenced. The balloon seemed to have found its head, the way a horse will, and now the whole crazy assembly was rising at a fairly good clip, drifting southeast. Joe, panting, landed beside me and turned over to watch just as I was.

There was no noise, no event that marred the stillness of another Vermont summer morning. Neither of us ever saw or heard about that little rocket again. It lifted off, vanished out of sight silently, and that was that. There's nothing more to tell. I don't know if it made it into orbit or not. Chances are it didn't, quite honestly.

You already know the rest of the story. When the great starship drifted, slowly at first and then ever quicker, out of the stars and passed through our solar system, no nation was able to put anything into orbit, much less catch it. We all saw it at night, shining up and down the rainbow of colors. “A siren of light,” some news reported called it. It passed through, beamed some radio message at us, and was gone into the dark, swinging close past the sun and picking up speed; something about using the Sun's gravity, I never understood that really well.

That was also over forty years ago now, and practically the whole world's been working on decoding that radio signal, as it seems to be densely packed and layered with information. With everyone trying so hard to figure out what the starship said as it passed on through, and with all the advances there’ve been from the parts of the message that we do understand, not much time is left over for fighting each other these days. I suppose that's a good thing, and that people are forgetting about nations and colors and the like. All that seems mighty petty when you've been visited by creatures from light-years away, and you know there's a bigger universe than one small planet. I'm all for that. But I think we have another problem that didn't get solved by that visitor from the stars. That other problem is why, while most of us are preparing to venture out to the stars, I’ve worked over these past sixty years to make sure that some of us will stay behind. Maybe it’s time to go, but no one leaves their mamma all alone in the night, exhausted and mortally wounded by her own children’s passing. Some of us want to stay and tend her. Some of us want to fix the damage we all did when we broke free of the nest, pushed or not.

The wind's howling again. The nurse came round with a pill before, but I was so busy writing that I passed it up. Now, it's late in the night and the wind's howling again. Outside Cedar Lake Rest Home, dust is billowing quite thickly tonight. It obscures the stars.

The dust is a symptom of our other problem. The dust, and the sunglasses to protect your eyes, and the skin in a tube for the rest of you. The cancer in seventy percent of the population is the problem, and the starvation over half the globe. Our planet is sick, and may be dying. We've poisoned it. I don't know if there's time for what we now have to do even for ourselves, but I also know we can’t turn our back, or leave behind a soiled nest.

What if the balloon made it to two hundred thousand feet? What if it jettisoned like it was supposed to, that strange umbrella-wing unfurled, rockets firing softly in the high, thin air. What if it pushed up smoothly through the atmosphere, almost to the very top? What if the wing jettisoned, just like it was supposed to, and the last engine in the tail of what remained roared to life, hurling a homemade message in a bottle into the larger sky, even if for just a few minutes?

Would that starship have talked to us if Joe Reeser had never launched his crazy rocket? This is the question that has haunted me these three score years. I left Pearson Falls shortly after we launched Joe's machine, after we laid Claire to rest in the sky. I left out of discontent, and wandered a good part of the world, never settling down until I got too old to wander. I was too haunted by those four tolling words to settle down, and I’ve seen the devastation, the denuded forests, the dying animals, the poisoned water where nothing can live. I've come to rest here, now, and I'm still haunted. I cheered when the Russians put up Sputnik, even if all it did was go “Beep, beep”, but the starship had long gone by then. Compared to the siren of light in the sky, Sputnik was a wet firecracker. Still, I cheered, because I know; it’s time to go.

Now, though, with the Mars station in orbit and the landers starting to build Mars Base, I watch closely. Surveying the Moon, Mars and the asteroids has run the world bankrupt. It's unpopular and might get voted out before some return comes back from the project. I dearly hope not. Pretty soon it's going to be more friendly out there in space than what's down here. All the farms turned to deserts, the oceans full of chemicals, the fragile sky finally falling. It's the only way out we have left. And I know now, in my old age, that some of us must stay behind to put right what we’ve made wrong.

These days, they say we came from the stars, when the Earth was young. We drifted down on the forming world as elements and light. So we came from the stars. What no one ever talks about, though, is how hard it will be to walk back.

March 22, 1999. Hyannis, Cape cod. Revised February 21, 2006, Oakland, CA.

Notes:

I revised thiusthis story at the suggestion of an editor who was, he said, interested in publishing this piece. That publication never happened, but the revisions were worth keeping.