EXCERPT

Two Bodies in Flight

Petawawa army base, Ontario. 1909.

This was what he loved: the cough of smoke, the engine bursting to life, the sensation—still a shock, even now—of being buffeted upward, the way a leaf rises.

As a child he had lived constantly around kites. Kites the size of sheds, kites like diving birds, kites that launched from the water. And everywhere was that dream, contagious, of flight. He had lain in the grass and watched the red fabric through the gaps in his fingers, and wondered again and again how it felt.

Now he knew that it was closest to the sensation of being caught out in the water in a craft too small. But instead of the helplessness there was the small, determined sense of control—the movements of his shoulders against the plates, his feet braced, the wood pressing his arms, the sound of the fabric, everything as familiar as breathing. They had coated those wings, strung that chain, tried every conceivable (and some inconceivable) designs for the propeller. There could be no surprises here. He was as certain of it as he was of his own heartbeat. Uncountable times now this little bundle of bamboo and canvas had lifted with him, uncountable times he had wrangled it through near-disaster, through failed starts, through the infinitely more irritating times when there had been no start because of the weather, or the engine, or waiting for one part or another.

There had been a time when he wondered whether his obsession with these machines was in part a way of securing his place in the family that had become like his own—the Bells and their inventing household, rich in money and love and ideas. Whether otherwise he might have been out west working in the mines, like so many of the other boys, or on a railway somewhere. But then he’d step out and see the sun slipping off wings, sliding through the red silk of a kite, and he would know, deep inside, that he had been born only for this.

August now, and he’d woken at three in the morning and within a half hour he’d dragged Casey out of bed and convinced him to do a final set of test flights. That afternoon government officials would be coming to the military base where they’d been awkwardly accommodated, coming to assess the miracle flying machine and decide the rest of their lives.

Mostly it was nerves, and partly that old, reckless need. Casey was awake, anyhow, and got dressed immediately. Off they went—four am and the sky was pearl-grey, and this was the way he liked things: the two of them off on one hare-brained adventure or another, Casey shaking his head and saying John, disapproving and pleased.

The moon blazed above them.

He’d had this moment once before—the yawning, bottomless fear, standing at the cusp of his life. That had been three years ago, after graduating, and he’d put his head into Casey’s room and said—Well, what are you doing this summer? What do you say about getting into the air? And they had returned to the Cape Breton hills and water where he had grown up, and they had been not children anymore but kings, his calculations and Casey’s level-headed designs and Curtiss’s engines and Tom’s diagrams and their hosts enfolding them.

And now they were at another edge, alone in the camp outside Ottawa, entirely in charge of the trials. Well, it wasn’t quite just the two of them. There was Kathleen, for one thing, a presence he had initially dreaded and then come to accept and finally, quite against his will, ended up liking. She and Casey continued to baffle him. He had never, in years of friendship and living practically all on top of each other in the same house, seen more than a chaste kiss. Kathleen was nearly one of the boys, kept Casey tidy and even more orderly than he would have been on his own, and they went about together like a pair who had been married fifty years rather than two.

“Get a look at that,” Casey said. “No, to your three o’clock. There—”

It was a small hawk—a merlin, female, with the streaked brown breast. It rose swiftly up, whirled at a dizzying speed, then held completely still over the grass.

“Ailerons,” Casey murmured, and sure enough the raised feathers at the tips of the hawk’s wing were visible. It had taken them months—years really—to figure that out, to realize how roll needed to be incorporated.

The bird banked, rose smoothly at an angle.

“Only a few people in the world know what that feels like,” Casey said.

“She does it better than we do.”

“I don’t know. Your run yesterday was pretty close.”

Their breaths made a pale cloud.

“Shall we get Willie?” John said. “He won’t want to miss the fun.”

He half wanted Casey to argue it, but Casey only said: “Alright, but if he’s pissed off it’s your problem,” in that equable way of his.

The merlin, in the distance, made a perfect streak as it dove into the grasses.

Willie was groggy but content enough to be dragged along. They waited in the drifting fog while he fumbled for his clothes.

“It’s devil-o-clock,” he said.

“John thinks he can make a few test flights before the photographers catch us,” Casey said.

Willie, buried in fabric, snorted something that sounded like madmen.

And then they were off, a trio now, out to the shed where the Silver Dart rested. No matter how many others came after, it was this creation he would love. It was the one that had flown where his own family could see, the one his whole town had watched, breathless and shouting and skating behind him on the ice. It was the last thing they had worked on all together, before Tom—upright, soft-spoken, gentle Tom—died in a useless disaster they never spoke of; before Curtiss ran off with their patents to make himself a millionaire with his engines.

“Kiss your darling, Johnny,” Casey said, and laughing he ran his hands up the glossy wing and pressed his lips to the smooth beams where they met at the steering wheel.

The taste of the varnish was bitter and familiar.

“Till death do part,” Willie said, and went to get the fuel tank.