Short Story: "Flyover"
I wrote a short story on the spur of the moment this month. I didn't know whether it would end up being any good or not; it was just something I had to write, to crystallize some thoughts and emotions and get them off my chest; and if it turned out decent enough to share, all well and good. It is very much a story for 2020, though true to my usual form, it's set in a different era than our own. So here it is, and this is my very small Christmas gift to you. A short story dedicated to anyone who has had a plan upset, a dream dashed, a light at the end of the tunnel moved further away, but is still trying to keep their eye on it.
Almost at the crest of the slope Linda paused and looked back. For a moment she thought she heard the distant hum of engines, and was not sure whether the responsive feeling was expectancy or a sinking feeling. She stood still and listened, her hands deep in her coat pockets, the cold biting her toes in the few seconds’ break from walking, and concluded she had been mistaken; for the dim blue horizon remained empty, the stillness of the wooded hills and rolling cornfields unbroken.
She turned and trudged the last few paces up to where the hilltop leveled out and the bare cornfield stretched for a quarter of a mile ahead of her along the high ground. The cornstalk stubs ran in rows between lumpy furrows of half-frozen soil; ice-skimmed puddles lay flat and opaque between them, and here and there a smashed ear of corn half-eaten by deer or squirrels. Linda tramped steadily forward for ten yards or so, then paused again to look back down on the house before the rise she had climbed hid it from view. The small, slightly dingy white farmhouse lay down in the hollow surrounded by a few pine trees and a couple of big, spidery ancient maples, reached by a long curving driveway winding down from the road. The roof needed fixing, Linda thought; it sagged a little and the shingles were lichened on the side where the trees were closest. A thin gray thread of smoke from the kitchen stovepipe was promptly whisked away by the wind as soon as it got above the level of the hollow, conveying an impression of chilliness rather than warmth.
Linda drew a deep, deliberate breath, but even letting the crisp cold air fill her lungs to their fullest extent did not completely relieve the weight on her chest, the weight that she came up here to walk off every day when her grandmother, hobbled by rheumatism and easily tired with a touchy heart, was taking her afternoon rest. It was possible to feel trapped even in a place one genuinely loved. For she did love even the shabby old house; she still loved the spare beauty of the wooded hills even in the chill austerity of late November and early December, when the winter sun gilded the bare wind-tossed branches with a strange grace and the blue and dove afternoon skies blended into lilac sunsets.
Far ahead across a series of cornfields shaped to the contours of the countryside, she could see the place where the road disappeared into the distance around a bend. It seemed like she could never get beyond that point, except for little errands that were over quickly and always left her back in the same place, looking at it from this side. It was harder to look at this year, because this year she had not meant to be standing here again as November came to an end. Last November had been all hope and promise and looking forward: last November when she and Terry were newly engaged, and the muddy road was something that brought him to see her as often as he could think up an excuse for it, and around the bend was their future. Nineteen-hundred-and-forty-two was supposed to be her year—the red-letter, gold-leaf year when she finally began to live life after so many rehearsals.
All that had changed one chill, sunny Sunday afternoon in December with an interrupted radio broadcast—and now Terry was gone, training to be a flyer on the other side of the country, and it was sometimes frighteningly hard to remember his face without looking at the snapshots he sent her. A little frightening, too, to realize that sometimes she actively tried not to think of him, because she flinched away from the gnawing ache of unsatisfied longing that it brought. It hurt to remember the plans they had made, when the dates those things were supposed to happen had already come and gone. It didn’t do to remember the times when they had kissed, because that left her restless and good for nothing if it was day, unable to sleep if it was night.
A new army base had been built twenty miles away, and now planes flew over the farms by twos and threes and squadrons, day and night—exciting at first; but to Linda, as the months wore on, they became only something that symbolized how the world was passing her by—ever present but always out of reach. Somehow her life had been upended and yet was exactly the same. How could life change for a household so far out of the world except to take the world further away?—and yet bring it torturingly close, with the consciousness that men from all corners of the country were flying in formation above the cornfields, and the newspapers crowded with accounts of things happening everywhere in the world.
Linda had always dreamed of travel…but with the world at war, who knew how many years or decades it would be before that was possible again for anyone? For a few daring, hope-springing months she had seemed closer to things like that, too. Not that it had been in their immediate plans; but marriage to Terry made all sorts of things seem more possible. He was so full of forthright life and vigor and the attitude that moves things and makes things happen, life with him would never be stagnant, never feel constrained. It was that quality which made the prospect of merely moving to the other side of town where Terry worked on his brother’s dairy farm seem such a vital change. Stepping into the orbit of his big family of married brothers and sisters and cousins, all busy and enthusiastic in their various callings, promised to make her finally a part of the world instead of an onlooker. Life wasn’t defined by a small town or a big town; it was how much you were a part of it.
The drone of aircraft engines was coming from somewhere in the azure sky to the south. Linda glanced over her shoulder, saw the pair of single-engined fighters small on the horizon and drawing nearer, and unconsciously quickened her step, lifting her feet higher over the hard furrows. The nasal drone grew louder, echoing back from the wooded ridge beyond the house, and something of the old exhilaration stirred in her in spite of herself so that she squeezed her gloved hands a little tighter in her coat pockets. Walking fast, she glanced up again and saw the fighters skimming level over the fields, tilting their wings ever so slightly in near-perfect synchronization, saw the white star bold on each gray fuselage; they were nearly low enough to discern the shape of a pilot’s helmet in the cockpit. They swept over, her eyes clinging to them and her heart flickering faster and faster until watching and walking was not enough and she pulled her hands from her pockets and began to run. She ran as hard as she could, the cold air bursting her lungs and whipping in her face; a downward dip in the ground gave her momentum so that for a moment, her head flung back to watch the sky and the receding fighters, her feet barely seeming to touch the ground, it was almost like flight: for a moment she was free.
Her foot smashed through the thin ice of a frozen puddle and she staggered and barely managed to keep her balance as she lurched to a stop, tripping over a particularly deep rut between the cornstalks. She stood breathing hard, her chest hurting, staring after the planes as they disappeared into the purple-blue sky above the distant bend in the road, her brief surge of spirits punctured like the broken ice on the puddle.
A cold fear settled around her heart. What if Terry never came back? What if she was stranded here forever, the edge of her world the far side of a cornfield she could cross and come back on her afternoon walk?
Marriage was the only thing that had ever presented itself as a good enough reason to go down that road, to find someone else to come and bury themselves in the little house among the pines which her grandmother would never leave in the years she had remaining and look after her so that Linda was free. It was the one thing for which her grandmother would truly be joyful no matter the inconvenience to herself…any other reason would seem artificially contrived, even selfish.
If Terry did not come back to her, that vision was gone. In the grip of today’s feelings, Linda could not imagine ever feeling the same way about someone else. Having had one brief, sweet taste of what it was like to love and be loved this way, could she ever go back to life as it had been before, or would she be restless and sleepless forever?
Fields, hills, and road were silent again. Not the faintest echo of an aircraft engine broke the stillness, though Linda strained her ears for it…something within her snapped in frustration at the petty failure and it wrenched a silent cry from her heart: oh, God, will there ever be anything else but this?
Slowly, memory came to her aid. Once before she had stood nearly on this spot on a bare winter day, more than a year before she met Terry, and had looked at the place where the road disappeared and seen no future. She could see nothing beyond the bend in the road, and her heart had made the same forlorn unspoken cry. But she had resolved to believe that the answer would come one day, and that her God would ordain things for her good.
Sometimes you couldn’t do more than resolve to believe. Lord, I believe; help thou my unbelief. The trusting came later, slowly, became a way of life as you lived it. And sometimes the lesson needed to be learned over again. It took time. It took patience.
Linda shut her eyes for a moment and drew breath, and this time she spoke silently to herself. Patience.
Wait.
Trust.
She turned and started back at a slow meandering pace, scuffing at papery dried cornhusks matted to the ground, lingering to break a frozen clump of dirt with the toe of her boot. The crisp air and the exertion had cleared her head and relaxed the tenseness of her shoulders, as it often did. It was good to have this big bare field, high up and far away from any eyes upon her, to run, to rebel and wrestle and calm herself to resolve and acquiescence again.
As she descended the sloping edge into the hollow, she heard the distant drone of an engine once more. She looked up, searching for the speck of motion above the trees.
The mound of fluffy gray-blue clouds in the west had turned a vivid, glowing cerulean, as if someone had set a lamp behind blue stained glass, with a touch of rose-color radiating from the heart of it. It looked like the gateway to some other glowing kingdom of the sky; and for a moment, as the black speck of the plane passed in front of the light, Linda half expected it to vanish through the portal. But it was coming this way.
She kept on walking while the roar of the engine gradually grew louder, not watching the plane’s approach. But as it passed noisily overhead, when she was halfway down the driveway to the house, from habit she stopped to watch it out of sight. Her eyes followed intently the spread of black silhouetted wings and the blur of the propeller etched against the sky, and a brief smile touched her lips all but unconsciously, as her heart followed it wistfully on its flight.
Then she put her balled-up hands in her coat pockets again for warmth, and resumed her walk to the house.