The Invention of Flight Read online

  The Invention of Flight

  Winner of

  THE FLANNERY O’CONNOR AWARD FOR SHORT FICTION

  The Invention of Flight

  Stories by Susan Neville

  Paperback edition published in 2010 by

  The University of Georgia Press

  Athens, Georgia 30602

  www.ugapress.org

  © 1984 by Susan Neville

  All rights reserved

  Set in Linotron 202 Baskerville

  Printed digitally in the United States of America

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition of this book as follows:

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Neville, Susan, 1951-

  The invention of flight : stories / by Susan

  Neville.

  109 p.; 23 cm.

  I. Title.

  PS3564.E852515 1984 813′.54—dc19 83-24142

  ISBN 0-8203-0706-8 (alk. paper)

  Paperback ISBN-13: 978-0-8203-3705-0

  ISBN-10: 0-8203-3705-6

  British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

  The author and the publisher gratefully acknowledge the following publications in which stories from this collection first appeared: “Johnny Appleseed,” Apalachee Quarterly, Pushcart Prize IV; “Banquet,” “Rondo,” Ascent; “Rain Forest,” Gallimaulfry; “Rapture,” Indiana Writes; “Second Coming,” Pigiron; “The Beekeeper,” A Shout in the Street.

  ISBN for This digital edition: 978-0-8203-3756-2

  FOR KEN

  Contents

  The Beekeeper

  Rondo

  Kentucky People

  Second Coming

  Banquet

  Rapture

  Johnny Appleseed

  Rain Forest

  Cousins

  The Invention of Flight

  The Invention of Flight

  The Beekeeper

  Lorrine’s house in mid-summer. Kitchen full of plastic bags filled with bleached towels, dampening. The hiss of the iron. The outside softened through the gray grid of screens. Her husband’s father lying in the yard in a hammock drinking gin and tonics, an old salt feeling in the gentle rocking the roll of the ocean, surrounded by the blue air, a yellow glass beading on a wrought-iron table, arbors of purple clematis and a hedge of white hydrangeas. The town itself surrounded by green rippling corn, by sloping rolls of hay like praying horses.

  “Lorrine, more gin.” She puts down the iron, reaches up behind jars of tomatoes for a new bottle, and takes it out to him. The bottle is full but the seal is broken from the watering down, every two bottles really one, every two drinks really one, and then he falls asleep after a few sips and she pours the rest into the hedge and later, when he wakes up, he says, “The old sailor really tied one on, Reeny,” and she says yes, the old sailor really tied one on. He takes the bottle from her, pours some into the glass, mixes it with tonic, says, “You’re a blessing to an old man, Reeny,” and lies back into the hammock, rearranges the pillow beneath his head. His lips move out to meet the glass. He takes a drink and then rests it on his stomach which is round but hard for a man his age. His face looks healthy, tanned. A sun-bleached mustache rests, a pale scar above his lip. But his legs are too white, shrunken, and it’s with difficulty that he walks from his room at the back of the house in the morning to his hammock and the return trip at night.

  He smiles and Lorrine tenses slightly, realizes too late that his real purpose for getting her out here is that he’s full of conversation, and she knows that she will listen too long, barely able to follow it because of his age, because she has never been to any of the places that he talks about nor seen any of the things he has seen and because, even after years in this country, his accent is still thick. A week ago he had spent a half an hour saying tshashoo, tshashoo, tshashoo and she had thought he was talking about sneezes until she realized he wanted a certain kind of nut. “I dinna learn from books,” he says, moving the glass in circles on his stomach. “I saw the fish born in river and go fifty miles away but ever year they come hop hop hop back to where they born.” He pauses, then goes into a long story, something about Finland and ropes, then without transition starts a childhood story about Denmark, about walking miles through snow to see the Queen Mary, about his father taking him to see their cow slaughtered for the meat, a bloodstained broom and oil drums the things he remembers. Lorrine asks polite questions, has never been able to figure out how not to do that or how to get away from the rambling comfortably. She remembers her husband before he died had been able to just sit back in his own chair, close his eyes, and nod as if he were listening, a transistor radio that his father couldn’t hear bulging in his shirt pocket like cigarettes, broadcasting a game from St. Louis.

  The phone rings and she moves toward the door, says, “It’s the phone, Papa,” and he says, “I don wanna be a preacher, I don wanna preach. But some day, fifty years, they will be starving, the people starve. The fish, they not as fat as they used to be.” Lorrine nods, smiles, opens the screen door, and shuts it behind her.

  She picks up the phone, says, “No,” and hangs up, an irritation but she’s thankful for it, hears him call, “Lorrine,” and she goes to the door. “Who was it?” he says, and he smiles at her, lifts his head from the pillow, wants her to come back outside. “Wrong number, Papa.” She turns back into the kitchen, says, “I’ll be out later with some lunch.” She takes a linen towel out of the bag and presses the iron to it. She thinks of the old man in the back yard, no relation to her really, not by blood or even country, but so helpless and so many years left in him. In June a cottonwood tree two blocks away had made drifts of white seeds at the side of her house and he had thought it a late snow, had asked her to bring him a sweater with the temperature nearing ninety. But he knows several languages, has fought in wars and seen death, his life more important than hers surely. She seldom goes to church, is not one to believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible, but she does believe that God is love, literally, or, to be more exact, that love is God, or at least the evidence, and she is sure that she feels some love for him and that keeps things in balance. She picks up one of his cotton shirts. There is a large spot on the front that did not come out in the wash. She will let it dry completely and next winter she will wet it again and put it out on the line and the freezing, somehow, will take away the stain. This is one of the things that she knows and forgets that she knows. She forgets these things, then remembers them at odd times, remembers that feeding ground glass or oyster shells to chickens will strengthen the eggs or that rusty nails in the ground will turn hydrangeas blue, forgets them and remembers them with surprise, with a feeling of this is me, this is what I know. She forgets these things because her thoughts are filled with sea stories, with the sound of the old man’s voice which she hears all day and as she falls asleep until it seems sometimes that he has drawn the ocean around them and the yard is water, the cornfields water, the heat bending the air is water and at night the trees sound like waves and her bed rocks.

  The kitchen gets too warm and she opens a window and hears him begin to talk to her through the screen. She touches the warm towels in neat stacks and the shelf of cool blue canning jars. “In Jamaica,” he says, “the banana drop the pits before it die. Then a little tree. I ask where this come from, they say the banana tree know it going to die.” She irons a crease on a pair of faded pants. The hot iron on the fabric smells like salt.

  At night he sits in the room where the television is, where Lorrine and her husband spent their evenings, and he turns on the picture but no sound. The picture he uses as the other half of a conversation. He sees a shark on the screen and says, “Sharks. Now
you in my subject,” and he begins a long story about a shark. There is a rope tied to Matt Dillon’s saddle and he says, “Ropes. Everything ropes. Climb ropes to get on ship, rope nets, ropes all on the deck, sleep on a bed of ropes.” Lorrine goes in and out of the room, gives him small glasses of cherry wine from Denmark, brings him corn chips, turns back the covers on his bed, amazed sometimes at how she had spent all of her life first outside of this town and then in it. Some nights she tries to bring up her own subjects, to have a conversation, and he does try to listen, but something she says always reminds him of something and he interrupts her excitedly and begins talking again and continues for hours. But some nights she loves the skin on his face, which is like paper or a fine soap. Some nights she loves the skin on his face and his resemblance to her husband and even some of his stories, and other nights she sits by herself in the dark in the living room, her legs covered with an afghan, the sound of his voice roaring like the inside of a shell.

  When their Social Security checks come on the same day, he sends her to the store for honey. He puts thick spoonfuls of it on the yeast biscuits that she makes twice a week, lets it drip and coat his fingers like glass, leave sticky dark spots on his clothes. He smiles like a baby when he eats, purses his mouth like a kiss to blow away flies. She eats some of the honey herself, but it is too thin, not as thick and dark as the sourwood honey her grandfather’s bees had made in North Carolina or even the clover honey her father’s bees had made. (His hat was covered with a net that reached down to his waist, his pants tied tight around the ankles. In swarming season, if a queen would leave and take the rest of the bees, he could find the tree where they rested on a branch, hanging together as thick and dark and long as an Amish beard, and he could cut off the branch and take the swarm back to a new hive and none of them would sting him. “Bees are the gentlest creatures,” he would say. “They don’t know anger.”)

  She sees that there is going to be an auction of the estate of a man that she knew had kept bees and she makes sure the old man has plenty of ice and that it’s not going to rain and she calls up her friend Eva whose husband had just retired. Eva picks her up and they drive out to the country. They ride almost as high above the road in Eva’s old Studebaker as if they’re on a tractor. She looks at the soft faded cotton of her dress and of Eva’s dress. There is a faint pleasant odor of bleach. “Do you remember back when flour sacks were printed with pretty designs, the dresses we had from them?” Eva nods, pulls some hair away from her glasses, says, “I’m glad to get away from the house,” and Lorrine says, “So am I. It’s so pretty today,” and Eva says, “It is,” and Lorrine thinks at last, a conversation.

  Eva tells Lorrine about her husband, about his boredom at being retired, and how she tries to get him interested in things but he seems to be giving up, looks older each day. Lorrine tells Eva about the old man, his nonstop talking, and they both tell stories of aunts taking care of sick uncles, mothers watching after grandmothers, mothers dressing feebleminded children until one of them dies, heroines to both of them, greater than anything that happens in war, heroines to them but crazy too in some way, and Eva gets bold and says, “A perfectly strong woman giving up her life for a child that will never be any good, what’s the sense in that?” Lorrine says, “You’re right, what’s the sense?” She asks if Eva remembers Jim Harmon, the friend of both their families when they were young, who had left his wife and children in the middle of the winter and never sent any money, all of them too sick with the flu to get to another farm to get help and one of the children close to death before a neighbor stopped by to get some eggs because her hen had stopped laying. And the mother had gotten well and taken care of the farm and the children, wearing herself out in later years, but there was no question of who was good there and who wasn’t. Eva looks pious, says, “The good Lord made that hen stop laying.” Lorrine doesn’t say anything, has grown up in a town where people claim the Lord sells their house when they’re ready to move, that He makes the shopkeepers downtown have a sale on their size on the exact day they go through a pair of shoes. Lorrine has never had much patience with that kind of thinking, always remembers someone down the street who has cancer, so why is God worrying about someone’s picnic or a pair of shoes.

  Eva pulls into the lane leading to the farm where the auction is being held. The house and outbuildings are a local oddity, painted a light green with parapets on the top trimmed in gold because the farmer’s wife had been from some place in Eastern Europe or Asia, nobody knew where. There are already around two hundred people in the yard, women picking through tables of linens, glassware, kitchen equipment, Christmas decorations, cheap jewelry, all of it arranged in boxes by the auctioneer but already out of order as someone sees a box of things she’ll bid on and something, a potholder or bracelet in a box next to it that she likes also and she transfers it to the box she wants, this going on up and down the tables. The men stand at the edges looking at rusted farm equipment, sitting in overstuffed living room chairs on the lawn, eating chili dogs and bologna sandwiches, drinking lemonade. It’s like a fair and Lorrine and Eva are excited, now and then hold on to one another’s hands like children. They see people they haven’t seen in years; they finger quilts and talk about embroidered pillowcases and they feel younger. Eva sees some green depression glass and she decides right then to collect it. Lorrine stands by the bee equipment and feels uncomfortable when anyone else comes to look at it, as if they’re looking through something that belongs to her already.

  The first thing sold is a gun. One of the auctioneer’s helpers stands on a table, dark hair slicked back and workshirt sleeves cut off at the shoulder and unbuttoned, strong chest and arms. He holds the gun above his head and the men group around him. Everything wood, the gun and furniture, has been polished with lemon oil. Lorrine watches the boy hold the gun, thinks that someday he will be dead, and she wonders where a crazy thought like that comes from; she won’t think of her husband that way. It’s impossible really that he isn’t still alive, his cuffs filled with sawdust and arms dark with sticky resins from his work so that he always smelled of pine. The way he would unconsciously crook his arm like an usher at a wedding whenever she’d take it, like a schoolboy, the pleasure in that. But she won’t allow herself to think of that, looks instead away from the men and at a pot of begonias on the porch, a stack of books on one side of the begonias, an old jewelry box on the other, empty no doubt or someone would have hidden it in the bottom of a box of fabric scraps and spoons.

  The gun sells and the fishing tackle sells and the tables full of boxes. Eva gets her depression glass. Only one person bids halfheartedly against Lorrine for the bee equipment and she gets it for ten dollars—two hives, a veil, a smoker, gloves, and a book. Someone tells her where she can get some inexpensive bees and she is so pleased that she bids five dollars on the jewelry box that no one wants and gets that also. On the way home she is so content that she almost sleeps. The air is the color of apricots and the fields stop looking like the ocean. The earth becomes solid again. She runs her hand over the worn velvet of the jewelry box in her lap and something small falls out the bottom and onto her dress. She sees that it’s a delicate pink cameo and she almost cries at the beauty of that, not of the cameo as much as the fact that it has been hidden and now it isn’t, something this lovely. Eva pulls up in front of Lorrine’s house and Lorrine asks her in but she says, “No, Bill probably misses me,” and Lorrine says, “And Papa me,” and Eva helps her get her hives from the backseat and carry them to the porch.

  Lorrine leaves the equipment outside and takes the book inside, is greeted by the old man, who shuffles in from the kitchen and says, “Hello. Hello. You know a palm tree grow tall but you put it in a bucket, even outside, it only grow to six feet.” She walks into the living room and sits on the sofa, opens her book, and begins trying to read. He follows her in and sits on a chair beside her. He reaches over to touch her knee and she looks at him and nods and he takes it as a sign that he c
an begin a story and again it’s the sea and places she hasn’t heard of after the lovely day with Eva and she feels something unfamiliar. She knows he’s tired, if only from having to get inside by himself and the walk from the kitchen to the living room, something he seldom does. She knows that he’s tired and that he’s probably hungry, but she doesn’t get up to fix dinner; she sits and reads the book, holding the edges of the book tightly. He talks and she reads and finally he looks at her and is puzzled. He gets up and moves slowly out of the room, his legs so thin. In a while he’s back with two bowls of dry cereal and two spoons. He hands one to her and says, “The milk I forgot,” and she says, “Thank you,” and begins to eat the cereal as it is without offering to go and get milk. Again he is puzzled, but he eats it that way too, his mouth slightly open and crunching loudly.

  He finishes eating and sits with the bowl resting on his knees. He plays at trying to balance the spoon on his middle finger. “I tell you about bees,” he says. “The workers all female.” She looks this up in the book and finds that yes, this is true. Her father had taught her how to care for the bees and gather the honey, how to find the old queen and replace her in the spring with a new one that would arrive in the mail in a small wooden box with a screen, but he had not told her much about the bees themselves, how they lived their lives. The old man turns in his chair to look out the window. The cereal bowl falls to the carpet, but he doesn’t seem to notice. He begins a story about Jamaica, a family he lived with for a while when he was ill, the meals they served and the color of the ocean there, the design on the wallpaper in his room, the taste of breadfruit. Queen bees, she reads, can lay eggs and hatch them without any fertilization. All the unfertilized eggs will be drones, male bees. The fertile ones become workers. She looks up drones. Their sole purpose in life is to mate with the queen. All of the drones leave the hive with the queen on her wedding flight. One of them mates with her and he dies. He is not killed by the queen, as is often thought, but he dies at the moment of intrusion due to the structure of his own body. The queen rips herself away from the dead drone and in the process takes part of his organs with her. She then is able to fertilize the eggs as well as lay them. He runs his fingers along a slick pinkish scar on his arm. “Fishing,” he says and leans his head back on the chair. “I want to fish.” There is a picture in the book of fat drones gorged with honey lying on the ground outside the hive where they have been turned out to die. This happens in the fall or sometimes in mid-summer after the first honey flow between apple bloom and white clover. He has no baskets on his legs in which to carry pollen and his tongue is so unsuited to the gathering of honey from flowers that he might starve to death in the midst of a clover field in full bloom.