Two in the Field (30 page)

And so on.

The pennant-topped tents stretched over ten acres. Tim stopped before a flamboyant billboard that proclaimed:

Twain asked Donaldson’s whereabouts and we were directed to a far corner of the lot.

“That’s him.” Twain pointed to a short, dapper man with curly black hair, a sunburnt face, and a mustache with waxed ends. He vaguely reminded me of Charlie Chaplin. With deft movements he was removing folds of heavy varnished fabric from a packing crate.

“Hi, Mark!” said Donaldson. “You’re a mite early. I’m about to connect to the city’s line; we’ll be inflated and ready to go after the first Hippodrome show.”

Twain explained the situation.

“Can I go?” Tim begged. “You don’t have to if you’re scared, Sam.”

The kid was playing dirty.

“It’s as safe as being on the river,” Twain offered.

Thanks a lot, I thought.

“Don’t be such a sour ass,” a gruff voice said behind me.

Annoyed, I spun around. Nobody was there.

“Give the lad his chance!” another voice said.

I turned and found only a grinning Twain, who hooked a thumb at Donaldson and said, “Ventriloquist.”

“At your service,” Donaldson said in his own voice, and extended his hand. “No harm intended.”

We watched him remove the rest of the balloon bag—the “aerostat,” he called it—and fit a gas hose to its neck. He tightened clamps at the top, opened a valve, and the varnished mass slowly began to fill.

“Helium’s ideal but too costly, and P.T.’s a cheapskate,” Donaldson said. “Hydrogen’s the lightest and gives 70 percent more lift than this common illuminating gas. But then more ballast is required, and it’s also very combustible.” Seeing my expression, he added, “Don’t worry, she’s safe as anything made today.”

Exactly the problem.

“Day after tomorrow I’ll be soaring hundreds of miles over
Lake Michigan.” He smiled. “Maybe you’d rather the boy went on
that
trip.”

“Wow, Sam!”

“Not really.”

“Today’s a promotion, so we’ll stay below a thousand feet.” He noted the mild breeze with an approving smile. “Conditions couldn’t be better.”

Tim took a stance directly before me, hands on hips.

The breeze gusted and Donaldson’s roustabouts grabbed the anchor lines. “Cinch those!” he ordered. Then, to us, “I need more ballast. You and the boy would be perfect.”

“C’mon, Sam!” said Tim.

“Look, your mother wouldn’t—”

“She isn’t here,” he interrupted, and turned to Donaldson. “I’ll go. Can we get somebody else?”

“Without a doubt.” Donaldson smiled again. “Somebody who’ll pay handsomely for the privilege.”

Twain’s chuckle added to my irritation. I was in a tough place. I didn’t like heights in the best of times; even commercial jetliners made me nervous. But if I pulled rank on Tim, he’d see me as just one more adult to avoid. On the other hand, if he went up without me and something happened, what could I say to Cait?

“Just straight up and then straight down, right?”

“A bit more.” Donaldson seemed to be trying to hide his amusement. “But basically so.”

“Hurray, Sam!”

Music sounded in the distance and we saw columns of musicians in bright uniforms moving toward the entrance.

“Enjoy the show,” Donaldson told us. “Come out a little ahead of the crowd, and we’ll lift off then.”

I couldn’t believe I’d agreed to this.

The wild animal acts were Tim’s favorite. He also enjoyed the frantic equine races around the big oval track, and “Sports of Ancient Greece and Rome,” but his attention flagged during “A Chinese Ballet Divertissement.” However, when aerial performers began flying above us, his eyes remained riveted on one Mlle. D’Atalie, a curvy little thing. Nobody remotely like
her
was to be seen in O’Neill City.

We left halfway through the Grande Finale. The balloon, with
P.T. Barnum
now visible on it in huge blue letters, tugged at its ropes. The breeze was kicking up stronger now. So were my nerves.

“Fifty thousand cubic foot capacity!” Donaldson’s voice boomed out over a growing throng. “Can make aerial voyages of four hundred miles with ease!” He gestured to us. “These are today’s intrepid voyagers.”

Not a happy adjective choice.

Donaldson steadied a small ladder for us as we climbed into the basket. I didn’t like the sensation of it swaying under my feet. “Whatever you do, don’t pull on
that.”
He pointed to a control line from the bag that was painted bright red. “It releases the ripping panel.”

“Right,” Tim said smartly while I nodded.

As if we had a clue.

The rim of the basket, properly called the “gondola” or “car,” held a grappling iron, a map board, and several primitive instruments that Donaldson identified for us: a barometer that registered altitude; and a statoscope that indicated rates of ascent or descent. He told us that in earlier years aeronauts tossed out bits of paper to see if they were rising or falling.

“They couldn’t tell?” I said incredulously.

“Not so easy in the clouds,” he replied. “Or at night.”

“Doesn’t the movement tell you?”

He smiled. “Wait and see.”

A wave-like ripple traveled leisurely over the fabric.

“Is this inflated enough?” I demanded.

“Around three miles up,” Donaldson said, “gas doubles in volume. At five to six miles it triples.”

“We’re going up
six miles?”
Tim asked eagerly.

“Not at all,” Donaldson said. “My point is merely that gas expands in thinner air. Inflate the aerostat to capacity now and gas would be forced out of the neck”—he pointed to a tapered, trunk-like appendage overhead—“directly down upon us.”

“And if you close off the neck?” Tim said.

“The aerostat explodes.” Donaldson spread his hands casually to indicate a massive outburst.

Wonderful, I thought.

“We’ll weigh off now.” He motioned to the roustabouts, who began freeing the anchor ropes, then he emptied sand from one of the ballast bags until we rose slightly. “That ought to do it. Forty-four pounds. Light wind. We’ll have a nice easy lift.”

A gust tilted us sideways as we began to rise. I braced a foot on the gondola wall and clutched at ropes leading to the suspension hoop.

“Stay seated,” Donaldson said calmly.

Tim let out a “Whee!” as we straightened and rose faster. I closed my eyes, which was worse, then tried peering cautiously over the side. Barnum’s giant tents were shrinking. The surrounding grid of streets and houses began to resemble a planner’s model.

“How do you steer it?” Tim asked.

“You can try swaying or leaning,” Donaldson joked. “But in truth, we go where the wind carries us. It’s the joy of ballooning.”

“Look, you said this was an
ascension
, nothing more.” I looked
nervously over the side as far as I dared. “Where are the ropes for pulling us down?”

Donaldson pointed to thick coils of Manila hemp lying on the gondola’s perimeter. “This guide line is three hundred feet long and weighs 150 pounds. Anything more and we’d go nowhere. Mr. Clemens didn’t pay simply to stay anchored above the ground. You want actual flight, don’t you?” Ignoring my head-shaking, he said, “The simple truth is that we’d be more wind-tossed if we were anchored. This way, we sail easily.”

Thousands have done this and survived, I told myself. But was it true for 1875? “Okay, how do we get back?”

“Leave it to me.” He waved a hand grandly. “Isn’t this majestic? It’s so still that we could light a candle and it wouldn’t be extinguished.”

He was right. There was no detectable wind, no rush of air. The resulting hush did carry a sort of majesty. I heard a dog bark down below, then saw ant-sized people waving and hallooing to us, their shouts rising clearly. I could even hear the muted rumble of a cart’s iron wheels.

“Very little up here to obstruct sound.” Donaldson leaned back and said in a rhapsodic tone, “At night it’s splendid to gaze at the moon to the music of rivers and streams below.”

Rustlings of fabric and creakings of wicker grew louder. “Jesus,” I breathed as currents suddenly swept us in spirals, the gondola lurching and swaying.

“We rise faster as the air thins,” Donaldson explained, leaning over the opposite side, working calmly at the coils of the guide rope as if we weren’t being buffeted. “And winds are often stronger.”

“What happens if we just keep climbing?” Tim looked a shade paler.

“Several aeronauts did that in ’62.” Donaldson might have
been describing a science project. “Ascended upwards of thirty thousand feet and came down an interesting shade of blue.”

“Dead?” Tim’s eyes were wide.

“Oh, decidedly.” Donaldson laughed. “In the higher regions you soon asphyxiate from lack of oxygen.” He fed the heavy rope over the side, and soon the spiraling and lurching eased. “We won’t be ascending much now.” He tugged on a line and we drifted downward some fifty feet.

“What’d you do?” Tim asked.

“Opened the clapper,” Donaldson said. “Released gas up on top. With less gas volume, the air pushes us down.”

I looked behind us and could barely make out Hartford’s distant spires. “How do we get back to Barnum’s?”

“My men will fetch us.” Donaldson let out the last of the rope and gave the gas-valve line another tug. We settled to about three hundred feet, and there we stayed, the guide rope slowing and steadying us. “Better?”

“Much,” I said.

As we sailed along, he told us of landing in a field he thought vacant and barely escaping the horns of a pissed-off bull; of being pursued by angry farm women into whose apple butter makings he’d accidentally dumped ballast sand; of presiding over a wedding in his gondola above fifty thousand people gathered at Barnum’s Hippodrome.

He looked at me. “Are you married, Mr. Fowler?”

I checked myself before saying “divorced.” Tim didn’t need to know about that.

“An aerial nuptial,” Donaldson said, “would be something to tell your children about.”

“I’ll consider it.”

Tim asked if he could steer. Ignoring my objections, Donaldson let him take the controls. Tim promptly let out too much gas
and we began sinking. He overcorrected by pouring out too much ballast. We shot up again. Donaldson took over, handling the valve rope adroitly; between it and the heavy trailing rope we stayed on an even keel.

“It’s harder than it looks,” Tim admitted.

The wind grew stronger as the afternoon waned.

“Time to land.” Donaldson peered downward. “We’re on our track. The crew will have no trouble finding us, even if we overshoot our field.”

“Overshoot?” I echoed.

He pointed to the ballast bags. “Pour slowly and evenly if I call for it.” He opened the gas valve and we tilted down toward a patch of open ground that looked considerably un-fieldlike and more like a series of rocky outcroppings. It seemed to me that the wind was carrying us too fast. A man dodged between the outcroppings in pursuit of the ground rope. He grabbed it but was knocked flat, dragged, and lost his grip. Now there was no doubt we were going too fast—and straight toward a row of tall trees.

Donaldson calmly freed the guide rope from the gondola. It serpentined to the ground and we rose so abruptly that my stomach sank toward my shoes. Whistling blithely, Donaldson eyed the approaching trees. It seemed that we might just clear their spiny tips. Then a downdraft gripped us. “Pour,” he said calmly. “Steady on,” he added when I nearly emptied my bag in one thrust.

It didn’t seem to make much difference. We slid down toward the trees. “Another bag!” Donaldson didn’t sound quite so chipper. Seeing Tim’s face going pale, I cursed myself for getting us into this madness.

“There’s a narrow spot where we can set down just past the trees,” Donaldson said. “But we don’t want to be carried farther.”
He pointed to the two remaining ballast bags. “The instant I say so, heave them down. There’s no room for misjudgment.”

We nodded tensely.

“Otherwise,” he went on with a trace of his usual sang-froid, “we may spend the night aloft after all.”

Very funny. I knew we were about to crash and die.

A lot of things happened at once. The trees—towering dark poplars—rose up at us and suddenly we were not above them but among them. “Heave!” Donaldson yelled. Our adrenaline pumping, we flung the twenty-two pound bags into space as if they were baseballs. A branch whacked the gondola and brought a grunt from Donaldson. We seemed to shoot straight up the face of a giant tree. Tipped at a radical slant, I looked down and saw that somehow we’d leap-frogged the tree row and were directly over a clearing.