WILLIAM L . BAYNE

APPOMATTOX

The last time I saw my father was at a Greyhound bus station in Chicago, Illinois. It was 1958. He put my brother and I on a bus bound for Jacksonville, Florida. I was 5 and Tommy was 7. We didn’t understand why we were being sent home alone, only that it was sudden and final and no one had told us why.
I knew my father as the man who let me take the wheel in his airplane. It was a Cessna, I think, because I thought every airplane was a Cessna if it wasn’t a jet, and I hadn’t yet found out about Piper Tomahawks or biplanes. It turns out that this one was stolen. My father used to take them out on test flights, never to return, at one private airport after another.
The wheel felt heavy in my hands, and I strained to see out the windshield. My natural pull on the pilot’s yoke caused the plane to rise in the air, and me to fall back into my seat. My father pushed the yoke forward and the plane leveled off. That remains my best memory of him. Level off. Push forward to go down, pull back to rise. Simple fatherly instructions, and all I had to go on for the rest of my life.
They work great in an airplane, but just about nowhere else. We had taken off that morning, after a night and a day at a Holiday Inn, with ice cream after hamburgers and a dip in the pool, where I dove in the deep end before my brother did, and shamed him, for which I was punished for almost 7 years. He had nowhere else to put his pain. When I was 11, I hit him in face. Tommy was a handsome boy turning teenage, and all about the girls. A black eye or even a bruise made by his little brother was no longer worth the effort. From then on, I was simply ignored.
My father had disappeared when I was still a toddler, after being found out as a bigamist. I guess that made the airplanes pretty handy. My grandfather saw to it that he left town in a hurry. Things stayed that way for years, until he suddenly reappeared, to take my brother and I on what we thought was a summer vacation.

* * *

The Indiana State Police pulled our bus off the road three hours out of Chicago, after my grandfather got word that we were on our way. My mother had called him, hysterical that we’d been kidnapped or worse. Someone had told her that we were coming, long after the bus had left the station.
My grandfather was as kind and as civilized as any gentleman raised in the 19th century could be. But he was also well connected, in ways I never realized until many years later. The Indiana State Police came aware of those connections almost immediately, and we were taken off the bus in darkness, pulled over with flashing lights and sirens on a two-lane stretch of Highway 43, just north of Lafayette, Indiana.

* * *

St. Joseph’s Orphan Asylum was a snapshot from a low rent horror movie – a manual labor school for boys, complete with wrought iron arches and moldy brick walls. The inside hallways had checkered linoleum floors, likely off-white long past, now gone a dark shade of grey, streaked with chalky wheel marks in the seams and at the ragged corners.
We were placed in a dormitory room, with a long line of metal-frame single beds. The room was dark, lit only by the dull spill of fluorescent light from the hallway.
A dark silhouette in the doorway spoke. “Take off your shoes.”
It was very late. Tommy took his shoes off and crawled into bed.
I was too frightened to know any better, and got in without removing mine. I would be grateful for that later.

* * *

“Get down from there.” The voice was insistent. I hated getting caught, but I was grateful to hear it.
I was stuck in a tree. The tree was right by the wall. I thought I could climb it and use one of the branches to get over the wall. But I was too scared to jump across the gap, even though I was wearing Keds, the shoe that helped you jump higher and run faster.
That was the first time I remember being scared of heights. I loved airplanes and the not-so-dizzy look you got at all the miniature farms and city streets so far below. All of my toys were little, so everything seemed right-sized when I was way up high. But not in the dark in a tree by a wall all alone.
I don’t remember how I got back to the big room, or even how I left the orphanage. It all felt like some kind of gigantic dream, starting in the sky above in my father’s airplane, and ending at some orphanage in the darkness.

* * *

I woke up in the back seat of a car. We were outside of an airport. A dark-haired man took both our hands and walked us through the crowds, all the way to a long room with windows, where we could see the airplanes take off and land.
He pointed outside the gate and said, “That’s your flight. You’re going home.”
For a moment, I thought my father would be there, but then I realized he wasn’t coming.
The airplane was big, bigger than I had imagined. We walked out on the tarmac, together with the dark-haired man. He stopped at the bottom of a metal stairway, and motioned for us to go ahead.
The stairs were perched at an angle, behind the airplane’s sleek round nose, tipped towards the sky. I could hear the sound of propellers in the distance, as another airplane rolled slowly out along the taxiway. A beautiful woman in a bright blue uniform stood atop the stairs, her dress flapping in the wind. She smiled as we climbed the metal steps.
“Are you the Brown boys? Tommy? And Billy?” She looked right at me.
It was the first time I’d felt that warm sensation in my belly, the adoration of beauty, the strange affection and the complete weakness that came along with it. It was terrifying.
I managed a nod.
“Welcome to Eastern Airlines. I’m Susan.” Another woman stepped out on the landing. “And this is Elaine.”
I had never seen two more beautiful women in my life, except perhaps for my mother. I had only seen her in photographs, for as long as I could remember.
Elaine took my hand.
They put us in the big seats at the front of the airplane, and told us if we stayed quiet, that we might get to meet the Captain. And maybe he would let us visit the cockpit and watch him fly the plane. People came streaming down the aisles, all sorts of people. They seemed excited and happy, as if we were all going to a party.
After everyone had passed, Susan put our seat belts on and Elaine gave us toy soldiers, blue and gray. Tommy wanted the gray, because we were from Florida. I got the blue ones.
The airplane was not so noisy as my father’s, even though it was much larger. Elaine and Susan brought us Coca-cola in a glass with ice cubes, and lunch on a tray with silver forks and knives, and white cloth napkins. Out the window, tiny farms and cities passed below in the mist.
My brother and I fought the Civil War over and over again, until I grew tired of losing. The gray soldiers wouldn’t leave me alone.
I fell asleep.
When I woke up, the plane wasn’t moving.
I didn’t know where I was.

* * *

Elaine took my hand and walked me outside. I saw my grandfather at the bottom of the stairway and I knew that everything would be all right.
My mother was there. She was even more beautiful than Elaine. I hadn’t seen her in a long time. I think I cried and ran to her.
We told them all about the airplane and the Holiday Inn and the pool and the orphanage. And the Civil War soldiers.
Tommy said his soldiers were better than mine.
I stayed quiet.
My grandfather worked for the government in Washington, DC. He had already taught us all about the Civil War. I knew the other side had won.
Tommy couldn’t change that, no matter how hard he tried.
He was a lot like his father.