Once aloft, any fear had left him, and with it all reasonable consideration of malfunction. Ironically, the very moment when his father was more absent from his thoughts than at any time in his short life, Lloyd was more in harmony with Hephaestus’s blindered faith in the magic of invention than ever before. Airborne above 1845 St. Louis on the day of a major slave auction, he was not only his father’s son; he felt the uncanny sense of his sister’s spirit for the first time since leaving Ohio. He was going to rescue his mother from drudgery and humiliation. He was going to lead them all forth to meat, wine, and fresh linen.
This invigorating delusion did not last very long. Urim and Thummim became more agitated as the craft wisped over the humming port like a crazed eclipse heading toward the city buildings and the scene in progress on the courthouse steps. Lloyd rode in a harness that he had fashioned from pilfered horse tack attached to the great plume of flag-and-underwear canopy that fanned out above and behind the miraculous kite cage. His intention was to pass over the courthouse dome and heave a fine fishnet rigging line down as an anchor that Brookmire would attach, and then to cut himself and the parafoil loose and ride the wind line down and around to make a spectacular landing amid the auction. Then he and Brookmire would wind down the weird-shaped giant box kite and introduce the brothers to the stunned populace. It would be the perfect theatrical occasion to launch their show-business career. As mortified as Mulrooney might feel at their disappearance (and did), he would be speechless with delight and gratitude when the crowd roared. And the fact that the entire performance would overshadow a slave auction was an inspired twist that Lloyd could not resist. The whole deranged caper sparkled in his mind.
Mulrooney would forgive him the fright he had caused and grasp the commercial opportunities the stunt would create. Although not everyone (fortunately enough!) would believe that Urim and Thummim came from the Red Planet, their singular appearance and bizarre mode of arrival would cause a sensation. Mulrooney’s future as a famous showman would be assured. Lloyd himself would be hailed as a god of invention and adventure. There would be no more broadcloth and boiled-leek broth. He would have a Villa of Wonders and roast duck, and every night a lascivious lady would come to him. His father would have a workshop again, and his mother a garden, roots, herbs, sweet-smelling leaves, and healing teas always brewing.
The possibility that even if the aeronautics went off without a hitch-which was hardly likely, given the many unknown and unforeseeable factors involved-the appearance out of the sky of such outlandish-looking individuals as Urim and Thummim, and the disruption of a significant slave auction, might instigate something more like a riot rather than endless rounds of applause did not occur to the boy with anything like the clarity it should have. He was blind to everything but his own ambition and his desperate craving for adulation-the sanctuary of money and freedom he hoped would descend upon him as soon as he descended into the thoroughfares of the city. This was his moment, his chance to reverse the fortunes of his family and establish a place for himself in the history of transport, science, and entertainment. The world.
Then a sudden rogue gust rose up as they crossed through the hotter air of the cityscape. The thermal blast destabilized the Miss Viola after its smooth drift over the cooler water. Lloyd’s parawing ripped free and swept him up to breaking point above the kite nest, the perforated panels bloated with air. Mulrooney’s stomach leaped up into his throat at what he saw next. Brookmire nearly fell from his perch.
The spiral kite cell caught the updraft and surged up to graze Lloyd’s swinging legs and then veered off back toward the Mississippi, the Ambassadors clicking and squealing like hysterical animals in a drowning cage. The tether that Lloyd held to the kite now threatened to drag him out of control and he was forced to let go, releasing the deformed brothers to the mercy of the sky. Meanwhile, he was rising higher than he had intended, the figures below seething like ants before a rainstorm. The power of the wind billowed out his homemade wings and filled his belly with the butterflies that a normal person would have felt long before. His whole being was alive, and terrified at the volatile elements now determining his fate. The kite was but a speck in the air. He felt the world slipping away. Then he remembered that he could steer. He had to steer-for his life. And yet even now-ruptured from the Miss Viola, with the Ambassadors from Mars doomed to some terrible crash in heavy timber-he felt the psychological as well as the physical force of the wind lifting him, calling him upward…
Years before Sir George Cayley’s hapless coachman was compelled to make his historic glider flight (which inspired him to defecate in his trousers and resign his post). Long before Lawrence Hargrave and Alexander Graham Bell experimented with their kites and Otto Lilienthal broke his neck. Before Samuel Pierpont Langley catapulted his Aerodromes-and before the bicycle-repairing Wright brothers from another small town in Ohio took their fifty-nine-second flight into history over the dunes of Kitty Hawk-Lloyd Meadhorn Sitturd was flying, fulfilling the dreams of the Egyptians, Assyrians, Chinese, Indians, Norse, and Greeks. Not falling. He was riding the wind in a winged vehicle that, while neither heavier than air nor machine-powered, possessed a capacity for maneuverability that would not be achieved by others for another fifty years.
But herein lay the great shortcoming of his undertaking. Wilbur Wright’s critical insight was that the secret of controlled flight lay as much in the skills of the pilot as in the capabilities of the craft. It was not enough for the machine to have the ability to maneuver; it was essential for the pilot to have the experience to utilize this potential. Without control, the solutions of lift and propulsion were meaningless. Despite the feverish pace at which he had been working, Lloyd had not had time to align his personal skill with the potential of his creation. Faced now, at approximately three hundred feet, with the combined circumstances of the failure of one half of his enterprise (the loss of the Miss Viola and its cargo of the Ambassadors) and the success of his own means of aviation he was forced to apply all that he had learned about the wind with perilous immediacy.
He pulled the left steering toggle and swung left, sailing faster down and forward, whistling over the steeples and the carriage-colliding laneways to the horror and amazement of Mulrooney, Hansel Snowden Brookmire, and the people of St. Louis. Flaring slowed his driving speed and restored lift, while his body trembled in the risers. The thought of the helpless brothers breaking every bone in their bodies stabbed him with remorse and doubt. He whooshed around a smokestacked section of town, heading back toward the courthouse, but in banking the toggle tore and a puff of air stalled the edge of the parafoil.
Where the wing had been filled like a lung, it now gasped and he jostled in the rigging. The sunlight burned into his retinas. He heard a cry come up from the streets beneath him and the whinnying of crazed horses. The turbulence batted at him like a spinning leaf-his nerves were frayed like the ribbons he clung to.
He tried to readjust, flying at half brakes, one toggle up, one down. But in swerving around to make the courthouse and the confusion of Fourth Street, where he was to have made his epochal landing, he overcompensated and then had to brake full-which battered the wing chute more. One of the main leads streaming down to the risers broke-the toggle did not respond. He felt the heat waves rising up from the bricks below-the smell of horse manure and the din of human panic.
Ground rush hit him-the mess of scattering street traffic engulfing his field of vision, all the glory gone, leaving stomach-churning, muscle-bracing expectations of obliteration upon impact! He yanked the toggles, beginning to plummet, regaining control too late, and swooping down like a raptor to strike a fleeing rodent in a field of dry corn.