Like most of the others Professor Lowe at first didn’t really notice me at all. Then early one morning about a week after I had been there he said, “So you are Neddy’s little computer key, the boy from Philadelphia,” but I didn’t grasp what he meant. Later that afternoon Mr. Edward told me, “That kindly savant Professor Lowe is convinced you are helping with my calculations, so please keep quiet and both of us in his best graces,” before he added, lowering his voice, “though the rest of these characters are, as my father would say, a Schlangennest.” I asked, “Mr. Edward, Sir, excuse me but come again?” and he replied, “Nidum serpentium,” and I said I didn’t understand, worried I was supposed to get what he was talking about, but he chuckled, “Neddy—and perhaps it’s best you don’t.”
Usually I was referred to as an “aide to Mr. Edward Linde,” or “Professor Linde” as Misters Paullin and Starkweather called him, and often when that particular combination—“aide” and “Professor Linde”—was uttered, shortly thereafter I found myself at far more tedious, difficult work. I slogged sandbags to the baskets, unfurled the telegraph wires that rode up with the balloons, arranged the necessary tools for the various aeronauts or others on the team, helping unpack or break down the campsites as we moved along the Potomac, either on the Maryland side when we weren’t based at Fort Corcoran or temporarily stationed in one of the other ones along the Virginia banks. The periodic gunfire and talk of snipers made me always want to stay behind the cordon of federal troops and forts that guarded the north shore of the Potomac and Washington. I also always offered to lend a hand with the meals, though the white man in charge of mess, Paul Danahy, didn’t want me anywhere nearby. Point of fact whenever Mr. Edward wasn’t right beside me and I wasn’t busy with one of their tasks nearly all of them ordered me to stay out of their way.
There was only one other colored man working for the Corps; his name was Ulysses Harris. Twenty-five and a good foot-and-a-half taller than me, he at first didn’t say much of anything or even look in my direction. After he realized, however, that he and I had to eat together and do everything else personal together, sleep and crap in the same place, away from everybody else, he started to grow a little and then considerably more friendly. I learned he was born in Winchester, Virginia, up in the Shenandoah Valley not all that far from where we were or from Harper’s Ferry, where the great martyr John Brown had launched his raid, and that he and his family escaped north to Maryland and then into Pennsylvania, where he had spent a few years near Greencastle. He said he had a wife there, Lizzie, a former escapee like himself, though she was from Martinsville, as well as a baby son, Lysander, and after the war wanted to be a minister rather than digging ditches, pitching tents and securing pulleys. I told him I lacked the introspection to be a preacher, the gift of insight to be a teacher, no contacts to undertake an apprenticeship, the strength to be a stevedore, the patience to be a waiter or porter, and no money to pursue any of the higher professions open to us in Philadelphia, so like my father before me I was going to be a cook and, I hoped, eventually a caterer, though I didn’t say I was choosing this path mainly because I couldn’t think of anything else. Sometimes in the evenings when Nimrod was free he joined us, and we sat and chatted, both of them asking a hundred questions about Philadelphia, which they really hoped to see someday, and me asking about Annapolis and Washington and Greencastle. I wanted to tell to them about my train trip down with Dandy and ask about slavery, though from Philadelphia etiquette I knew better and didn’t dare. We’d gab until the sky grew black and our lids heavy, forcing Nimrod to hurry back or lose his post. When it started to get real cold at night Ulysses didn’t even have a blanket, but Mr. Edward had given me one of his extras, a quilt with all of Pennsylvania’s counties sewn on it, so I invited him under it with me and soon we were sleeping arm in arm.
One Saturday toward the end of September, General McClellan ordered Professor Lowe to ascend in the Eagle above Fort Corcoran and report on the rebel positions south of us, near Falls Church, in preparation, everybody was saying, for a battle. We were all commanded to stay inside the fort’s walls, to the rear of it, well behind the line of fire. Though Mr. Edward said the Confederates were at least three or four miles away and we had nothing to worry about, my heart hammered whenever I imagined they might be closer. “Worse comes to worst you can play a bondsman,” he said to me, drily, “but they will surely slit my throat with a bayonet since our dear President can’t see fit to sign off on our commissions, and where, pray tell, would that get us?” I wanted to tell him I knew nothing about commissions but was not about to play, let alone be anybody’s slave, but instead I kept quiet and calmed myself down by helping him and the other assistants ready the telegraph cable and the relay machine, the gauges, which he said he had ensured were perfectly calibrated, and several flags that Professor Lowe was going to take up in the balloon with him.
Soon as the balloon was filled, all the white folks, save Mr. Edward and the receiver operator, and Ulysses took hold of the cables, easing them through the pulleys. Up Professor Lowe rose into the air, slowly, then more rapidly, finally hovering about 1000 or so feet above. Mr. Edward and I reeled out the telegraph wire until Professor Lowe was so far up we could see only the basket’s square brown wicker bottom and the immense tan curves and slope of the balloon’s globe. Professor Lowe gave a signal for the cables to be tied and staked, though several assistants still held on. Where I sat, along the slope of the real wall’s revetment near the telegraph operator I could see and hear Mr. La Mountain grumbling about something to Mr. Paullin, and Mr. Edward, approaching me and observing them as well whispered, “That one is the most notorious of vipers.” I didn’t dare reply but I had seen Mr. La Mountain and Professor Lowe, and Mr. Wise and the others arguing several times since I arrived. I continued watching them, Mr. La Mountain flailing his arms about then walking away towards a group of soldiers. As he left our area Mr. Ezra Allen came over and asked Mr. Edward how the transmission was going. The telegraph operator working at the receiver was writing down the messages as quickly as possible, which led Mr. Edward to say, “Just dandy,” provoking a double-take from me. Finally Nimrod appeared with an older soldier who asked both Mr. Edward and the telegraph operator, “Do you have the coordinates?” and the receiver handed them over. This continued for a while, Nimrod and that white man coming and going, taking the pages with them—
— Till suddenly two orderlies rode up and all around us curtains of gunfire and the periodic boom of cannonade. Professor Lowe is making signals with the flags, though I can’t tell what he’s conveying but Mr. Edward says he is helping to calibrate the position of the guns. But I don’t understand, and Mr. Edward repeats, “The guns, the position of the guns,” when something batters the outer walls of the fort and we all slide lower down the revetment’s slope, while others even lie flat on their stomachs on the ground. The fusillade continues without relent, more balls blasts the front palisades, while Professor Lowe continues high above making signs with the flags and Mr. Edward is raising his voice yet I can barely hear him above the gunfire, “We are taking the traitors out,” and I say, “But Mr. Edward, Sir, what is Professor Lowe doing with the flags?” and Mr. Edward hollers, “Neddy, Theodore, Neddy—and why don’t you just be quiet for a damned minute!” I shut my mouth as the orderlies ride in again, they and we all watching Professor Lowe, and this pattern persists, with fewer and fewer bullets or miniés falling our way though we can hear the cannons and field guns firing from our fort and the stench of the gunpowder lingers, Mr. Ezra Allen whistles, everyone, including me, stands and hauls Professor Lowe down, hauling on the cables as he releases the gas, descending, until the basket gently yet firmly hits the ground. All of us, save Mr. La Mountain, who has disappeared to who knows where, applaud him, as another military orderly arrives with a report from the generals.