except for a universal moan when all at once the lights went out.
When it had clearly passed over, we went out. A little rain had
fallen. The B-30s lay around the trash-speckled field like dead seagulls
cast on a beach after a storm. One had been lifted up and laid over the
back of another, as though “treading” it like a cock does a hen, to
make more. One flipped halfway over on bent wing. They’d been made,
after all, to be as light as possible. We walked among them afraid and
grieving and delighted.
One death could be attributed to the big wind. A ship had been pushed
forward, lifted, and fallen again so that its left landing gear had buck-
led and it slumped sideways. Connie and Rollo, assigned to the team
checking the ships for damage, found Al Mass in the forward cabin,
dead. He hadn’t been hurt in the fall or in the crushing of the cabin,
and the coroner determined or at least made a good guess that he’d
died of a heart attack from the stress of the storm and maybe the
sudden shock of the plane’s inexplicable takeoff. Midgets aren’t known
for strong hearts, the coroner averred. Rollo and Connie gave evidence
that supported the theory of a heart attack, but (without testifying to
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 385
it, give the little guy a break) they both supposed that it might have
come a little before the big wind, since Al was without his pants when
they came upon him, and nearby was the abandoned brassiere of
another interloper, who’d apparently left him there, alive or more likely
dead: but who that was we’d never learn.
Al’s buried in the Odd Fellows cemetery there in Ponca City; Van
Damme Aero acquired a small area that’s given over to Associates who
died in the building of the Pax there from 1943 to 1945 and had no
other place to lie. There are twelve, nine of them women. They fell
from cranes, they stepped in front of train cars, they were hit by engines
breaking loose from stationary test rigs, got blood poisoning from tool
injuries, dropped dead from stroke. It was dangerous work, the way we
did it then.
That ship they found Al in was actually the one that, years after,
was hauled out to repose in the field across Hubbard Road from the
Municipal Airport, wingless and tail-less. The story of Al and how he
was found had been forgotten, or hadn’t remained attached to this par-
ticular fuselage, and no ghosts walked. By then what was left of Hen-
ryville had been bulldozed away, unsalvageable and anyway unwanted,
the land was more saleable without that brief illusion of a town, though
the streets that the men and women had walked and biked to work
along, and driven on in their prewar cars, and sat beside in the eve-
nings to drink beer and listen to the radio, can still be traced, if you
open your mind and heart to the possibility of their being there. There’s
a local club devoted to recovering the layout of it all, the dormitories,
the clinics, the shops and railroad tracks, and marking the faint street
crossings, A to Z. But that’s all.
Afterword
To take on any aspect of the American military effort in World War
II as a subject for fiction, especially any aspect of the air war, is
to invite criticism from the very many experts who know more
about it than you ever will—not only archivists and historians
and buffs, but also those who remember firsthand the planes and the
factories and the people that built them. In part to evade the heavy
responsibility of accuracy, I chose in this story to invent a bomber that
never existed, though it is modeled on a couple that did. Somewhat on
a whim, I placed the factory that is making this imaginary bomber in
Ponca City, Oklahoma, though there was no such factory there—the
nearest was the Boeing plant in Wichita, Kansas. I have taken other
smaller liberties with the historical record, some obvious, some perhaps
not. Some things that might appear to be invented are true: the multiple
suicides of Part One, Chapter Two are among these. The true story of
the Women Airforce Service Pilots (as told by—among others—Adela
Riek Scharr in Sisters in the Sky) is more extraordinary than any
fictional account could suggest. I have drawn extensively on the
personal accounts of the many women who went to work in the
munitions plants, gas stations, weather stations, and offices, who drove
trucks, flew planes, and succeeded in hundreds of jobs they had never
expected to do. For most of them, and for the many African American
388 / A F T E R W O R D
men and women, Hispanics, Native Americans, and people with dis-
abilities who also served, the end of the war meant returning to the
status quo ante: but things could never be restored just as they had
been, and the war years contained the seeds of change that would even-
tually grow again.
Among the hundred-odd books that a complete bibliography for
this novel would include, I am most indebted to A Mouthful of Rivets:
Women at Work in World War II by Nancy Baker Wise and Christy
Wise. The first-person accounts collected there are an enduring monu-
ment to the women of that period. Firsthand accounts like Slacks and
Calluses: Our Summer in a Bomber Factory by Constance Bowman,
and Punch In, Susie! A Woman’s War Factory Diary by Nell Giles,
were helpful. Don’t You Know There’s a War On? The American
Home Front, 1941–1945 by Richard R. Lingeman was important for
the background, as was Alistair Cooke’s America, the recently repub-
lished account of Cooke’s car trip across the country in 1941 to 1942.
Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War,
1929–1945 by David M. Kennedy was illuminating on the details of
policy, particularly the draft. Susan G. Sterrett’s Wittgenstein Flies a
Kite was my source for most of the stories about early flight, including
the remarkable one previewed in its title.
Just as useful day to day were the Internet sites with information on
a thousand topics. From the official site of the B-36 bomber I learned—
after deciding that my bomber would be called the Pax and would be
struck by a tornado in Oklahoma—that the B-36 was called the Peace-
maker, and a fleet of them was damaged by a tornado in Texas. I found
pictures of train car interiors on the Katy Railroad, studied salon hair-
styles of the 1930s, marveled at Teenie Weenies Sunday pages, learned
about the rise of sports betting in the war, read about poor posture and
nursing care for spinal fusion in 1940, and far far more.
I am grateful to Michael J. Lombardi of the Boeing Archives in
Seattle for spending a day finding references and answering my ques-
tions, and to Andrew Labovsky and all the crew of Doc, the B-29 being
lovingly restored at the Kansas Aviation Museum in Wichita, for allow-
ing me up into the plane, as well as supplying me with facts from their
bottomless well. In Ponca City my very great thanks to Sandra Graves
and Loyd Bishop of the Ponca City Library for their great help on a
A F T E R W O R D / 389
peculiar errand—casting their hometown for a part it never played.
Bret A. Carter was generous with his collection of Ponca City and Kaw