Read The Boy Who Could Fly Without a Motor Online
Authors: Theodore Taylor
Another acclaimed story by Theodore Taylor
Also look for Theodore Taylor's forthcoming
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Copyright © 2002 by Theodore Taylor
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first Harcourt paperback edition 2004
The Library of Congress has cataloged
the hardcover edition as follows:
Taylor, Theodore, 1921â
The boy who could fly without a motor/by Theodore Taylor.
p. cm.
Summary: In 1935, living at a lighthouse near San Francisco,
a lonely nine-year-old boy inadvertently summons
a magician who teaches him the secret of flying.
[1. FlightâFiction. 2. MagiciansâFiction.
3. LonelinessâFiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.T2186Br 2002
[Fic]âdc21 2001039848
ISBN 0-15-216529-0 ISBN 0-15-204767-0 pb
Text set in Bembo
Display set in Nicolas Cochin
Designed by Cathy Riggs
A C E G H F D B
Printed in the United States of America
ONEFor great-grandsons Adam and Nathaniel,
with much loveâT. T.
A MERE FIFTY-TWO POUNDS, FOUR-FEET
-two-inches tall, brown eyed and brown haired, nine-year-old Jonathan Jeffers thought he was the loneliest boy on Earth.
He lived with his Ether, James, and his mother, Mabel, in a red-painted cottage on Clementine Rock, near Three Fathom Shoal and Persiphone Reef, next to an old white-painted brick lighthouse, nineteen miles off the coast of California.
He had a big brown-and-black dog named Smacks, a dog of many breeds. They were constant companions, as Jon desperately needed a friend. Smacks served him as best he could just by being there.
All night and on foggy days, the strong beam of the lighthouse went around and around, warning ships to stay away from the rock, the shoal, and the reef. The light was powered by a big generator, and Jon's father, a boatswain mate first class in the United States Coast Guardâor bosunâwas the keeper. On a clear night, the light could be seen from passing ships twenty-two miles away.
When the heavy, cold mists rolled in toward San Francisco, which was to the north of Clementine, the hoarse foghorn also bellowed. Hour after hour. Sometimes day after day. AHHHHHH-RURH-RRRR-AAAA- AAAATS. It sounded like "Ah, rats" to Jon, who had a strong oval face and an imagination as broad as the sweep of the light.
He hated the fog and the "Ah, rats" horn. And he didn't exactly like the seals that barked most of the day on the outlying rocks, either.
On the nights when the eaves were dripping and the horn was blowing, Jon sometimes thought of the famous Ghosts of Clementine. The rock was named after die sailing ship that had crashed into it in 1850. The ship had been bound for San Francisco, carrying Chinese workers from Canton to build railroads.
All of the 129 men had died, and their ghosts were still around the rock, or so Jon had been told by an older girl, Eunice Jones, the daughter in the Coast Guard family the Jeffers had replaced. Eunice was thirteen, tall for her age, and skinny as spaghetti. She knew the rock's history. She'd said that when the gray fog blanket was thick, the ghosts rose out of the sea and climbed up the steep sides of Clementine, which was shaped like a long high box with coarse grass on top. The sodden ghosts moaned in sorrow as they climbed. Jon had had some horrendous dreams as the result of Eunice's stories and that deep-throated foghorn.
Eunice had said she'd met some of the "living-dead" ghosts herself and that Jon would likely meet a few as well. They were spooky but pitiful and harmless, and they lived under the rock, she'd said. Jon had thought Eunice was a little spooky hersel£ She had long fingers and lisped.
There also were ghosts of shipwrecked sailors out at Three Fathom Shoal and Persiphone Reef) Eunice had told him. The rusted prow of a steel ship still rode the reef, sticking up like an open shark's jaw, water washing over it. Altogether more than three hundred people had died on the rock, the shoal, and the reef before the government had erected the lighthouse sixty years ago.
Jon's mother and father said that the ghosts were utter nonsense. Ghosts do not exist, they said. Ghosts do not swim, they said. And they do not live under the rock.
Jon tried to believe them, but on some nights, when the horn went silent for its programmed thirty seconds, Jon thought he heard the ghosts moaning and was afraid to peer out his window into the rolls of thick mist. Perhaps a dripping, pitiful Chinese face would be there, staring in at him. Even Smacks seemed nervous on these occasions.
His father said, "Jon, don't let your imagination hear sounds that aren't there."
But Jon's problem was his
ears,
not his imagination. His hearing was too sharp and the sounds seemed too real, so he wrapped his head with his pillow those nights and shivered, hoping the ghosts wouldn't come in.
Eunice had said he would go crazy out there.
Maybe he
would
go crazy. His father had to serve three years on the rock. One year had gone by so far.
Jon did have things to keep him occupied. He'd gone through primary school in San Francisco, and now his mother taught him five mornings a week, with textbooks and exams from the mainland. They also had a radio, and after he listened to the many programs, Jon had dreams that carried him around the globe. New York, London, Tokyo, Paris. Anywhere but Clementine.
Anywhere!
To amuse himself during his free daylight hours, Jon kept an eye out for big ships passing Clementine Light. He'd run up to the tower, Smacks at his heels, and watch them through his father's powerful telescope. If they came close enough, Jon would wave and record their names in his logbook. Anything to entertain himself. Anything to stay busy.
In good weather, private planes on Sunday joyrides would come out from shore and circle the lighthouse. Jon would again run to the light platform and wave. The pilots would often wave back. The open-cockpit biplanes were his favorite. Jon also built model airplanes, mostly world war I fighters, to pass the time and take his mind off the Clementine ghosts.
LAST YEAR JON'S GRANDPARENTS IN NEW
Mexico had given him a subscription to
Popular Science
magazine, and he read every issue cover to cover. Calling himself Mr. J. Jeffers, he'd written to various advertisers about mail courses for bodybuilding, being a detective, and careers in aviation and electronics.
It was 1935, and a time of great scientific advancements. Charles Lindbergh had flown alone across the Adantic, radio and talking pictures had been invented, and the first liquid-fueled rocket had been launched. Jon made notes about all these amazing events. He'd even written to Lindbergh, asking him to be a pen pal, but he hadn't yet heard back.
There was one particular article in an issue
of Popular Science
that Jon kept reading and rereading. Written by a doctor of parapsychology, someone who deals in psychic phenomena, it was about telepathy, or sending and receiving messages using nothing more than the mind. Hoping to cure his loneliness, Jon began to practice telepathy, sending messages all over the place, sometimes concentrating so hard he got headaches. But, so far, he'd never received a mental-wave message back from any listener. Perhaps he was too young, he thought, and his brain wasn't developed enough
Before becoming involved in telepathy, Jon had stuffed messages into bottles, giving his exact latitude and longitude, and cast them into the ocean:
Help! Help! I am shipwrecked and stranded on a terrible rock that is full of ghosts.
Signed:
Jon Jeffers, Seaman First Class. U.S. Coast Guard
He'd also make up stories and tell them to his parents during supper, stories like "Albie, the Albatross," about how Jonathan Jeffers rode the back of a big bird to Paris, or "In the Ice," in which he and Smacks were adrift on an ice floe in the Arctic Ocean. He told stories about cowboys and pirates and bandits. They weren't long, but they were stories with a definite beginning, middle, and end.
"Someday you'll be a writer," his mother said proudly.
But at the moment, Jon was only interested in getting off Clementine Rock. His problem was very simple: Except for Smacks he had no playmates, no friends, and no one to talk to except his mother and father and the seals and seabirds surrounding Clementine.
The best time on the island was when the Coast Guard supply boat came to the rock. Even Smacks would bark joyfully as the boat approached. It steamed out twice a month, weather permitting, with fresh vegetables, milk, meat, mail, and back issues of the
San Francisco Chronicle.
The Coast Guard crew usually brought Jon candy and a book or two when they came, but when the tug pulled away from the small dock at the base of the rock, bound back to San Francisco, Jon always felt die same old sadness.
Once a year, thankfully, the Jeffers family had shore leaveâsixty days on the mainland. On their first trip, they visited relatives, went to movies and amusement parks, shopped for clothes, and ate at restaurants. It was a heavenly time.
But all too soon they were sent straight back to the rock, where the wind softly ruffled the thick grass outside their cottage or sometimes roared, flattening the grass and driving sheets of cold rain before it.
Jon was back to talking to Smacks and the wheeling birds, fishing off the dock, or watching the passing ships through his father's telescope, wishing he were aboard them. Back to the same awful life on Clementine that Eunice had warned him about, and after he did all these things, there was nothing left to do except think and dream, listen to the radio, and practice telepathy.
On clear nights he'd often look out of his window at the far-off glow of the city, wishing he were there. He thought it would be wonderful to walk on water, to set off across the waves and visit San Francisco. But it would be a long hike. One afternoon he decided it would be much better to tread on air and arrive in the big city without wet feet.
Fly over! Escape the rock! What a terrific idea!
He talked to Smacks about it, maybe a loony thing to do. But anything he did was okay with Smacks.
So, during the next few days, Jon thought a lot about body flying. He told his mother, and she said it was quite natural to think about flying through the air, looking down on Earth. She remembered a dream she'd had in childhood, when she'd flown without flapping her arms. She agreed it would be glorious to actually body fly.
On some nights, in his small bed with its four red posts and the yellow spread on which his mother had embroidered a pelican, Jon would imagine that the bed had mystical powers and could fly out the wide window, over his mother's pots of geraniums. In one dream, he saw himself sitting on the four-poster as it zipped over the waves and then landed in the heart of the city, causing a great commotion.
Once, he actually got out of bed and measured the window. By tilting the bed just a little, he would be able to pass through with ease.
On these nights he also practiced telepathy:
Hello, out there. This is Jon Jon jeffers, wanting to talk to someone about being stranded on a rock in the Pacific Ocean. I need advice on how to body fly.
Somewhere someone had to be listening.
ON AN UNUSUALLY SUNNY AND ALMOST
warm morning in September, after a windy night with the seas crashing against Clementine Rock, Jon walked down the winding path to the tiny beach cove. He wanted to see if anything had washed up during the night. Smacks trotted behind him, down the fifty-four steps to the water.
Occasionally, Jon would find a glass fishing-net float from Japan or a wooden box with foreign lettering or a bottle or a life ring. Once, an airplane wing tank washed ashore and Jon's father cut a big hole in it. The tank became a fine swing, up by the red cottage.
The tide was far out that morning, and Jon poked around the damp, rippled sand with his toes, seeing nothing of interest aside from some empty clam and spiral shells. The sunning seals, which shared their rocks with the fish-diving pelicans and cormorants, were strangely quiet, as if something or someone had cast a spell over the cove. Never had they been so silent. They almost seemed frightened.
Suddenly, Jon saw
him.
There, sitting on a rock mound to the far side of the cove, was a strange man in a strange costume. A split down the front of his red satin gown revealed pants of the blackest velvet and shoes of red fur that curled up at the toes. His white hair was swept back from his forehead and fell in a braid almost to the middle of his back. On top of his head perched a small black hat that looked like an overturned cup.
Smacks saw him, too. He always barked at anything that invaded Clementine, even the occasional schools of killer whales that steered too close to the rock. But this time Smacks didn't bark. He stared at the stranger and then turned and ran back up the fifty-four steps, tail between his legs.