Songs of the Humpback Whale: A Novel in Five Voices

39 REBECCA Friday, July 13, 1990

Midwest Airlines flight 997 crashed on September 21, 1978, in What Cheer, Iowa-a farming town sixty miles southeast of Des Moines. Newspaper reports I have read say there were 103 passengers on the plane. There were five survivors including me. I do not remember anything about the crash.

You get the feeling that anybody in What Cheer would be able to direct us to Arlo van Cleeb’s farm. This is the place where the plane crashed and in fact it was Rudy van Cleeb, the man’s son, who took the famous picture of me running away from the plane and waving my arms. He is also the one who drove me to the hospital. I would like to thank him but it turns out he is dead. Killed in some accident that involved a combine.

Arlo van Cleeb is very surprised to see me. He keeps pinching my face and telling my mother how nice I grew up. We are sitting in his living room, and I am listening to my mother tell him the story of my life. We are only up to age eight, when I played a molar in a school play about dental hygiene.

“Excuse me,” I say. “I don’t mean to be rude but maybe we should just go on out there.”

“The good Lord loves patience,” Mr. van Cleeb says.

Seventy million years later, my mother stands up from the flowered couch. “If you don’t mind.”

“Mind!” Mr. van Cleeb says. “Why would I mind! I’m flattered that you’ve come.”

Corn is a funny thing-it’s much higher and thicker than I’d expected. When you drive through Iowa, you have to inch out at the intersections because cars coming in the other direction can’t see you through the thatch of stalks. I can see why we didn’t decide to just wander out here on our own. Most likely, we never would have found our way back. Mr. van Cleeb turns and cuts through the corn like there are actually paths. Then he spreads the final wall of stalks.

It is a wide open area about the size of a football field. The ground is jet black. In the middle of this is a rusted frame, cracked at the middle and the seams like a lobster. One wing sticks out like an elbow. There are several sections, too, sitting here and there: a row of seat skeletons, the huge fan of an engine, a propeller the size of my body.

“May I?” I ask, pointing to the plane. The farmer nods. I walk up to it, touching the rust and rubbing it between my fingers. It comes off orange and powdered. Although it is broken into pieces, it still looks like a plane. I crawl through a gash in the body and walk down what is left of the aisle. There are weeds wrapped around the metal.

It still smells like smoke. “Are you okay?” my mother yells.

I count down the holes where windows used to be. “This is where I sat,” I say, pointing to a hole on the right side. “Right here.” I step down into the place where the seat used to be. I keep waiting to feel something.

I walk the rest of the way down the aisle. Like a stewardess, I think, only the passengers are ghosts. What about all those people who died? If I were to dig through some of the twisted steel at my feet would I find carry-ons, jackets, pocketbooks?

I cannot remember anything about the crash. I do remember being in the hospital, and the nurses who sat with me and read me nursery rhymes. Jack and Jill went up the hill, they’d say, and they’d wait to see if I could finish the rest. I slept for a long time when I got to the hospital and when I woke up both my parents were there. My father had brought a yellow teddy bear, not one from home but a new one. He sat on the edge of the bed and my mother sat on the other side. She brushed my hair and told me how much she loved me. She said the doctors wanted to make sure I was just fine and then we would all go home and everything would be better.

Because it was a special circumstance, my parents were allowed to stay overnight in the hospital. They slept on the little bed next to mine. A few times during the night I woke up to make sure they were there. At one point I had a nightmare; I don’t remember about what. I had lost that yellow bear because my arms relaxed in sleep. But I woke up terrified and looked over to the other bed. There wasn’t much room there so my parents had curled into a little ball. My father’s arms were wrapped around my mother, and my mothers lips were pressed against my father’s shoulder. I remember staring at their hands, at how they were locked together. I had been asleep and I couldn’t hold onto that stupid bear, so I figured this was something truly special. My parents were holding onto each other. It just looked so, well, solid, that I closed my eyes and forgot about my nightmare.

I cannot remember anything about the crash. I crawl out from another gash in the metal and sit on the edge of the wing. I close my eyes and try to imagine fire. I try to hear screams, too, but nothing comes. Then there is a wind. It sings through the metal like a giant flute. The corn begins to whisper and when it does I know where all those people are, all the people who have died. They never left here. They are in the earth and wound around the frame of the plane. I stand and run away from the wreck. I press my hands over my ears, trying not to hear their voices, and for the second time, I outdistance Death.