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The Balloonitic
OXFORD, MISSISSIPPI, 1908
The courthouse elms were dew-black with dawn when the Balloonitic came rumbling into the Square aboard his mule-drawn buggy, one wheel wobbling out of true. An ancient driver sat at the reins with the surly airman hunched alongside him, his boots propped dusty and seam-busted on the splashboard. A brown mountain of canvas loomed from the bed of the conveyance, dwarfing the odd pair of itinerant wagoners. The fabric was crumpled and creased, the geologic panes etched with the soils of distant hills and pastures and bogs. The bleached white facade of the county courthouse stared down at the soiled heap passing before it, unimpressed.
Carnival tents were sprouting in the Square like overnight toadstools. There was the snake charmer, the bearded lady, and the wild man from Borneo, who gnawed on white clubs of ox bone, his ankle shackled to an iron stake driven deep into the earth beneath his tent. One might have witnessed any of these marvels for a dime. But the three brothers who followed the wagon across the Square, marching along the dark, dew-cut streaks of its passage like tightrope walkers—Billy and Jack and Johncy Falkner—did not come for such lesser wonders. They came to watch a man die.
The buggy halted, and the Gypsy balloonist and his helper stepped down and went to work removing posts and planks from beneath the piled canvas, erecting a crude framework of sawn pine in the middle of Oxford Square, before the four-sided clock of the courthouse, whose faces rarely agreed. Over this, they draped the canvas gasbag, tugging and coaxing corners like men making up a bed, and the helper set a skillet of hot coals beneath the flaccid shroud. The Balloonitic lifted a five-gallon can of coal oil down from the bed of the buggy and, kneeling, slung the first dipper of oil onto the coals. The skillet flashed and crackled, belching black balls of oil smoke into the open maw of the balloon.
He would sling the dipper again and again, twice a minute until, two hours later, the canvas had begun to swell ever so slightly, bulging here or there. By this time, the two younger brothers, Jack and Johncy, had wandered off to pitch rings over the necks of milk bottles or dunk their heads for apples, to gaze upon the prize pumpkins and potatoes in the farmers’ stalls. The streets were alive with horses and carriages, and townsfolk clacked back and forth along the board sidewalks that fronted the two-story brick and stucco facades of the Square’s storefronts, many with balconies or cast-iron columns. Only Billy, eleven years old, stood fixed on the lawn, watching the coal fire fill the shoddy lung of canvas.
By noon, the gasbag had swelled lopsided over the wooden frame, like a sick cloud, and the Balloonitic could stand upright beneath the burled canvas. With each flash of coal oil, Billy saw him silhouetted against the soiled sailcloth walls, his poses strange and rampant, like some shade of man wheeling about the storm of creation, stoking its fire. Suddenly his mustachioed face ducked from beneath the canvas, sooty and red-eyed, wreathed in the blackest smoke.
“Brandy!” he yelled at his helper, who nodded and fetched a pint bottle from the throat of his boot. The Balloonitic took the bottle and unscrewed the cap and sucked on the spout, then pointed the bottle at Billy. “Fetch them little brothers of your’n, and whichever else of these little pie-faces can make themselves useful.”
Billy rounded up ten boys from the shooting gallery and the ring toss and from behind the bearded lady’s tent, where they sat smoking pilfered tobacco and daring one another to lift the flap. They each held one of the mooring lines that dangled from the balloon, watching the sullen globe form beneath the braids of hemp. It flickered and belched, emitting black gouts of smoke, and Billy felt his own chest swelling in unison. Soon a man would ascend into the Mississippi heavens, high enough to see the university, the rail depot, the lazy scrawl of the Tallahatchie River. He would hang amid the clouded aeries of gods and eagles, and then he would fall, returning to the red clay and cotton fields of the state, living or dead. Either was miracle enough.
By five o’clock, the autumn sky was crumbling, laced with fire, and the balloon was huge above them, straining at its moorings. It threw a shadow the size of a house, and the boys were buoyant beneath its power. They were lifted onto their tiptoes again and again. Billy looked at his little brothers Jack and Johncy, who were small enough to be tugged from the turf for long, lazy seconds, their faces soft with wonder.
Now the Balloonitic emerged from his hide, soot-faced as a smithy or coal miner or fugitive from Hades, his cheeks slashed with tears. His helper came scurrying to him, carrying his parachute like an offering, a giant silk dress folded inside a croker sack. The balloonist heaved himself into the straps and buckles, carefully adjusting his testicles to the gasped dismay of the finer ladies in the crowd, and the helper tied a static line of grocer’s string to a trapeze dangling beneath the mouth of the balloon. This was meant to rip open the chute. Few noticed, as Billy did, how the man didn’t so much as check the knot.
The man settled himself onto the crossbar of the trapeze, wiggling his butt into place, and the balloon bounced and lolled like a drunkard’s head. His booted feet hung short of the earth, like a child in a kitchen chair, and he looked across his gathered flock. Sunspotted farmers in from the fields, their faces sculpted pale by the morning’s straight razor, and fat-cheeked country wives holding babies against their hips, toddlers clung slobbering to their skirts. White-haired captains who fought in the First Mississippi Partisan Rangers or Second Mississippi Infantry, who still wore their battle grays to reunions, the waists of the britches taken out by town tailors in armbands, and their great-grandsons, this motley assortment of boys who held the balloon to the earth.
The Balloonitic’s eyes, red with smoke and brandy, roved this crowd, as if he knew what terrible secrets pumped through the numbered chambers of their hearts.
He looked at the underweight eleven-year-old who’d watched him all day with smoldering black eyes—eyes that looked like they could burn a hole through his canvas moon. “What’s your name, boy?”
The boy stood taller, as if called to attention. “Billy Falkner, sir.”
The Balloonitic gestured the boy forth, clapping a soot-stained hand on his shoulder. “All right, Billy Falkner, tell these slobbering little pie-faces to turn her loose.”
Billy looked to the other boys, wearing the man’s sooty handprint like a badge of honor. “All right, boys, you heard the man. Let slip the lines!”
They did. The braided hemp moorings slithered from their opened hands as the balloon leapt from the rig. A gust of wind shoved it sideways, the swollen canvas bobbing drunkenly across the white face of the courthouse—built after General Whiskey Smith burned the original building in 1864. The crowd gasped as the black elms of the Square threatened to rake the balloon from the sky. The trees missed, their naked clutches falling just short of the dangling man, and the balloon rose and rose, freed of entanglements, rising higher than the courthouse clock. Now the brothers were running, chasing the balloon as it bobbled across town. They hurdled the iron hitching chain that lined the Square, causing horses to stamp and rear, and went skittering and scrambling down the street, between the rowed offices of dentists and attorneys, past the site of the First National Bank of Oxford, where their grandfather, the Colonel, would one day feel entitled, as bank president, to throw a brick through the plate glass window after a night of hard drinking out in the country.
The balloon bobbed above a dusking foreground of steeples and flagpoles and oaks, ever climbing, shrinking, floating high enough to catch the last planes of sun, burning like Mars against the iron sky, and the boys’ lungs were searing as they ran and ran. Billy led them, jumping creeks and ducking clotheslines, dodging barking dogs. His heart was a bloody planet, banging with thunder, threatening to burst from his chest, to follow the fleeing balloon into the dying autumn sky. He realized it was heading for South Second Street, where they lived with their mother and father and grandmother Damuddy on the old Johnny Brown place.
Copyright © 2022 by Taylor Brown
