The truth of it is, the robbers of the glass tub, thieves of Mr. de Persia’s precious person (it was now worth a ransom of thousands), held him captive in the blue balloon.
The thieves were two young men and a young woman. They were all no more than twenty years old, or so they appeared through binoculars. The three had whisked (if you could whisk a great body like Mr. de Persia) the body away like true professionals, and apparently as lightly as angels carry the departed. The town had thought they were the photographers—who in truth lay gagged in a nearby gully. As though they were rescuing someone from water, they hovered, dropped a sling with two men clinging to it like insects. In a flashing moment, the two men deftly slipped the sling under Mr. de Persia’s arms and up rose all three as lightly as aerialists, and the balloon floated away.
Who saw Mr. de Persia’s ascension over East Texas that misty morning? The three guards certainly did not. They were off in the wings with three teen-age girls who came at the same time every dark morning before dawn. Since they thought they were being photographed when they saw the balloon, they all cringed together in a mass, burrowing and hiding their faces under one another like animals keeping warm, and so saw nothing. But the thieves in the balloon had not only taken Mr. de Persia, they had taken photographs which later proved that the guards had not, as they had said, fallen asleep, and which were sold under the counter for a price.
What was that falling out of the sky one morning? Fingers pointed to something high, high up, flashing like a silver leaf, something turning in the light. Then it was lost in the darkness behind cloud. Something was falling, then rising again. There was a feeling of terror over the town, it was like the end of the world. People in backtowns, hidden bayou towns and in the swamp who suddenly saw a shape in the sky, fell to the ground on their knees or ran into their root cellars, shaking and praying, believing it to be the end of the world. All day the whole world of Thicket towns was haunted and scared to death.
When it dropped low over the town of Rose, people saw the blue balloon trailing its streamer. It read: WE’VE GOT HIM. “He’s in the blue balloon!” the cry went up from the town. Now the town was shocked and dumbfounded and everyone felt helpless. How in God’s name could you capture a man held prisoner in a floating balloon? Well, the balloon would have to come down. Its floating duration was pretty short. If it came down low enough, cowboys said they could lasso it.
But the blue balloon was riding the wind in a Gulf current that kept it amazingly aloft. It hunted for wind and got caught in an elevator of rising air and lifted upward, wallowing lazily in the draughts, until it settled softly on a miraculous cushion of wind, springy and holding it aloft like water-wings, and there it was sustained, sliding sideways over East Texas without a care in the world. The girl in the basket was playing an Irish harp and the music of the harp fell down sweetly over the countryside and some thought they were in their eternity, such celestial and angelic harmonies tinkled down in glassy cascades, chining and fluting and thrumming. How odd the world had become, like a dream or a vision or some kind of madness!
What people below didn’t know was that the girl in the balloon had pulled up her skirt and straddled Mr. de Persia. Her motive was not strictly self-satisfaction—so many had tried to get at Mr. de Persia who seemed to be offering a helluva good time to somebody—it was a martyr’s desire to perpetuate the great fabricator that sat her astride Mr. de Persia, riding him in midair on a June afternoon in a blue balloon.
But was it a fountain that never went dry? The girl, whose name was Selina Rosheen, was a mysterious and lustful beauty who had come into town—because of the de Persia notoriety—from where no one knew—she was probably a Gypsy, a Mexican, someone of strange and exotic race—who knew? Although Selina Rosheen was filled brimming with the rich and magic elixir of Mr. de Persia, there was no sign on the great man of his loss. Upraised he remained, the indefatigable sleeper. Selina Rosheen swore that Mr. de Persia moved a little. “He could make an army!” Selina exclaimed. “But I’ve got what I wanted out of him. I can tell.”
Two and a half years later a baby boy, somewhat over a year old, it was guessed, was found in a hollow log at the edge of the Thicket near Camden. A sawmill man named Leander Suggins, going to work to cut trees in the Thicket, heard the cries and found the child. It was in good health, except for a wound on the inside of its thigh near its sex that looked like the bite of a serpent and was the shape of a harp.
Leander’s wife, Nesta, part Indian and one-third Mexican, the rest Scotch-Irish, she told everybody, found it hard to believe Leander’s story. “Don’t come home to tell me you found a baby in a log. You been straddling that log. Knowing you, I wouldn’t doubt it, you’d straddle anything that’s got a hole in it.” Naturally there were lots of stories among the men about Leander and the hollow log, Leander and the knothole, etc.
But the sight of Leander Suggins and the baby walking down the road to the Orphans Home with the baby bottle of milk in his hip pocket was sweet. For some moments he wanted to keep the baby because it felt so warm and alive in his arms and gave him a feeling he’d never had before that he couldn’t name. But it was out of the question because Nesta wanted to work all day in her Hair Salon which she had developed through hard work and a natural talent and had no interest in a baby. That was why he two-timed her sometimes that made him suffer so much afterwards—because she wouldn’t let him have it as often as he needed it, which was just about every noon and night, because she didn’t want to get pregnant.
“You little bugger,” Leander said to the baby as he walked down the road to the Orphans Home up at Longview. After he left the baby on the road he kept looking back at the gray lonesome-looking house that was the Orphans Home until it went out of sight around a bend; and when he got home he went and got drunk and it was after some time then that one of his drinking buddies discovered the baby bottle still in his hip pocket. Leander defended the bottle with such a rage that he just about started a drunken fistfight and nobody succeeded in getting the baby bottle away from him. Walking home drunk, he held the bottle close to him and felt such an old sorrow that he cried in low sobs—why, he couldn’t fully understand, but it had a lot to do with his suddenly realizing that he was tired and lonesome in this life of hard day-labor work and of being poor and it also had to do with the baby and his feeling for it, he knew. He stumbled home and in his drunkenness hid the baby bottle under his pillow where he found, in the morning, that it had squirted out milk through its nipple as he turned his heavy head on it. When he got up he hid the bottle in his work clothes and later, in the Thicket at lunchtime, he went off and buried the baby bottle under a young white hawthorn, as if the baby he found in the log had died.
Then it was Ace Adair one day, coming up the same road after the little orphan Addis to adopt him for Jewel. The Methodist Church in Rose, under the auspices of the Ladies’ Missionary Society and with the help of Reverend Bill Jack Pugh—he was called Brother Bill Jack—had helped Jewel with her application and all the red tape you had to do to adopt a baby.
But more about Ace Adair and Jewel and Addis later, and back, now, to Mr. de Persia.