by Jan Carson
The beginning of her story was somewhat hazy. Junior Button was already folding into dotage and the recollection of names, places and dates that had occurred over a hundred years before his birth left him somewhat pickled. He offered everything he could recall and embellished the rest, drawing heavily from his somewhat rusty remembrances of the Old Testament, Greek mythology and the British science fiction show Dr Who, which he’d been briefly infatuated with during the mid-eighties. ‘It’s like this,’ he’d said, beginning somewhere south of the start, ‘you’re from a long line of flying children, girl. Littl’uns with wings that could fly as soon as they learned to walk.’ Martha Orange had laughed then, the sort of slack-jawed chortle she reserved for the truly senile patients: warm and generous and carefully aloof. Junior Button had not laughed nor even smiled. His seriousness had frightened her. She’d begun to realize that he actually believed in flying children and less than ten minutes later as he’d encouraged her to remove the top two buttons of her work blouse, to slide her hand inside her shirt and feel, on the straining blade of each shoulder, a raised scar where there’d once been a wing, she’d slowly come to admit that she too believed in flying children.
The children of Jefferson, Oklahoma had been flying for longer than folks had been remembering. Down the generations their legends, improbable as Old Testament plagues, had been faithfully recorded in vellum-bound scrapbooks and passed from one deathbed confessional to the next. None of the residents of Jefferson could remember a time before the flying children. In Jefferson, children had always flown, though flight was not an absolute given. With the blessed exception of twins and triplets, a family could only expect one winged child per generation. The emergence of a second newborn sporting a set of stubby, soon-to-be feathered protrusions was ample cause for speculation regarding its paternity.
The town’s elders – including, over the years, a discerning gaggle of silver-haired Lutheran clergymen, two Anglicans and a solitary Jesuit priest (unpopular enough to pronounce Oklahoma unconvertible and retreat, in a matter of months, to the papist sanctuary of inner-city Chicago) had yet to deliver judgment on this peculiar phenomenon. Whilst it was gravely noted that the Angels of the Lord were winged to facilitate eternal hovering about the Almighty’s throne, it was also noted that Satan himself had once been equipped with a pair of flying wings. For two centuries the people of Jefferson debated, prayerfully and under influence of strong liquor, the age-old question, more pertinent with the disappearance of each flying child: were they peculiarly blessed, peculiarly cursed, or, as the oldest and wisest dared to suggest, caught in Job’s headlock, cursed to be supremely blessed and blessed to be supremely cursed?
Afraid of becoming a spectacle, all but the senile and halfwit cousins knew not to speak of such splintered miracles outside the Jefferson city limits. However, in the name of necessity, Jefferson’s flying children twice sacrificed their anonymity for the greater good.
During the Civil War years the children were recruited alongside the adult soldiers, scuttling between one Union safe hold and the next with notes and candy and double-wrapped pouches of gunpowder tucked into their stockings; anything to encourage the boys at the frontline. On July 7th, 1863 they hung low in the marl-grey sky over Honey Springs, tucking scuffed knees to chins as they struggled to avoid stray bullets. The flying children, many of whom were too small to understand the complexities of Union versus Confederate, rode the thermals, graceful as turtle doves as they peered through the gunpowder clouds, audience to an unholy playground skirmish. And when an untimely summer downpour left the Confederate gunpowder barrels damp as river sand, they swooped low, replenishing the Union stocks with pockets full of bone-dry powder. Later, when the battle was won and Cooper’s boys lay disarmed and bloody on Indian land, they flew home carrying news of Union triumph like fresh feathers for their infant wings. They had little clue which side they belonged to, for both armies were as black, white and sleek-haired brown as their own mottled ranks. They flew for dimes and boiled candy and the darkling suspicion that the grown-ups depended upon them.
Almost eighty years later a handful of flying children – seven in total: six boys and a solitary, blunt-banged girl – were drafted, without permission or proper understanding, into the European war effort. A punt-faced commander, having caught a rumor of flying children as it circulated round the bunk houses at Fort Sill, arrived in Jefferson, Oklahoma early in the morning of Christmas Day 1941. Promising a smorgasbord of festive blessings – an Ivy League education for every Jefferson child, a new schoolhouse, various larger items of farm equipment and the safe return of every child – he talked the townsfolk into lending seven children for the war effort. ‘It’s like this, kids,’ he yelled at the terrified children as they lurched and sniffled their way back to Fort Hill in an army Jeep. ‘That bastard Hitler is frying littl’uns younger than you lot and gassing old folks and doing Lord only knows what experiments on mutants like you. Quit your sniveling. You should be thankful for a chance to help cut that SOB down.’
Trailing the troop ships across the Atlantic, the flying children soon forgot Jefferson. They looped the stratosphere, swinging low to brush the bearded undulations of the waves and, like Noah’s raven, returned by night to sleep as kidney beans curled together in one of the ship’s many lifeboats. Only the highest in command had been informed of their existence. The ordinary soldiers, many of whom had never before crossed state lines, excused the children when they appeared in telescopes and binocular sights as strange birds, peculiar to the continental drift. The children reveled in the open sky. They flew like fighter pilots and dined like demigods on tinned fruit and Hershey bars. Recalling the claustrophobic fields and streets of Jefferson, Oklahoma, they could only conclude that their parents were selfish creatures, denying them the full breadth of their prodigal wings. By the time they hit Europe all seven children had lost their instinct to return home.
The ships docked in Belfast on January 26th, 1942, and while the regular troops trooped through the city exploring the public houses and dance halls, the children made darting, exploratory flights through the Glens of Antrim and the Newry Hills, thrilled by the jungling foliage and lush greens. Accustomed to the flat Oklahoma plains, everything seemed damp, pocket-sized and saturated in color. Such a small island, the children mused, no bigger than a single state. Yet this tiny teaspoonful of a tiny continent served to whet their appetites for further adventures. In the early days Europe felt like a homecoming for the children. The streets ran thick with mythical stories: monsters, angels, immortal beings. For one short instance the flying children felt almost acceptable. America was a youngster, too efficient to argue after unbelievable legends. No one had ever celebrated the children for their oddities. Huddling for the night in barns and rural barracks, they began to speak healing words over each other, ‘lucky’ and ‘blessed’ and ‘terribly, terribly fortunate’; the squat syllables rocking them into deep, satisfying sleep.
It was only many months later, flying low over Dachau and Buchenwald and Auschwitz, that the children came to understand the dark mission which had drawn them so far from home. They began to re-imagine their parents as saints and prophets; their small, suffocating town, a haven of quiet sense. Eyes full of impossible suffering, they hid behind their camera lenses, snapping children, adults and old people reduced to bone and paper. Each silent flight became an opportunity to repent. No longer blessed, no longer lucky, no longer baptized by good, good fortune, the children grew heavier with every sad mission. Afterwards, without consulting, two of the seven attempted to claw themselves free of their wings. A third, under the mistaken assumption that this might instigate blindness, rubbed vinegar in her own eyes. All but the child given to localized hysterics lost the ability to laugh audibly. All sacrificed their teenage years, tripping straight from child to adult. There were sights and smells so horrific they could never be flown away from.
The war ruined the people of Jefferson, Oklahoma. When the prodigal seven were
returned, unceremoniously dumped from a speeding Landrover, they spiraled into the backfields like wilted sycamore seeds, too limp-winged and exhausted to soar. Over the coming weeks these children seemed to shrivel into themselves. They suffered from nightmares and panic attacks, dry skin and migraine headaches. Though fully capable of flight they had no appetite for the heavens. For years they dragged their unfurled wings behind them, shameful things drooping like the living room curtains from each shoulder. These children amounted to nothing and passed away in early adulthood, too tired to rise in a world so unbearably heavy. The mothers and fathers kicked themselves for their stupidity. They took up arms and rebuilt their defenses. Jefferson, Oklahoma became a cold shoulder for strangers, a safe hold for its own.
The town adapted to its flying children. Trampolines and straw-stuffed mattresses bloomed at regular intervals along the High Street, rain-soaked and ready to cushion the faltering infant fliers. The schoolhouse went unroofed for generations. Impervious to the odd Oklahoma downpour, the classroom ceiling was removed to save the grazed heads and bruised wings of those children too sky sung to keep their seats for an entire lesson. Younger children, not yet capable of controlling their flighty urges, were often corralled, bound to their bunk beds with belts and laces for their own safety. Locally, such behavior was considered more prudent than cruel. The modern world, even the idle armpit of Oklahoma, was not best suited to flying children. Dangers lurked in the eaves of taller buildings and overhanging trees. Tragic tales were passed like good luck charms from one generation to the next, keeping even the most formidable kids local and grounded long after the migratory urges kicked in.
Telegraph wires, the children were told, had been outlawed in 1948 after the untimely death of a local teenager. The effeminate fourth-born of Jefferson’s only practicing butcher had been burdened at birth with a pair of fully formed wings and the unfortunate name of Frances Farley. (This name, though not particularly ridiculous in and of itself, was unfortunate by association for it was also his mother’s name, which she, desperate for a daughter and just turned forty-two, had decided to bestow upon her fourth son.)
By his seventh birthday Frances Farley could fly for up to three hours unaided. On warm afternoons he hovered above the county high school’s gym hall, spying on the older boys as they sweated into their vests and wrestling leotards. Later, when a testosterone spurt turned him particularly bold, he began to favor the changing room skylights where for up to an hour at a time he watched their naked torsos and buttocks surf the shower room steam like lumbering, pink-skinned gorillas. On such occasions Frances Farley was a teeter-totter torn between rapture and Christian consequence. Though he had no desire to emulate the ordinary, young Frances knew better than to speak of such dark pleasures. His brothers – three brutish lads with feet like backyard anchors – repulsed him with their talk of God and next-door girls and bloody, butchering futures. Frances Farley was built for higher things. He flew to court the angel’s share, to shirk the parched reality of butcher brothers and Jefferson, Oklahoma. Even in flight the town dragged on his heels, holding him captive by skylights and uncurtained windows; one part angel, two parts teenage boy.
His parents knew nothing of Frances’s expeditions. Having birthed three perfectly ordinary, unwinged sons, his mother presumed Frances’s solitude a natural side-effect of flight. The boy’s feminine affectations went unnoticed in a house where the manly stench of meat and cleaver made even his slight-hipped mother seem faintly masculine. Frances Farley did his best to fake an interest in steak and football. He intended to grow a mustache before the people of Jefferson grew suspicious. The mustache never surfaced. During one of his afternoon excursions, preoccupied by desire and a growing sense of curdling guilt (having lately found himself attracted to the middle-aged man who mowed his father’s lawns), Frances Farley flew straight into a telegraph wire, became entangled and hung himself by the neck in full view of his three older brothers.
The implications were twofold. Watching from the meeting house steps as they paced the dead hour between baseball practice and midweek Bible study, all three elder brothers spontaneously lost their faith. In the coming years butchery would serve as substitute religion in the Farley household. Meanwhile, every resident in a six-mile radius simultaneously lost telephone service for over an hour as the authorities untangled and removed the twisted remains of Frances Farley. To this day Frances Farley’s legacy remains as a permanent kink in the wires operating the home telephones of Jefferson, Oklahoma. Half curse, half blessing, this almost unnoticeable knot automatically censors away all the villagers’ talk of miracles, both domestic and divine.
The people of Jefferson, Oklahoma could never settle on the issue of flying children. To glory in the unrestrained beauty of a swooping, looping child was one thing. To lose that child to the wider skies, another thing entirely. The parents of Jefferson lived in constant dread of the moment, around the age of twelve or thirteen, when their children would begin to flirt with the dead air around the city limits. Questions as innocuous as, ‘is New York really that big?’ and ‘how wide is the Atlantic ocean?’ would take on a peculiarly sinister significance as the children became aware of a world beyond their backyard fence. By the time their sixteenth birthdays rolled round, all but the most timid had migrated: west to California, east to the big city, far, far away to over-ocean countries and continents torn from the pages of the children’s encyclopedia. Flying children did not return. Neither were they inclined to write home or, when the advent of telephones made such communication possible, call on birthdays or anniversaries. Flying children were temporary creatures like wasps or bluebottles, born for a single season of flight and suddenly lost.
The mothers of Jefferson, Oklahoma were not like other American mothers. They loved their children harder and faster than most, squeezing extra birthdays, extra treats and memories into their sixteen short years. Their hearts, when examined by scientific men with scalpels and microscopes, were around one-third thicker and more elastic than any American heart previously examined in laboratory conditions. Jefferson mothers were long-suffering women who lost in public, grieved in private and never once blamed God for all his jealous takings.
In 1945 the flying children returned from the war, wilted slips of their former glory. In 1947, five flying children formed a leaving pact and, with little regard for their parents or siblings, skipped town en masse; a flock of migrating teenagers, bobby socks twinkling like tiny stars in the drawing dusk. In 1948 Frances Farley unceremoniously hung himself from the telephone wires and on Thanksgiving evening, 1950, temporarily unhinged by the discovery of a North African map secreted beneath his son’s bed, the Baptist pastor took a shotgun to his fourteen-year-old son. ‘Better dead and buried,’ he explained to the local sheriff, ‘than disappearing some evening. A thing like that’ll break a mother’s heart real slow.’ Three centuries of loss had worn the good folks of Jefferson, Oklahoma thin around the edges. The women were gaunt, the men morose and prone to premature balding. Young couples, previously magnetic, turned celibate on their honeymoon night, terrified by the possibility of conceiving a short-loan baby. The joy had long since split the blessing, and most every resident of Jefferson now believed themselves cursed above all middling American towns.
On February 7th, 1951, a secret meeting was called in the Newhalls’ hayshed and by a universal consensus of all but three, the people of Jefferson voted to end the flying era. Babies born winged would come under the knife. On the third day of their existence, regardless of background or parental whim, the local physician would take a scalpel to each shoulder and circumcise the flight from the mewling infant. Though somewhat barbaric, the operation would keep Jefferson’s children ordinary and grounded right through their teenage years. The children, it was decided, should never be told of the special blessing which had cursed them from birth.
By Easter of 1951 circumcision was a standardized practice in Jefferson, Oklahoma. Older children, already accustome
d to flight, were given a choice: succumb to the knife or skip town before they upset the younger ones. Even in backwater Oklahoma peer pressure proved a powerful force and most children chose amputation. Afterwards they attended homecoming dances and Sunday school picnics unencumbered by the weight of wings. The sky lust had not left them but flight was no longer within their reach. They felt inexplicably clumsy in their fancy clothes, ill-inclined to dance or date. Several took shotguns to their misery whilst the rest found more mundane ways to skip town – pickup trucks and Greyhound buses and bicycles cycling them across the United States, obedient to their migratory urges.
Forty-five years mumbled past. Children no longer flew in Jefferson, Oklahoma. Only the elders could recall with any clarity the image of a child caught in actual soaring flight. Flying children were still being conceived on a bimonthly basis. Responsibility for controlling the problem now rested upon the county midwives, a group of stout-armed women who could be trusted to remain both firm and discreet when faced with a hysterical new mother. ‘Tell no one,’ they urged generation after generation of horrified young girls. ‘You don’t want your baby growing up a freak. It’s best to deal with this now before the rumors start.’
Over the years the maternity hospital incinerator saw dozens of not-yet-feathered wings, delicate as infant hands, reduced to ash clouds and returned to the heavens. The people of Jefferson, Oklahoma did not speak of such sharp sorrow. They were a stoic breed, inclined to persevere in the face of drought and great sadness. However, the flight could not be cut out of Jefferson’s children. As time passed they found increasingly elaborate ways to bolt. With no good explanation for the strings and magnets which drew them any which way but Oklahoma, these children believed themselves bad mothers and friends, unworthy sons and daughters, inadequate students. They itched through their early years and, at the first opportunity, took the one straight road out of Jefferson, Oklahoma and never came back.