by Jane Yolen
DIVIDING THE GOOSE
Russia
Once there was a poor peasant who had many children, but no possessions except one goose. He saved this goose for a long time; but hunger is nothing to be trifled with—and things had reached such a point that he had nothing to eat. So the peasant killed the goose, roasted it, and put it on the table. So far, so good; but he had no bread and not a grain of salt. He said to his wife, “How can we eat the goose without bread or salt? Perhaps I should take the goose to the baron as a gift and ask him for bread.”
“Well, go with God,” said his wife.
The peasant came to the baron and said, “I have brought you a goose as a gift. You are welcome to all I have. Do not disdain it, little father.”
“Thanks, peasant, thanks. Now divide the goose among us, without doing wrong to anyone.”
Now this baron had a wife, two sons and two daughters—all in all there were six in his family. The peasant was given a knife and he began to carve and divide the goose, he cut off the head and gave it to the baron. “You are the head of the house,” he said, “so it is fitting that you should have the head.” He cut off the pope’s nose and gave it to the baron’s wife, saying, “Your business is to sit in the house and take care of it, so here is the pope’s nose for you.” He cut off the legs and gave them to the sons, saying, “Here is a leg for each of you, to trample your father’s paths with.” And to each daughter he gave a wing. “You won’t stay long with your father and mother; when you grow up, off you will fly. And I,” he said, “I’m just a stupid peasant, so I’ll take what is left.” Thus he got most of the goose. The baron laughed, gave the peasant wine to drink, rewarded him with bread, and sent him home.
A rich peasant heard about this, envied the poor one, roasted five geese, and took them to the baron.
“What do you want, peasant?” asked the baron.
“I have brought Your Grace five geese as a gift.”
“Thanks, brother! Now apportion them among us without doing wrong to anyone.”
The peasant tried this and that, but saw no way of dividing the geese equally. He just stood there scratching his head.
The baron sent for the poor peasant and told him to divide the geese. He took one goose, gave it to the baron and his wife, and said, “Now you are three.” He gave another goose to the two sons and a third one to the two daughters, saying, “Now you also are threes.” The last pair of geese he took for himself, saying, “Now I and the geese are another three.”
The baron said, “You are a clever fellow; you have managed to give everyone an equal share and you have not forgotten yourself either.” He rewarded the poor peasant with money and drove out the rich one.
THE MEN WHO WOULDN’T STAY DEAD
France
Gentlemen, if you choose to listen, I will recount to you an adventure which once happened in a castle that stood on the bank of a river, near a bridge, and at a short distance from a town, of which I forget the name, but which we may suppose to be Douai. The master of this castle was humpbacked. Nature had exhausted her ingenuity in the formation of his whimsical figure. In place of understanding, she had given him an immense head, which, nevertheless, was lost between his two shoulders; he had thick hair, a short neck, and a horrible visage. Spite of his deformity, this bugbear bethought himself of falling love with a beautiful young woman, the daughter of a poor but respectable burgess of Douai. He sought her in marriage, and, as he was the richest person in the district, the poor girl was delivered up to him. After the nuptials he was as much to pity as she, for, being devoured by jealousy, he had not tranquillity night or day, but went prying and rambling everywhere, and suffered no stranger to enter his castle.
One day during the Christmas festival, while standing sentinel at his gate, he was accosted by three humpbacked minstrels. They saluted him as a brother and as such asked for refreshment. Contrary to expectation, he led them to his kitchen, gave them a capon with peas, and to each a piece of money. Before they departed, however, he warned them never to return, on pain of being thrown into the river. At this threat of the chatelain the minstrels laughed heartily, and took the road to the town, singing in full chorus, and dancing in grotesque derision. He, on his part, without paying any further attention to them, went to walk in the fields.
The lady, who saw her husband cross the bridge, and had heard the minstrels, called them back to amuse her. They had not been long returned to the castle when her husband knocked at the gate, by which she and the minstrels were equally alarmed. Fortunately the lady perceived, on a bedstead in a neighboring room, three empty coffers. Into each of them she stuffed a minstrel, shut the covers, and then opened the gate to her husband. He had only come back to spy the conduct of his wife, as usual, and after a short stay went out anew, at which you may believe his wife was not dissatisfied. She instantly ran to the coffers to release the minstrels, for night was approaching, and her husband would not probably be long absent. But what was her dismay when she found them all three suffocated! Lamentation, however, was useless. The main object now was to get rid of the dead bodies, and she had not a moment to lose. She ran then to the gate and, seeing a peasant go by, offered him a reward of thirty livres, and leading him into the castle, she took him to one of the coffers and, showing him its contents, told him he must throw the dead body into the river. He asked for a sack, put the carcass into it, pitched it over the bridge into the stream, and then returned quite out of breath to claim the promised reward. “I certainly intended to satisfy you,” said the lady, “but you ought first to fulfill the conditions of your bargain; you have agreed to rid me of the dead body, have you not? There, however, it is still”; saying this, she showed him the other coffer, in which the second hunchback had expired. At this sight the clown was perfectly confounded, saying, “How the devil! come back! a sorcerer!” He then stuffed the body into the sack, and threw it, like the other, over the bridge, taking care to put the head down and to observe that it sank.
Meanwhile the lady had again changed the position of the coffers, so that the third was now in the place which had been successively occupied by the two others. When the peasant returned she showed him the remaining body. “You are right, friend,” said she, “he must be a magician, for there he is again.” The rustic gnashed his teeth with rage. “What the devil! Am I to do nothing but carry about this accursed hunchback?” He then lifted him up, with dreadful imprecations, and, having tied a stone round the neck, threw him into the middle of the current, threatening, if he came out a third time, to dispatch him with a cudgel. The first object that presented itself to the clown on his way back for the reward was the hunchbacked master of the castle returning from his evening walk and making toward the gate. At this sight the peasant could no longer restrain his fury. “Dog of a hunchback, are you there again?” So saying, he sprang on the chatelain, stuffed him into a sack, and threw him headlong into the river after the minstrels. “I’ll venture a wager you have not seen him this last time,” said the peasant, entering the room where the lady was seated. She answered that she had not. “Yet you were not far from it,” replied he. “The sorcerer was already at the gate, but I have taken care of him. Be at your ease, he will not come back now.” The lady instantly understood what had happened and repaid the peasant to his satisfaction.
THE STORY OF CAMPRIANO
Italy
There was once a man, a tiller of the soil, named Campriano. He had a wife and a mule. Yokels from backward Ciciorana sometimes passed through the field he was working and called to him, “Hey, Campriano, what are you doing?” They would ask him if he was ready to go home, and frequently he and his mule would walk a little way with them.
One morning Campriano slipped a few gold pieces he had saved into his mule’s rear end. When the yokels from Ciciorana came by, Campriano said, “Wait for me, I’m going home, too.” He loaded his things onto the mule and joined the group in conversation. It was springtime and the fresh grass relished by animals abounded
, so the mule, which had eaten his fill, soon cut loose and dropped the money his owner had hidden in him.
The yokels from Ciciorana exclaimed, “Why, Campriano, your mule makes droppings of money!”
“That’s right,” replied Campriano. “Without him, I’d never manage. He’s my fortune.”
Right off the bat they said, “Campriano, you must sell him to us! You must!”
“I’m not selling him.”
“But if you did, what would you ask for him? A whole lot?”
“I wouldn’t sell him for all the money in the world. You’d have to offer me … no less than three hundred crowns.”
The yokels of Ciciorana dug into their pockets and all together came up with three hundred crowns. They led the mule away, and the minute they got home they told their wives to spread sheets in the stable to catch all the gold that would be dropped during the night.
In the morning they ran to the stable and found the sheets loaded with manure. “Campriano has cheated us! We’ll kill him!” With that, they grabbed up pitchforks and shovels and marched off to Campriano’s house.
His wife answered the door. “Campriano isn’t here, he’s out in the vineyard!”
“We’ll get him out of the vineyard!” they shouted, and marched on. At the vineyard, they called to him, “Come out, Campriano! We are going to kill you!”
Campriano emerged from the rows of vines. “Why?”
“You sold us the mule, and he doesn’t turn out any money!”
“Let me ask how you treated him,” said Campriano.
“We treated him fine. He had sweet broth to drink and fresh grass to eat!”
“Poor animal! If he’s not dead by now, he will be shortly! He’s accustomed to eating roughage that shapes into durable coins, don’t you see? Wait a minute, and I’ll come and look at him. If he’s still all right, I’ll take him back. If not, you’ll keep him and hold your peace. But first, I have to stop by my house a minute.”
“All right! Go ahead, but come straight back. We’ll wait here.”
Campriano ran to his wife and said, “Put on a pot of beans to boil. But when we return, pretend to pull it out of the cupboard while they boil. Is that clear?”
Campriano accompanied the Ciciorana yokels to the stable and found the mule standing in the middle of the dung-laden sheets. “It’s a wonder he’s still alive,” he said. “This animal is no good for work any more. But how could you! If I’d only known you’d break him down that way! Poor thing!”
The yokels were puzzled. “What do we do now?”
“What do you do now? I have nothing more to say, and you shouldn’t either!”
“You have a point!”
“It was just one of those things. Come to my house to dinner, and let’s forget the whole business once and for all.”
They got to Campriano’s and found the door closed. Campriano knocked, and his wife emerged from the barn, pretending to finish her chores and enter the house only at that moment.
The fire was out in the kitchen. Campriano said, “What! You’ve not cooked my dinner yet?”
“I just got back from the field,” she replied. “But I’ll scrape up something right away.”
She set the table for everybody, then opened the cupboard, where the pot of beans boiled.
“What!” exclaimed the yokels of Ciciorana. “A pot that boils all by itself in the cupboard? How does it do that without any fire underneath it?”
“Goodness knows what we’d do without that pot!” replied Campriano. “How could my wife and I go out together to work if we weren’t sure of finding the soup ready and waiting when we got back?”
“Campriano,” said the yokels, “you must sell it to us.”
“Not for all the money in the world.!”
“Campriano, things didn’t work out with the mule. To make up for it, you have to sell us the pot. We’ll give you three hundred crowns.” Campriano sold the pot for three hundred crowns, and they left.
His wife said to him, “They were ready to kill you over the mule. How will you get out of this one?”
“Leave everything to me,” said Campriano. He went to a butcher, bought an ox-bladder, and filled it with raw blood. He said to his wife, “Here, put this bladder in your bosom, and don’t be afraid when I throw a knife at you.”
The yokels of Ciciorana arrived carrying clubs and stakes. “We want your head! Give us back our money, or we’ll kill you!”
“Now, now, calm down! Let’s hear what it is this time.”
“You told us that pot boiled without fire. We went out to work with our wives, and when we came back, the beans were as raw as ever!”
“Easy, now, easy! It must be the fault of that confounded wife of mine. I’m going to ask her if she didn’t switch pots on me …”
He called his wife and asked, “Honestly, did you switch pots on these men?”
“Of course I did. You go and give things away without asking me anything. Then I have to do the work! I don’t want to part with that pot!”
Campriano let out a yell. “You wretch!” He grabbed a knife, flung it at her, striking the bladder hidden in her bosom, and blood squirted all over the place. Down fell the woman in a whole pool of it.
The two yokels of Ciciorana turned as pale as ghosts. “You mean you’d kill a woman, Campriano, over a pot?”
Glancing at his wife all covered with blood, Campriano pretended to be sorry. “Poor thing, we’ll just have to revive her!” He pulled a straw from his pocket, placed it in the woman’s mouth, blew three times into it, and the woman rose as sound and fresh as ever.
The two yokels were wide-eyed. “Campriano,” they said, “you must give us that straw.”
“No, indeed,” replied Campriano. “I’m often overcome with the urge to kill my wife. If I didn’t have that straw, I couldn’t revive her afterward.”
They begged and pleaded with him and ended up giving him another three hundred crowns, so Campriano let them have the straw. They went home, picked a fight with their wives, and knifed them. They were apprehended while still blowing into the straw, and imprisoned for life.
The numbskull, noodlehead, idiot, bumpkin, silly—in other words, the fool—is the butt of jocular or droll stories the world around.
A few of the fools have names by which they are famous for their foolishness, like Lazy Jack and Nasr-ed-Din Hodja (who wavers between being the fool and being the rogue). Sometimes the population of a particular country, city, or locality bears the stigma of being peculiarly stupid: the inhabitants of Chelm in Jewish tales, the men of Gotham in England; the Biellese in Italy, the Irish and Poles during certain periods in America, the hillbillies in the American South. Often the stories are interchangeable, from one culture to another, only the name of the fool varying according to the teller.
Some cultures, such as that of the Pueblo Indians of the Southwest, have sacred clowns, and it is the nature of these clowns to insert ribald jokes, foolish actions, and even gross remarks in between the more solemn parts of the religious rituals. They are, as Richard Erdoes and Alfonso Ortiz explain in American Indian Myths and Legends, “the comic counterpart of solemnity, the underscoring of the duality of life.”
That same underscoring can be seen in the long-valued tradition of the fool in Indo-European cultures. There are mentions of madmen with both poetic and prophetic powers in early Muslim sources: for example, the jester Bahlul in the ninth-century court of Harun al-Rashid. In Imperial Rome fools were kept by wealthy Romans, who also included deformed or imbecilic slaves in their retinues. The clergy in medieval France celebrated a “Feast of Fools” in which ecclesiastical ritual was parodied.
Weaving in and out of this tradition of the fool are the popular stories, jests, songs, narratives, and ballads about fools and foolish behavior. These are supposed to point out, in reverse, just how wise humans might be. But, as Alan Garner comments in the introduction to his book The Guizer: “The element I think marks us most is that of the Foo
l. It is where our humanity lies.”
THE THREE SILLIES
England
Once upon a time there was a farmer and his wife who had one daughter, and she was courted by a gentleman. Every evening he used to come and see her, and stop to supper at the farmhouse, and the daughter used to be sent down into the cellar to draw the beer for supper.
So one evening she had gone down to draw the beer, and she happened to look up at the ceiling while she was drawing, and she saw a mallet stuck in one of the beams. It must have been there a long, long time, but somehow or other she had never noticed it before, and she began a-thinking. And she thought it was very dangerous to have that mallet there, for she said to herself, “Suppose him and me was to be married, and we was to have a son, and he was to grow up to be a man, and come down into the cellar to draw the beer, like I’m doing now, and the mallet was to fall on his head and kill him, what a dreadful thing it would be!” And she put down the candle and the jug, and sat herself down and began a-crying.
Well, they began to wonder upstairs how it was that she was so long drawing the beer, and her mother went down to see after her, and she found her sitting on the settle crying, and the beer running over the floor. “Why, what ever is the matter?” said her mother.
“Oh, Mother!” says she, “look at that horrid mallet! Suppose we was to be married, and was to have a son, and he was to grow up, and was to come down into the cellar to draw the beer, and the mallet was to fall on his head and kill him, what a dreadful thing it would be.”
