Santa Claus Conquers the Homophobes

by Robert Devereaux

  Santa halted beside a fruiting pear tree. “I have touched their hearts and seen how unrelentingly vile they are in ways beyond number. From childlike purity have so many devolved into monsters. Gropers for power, hard-hearted consumers, idle spendthrifts of their precious time alive, the envious, the lustful, lackhands and lunkheads—the list has no end. Were I to assume their pain in removing the egg-seeds, I would not have begun to heal all the diseased parts of them. Better they die in the extraction.”

  “You don’t mean that,” replied the Son, condemning him not in the least. “My Father, infinitely wise yet inscrutable in his ways, has granted this one alteration in his creation’s plan, but only through you can it be achieved.”

  “I seated the egg-seeds with the best intent. The Tooth Fairy about-faced them. Why shouldn’t she be ordered to remove them and suffer the pain you speak of?”

  “Would you have it so?”

  Santa hesitated. If forced, she would seek means to do worse. No, the Tooth Fairy should come nowhere near the sleepers. Besides, he felt like a shirker. There was a reason he had been chosen to walk with the greatest of all sacrificial lambs in this garden.

  “Thy will be done,” he said finally.

  “My will is that thy will be done. That is, that you willingly embrace this task, not provoked by feelings of obligation or guilt but out of love for these once innocent creatures. Observe.”

  Santa gazed upon the earth, taking in the seething masses and focusing on each of them, seeking the uncorrupted infant at the heart of every mortal.

  “Observe the children,” said the Son. “They live in them still, buried in the barren earth of despoiled community. If you make this sacrifice, it will be as the planting of a fresh bed of flowers, an invitation to these children to rise from dormancy.”

  Santa fell in love with the buried boys and girls, their eyelids closed, their lips parted, their tiny noses no longer breathing.

  “Mortal grown-ups can choose redemption at any time, if they will only give the child free rein. Eating the Divine Mother’s chocolate egg opens one small way to do that. And a goodly number will apply that lesson in other areas of their lives. You alone can give them that chance.”

  Santa returned his gaze to the loving god who had given up his life to save all humankind, and who continued to bear the unbearable burden of their sins. “I’ll do it,” he said.

  “Be blessed in that choice. And know that I am with you always. Take heart. This will not be easy. Often you’ll wish you had refused this task. But be assured, release awaits you on the other side.”

  “Release?”

  “When it is finished, you will understand.”

  The Son’s remarks had turned cryptic, but their conversation was at an end. And now Santa stood where he had before, between Wendy and the Easter Bunny, as if there had been no walk in the garden at all.

  “Go thou,” said the Divine Mother, “and heaven go with you.”

  As the Easter Bunny sank through the clouds and picked up speed, Wendy shouted after him, “We’ll come for you.”

  She took Santa’s hand then and they drifted earthward without regret or depression. Their visit had, after all, reached its natural conclusion, there was much to do, and they were determined to do it correctly.

  “We can save them, Daddy,” she said.

  “I know we can,” said Santa. “I know it, dear.”

  Chapter 33. Racing Against the Dawn Line

  WHEN TWO SLEIGHS LANDED in the clearing before his burrow, the Easter Bunny was surprised, though he knew Wendy had her own sleigh. “We’ll make better time,” said Santa. “A lighter load for the team.”

  “Oh, I see,” he said, tumbling in beside Santa.

  Santa glared. “Lighter than that. You will fly beside me, on your own steam. And never,” he added significantly, “are you to drop back and converse with Wendy. In fact, you are not to converse with me, unless I initiate it or it’s germane to the task at hand.”

  “Ah,” said the Easter Bunny. If he thought about it, he could have read much into Santa’s words. He decided not to think about it. Tonight would be long enough without erratic detours into valleys of fret and fidget.

  Santa turned about, the heavy reins creaking in his hands. “All set, Wendy?”

  “Yep,” she said.

  “Off we go, then!” A whipsmack, and their sleighs rose into the air, the Easter Bunny easily paralleling Santa’s maneuvers. So swift they flew, in one breath they had landed on their first lawn. In the time it took Santa and Wendy to reach the first sleeper, the Easter Bunny dashed through the house, pulling baskets out of the air, placing them just so, and dotting the back lawn with concealed Easter eggs. He met them in the bedroom, where the pouch slung upon his back took on weight for the first time that night. He gestured toward his shoulder and a chocolate egg leapt between his paws. Before him, Saint Nicholas removed with a grunt some terrible excrescence from the sleeping mortal’s chest, a thing of blood and tendrils, which crumbled to dust and blew away in his hands.

  “Leave the egg and let’s go.”

  The look on Santa’s face shocked him.

  “Are you okay, Daddy?”

  “Yes, dear.” But the Easter Bunny, placing the chocolate egg on the sleeper’s nightstand, wasn’t so sure.

  Quickly they established a routine, flying and landing, dashing through the house for his annual deliveries—and into neighboring homes where no implants had been left—then to bedside, where Santa did his best to absorb the pain as he grimaced and extracted and the vile dust fell through his fingers, after which the Easter Bunny set beside each dozing extractee the Divine Mother’s redemptive gift.

  Never did it become monotonous, though tens of thousands of homes went by in a normal-time’s heartbeat and their routine never deviated; they couldn’t spare the time to pause or ponder or trade idle remarks. The Easter Bunny imagined a sorrow-filled world, vast looming mountain ranges of gloom everywhere, each delivery of a heavenly egg replacing a tiny smear of gloom with a brilliant dab of lemon. Their way was long and tortuous, but when they were done, the world would be bathed in the purest light, an entire race of beings transformed.

  His one worry, though he dared not voice it, was for Santa. The tormented elf moved more and more as though he amassed worlds of pain. And he began, almost imperceptibly, to slow.

  Every so often, Wendy voiced her concern. “Are you okay, Daddy?” she would repeat, doing her best not to sound alarmed.

  “Yes, dear,” he would answer, the soul of patience and dissembling, minimizing the seriousness of what was happening to him. But though sunrise lay far off, the Easter Bunny knew they were racing against time and that it was a race they could not afford to lose.

  On, on, on they went, through a world of darkness, leaving tiny spicules of light by each bedside, next to huddled homophobic homeless men and women, alongside hospital beds, and marriage beds in honeymoon suites, and deathbeds. He neither stinted nor scrimped on his regular deliveries; even so, this grand odyssey had the spirit of Easter writ large upon its face, the dark sorrows of the Savior’s sacrifice, from which would emerge a rebirth of hope, of generosity, and an embrace of the astounding variety of the Father’s creation.

  At first, the impression of Santa’s slowing and not the fact came to the Easter Bunny. Then the fact. But he saw the worthy saint fight back, driving himself and his reindeer even harder. If but one sleeper woke to a prejudice unleavened with the least modicum of good will, the world might be utterly lost. For as Santa had commented in heaven, one determined miscreant can change the course of history.

  Another image sustained him.

  He fancied he was delivering one gargantuan Easter basket to the entire world. If you could step back and view all the divine eggs they were leaving, you would see in minute detail the woven basket, the towering chocolate bunny, surrounding him a generosity of jelly beans, peeping marshmallow chicks, and brightly wrapped ovoid confections, everything cushioned
in green cut shreds of plastic grass. And on the morrow, a slumberous and reinvigorated World Soul would wake and blink and scarce credit its eyes, delighting in heaven’s miraculous gift and striding into a new day, the burden of one sad sin lifted from its shoulders.

  Holding off the night even as they sped through it, on the trio flew, the Easter Bunny soaring along their redemptive path with mingled hope and anxiety.

  * * *

  Santa’s first instinct was to recoil from the task, to perform it mechanically, shutting off all feeling. If he deadened himself to the extraction and the lances of pain, becoming nothing but a red-suited, black-booted automaton, he could, he thought, maintain the stamina to survive the night’s work.

  Very quickly he learned that that was folly. More intimate than during the implantation must he now become with these sleepers, lest he extract imperfectly. He could not afford to overlook any abortive matter nor feel inattentively the agony attached to the removal. He had to stay focused on the pain.

  One hundred homes in, as he grasped the gangrenous implant in seventy-six-year-old Benjamin Norton’s chest, deftly wrenching it free of its moorings and drawing it forth to pulse and die and turn to dust and then to a pestilent vapor in his palms, two significant shifts occurred in him.

  The first was the realization that the suffering he had taken on was not going to diminish or dissipate in any way, that all of it would persist as the night progressed, piled on top of what had come before.

  The second was the beginning of resentment, the first small wedge that signaled Pan’s return. Why couldn’t the Easter Bunny assume his share of pain? Why not Wendy, who could have monitored the implants as easily as he? Why not the mortals themselves? Why, instead of merely the spiritual emptiness attendant upon extraction, did they not suffer even the slightest discomfort? Something, anything, to take the edge off his one hundred percent suffering on their behalf!

  Anger, resentment, and shame grew in Santa’s breast. And these feelings too were part of the torment he took on, which wasn’t simply the physical pain that went with the extraction, but the pent-up evil the sleepers had been poised to unleash upon waking, and on top of that, all of his feelings about them and Wendy and the Easter Bunny, about having to perform this task instead of staying home, comfy with his pipe and slippers, imagining the Easter joy being spread by that other great deliverer of goodies.

  Take for instance, the Baptist minister Calvin Jurgens and his wife Betty, good souls as far as humankind’s compromised notions of goodness went. Their bedroom in Ashland, Ohio smelled of pressed flowers and pinched-off dreams. As Wendy stood by to give moral support, and the Easter Bunny hopped about placing chocolate eggs on their nightstands, Santa bent first to Calvin. The minister’s egg-seed pulsed with ill will. Its root tips wormed their way into a dream in which Calvin rehearsed remarks that would replace his prepared sermon. Santa was privy to it all, the pretense at non-interpretation of the Holy Bible, the selective dismissal, adoption, and distortive magnification of key passages, the equating of homosexual practice with lying and cheating, with murder and adultery and stealing and fornication. He heard too the words that would explode from this wretched pack of lies, that would incite the congregation, themselves turned in the night, to kill gays in God’s name, giving teeth to the Levitical injunction to put to death men who slept with men, and extending it to embrace lesbians, bisexuals, and the transgendered. Santa absorbed the whole bundle of judgmentalism masked in piety, which was but a fraction of the vileness in Calvin’s inverted egg-seed. Extracting the implant would not begin to address the waywardness of this man’s heart. What’s the use, Santa thought, and cursed himself for thinking it. Why should I taste the bitterness of this wretched fellow’s prejudices, the nastiness beneath his transparent veil of goodness? Why should he not suffer a little for his misguided choices?

  Then Santa caught himself.

  He recognized what he was about—the demeaning, the demonizing, the intolerance—and rejected it. The whole swirl of emotions tapped directly into Pan, not lending him power but making Santa aware that he lurked just below the surface. He began to question how far his generosity went. How shallow was Santa, how unendingly deep Pan? But that fear too was surely an illusion. He was all generosity, and by God he would prove it by continuing to take the weight of suffering upon his shoulders, house by house, sinner by sinner.

  Still, the strain grew as the night progressed.

  Then there was Wendy.

  Sometimes, as they swooped toward a home, she would project its inhabitants’ coming nastiness. And when they flew away, she would project what had replaced it, to lift Santa spirits and to keep their task from seeming an endless, undifferentiated round.

  But what also developed, because Wendy had not so long ago been mortal, was an aversion to the sight of her.

  Surely this would pass, he thought. If it did not, the night’s effort wasn’t worth the candle. He was glad that they had taken their own sleighs and that he led the way through the night sky. More and more, he avoided eye contact with her. When she asked if he was all right, there was a barely perceptible pause before he marshaled his generosity and said, “Yes, dear.”

  She was a good girl. Even at nine, and mortal, she had been very good indeed. But given the depths of wickedness he had plumbed this night, even in the young, he had to wonder what unworthiness lurked in her heart. Or in her mother’s. He already knew what lurked in his own.

  Had his nice list grown so much longer than his naughty list merely because he hadn’t looked deep enough into mortal hearts? After tonight, could any boy or girl be counted nice?

  Nonsense. There were countless homes he hadn’t visited, neither for insertion nor extraction, because not a trace of homophobia dwelt there. Ah but what of their other failings?

  He wanted to laugh. He wanted to cry.

  The qualities that moored him to his role as Santa Claus felt as if they were becoming unmoored.

  No! Cling to generosity and all else would return. Did it hurt to give? Then he would increase his giving. Was the pain crushing? He would pile it on. Was there far more to forgive in mortals than he had ever guessed? Why then, he would forgive and keep on forgiving.

  He knew he was slowing.

  He pushed harder.

  Fortunately, the Easter Bunny avoided conversation and kept his distance, tending to the placing of the Divine Mother’s eggs with a subtle smugness that grated only a little.

  Santa had no idea if he would survive the night. But he was determined to go on, right to the last house. Like a roused bull, he lowered his great head and charged with a will into the unspeakable darkness before them.

  Chapter 34. Heading Home, Heavy Laden

  FINE. HE WASN’T WELCOME at the North Pole.

  Santa had snubbed him. He had provided reasons in his visit to the burrow, though memory refused to divulge them. The Easter Bunny wore a sheen of shame and accepted that his sins, whatever they were, were irreversible and unforgivable, no matter how contrite he carried himself, no matter how changed he was.

  But one’s emotional field is ever rich and loamy.

  As he flew home in the pre-dawn hour for a well-deserved rest, the Easter Bunny flared with pride. Umpteen million chocolate eggs from the Divine Mother’s womb had he held and marveled at, sniffing them and caressing them and setting them beside as many homophobic mortals. Each such egg, unique in its perfection, had thrilled him. To hold such goodness between his paws, to leave a heavenly confection where each hungering soul would find it upon waking—what a privilege it had been to be the Divine Mother’s go-between.

  Dare he say it? Why not? No one else was about, as he trailed a gaping wake of night air behind him. It had been a privilege as well to be in the presence of Santa’s suffering. For hide it as Santa might, he hadn’t been able to hide it at all. The robustious elf had grown dark and depleted, in physique and spirit, as he carried out his charge. His eyebrows bristled in all directions, his boots l
ost all sheen and buff, his suit had been soiled with the dust of dissolving nastiness. His chubby face grew gaunt and lined. His walk lost its bounce.

  To watch it occur had been magnificent and terrifying.

  He, the Easter Bunny, would not collapse in exhaustion when he reached home, despite tonight’s extra duties. The divine fires within were banked too high for that. He would dash about his burrow, trumpet his triumph to the hens, kiss every square inch of his abode, leap to the ceiling, dash again everywhichwhere, and return and regale anew his puzzled-eyed, rump-egged layers.

  Santa? Only the Father knew what the pain would do to him. If indeed it dissipated, it might not do so soon enough. By the time the Easter Bunny had veered off with a farewell wave, Santa was swimming in aches, his face scandalous with hurt.

  Speeding along, the Easter Bunny stroked the strap across his chest, feeling at his back the featherweight pouch. This sacred womb he would enshrine in his quarters, his first sight upon waking, his last before closing his eyes. He prayed for Santa’s survival and recovery, worrying what the world would be like if that recovery was slow in coming or Santa’s survival thrown into doubt.

  But his heart was filled with too much joy to entertain these worries long. No more would he quiver in dread, having done what he had done this night. He had gulped down panic, embraced an impossible challenge, and seen it through. He had changed his itinerary, been nimble in his planning, and not missed a single house (he stopped, did a mental scan, and assured himself that this was so). If the archangel showed up to thank him, fine. If not, fine. The doing had been all.

  Ahead, a familiar forest rose into view. The Easter Bunny put on a last burst of speed, scurrying along the treetops toward home and an exuberant, if solitary, celebration.

  * * *