by James Morrow
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“I’m talking about buying that little canary of yours for three hundred thousand bucks.”
“Buying her?” said my wife, inflating. Polly the puff adder, Polly the randy tree frog.
“She’s the environmental simulacrum we’ve always wanted,” said Logos. “With Zenobia, we can convincingly model the long-term effects of fluorocarbons, nitrous oxide, mercury, methane, chlorine, and lead. For the first time, we can study the impact of deforestation and ozone depletion without ever leaving the lab.”
Polly and I stared at each other, making vows with our eyes. We were patriotic Americans, my wife and me, but nobody was going to deplete our baby’s ozone, not even the President of the United States himself.
“Look at it this way,” said Borealis; he gripped his coffee mug with one hand, tugged anxiously at the kitchen curtains with the other. “If scientists can finally offer an irrefutable scenario of ecological collapse, then the world’s governments may really start listening, and Asa here will get to grow up on a safer, cleaner planet. Everybody benefits.”
“Zenobia doesn’t benefit,” said Polly.
Borealis slurped coffee. “Yes, but there’s a greater good here, right, folks?”
“She’s just a globe, for Christ’s sake,” said Logos. “She’s our globe,” I said.
“Our baby,” said Polly.
“My sister,” said Asa.
Logos massaged his beard. “Look, I hate to play hardball with nice people like you, but you don’t really have a choice here. Our test results are in, and the fact is your biosphere harbors a maverick form of the simian T-lymphotrophic retrovirus. As county health commissioner, I have the authority to remove the creature from these premises forthwith and quarantine it.”
“‘The fact is,’” I snorted, echoing Logos. “‘The fact is’—the fact is, our baby couldn’t give my great aunt Jennifer a bad cold.” I shot a glance at Borealis. “Am I right?”
The doctor said, “Well…”
Logos grunted like one of the pigs we used to raise before the market went soft.
“I think you gentlemen had better leave,” my wife suggested icily.
“We have a barnful of dogs,” said Asa in a tone at once cheerful and menacing. “Mean ones,” he added with a quick little nod.
“I’ll be back,” said the commissioner, rising. “Tomorrow. And I won’t be alone.”
“Bastard,” said Polly—the first time I’d ever heard her use that word.
So we did what we had to do; like Amram and Jochebed, we did what was necessary. Polly drove. I brooded. All the way up Route 322, Zenobia sat motionless in the back, safely buckled into her car seat, moaning and whimpering. Occasionally Asa leaned over and gently ran his hairbrush through the jungles of her southern hemisphere.
“Gorgeous sky tonight,” I observed, unhooking our baby and carrying her into the crisp September darkness.
“I see that.” Zenobia fought to keep her voice in one piece.
“I hate this,” I said, marching toward the bluff. My guts were as cold and hard as one of Zenobia’s glaciers. “Hate it, hate it…”
“It’s necessary,” she said.
We spent the next twenty minutes picking out constellations. Brave Orion; royal Cassiopeia; snarly old Ursa Minor; the Big Dipper with its bowlful of galactic dust. Asa stayed by the Land-Rover, digging his heel into the dirt and refusing to join us, even though he knew ten times more astronomy than the rest of us.
“Let’s get it over with,” said our baby.
“No,” said Polly. “We have all night.”
“It won’t be any easier in an hour.”
“Let me hold her,” said Asa, shuffling onto the bluff.
He took his sister, raised her toward the flickering sky. He whispered to her—statistical bits that made no sense to me, odd talk of sea levels, hydrogen ions, and solar infrared. I passed the time staring at Jake’s Video, its windows papered with ads for Joe Dante’s remake of The War of the Worlds.
The boy choked down a sob. “Here,” he said, pivoting toward me. “You do it.”
Gently I slid the biosphere from my son. Hugging Zenobia tightly, I kissed her most arid desert as Polly stroked her equator. Zenobia wept, her arroyos, wadis, and floodplains filling with tears. I stretched out my arms as far as they would go, lifting our daughter high above my head.
Once and only once in my days on the courts did I ever hit a three-pointer.
“We’ll miss you,” I told Zenobia. She felt weightless, airy, as if she were a hollow glass ornament from a Garber Farm Christmas tree. It was just as she’d said: the stars wanted her. They tugged at her blood.
“We love you,” groaned Polly.
“Daddy!” Zenobia called from her lofty perch. Her tears splashed my face like raindrops. “Mommy!” she wailed. “Asa!”
In a quick, flashy spasm I made my throw. A good one—straight and smooth. Zenobia flew soundlessly from my fingertips.
“Bye-bye!” the three of us shouted as she soared into the bright, beckoning night. We waved furiously, maniacally, as if hoping to generate enough turbulence to pull her back to central Pennsylvania. “Bye-bye, Zenobia!”
“Bye-bye!” our baby called from out of the speckled darkness, and then she was gone.
The Earth turned—once, twice. Raspberries, apples, Christmas trees, asparagus, basset pups—each crop made its demands, and by staying busy we stayed sane.
One morning during the height of raspberry season I was supervising our roadside fruit stand and chatting with one of our regulars—Lucy Berens, Asa’s former third-grade teacher—when Polly rushed over. She looked crazed and pleased. Her eyes expanded like domes of bubble gum emerging from Asa’s mouth.
She told me she’d just tried printing out a Down to Earth, only the ImageWriter II had delivered something else entirely. “Here,” she said, shoving a piece of computer paper in my face, its edges embroidered with sprocket holes.
Dear Mom and Dad:
This is being transmitted via a superluminal wave generated by nonlocal quantum correlations. You won’t be able to write back.
I have finally found a proper place for myself, ten light-years from Garber Farm. In my winter, I can see your star. Your system is part of a constellation that looks to me like a Zebu. Z is for Zebu, remember? I am happy.
Big news. A year ago, various mammalian lines—tree shrews, mostly—emerged from those few feeble survivors of the Fourth of July catastrophe. And then, last month, I acquired—are you ready?—people. That’s right, people. Human beings, sentient primates, creatures entirely like yourselves. God, but they’re clever: cars, deodorants, polyvinyl chlorides, all of it. I like them. They’re brighter than the dinosaurs, and they have a certain spirituality. In short, they’re almost worthy of being what they are: your grandchildren.
Every day, my people look out across the heavens, and their collective gaze comes to rest on Earth. Thanks to Asa, I can explain to them what they’re seeing, all the folly and waste, the way your whole planet’s becoming a cesspool. So tell my brother he has saved my life. And tell him to study hard—he’ll be a great scientist when he grows up.
Mom and Dad, I think of you every day. I hope you’re doing well, and that Garber Farm is prospering. Give Asa a kiss for me.
All my love,
Zenobia
“A letter from our daughter,” I explained to Lucy Berens.
“Didn’t know you had one,” said Lucy, snatching up an aluminum pail so she could go pick a quart of raspberries.
“She’s far away,” said Polly.
“She’s happy,” I said.
That night, we went into Asa’s room while he was practicing on his trap set, thumping along with the Apostolic Succession. He shut off the CD, put down his drumsticks, and read Zenobia’s letter—slowly, solemnly. He yawned and slipped the letter into his math book. He told us he was going to bed. Fourteen: a moody age.
; “You saved her life?” I said. “What does she mean?”
“You don’t get it?”
“Uh-uh.”
Our son drummed a paradiddle on his math book. “Remember what Dr. Logos said about those coal miners? Remember when he told us Zenobia was like a canary? Well, obviously he got it backwards. My sister’s not the canary—we are. Earth is.”
“Huh?” said Polly.
“We’re Zenobia’s canary,” said Asa.
We kissed our son, left his room, closed the door. The hallway was papered over with his treasures—with miss piggy for president posters, rock star portraits, and lobby cards from the various environmental apocalypses he’d been renting regularly from Jake’s Video: Silent Running, Soylent Green, Frogs…
“We’re Zenobia’s canary,” said Polly.
“Is it too late for us, then?” I asked.
My wife didn’t answer.
You’ve heard the rest. How Dr. Borealis knew somebody who knew somebody, and suddenly we were seeing Senator Caracalla on C-Span, reading the last twelve issues of Down to Earth, the whole story of Zenobia’s year among us, into the Congressional Record.
Remember what President Tait told the newspapers the day he signed the Caracalla Conservation Act into law? “Sometimes all you need is a pertinent parable,” he said. “Sometimes all you need is the right metaphor,” our chief executive informed us.
The Earth is not our mother.
Quite the opposite.
That particular night, however, standing outside Asa’s room, Polly and I weren’t thinking about metaphors. We were thinking about how much we wanted Zenobia back. We’re pretty good parents, Polly and I. Look at our kids.
We winked at each other, tiptoed down the hall, and climbed into bed. Our bodies pressed together, and we laughed out loud. I’ve always loved my wife’s smell; she’s like some big floppy mushroom you came across in the woods when you were six years old, all sweet and damp and forbidden. We kept on pressing, and it kept feeling better and better. We were hoping for another girl.
Known But to God and Wilbur Hines
MY KEEPER faces east, his gaze lifting above the treetops and traveling across the national necropolis clear to the glassy Potomac. His bayonet rises into the morning sky, as if to skewer the sun. In his mind he ticks off the seconds, one for each shell in a twenty-one-gun salute.
Being dead has its advantages. True, my pickled flesh is locked away inside this cold marble box, but my senses float free, as if they were orbiting satellites beaming back snippets of the world. I see the city, dense with black citizens and white marble. I smell the Virginia air, the ripe grass, the river’s scum. I hear my keeper’s boots as he pivots south, the echo of his heels coming together: two clicks, always two, like a telegrapher transmitting an eternal I.
My keeper pretends not to notice the crowd—the fifth graders, Rotarians, garden clubbers, random tourists. Occasionally he catches a cub scout’s bright yellow bandanna or a punker’s pink mohawk. “Known but to God,” it says on my tomb. Not true, for I’m known to myself as well. I understand Wilbur Simpson Hines perfectly.
Thock, thock, thock goes my keeper’s Springfield as he transfers it from his left shoulder to his right. He pauses, twenty-one seconds again, then marches south twenty-one paces down the narrow black path, protecting me from the Bethesda Golden Age Society and the Glen Echo Lions Club.
I joined the army to learn how to kill my father. An irony: the only time the old man ever showed a glimmer of satisfaction with me occurred when I announced I was dropping out of college and enlisting. He thought I wanted to make the world safe for democracy, when in fact I wanted to make it safe from him. I intended to sign up under a false name. Become competent with a rifle. Then one night, while my father slept, I would sneak away from basic training, press the muzzle to his head—Harry Hines the hot-blooded Pennsylvania farmer, laying into me with his divining rod till my back was freckled with slivers of hazelwood—and blow him straight to Satan’s backyard. You see how irrational I was in those days? The tomb has smoothed me out. There’s no treatment like this box, no therapy like death.
Click, click, my keeper faces east. He pauses for twenty-one seconds, watching the morning mist hovering above the river.
“I want to be a doughboy,” I told them at the Boalsburg Recruiting Station. They parceled me. Name: Bill Johnson. Address: Bellefonte YMCA. Complexion: fair. Eye color: blue. Hair: red.
“Get on the scales,” they said.
They measured me, and for a few dicey minutes I feared that, being short and scrawny—my father always detested the fact that I wasn’t a gorilla like him—I’d flunk out, but the sergeant just winked at me and said, “Stand on our toes, Bill.”
I did, stretching to the minimum height.
“You probably skipped breakfast this morning, right?” said the sergeant. Another wink. “Breakfast is good for a few pounds.”
“Yes, sir.”
My keeper turns: click, click, left face. Thock, thock, thock, he transfers his rifle from his right shoulder to his left. He pauses for twenty-one seconds then marches north down the black path. Click, click, he spins toward the Potomac and waits.
It’s hard to say exactly why my plans changed. At Camp Sinclair they put me in a crisp khaki uniform and gave me a mess kit, a canteen, and a Remington rifle, and suddenly there I was, Private Bill Johnson of the American Expeditionary Forces, D Company, Eighteenth U.S. Infantry, First Division. And, of course, everybody was saying what a great time we were going to have driving the Heinies into the Baltic and seeing gay Paree. The Yanks were coming, and I wanted to be one of them—Bill Johnson née Wilbur Hines wasn’t about to risk an AWOL conviction and a tour in the brig while his friends were off visiting la belle France and its French belles. After my discharge, there’d be plenty of time to show Harry Hines what his son had learned in the army.
They’re changing the guard. For the next half hour, an African-American PFC will protect me. We used to call them coloreds, of course. Niggers, to tell you the truth. Today this particular African-American has a fancy job patrolling my tomb, but when they laid me here in 1921 his people weren’t even allowed in the regular divisions. The 365th, that was the nigger regiment, and when they finally reached France, you know what Pershing had them do? Dig trenches, unload ships, and bury white doughboys.
But my division—we’d get a crack at glory, oh, yes. They shipped us over on the British tub Magnolia and dropped us down near the front line a mile west of a jerkwater Frog village, General Robert Bullard in charge. I’m not sure what I expected from France. My buddy Alvin Platt said they’d fill our canteens with red wine every morning. They didn’t. Somehow I thought I’d be in the war without actually fighting the war, but suddenly there we were, sharing a four-foot trench with a million cooties and dodging Mieniewaffers like some idiots you’d see in a newsreel at the Ziegfeld with a Fairbanks picture and a Chaplin two-reeler, everybody listening for the dreaded cry “Gas attack!” and waiting for the order to move forward. By April of 1918 we’d all seen enough victims of Boche mustard—coughing up blood, shitting their gizzards out, weeping from blind eyes—that we clung to our gas masks like little boys hugging their teddies.
My keeper marches south, his bayonet cutting a straight incision in the summer air. I wonder if he’s ever used it. Probably not. I used mine plenty in ’18. “If a Heinie comes toward you with his hands up yelling ‘Kamerad,’ don’t be fooled,” Sergeant Fiskejohn told us back at Camp Sinclair. “He’s sure as hell got a potato masher in one of those hands. Go at him from below, and you’ll stop him easy. A long thrust in the belly, then a short one, then a butt stroke to the chin if he’s still on his feet, which he won’t be.”
On May 28 the order came through, and we climbed out of the trenches and fought what’s now called the Battle of Cantigny, but it wasn’t really a battle, it was a grinding push into the German salient with hundreds of men on both sides getting hacked to bits like we were a bunch of st
eer haunches hanging in our barns back home. Evidently the Boche caught more than we did, because after forty-five minutes that town was ours, and we waltzed down the gunky streets singing our favorite ditty.
The mademoiselle from gay Paree, parlez-vous?
The mademoiselle from gay Paree, parlez-vous?
The mademoiselle from gay Paree,
She had the clap and she gave it to me,
Hinky Dinky, parlez-vous?
I’ll never forget the first time I drew a bead on a Heinie, a sergeant with a handlebar mustache flaring from his upper lip like antlers. I aimed, I squeezed, I killed him, just like that: now he’s up, now he’s down—a man I didn’t even know. I thought how easy it was going to be shooting Harry Hines, a man I hated.
For the next three days the Boche counterattacked, and then I did learn to hate them. Whenever somebody lost an arm or a leg to a potato masher, he’d cry for his mother, in English mostly but sometimes in Spanish and sometimes Yiddish, and you can’t see that happen more than once without wanting to kill every Heinie in Europe, right up to the Kaiser himself. I did as Fiskejohn said. A boy would stumble toward me with his hands up—“Kamerad! Kamerad!”—and I’d go for his belly. There’s something about having a Remington in your grasp with that lovely slice of steel jutting from the bore. I’d open the fellow up left to right, like I was underlining a passage in the sharpshooter’s manual, and he’d spill out like soup. It was interesting and legal. Once I saw a sardine. On the whole, though, Fiskejohn was wrong. The dozen boys I ripped weren’t holding potato mashers or anything else.
I switched tactics. I took prisoners. “Kamerad!” Five at first. “Kamerad!” Six. “Kamerad!” Seven. Except that seventh boy in fact had a masher, which he promptly lobbed into my chest.
Lucky for me, it bounced back.
The Heinie caught enough of the kick to get his face torn off, whereas I caught only enough to earn myself a bed in the field hospital. For a minute I didn’t know I was wounded. I just looked at that boy who had no nose, no lower jaw, and wondered whether perhaps I should use a grenade on Harry Hines.
