by James Morrow
So hard-edged, the future, Abe thought, levering himself out of the taxi and unflexing his long, cramped limbs. Boston had become a thing of brick and rock, tar and glass, iron and steel. “Wait here,” he told the driver.
He entered the public gardens. A truly lovely spot, he decided, sauntering past a slave team planting flower beds—impetuous tulips, swirling gladiolus, purse-lipped daffodils. Not far beyond, a white family cruised across a duck pond in a swan-shaped boat peddled by a scowling adolescent with skin like obsidian.
Leaving the park, Abe started down Boylston Street. A hundred yards away, a burly Irish overseer stood beneath a gargantuan structure called the John Hancock Tower and began raising the scaffold, thus sending aloft a dozen slaves equipped with window-washing fluid. Dear Lord, what a job—the facade must contain a million square yards of mirrored glass.
Hard-edged, ungiving—and yet the city brought Abe peace.
In recent months, he had started to grasp the true cause of the war. The issue, he realized, was not slavery. As with all things political, the issue was power. The southerners had seceded because they despaired of ever seizing the helm of state; as long as its fate was linked to a grimy, uncouth, industrialized North, Dixie could never fully flower. By endeavoring to expand slavery into the territories, those southerners who hated the institution and those who loved it were speaking with a single tongue, saying, “The Republic’s true destiny is manifest: an agrarian Utopia, now and forever.”
But here was Boston, full of slaves and steeped in progress. Clearly the Seward Treaty would not prove the recipe for feudalism and inertia Abe’s advisors feared. Crude, yes; morally ambiguous, true; and yet slavery wasn’t dragging the Republic into the past, wasn’t retarding its bid for modernity and might.
“Sign the treaty,” an inner voice instructed Abe. “End the war.”
Sunday was the Fourth of July, which meant the annual backyard picnic with the Burnsides, boring Ralph and boorish Helen, a tedious afternoon of horseshoe tossing, conspicuous drinking, and stupefying poolside chat, the whole ordeal relieved only by Libby’s barbecued spare ribs. Libby was one of those wonderful yard-sale items Marge had such a knack for finding, a healthy, well-mannered female who turned out to be a splendid cook, easily worth ten times her sticker price.
The Burnsides were an hour late—their rickshaw puller, Zippy, had broken his foot the day before, and so they were forced to use Bubbles, their unathletic gardener—a whole glorious hour of not hearing Ralph’s thoughts on the Boston sports scene. When the Burnsides finally did show, the first thing out of Ralph’s mouth was, “Is it a law the Sox can’t own a decent pitcher? I mean, did they actually pass a law?” and Walter steeled himself. Luckily, Libby used a loose hand with the bourbon, and by three o’clock Walter was so anesthetized by mint juleps he could have floated happily through an amputation, not to mention Ralph’s vapid views on the Sox, Celtics, Bruins, and Patriots.
With the sixth drink, his numbness segued into a kind of contented courage, and he took unflinching stock of himself. Yes, his wife had probably bedded down with a couple of her teachers from the Wellesley Adult Education Center—that superfluously muscled pottery instructor, most likely, though the drama coach also seemed to have a roving dick—but it wasn’t as if Walter didn’t occasionally use his orthodontic chair as a motel bed, wasn’t as if he didn’t frolic with Katie Mulligan every Wednesday afternoon at the West Newton Hot Tubs. And look at his splendid house, with its Jacuzzi, bowling alley, tennis court, and twenty-five-meter pool. Look at his thriving practice. His portfolio. Porsche. Silver rickshaw. Graceful daughter flopping through sterile turquoise waters (damn that Happy, always using too much chlorine). And look at his sturdy, handsome Marge, back-floating, her pregnancy rising from the deep end like a volcanic island. Walter was sure the kid was his. Eighty-five percent sure.
He’d achieved something in this life, by God.
At dusk, while Happy set off the fireworks, the talk got around to Blue Nile. “We had Jimmy tested last week,” Walter revealed, exhaling a small tornado of despair. “Positive.”
“Good Lord, and you let him stay in the house?” wailed Ralph, fingering the grip of his Luger Parabellum PO8. A cardboard rocket screeched into the sky and became a dozen crimson starbursts, their reflections cruising across the pool like phosphorescent fish. “You should’ve told us. He might infect Bubbles.”
“It’s a hard virus to contract,” Walter retorted. A buzz bomb whistled overhead, annihilating itself in a glittery blue-and-red mandala. “There must be an exchange of saliva or blood.”
“Still, I can’t believe you’re keeping him, with Marge pregnant and everything.”
Ten fiery spheres popped from a Roman candle and sailed into the night like clay pigeons. “Matter of fact, I’ve got an appointment with Grant on Monday.”
“You know, Walter, if Jimmy were mine, I’d allow him a little dignity. I wouldn’t take him to a lousy clinic.”
The pièce de résistance blossomed over the yard—Abe Lincoln’s portrait in sparks. “What would you do?”
“You know perfectly well what I’d do.”
Walter grimaced. Dignity. Ralph was right, by damn. Jimmy had served the family with devotion and zest. They owed him an honorable exit.
The President chomped into a Big Mac, reveling in the soggy sauces and sultry juices as they bathed his tongue and rolled down his gullet. Were he not permanently lodged elsewhere—rail splitter, country lawyer, the whole captivating myth—he might well have opted to settle down here in 2010. Big Macs were a quality commodity. The entire menu, in fact, the large fries, vanilla shakes, Diet Cokes, and Chicken McNuggets, seemed to Abe a major improvement over nineteenth-century cuisine. And such a soothing environment, its every surface clean and sleek, as if carved from opaque ice.
An enormous clown named Ronald decorated the picture window. Outside, across the street, an elegant sign—Old English characters on whitewashed wood—heralded the Chestnut Hill Country Club. On the grassy slopes beyond, smooth and green like a billiards table, a curious event unfolded, men and women whacking balls into the air with sticks. When not employed, the sticks resided in cylindrical bags slung over the shoulders of sturdy male slaves.
“Excuse me, madam,” Abe addressed the chubby woman in the next booth. “What are those people doing? Is it religious?”
“That’s quite a convincing Lincoln you’ve got on.” Hunched over a newspaper, the woman wielded a writing implement, using it to fill tiny squares with alphabet letters. “Are you serious? They’re golfing.”
“A game?”
“Uh-huh.” The woman started on her second Quarter Pounder. “The game of golf.”
“It’s like croquet, isn’t it?”
“No. Golf.”
Dipping and swelling like a verdant sea, the golf Held put Abe in mind of Virginia’s hilly provinces. Virginia, Lee’s stronghold. A soft moan left the sixteenth president. Having thrown Hooker and Sedgwick back across the Rappahannock, Lee was ideally positioned to bring the war to the Union, either by attacking Washington directly or, more likely, by forming separate corps under Longstreet, Hill, and Ewell and invading Pennsylvania. Overrunning the border towns, he could probably cut the flow of reinforcements to Vicksburg while simultaneously equipping the Army of Northern Virginia for a push on the capital.
It was all too nightmarish to contemplate.
Sighing heavily, Abe took the Seward Treaty from his vest and asked to borrow his neighbor’s pen.
Monday was a holiday. Right after breakfast, Walter changed into his golfing togs, hunted down his clubs, and told Jimmy they’d be spending the day on the links. He ended up playing the entire course, partly to improve his game, partly to postpone the inevitable.
His best shot of the day—a 350-yard blast with his one-iron—carried straight down the eighteenth fairway and ran right up on the green. Sink the putt, and he’d finish the day one under par.
Sweating in the relent
less fifth-of-July sun, Jimmy pulled out the putter. Such a fine fellow, with his trim body and huge eager eyes, zags of silver shooting through his steel-wool hair like the aftermath of an electrocution, his black biceps and white polo shirt meeting like adjacent squares on a chessboard. He would be sorely missed.
“No, Jimmy, we won’t be needing that. Just pass the bag over here. Thanks.”
As Walter retrieved his .22 caliber army rifle from among the clubs, Jimmy’s face hardened with bewilderment.
“May I ask why you require a firearm?” said the slave.
“You may.”
“Why?”
“I’m going to shoot you.”
“Huh?”
“Shoot you.”
“What?”
“Results came Thursday, Jimmy. You have Blue Nile. Sorry. I’d love to keep you around, but it’s too dangerous, what with Marge’s pregnancy and everything.”
“Blue Nile?”
“Sorry.”
Jimmy’s teeth came together in a tight, dense grid. “In the name of reason, sell me. Surely that’s a viable option.”
“Let’s be realistic. Nobody’s going to take in a Nile-positive just to watch him wilt and die.”
“Very well—then turn me loose.” Sweat spouted from the slave’s ebony face. “I’ll pursue my remaining years on the road. I’ll—”
“Loose? I can’t go around undermining the economy like that, Jim. I’m sure you understand.”
“There’s something I’ve always wanted to tell you, Mr. Sherman.”
“I’m listening.”
“I believe you are the biggest asshole in the whole Commonwealth of Massachusetts.”
“No need for that kind of talk, fellow. Just sit down on the green, and you’ll—”
“No.”
“Let’s not make this difficult. Sit down, and you’ll get a swift shot in the head—no pain, a dignified death. Run away, and you’ll take it in the back. It’s your choice.”
“Of course I’m going to run, you degenerate moron.”
“Sit!”
“No.”
“Sit!”
Spinning around, Jimmy sprinted toward the rough. Walter jammed the stock against his shoulder and, like a biologist focusing his microscope on a protozoan, found the retreating chattel in his high-powered optical sight.
“Stop!”
Jimmy reached the western edge of the fairway just as Walter fired, a clean shot right through the slave’s left calf. With a wolfish howl, he pitched forward and, to Walter’s surprise, rose almost instantly, clutching a rusty, discarded nine-iron that he evidently hoped to use as a crutch. But the slave got no farther. As he stood fully erect, his high, wrinkled forehead neatly entered the gunsight, the crosshairs branding him with an X, and Walter had but to squeeze the trigger again.
Impacting, the bullet dug out a substantial portion of cranium—a glutinous divot of skin, bone, and cerebrum shooting away from Jimmy’s temple like a missile launched from a brown planet. He spun around twice and fell into the rough, landing behind a clump of rosebushes spangled with white blossoms. So: an honorable exit after all.
Tears bubbled out of Walter as if from a medicine dropper. Oh, Jimmy, Jimmy…and the worst was yet to come, wasn’t it? Of course, he wouldn’t tell Tanya the facts. “Jimmy was in pain,” he’d say. “Unbearable agony. The doctors put him to sleep. He’s in slave heaven now.” And they’d give him a classy send-off, oh, yes, with flowers and a moment of silence. Maybe Pastor McClellan would be willing to preside.
Walter staggered toward the rough. To do a funeral, you needed a body. Doubtless the morticians could patch up his head, mold a gentle smile, bend his arms across his chest in a posture implying serenity…
A tall, bearded man in an Abe Lincoln suit appeared on the eighteenth fairway, coming Walter’s way. An eccentric, probably. Maybe a full-blown nut. Walter locked his gaze on the roses and marched straight ahead.
“I saw what you did,” said the stranger, voice edged with indignation.
“Fellow had Blue Nile,” Walter explained. The sun beat against his face like a hortator pounding a drum on a Roman galley. “It was an act of mercy. Hey, Abe, the Fourth of July was yesterday. Why the getup?”
“Yesterday is never too late,” said the stranger cryptically, pulling a yellowed sheaf from his vest. “Never too late,” he repeated as, swathed in the hot, buttery light, he neatly ripped the document in half.
For Walter Sherman, pummeled by the heat, grieving for his lost slave, wearied by the imperatives of mercy, the world now became a swamp, an all-enveloping mire blurring the stranger’s methodical progress toward McDonald’s. An odd evening was coming, Walter sensed, with odder days to follow, days in which the earth’s stable things would be wrenched from their moorings and torn from their foundations. Here and now, standing on the crisp border between the fairway and the putting green, Walter apprehended this tumultuous future.
He felt it even more emphatically as, eyes swirling, heart shivering, brain drifting in a sea of insane light, he staggered toward the roses.
And he knew it with a knife-sharp certainty as, searching through the rough, he found not Jimmy’s corpse but the warm hulk of a humanoid machine, prostrate in the dusk, afloat in the slick oily fluid leaking from its broken brow.
The Confessions of Ebenezer Scrooge
Charity is the grin of slavery.
—John Calvin Batchelor
IT WAS SHAPING UP to be another of those confounded metaphysical Christmases, or so I surmised from the diaphanous form standing in the doorway to my bedchamber.
“Begone!” I instructed my former partner’s shade.
“Fish a herring, Ebenezer,” replied Marley’s spectral self.
“You’re but the product of my wayward stomach,” I said accusingly. “You’re a dream made of rancid cheese. A figment born of rotten figs.”
“No more now than when last we met.” The Spirit lumbered toward my bed, dragging his preposterous chain behind him, the concomitant ledgers, cash boxes, keys, and padlocks clanking along the floor as if to herald the incipient New Year.
Fear grew within me like hoarfrost on a windowpane. I’d never get used to these ambulatory corpses. “Am I not rehabilitated, Jacob?” I pleaded. “Don’t I support every worthy cause in Christendom?” My goosebumps were as big as warts. “You should see the turkey Cratchit’s getting this year. A walrus with wings. Why are you here?”
Remaining mute, Marley extended his arms and moved them spastically, like a clockwork maestro conducting an orchestra.
“Speak to me, Jacob!”
Although I’d latched the casement, a sharp wind spiraled toward me like the Devil’s own sneeze. Caught in the updraft, my candlesticks took to the air like twigs. The mirror above my dresser jerked free of its nail and, striking the floor, became a million glassy daggers. My bed pitched and rolled as if riding the lip of a maelstrom, its canopy snapping and fluttering, and suddenly I was off the mattress, hurtling across the room on a collision course with the door.
“From now on,” I heard Marley say before the jamb blew out my lights, “turkeys won’t turn the trick.”
I awoke—of all things—upright. My knees trembled, my legs shimmied, yet I stood erect. A moor spread before me, bathed in icy yellow moonlight and dotted with patches of fog. Twenty yards away, the mist congealed into a seamless mass that slithered across the ground, rolled over a stone wall, and lapped against a mountainous mansion like surf caressing a rocky shore.
“They’re expecting you,” said Marley, materializing atop the porch.
Crooked cupolas, tilted shutters, shattered windows: but the house’s queerest aspect was the grim perversion of Yuletide its owners kept. On the front lawn the skeletons of eight reindeer, their bones threaded with baling wire, pulled a sleigh jammed with ashes, coal, and decaying cornhusk dolls. Through the parlor window I glimpsed a pine tree, its needles lifeless as shorn whiskers, its branches hung with stubby candle
s and moldy spheres of popcorn.
Knee-deep in fog, I approached the porch. Marley yanked back the door and, seizing my frigid hands, guided me down a candlelit hallway to a voluptuously baroque dining room. The curtains were heavy, luminous, and fiery red, like molten earth spilling from a volcano. The rug boasted the thick emerald splendor of a peat-moss roof. In one corner, a grandfather clock, bug-infested as a rotten log, tolled the midnight hour with hoarse, tubercular bongs. Opposite, a fire seethed on a cavernous hearth, the tips of the flames narrowing into alphabet characters that spelled out an evanescent NOEL.
Laden with food—meats, breads, legumes, wines, desserts—the linen-swathed banquet table hosted a half-dozen of the most outré creatures I’d ever beheld. Living cadavers they seemed, deathly pale, their eyes dark as cliffside rookeries, their clothing tattered like manuscripts at the mercy of book lice. Around his neck, each guest wore a small marble gravestone suspended on a rusty chain.
“Three years ago we operated wholly in the indicative mood—Christmas Past, Christmas Present, Christmas Future,” Marley explained. “But reality is more complicated than that, don’t you agree, Ebenezer?”
“If I were you, I’d attend carefully to what I’m about to hear,” the Ghost of Christmas Subjunctive—so ran the inscription on his stone—asserted as he jabbed his fork into a ruddy potato and lifted the prize to his mouth. He was dressed foppishly, all velvet ribbons and lace filigree, an immaculate white handkerchief emerging from his waistcoat pocket like a puff of smoke.
The Ghost of Christmas Present Perfect sipped her claret and said, “We have traveled a long, hard road to bring you our message.” For the price of her black silk dress, Cratchit could have paid off all his medical bills. An aristocrat, surely, as flawless in face and carriage as her epithet implied.
The Ghost of Christmas Future Perfect was likewise female, likewise comely, but I could not for the life of me identify the silvery material enveloping her topographically varied form. “Before the evening is out,” she said, sweeping her gloved hand across the steaming heaps of plenitude, “your worldview will have undergone yet another revolution.”
