by James Morrow
Quel banquet! Not one stuffed goose but two, big as albatrosses, their plucked flesh turned brown with immolation. A roast suckling pig, its mouth plugged with an apple. A mound of aspic molded to resemble an angel. A knoll of spaghetti piled up like the brain of some preternatural whale.
“Observe this cloth,” demanded the Ghost of Christmas Imperative, pulling the handkerchief from the pocket of Christmas Subjunctive. When alive, Christmas Imperative had evidently been a military man, an officer. Epaulettes clung to his greatcoat like gold jellyfish. A leather belt bearing scabbard and sword constrained his overfed belly. “Note the robust threads,” he said, presenting me with the kerchief. “Tell me what material it is.”
“Cotton?” I hazarded.
“Quite so. Finest flower of the Mississippi Delta. Now name the price.”
“I have no idea. I run a counting house, not a textile factory.”
“This afternoon you could buy a bale off the Bristol docks for six pounds,” said the Ghost of Christmas Conditional. She’d made no effort to camouflage her profession. Rouged cheeks, hair dyed a lurid crimson, low-cut dress displaying cleavage like a furrow in a wheat field. “If persistent, you could dicker them down to five.”
“But permit us to tell you the real price,” said Christmas Imperative, stroking the tanned flanks of the nearer goose.
The Ghost of Christmas Past Perfect—and a thing of the perfect past he was, his body swathed in a toga, his head ringed by a laurel crown—clapped his hands, whereupon the recently fondled goose split open and, like a bitch birthing some absurdly proliferous litter, spewed out a score of dark homunculi, each no higher than a pepper shaker. Dressed only in ragged trousers, the little men exuded pinpoints of perspiration as they trekked across the linen toward a porcelain bowl brimming with sugar cubes.
“To wit, the real price of cotton is the blood and misery of a million Negro slaves,” said Marley as he seized a strand of spaghetti and handed it to Christmas Imperative.
“How grotesque!” I gasped.
“We had hoped to avoid frightening you,” said Christmas Past Perfect, adjusting his crown.
In the fireplace, the flames spelled out THE REAL PRICE.
“Lift those bales!” With a merciless flick of the wrist, Christmas Imperative laid the spaghetti across the Negroes’ shoulders. Their flesh jumped spasmodically beneath the blow, their lungs unleashed steam-whistle shrieks. “Hurry! Now!” Like ants trapped in some insectile hell, the slaves hefted sugar cubes onto their backs and, staggering beneath the crystalline burdens, started toward the tea pot.
“Nor does the price of cotton end here,” said Marley.
As the slaves dumped their loads into the tea, a haggard child with dull eyes and tangled hair wandered into the room gripping a hank of cotton yarn. He was as transparent as water, insubstantial as grass. Face locked in a wince, he extended his free hand and plucked the apple from the roast pig’s jaw.
“See who must spin and wind the yarn,” Christmas Imperative continued, gripping the handle of his sword. “Spin and wind, spin and wind—fifteen hours a day, six days a week, fifty-two weeks a year!”
Frantically the boy began twisting the yarn around the apple as if it were a bobbin.
“By his thirteenth birthday, he will have spent three-fourths of his waking hours within the walls of a brutish, stinking mill,” asserted Christmas Future Perfect, rubbing a gloved hand against her metallic sleeve.
“He had hoped to save enough money to buy his mother a locket for her fortieth birthday,” noted Christmas Past Perfect.
“She died first,” said Marley.
The yarn was lacerating the boy’s hands now. Gouts of blood dribbled from his mangled flesh.
“What do you require of me?” I asked, tears of remorse flooding my eyes. “Shall I send the boy a thousand pounds? Fine! Reward any overseer who spares the lash? Done! Believe me, Spirits, I’m the very soul of Christmas. I’ll give every slave a turkey.”
“Philanthropy is a marvelous impulse,” said Marley, slicing off a serving of pork.
“This time out, however, we would prefer to teach you a different truth.” Christmas Conditional lifted a silver flask to her painted lips and gulped down half the contents.
Like a snowman standing before a furnace, the boy and his yarn vaporized, leaving the apple to hover in the air. Now it moved, flying across the room and entering the pig’s mouth like a musket ball burrowing into a rampart.
Marley swallowed a succulent chunk of pork. “You see, Ebenezer, charity begs a crucial question. How did the bestower attain the position from which he now exercises his largesse?” My dead colleague cleaned his teeth with one of his many appended keys. “Through imagination and merit? Or through inherited privilege and ruthless exploitation?” With a quick, foxlike grin, he opened a cash box and drew out a pamphlet labeled, “Manifest der Kommunisten der Frederich Engels und Karl Marx,” handing it to Christmas Present Perfect. “The first copy rolled off the presses last night in Brussels.”
“By noon tomorrow, they will have printed ten thousand,” noted Christmas Future Perfect.
“Given the capital, they would happily print ten thousand more,” Christmas Conditional elaborated, swilling gin.
“Get to work!” screeched Christmas Imperative, scourging the slaves and sending them pell-mell back to the sugar bowl.
“A new idea has entered the world.” Christmas Present Perfect removed a fan from her bosom and, spreading it open, evaporated the sweat from her upper lip. “It has christened itself not philanthropy but justice.” She turned back the cover of the pamphlet and placed her red fingernail atop the first sentence. “A spectre is haunting Europe,” she read, “the spectre of Communism.”
The flames spelled out COMMUNISM.
Marley ate pork. “To wit, heaven will never come to earth simply because slave holders exhibit flashes of mercy or children get grants from anonymous benefactors. Certain evils dwell in society’s bedrock, and must be blasted out. You can’t throw turkeys at every problem.”
“Of course,” I said. “Naturally. I understand. Give me Herr Engels’s address, and I shall send him sufficient funds to buy his own printing press.”
Marley unlocked another cash box, procuring a copy of my favorite story—my own true biography, A Christmas Carol.
“Were I to affix an alternative title,” said Christmas Subjunctive, “I’d call it A Christmas Swindle.” He pulled out his snuff box and, like an artilleryman loading a cannon, rammed a pinch of sot-weed into his left nostril. “Thanks to this trickster Dickens, millions now regard greed as but the personality defect of a few isolated skinflints like yourself, when in fact it’s inherent in the system.”
The flames spelled out THE SYSTEM.
Marley lurched away from the volume, as if it were exuding a disagreeable odor. “To wit, the thing’s a pile of horse manure.”
I blanched, my face becoming as bloodless as my partner’s. “Such vulgarity, Jacob. Please…”
“Do you truly believe the spiritually deformed can be made to acknowledge their sins?” demanded Marley, filling his cup with freshly sugared tea. “Do you think Nero ever knew a single moment of remorse? Did the Borgias beg heaven for forgiveness? Did Bonaparte repent on his deathbed?”
“I don’t know about Nero. I only know that, three years ago, you and the Spirits suffused my shadowed existence with the light of generosity.”
“Yes, and if we had it to do over again…” Christmas Subjunctive took a second pinch of snuff. “Ah, but we do have it to do over again, don’t we?”
“Ebenezer, you must destroy the myth of the redeemable master,” said Marley. “Of all humankind’s numerous delusions, none is a greater impediment to utopia. Three years ago you mended your ways—and now you must unmend them.”
“I wish you people would make up your minds,” I said, my voice jagged with irritation.
“Eat!” said Christmas Imperative.
In consequence of m
y backsliding, Marley and his ectoplasmic crowd are at peace now, and so am I. Indeed, as I lie tonight beneath my silken sheets, making ready to join the Spirits on the sunless side of the grave, I realize I’ve never felt better. I’m my old self again, my true self, contented and fulfilled.
Three days after the Spirits came, I revoked my contributions to the Asylum Fund, the Orphan Drive, and Saint Christopher’s Hospital for Indigents and Debtors. Epiphany found me lowering Cratchit’s salary to its 1843 level and reducing his coal quota to one lump per day. The following week I contrived for my nephew’s wife to learn of his various trysts. Of the whole wretched lot, only the runt prospered. Somehow he conquered his infirmities, trading crutch for rifle. His twenty years’ service to Queen and Country climaxed in the Transvaal when, on his forty-fourth birthday, a Zulu spear entered his left eye and punctured his brain clear to the back of the skull.
Marley, in his foresight, anticipated the fruits of my relapse. He knew I’d become exactly what the reformers, uplifters, and socialists needed. A symbol. A rallying point. Scrooge the system. Thanks to the Spirits and me, a new world is coming, I’m sure of it.
God bless us, every one.
Bible Stories for Adults, No. 46: The Soap Opera
THE CURTAIN rises on a vast pile of excrement and refuse. As dung heaps go, this one is actually rather appealing, a hypnotic conglomeration of ash, trash, discarded toys, castoff utensils, eggshells, orange rinds, coffee grounds, fossil feces, and fifty-five-gallon drums, not to mention the refrigerator, washing machine, toilet bowl, food processor, and VCR, plus the two TV sets and the large Whirlpool clothes dryer. Our initial impression is of a huge mound of aspic in which some demented chef has suspended characteristic chunks of the twentieth century.
Two wooden poles bracket the dung heap, a high-tension line slung between them. In the middle of one pole sits a jury-rigged transformer, furtively siphoning electricity from the cable and feeding it to a long strip-plug swaying above the trash like a pendulum. About half the machines are connected to the plug, including the forty-inch Zenith TV, stage left, and the thirty-inch Sony TV, stage right.
Enter our hero, Job Barnes: ageless, beardless, spry. He wears an Italian silk suit that cost more than the present production. Like a masochistic mountain climber, he slowly ascends the eastern slope of the heap. Reaching the summit, he brushes bits of garbage from his coat and trousers and speaks directly to the audience.
JOB. Ahhhh, the old neighborhood—there’s never been a dung heap like it. Do you see the holiness rising from these eggshells? Good. Can you sense the sacredness of these orange rinds? Grasp the godhead in these coffee grounds? Wonderful. I spent the most intense moments of my life in this place, railing against the cosmos, demanding to know the reason for my suffering. (Indicates clothes dryer and TV sets) Some things have changed, of course. Twenty-four centuries ago, we didn’t have major appliances. We didn’t have cable.
He starts down the western face of the heap.
JOB. Permit me a bit of vanity, will you? When my book made the rounds in New York, nine major publishers bid on it. The Job Barnes Story: How I Suffered, Suppurated, and Survived. My agent and I decided to go with St. Martin’s Press. The name had a certain spiritual ring, plus they coughed up three million dollars. (Wanders toward the Zenith TV) Random House offered as much, but I’d had quite enough randomness in my life by then. (Taps on the TV) My agent betrayed me. She comes to me and she says, “There’s a movie deal in the works,” then she turns around and sells the thing to television. One Man’s Misery, the world’s first soap opera set on the edge of the Arabian Desert in the fourth century B.C. Pure trash, but people are eating it up. Last season, we left Ryan’s Hope in the dust and nearly blew General Hospital off the air.
He slips a vest-pocket King James Bible from his suit and opens to the Book of Job.
JOB. You all know the concept. (Reads) “There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name was Job—and that man was blameless and upright, and one that feared God, and eschewed evil. And there were born unto him seven sons and three daughters. His substance also was seven thousand sheep, and three thousand camels, and five hundred yoke of oxen, and five hundred she asses, and a very great household.” (Closes Bible) An old story, really. Man finds perfect life, man loses perfect life, man regains perfect life.
Unseen by Job, a tattered quilt rises from the western slope of the dung heap. Underneath we spy Franny Fenstermacher, a middle-aged female Pangloss, the sort of woman who’d note the protein value of the worm you just consumed with your apple. Bent with osteoporosis, wracked by emphysema, she wears grimy overalls, a soiled work shirt, a ratty apron, and a red kerchief tied around her head like a bandage. As she yawns and stretches, we get intimations of her vanished vibrancy and former beauty.
JOB. Yes, but is our hero truly content after that? Does he come home every day, admire his new camels, count his new oxen, soak in his hot tub, take his Mercedes out for a spin? (Plucks a yellowing newspaper from the dung heap) For the first millennium or so: yes, he does. But then, gradually, doubts overtake him. He wonders if he’s been exploited. He wonders if he should retract his repentance. He even wonders if he should ask God to…apologize. (Reads) “One hundred seventy die in Miami jetliner crash.” (Turns page) “Mudslide buries 95,000 in Lisbon.” (Turns page) “Dear Abby: My first grandchild was born with spina bifida…” (Turns to comics) “What’s that lump, Blondie?’ ‘I can no longer hide the truth, Dagwood. I’ve got breast cancer…’”
Still unnoticed by Job, Franny crawls up the slope on hands and knees. She gets to within a foot of the Sony TV, then collapses, dizzy and exhausted. Meanwhile, Job sets down the newspaper and lifts his eyes to heaven.
JOB. Listen, sir, I want the contest to continue. I’d like to see you once more—today, if you can make it. This is your servant Job speaking, and I’m asking, most humbly, for a rematch. (Protracted pause) Silence. Utter quiet. He’s been like that lately. So aloof, so distant, so…(Gags on the air) Pfffooo, the smell hasn’t changed, has it? A sea of hog vomit at low tide. (Recovers) Still, I’m glad I’m not home now. Every day at this time, the maids watch One Man’s Misery. The damn thing echoes all over the mansion. Here, at least, I’m safe…
Franny flicks on the Sony. An organ theme bursts forth, the sort of nervous chords heard in 1940s radio dramas, but the screen remains blank. Job is startled by the sound—and equally startled to see Franny crouching in front of the TV.
JOB. Jesus!
DOCTOR’S VOICE. (From the Sony) That’s right, Mrs. Barnes. Your baby has no brain. You could use his head for a piggy bank, were you so inclined…
MOTHER’S VOICE. (From the Sony) Are you certain, doctor?
DOCTOR’S VOICE. (From the Sony) That’s not God’s grace you see streaming from his little ear—it’s the light of this candle.
Music: organ bridge.
FRANNY. (Resignedly, as she lowers the volume) The Sony has sound but no picture. The Zenith has picture but no sound. Between them, they make a reasonable home entertainment center. (Gestures toward the Zenith) Would you mind?
JOB. I hate this show.
FRANNY. Please.
JOB. It feeds on pain.
FRANNY. (Coughing) Do a poor sick woman a favor.
Job flicks on the Zenith; mid-shot of Jemima, married daughter of the hero of One Man’s Misery, dressed in the fashion of the fourth century B.C. She sits at a loom, weaving. As Franny raises the volume on the Sony, one of Jemima’s handmaids, Lilia, rushes into the shot and throws herself on the floor.
JEMIMA. (On television) What is it, Lilia?
LILIA. (On television) Mistress, a tragedy has occurred.
JEMIMA. Speak its name.
LILIA. I fear to.
JEMIMA. Obey me.
LILIA. There was a camel stampede.
JEMIMA. And?
LILIA. And your firstborn son. He’s…dead.
Music: organ bridge.
NARRATOR. (Voice-over,
from the Sony) Will life get even more trying for Job and his family? Will Kezia emerge from her coma? Will the village surgeons give Keren-happuch the lower jaw she so fervently desires? Will our hero continue to trust God? Tune in tomorrow for the next inspiring episode of One Man’s Misery.
Job flicks off the Zenith. Franny flicks off the Sony.
FRANNY. Damn. Slept through most of it. I’d better get a clock radio.
JOB. Who the hell are you?
FRANNY. I live here. Franny Fenstermacher. (Assertive) This dung is all mine.
JOB. Squatter’s rights?
FRANNY. Exactly. (Friendly but cautious) I’d be happy to help you find your own heap, but this one’s taken.
JOB. (Pointing to cables) Are you responsible for all these wires and things?
FRANNY. (Proud) Uh-huh. Ever visit Fenstermacher’s House and Garden Supplies on Central Avenue? I own that too. (Sweeps hand across dung heap) I expect I’ll install some plumbing next. You know—get the toilet working, maybe put in a Jacuzzi. (Struggles to her feet, coughing) Assuming I don’t go blind first. The diabetes.
JOB. Oh, dear.
FRANNY. Not to mention the emphysema, the osteoporosis, the arthritis…
JOB. How horrible.
FRANNY. It’s terrible, but it’s not horrible. Horrible’s what happened to my husband.
JOB. (Gulps) Oh?
FRANNY. Lost everything when our local S & L went under. The day Bill got the news, you know what he did? Walked straight into a McCormick reaper.
JOB. Killed?
FRANNY. Shredded.
JOB. I’m sorry.
FRANNY. Like a CIA document. I can talk about it now, but I nearly went mad at the time.
JOB. Indeed.
FRANNY. Then there’s my son. You know what a Bradley-Chambers child is?
JOB. (Aside) I don’t want to hear about this.
FRANNY. A Bradley-Chambers child suffers from Bradley-Chambers syndrome. Cleft palate, too many fingers, kidneys pitted with lesions, defective heart. He lives in constant pain. My Bradley-Chambers child is named Andy.
