Bible Stories for Adults (15 page)

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 relentless 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 Mc Clellan 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.

Charity is the grin of slavery.

—John Calvin Batchelor

 

I
T 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 candles 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 halfdozen of the most
outre
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.”

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 in-sectile 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.