by James Morrow
Bible Stories
for Adults
* * *
Job’s back on the old dung heap, and he wants a rematch with God. A Series-700 computer successfully reconstructs the tablets with the Ten Commandments from a million indecipherable shards—only to have second thoughts. Sheila, the lascivious sinner fished from the Flood by the captain of the Ark, has an agenda all her own. A congregation of sexless androids believes Darwin’s theory of evolution applies to them and awaits the Great Genital Coming. And God justifies why he once beset mankind with an unusual plague. Why? Spare the rod, spoil the species. He says. (And He’s always right. That’s why He’s got the job.)
James Morrow unabashedly delves into matters both sacred and secular in this collection of stories buoyed by his deliciously irreverent wit. Among the dozen offerings is “Bible Stories for Adults, No. 17: The Deluge,” winner of a Nebula Award for Best Short Story. Humorous, cheerfully blasphemous, and ultimately poignant, these tales show Morrow at his divine best.
Also by James Morrow
Towing Jehovah
City of Truth
Nebula Awards 26, 27, and 28 (editor)
Only Begotten Daughter
This Is the Way the World Ends
The Continent of Lies
The Wine of Violence
Copyright © 1996, 1994, 1992, 1991, 1990, 1989, 1988, 1987, 1984 by James Morrow
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be mailed to:
Permissions Department, Harcourt Brace & Company,
6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Morrow, James, 1947-
Bible stories for adults/James Morrow.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-15-100192-8.—ISBN 0-15-600244-2 (pbk: A Harvest original)
1. Science fiction, American. 2. Satire, American. I. Title.
PS3563.0876B5 1996
813'.54—dc20 95-36805
Text set in Sabon
Designed by Judythe Sieck
Printed in the United States of America
First edition
A B C D E
Publication acknowledgments appear here,
which constitutes a continuation of the copyright page.
CONTENTS
Preface
Bible Stories for Adults, No. 17:
The Deluge
Daughter Earth
Known But to God and Wilbur Hines
Bible Stories for Adults, No. 20:
The Tower
Spelling God with the Wrong Blocks
The Assemblage of Kristin
Bible Stories for Adults, No. 31:
The Covenant
Abe Lincoln in McDonald’s
The Confessions of Ebenezer Scrooge
Bible Stories for Adults, No. 46:
The Soap Opera
Diary of a Mad Deity
Arms and the Woman
Publication Acknowledgments
About the Author
PREFACE
There are two kinds of people in the world, those who believe the Bible is an anthology and those who believe it is a collection. Do the Scriptures trace to many minds, or were they dictated by a single Author? As the year 2001 approaches, this controversy will grow increasingly acute. The Parousia may get postponed, Jesus may neglect to come, Judgment Day may decline to dawn, but the one thing we do know the turn of the millennium will bring is millennialism. It will bring prophecies, predictions, and plays for power by those for whom the Bible is the “Word of God.” People who prefer the anthology theory of Bible origins, meanwhile, may experience a strong impulse to head for the hills. Myself, I intend to roll up my sleeves, fire up my computer, and continue rewriting Holy Writ as subversively as I can.
Four of the stories in the present collection are overt critiques of famous Bible tales: a deconstruction of the Flood legend, a follow-up to the Tower of Babel fable, an alternative climax to Moses’ theophany on Sinai, and the further fulminations of Job. The Judeo-Christian worldview also informs “Daughter Earth,” with its unprecedented nativity; “Spelling God with the Wrong Blocks,” my attempt to stand so-called creation science on its head; and “Diary of a Mad Deity,” which purports to explain why Yahweh possesses the authoritarian personality he so frequently exhibits in the Torah.
Monotheism is just one of the myths by which we live, and Yahweh is just one of the deities who populate these stories. Powering the plot of “Known But to God and Wilbur Hines” is the dark god of nationalism. “The Confessions of Ebenezer Scrooge” exploits Dickens’s morality tale to ask whether charity alone can exorcise the demons that drive monopoly capitalism. “Arms and the Woman” considers the Iliad as a tract celebrating the cult of organized warfare.
Eschatological themes are not the only ones that fascinate me. “The Assemblage of Kristin” uses ghost-story conventions to address the mystery of consciousness; “Abe Lincoln in McDonald’s” considers the notion that middle-class America would have far less difficulty accommodating chattel slavery than is commonly supposed; motifs of procreation, parenting, feminism, and epistemology figure throughout these pages. Nevertheless, religion remains the obsession I am most often called upon to defend. Whenever one of my send-ups of the sacred appears in a magazine, I can expect a letter from a churchgoer informing me that I missed the point of whichever scriptural passages I was trying to flay. Meanwhile, my friends in the nouveau paganism camp accuse me of quaintness: Bible thumpers are straw men, so why bother? (In this view, my efforts amount to what P. J. O’Rourke calls “hunting dairy cows with a high-powered rifle and scope.”) My answer is that straw men, once set aflame with zeal, can be quite dangerous and that the gap between New Age irrationalism and Christian fundamentalism is not nearly so wide as we might wish to believe.
Much to my delight, Harcourt Brace has elected to release Bible Stories for Adults in tandem with a trade paperback reprint of my 1990 novel, Only Begotten Daughter, an inquiry into a neglected branch of Jesus’ family tree. Together, these two volumes can be taken as a science-fiction satirist’s responses to the Old Testament and the New Testament respectively. While the meanings of the present stories and Only Begotten Daughter may be ambiguous, their source—as far as I can tell—is not. To the best of my knowledge, all issue from the same bewildered pilgrim operating with a single befuddled brain.
James Morrow
State College, Pennsylvania
September 11, 1995
Bible Stories for Adults, No. 17: The Deluge
TAKE YOUR CUP down to the Caspian, dip, and drink. It did not always taste of salt. Yahweh’s watery slaughter may have purified the earth, but it left his seas a ruin, brackish with pagan blood and the tears of wicked orphans.
Sheila and her generation know the deluge is coming. Yahweh speaks to them through their sins. A thief cuts a purse, and the shekels clank together, pealing out a call to repentance. A priest kneels before a graven image of Dagon, and the statue opens its marble jaws, issuing not its own warnings but Yahweh’s. A harlot threads herself with a thorny vine, tearing out unwanted flesh, and a divine voice rises from the bleeding fetus. You are a corrupt race, Yahweh says, abominable in my sight. My rains will scrub you from the earth.
Yahweh is as good as his word. The storm breaks. Creeks become rivers, rivers cataracts. Lakes blossom into broiling, wrathful seas.
Yes, Sheila is thoroughly
foul in those days, her apple home to many worms, the scroll of her sins as long as the Araxas. She is gluttonous and unkempt. She sells her body. Her abortions number eleven. I should have made it twelve, she realizes on the day the deluge begins. But it is too late, she had already gone through with it—the labor more agonizing than any abortion, her breasts left pulpy and deformed—and soon the boy was seven, athletic, clever, fair of face, but today the swift feet are clamped in the cleft of an olive-tree root, the clever hands are still, the fair face lies buried in water.
A mother, Sheila has heard, should be a boat to her child, buoying him up during floods, bearing him through storms, and yet it is Sam who rescues her. She is hoisting his corpse aloft, hoping to drain the death from his lungs, when suddenly his little canoe floats by. A scooped-out log, nothing more, but still his favorite toy. He liked to paddle it across the Araxas and catch turtles in the marsh.
Sheila climbs aboard, leaving Sam’s meat to the sharks.
CAPTAIN’S LOG. 10 JUNE 1057 AFTER CREATION
The beasts eat too much. At present rates of consumption, we’ll be out of provisions in a mere fifteen weeks.
For the herbivores: 4,540 pounds of oats a day, 6,780 pounds of hay, 2,460 of vegetables, and 3,250 of fruit.
For the carnivores: 17,620 pounds of yak and caribou meat a day. And we may lose the whole supply if we don’t find a way to freeze it.
Yahweh’s displeasure pours down in great swirling sheets, as if the planet lies fixed beneath a waterfall. Sheila paddles without passion, no goal in mind, no reason to live. Fierce winds chum the sea. Lightning shatters the sky. The floodwaters thicken with disintegrating sinners, afloat on their backs, their gelatinous eyes locked in pleading stares, as if begging God for a second chance.
The world reeks. Sheila gags on the vapors. Is the decay of the wicked, she wonders, more odoriferous than that of the just? When she dies, will her stink drive away even flies and vultures?
Sheila wants to die, but her flesh argues otherwise, making her lift her mouth toward heaven and swallow the quenching downpour. The hunger will be harder to solve: it hurts, a scorpion stinging her belly, so painful that Sheila resolves to add cannibalism to her repertoire. But then, in the bottom of the canoe, she spies two huddled turtles, confused, fearful. She eats one raw, beginning with the head, chewing the leathery tissues, drinking the salty blood.
A dark, mountainous shape cruises out of the blur. A sea monster, she decides, angry, sharp-toothed, ravenous…Yahweh incarnate, eager to rid the earth of Sheila. Fine. Good. Amen. Painfully she lifts her paddle, heavy as a millstone, and strokes through a congestion of drowned princes and waterlogged horses, straight for the hulking deity.
Now God is upon her, a headlong collision, fracturing the canoe like a crocodile’s tail smacking an egg. The floodwaters cover her, a frigid darkness flows through her, and with her last breath she lobs a sphere of mucus into Yahweh’s gloomy and featureless face.
CAPTAIN’S LOG. 20 JUNE 1057 A.C.
Yahweh said nothing about survivors. Yet this morning we came upon two.
The Testudo marginata posed no problem. We have plenty of turtles, all two hundred and twenty-five species in fact, Testudinidae, Chelydridae, Platysternidae, Kinosternidae, Chelonidae, you name it. Unclean beasts, inedible, useless. We left it to the flood. Soon it will swim itself to death.
The Homo sapiens was a different matter. Frightened, delirious, she clung to her broken canoe like a sloth embracing a tree. “Yahweh was explicit,” said Ham, leaning over Eden II’s rail, calling into the gushing storm. “Every person not in this family deserves death.”
“She is one of the tainted generation,” added his wife. “A whore. Abandon her.”
“No,” countered Japheth. “We must throw her a line, as any men of virtue would do.”
His young bride had no opinion.
As for Shem and Tamar, the harlot’s arrival became yet another occasion for them to bicker. “Japheth is right,” insisted Shem. “Bring her among us, Father.”
“Let Yahweh have his way with her,” retorted Tamar. “Let the flood fulfill its purpose.”
“What do you think?” I asked Reumah.
Smiling softly, my wife pointed to the dinghy.
I ordered the little boat lowered. Japheth and Shem rode it to the surface of the lurching sea, prying the harlot from her canoe, hauling her over the transom. After much struggle we got her aboard Eden II, laying her unconscious bulk on the foredeck. She was a lewd walrus, fat and dissipated. A chain of rat skulls dangled from her squat neck. When Japheth pushed on her chest, water fountained out, and she released a cough like a yak’s roar.
“Who are you?” I demanded.
She fixed me with a dazed stare and fainted. We carried her below, setting her among the pigs like the unclean thing she is. Reumah stripped away our visitor’s soggy garments, and I winced to behold her pocked and twisted flesh.
“Sinner or not, Yahweh has seen fit to spare her,” said my wife, wrapping a dry robe around the harlot. “We are the instruments of his amnesty.”
“Perhaps,” I said, snapping the word like a whip.
The final decision rests with me, of course, not with my sons or their wives. Is the harlot a test? Would a true God-follower sink this human flotsam without a moment’s hesitation?
Even asleep, our visitor is vile, her hair a lice farm, her breath a polluting wind.
Sheila awakens to the snorty gossip of pigs. A great bowl of darkness envelops her, dank and dripping like a basket submerged in a swamp. Her nostrils burn with a hundred varieties of stench. She believes that Yahweh has swallowed her, that she is imprisoned in his maw.
Slowly a light seeps into her eyes. Before her, a wooden gate creaks as it pivots on leather hinges. A young man approaches, proffering a wineskin and a cooked leg of mutton.
“Are we inside God?” Sheila demands, propping her thick torso on her elbows. Someone has given her dry clothes. The effort of speaking tires her, and she lies back in the swine-scented straw. “Is this Yahweh?”
“The last of his creation,” the young man replies. “My parents, brothers, our wives, the birds, beasts—and myself, Japheth. Here. Eat.” Japheth presses the mutton to her lips. “Seven of each clean animal, that was our quota. In a month we shall run out. Enjoy it while you can.”
“I want to die.” Once again, Sheila’s abundant flesh has a different idea, devouring the mutton, guzzling the wine.
“If you wanted to die,” says Japheth, “you would not have gripped that canoe so tightly. Welcome aboard.”
“Aboard?” says Sheila. Japheth is most handsome. His crisp black beard excites her lust. “We’re on a boat?” Japheth nods. “Eden II. Gopher wood, stem to stern. This is the world now, nothing else remains. Yahweh means for you to be here.”
“I doubt that.” Sheila knows her arrival is a freak. She has merely been overlooked. No one means for her to be here, least of all God.
“My father built it,” the young man explains. “He is six hundred years old.”
“Impressive,” says Sheila, grimacing. She has seen the type, a crotchety, withered patriarch, tripping over his beard. Those final five hundred years do nothing for a man, save to make his skin leathery and his worm boneless.
“You’re a whore, aren’t you?” asks Japheth.
The boat pitches and rolls, unmooring Sheila’s stomach. She lifts the wineskin to her lips and fills her pouchy cheeks. “Also a drunkard, thief, self-abortionist”—her grin stretches well into the toothless regions—“and sexual deviant.” With her palm she cradles her left breast, heaving it to one side.
Japheth gasps and backs away.
Another day, perhaps, they will lie together. For now, Sheila is exhausted, stunned by wine. She rests her reeling head on the straw and sleeps.
CAPTAIN’S LOG. 25 JUNE 1057 A.C.
We have harvested a glacier, bringing thirty tons of ice aboard. For the moment, our meat will not become carrion; our ti
gers, wolves, and carnosaurs will thrive.
I once saw the idolators deal with an outcast. They tethered his ankles to an ox, his wrists to another ox. They drove the first beast north, the second south.
Half of me believes we must admit this woman. Indeed, if we kill her, do we not become the same people Yahweh saw fit to destroy? If we so sin, do we not contaminate the very race we are meant to sire? In my sons’ loins rests the whole of the future. We are the keepers of our kind. Yahweh picked us for the purity of our seed, not the infallibility of our justice. It is hardly our place to condemn.
My other half begs that I cast her into the flood. A harlot, Japheth assures me. A dipsomaniac, robber, lesbian, and fetus-killer. She should have died with the rest of them. We must not allow her degenerate womb back into the world, lest it bear fruit.
Again Sheila awakens to swine sounds, refreshed and at peace. She no longer wishes to die.
This afternoon a different brother enters the pig cage. He gives his name as Shem, and he is even better looking than Japheth. He bears a glass of tea in which float three diaphanous pebbles. “Ice,” he explains. “Clotted water.”
Sheila drinks. The frigid tea buffs the grime from her tongue and throat. Ice: a remarkable material, she decides. These people know how to live.
“Do you have a piss pot?” Sheila asks, and Shem guides her to a tiny stall enclosed by reed walls. After she has relieved herself, Shem gives her a tour, leading her up and down the ladders that connect the interior decks. Eden II leaks like a defective tent, a steady, disquieting plop-plop.
The place is a zoo. Mammals, reptiles, birds, two by two. Sheila beholds tiny black beasts with too many legs and long cylindrical creatures with too few. Grunts, growls, howls, roars, brays, and caws rattle the ship’s wet timbers.
Sheila likes Shem, but not this floating menagerie, this crazy voyage. The whole arrangement infuriates her. Cobras live here. Wasps, their stingers poised to spew poisons. Young tyrannosaurs and baby allosaurs, eager to devour the gazelles on the deck above. Tarantulas, rats, crabs, weasels, armadillos, snapping turtles, boar-pigs, bacteria, viruses: Yahweh has spared them all.