Bible Stories for Adults

by James Morrow

  My friends were no worse than a tarantula, Sheila thinks. My neighbors were as important as weasels. My child mattered more than anthrax.

  CAPTAIN’S LOG. 14 JULY 1057 A.C.

  The rains have stopped. We drift aimlessly. Reumah is seasick. Even with the ice, our provisions are running out. We cannot keep feeding ourselves, much less a million species.

  Tonight we discussed our passenger. Predictably, Japheth and Shem spoke for acquittal, while Ham argued the whore must die.

  “A necessary evil?” I asked Ham.

  “No kind of evil,” he replied. “You kill a rabid dog lest its disease spread, Father. This woman’s body holds the eggs of future thieves, perverts, and idolators. We must not allow her to infect the new order. We must check this plague before our chance is lost.”

  “We have no right,” said Japheth.

  “If God can pass a harsh judgment on millions of evildoers,” said Ham, “then surely I can do the same for one.”

  “You are not God,” said Japheth.

  Nor am I—but I am the master of this ship, the leader of this little tribe. I turned to Ham and said, “I know you speak the truth. We must choose ultimate good over immediate mercy.”

  Ham agreed to be her executioner. Soon he will dispose of the whore using the same obsidian knife with which, once we sight land, we are bound to slit and drain our surplus lambs, gratitude’s blood.

  They have put Sheila to work. She and Ham must maintain the reptiles. The Pythoninae will not eat unless they kill the meal themselves. Sheila spends the whole afternoon competing with the cats, snaring ship rats, hurling them by their tails into the python pens.

  Ham is the handsomest son yet, but Sheila does not care for him. There is something low and slithery about Ham. It seems fitting that he tends vipers and asps. “What do you think of Yahweh?” she asks.

  Instead of answering, Ham leers.

  “When a father is abusive,” Sheila persists, “the child typically responds not only by denying that the abuse occurred, but by redoubling his efforts to be loved.”

  Silence from Ham. He fondles her with his eyes.

  Sheila will not quit. “When I destroyed my unwanted children, it was murder. When Yahweh did the same, it was eugenics. Do you approve of the universe, Ham?”

  Ham tosses the python’s mate a rat.

  CAPTAIN’S LOG. 17 JULY 1057 A.C.

  We have run aground. Shem has named the place of our imprisonment Ararat. This morning we sent out a Corvus corax, but it did not return. I doubt we’ll ever see it again. Two ravens remain, but I refuse to break up a pair. Next time we’ll try a Columbidae.

  In an hour the harlot will die. Ham will open her up, spilling her dirty blood, her filthy organs. Together we shall cast her carcass into the flood.

  Why did Yahweh say nothing about survivors?

  Silently Ham slithers into the pig cage, crouching over Sheila like an incubus, resting the cool blade against her windpipe.

  Sheila is ready. Japheth has told her the whole plot. A sudden move, and Ham’s universe is awry, Sheila above, her attacker below, she armed, he defenseless. She wriggles her layered flesh, pressing Ham into the straw. Her scraggly hair tickles his cheeks.

  A rape is required. Sheila is good at rape; some of her best customers would settle for nothing less. Deftly she steers the knife amid Ham’s garments, unstitching them, peeling him like an orange. “Harden,” she commands, fondling his pods, running a practiced hand across his worm. “Harden or die.”

  Ham shudders and sweats. Terror flutes his lips, but before he can cry out Sheila slides the knife across his throat like a bow across a fiddle, delicately dividing the skin, drawing out tiny beads of blood.

  Sheila is a professional. She can stiffen eunuchs, homosexuals, men with knives at their jugulars. Lifting her robe, she lowers herself onto Ham’s erection, enjoying his pleasureless passion, reveling in her impalement. A few minutes of graceful undulation, and the worm spurts, filling her with Ham’s perfect and upright seed.

  “I want to see your brothers,” she tells him.

  “What?” Ham touches his throat, reopening his fine, subtle wound.

  “Shem and Japheth also have their parts to play.”

  CAPTAIN’S LOG. 24 JULY 1057 A.C.

  Our dinghy is missing. Maybe the whore cut it loose before she was executed. No matter. This morning I launched a dove, and it has returned with a twig of some kind in its beak. Soon our sandals will touch dry land.

  My sons elected to spare me the sight of the whore’s corpse. Fine. I have beheld enough dead sinners in my six centuries.

  Tonight we shall sing, dance, and give thanks to Yahweh. Tonight we shall bleed our best lamb.

  The world is healing. Cool, smooth winds rouse Sheila’s hair, sunlight strokes her face. Straight ahead, white robust clouds sail across a clear sky.

  A speck hovers in the distance, and Sheila fixes on it as she navigates the boundless flood. This sign has appeared none too soon. The stores from Eden II will not last through the week, especially with Sheila’s appetite at such a pitch.

  Five weeks in the dinghy, and still her period has not come. “And Ham’s child is just the beginning,” she mutters, tossing a wry smile toward the clay pot. So far, the ice shows no sign of melting; Shem and Japheth’s virtuous fertilizer, siphoned under goad of lust and threat of death, remains frozen. Sheila has plundered enough seed to fill all creation with babies. If things go according to plan, Yahweh will have to stage another flood.

  The speck grows, resolves into a bird. A Corvus corax, as the old man would have called it.

  Sheila will admit that her designs are grand and even pompous. But are they impossible? She aims to found a proud and impertinent nation, a people driven to decipher ice and solve the sun, each of them with as little use for obedience as she, and they will sail the sodden world until they find the perfect continent, a land of eternal light and silken grass, and they will call it what any race must call its home, Formosa, beautiful.

  The raven swoops down, landing atop the jar of sperm, and Sheila feels a surge of gladness as, reaching out, she takes a branch from its sharp and tawny beak.

  Daughter Earth

  WE’D BEEN TRYING to have another child for over three years, carrying on like a couple from one of those movies you can rent by going behind the beaded curtain at Jake’s Video, but it just wasn’t working out. Logic, of course, says a second conception should prove no harder than a first. Hah. Mother Nature can be a sneaky old bitch, something we’ve learned from our twenty-odd years of farming down here in central Pennsylvania.

  Maybe you’ve driven past our place, Garber Farm, two miles outside of Boalsburg on Route 322. Raspberries in the summer, apples in the fall, Christmas trees in the winter, asparagus in the spring—that’s us. The basset hound puppies appear all year round. We’ll sell you one for three hundred dollars, guaranteed to love the children, chase rabbits out of the vegetable patch, and always appear burdened by troubles greater than yours.

  We started feeling better after Dr. Borealis claimed he could make Polly’s uterus “more hospitable to reproduction,” as he put it. He prescribed vaginal suppositories, little nuggets of progesterone packed in cocoa butter. You store them in the refrigerator till you’re ready to use one, and they melt in your wife the way M & Ms melt in your mouth.

  That very month, we got pregnant.

  So there we were, walking around with clouds under our feet. We kept remembering our son’s first year out of the womb, that sense of power we’d felt, how we’d just gone ahead and thought him up and made him, by damn.

  Time came for the amniocentesis. It began with the ultrasound technician hooking Polly up to the TV monitor so Dr. Borealis could keep his syringe on target and make sure it didn’t skewer the fetus. I liked Borealis. He reminded me of Norman Rockwell’s painting of that tubby and fastidious old country doctor listening to the little girl’s doll with his stethoscope.

  Polly and I
were hoping for a girl.

  Oddly enough, the fetus wouldn’t come into focus. Or, if it was in focus, it sure as hell didn’t look like a fetus. I was awfully glad Polly couldn’t see the TV.

  “Glitch in the circuitry?” ventured the ultrasound technician, a tense and humorless youngster named Leo.

  “Don’t think so,” muttered Borealis.

  I used to be a center for my college basketball team, the Penn State Nittany Lions, and I’ll be damned if our baby didn’t look a great deal like a basketball.

  Possibly a soccer ball.

  Polly said, “How is she?”

  “Kind of round,” I replied.

  “Round, Ben? What do you mean?”

  “Round,” I said.

  Borealis furrowed his brow, real deep ridges; you could’ve planted corn up there. “Now don’t fret, Polly. You neither, Ben. If it’s a tumor, it’s probably benign.”

  “Round?” Polly said again.

  “Round,” I said again.

  “Let’s go for the juice anyway,” the doctor told Leo the technician. “Maybe the lab can interpret this for us.”

  So Borealis gave Polly a local and then inserted his syringe, and suddenly the TV showed the needle poking around next to our fetus like a dipstick somebody was trying to get back into a Chevy. The doctor went ahead as if he were doing a normal amnio, gently pricking the sac, though I could tell he hadn’t made peace with the situation, and I was feeling pretty miserable myself.

  “Round?” said Polly.

  “Right,” I said.

  Later that month, I was standing in the apple orchard harvesting some Jonafrees—a former basketball center doesn’t need a ladder—when Asa, our eleven-year-old redheaded Viking, ran over and told me Borealis was on the phone. “Mom’s napping,” my son explained. “Being knocked up sure makes you tired, huh?”

  I got to the kitchen as fast as I could. I snapped up the receiver, my questions spilling out helter-skelter—would Polly be okay, what kind of pregnancy was this, were they planning to set things right with in utero surgery?

  Borealis said, “First of all, Polly’s CA-125 reading is only nine, so it’s probably not a malignancy.”

  “Thank God.”

  “And the fetus’s chromosome count is normal—forty-six on the money. The surprising thing is that she has chromosomes at all.”

  “She? It’s a she?”

  “We’d like to do some more ultrasounds.”

  “It’s a a she?”

  “You bet, Ben. Two X chromosomes.”

  “Zenobia.”

  “Huh?”

  “If we got a girl, we were going to name her Zenobia.”

  So we went back down to Boalsburg Gynecological. Borealis had called in three of his friends from the university: Gordon Hashigan, a spry old coot who held the Raymond Dart Chair in Physical Anthropology; Susan Croft, a stern-faced geneticist with a lisp; and Abner Logos, a skinny, devil-bearded epidemiologist who somehow found time to be Centre County’s public health commissioner. Polly and I remembered voting against him.

  Leo the technician connected Polly to his machine, snapping more pictures than a Japanese extended family takes when it visits Epcot Center, and then the three professors huddled solemnly around the printouts, mumbling to each other through thin, tight lips. Ten minutes later, they called Borealis over.

  The doctor rolled up the printouts, tucked them under his arm, and escorted Polly and me into his office—a nicer, better-smelling office than the one we’d set up in the basset barn back home. He seemed nervous and apologetic. Sweat covered his temples like dew on a toadstool.

  Borealis unfurled an ultrasound, and we saw how totally different our baby was from other babies. It wasn’t just her undeniable sphericity—no, the real surprise was her complexion.

  “It’s like one of those Earth shots the astronauts send back when they’re heading toward the moon,” Polly noted.

  Borealis nodded. “Here we’ve got a kind of ocean, for example. And this thing is like a continent.”

  “What’s this?” I asked, pointing to a white mass near the bottom.

  “Ice cap on the southern pole,” said Borealis. “We can do the procedure next Tuesday.”

  “Procedure?” said Polly.

  The doctor appeared to be experiencing a nasty odor. “Polly, Ben, the simple fact is that I can’t encourage you to bring this pregnancy to term. Those professors in the next room all agree.”

  My stomach churned sour milk.

  “I thought the amnio was normal,” said Polly.

  “Try to understand,” said Borealis. “This fetal tissue cannot be accurately labeled a baby.”

  “So what do you call it?” Polly demanded.

  The doctor grimaced. “For the moment…a biosphere.”

  “A what?”

  “Biosphere.”

  When Polly gets angry, she starts inflating—like a beach toy, or a puff adder, or a randy tree frog. “You’re saying we can’t give her a good home, is that it? Our other kid’s turning out just fine. His project took second prize in the Centre County Science Fair.”

  “Organic Control of Gypsy Moths,” I explained.

  Borealis issued one of his elaborate frowns. “You really imagine yourself giving birth to this material?”

  “Uh-huh,” said Polly.

  “But it’s a biosphere.”

  “So what?”

  The doctor squinched his cherubic Norman Rockwell face. “There’s no way it’s going to fit through the canal,” he snapped, as if that settled the matter.

  “So we’re looking at a cesarean, huh?” said Polly.

  Borealis threw up his hands as if he were dealing with a couple of dumb crackers. People think that being a farmer means you’re some sort of rube, though I’ve probably rented a lot more Ingmar Bergman videos than Borealis—with subtitles, not dubbed—and the newsletter we publish, Down to Earth, is a damned sight more literate than those Pregnancy Pointers brochures the doctor kept shoveling at us. “Here’s my home number,” he said, scribbling on his prescription pad. “Call me the minute anything happens.”

  The days slogged by. Polly kept swelling up with Zenobia, bigger and bigger, rounder and rounder, and by December she was so big and round she couldn’t do anything except crank out the Christmas issue of Down to Earth on our Macintosh SE and waddle around the farm like the Hindenburg looking for New Jersey. And of course we couldn’t have the expectant couple’s usual fun of imagining a new baby in the house. Every time I stumbled into Zenobia’s room and saw the crib and the changing table and the Cookie Monster’s picture on the wall, my throat got tight as a stone. We cried a lot, Polly and me. We’d crawl into bed and hug each other and cry.

  So it came as something of a relief when, one frosty March morning, the labor pains started. Borealis sounded pretty woozy when he answered the phone—it was 3 A.M.—but he woke up fast, evidently pleased at the idea of getting this biosphere business over with. I think he was counting on a stillbirth.

  “The contractions—how far apart?”

  “Five minutes,” I said.

  “Goodness, that close? The thing’s really on its way.”

  “We don’t refer to her as a thing,” I corrected him, politely but firmly.

  By the time we got Asa over to my parents’ house, the contractions were coming only four minutes apart. Polly started her Lamaze breathing. Except for its being a cesarean this time, and a biosphere, everything happened just like when we’d had our boy: racing down to Boalsburg Memorial; standing around in the lobby while Polly panted like a hot collie and the computer checked into our insurance; riding the elevator up to the maternity ward with Polly in a wheelchair and me fidgeting at her side; getting into our hospital duds—white gown for Polly, green surgical smock and cap for me. So far, so good.

  Borealis was already in the OR. He’d brought along a mere skeleton crew. The assistant surgeon had a crisp, hawkish face organized around a nose so narrow you could’ve opened
your mail with it. The anesthesiologist had the kind of tanned, handsome, Mediterranean features you see on condom boxes. The pediatric nurse was a gangly, owl-eyed young woman with freckles and pigtails. “I told them we’re anticipating an anomaly,” Borealis said, nodding toward his team.

  “We don’t call her an anomaly,” I informed the doctor.

  They positioned me by Polly’s head—she was awake, anesthetized from the diaphragm down—right behind the white curtain they use to keep cesarean mothers from seeing too much. Borealis and his sidekick got to work. Basically, it was like watching a reverse-motion movie of somebody stuffing a turkey; the doctor made his incision and started rummaging around, and a few minutes later he scooped out an object that looked like a Rand McNally globe covered with vanilla frosting and olive oil.

  “She’s here,” I shouted to Polly. Even though Zenobia wasn’t a regular child, some sort of fatherly instinct kicked in, and my skin went prickly all over. “Our baby’s here,” I gasped, tears rolling down my cheeks.

  “Holy mackerel!” said the assistant surgeon.

  “Jesus!” said the anesthesiologist. “Jesus Lord God in heaven!”

  “What the fuck?” said the pediatric nurse. “She’s a fucking ball.”

  “Biosphere,” Borealis admonished.

  A loud, squishy, squalling noise filled the room: our little Zenobia, howling just like any other baby. “Is that her?” Polly wanted to know. “Is that her crying?”

  “You bet it is, honey,” I said.

  Borealis handed Zenobia to the nurse and said, “Clean her up, Pam. Weigh her. All the usual.”

  The nurse said, “You’ve got to be fucking kidding.”

  “Clean her up,” the doctor insisted.

  Pam grabbed a sponge, dipped it into Zenobia’s largest ocean, and began swabbing her northern hemisphere. Our child cooed and gurgled—and kept on cooing and gurgling as the nurse carried her across the room and set her on the scales.