I had a great time, meeting some marvelously creative game designers and seeing how they think and plan in order to create great electronic games. But one of the best experiences wasn’t at “the ranch”—it was at the home of one of the designers, where they trotted out a game designed by Greg Johnson, who didn’t even work for LucasFilm Games.
The game was Feed the Baby of Love Many Beans or Perish in the Flames of Hell, and every scrap of gameplay in the story you just read comes from Greg’s wonderfully irreverent game. (He later made me a game board of my own so I could own it and play it, and from time to time I trot it out and we play a round of it.) The real fun of the game, however, was that beyond the gameplay itself, Greg and the other guys had surrounded it with all kinds of unrelated rituals that bound them together as a community, so that the game itself, the outcome of the game, was both more and less than it seemed. More, because the game had become a symbol of their camaraderie and they pretended it had magical resonance in the real world; and less, because the game itself didn’t actually matter, and nobody minded much who won and who lost.
One more element was needed before I could put things together and write a story. I was invited to take part in an anthology of stories in honor of Ray Bradbury (The Bradbury Chronicles, ed. William F. Nolan and Martin H. Greenberg). For this occasion, Bradbury had generously allowed a group of writers to set stories in the worlds he had created.
I knew immediately that, much as I loved his Martian and October Country stories, it was Dandelion Wine that I was going to visit. I loved that book. I didn’t read it as a little kid, required by teachers to put on Doug Spaulding’s sneakers—I read it in my late teens, as a sophisticated college student, and it melted me back into my childhood and made me see it through gold-colored glasses. Unlike the disillusionists of this world, who insist that the darkest of all possible views must be the “real” one, I knew in reading Dandelion Wine that the truth ran the other way. Living through childhood can be difficult and painful, but in fact, with relatively rare exceptions, it is also a glorious time that we’re simply too short and too shortsighted to see. It is childhood that shapes our lives; it is the hopeful child inside us that gives us the faith that allows us to try things and achieve things in adulthood.
So, even though I was a sci-fi writer, I knew I was going to write an absolutely realistic but, I hoped, poetic story that echoed the optimism in the midst of struggle that marked Dandelion Wine as Bradbury’s finest writing.
And I knew, without even having to think about it, that the story I was going to write was “Spider Eyes”—only this time, Rainie Pinyon would find Douglas Spaulding as a grownup, a husband and father, vulnerable to her, drawn to her—but still determined to be the man he was supposed to be.
The trouble was that Dandelion Wine was set in the 1930s, and the rock ’n’ roll culture simply took place too late. It would not work.
That’s when the character of the grandfather was born. He was the Douglas Spaulding of Dandelion Wine, but the town and the world were not changed, and he wanted his grandson to hold that world together for his own children.
I knew exactly the town where I wanted the story set, too. It was Nauvoo, the onetime Mormon capital on the banks of the Mississippi, just across from the southern tip of Iowa. Not because of any Mormon connection—this time around, the hero was not going to be Mormon—but because I had visited Nauvoo and fallen in love with the slightly shabby but still living downtown, the old houses, the river just down from the bluff. I thought: This is just the kind of place where Rainie Pinyon might get off the bus and go to the café (where I had recently dined) and order their slightly crusty fried eggs and decide, I think I’ll work here for a while.
The elements were all together, and I knew it was going to be one of the best things, if not the best thing, I had ever written. Which scared me so much that I put off writing it for about as long as I could. The deadline for the Bradbury anthology was looming. And finally, while visiting in the home of friends in Sterling, Virginia, I sat down at their dining room table and wrote the thing in one sitting.
It was exactly what I wanted it to be.
The trouble was, it was just a short story. It appeared in the anthology and whoever read it, read it, but then it was gone. I thought of expanding it into a novel, but I was afraid the weight of it would be too much. I tried developing it as a screenplay, writing one version of it myself and then getting my friend and partner Aaron Johnston to write what turned out to be a very good draft. Someday, using ideas Aaron and I came up with for the screenplay, I may write that novel version yet.
But here’s one of the barriers. Where would I publish it?
I’m a genre writer. I’m known as a writer of kids-in-space stories. Even though I take those stories very seriously as literature—indeed, more seriously than I think most “literary” writers take their productions—it means I’m on the wrong side of the apartheid fence in the literary world. We who actually write for the joy of our readers instead of to impress them are considered tainted. I could easily get a small press to publish the book, but I would have zero chance of getting a novel version of “Feed the Baby of Love” published in a serious way by a major publisher. They have too much contempt for a genre they do not understand and for a kind of writing they and their literary community forsook long ago.
It would be so easy to add a little magic to the story and make it a contemporary fantasy. Then I could sell it without a problem.
Not a chance. Sometimes a story has to be what it is. This is one of those times.
Of course, I might be delusional here. This story might be so personal that I’m the only reader who thinks it’s as wonderful as I think it is. In which case, it’s a mercy that it hasn’t been available to the general public for all these years, because I’ve been allowed to maintain my illusions. I still have them, though, and intend to keep them. This story, more than any other I’ve written, tells the truth about what life is for.
The story “Feed the Baby of Love” is copyright © 1991 by Orson Scott Card. The game “Feed the Baby of Love Many Beans or Perish in the Flames of Hell” is copyright © 1990 by Greg Johnson. All quotations and game features depicted in this story are used by permission of the gamewright. The lyrics to “The Baby of Love” by Rainie Pinyon are used with the consent of the copyright holder.
IV
HATRACK RIVER
GRINNING MAN
The first time Alvin Maker run across the grinning man was in the steep woody hills of eastern Kenituck. Alvin was walking along with his ward, the boy Arthur Stuart, talking either deep philosophy or the best way for travelers to cook beans, I can’t bring to mind now which, when they come upon a clearing where a man was squatting on his haunches looking up into a tree. Apart from the unnatural grin upon his face, there wasn’t all that much remarkable about him, for that time and place. Dressed in buckskin, a cap made of coonhide on his head, a musket lying in the grass ready to hand—plenty of men of such youth and roughness walked the game trails of the unsettled forest in those days.
Though come to think of it, eastern Kenituck wasn’t all that unsettled by then, and most men gave up buckskin for cotton during summer, less they was too poor to get them none. So maybe it was partly his appearance that made Alvin stop up short and look at the fellow. Arthur Stuart, of course, he did what he saw Alvin do, till he had some good reason to do otherwise, so he stopped at the meadow’s edge, too, and fell silent too, and watched.
The grinning man had his gaze locked on the middle branches of a scruffy old pine that was getting somewhat choked out by slower-growing flat-leaf trees. But it wasn’t no tree he was grinning at. No sir, it was the bear.
There’s bears and there’s bears, as everyone knows. Some little old brown bears are about as dangerous as a dog—which means if you beat it with a stick you deserve what you get, but otherwise it’ll leave you alone. But some black bears and some grizzlies, they have a kind of bristle to the hair on the
ir backs, a kind of spikiness like a porcupine that tells you they’re just spoiling for a fight, hoping you’ll say a cross word so’s they can take a swipe at your head and suck your lunch back up through your neck. Like a likkered-up river man.
This was that kind of bear. A little old, maybe, but as spiky as they come, and it wasn’t up that tree cause it was afraid, it was up there for honey, which it had plenty of, along with bees that were now so tired of trying to sting through that matted fur that they were mostly dead, all stung out. There was no shortage of buzzing, though, like a choir of folks as don’t know the words to the hymn so they just hum, only the bees was none too certain of the tune, neither.
But there sat that man, grinning at the bear. And there sat the bear, looking down at him with its teeth showing.
Alvin and Arthur stood watching for many a minute while nothing in the tableau changed. The man squatted on the ground, grinning up; the bear squatted on a branch, grinning down. Neither one showed the slightest sign that he knew Alvin and Arthur was even there.
So it was Alvin broke the silence. “I don’t know who started the ugly contest, but I know who’s going to win.”
Without breaking his grin, through clenched teeth the man said, “Excuse me for not shaking your hands but I’m a-busy grinning this bear.”
Alvin nodded wisely—it certainly seemed to be a truthful statement. “And from the look of it,” says Alvin, “that bear thinks he’s grinning you, too.”
“Let him think what he thinks,” said the grinning man. “He’s coming down from that tree.”
Arthur Stuart, being young, was impressed. “You can do that just by grinning?”
“Just hope I never turn my grin on you,” said the man. “I’d hate to have to pay your master the purchase price of such a clever blackamoor as you.”
It was a common mistake, to take Arthur Stuart for a slave. He was half Black, wasn’t he? And south of the Hio was all slave country then, where a Black man either was, or used to be, or sure as shooting was bound to become somebody’s property. In those parts, for safety’s sake, Alvin didn’t bother correcting the assumption. Let folks think Arthur Stuart already had an owner, so folks didn’t get their hearts set on volunteering for the task.
“That must be a pretty strong grin,” said Alvin Maker. “My name’s Alvin. I’m a journeyman blacksmith.”
“Ain’t much call for a smith in these parts. Plenty of better land farther west, more settlers, you ought to try it.” The fellow was still talking through his grin.
“I might,” said Alvin. “What’s your name?”
“Hold still now,” says the grinning man. “Stay right where you are. He’s a-coming down.”
The bear yawned, then clambered down the trunk and rested on all fours, his head swinging back and forth, keeping time to whatever music it is that bears hear. The fur around his mouth was shiny with honey and dotted with dead bees. Whatever the bear was thinking, after a while he was done, whereupon he stood on his hind legs like a man, his paws high, his mouth open like a baby showing its mama it swallowed its food.
The grinning man rose up on his hind legs, then, and spread his arms, just like the bear, and opened his mouth to show a fine set of teeth for a human, but it wasn’t no great shakes compared to bear’s teeth. Still, the bear seemed convinced. It bent back down to the ground and ambled away without complaint into the brush.
“That’s my tree now,” said the grinning man.
“Ain’t much of a tree,” said Alvin.
“Honey’s about all et up,” added Arthur Stuart.
“My tree and all the land round about,” said the grinning man.
“And what you plan to do with it? You don’t look to be a farmer.”
“I plan to sleep here,” said the grinning man. “And my intention was to sleep without no bear coming along to disturb my slumber. So I had to tell him who was boss.”
“And that’s all you do with that knack of yours?” asked Arthur Stuart. “Make bears get out of the way?”
“I sleep under bearskin in winter,” said the grinning man. “So when I grin a bear, it stays grinned till I done what I’m doing.”
“Don’t it worry you that someday you’ll meet your match?” asked Alvin mildly.
“I got no match, friend. My grin is the prince of grins. The king of grins.”
“The emperor of grins,” said Arthur Stuart. “The Napoleon of grins!”
The irony in Arthur’s voice was apparently not subtle enough to escape the grinning man. “Your boy got him a mouth.”
“Helps me pass the time,” said Alvin. “Well, now you done us the favor of running off that bear, I reckon this is a good place for us to stop and build us a canoe.”
Arthur Stuart looked at him like he was crazy. “What do we need a canoe for?”
“Being a lazy man,” said Alvin, “I mean to use it to go downstream.”
“Don’t matter to me,” said the grinning man. “Float it, sink it, wear it on your head or swallow it for supper, you ain’t building nothing right here.” The grin was still on his face.
“Look at that, Arthur,” said Alvin. “This fellow hasn’t even told us his name, and he’s a-grinning us.”
“Ain’t going to work,” said Arthur Stuart. “We been grinned at by politicians, preachers, witchers, and lawyers, and you ain’t got teeth enough to scare us.”
With that, the grinning man brought his musket to bear right on Alvin’s heart. “I reckon I’ll stop grinning then,” he said.
“I think this ain’t canoe-building country,” said Alvin. “Let’s move along, Arthur.”
“Not so fast,” said the grinning man. “I think maybe I’d be doing all my neighbors a favor if I kept you from ever moving away from this spot.”
“First off,” said Alvin, “you got no neighbors.”
“All mankind is my neighbor,” said the grinning man. “Jesus said so.”
“I recall he specified Samaritans,” said Alvin, “and Samaritans got no call to fret about me.”
“What I see is a man carrying a poke that he hides from my view.”
That was true, for in that sack was Alvin’s golden plow, and he always tried to keep it halfway hid behind him so folks wouldn’t get troubled if they happened to see it move by itself, which it was prone to do from time to time. Now, though, to answer the challenge, Alvin moved the sack around in front of him.
“I got nothing to hide from a man with a gun,” said Alvin.
“A man with a poke,” said the grinning man, “who says he’s a blacksmith but his only companion is a boy too scrawny and stubby to be learning his trade. But the boy is just the right size to skinny his way through an attic window or the eaves of a loose-made house. So I says to myself, this here’s a second-story man, who lifts his boy up with those big strong arms so he can sneak into houses from above and open the door to the thief. So shooting you down right now would be a favor to the world.”
Arthur Stuart snorted. “Burglars don’t get much trade in the woods.”
“I never said you-all looked smart,” said the grinning man.
“Best point your gun at somebody else now,” said Arthur Stuart quietly. “Iffen you want to keep the use of it.”
The grinning man’s answer was to pull the trigger. A spurt of flame shot out as the barrel of the gun exploded, splaying into iron strips like the end of a worn-out broom. The musket ball rolled slowly down the barrel and plopped out into the grass.
“Look what you done to my gun,” said the grinning man.
“Wasn’t me as pulled the trigger,” said Alvin. “And you was warned.”
“How come you still grinning?” asked Arthur Stuart.
“I’m just a cheerful sort of fellow,” said the grinning man, drawing his big old knife.
“Do you like that knife?” asked Arthur Stuart.
“Got it from my friend Jim Bowie,” said the grinning man. “It’s took the hide off six bears and I can’t count how many b
eavers.”
“Take a look at the barrel of your musket,” said Arthur Stuart, “and then look at the blade of that knife you like so proud, and think real hard.”
The grinning man looked at the gun barrel and then at the blade. “Well?” asked the man.
“Keep thinking,” said Arthur Stuart. “It’ll come to you.”
“You let him talk to White men like that?”
“A man as fires a musket at me,” said Alvin, “I reckon Arthur Stuart here can talk to him any old how he wants.”
The grinning man thought that over for a minute, and then, though no one would have thought it possible, he grinned even wider, put away his knife, and stuck out his hand. “You got some knack,” he said to Alvin.
Alvin reached out and shook the man’s hand. Arthur Stuart knew what was going to happen next, because he’d seen it before. Even though Alvin was announced as a blacksmith and any man with eyes could see the strength of his arms and hands, this grinning man just had to brace foot to foot against him and try to pull him down.
Not that Alvin minded a little sport. He let the grinning man work himself up into quite a temper of pulling and tugging and twisting and wrenching. It would have looked like quite a contest, except that Alvin could’ve been fixing to nap, he looked so relaxed.
Finally Alvin got interested. He squished down hard and the grinning man yelped and dropped to his knees and began to beg Alvin to give him back his hand. “Not that I’ll ever have the use of it again,” said the grinning man, “but I’d at least like to have it so I got a place to store my second glove.”
“I got no plan to keep your hand,” said Alvin.
“I know, but it crossed my mind you might be planning to leave it here in the meadow and send me somewheres else,” said the grinning man.
“Don’t you ever stop grinning?” asked Alvin.
“Don’t dare try,” said the grinning man. “Bad stuff happens to me when I don’t smile.”
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