Bible Stories for Adults by James Morrow Read Free Book Online

asked.
    My wife didn’t answer.
    You’ve heard the rest. How Dr. Borealis knew somebody who knew somebody, and suddenly we were seeing Senator Caracalla on C-Span, reading the last twelve issues of
Down to Earth
, the whole story of Zenobia’s year among us, into the
Congressional Record.
    Remember what President Tait told the newspapers the day he signed the Caracalla Conservation Act into law? “Sometimes all you need is a pertinent parable,” he said. “Sometimes all you need is the right metaphor,” our chief executive informed us.
    The Earth is not our mother.
    Quite the opposite.
    That particular night, however, standing outside Asa’s room, Polly and I weren’t thinking about metaphors. We were thinking about how much we wanted Zenobia back. We’re pretty good parents, Polly and I. Look at our kids.
    We winked at each other, tiptoed down the hall, and climbed into bed. Our bodies pressed together, and we laughed out loud. I’ve always loved my wife’s smell; she’s like some big floppy mushroom you came across in the woods when you were six years old, all sweet and damp and forbidden. We kept on pressing, and it kept feeling better and better. We were hoping for another girl.

Known But to God and Wilbur Hines
    M Y KEEPER faces east, his gaze lifting above the treetops and traveling across the national necropolis clear to the glassy Potomac. His bayonet rises into the morning sky, as if to skewer the sun. In his mind he ticks off the seconds, one for each shell in a twenty-one-gun salute.
    Being dead has its advantages. True, my pickled flesh is locked away inside this cold marble box, but my senses float free, as if they were orbiting satellites beaming back snippets of the world. I see the city, dense with black citizens and white marble. I smell the Virginia air, the ripe grass, the river’s scum. I hear my keeper’s boots as he pivots south, the echo of his heels coming together: two clicks, always two, like a telegrapher transmitting an eternal
I.
    My keeper pretends not to notice the crowd—the fifth graders, Rotarians, garden clubbers, random tourists. Occasionally he catches a cub scout’s bright yellow bandanna or a punker’s pink mohawk. “Known but to God,” it says on my tomb. Not true, for I’m known to myself as well. I understand Wilbur Simpson Hines perfectly.
    Thock, thock, thock goes my keeper’s Springfield as he transfers it from his left shoulder to his right. He pauses, twenty-one seconds again, then marches south twenty-one paces down the narrow black path, protecting me from the Bethesda Golden Age Society and the Glen Echo Lions Club.
    I joined the army to learn how to kill my father. An irony: the only time the old man ever showed a glimmer of satisfaction with me occurred when I announced I was dropping out of college and enlisting. He thought I wanted to make the world safe for democracy, when in fact I wanted to make it safe from him. I intended to sign up under a false name. Become competent with a rifle. Then one night, while my father slept, I would sneak away from basic training, press the muzzle to his head—Harry Hines the hot-blooded Pennsylvania farmer, laying into me with his divining rod till my back was freckled with slivers of hazelwood—and blow him straight to Satan’s backyard. You see how irrational I was in those days? The tomb has smoothed me out. There’s no treatment like this box, no therapy like death.
    Click, click, my keeper faces east. He pauses for twenty-one seconds, watching the morning mist hovering above the river.
    â€œI want to be a doughboy,” I told them at the Boalsburg Recruiting Station. They parceled me. Name: Bill Johnson. Address: Bellefonte YMCA. Complexion: fair. Eye color: blue. Hair: red.
    â€œGet on the scales,” they said.
    They measured me, and for a few dicey minutes I feared that, being short and scrawny—my father always