‘Another yard of Frazer,’ said Pa. ‘Son, I get this every damn Chris…’
They had to stop to wait for Pa to finish coughing. Roderick looked at the stars. Damn Christmas, Christmas of the damned, dead souls. Burning like candles on a tree. If everyone lit one little candle, Pa always said, we’d have a candle shortage overnight. Pa coughing out his soul in a cloud right here on earth. Spitting in the snow to leave a wren-mark. For Robbie the Bobbin. Hunted by a hawk, up it comes, somebody marking its fall. Souls escaping on a sigh.
Ma always said that souls were only held to Earth by the weight of sin, they rose up to Heaven by dropping it: giving all your pride to the Sun, all your love of money to Mercury, all your lust to Venus, all your gluttony to the Moon, all your anger to Mars, all your envy to Jupiter and all your laziness to Saturn, finally entering the astral sphere to become a pure flame, a star. Which one would be Sister Mary Martha? If Roderick had his way, she’d be the brightest, nightbright as she had been dayplain, the almost invisible virgin now crawling up the stairs of the sky (cleaning each one) to her jewelled crown.
None of them, he guessed. All just burning globs of goop, so many light-years away. And when people died, they went the same place as the mark of a wren in last year’s snow.
Pa finished his cough. ‘Okay, home! Home, to hang up our socks!’
Christmas was all in the head, Pa said (the heart, Ma corrected). So really this home-made tree was just as good as any real one, wasn’t it?
Roderick looked at it and saw tall evergreens, cut down in the mountains by singing lumberjacks, hauled to town on horse-drawn sledges with bells all over them. It was set up in a house where there were wreaths on the doors and red candles in the windows, to guide visitors who would arrive any minute in their top hats and bonnets, laughing all the way to the bank, through the banks of snow and loaded down with presents (and of course cards showing all of this), Bob Cratchit goose puddings, black servants beaming at them over silver trays of eggnogs, giant dolls and electric trains that Father would play with when not admiring his new pipe and shotgun, but not half as much as Mother admired her new automatic kitchen machinery or her genuine diamonds lasting a lifetime or her personal transit car, just right for shopping (for turkey and trimmings, gifting ideas or magazines showing all of this including cards on the mantel (showing all…)) or for getting the kids Back to School, so much easier and fun to learn with a homework computer, just coming out of that big box under the glittering tree. The tree…
At the same time, Roderick saw it was only the bottom of a cardboard box with a green triangle drawn on it and a light bulb stuck through a hole. The bulb wasn’t really connected to anything, but then it was burned out anyway. And anyway, they had to keep the power-bill down this month. And all the other bills, like food. Ma and Pa would be imagining their Christmas dinner too, and probably their presents.
All the same, they hung up three stockings on the back of three dining-room chairs. And in the morning there was stuff in them!
In Pa’s stocking there was a beautiful hand-painted certificate awarding him the Nobel Prize for Inventions. And a drop of water.
In Ma’s stocking there was a wonderful little machine to help her make up titles for her sculptures: two cardboard wheels with words on them (Forest Sneeze, Shoelace Metonymy; etc). And a drop of water.
The drops of water had been snowflakes when Roderick put them in the stockings. Ma and Pa said they could see that they’d been pretty terrific snowflakes, too.
In Roderick’s stocking was a foot.
‘Don’t look so puzzled, son.’ Pa went out to his workshop and brought in the rest of the present: a complete, full-sized adult body in pink plastic, with a gleaming stainless steel head.
‘Oh,’ said Roderick, trying to sound pleased. ‘Clothes.’
XVIII
‘Frankly, Father, I expected something like this. You would give him those Protestant books to read…’
‘Kierkegaard? But Sister, it’s just, just a book about faith, the blind leap into darkn—’
‘All the same, Father. All the same.’ Sister Filomena held out the essay by two fingers, avoiding contamination. ‘No doubt you’ll be wanting a word with him about this.’
‘Well of course I’ll speak to the boy if…’
‘Boy! Lord have mercy on us, he can’t even get his knees under the desk. He’s head and shoulders over all the other children. Yes and all the girls have been — well, looking at him. He’s just not natural.’
‘Maybe we should graduate him or something… but you know, I keep feeling I’m almost getting through to him. Oh, sinful pride maybe, but I, it’s just that I’ve never had the opportunity before to bring into the faith a ro — a person like him.’
Sister Filomena hmp’d and went away, leaving the essay on his desk. He began to read:
And so it went, through all the scenarios where Abraham, believing or doubting the voice, killed Isaac, was killed by Isaac, killed himself, killed someone else, killed an animal; where the altar (badly built) collapsed, killing them both or one of them; where a voice told him to look in a near-by thicket for his real victim (which turned out to be a ram, another son, a mirror); where he ignores the second voice and kills Isaac, and one intriguing version where, having raised the knife to strike,
Hard to blame the Springtime and glands for stuff like this. Especially when Father Warren could not yet be certain the boy had any glands.
But the girls do have glands, he reminded himself. There was a warning to be taken from the Asimov story ‘Satisfaction Guaranteed’ all right, in which a woman and a robot –
He diverted his thoughts from the subject a split-second before they became pleasurable. Well robots, then: it always came back to robots. Under his guidance the boy would read everything they could dig up, fact and fiction, about robots, androids, automata, golems, homunculi, teraphim, steam men, clockwork dancers, wooden dolls, simulacra, manikins, audioanimatrons, tachy-pomps, usaforms, sensters, mechanical chess-players, bionic men, cyborgs, marionettes that come to life, electrified monsters that murder children, chemical creations that turn against their masters, a living brain floating in a fish-tank, a malevolent computer seeking to dominate the world. If he wanted robots he’d get them: singers, housekeepers, factory hands, potato diggers, novelists, boxers, judges, surgeons, policemen, detectives, actors, carpenters, assassins, botanists, diplomats (priests?)… even scapegoats… a thousand stories twanging the same old string, that’s the way to get him off the subject, that’s the way to do it…
Roderick shifted a little in his chair. This new body with the clothes and all wasn’t so terrific all the time. If it wasn’t that Pa had worked so hard on it and made himself sick and all, Roderick would like to try putting on his old body again. Boy, he could almost feel his old treads, biting into the soil only last summer but it felt like a lifetime ago, he remembered one day when he’d stopped to rest and looked around and there were his own marks cutting right across the yard, the place where he’d dodged to miss a dandelion, the place where he’d put on speed to squash this dog-turd, he could see it all now, every detaiclass="underline" a stick with the skin off it, a bumble-bee hesitating by the dandelion, nothing lost. Nothing ever lost.