The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror(15)
“I have striven with God—if you are not God, as I suspect, you have at least been sent by God, for there is nothing quite right about you,” Jacob said, “and I have prevailed.” He was breathing quite heavily by then, and I could smell the red in his lungs.
Then he said, “I will not let you go unless you bless me,” which I’ll admit took me by surprise. Well, I’m not authorized to give blessings like that, and no one had told me to go down and bless him. I was supposed to wrestle with him until the breaking of the day, no more and no less, so I didn’t say anything, and I didn’t let go of him either. If I’m honest, I suppose I didn’t really want to bless him at that point. I think I may have been offended.
After a little while had passed, Jacob spoke again. “Please tell me your name.” Well, I hadn’t been authorized to do that either, even though ordinarily I’m cleared to speak the true names of most things, including seven of the most private names of God. But I didn’t believe Jacob had any jurisdiction over me—I still don’t—and so I said nothing. And then he said nothing, and I still said nothing, and he didn’t let me go, and I didn’t let him go, and that went on for quite some time. It grew very tiresome after a while, and he wept and shivered a great deal. Finally he stopped weeping and shivering. I left his body where we had been wrestling, when it was over; presumably he is buried there now, or else in some other place. Ultimately he has been reconciled to God, so there’s no point in speculating what other outcomes may have been possible. God reconciles everybody.
You are probably thinking I must have violated some ordinance, as I am not normally authorized to deal out death. I want to make it very clear that I do not believe I have broken any rules, and no one in my chain of command has ever expressed anything other than satisfaction with my methods. I am not rebellious. If I had overstepped my bounds, someone would have said something. I was not authorized to either kill the man or bless him, and so I did neither. He died because he would not let go of me. It is not my fault that a man cannot prevail against a principality and a power. No man ever has. I keep telling them not to be afraid, and they shouldn’t be, but nobody ever listens to me; I don’t think that’s my fault either. Anyhow, that was all a long time ago now.
FOUR
The Six Boy-Coffins
Once there was a little girl who tried very hard not to be born. Her father, the king, and her mother, the king’s wife, had six children already—all sons. Together they were happy. As the boys grew and took their first steps from the schoolroom to the field, the king realized that they would someday turn into men. Six sons were one thing. Six men were quite another. A king could love his little children; but what could he do with deep-voiced, straight-backed men? And what could a kingdom do with six kings? (He was thinking, perhaps, of his own brothers.)
So one day, the king said to his wife, “If the next child you bear me is a girl, then let the six others die, so that our wealth need not be divided and that she alone may inherit the kingdom.” He tousled the hair of their youngest son, who was called Elyas, and who always sat nearest to him, as he said it. And the king’s wife said, “It shall be as you say,” because it always was.
“Had my own brothers lived,” the king said, “they should certainly have tried to harm our own children and stifle our peace.” His own brothers, however, had not lived. It was an important task of kingship, determining when brothers and sons were no longer necessary.
And his wife said it was true, what he said, because it was.
The king ordered six small coffins to be made of yew by the city’s finest carpenters, and fitted each with a fine goose-down pillow and clean-smelling wood shavings. Even dead, the boys would be king’s sons, and he was unwilling to spare any expense.
He ordered that the boy-coffins be placed all in a line in a high-off room, distant from all other rooms in the castle. He ordered the door locked, and the only key given to his wife, whose chief employment was the production and maintenance of any of the king’s children, living or dead.
“Cheer up,” the king told his wife. “You may bear me another son yet, and then we won’t need the key after all.”
After this, at every meal, the king’s wife turned aside her plate for the king’s dogs. At night she took to walking the halls of the castle in her slippers, so that no one could hear her footsteps, fingering the iron key at the bottom of her dressing-gown pocket and whispering to the not-yet child curved like a scythe inside of her, “Don’t be born, please. Go back, if you can. There is no welcome here; find another door. Don’t be born. I cannot mother you, so please don’t be born. I would make it up to you, if I could, but I can’t, so don’t be born. If you love me, as a child should, don’t ask me to birth you.”
“The king’s wife looks drawn and pale,” the king announced over supper, looking her over carefully, “and not at all well.”
“I feel fine,” the king’s wife said. She tore off the crust from her bread and put it in her mouth. It had been so long since she had chewed and swallowed that it lay dead and heavy on her tongue. She smiled with her lips closed. “I feel very well.”
“But your health is not only your own now,” the king reminded her. “It is our child’s, and mine. A queen,” he reminded everyone else at the table, “is the foundation a king uses to build a future.”