You Don't Know Beans
So Jack walks into a bar and he says
"I've got 5 beans. Who's with me?"
Nobody says anything at first. But
then some guy says "lemme see 'em."
Jack shows him the beans and the guy
says "You pay for these?"
"These ain't no ordinary beans,"
says Jack "these here are magic beans." He goes on like
this, and pretty soon a few guys go with him.
*
The next morning we see this giant
beanstalk coming out of the ground. Five trunks are braided and
they're covered with throbbing veins that pump water up out of the
earth. The dang thing shades half the town. Jack's mother says she
doesn't know where he is.
So we wait a few days, but nothing
happens except mushrooms are coming up everywhere and the corn isn't
growing, what with dense shadow covering most of the arable land
north of Jack's mother's house.
At first light on the seventh day we
start in on the beanstalk. It's slow going. Then we get the idea of
cutting through some of the vein-like things. Water spurts out like
blood, and after a while the whole stalk kinda starts to deflate. We
also mix up some salt water and squirt it up some of the tubes. Late
in the evening a couple of things fall out of the sky. Some kid
comes running up a few minutes later to tell us that bean pods 12
feet long are falling on the north side of town. One of them crashed
right through the roof of the dentist's house. We gotta stop he
says.
"No way," I tell him. "You
tell Doc Wilson we'll be over to fix his roof after we're done here."
We keep going, and sometime after dark
the thing starts to give. Longitudinal fibers are cracking like
cannon shot and soon the noise is so steady we are half deaf. Maybe
that's why, it already being dark and all, we don't realize at first
when the stalk comes down.
The ground jumps and a tremendous cloud
of dust explodes away from the stricken stalk. Things get quiet, and
we feel pretty good until Jimmy the butcher, said "Where you
figure it landed?" Don't really know what to say after that.
*
The beanstalk took out a good fifth of
the town, but I still say it was a small price to pay. And we did
get a few tons of beans out of it. But I do wonder what happened to
Jack and the others, up above the sky.
Publ. Daily Cabal 2007
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