Diminishing Returns
Joshua E. AbramsIt all started with three beans. Three little beans, dark brown with white speckled spots. Three little beans, simple enough in form and function, but what a function! Who knew what those little beans could do?
Jack knew least of all. He should have known better, but starvation does strange things to a person. Jack should have been smarter not to give his cow away, but, in his hunger-addled mind, he thought he'd made the smarter deal. The cow was a miserable beast, too sickly for milk, too skinny for meat. Three beans, in comparison, were an investment. They were something to plant, something to harvest. Three beans, to Jack, were the right-sized crop for lean times, requiring nothing but a little soil and water, however precious water may be.
These were, at least, his thoughts when the old man offered his beans to trade.He opened a small cloth pouch and dropped them into his dirty palm, holding them up for the boy to see. These are special beans, the old man intoned. They’ll grow long and strong, he said, put some food on your plate once in a while.
Jack stared at the three dark brown, white-speckled beans. He had doubts - he was offended by the meager offer, at first, when the old man sidled up to him at the market and offered a few beans for the cow - but, as he looked at them, the stranger's words began to make sense. These beans you can eat, he said. That cow you can't. These beans will grow fast, little work, little care, give you enough to live on. These are special beans, he said, guaranteed to take care of you, give you everything you need. More than you need, or think you do.
These beans are all you need. Magic beans, the old man said, half rant, half chant, and Jack began to come around.
He took them. He handed over his cow, dropped the beans into their pouch, and tied the pouch to his belt. Good choice, the old man cackled, then pulled the boy close, drew his mouth near Jack's ear and whispered, Just don't plant them too near each other. Keep them apart. Far apart.
Jack plodded home with his earnings, the man's odd words ringing in his ears. He was less sure of the exchange with every step, wondering just how much benefit three little beans could bring, after all. But one must make the most of one's decisions, even the bad ones, so he shrugged his bony shoulders and hoped for the best.
When Jack came home and displayed the three little brown beans on the table, his mother saw in them her family's destitution. She had waited all day for her son's return, praying for profit. She took no stock in magic beans and knew not whom to beat, her idiot son or the mother who raised him. She put the question to him simply but with menace: How can you plant beans in a drought?
Rain had not fallen in their poor country for years. Plants burned up under the cloudless, windless sky. Farms turned to dust, people into skeletons. The land was hard and cracked. Many who survived wished that they hadn't, but remaining alive, did their best to stay so. For Jack and his mother, selling the cow was a final stop-gap before their pauperization. But now, with three beans on the kitchen table, nothing was left but to cry and starve.
The haggard woman slapped poor Jack across the face, croaking, You stupid boy, you've turned us into beggars. But Mother, the boy cried, eyes wet, his cheek burning, these are magic beans!
He wanted to describe the old man to her, relate the story, the half-rant, half-chant, how reasonable it all seemed, but her hand struck him again. You will get our cow back, boy, she said. You will take those beans and find that man and get our cow back. She threw the empty pouch at her son. You will go tomorrow at daybreak and retrieve our cow.
Jack spent the night outside, on the stoop, gripping the small pouch of beans in his hand. His mother banished him from the house so he sat by the door and stared up at the stars. The full moon began to climb through the heavens, its gray light falling on the tortured land. Moonlight illuminated the small shed where they once kept their cow. Jack looked at it and recalled the old man. Magic beans, he thought.
Jack stood up and went behind the house to his mother's old vegetable patch. He cleared the ground, pulling out the dead stumps of failed harvests, breaking up the hard clumps of dirt, turning the dusty soil over with his hands. He made three small holes with his finger, spacing them several feet from one another, and dropped a bean into each. Jack covered the holes and patted them down. He drew the lid from their small well and let the bucket down, lowering it slowly to keep it from rattling and waking his mother. What he drew was more mud than water, but it was wet enough. Jack watered his crop. Then he crawled up onto the stoop and fell asleep.
He awoke at daybreak the next morning, remorseful and ready to dig the beans back up. It was a long walk back to the town, but Jack would retrieve the three magic beans from the barren earth and get his cow back. He pushed himself up from the stoop and went behind the house to his mother's vegetable patch.
Three bright green shoots grew where he had planted three brown beans with speckled white spots the night before.
He fell to his knees. He blinked rapidly, agape, then scampered wildly up to the shoots on his hands and knees. Each shoot was a finger's-width thick and half a foot high, buds on the stems, looking as healthy and strong as any crop after a good rain. Magic beans, Jack thought, as frightened as he was excited.
The magic beanstalks grew higher with every passing day. They thrived on little water and blazing sun. Their growth was, in fact, disproportionate to all reason. Within a week there were enough beans for Jack and his mother to eat. Within two more they had enough to feed their neighbors. Within a month the stalks were higher than the house; within another they stretched up into the sky.
Jack's mother forgave him as soon as she saw the three strong shoots that first morning, once she could believe her eyes. Jack smiled for the first time in a very long while to have his mother's approval. He felt more adult to have made a good trade, to be able to provide for his mother.
The beans were moist and tasty, good to eat raw or cooked. They stored well, remained fresh for weeks. His mother fried them in oil, seasoned them with salt, or mashed them and baked them into small cakes. Raw they were almost juicy, the perfect food for parched times. Jack's body filled out. His cheeks gained color.
Neighbors came from miles around to see the magic beanstalks that grew where nothing else would. Some came to gawk, some to beg. None of them went away empty-handed.
Jack shared beans with every comer. He could not afford not to. Beans fell day and night from the stalks and covered the ground. They fell on the roof, pattering like hailstones, hundreds of little beans (solid brown, unspeckled) tapping on the cracked, wooden shingles every hour. They flooded the market, enough to fill stomachs for miles around, enough to barter with, to trade. Their moistness and meatiness gave them currency, better than gold.
Jack shared advice as freely as his beans. He told anyone who asked how to plant them - behind the house, beneath a full moon, with a quarter-bucket of mud and a heart swollen with despair. His neighbors planted their solid brown, unspeckled beans everywhere, following Jack's instructions, adding rituals of their own. Some said prayers, others touched the beans to their nose. Nothing worked. Across the entire dusty countryside only three stalks grew.
Suspicions, inevitably, grew, as well. By the end of the forth month, as the stalks entwined with one another into a single, braided trunk, as beans pelted the house day and night from above, Jack and his mother found themselves under siege from below. The neighbors’ unease over their bean monopoly surpassed any gratitude for the free food. People grumbled accusations of sorcery, of hoarding secrets, of lording over their neighbors, of scheming to put the whole country into debt. Jack told and retold the story of the old man, of the cow and the three speckled, brown beans, the half-rant, half-chant, but people stopped believing him. No one recalled any such man, nor did the poor, starved cow ever appear again. Jack’s reputation plummeted, though no one refused his charity.
It was on a particularly fiery, dry day that a crowd gathered outside Jack’s gate. The three intertwined stalks, planted too close together, stretched far into the sky, beyond human vision. Beans fell in a gentle drizzle over the land, bouncing as they hit the solid ground. Jack bounded around his yard with a wheelbarrow and a shovel, scooping beans with a swift, powerful movement learned by months of practice. His mother sat at their stoop, pouring beans into burlap sacks, sighing to herself, unsure of what sort of blessing she had been burdened with.
Jack pushed the wheelbarrow toward the visitors, welcoming them with a sweaty brow, his face flushed and full, greeting them with an offer of beans, as many as they needed.
We're taking over, the tallest of them (walleyed, chinless) grunted, by way of greeting.
The crowd, a dozen strong, grumbled threatingly.
Step aside, the walleye demanded, or we'll push you down.
Jack, his hearing addled by months of beans thundering on his roof, cupped his ears, leaned over the wooden fence, asked, What?
The walleye shoved the boy's face in with his palm, sent him sprawling backwards onto the ground. The crowd pushed through the fence and put upon the boy. Two grabbed his mother, who ran up to them screaming, and stuffed her into a burlap bag.
Jack hollered and kicked, the food and the work making him stronger than his attackers. He threw one off, pushed down another, and ran to his mother. The boy heaved past her assailants, hefted her - still in the sack - over his shoulder, and ran.
The mob took off after him. As they ran beans seemed to rain down harder, pelting them in a brown, unspeckled torrent. The men tripped over them like banana peels. Two blindly collided into one another. The walleye tripped over Jack's shovel and was knocked senseless against the hard, furrowed ground. Another man, a concave asthmatic, collapsed, out of breath, into the wheelbarrow. The falling beans beat against the attackers’ skulls, confounding their pursuit, and they lost sight of Jack as he slipped behind the house.
When the mob made their way to the back of the house, they found no one. They ran to the shed where Jack's starved cow once lived, they ran inside the house, one even tried to climb the roof, but the boy and his mother were nowhere to be seen. Could they have looked up, through the flood of falling beans, they would have seen a figure climbing, pushing through the leaves, the curling, twining vines, a burlap sack flung over his shoulder.
The boy pulled himself up the beanstalk with tears in his eyes. He climbed higher than the houses and the dead trees. He climbed past the shouts and chaos on the ground, past the sound of thundering beans, up to where the air was cooler and a dry but pleasant breeze rustled through the leaves. He climbed higher than human sight could go, his poor mother still tucked in the sack. Jack climbed until he was exhausted, and then he collapsed onto a broad leaf. Mother, he gasped, pulling her from the burlap, grasping her hand, patting her cheek, Mother, what should we do? He shook her, gently, by the shoulders, squeezed her arms, but when she would not move, or wake, or breathe, he understood that the woman was dead.
Jack lay there, holding onto his mother, for a long time. He lay there beyond the count of minutes, beyond the count of hours. He lay there with the leaves rustling and beans falling for what could have been days, though the sun never moved from the sky. Jack lay there until all the grief was drained out of him, and all of the fear. When he placed his mother’s head down on the greenery, covering her body with the burlap sack, he was no longer his mother’s scared, young son, no longer a child at all.
He leaned over and looked down at the distant ground. The leaves and falling beans obscured his view, but he could recognize the countryside stretching out below. In every direction, as far as he could see, the land was brown and drab, a wasted, desert landscape. Jack then twisted his body and stared into the bright sky. The beanstalk stretched up, past his line of sight, twisting and curling, into the far heights of the heavens.
Everything leads to something, Jack thought, and a giant beanstalk could not be any different.
Down versus up; the choice was obvious. With one last look at his mother's covered remains, he found a branch to hoist himself up.
As he climbed, he remembered the old man. Magic beans, Jack repeated to himself, like a promise, looking ahead, up into the distance.
Joshua E. Abrams lives and works in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, but wishes he were in an attic in Brooklyn. He has published fiction previously on Reflection's Edge, and journalism in other print and online publications. A recent commentary piece may be found on nthposition.com.