Authors: Orson Scott Card
“Yeah,” he said. He turned and walked down the stairs. She closed the door and stood there with her hand on the knob as she heard him start the car and drive away. It was hot in her apartment, with the heater on, with her coat on. She pulled it off and threw it against the door. She pulled off her sweater, her shoes, all her clothes and threw them against the walls and crawled into bed and cried, the way she used to cry when her mother didn’t let her do what she
needed
to do. Cried herself to sleep.
She woke up with the sun shining into her window. She had overslept. She was late for work. She jumped out of bed and got dressed, hurrying. Minnie will be furious. I let her down.
But by the time she had her clothes on, she knew the truth. She had overslept because in her heart she knew she was done with this place. She had no reason to get up early because working for Minnie Wilcox wasn’t her job anymore. She had found all that she was looking for when she first dropped out and went searching. Her music was back. She had something to sing about again. She could go home.
She didn’t even pack. Just took her purse with all her credit cards and walked to the post office, which was where the buses stopped. She didn’t care which one—St. Louis, Chicago, Des Moines, Cairo, Indianapolis, any bus that got her to an airport city would do. It turned out to be St. Louis.
By the time she saw the Gateway Arch she had written a song about feeding the baby of love. It turned out well enough that it got her some
decent radio airplay for the first time in years, her first top-forty single since ’75.
Tried to walk that lonely highway
Men and women, two by two
Promising, promising they will be true
You went your way, I’ll go my way
Feeling old and talking new
Whatever happened to you?
I wonder what happened to you?
Spoke to someone in the air
Heard but didn’t heed my prayer
Couldn’t feed it anyway
Didn’t have the price to pay
You got to feed the baby
Hungry, hungry, hungry baby
Got to feed the baby of love
She had her music back again, the only lover that had ever been faithful to her. Even when it tried to leave her, it always came home to her in the end.
This story was born during the months just before I got married, when I was already living in the apartment Kristine and I were going to share after the wedding. One of my favorite singer-songwriters of all time is Joni Mitchell—her music is still locked into my heart, and her lyrics pop up all the time. During those lonely months before the wedding, I was at a magazine store in downtown Salt Lake City and found a story about Joni Mitchell and read it in the store (yes, in my poverty I was that kind of “customer”).
In the story I learned that at one point she had dropped out and disappeared; the idea that came into my mind (or was it in the article?) was that she must have needed to get back on the street again, as one of her song lyrics says.
That night, playing her albums (a stack of about five records on a turntable/record changer—we’re talking the Stone Age here), I jotted the notes for a story about a rock singer who goes, not to the “street,” but to a small town in Utah, where she brings her rock ’n’ roll expectations to a place where people don’t share them. She falls in love with a young Mormon husband who loves her music and her, but at the last minute he can’t be false to his wife, can’t throw away the values that have shaped him into the kind of man this rock singer fell in love with. The idea is that you can’t have it both ways—you can’t be
this
person and have
that
experience.
I knew perfectly well that this was a seriously old-fashioned story, but it was also a true one. I was about to make some pretty serious covenants with my wife-to-be, which I intended to keep. But . . . I was also going to be pursuing a career (such was my overweening confidence) in which I might meet famous people and encounter the temptations that come to the rich and famous. I was keenly aware of all the Hollywood and New York artistic types who thought that their talent gave them a free ticket to break their word and hurt anyone they wanted to, because, after all, they were “geniuses.” So in a way, this story idea was a reminder to myself that genius excuses nothing. So what if you’re a really talented writer or actor or singer or athlete? If you’re false to your wife, if you can’t keep your word, then you still suck as a human being.
In other words, I was forewarning and, perhaps, forearming myself. Though none of that was consciously in my mind at the time, I can assure you! I simply thought of it as a cool story idea.
The trouble is, it was a cool story idea that I wasn’t ready to write. Because I wrote it. It’s a miserable little fragment called “Spider Eyes.” I’m tempted to include it here just so that you can nod your heads and say, Yep, Card’s right, that story is a real toilet-stuffer.
The problem, I see now, is that I couldn’t write the story because I had never actually been married. I was looking at marriage from the wrong direction. Starry-eyed and naive, I had no idea how hard and how powerful this thing could be. I also had no idea, really, of what the life of a professional artist of any kind could be like, how frightening it was to get up every morning knowing that if you didn’t perform
today
at least as well as you did yesterday, your career could simply disappear. So the story
I wrote then was shallow, empty, nothing, because I was too ignorant about the real world to write it.
But there it sat, in the back of my mind, waiting.
Skip a decade.
Ender’s Game
has been published. I get an invitation from LucasFilm Games to come out to “the ranch” in Marin County and consult with them on some games. They’re paying for the ticket—do you think I’m going to pass this up?
I had a great time, meeting some marvelously creative game designers and seeing how they think and plan in order to create great electronic games. But one of the best experiences wasn’t at “the ranch”—it was at the home of one of the designers, where they trotted out a game designed by Greg Johnson, who didn’t even work for LucasFilm Games.
The game was Feed the Baby of Love Many Beans or Perish in the Flames of Hell, and every scrap of gameplay in the story you just read comes from Greg’s wonderfully irreverent game. (He later made me a game board of my own so I could own it and play it, and from time to time I trot it out and we play a round of it.) The real fun of the game, however, was that beyond the gameplay itself, Greg and the other guys had surrounded it with all kinds of unrelated rituals that bound them together as a community, so that the game itself, the
outcome
of the game, was both more and less than it seemed. More, because the game had become a symbol of their camaraderie and they pretended it had magical resonance in the real world; and less, because the game itself didn’t actually matter, and nobody minded much who won and who lost.
One more element was needed before I could put things together and write a story. I was invited to take part in an anthology of stories in honor of Ray Bradbury (
The Bradbury Chronicles
, ed. William F. Nolan and Martin H. Greenberg). For this occasion, Bradbury had generously allowed a group of writers to set stories in the worlds he had created.
I knew immediately that, much as I loved his Martian and October Country stories, it was
Dandelion Wine
that I was going to visit. I loved that book. I didn’t read it as a little kid, required by teachers to put on Doug Spaulding’s sneakers—I read it in my late teens, as a sophisticated college student, and it melted me back into my childhood and made me see it through gold-colored glasses. Unlike the disillusionists of this world, who insist that the darkest of all possible views must be the “real”
one, I knew in reading
Dandelion Wine
that the truth ran the other way. Living through childhood can be difficult and painful, but in fact, with relatively rare exceptions, it is also a glorious time that we’re simply too short and too shortsighted to see. It is childhood that shapes our lives; it is the hopeful child inside us that gives us the faith that allows us to try things and achieve things in adulthood.
So, even though I was a sci-fi writer, I knew I was going to write an absolutely realistic but, I hoped, poetic story that echoed the optimism in the midst of struggle that marked
Dandelion Wine
as Bradbury’s finest writing.
And I knew, without even having to think about it, that the story I was going to write was “Spider Eyes”—only this time, Rainie Pinyon would find Douglas Spaulding as a grownup, a husband and father, vulnerable to her, drawn to her—but still determined to be the man he was supposed to be.
The trouble was that
Dandelion Wine
was set in the 1930s, and the rock ’n’ roll culture simply took place too late. It would not work.
That’s when the character of the grandfather was born.
He
was the Douglas Spaulding of
Dandelion Wine
, but the town and the world were not changed, and he wanted his grandson to hold that world together for his own children.
I knew exactly the town where I wanted the story set, too. It was Nauvoo, the onetime Mormon capital on the banks of the Mississippi, just across from the southern tip of Iowa. Not because of any Mormon connection—this time around, the hero was not going to be Mormon—but because I had visited Nauvoo and fallen in love with the slightly shabby but still living downtown, the old houses, the river just down from the bluff. I thought: This is just the kind of place where Rainie Pinyon might get off the bus and go to the café (where I had recently dined) and order their slightly crusty fried eggs and decide, I think I’ll work here for a while.
The elements were all together, and I knew it was going to be one of the best things, if not
the
best thing, I had ever written. Which scared me so much that I put off writing it for about as long as I could. The deadline for the Bradbury anthology was looming. And finally, while visiting in the home of friends in Sterling, Virginia, I sat down at their dining room table and wrote the thing in one sitting.
It was exactly what I wanted it to be.
The trouble was, it was just a short story. It appeared in the anthology and whoever read it, read it, but then it was gone. I thought of expanding it into a novel, but I was afraid the weight of it would be too much. I tried developing it as a screenplay, writing one version of it myself and then getting my friend and partner Aaron Johnston to write what turned out to be a very good draft. Someday, using ideas Aaron and I came up with for the screenplay, I may write that novel version yet.
But here’s one of the barriers. Where would I publish it?
I’m a genre writer. I’m known as a writer of kids-in-space stories. Even though I take those stories very seriously as literature—indeed, more seriously than I think most “literary” writers take their productions—it means I’m on the wrong side of the apartheid fence in the literary world. We who actually write for the joy of our readers instead of to impress them are considered tainted. I could easily get a small press to publish the book, but I would have zero chance of getting a novel version of “Feed the Baby of Love” published in a serious way by a major publisher. They have too much contempt for a genre they do not understand and for a kind of writing they and their literary community forsook long ago.
It would be so easy to add a little magic to the story and make it a contemporary fantasy. Then I could sell it without a problem.
Not a chance. Sometimes a story has to be what it is. This is one of those times.
Of course, I might be delusional here. This story might be so personal that I’m the only reader who thinks it’s as wonderful as I think it is. In which case, it’s a mercy that it
hasn’t
been available to the general public for all these years, because I’ve been allowed to maintain my illusions. I still have them, though, and intend to keep them. This story, more than any other I’ve written, tells the truth about what life is for.
The story “Feed the Baby of Love” is copyright © 1991 by Orson Scott Card. The game “Feed the Baby of Love Many Beans or Perish in the Flames of Hell” is copyright © 1990 by Greg Johnson. All quotations and game features depicted in this story are used by permission of the gamewright. The lyrics to “The Baby of Love” by Rainie Pinyon are used with the consent of the copyright holder.
The first time Alvin Maker run across the grinning man was in the steep woody hills of eastern Kenituck. Alvin was walking along with his ward, the boy Arthur Stuart, talking either deep philosophy or the best way for travelers to cook beans, I can’t bring to mind now which, when they come upon a clearing where a man was squatting on his haunches looking up into a tree. Apart from the unnatural grin upon his face, there wasn’t all that much remarkable about him, for that time and place. Dressed in buckskin, a cap made of coonhide on his head, a musket lying in the grass ready to hand—plenty of men of such youth and roughness walked the game trails of the unsettled forest in those days.