Jacob's Children, Chapter One

Long, long ago, in a place not so far from here lived a man named Jacob. Jacob was enormously fat. Now, when I say he was gargantuan, I do not mean to say he was merely overweight or obese or rather round or pleasingly plump or rotund. No, Jacob was a man of huge girth, so much so that for many years before his death, he was unable to leave his house; indeed, he could not even leave his bed. He required round-the-clock nursing to do for him what he could no longer do for himself, which was just about everything.

Jacob was dearly loved in his village, though, and the nursing of him was taken in turns by the village women (for this was a time long before men would have considered doing such a thing, though many of them secretly longed to). It might even be said that the women were eager to do this service for Jacob and could be heard humming about their homes all the day before going to his house for their place in the rotation. To someone from outside the village this might have seemed a great mystery, for what they would have seen is an enormity of a man who could do very little, who was incapable of so much as playing a hand of cards or taking the opposing side in a chess match. He was a sweet-natured man and this would no doubt account, in a stranger's mind, for much of the attraction, but not for such devotion over such a long period of time. In the end, such a person would have to simply walk away, shaking his head in consternation.

But, in fact, there were no such strangers in Jacob's village, for it was well off the beaten path and very few other than its inhabitants ever cast a shadow in its streets. So, there really wasn't anyone to call this queer arrangement into question and no one in the village could recall a time when it was otherwise. Thus it went on for many years.

One of the odd facts reported by the women was that, though they lovingly prepared meals for Jacob, he never ate much at all. As the years wore on, it became more and more mysterious not only how he maintained his bulk, but how he sustained life at all. Before he became bedridden this had been a subject of some gossip, for when he shopped in the village market or harvested items from his garden or hunted the woods for rabbits or squirrels, he was always seen to have only a small amount of food, too small for a man of his increasing size. Of course, the gossip said that he must have stashes of food about his house, that somehow or another he smuggled things in when no one was watching or had them delivered from the city by post. Never mind that he never received any packages (or indeed, much of anything at all) at the village post office; gossip never has been one to rely upon facts for its fuel.

In any case, after he became confined to his bed, it became clear there was no secret stash of food to which he could have had access, for he could not have gotten to it even if it had existed. Some of the more cruel tongues wagged that he could have hidden entire banquets in all those folds of flesh, but it required only one withering glance from a village woman to quell this kind of talk, for of course they had each washed, lovingly and with great care, each of those folds, mounds, hillocks, valleys, moraines of flesh and knew better. So the mystery remained.

Chapter Two is here.