Throwback Thursday: ‘Stalk’ by George McWhirter

I’ll tell it to you, cold as porridge.  Never mind me being a scientist and having to stay objective. I’m a Scot, and breeding behooves me to tell it so. There’s Jack. His father has a great estate, prize heifers and bulls, which his dad sells as whole animals, or eggs and sperm since the science of animal husbandry developed that end of the business. But his son’s sole interest lies in the story his daddy tells him every night about Jack and the Beanstalk. 
 
For his Dad, it’s a cautionary yarn about foolhardiness: a cow with its milk and beef being worth more than a brainless bean that doesn’t know when to quit growing. However, the idea of a giant beanstalk, grown from a magic bean ― a bean bought with the prize heifer that the farmer sends his son to sell at auction ― thrills our cattle breeder’s boy. In time, the symbiosis morphs and Jack, once the father’s fortune is bequeathed to his discretion, assigns much treasure from his father’s grazing lands and cattle labs into research for that bean. 
 
To evolve such a bean requires genetic engineering, which delights his dad when Jack takes it up. Regrettably, his bairn’s studies are not directed at animal husbandry. Jack does string the cattle dealings along behind him, on his way to the magic gene for the magic bean, which our lad, Jack, pays to discover, test and replicate in numerous laboratory trials carried out by me. He will release some proprietary right for the code to my future use, he says, on one signed condition: I never apply it to another bean.

 “Go. Breed your broccolis, as big as those trees little kids imagine them to be, but leave the beans to me. Now, call me Jack,” he enjoins me, his science serf, the lab lackey he’d leave without a bean to his name. Me, who’s rebuilt aubergines from their atoms up, using my Scanning Tunnelling Microscope to see with, and a nanoscopic needle to thread a virus with growth-boosting DNA into the gene. Me, who from the genes of prize-winning eggplants at county fairs, grew eye-poppers that gleam like pregnant Queen Latifah’s belly in a bikini. Boy, were those beasties beautiful to fondle and behold. But nae matter. I nod at him and the petri dish, where the first giant bean genes coil under the nanoscope, like convolving motifs on a Persian carpet.  

“Yes, call me Jack.” Jack grins at me. I don’t know if it’s the only grin I’ll get out of him in a while. “John Wilson Woodruff is too much of a mouthful. And JWW makes me sound like a brand of disinfectant.”

Thereafter I address him as Jack, accepting the dopey congruity between the man’s name and his life’s work, which I’ll share, mind you, to my sundry spin-off and academic benefits. At this juncture, I think it’s straight agribusiness Jack is into: big beans for big Yankee appetites. I bandy about a name for the marketing. Beans got to have names — jumping beans, kidney beans, navy beans — names that make them sound better than they taste. ‘Jack-beans’ will surely stamp out anybody’s hunger quicker than a bowl of jackboots, but I tell him the name anyway.

“I knew the Scots imagination bristled like a thistle, but keep it in your sporran and leave that side of things to the marketing department,” Jack answers me.