“Yes,” Connie replies wistfully. His larynx contracts. - And her daughter.
Valerie sympathetically puts a hand on his arm.
“If I don't find green, maybe we can somehow fake it.”
- Oh Valerie, Valerie! How I wish I would never take spiritual dignity!
- We will mix yellow with orange. I'm sorry, Father.
“How I wish this cup passed me!”
- I mean - yellow with blue.
Connie wraps her hand around the font, hugging her like he could hug a frightened child.
“Please, stay with me.”
Together they go through the sharp, jagged, March air and, reaching the intersection with Warren Avenue, turn into a dilapidated pile of bricks with a sign "No. 47". It's dark in the hallway, like in a crypt. Turning on the flashlight, Connie leads it upward until he distinguishes a piece of paper with the inscription "A. Dunphy," stuck on a rumpled mailbox. He climbs the stairs to apartment 8C, the parishioner follows him on the heels. On the third landing, Connie stops to catch her breath. On the sixth, he places a font on the ground. Valerie wipes his forehead with the sleeve of the parka, then she picks up his font, and they continue their climb.
Angela Dunphy's door was corroded by a woodworker, cracked and hung on one hinge. From their knocking, it swings open by itself.
Upon entering, they find themselves in the kitchen - a tight musty space that could cause claustrophobia if it were not so poorly furnished. A saucepan hangs over a gas stove, a frying pan is placed on top of the refrigerator, the floor is a motley cluster of slivers, pieces of ruberoid and leprosy linoleum flakes. Valerie lowers the font next to the sink. Connie observes that the container in which Angela Dunphy washes dishes is actually even smaller than the one that the Church of Immediate Conception uses to grant infertility immortality.
On tiptoe he goes into the bedroom. The parishioner is fast asleep, her terry bathrobe is half open, giving way to a sleepy sucking child; milk flows from her breasts, tracing belly with white streams. Now he needs to move, quickly and decisively, so that there is no struggle, no melodramatic repetition of the scene from the First Book of Kings, chapter 3, verse 27 - a desperate harlot trying to wrest her child from the Solomon swordsmen.
Holding her breath, Connie leans over to the bed and, with the dexterity of caress, stretching the contents of the egg, removes the barren girl from the folds of her dressing gown and takes her to the kitchen.
Valerie with a grim face sits on a shaky three-legged stool near the refrigerator.
“O beloved children, since all human beings descend into this world, dwelling in sin,” Connie whispers, looking at Valerie with a wary look, “and since they cannot know the goodness of our Lord except by being born again from water,” he puts child on the floor at the feet of Valerie - I urge you to appeal to the Lord the Father, so that through this baptism, Merribell Dunphy could find the Kingdom of God!
“Just don't call me,” Valerie cuts off.
Connie fills the pan, pours water into the font and returns to the sink for the next portion. This is not quite holy water, he muses, and far from peaceful, but at the same time it is likely that it is not typhoid; the best that the unpaid Boston Water Authority can offer. He pours his burden into the font, then brings another.
The face of Merribell is opened by a wide milk yawn, but she does not scream.
Finally, the vessel is full.
“Bless these waters, Lord, that they may bestow eternal life on this sinner!”
Kneeling, Connie begins to unwind the baby's diaper. The first pin is unfastened easily. When he begins to tinker with the second, her tip pierces the flesh of the thumb. “Here is the crown of thorns,” he decides, feeling a prick and seeing blood.
The priest carries a naked child to the font. After wetting his punctured finger, he puts it on Merribell's forehead and draws a sacred plus with a mixture of water and blood.
- We welcome this sinner that now joins the mystical body of Christ, and mark her with the sign of the Cross of Christ.
He begins to dive. The back of the head ... ears ... cheeks ... mouth ... eyes ... Oh God, what a monstrous trust - this power to sign for the human soul!
“Merribell Dunphy, I'm baptizing you in the name of the Father ...”
And then nausea comes; it devastates the digestive tract of Stephen, kneeling in front of the porcelain toilet. His sin pours out of him in a burning stream - acid-soaked strips of cabbage, caustic lumps of potato, sticky threads of bile. However, he knows that all this suffering is nothing compared to what he has to endure upon the transition from this world to the next one.
Devastated, he walks to the bedroom with wrong steps. Kate somehow managed to get the older children to school before crashing down on the floor next to the baby. She shudders from bouts of remorse. Screams and laughter are rushing from the children's room: preschoolers hoarse from a squeal are busy playing the blind-man's glasses.
“Fresh machines,” she mutters. Her voice sounds exhausted, lifeless. She lights a cigarette. - Sinning sinners like ...
Will it help him if he drinks another rum, estimates Stephen, or will it only get worse? He holds out his hand. Having run over the night table, his fingers touch the capsule of aspirin, touch the canned Epigaea repens and squeeze on the neck of a half-empty bottle of Erbutus. The red cockroach hurries away, crossing the napkin.
“I left Willy at home today,” Kate says, taking a drag. “He says his stomach hurts.”
Raising the bottle, Stephen for the first time notices that a paragraph of the printed text entitled "The History of Erbutus Creeping" is placed on its sticker.
- His stomach always hurts.
He is looking through an article written rather frivolously.
“I think he is telling the truth.”
Epigaea repens. Erbutus creeping. May color. Suddenly, everything becomes clear to him.
- What is today's date? - asks Stephen.
- Sixteenth.
“The sixteenth of March?”
- Well yes.
“So tomorrow is St. Patrick's Day? ”
- Yes, so what?
“Tomorrow is St. Patrick's Day, ”Stephen, like an auctioneer accepting the final price, bangs a bottle on the night table,“ and tomorrow Valerie Galloger leaves Boston Island! ”
“Former Roger teacher?” Is leaving?
- Leaving! - Grabbing a canned flower, he shakes it in the face of his wife. - Leaving ...
* * *
“... Son,” Connie says, raising a gurgling child out of the water, “and the Holy Spirit.”
Merribell Dunphy screeches and wriggles. She glides in his hands like a bar of soap. Connie somehow manages to wrap her in a dish towel and shoves her into Valerie's arms.
“Would you like me to say who you are?” She tells him.
“I'm Father Cornelius Dennis Monegan from Charleston Ward.”
“You are a tired and confused pilgrim, Father.” You are as tired a traveler as I am.
Angela Dunphy rushing in milk stumbles into the kitchen. At the sight of a priest she recoils back. Her mouth opens and a howl breaks out from him - according to Connie's ideas, such cries emit sinners spinning on the skewers of the Underworld.
- No! Don't need her either! Merribell! No !!
“Your child is safe and sound,” Valerie reassures her.
Connie squeezes his palms together, clutching his fingers in agony and entreaty. He moves forward; his knees hit the floor, crunching into the broken linoleum with a crunch.
- I beg you! He cries.
Angela snatches Valerie Merribell and puts a screaming child on her chest.
- Oh, Merribell ... Merribell ...
- I beg you! - Connie's voice sounds hoarse and torn, as if he had been shot through the larynx. “I beg you ... I beg,” he pleads. Tears roll from his eyes, tickling his cheeks and falling to the floor.
“It's not her job to let you go,” Valerie says.
Connie pu
lls the snot back into his nose.
- Sure.
“The ship is leaving tomorrow.”
- A ship? - Connie puts a sleeve to his face, blotting tears.
“A rescue ship,” the parishioner explains to the priest. She puts her hands under his arms, inch by inch, lifts him to his feet. “The ship of salvation, almost Noah's ark.”
* * *
- Mom, I want to go home!
- Say it to your stepfather.
- There is cold!
- I know, my heart.
- And it's dark!
- Try to be patient.
- Mom, my stomach hurts!
- Poor.
- And the head!
- Do you want an aspirin?
- I want to go home!
“Isn't that a mistake?” Stephen doubts. Shouldn't they all be in their bed now instead of wandering here in the night fog, at the risk of catching a cold, and possibly pneumonia? However, he does not lose faith. Somewhere here, among the labyrinth of Khusak docks, in the pungent smell of the salty wind and the stink of rotting cod, the very ship is waiting for them.
Leading his wife, stepsons and stepdaughters along berth number seven, he carefully examines the scows and barges standing here, tugboats and trawlers, refrigerators and bulk carriers. Seagulls and cormorants roar over the marinas, piercing their eternal disapproval of the world piercingly. On the other side of the canal, illuminated by sodium floodlights, in its usual place near the Charleston shipyard, the Constitution is swaying on the waves of the USS [12].
“Why did we come here at all?” Beatrice asks.
“Your stepfather knows what he's doing,” Kate holds the baby tighter to her chest, protecting him from the sea breeze.
“What is this ship even called?” - asks Roger.
“Mayflower [13]," replies Stephen.
Epigaea repens, Erbutus creeping, May flower.
- How is it spelled? - insists Roger.
- Um ...
- ... flao-er-r?
- Well done, Roger, I realized! - praises Stephen.
“I read it!” The boy explains indignantly, pointing with his right mitt in front of him.
Fifty yards away, moored between a tanker and some wreck, a battered cargo ship sways in the rising tide. A single word is visible at its stern - "Mayflower." The name, meaning for the inhabitants of Boston Island, is much more than just the sum of the letters that make it up.
“Now are we going home?” - asks Roger.
“No,” says Stephen. He taught this story countless times: sending separatists from England to Virginia ... their dangerous journey ... unplanned landing on Plymouth Rock ... signing an agreement according to which the non-separatists on board were obligated to obey any rules established by the separatists. “Now we will go on a beautiful and long journey.”
“On this thing?” “Willie asks.”
- Are you kidding! - says Laura.
- Not me! - says Claude.
- Do not even think! - says Yolanda.
“Sayonara [14],” says Tommy.
“It seems like I'm going to be sick,” Beatrice says.
“It's not for you to decide,” Stephen answers his adoptive children. He examines the hull, spotted from rust, nostrilized from decay - another victim of the Flood. One of the passengers, in which he recognizes his neighbor Michael Hines, leans out of the window, like a dog looking out of a booth. - Up to further orders, I establish the rules here.
Half by persuasion, half by coercion, he leads his disgruntled family down the gangway up to the quarterdeck, where they are met by a squat man in an orange raincoat and a brown shift cap and demands a ticket from them.
- Happy St. Patrick's Day! - says Stephen, solemnly waving a canned flower.
“We place you guys on the tank,” a man shouts through the grunts of idling engines. “You can hide behind the piano there.” At ten o'clock you will bring bran pancakes and coffee.
While Stephen and his children are dragging a single bar up the bow ladder, the Mayflower team gives the moorings and lifts the anchors, preparing the ship for sailing. Engines are gaining momentum, smoke is pouring from two pipes of the ship. Sunlight begins to ooze over the bay, staining the eastern part of the sky with a hot blush and making the island's multi-window skyscrapers sparkle like New Year trees.
The brisk boat of the Guard of Immortality slides past, heading to the berths and obviously not suspecting that enemies of the non-conceived are hiding in two steps from it.
Slowly, carefully, Stephen makes his way through the labyrinth of wooden packing crates - it seems that today all the pianos are taken out of the Boston Island to the last - until it finally reaches the bulwark on the right side of the ship. His fingers close on the handrail, the Mayflower, meanwhile, picks up speed and passes banks, maneuvering among the reefs, like a slalomist descending from a mountain.
- Hi, Steaven! - A full woman emerges from somewhere near him and kisses him briefly on the cheek.
He swallows and blinks, like a man who crawled out into the sunlight from the darkness of the copulation. The presence of Valerie Galloger at the May Flowers does not surprise him, but he is puzzled at the sight of the people who accompany her. Angela Dunphy, breastfeeding baby Merribell. Her cousin Lorna, still stressed pregnant. And also - and this strikes him the most - Father Monaghan, leaning his fragile body on the baptismal font.
- What, with us? .. you? .. - stammers, begins Stephen.
“My blood told me,” Valerie Galloger answers; her red hair flutters like a banner. - In nine months I will give life to our child.
Immediately after this, the sky above Stephen's head is filled with swarms of tiny black birds. No, not the birds, he understands: these are devices. Ovulation meters cut through the air - at first only a few pieces, then tens, then hundreds, followed by an appropriate number of sperm counters. While these small mechanisms splash into the water and drown, covering the bottom of the harbor, like smuggled tea at one of the earlier moments of the Boston rebellion [15], there are loud but felt joyful exclamations among the stowaways.
- Hello, Father Monaghan. - Stephen unfastens his sperm counter. “I did not expect to see you here.”
The priest smiles languidly, drumming his fingers along the edge of the font.
“Valerie told me that you were going to be a father again.” Congratulations
“Instinct tells me it's a boy,” says Stephen, bending over the railing. “He will receive two candies each by Christmas,” the tired pilgrim announces with a pale smile, breaking the chains chained to the future with a sharp movement of his hand.
“If I don't do it now,” Connie thinks, turning to Valerie Galloger, “I will never again be able to gain courage.”
- Do we have a destination? He asks. Like a bear preparing to climb a tree, he wraps his arms around the font, clutching it to his chest.
“Only the goal,” Valerie traces the horizon with a broad gesture. “We will not find Eden, holy father.” The entire Baltimore reef is now a swarming mass of flesh; newborns fill it from coast to coast. - She takes off her ovulation and throws it overboard. - On the shoals of Minneapolis, the local Guard, as a rule, throws homosexuals and women who have lost menstruation into the sea. In the California archipelago, male parishioners regularly undergo potency tests and ...
- And the islands of Atlanta?
- A real nightmare.
- Miami Island?
“Don't even think.”
Connie puts the font on top of the bulwark, then perches himself on the railing, riding on them like a child swinging on a blackboard. A strong chain rings around the font, its steel links glisten in the light of the rising sun.
“Then where are we going?”
“East,” Valerie says. - To Europe ... What are you doing?
“East,” Connie repeats, handling the font in the sea. - To Europe.
A muffled splash echoes through the harbor. The font disappears into the water, dragging a chain.
- Holy father!
Taking a deep breath in the chest, Connie watches the chain. A spiral of steel links unwinds smoothly and swiftly, like a coiled rattlesnake rushing to a victim. The chain is pulled. Connie feels an iron handcuff grab his ankle. He flips overboard. He is falling.
“Bless these waters, Lord, that they may bestow eternal life on this sinner ...”
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