"Flaying machines," she mutters. Her tone is beaten, bloodless. She lights a cigarette. "Peeling the damned like . . ."
Will more rum help, Stephen wonders, or merely make them sicker? He extends his arm. Passing over the nightstand, his fingers touch a box of aspirin, brush the preserved Epigaea repens, and curl around the neck of the half-full Arbutus bottle. A ruddy cockroach scurries across the doily.
"I kept Willy home today," says Kate, taking a drag. "He says his stomach hurts."
As he raises the bottle, Stephen realizes for the first time that the label contains a block of type headed The Story of Trailing Arbutus. "His stomach always hurts." He studies the breezy little paragraph.
"I think he's telling the truth."
Epigaea repens. Trailing arbutus. Mayflower. And suddenly everything is clear.
"What's today's date?" asks Stephen.
"Sixteenth."
"March sixteenth?"
"Yeah."
"Then tomorrow's Saint Patrick's Day."
"So what?"
"Tomorrow's Saint Patrick's Day" – like an auctioneer accepting a final bid, Stephen slams the bottle onto the nightstand – "and Valerie Gallogher will be leaving Boston Isle."
"Roger's old teacher? Leaving?"
"Leaving." Snatching up the preserved flower, he dangles it before his wife. "Leaving . . ."
". . . and of the Son," says Connie, raising the sputtering infant from the water, "and of the Holy Ghost."
Merribell Dunfey screeches and squirms. She's slippery as a bar of soap. Connie manages to wrap her in a dish towel and shove her into Valerie's arms.
"Let me tell you who you are," she says.
"Father Cornelius Dennis Monaghan of Charlestown Parish."
"You're a tired and bewildered pilgrim, Father. You're a weary wayfarer like myself."
Dribbling milk, Angela Dunfey staggers into the kitchen. Seeing her priest, she recoils. Her mouth flies open, and a howl rushes out, a cry such as Connie imagines the damned spew forth while rotating on the spits of Perdition. "Not her too! Not Merribell! No!"
"Your baby's all right," says Valerie.
Connie clasps his hands together, fingers knotted in agony and supplication. He stoops. His knees hit the floor, crashing against the fractured linoleum. "Please," he groans.
Angela plucks Merribell from Valerie and affixes the squalling baby to her nipple. "Oh, Merribell, Merribell . . ."
"Please." Connie's voice is hoarse and jagged, as if he's been shot in the larynx. "Please . . . please," he beseeches. Tears roll from his eyes, tickling his cheeks as they fall.
"It's not her job to absolve you," says Valerie.
Connie snuffles the mucus back into his nose. "I know."
"The boat leaves tomorrow."
"Boat?" Connie runs his sleeve across his face, blotting his tears.
"A rescue vessel," his parishioner explains. Sliding her hands beneath his armpits, she raises him inch by inch to his feet. "Rather like Noah's Ark."
"Mommy, I want to go home."
"Tell that to your stepfather."
"It's cold."
"I know, sweetheart."
"And dark."
"Try to be patient."
"Mommy, my stomach hurts."
"I'm sorry."
"My head too."
"You want an aspirin?"
"I want to go home."
Is this a mistake? wonders Stephen. Shouldn't they all be in bed right now instead of tromping around in this nocturnal mist, risking flu and possibly pneumonia? And yet he has faith. Somewhere in the labyrinthine reaches of the Hoosac Docks, amid the tang of salt air and the stink of rotting cod, a ship awaits.
Guiding his wife and stepchildren down Pier 7, he studies the possibilities – the scows and barges, the tugs and trawlers, the reefers and bulk carriers. Gulls and gannets hover above the wharfs, squawking their chronic disapproval of the world. Across the channel, lit by a sodium-vapor searchlight, the USS Constitution bobs in her customary berth beside Charlestown Navy Yard.
"What're we doing here, anyway?" asks Beatrice.
"Your stepfather gets these notions in his head." Kate presses the baby tight against her chest, shielding him from the sea breeze.
"What's the name of the boat?" asks Roger.
"Mayflower," answers Stephen.
Epigaea repens, trailing arbutus, may flower.
"How do you spell it?" Roger demands.
"M-a-y . . ."
". . . f-l-o-w-e-r?"
"Good job, Roger," says Stephen.
"I read it," the boy explains indignantly, pointing straight ahead with the collective fingers of his right mitten.
Fifty yards away, moored between an oil tanker and a bait shack, a battered freighter rides the incoming tide. Her stern displays a single word, Mayflower, a name that to the inhabitants of Boston Isle means far more than the sum of its letters.
"Now can we go home?" asks Roger.
"No," says Stephen. He has taught the story countless times. The Separatists' departure from England for Virginia . . . their hazardous voyage . . . their unplanned landing on Plymouth Rock . . . the signing of the covenant whereby the non-Separatists on board agreed to obey whatever rules the Separatists imposed. "Now we can go on a nice long voyage."
"On that thing?" asks Willy.
"You're not serious," says Laura.
"Not me," says Claude.
"Forget it," says Yolanda.
"Sayonara," says Tommy.
"I think I'm going to throw up," says Beatrice.
"It's not your decision," Stephen tells his stepchildren. He stares at the ship's hull, blotched with rust, blistered with decay, another victim of the Deluge. A passenger whom he recognizes as his neighbor Michael Hines leans out a porthole like a prairie dog peering from its burrow. "Until further notice, I make all the rules."
Half by entreaty, half by coercion, he leads his disgruntled family up the gangplank and onto the quarterdeck, where a squat man in an orange raincoat and a maroon watch cap demands to see their ticket.
"Happy Saint Patrick's Day," says Stephen, flourishing the preserved blossom.
"We're putting you people on the fo'c'sle deck," the man yells above the growl of the idling engines. "You can hide behind the pianos. At ten o'clock you get a bran muffin and a cup of coffee."
As Stephen guides his stepchildren in a single file up the forward ladder, the crew of the Mayflower reels in the mooring lines and ravels up the anchor chains, setting her adrift. The engines kick in. Smoke pours from the freighter's twin stacks. Sunlight seeps across the bay, tinting the eastern sky hot pink and making the island's many-windowed towers glitter like Christmas trees.
A sleek Immortality Corps cutter glides by, headed for the wharfs, evidently unaware that enemies of the unconceived lie close at hand.
Slowly, cautiously, Stephen negotiates the maze of wooden crates – it seems as if every piano on Boston Isle is being exported today – until he reaches the starboard bulwark. As he curls his palm around the rail, the Mayflower cruises past the Mystic Shoals, maneuvering amid the rocks like a skier following a slalom course.
"Hello, Stephen." A large woman lurches into view, abruptly kissing his cheek.
He gulps, blinking like a man emerging into sunlight from the darkness of a copulatorium. Valerie Gallogher's presence on the Mayflower doesn't surprise him, but he's taken aback by her companions. Angela Dunfey, suckling little Merribell. Her cousin, Lorna, still spectacularly pregnant. And, most shocking of all, Father Monaghan, leaning his frail frame against his baptismal font.
Stephen says, "Did we . . . ? Are you . . . ?"
"My blood has spoken," Valerie Gallogher replies, her red hair flying like a pennant. "In nine months I give birth to our child."
Whereupon the sky above Stephen's head begins swarming with tiny black birds. No, not birds, he realizes: devices. Ovulation gauges sail through the air, a dozen at first, then scores, then hundreds, immediately purs
ued by equal numbers of sperm counters. As the little machines splash down and sink, darkening the harbor like the contraband tea from an earlier moment in the history of Boston insurgency, a muffled but impassioned cheer arises among the stowaways.
"Hello, Father Monaghan." Stephen unstraps his sperm counter. "Didn't expect to find you here."
The priest smiles feebly, drumming his fingers on the lip of the font. "Valerie informs me you're about to become a father again. Congratulations."
"My instincts tell me it's a boy," says Stephen, leaning over the rail. "He's going to get a second candy cane at Christmas," asserts the bewildered pilgrim as, with a wan smile and a sudden flick of his wrist, he breaks his bondage to the future.
If I don't act now, thinks Connie as he pivots toward Valerie Gallogher, I'll never find the courage again.
"Do we have a destination?" he asks. Like a bear preparing to ascend a tree, he hugs the font, pulling it against his chest.
"Only a purpose." Valerie sweeps her hand across the horizon. "We won't find any Edens out there, Father. The entire Baltimore Reef has become a wriggling mass of flesh, newborns stretching shore to shore." She removes her ovulation gauge and throws it over the side. "In the Minneapolis Keys, the Corps routinely casts homosexual men and menopausal women into the sea. On the California Archipelago, male parishioners receive periodic potency tests and – "
"The Atlanta Insularity?"
"A nightmare."
"Miami Isle?"
"Forget it."
Connie lays the font atop the bulwark, then clambers onto the rail, straddling it like a child riding a see-saw. A loop of heavyduty chain encircles the font, the steel links flashing in the rising sun. "Then what's our course?"
"East," says Valerie. "Toward Europe. What are you doing?"
"East," Connie echoes, tipping the font seaward. "Europe."
A muffled, liquid crash reverberates across the harbor. The font disappears, dragging the chain behind it.
"Father!"
Drawing in a deep breath, Connie studies the chain. The spiral of links unwinds quickly and smoothly, like a coiled rattlesnake striking its prey. The slack vanishes. Connie feels the iron shackle seize his ankle. He flips over. He falls.
"Bless these waters, O Lord, that they might grant this sinner the gift of life everlasting . . ."
"Father!"
He plunges into the harbor, penetrating its cold hard surface: an experience, he decides, not unlike throwing oneself through a plate glass window. The waters envelop him, filling his ears and stinging his eyes.
We welcome this sinner into the mystical body of Christ, and do mark him with the Sign of the Cross, Connie recites in his mind, reaching up and drawing the sacred plus sign on his forehead.
He exhales, bubble following bubble.
Cornelius Dennis Monaghan, I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, he concludes, and as the black wind sweeps through his brain, sucking him toward immortality, he knows that he's never been happier.
Timmy and Tommy's Thanksgiving Secret
Bradley Denton
Timmy and Tommy were best friends. They lived on a farm in the Great Midwest with Daddy Mike, Mama Jane, Buster and Scotty the Farm Dogs, several pigs, a few chickens, and Maybelle the Moo Cow. Timmy was five years old and belonged to Daddy Mike and Mama Jane, but Tommy was younger, and an orphan. Even worse, he couldn't talk.
But Timmy didn't feel sorry for Tommy, because Tommy was just like one of the family. Mama Jane called him Timmy's adopted brother. Tommy even went out with Timmy every morning to watch Daddy Mike milk Maybelle the Moo Cow, and Daddy Mike would surprise them both with squirts of milk in their faces.
"Ha ha!" Daddy Mike would laugh. "Look alive, there!"
Then Timmy would laugh too, and Tommy would do the best he could.
And even though Mama Jane had said that Timmy didn't have to share his room with Tommy, Timmy was glad to do it anyway. At night after they went to bed, he and Tommy whispered secrets that they promised never to tell anyone else – secrets about all the adventures they'd had together.
And oh! What adventures!
They fought pirates on the banks of Muddy Pond . . .
They chased buffalo across Grassy Meadow . . .
They explored deserts that looked just like Rocky Pasture . . .
And best of all, they scaled the dizzying heights of Towering Grain Silo.
That is, Timmy did. Tommy always refused to climb the shaky ladder. So Timmy would go up alone, and when he reached the very tip-top, he would look down and shout, "Tommy is a chicken! Tommy is a chicken!"
At this, Tommy would always look very indignant, and sometimes he would even stalk off in a huff. A chicken, indeed! What an insult!
But by bedtime, all would be forgiven, and Timmy would lie awake in bed and whisper secrets across the room to where Tommy slept on a pallet on the floor. And although Tommy couldn't talk the way normal people did, sometimes he would jabber nonsense in response to Timmy's whispers. At least, Daddy Mike said that it was nonsense, but Timmy knew better. After all, Tommy's jabbering sounded just like Mrs. Krunholtz at Sunday Church when she rolled around on the floor and spoke in tongues. And no one ever said that Mrs. Krunholtz was jabbering nonsense.
One November morning while it was still dark, Timmy woke up to the sounds of the kitchen door banging shut and Daddy Mike's boots clomping into the barnyard. Timmy was surprised. Daddy Mike got up early every morning to milk Maybelle, but never this early. Timmy didn't know what to make of it.
"Come on, Tommy!" Timmy cried, throwing off his blankets and grabbing his pint-sized coveralls from the bedpost. "Let's go see what Daddy Mike's doing! Maybe we can help!"
Tommy jabbered in agreement, and together they hurried downstairs, almost tumbling over one another in their excitement.
When they reached the kitchen, they found that Mama Jane was up and about, too. She was putting a big pot of water on the stove.
"Oh good," Mama Jane said when she saw Timmy and Tommy. "I'm glad you two are bright-eyed and bushy-tailed! There's a lot to do today!"
"Why?" Timmy asked. "What's today?"
"Well, my goodness, child!" Mama Jane said. "It's Thanksgiving! Now, run out and help Daddy Mike. The sun's coming up, and my whole family will be here before you can say Jack Robinson – so hop to it!"
Timmy and Tommy hopped outside, and then Timmy saw Daddy Mike, along with Buster and Scotty the Farm Dogs, standing in the barnyard beside the old oak stump that Timmy and Tommy used as the deck of their battleship. So Timmy dashed out to the stump with Tommy hurrying close behind.
"Why, there you are!" Daddy Mike exclaimed when he saw Timmy and Tommy. "I thought you were going to sleep the day away!" And with that, he grabbed Tommy by the feet and slammed him onto the stump.
"Daddy Mike!" Timmy cried. "Is Tommy in trouble?"
"In a manner of speaking," Daddy Mike said. Then he picked up a hatchet that had been hidden on the far side of the stump, and with one quick stroke, he chopped off Tommy's head. Tommy's head flew away and tumbled to the dirt, and Tommy's blood spurted from his neck onto Daddy Mike's hand.
Then Buster and Scotty the Farm Dogs began making quite a ruckus. They were fighting over Tommy's head.
"Timmy, take Tommy's head and put it in the trash barrel down by the barn," said Daddy Mike. "If Buster or Scotty got hold of it, they could start choking, and then I'd have to get the gun."
So Timmy picked up Tommy's head and went down to the barn with Buster and Scotty nipping at his heels.
"Tommy?" Timmy said to Tommy's head. "What did you do to get in trouble?"
But Tommy's head didn't even jabber. It just gazed up at Timmy with one glassy black eye.
"Timmy!" Daddy Mike cried then. "Come look at this!"
Daddy Mike sounded excited, so Timmy dropped Tommy's head into the trash barrel and ran back to the old oak stump as fast as he could. When he got there, he saw Tommy staggering towa
rd the house, leaving a squiggly trail of blood behind him. Before long, though, Tommy flopped over and lay there twitching.
"Did you ever see the like?" Daddy Mike asked.
But Timmy didn't have a chance to answer, because Buster and Scotty the Farm Dogs came running back from the trash barrel, snarling and biting at each other all the way.
"Quick, Timmy!" Daddy Mike said. "Pick up Tommy and take him to Mama Jane while I have a talk with Buster and Scotty!"
Witpunk Page 6