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  A wide, milky yawn twists Merribell's face, but she does not cry out.

  At last the vessel is ready. "Bless these waters, O Lord, that they might grant this sinner the gift of life everlasting."

  Dropping to his knees, Connie begins removing the infant's diaper. The first pin comes out easily. As he pops the second, the tip catches the ball of his thumb. Crown of thorns, he decides, feeling the sting, seeing the blood.

  He bears the naked infant to the font. Wetting his punctured thumb, he touches Merribell's brow and draws the sacred plus sign with a mixture of blood and water. "We receive this sinner unto the mystical body of Christ, and do mark her with the Sign of the Cross."

  He begins the immersion. Skullcap. Ears. Cheeks. Mouth. Eyes. O Lord, what a monstrous trust, this power to underwrite a person's soul. "Merribell Dunfey, I baptize you in the name of the Father . . ."

Now comes the nausea, excavating Stephen's alimentary canal as he kneels before the porcelain toilet bowl. His guilt pours forth in a searing flood – acidic strands of cabbage, caustic lumps of potato, glutinous strings of bile. Yet these pains are nothing, he knows, compared with what he'll experience on passing from this world to the next.

  Drained, he stumbles toward the bedroom. Somehow Kate has bundled the older children off to school before collapsing on the floor alongside the baby. She shivers with remorse. Shrieks and giggles pour from the nursery: the preschoolers engaged in a raucous game of Blind Man's Bluff.

  "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 pursued 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.