her face from pointing directly at him. She didn't want to be forced to look at him, she didn't want to deal with him, until she had to. First she had to summon her concentration onto herself, to focus on creating herself as saint and healer.
She let the silence sink in on him for a few seconds, making him realize what a wonder had been taken from him. She opened her eyes slowly as if recovering from a trance, as if she had not been aware of him at all, standing there with a knife. She took a deep breath and released it with an audible sigh, and then slowly canted her head upwards with a look of mild astonishment as if she could not imagine how she came to be in such a place with such company. Some of her fans had told her she looked reborn when she came out of a song. They thought she must surely have been with the angels while she sang, letting their voices ring through her, which was why she was always disoriented when she finished. They were grateful to her for having come back to them, it showed how much she cared for them. Rae said she looked washed clean with the waters of Jordan when she, completed a hymn, cleansed and a little shaken by the experience. The Reverend Tommy R. Walker confessed that it was about the neatest trick he'd ever seen.
Aural looked up and fastened her gaze on Swann and realized that he, too, had been fooled. He was gaping at her, not quite sure who, or what, he saw.
'I know why you did it,' he said. His voice had changed, — grown younger.
Aural recognized the childish petulance in it, but there was something else there, something she couldn't identify.
She didn't know what he meant. 'Do you?' she asked.
' You hurt me because… ' He sniffed suddenly, wiping at his nose with the back of his knife hand. Aural realized that he had been weeping. 'Because you love me,' he finished.
Aural recognized the other quality in his voice now. It was forgiveness.
He was absolving her for stabbing him with the fork.
She nodded slowly, not trusting herself to say the right thing, but realizing she didn't need to speak at all, that he had something he wanted to say.
'You only do that because you love me, I know that,' he continued.
Aural nodded again, arching her eyebrows slightly, trying to look loving but stern.
'For your own good,' she said, suddenly inspired.
Swann's face wrinkled and he whimpered in his throat.
He looked at that moment about five years old.
'I know it,' he said, crying openly now. 'I know I'm bad.'
'Sometimes you're bad,' Aural said carefully. She was still not quite certain of her role. Was she his mother now? Or was she still the woman he planned to torture to death? He had not put the knife down nor even wavered with it. It continued to point at her as if it were a gun.
'But I do love Jesus, I truly do,' he said.
'Do you?'
'Yes, ma'am.'
'But you're bad anyway.' She thought she had gone far. Swann stiffened and his lip trembled with defiance.
'Sometimes,' he said, agreeing but not giving in.
Aural continued to look at him, not backing down but not knowing what else to do. He had regressed so quickly that she knew there must be something about her that made him think of his mother; something about her; something about pain. For a moment the knife seemed to quiver and she wondered if he was going to stab her. She wondered if he had stabbed his mother.
He stood there for a moment, towering over her as she sat on the floor, waving the blade in front of her face now, closer and closer, looking for all the world like a child with his first taste of power. Aural didn't know what to do, but she knew that she couldn't let him win. If she were to beat him, she had to do it now, when he was five years old and not an adult, when he was not certain he was in control and not happily convinced he was evil.
'Jesus loves you anyway,' she said at last.
He had wanted her to plead, to react to his menace; he had not expected calm. For a moment he was startled, as if instead of stepping away in fear she had slapped his face.
'Can I show you something?' he said, and Aural realized that things had changed again. He wasn't fully adult yet, but he wasn't addressing his mother anymore, either.
He sounded like an adolescent about to reveal a great truth to a newly discovered friend.
Aural nodded her consent, but he wasn't waiting for permission, he had already sat on the stone and was eagerly stripping off his shoes and socks and then tugging at his pants.
You're not going to show me anything I haven't seen too many times before, she thought, but to her surprise he made no motion to remove his underwear. He thrust a bare leg at her, proudly.
'What?' Aural asked.:,Look.' He gestured to his leg, using the knife as a pointer.
It took Aural a moment to realize what she was seeing.
Swann looked as if he were wearing the skin of a smaller man, and his entire leg, from foot to thigh, was being shrunken and drawn together as the flesh shriveled and puckered in what Aural finally knew to be the accumulated scar tissue of hundreds of dime-sized burns. His limbs gleamed in the candlelight with the particular sheen of contracted flesh.
He was watching her reaction eagerly, and when she looked at him again with the first glimmer of sympathy he lifted his foot and waggled it to get her attention.
'Look, look,' he said, excited by what he had to show her. He placed the point of the knife between his toes where, in the exquisitely sensitive space between the digits, were positioned more scars the size of the tip of her little finger, the flesh still recoiling as if in perpetual horror at the insult of the burning ember placed there years ago and pulling his toes together so that he could barely separate them on his own.
Aural gasped at the unforgiving nature of the traumatized skin. I'll look like that, she realized, and tears of sorrow welled up in her eyes.
But there was no self-pity in Swann's face as he pushed forth the other foot to be examined and admired. He looked proud, even smug.
'Your mother?' Aural asked.
'Mother was a Christian,' Swann said approvingly. As if she had given her son her own version of the stigmata to prove it.
'I can make it better,' she said.
'Can you?'
'I can make it all better,' she said. She extended her fingers towards his legs, and then up, towards his head, to indicate his heart, his mind, his past, his memories. 'I can heal your very soul.'
'God be praised,' he said.
'Help me up,' she said. He looked at her dully. 'On my feet,' she said.
'I can't do it sitting down.'
Swann extended a hand and helped her stand, then delicately traced his finger down her chest to a point just below the sternum, probing gently to find the point where the bone gave way to the soft tissue and muscle of the abdomen. He placed the point of the knife on the precise spot.:'You won't hurt me again, will you?' he asked.
'I'm going to heal you,' Aural said. 'I am a healer; but you got to trust me.':'I trust you,' he said, not moving the knife.
'You got to have faith,' she said.:'I do.' 'Faith in me, not just Jesus, but faith in me.'
'I do,' Swann said sincerely. 'I surely do.' Then his face slowly crinkled into a grin. 'But I ain't stupid, neither.'
Aural raised her manacled hands. 'Let us pray,' she said, and her voice took on the reverentially inspiring tone of the show tent. 'Sweet Jesus, dear sweet, sweet Jesus, this man is a terrible sinner, this man has the blood of his fellow human beings on his hands, this man has tortured and killed defenseless people, and he will do it again, dear Lord, he will do it again and again because there is no true repentance in his soul.
His soul is as black as this hole in the ground, his soul is twisted and warped and unholy, Lord, he is the worst of your children, he is the lost and forsaken and most despised of all your children here on earth.
Men have given up on him, men hate and revile him… but you love him, Lord.':'Hallelujah,' said Swann.
