The Human Stain

crow, and more than likely she was new. Or relatively new. Faunia herself hadn't been to visit the crow for months now, and not at all since she'd begun seeing Coleman. It was a while now since she'd gone looking for ways to leave the human race. She hadn't been a regular visitor here since after the children died, though back then she sometimes stopped by four or five times a week. “He can come out, can't he? He can come just for a minute.”

“Sure,” the girl said.

“I'd like to have him on my shoulder,” Faunia said, and stooped to undo the hook that held shut the glass door of the cage. “Oh, hello, Prince. Oh, Prince. Look at you.”

When the door was open, the crow jumped from its perch to the top of the door and sat there with its head craning from side to side.

She laughed softly. “What a great expression. He's checking me out,” she called back to the girl. “Look,” she said to the crow, and showed the bird her opal ring, Coleman's gift. The ring he'd given her in the car on that August Saturday morning that they'd driven to Tanglewood. “Look. Come over. Come on over,” she whispered to the bird, presenting her shoulder.

But the crow rejected the invitation and jumped back into the cage and resumed life on the perch.

“Prince is not in the mood,” the girl said.

“Honey?” cooed Faunia. “Come. Come on. It's Faunia. It's your friend. That's a boy. Come on.” But the bird wouldn't move.

“If he knows that you want to get him, he won't come down,” the girl said, and, using the tongs, picked up another mouse from a tray holding a cluster of dead mice and offered it to the snake that had, at long last, drawn into its mouth, millimeter by millimeter, the whole of the last one. “If he knows you're trying to get him, he usually stays out of reach, but if he thinks you're ignoring him, he'll come down.”

They laughed together at the humanish behavior.

“Okay,” said Faunia, “I'll leave him alone for a moment.” She walked over to where the girl sat feeding the snake. “I love crows. They're my favorite bird. And ravens. I used to live in Seeley Falls, so I know all about Prince. I knew him when he was up there hanging around Higginson's store. He used to steal the little girls' barrettes. Goes right for anything shiny, anything colorful. He was famous for that. There used to be clippings about him from the paper. All about him and the people who raised him after the nest was destroyed and how he hung out like a big shot at the store. Pinned up right there,” she said, pointing back to a bulletin board by the entryway to the room. “Where are the clippings?”

“He ripped 'em down.”

Faunia burst out laughing, much louder this time than before. “He ripped them down?”

“With his beak. Tore 'em up.”

“He didn't want anybody to know his background! Ashamed of his own background! Prince!” she called, turning back to face the cage whose door was still wide open. “You're ashamed of your notorious past? Oh, you good boy. You're a good crow.”

Now she took notice of one of the several stuffed animals scattered on mounts around the room. “Is that a bobcat there?”

“Yeah,” the girl said, waiting patiently for the snake to finish flicking its tongue out at the new dead mouse and grab hold of it.

“Is he from around here?”

“I don't know.”

“I've seen them around, up in the hills. Looked just like that one, the one I saw. Probably is him.” And she laughed again. She wasn't drunk — hadn't even got half her coffee down when she'd run from the house, let alone had a drink — but the laugh sounded like the laugh of someone who'd already had a few. She was just feeling good being here with the snake and the crow and the stuffed bobcat, none of them intent on teaching her a thing. None of them going to read to her from the New York Times. None of them going to try to catch her up on the history of the human race over the last three thousand years. She knew all she needed to know about the history of the human race: the ruthless and the defenseless. She didn't need the dates and the names. The ruthless and the defenseless, there's the whole fucking deal. Nobody here was going to try to encourage her to read, because nobody here knew how, with the exception of the girl. That snake certainly didn't know how. It just knew how to eat mice. Slow and easy. Plenty of time.

“What kind of snake is that?”

“A black rat snake.”

“Takes the whole thing down.”

“Yeah.”

“Gets digested in the gut.”

“Yeah.”

“How many will it eat?”

“That's his seventh mouse. He took that one kind of slow even for him. That might be his last.”

“Every day seven?”

“No. Every one or two weeks.”

“And is it let out anywhere or is that life?” she said, pointing to the glass case from which the snake had been lifted into the plastic carton where it was fed.

“That's it. In there.”

“Good deal,” said Faunia, and she turned back to look across the room at the crow, still on its perch inside its cage. “Well, Prince, I'm over here. And you're over there. And I have no interest in you whatsoever. If you don't want to land on my shoulder, I couldn't care less.” She pointed to another of the stuffed animals. “What's the guy over there?”

“That's an osprey.”

She sized it up — a hard look at the sharp claws — and, again with a biggish laugh, said, “Don't mess with the osprey.”

The snake was considering an eighth mouse. “If I could only get my kids to eat seven mice,” Faunia said, “I'd be the happiest mother on earth.”

The girl smiled and said, “Last Sunday, Prince got out and was flying around. All of the birds we have can't fly. Prince is the only one that can fly. He's pretty fast.”

“Oh, I know that,” Faunia said.

“I was dumping some water and he made a beeline for the door and went out into the trees. Within minutes there were three or four crows that came. Surrounded him in the tree. And they were going nuts. Harassing him. Hitting him on the back. Screaming. Smacking into him and stuff. They were there within minutes. He doesn't have the right voice. He doesn't know the crow language. They don't like him out there. Eventually he came down to me, because I was out there. They would have killed him.”

“That's what comes of being hand-raised,” said Faunia. “That's what comes of hanging around all his life with people like us. The human stain,” she said, and without revulsion or contempt or condemnation. Not even with sadness. That's how it is—in her own dry way, that is all Faunia was telling the girl feeding the snake: we leave a stain, we leave a trail, we leave our imprint. Impurity, cruelty, abuse, error, excrement, semen — there's no other way to be here. Nothing to do with disobedience. Nothing to do with grace or salvation or redemption. It's in everyone. Indwelling. Inherent. Defining. The stain that is there before its mark. Without the sign it is there. The stain so intrinsic it doesn't require a mark. The stain that precedes disobedience, that encompasses disobedience and perplexes all explanation and understanding. It's why all the cleansing is a joke. A barbaric joke at that. The fantasy of purity is appalling. It's insane. What is the quest to purify, if not more impurity? All she was saying about the stain was that it's inescapable. That, naturally, would be Faunia's take on it: the inevitably stained creatures that we are. Reconciled to the horrible, elemental imperfection. She's like the Greeks, like Coleman's Greeks. Like their gods. They're petty. They quarrel. They fight. They hate. They murder. They fuck. All their Zeus ever wants to do is to fuck — goddesses, mortals, heifers, she-bears — and not merely in his own form but, even more excitingly, as himself made manifest as beast. To hugely mount a woman as a bull. To enter her bizarrely as a flailing white swan. There is never enough flesh for the king of the gods or enough perversity. All the craziness desire brings. The dissoluteness. The depravity. The crudest pleasures. And the fury from the all-seeing