The Human Stain

The depravity. The crudest pleasures. And the fury from the all-seeing wife. Not the Hebrew God, infinitely alone, infinitely obscure, monomaniacally the only god there is, was, and always will be, with nothing better to do than worry about Jews. And not the perfectly desexualized Christian man-god and his uncontaminated mother and all the guilt and shame that an exquisite unearthliness inspires. Instead the Greek Zeus, entangled in adventure, vividly expressive, capricious, sensual, exuberantly wedded to his own rich existence, anything but alone and anything but hidden. Instead the divine stain. A great realityreflecting religion for Faunia Farley if, through Coleman, she'd known anything about it. As the hubristic fantasy has it, made in the image of God, all right, but not ours—theirs. God debauched. God corrupted. A god of life if ever there was one. God in the image of man.

"Yeah. I suppose that's the tragedy of human beings raising crows," the girl replied, not exactly getting Faunia's drift though not entirely missing it either. "They don't recognize their own species. He doesn't.

And he should. It's called imprinting," the girl told her. "Prince is really a crow that doesn't know how to be a crow."

Suddenly Prince started cawing, not in a true crow caw but in that caw that he had stumbled on himself and that drove the other crows nuts. The bird was out on top of the door now, practically shrieking.

Smiling temptingly, Faunia turned and said, "I take that as a compliment, Prince."

"He imitates the schoolkids that come here and imitate him," the girl explained. "When the kids on the school trips imitate a crow? That's his impression of the kids. The kids do that. He's invented his own language. From kids."

In a strange voice of her own, Faunia said, "I love that strange voice he invented." And in the meantime she had crossed back to the cage and stood only inches from the door. She raised her hand, the hand with the ring, and said to the bird, "Here. Here. Look what I brought you to play with." She took the ring off and held it up for him to examine at close range. "He likes my opal ring."

"Usually we give him keys to play with."

"Well, he's moved up in the world. Haven't we all. Here. Three hundred bucks," Faunia said. "Come on, play with it. Don't you know an expensive ring when somebody offers it to you?"

"He'll take it," the girl said. "He'll take it inside with him. He's like a pack rat. He'll take his food and shove it into the cracks in the wall of his cage and pound it in there with his beak."

The crow had now grasped the ring tightly in its beak and was jerkily moving its head from side to side. Then the ring fell to the floor. The bird had dropped it.

Faunia bent down and picked it up and offered it to the crow again. "If you drop it, I'm not going to give it to you. You know that.

Three hundred bucks. I'm giving you a ring for three hundred bucks—what are you, a fancy man? If you want it, you have to take it. Right? Okay?"

With his beak he again plucked it from her fingers and firmly took hold of it.

"Thank you," said Faunia. "Take it inside," she whispered so that the girl couldn't hear. "Take it in your cage. Go ahead. It's for you."

But he dropped it again.

"He's very smart," the girl called over to Faunia. "When we play with him, we put a mouse inside a container and close it. And he figures out how to open the container. It's amazing."

Once again Faunia retrieved the ring and offered it, and again the crow took it and dropped it.

"Oh, Prince—that was deliberate. It's now a game, is it?"

Caw. Caw. Caw. Caw. Right into her face, the bird exploded with its special noise.

Here Faunia reached up with her hand and began to stroke the head and then, very slowly, to stroke the body downward from the head, and the crow allowed her to do this. "Oh, Prince. Oh, so beautifully shiny. He's humming to me," she said, and her voice was rapturous, as though she had at last uncovered the meaning of everything.

"He's humming" And she began to hum back, "Ewwww ... ewwww . . . ummmmm," imitating the bird, which was indeed making some sort of lowing sound as it felt the pressure of the hand smoothing its back feathers. Then suddenly, click click, it was clicking its beak. "Oh, that's good" whispered Faunia, and then she turned her head to the girl and, with her heartiest of laughs, said, "Is he for sale? That clicking did it. I'll take him." Meanwhile, closer and closer she came to his clicking beak with her own lips, whispering to the bird, "Yes, I'll take you, I'll buy you—" "He does bite, so watch your eyes," the girl said.

"Oh, I know he bites. I've already had him bite me a couple of times. When we first met he bit me. But he clicks, too. Oh, listen to him click, children."

And she was remembering how hard she had tried to die. Twice.