The Human Stain

"Well...," Balich said, and put his hands up in the air, the palms to me, suggesting that, with all due respect, neither he nor I could possibly know that. "It was the professor who was behind the wheel, sir."

The moment had arrived when I was expected by Officer Balich not to insert myself foolishly as an amateur detective, not to press my contention further, but politely to take my leave. He had called me sir more than enough times for me to have no hallucinations about who was running the show, and so I did leave, and, as I say, that was the end of it.

The day Coleman was to be buried was another unseasonably warm, crisply lit November day. With the last of the leaves having fallen from the trees during the previous week, the hard bedrock contour of the mountain landscape was now nakedly exposed by the sunlight, its joints and striations etched in the fine hatched lines of an old engraving, and as I headed to Athena for the funeral that morning, a sense of reemergence, of renewed possibility, was inappropriately aroused in me by the illuminated roughness of a distant view obscured by foliage since last spring. The no-nonsense organization of the earth's surface, to be admired and deferred to now for the first time in months, was a reminder of the terrific abrasive force of the glacier onslaught that had scoured these mountains on the far edge of its booming southward slide. Passing just miles from Coleman's house, it had spat out boulders the size of restaurant refrigerators the way an automatic pitching machine throws fastball strikes, and when I passed the steep wooded slope that is known locally as "the rock garden" and saw, starkly, undappled by the summer leaves and their gliding shadows, those mammoth rocks all tumbled sideways like a ravaged Stonehenge, crushed together and yet hugely intact, I was once again horrified by the thought of the moment of impact that had separated Coleman and Faunia from their lives in time and catapulted them into the earth's past. They were now as remote as the glaciers. As the creation of the planet. As creation itself.

This was when I decided to go to the state police. That I didn't get out there that day, that very morning, even before the funeral, was in part because, while parking my car across from the green in town, I saw in the window of Pauline's Place, eating his breakfast, Faunia's father—saw him seated at a table with the woman who'd been steering his wheelchair up at the mountain cemetery the day before. I immediately went inside, took the empty table beside theirs, ordered, and, while pretending to read the Madamaska Weekly Gazette that someone had left by my chair, caught all I could of their conversation.

They were talking about a diary. Among the things of hers that Sally and Peg had turned over to Faunia's father, there had been Faunia's diary.

"You don't want to read it, Harry. You just don't want to."

"I have to," he said.

"You don't have to," the woman said. "Believe me you don't."

"It can't be more awful than everything else."

"You don't want to read it."

Most people inflate themselves and lie about accomplishments they have only dreamed of achieving; Faunia had lied about failing to reach proficiency at a skill so fundamental that, in a matter of a year or two, it is acquired at least crudely by nearly every schoolchild in the world.

And this I learned before even finishing my juice. The illiteracy had been an act, something she decided her situation demanded.

But why? A source of power? Her one and only source of power?

But a power purchased at what price? Think about it. Afflicts herself with illiteracy too. Takes it on voluntarily. Not to infantilize herself, however, not to present herself as a dependent kid, but just the opposite: to spotlight the barbaric self befitting the world. Not rejecting learning as a stifling form of propriety but trumping learning by a knowledge that is stronger and prior. She has nothing against reading per se—it's that pretending not to be able to feels right to her. It spices things up. She just cannot get enough of the toxins: of all that you're not supposed to be, to show, to say, to think but that you are and show and say and think whether you like it or not.

"I can't burn it," Faunia's father said. "It's hers. I can't just throw it in the trash."

"Well, I can," the woman said.

"It's not right."

"You have been walking through this mine field all your life. You don't need more."

"It's all that's left of her."

"There's the revolver. That's left of her. There's the bullets, Harry.

She left that."

"The way she lived," he said, sounding suddenly at the edge of tears.

"The way she lived is the way she died. It's why she died."

"You've got to give me the diary," he said.

"No. It's bad enough we even came here."

"Destroy it, destroy it, and I just don't know what."

"I'm only doing what is best for you."

"What does she say?"

"It doesn't bear repeating."

"Oh, God," he said.

"Eat. You have to eat something. Those pancakes look good."