Faith

As late as 1892, in Vermont, the body of Mercy Brown, thought to be a vampire, was exhumed for public autopsy.

—The Smithsonian

Mercy’s Father
This story begins once upon a dark, ignorant time, an age seductive with unhappiness as if ruin were a handsome prince. A father watches his neighbors pry his daughter out of her months-old grave because they believe, if her heart is uncorrupted, she is a vampire who can harm the living. And yes, Mercy’s heart still bleeds. And what’s more, the townspeople have faith that such a heart, in ashes, will cure consumption, burning it solving two problems. Moreover, Mercy’s father and everyone there know that his son Edwin has a persistent, bloody cough, one that demands he swallow.

The Etymology of Faith
From the Latin fidere (11c.), “to trust”

My Neighbor’s Father
Each year, on the anniversary of its success, a neighbor’s father watches a video of his heart surgery. Four years now, and because he cannot see his face or even his body beyond the cavity created for repair, it’s not traumatic to see himself opened and dead, invaded by instruments. He is seventy-one and hopes to watch his heart for another twenty years. That video begins mid-operation and ends well before closing, a sampler, he says, as if his heart were one among assorted candies. “No one else has seen it but my son,” he says, “and then just the once.”

The Sunshine Bible Class
For adults, at the church in which I was raised, there were two Sunday school classes for what my mother called “the older crowd.” Somewhere around age fifty, Sunday school attendees promoted themselves. If you were a man, you decided, one Sunday morning, to move to the Men’s Booster Class. If you were a woman, you changed rooms and settled in with the Sunshine Bible Class. Next to the afterlife, the sexes separated.

Verification
The first autopsy in the New World was performed to determine whether Siamese twins had one soul or two.

The Difficult Braille of the Body
“There’s nothing to worry about,” John Baird told his office boy William Taynton. Yes, but Taynton might have regretted promising, for a few shillings, to sit still in front of a hot transmitter for Baird’s attempt at technological history in October, 1925. Taynton’s face, if the test was successful, would be the first human’s to appear on television. But didn’t it say something about risk that Baird had used Stooky Bill, a ventriloquist’s dummy, for his previous tests? That under all those spotlights, there was reason to imagine his soul packing to flee? Moments before, for sure, John Baird, who’d positioned him, had run from the room to see him elsewhere. Alive or dead, his face would be on television. All he had to do, the studio door closed, Baird gone to another room, was wait and keep his faith in Baird’s inarguable phrase.

The Details of the Soil
The woman who offers me clay says, “Go on,” and waits as if I’m a dog sniffing at the end of a leash. The dirt eaters she grew up with are hundreds of miles from her driveway, but they’ve sent, for her birthday, the local clay she craves. “Go on,” she advises. “Trust me. It’s good for what ails you.”

The Shelter Revival
After decades of disrepair, all but the crazy deserting their underground rooms, bomb shelters are back, some old missile silos refurbished by squatters who share a belief in probability. What’s more, anxiety salesmen are pitching luxurious bunkers, communities for the cautious who can afford survival. Tsunami pods, tornado-proof pyramids—shelters are versatile now, more to fear than a massive nuclear launch. They’re built to endure comet strike, super volcano, solar flare, and the infinitesimal risk of brown dwarf star intrusion.

Groaning Boards
In letters to the Opinion Page of the local newspaper, the fundamentalists talk about creation, suggesting how most readers’ futures are doomed to fire. They condense antiquity, squeezing out the Paleozoic, Mesozoic...