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end, his only refuge was the sea.
    Of course he had monstrous effects on the weather, tides, fault lines, and volcanoes. It’s impossible to guess how many deaths he caused directly. Yesterday I heard a newsman say upward of twenty million. More than a few people tried to kill him right off the bat, but twice as many protected him. He took a razor in the shoulder somewhere in Burma. A man shot him in the guts outside Madrid. Five doctors across Spain saved his life that time, and dozens more around the world contributed to the treatment.
    He had an obvious way of pulling people together.
    For us, it started badly. Albert broke Margie’s heart before she even really saw him. Leaving his mother so fast, well, Margie never did recover.
    She spent her days following him on the news. Pretty soon we had a TV and a computer in every room, not that she moved much off the couch. She kept saying she hurt even after Doc Hanley pronounced her fit.
    People sent us things—money and things—mostly expecting us to keep these donations but plenty more of them looking for a blessing. We were easier to track down than our boy and easier to reach because the crowd around us was smaller.
    Some ladies wanted me. I doubt I had much to do with what made Albert different, and that’s a good thing. Can you imagine what the world would have done with two such boys?
    Suddenly we were richer than we’d ever expected. I hated it—all the attention that came with it. We gave most of the money to charity, but that only seemed to brighten the media spotlight and triple the contributions coming in.
    I had to quit my job at the feed shop. None of the reporters or those so-called holy pilgrims ever bought any feed or tack. They just got in the way and stole small items for souvenirs. By the end of the first week, you couldn’t find a pen to save your life. They’d taken every one. We had to calculate weights and costs in our heads. It made the bookkeeper crazy, so I quit before my boss had to ask, which left me with nothing to do but hole up in our trailer with poor Margie as she talked to her TVs and computers. I don’t mean she talked to them the way those things are like phones now. I mean she just laughed and chattered to herself as faces and maps flashed on the screens. Sometimes she cried, too, always when there was footage of mothers trying to touch their babies against him or when the Army lost track of him. None of those billion-dollar satellites were much good in the beginning because the cloud cover got too thick.
    Our boy never saw the sun or any real kind of sky until he was five. People say he backpedaled like crazy just so he could stare up at the clear patch for an instant.
    Nothing else surprised him. He knew everything about the human condition before he took his first step, which didn’t happen until he was three and a half. Some folks had the nerve to call him slow, but I’d like to see those full-grown fools stay on their feet if the world spun beneath them. He was fluent in more languages than you’ve got fingers and toes, comfortable in twice as many cultures and always learning. He personally witnessed more geology and biology and all the other ologies than a football stadium packed with teachers.
    Margie and me learned with him on the TV. So did billions of others. And we all saw too much to be ashamed of.
    No one could say hate, stupidity, and greed were new. The effects of such things had been in the papers our whole lives, but everybody said this baby made it personal for them.
    Hundreds of thousands of people tried to walk with him. Huge migrations rushed from the east side of every continent to the west end, then charged back again to wait for his next arrival. Knowing where he’d come ashore was a challenge in the early days, but crowds formed thirty deep along hundreds of miles of coastline just hoping he’d land near them.
    What else did they have to do while they were waiting except talk and make friends? Even