It was true that Boone did not know his parents. He knew neither the circumstances of his birth nor the reason for his abandonment. He simply appeared, like so many children born during the Depression, on the steps of a Catholic Church in Steubenville, Ohio. Little more than a month old, or so the nuns deduced, he had been swaddled in a homemade quilt that had gone stiff and brown from the absorption of a large amount of blood. However, everyone noted that he was well fed and fully developed for a child of his supposed age.

“Perhaps,” said one sister, looking down at the little boy who stretched and squirmed while succumbing to an inaudible yawn, “this was the quilt he was born on.”

“Perhaps,” said the priest, standing some distance away and keeping his own hands hygienically protected inside the wide sleeves of his red robe. It was Pentecost, and he had been preparing for early mass when the child was found.

“We’ll baptize him today, Father?”

“Clean him up first and then we’ll discuss preparations.”

But Boone was not baptized that day, or any other day after that. The priest calmly pushed the nuns’ pleadings aside. He made excuses, offered them placating but elliptical promises. And so Boone was neither saved nor, as he would often hear during the tent revival tirades of a Pentecostal preacher his adoptive mother took him to see some years later, assured a place in the Kingdom of Heaven.

The frightening suggestion of violence intimated by his swaddling quilt was, shortly after his discovery, nearly forgotten. And the inauspicious article was quickly burned with other rectory garbage. Before igniting, its interior cotton batting (also crusted with desiccated hemoglobin) flared as if it were saturated with accelerant. It lay, crackling and snapping, in the ruined cinders of betting sheets and erotic stereoscope cards furtively cast off by the priest earlier that morning.

-- From "North American Twilight"