The Skeleton Box (32 page)

One night when Rudy had to work late at the marina, Eddie took Bea for a drive in his father’s Ford. The car smelled of mothballs, Bea figured because his father owned a dry cleaners, but she didn’t mind because she’d never been alone with a boy in a car, as Rudy’s father wouldn’t let Rudy drive his car until he was eighteen. One by one, Eddie pulled four bottles of beer out from under the bench seat and laid them between him and Bea. She felt a tiny thrill hearing them clink against one another, because she’d never drunk a beer alone with a boy in a car, never drunk more than one beer at a time anywhere.

Bea opened two bottles and they drove around the lake, twice. She opened the other bottles, feeling warm and a little giddy, as Eddie swung up the dirt road to Pelly’s Point on the north shore. He parked near the edge of a high bluff and turned off his headlights and they gazed through elms at the reflection of stars twinkling on the lake surface. “It’s so beautiful,” Bea said, and Eddie winked at her and said, “Not as beautiful as you, little girl,” and Bea felt her cheeks flush.

Eddie McBride talked about the stuck-up girls at his high school, how all they thought about was getting into the University of Michigan and didn’t know how to have fun once in a while. Bea listened, watching Eddie’s languid blue eyes, trying to imagine the Ann Arbor girls carrying books against the fronts of their boyfriends’ baggy letter sweaters, wondering if they were all prettier and smarter than she was.

It happened fast. She didn’t resist, as she might have halfheartedly with Rudy, when Eddie McBride leaned over and kissed her, nor when he slid his hand across her belly and up to her right breast, so much surer and more fluid in his movements than Rudy that she feared he might think she had never been touched like that before. The smell of the mothballs grew stronger after they climbed into the backseat. Bea focused on it while Eddie gasped into the crook of her neck. He licked
her once behind the ear as his body went limp. He pushed himself up. “Whoa, little girl,” Eddie McBride said. “I won’t tell if you won’t.” Bea felt the urge to reach up and smack his face, but instead she closed her eyes and wrapped her arms around herself and shook her head no, she would not tell.

She held out for more than a month before she told Father Nilus in confession. Even though he could not see her through the confessional screen, she knew he would recognize her voice because he heard it almost every day when she worked with him in the sacristy and at the rectory, and she could feel him press his eyes closed in disappointment when she said, “I have committed a mortal sin.” She wondered, as she admitted to having had intercourse, whether she would’ve given in to the boy if Nonny had still been around, if she could have gone to Nonny and told her she didn’t understand why she would feel these urges for this boy when she knew she loved Rudy Carpenter and always would. These were not things she dared bring up with Mama Damico, who knew only that boys were bad and that her daughter, adopted or not, would not be bad.

When Bea finished her confession, Father Nilus did not speak for a long time. The confessional was stuffy and hot. Waiting, Bea imagined that she could smell the varnish evaporating off the wood, and she feared that she might faint, and that Father would have to come over to her side of the confessional and that then he would be absolutely certain that she was the girl who had had sex out of marriage, out of love, out of anything that mattered. It was a relief when he finally spoke and assured her that everything would be all right, that God was all-forgiving and would forgive her, but the extreme nature of her sin at such a young age would require a special sort of penance, and only after that could he give her absolution.

That night, Father Nilus drove her in his Studebaker up a two-track above the lake’s northeastern shore. Bea had never been in these woods before. She liked how the dying sun flickered on the leaves and evergreen boughs as the car crawled upward. Father parked and told Bea to wait in the car for a minute. He opened the trunk and removed some
things she couldn’t see. “Come along, Beatrice,” he called out. She got out of the car and saw Father Nilus with a wheelbarrow carrying a spade, a hoe, and other things beneath them.

It was August 21, 1950.

Nilus squinted up into the woods. “Go,” he said, motioning Bea ahead of him.

“But, Father, I don’t know—”

“I will guide you. The Lord will guide us.”

They stopped where the foliage was so thick that Bea couldn’t see down to the lake. Nilus pushed the wheelbarrow away from where they stood and returned with the spade. He used the blade to chop up the surface of the dirt. Then he instructed Bea to dig a hole, holding his arms out to show her how wide and how deep. She reached for the shovel, but he pulled it away and whispered that digging with her fingers would be part of her penance, that it would help to remind her that she had come from dust and to dust one day she would return.

“But, Father,” she said, “why did you bring—”

“That is my concern,” he replied. “Please now. Your penance. Dig, and I will pray for you, and your parents, and your boyfriend.”

She dug with both hands, the dirt clotting black beneath her stubby nails.

“You are seventeen years old,” Nilus told her. “You are not married. But you indulged in fornication. You gave your most precious gift not just to a boy who was not your husband, but to a boy who will never be your husband.”

“Ouch,” she said, catching the nail of a finger on a tree root gnarling through the pit of the hole. “Yes, Father,” she said. “I’m sorry, Father.”

Perhaps, she thought, he had brought her to do the burrowing because his arthritic knees were so hobbled that he might not have been able to climb back out of the hole. But why the digging anyway? What mysterious ritual was this? And what was in the wheelbarrow he seemed determined to keep from her?

She glanced up at Nilus. One of his arms was hidden beneath his black cassock. With his other he shifted the flashlight so that it shone
into her eyes. She shaded them with a hand. His long face glowed pale in the reflected light.

“My heart remains strong with faith in you, Beatrice,” he said. “But what of your boyfriend, what if he knew, how would his heart endure the knowledge?”

It would not, she thought. She ducked her head farther into the hole, digging harder as she swallowed a sob. Rudy would be off work by now, looking for her. “He doesn’t know,” she said, and whispered a prayer that he never would.

“And your parents, it would break their hearts, too.”

“Please, Father.”

“Your mother. Dear Lord, Beatrice. She wanted a daughter so badly that she went out of her way to find you, the jewel of her life.”

“Yes, Father.”

“To think that you could keep it from me. Haven’t I been your friend? Haven’t I done what I could for you since Sister Cordelia left us?”

“Yes, Father, you have.”

He had prayed with her every day that Nonny was all right.

“More than anything, Beatrice, you have broken the Lord’s heart. I could feel his sadness as I said a rosary for you today.”

She drew a hand close and saw blood smeared in the grime on her broken nail.

“Keep digging, child.”

“How much more?”

“A bit wider,” he said, waggling the flashlight beam around the hole.

She clawed at the wall opposite her, scooping out the dirt and wriggling worms, careful not to smudge the priest’s black leather shoes. She imagined she could actually smell the worms. She wished she had a yellow Life Saver to pop into her mouth.

“Here, child.”

Nilus bent and set a gardening trowel at the edge of the hole.

“Thank you, Father.”

She picked up the tool and began to hack at the hole’s inner walls.
Sweat trickled down between her shoulder blades. She set the trowel aside and reached into the bottom of the hole for the loose dirt she had scraped away. Her shoulders ached. She kept working.

Finally she looked up at Nilus, brushed away the damp hair that had fallen into her eyes.

“Will that do, Father?”

He glanced back at the wheelbarrow, his eyes flitting about, scanning the woods. “That should suffice,” he said. Bea started to rise from her knees but Nilus held his hand up to stop her. “Your absolution.”

“Oh.”

She folded her hands and bowed her head. Nilus placed his palm lightly atop her head.

“Please make a good act of contrition.”

“O my God,” she said, “I am heartily sorry for having offended thee, and I detest all my sins because of thy just punishments . . .”

When she finished, Nilus closed his eyes. “
Dominus noster,
” he said, “
Jesus Christus te absolvat
. . .”

She stood, her head still bowed.

“Thank you, Father.”

“You understand that you cannot speak of any of what has happened within the bounds of this confession.”

“I understand.”

“You must promise.”

She wasn’t sure why she had to promise if it was already part of her absolution. But she felt itchy and hot and tired and she wanted to take a bath and go to meet Rudy. She decided to tell him she had to work late for Father Nilus, which was close enough to the truth. Father, after all, had sworn her to secrecy in God’s name.

“I promise.”

“Good. Go now in peace.”

She gestured toward the wheelbarrow.

“Shouldn’t I—”

“I’ll be fine.” He took the trowel from her, used it to point back down the slope they had climbed. The sunlight was gone.

“You can make your way along the lake, yes?”

“Yes, Father. I’ll see you in the morning.”

She started down the incline. A dead branch cracked beneath her shoes. She glanced over her shoulder and saw Father Nilus still standing over the hole, watching her descend.

Fifty yards down, the slope before her dropped off, so she veered right, stepping sideways across the grade, grasping at poplar trunks for balance. She chanced a look back up and across the incline. Nilus was invisible through the darkened woods. She crouched and scrabbled back up the hill, squatting behind a pair of entwined birches where she thought she was hidden. Staying low, she doubled back and up to a spot about twenty yards from Nilus and the hole, where she got down behind a section of oak that had been severed from its trunk by lightning. She lifted her head and peered across shreds of charred bark. Nilus was a shifting shape in the gloom. She thought he had his back to her.

The sound startled her. It was a thud, something hard striking something else hard. The priest bent his body down. “Oh, my dear Lord,” he gasped. Then came a rattle, maybe rocks striking one another, then more thuds. “God, God,” he said, and she ducked behind the tree, thinking he might have heard her.

“Lord Jesus,” she heard him say. “What have I done?”

She raised her head again. Nilus had dropped to his knees and was gathering things from the ground and placing them in something she couldn’t see on the other side of him. He bent again and lifted the thing in front of him.

A box, she thought. Some sort of box. Nilus leaned forward until his shoulders were nearly parallel to the ground, lowering the box into the hole. He remained still for a moment, regarding the hole. Then he reached into his cassock and came out with a thin leather pouch. She had to squint to see it in the dusk. She had seen it before in the sacristy. It was brown and Father Nilus’s initials were engraved in gold lettering on one corner. He kept his money in it. Now he took it in one hand and, bracing himself on the rim of the hole with his other, leaned down into
the hole. When he rose back up, he slapped his empty hands clean, then struggled to his feet.

He stood rubbing his knees, moaning softly, then straightened and moved to the wheelbarrow. He took up the spade. A scoop at a time, he refilled the hole with the dirt mounded around it, then patted it all down, first with the shovel, then with his feet. He shambled into the woods and returned with an armful of twigs and boughs that he scattered over the hole.

She surveyed the area where she lay and made a picture in her mind. She thought she could probably find the hole again, even in the dark, although she doubted she would ever want to come back. It would just remind her of the night with Eddie. It wasn’t any of her business anyway. Father Nilus wouldn’t have made her promise if he had intended for her to come back and dig up whatever he had buried.

The shovel clanged into the wheelbarrow. Nilus took the handles and began to push the wheelbarrow down the ridge. Bea watched. He had nearly vanished into the dark when a crack opened in the sky and a shaft of moonlight spread across the path before him. He lurched away from the light, ducking his head, and caught his foot on something, tumbling down as the wheelbarrow tipped tools across the ground.

He lay still for a while. Beatrice stood, wondering if she would have to go over and help. Nilus raised himself to his elbows, cradled his face in his hands. Later she would decide that he had been weeping.

We sat in the car in silence. My mother stared at the seat in front of her.

“My God, Bea,” Darlene finally said.

“As you both know,” Mom said, “Eddie and Rudy were best friends until Eddie died. Which is as it should have been.”

“Did he force you, Bea?”

“We were children.”

Eddie had died in Vietnam. My father dragged his death around with him until his own death a few years later. I remembered asking my mother once if she’d had a fling with Eddie. “I wasn’t that kind of girl,” she told me.

There was no point in bringing that up now. Mom was right. They were kids.

“I’m sorry about all of that, Mom,” I said.

“I never wanted to think about it again.”

“Did you ever find out what was in the box?” I said.

“Gus,” Darlene said. “Leave it for a moment.”

“I was curious. A few weeks later, maybe a few months, I asked him. He told me it was just some old vestments, some other altar ware that needed to be put away. He said it didn’t matter, it was just a penance.”

“Did you believe him?” I said.

“I wanted to.”