Bryan Gruley - The Skeleton Box

Eddie was the cutest boy, too. All the other girls said he was the one they wanted to take them away, show them the big cities downstate. Bea didn’t want to think about that, but it was hard not to, because Eddie was always with Rudy, and so always with Bea, and every now and then, when Rudy’s head was elsewhere, Bea would catch Eddie looking at her, and she would try to pretend that she hadn’t caught him, but his smile to himself let on that he knew she’d seen him, and he knew she liked him looking at her.

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.”