Bryan Gruley - The Skeleton Box

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.”

“Did you ever go back?”

“Never,” Mom said. “Five-I think it was five-years later, I married Rudy. We tried for a long time to have children. The doctor told me to stop. Then we had you, Gus.”

“We’re going up there now. Can you find it?”

Mom stared at her hands. “If I can find the birch trees.”

Tree branches scratched the sides of the car, dropping tufts of snow as we climbed the two-track. Mom was glued to her window, watching.

We stopped at the edge of the clearing where the four trailers were circled. A strand of yellow do-not-cross tape lay on the ground between two trees. The trailers melted into dark when Darlene flicked her headlamps off. We got out of the car. She turned on a flashlight and aimed it at the clearing.