The Skeleton Box

TWENTY-FIVE

Darlene opened the back door of her sheriff’s cruiser and helped Mom slide in next to me. She looked tiny in her gray parka.

“Gussy?” she said. “What is going on?”

“You’ll see.”

“I want to go home.” She put a hand on the back of the seat, leaned forward, and addressed herself to Darlene. “Take me home, honey.”

Darlene pulled the car onto Route 816 and punched the accelerator. She replied without turning around. “I’m sorry, Mom C. You’re actually still in custody.”

“I hope you don’t get in any trouble,” I told Darlene.

“Christenson was the duty guy,” she said. “All those people from Tatch’s camp were keeping him pretty busy.”

“Where are you taking me?” Mom said.

Snow fluttered in the headlight funnels piercing the dark ahead of Darlene’s cruiser. The rear of the car shimmied as she eased into a descending hairpin. Mom grabbed at the seat, squinted out the window.

“Why are we going here? I hate this road.”

We were winding to the bottom of Dead Sledder Mile.

“Almost there, Bea,” Darlene said.

“Oh, God, not this road. Especially in the dark.”

Dead Sledder flattened. Darlene drove another mile, slowed, and came nearly to a stop. Mom was sitting up, watching. Darlene turned the cruiser onto a two-track, the tires groaning in the snow. The two-track wound upward through the dark trees.

“No,” Mom said. “Please, I don’t want to go.”

“It’ll be all right,” I said.

“Stop,” she told Darlene.

Darlene braked beneath a canopy of snow-laden evergreens.

“What’s the matter, Bea?”

“I know why you’re taking me here,” Mom said.

“Good,” I said. “Let’s go.”

Mom reached across the seat and grabbed my arm. “No.”

“Why, Mom? What’s up there?”

“Everybody has a past,” she said.

“What does that mean?”

“Gus,” Darlene said.

“The future is all that matters,” Mom said.

“Sorry, this is gibberish. Darlene, go.”

Mom moved as if to slap my face, but I caught her by the wrist.

“Darlene,” I said.

“Let go of me,” Mom said.

“Calm down.”

“I will.”

I let go. “You left the house the other night,” I said. “You snuck out to Dad’s tree house.”

“I don’t remember.”

“Don’t play the memory game.” I pointed through the windshield at the two-track. “You know what’s up there. Mrs. B knew what’s up there. Soupy’s mom knew.”

She looked out her window. “Louise loved money more than me,” she said. “Someone asked her. She told them. She wanted me to forgive her.”

“She told them what?”

Mom’s face fell into her hands. Her shoulders began to heave. I couldn’t afford to care. Not then.

“Mother,” I said, “I know you weren’t playing cribbage yesterday.”

“Go easy on her,” Darlene said.

“Why were you taking money out of the bank? Why were you going over your will? What are you afraid of? You hid the lockbox, then you made sure I had it. Was that a slip? Or did you really want me to know?”

“Please,” Mom said. She looked up, looked around, looked out her window again. “The sun. The sun was going down. I saw it on the leaves.”

“Gus,” Darlene said. “Leave her.”

“She’s playing us,” I said. “There is no sun. There are no leaves. Enough of the secrets.”

“You were not there,” Mom said.

The car lurched into reverse. “She’s had enough,” Darlene said.

“All right. Stop. Now.” It was Mom. “I’m not a ‘her.’ I’m not a ‘she.’ Don’t talk about me as if I wasn’t even here. I’m still here.”

“I’m sorry, Bea,” Darlene said. “We’ll talk in the morning.”

“No,” Mom said. “No.” She turned and looked into my eyes. “The truth will not set you free, son. The truth is a burden.”

She told us.

Bea Damico had loved Rudy Carpenter since she was in the sixth grade. They had gone steady since the eighth. Watching sunsets from the beach at the public access, lake water lapping across their feet, young Bea and Rudy had talked of the day when they would marry and buy a house on the lake. It wouldn’t have to be a big house, just one big enough for the two of them and maybe two children, a boy and a girl, and maybe a dog. The first time Rudy told Bea he loved her, she made him promise that they would paint the house yellow, her favorite color.

And then, one June, the summer before her last in high school, came Eddie McBride, Rudy’s cousin from Ann Arbor. Like the other downstate boys who appeared at their family cottages in summer, Eddie had about him a confidence-Mama Damico called it swagger, as if the word was an obscenity-that made a girl think, for just a minute, maybe longer, that there might be something beyond Starvation Lake, beyond the Frostee Freeze and sock hops, beyond plunking for bluegill and water-skiing barefoot and making out on the dive raft at Walleye Lake.

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.”

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.

Lisa Royall stood blinking in the light. She had something cradled beneath her coat.

“Lisa,” Darlene said. “Stay where you are.”

“Now what do you people want?” Lisa said. She took a step forward, shaded her eyes with a hand. “You want the children, too? Who is that anyway?”

“Sheriff’s Deputy Darlene Esper. Please remain still.”

“Hello, Lisa,” Mom said.

“Bea?”

“Yes, dear.”

Darlene started walking in Lisa’s direction. Mom and I followed. “You have nothing to worry about, Lisa,” Darlene said. “We’re just passing through.”

“You’re scaring the kids, you and everybody else tromping around up here. Why can’t you just let us be?”

“Everybody else?” I said. “Who else?”

“I don’t know. Somebody. A few hours ago.” She waved at the dug-up hill above the trailers. “Guess he thought I didn’t hear him. I yelled and he took off.”

Whistler, I thought.

“Go back to bed,” Darlene said.

“We’re not bad people,” Lisa said.

I looked at my mother. She was gazing up at the crosses in the trees. Darlene waved the flashlight beam at the nearest trailer.

“You better get that kid inside before he freezes to death.”

“She.”

“We’re going to be moving through now.”

Lisa watched from a trailer doorstep as we crossed the clearing to the ridge where the backhoe hunched amid the ruts and potholes. Mom stopped and surveyed the furrowed hill. She looked right, looked left.

“No,” she said. “I can’t-wait.” She held a hand out to Darlene. “The flashlight, please.”

Darlene gave it to her. Mom aimed the beam way up the hill and right, then swung it slowly to the left, beyond the area where Breck and Tatch and the campers had dug. She shifted the beam downward, then right again, then back, slower still, to the left, where she stopped. The beam had fallen on the crown of an old stump poking up through the snow. It was a good twenty feet from the nearest gully.

“There,” Mom said.

“Are you sure?” I said.

“Follow me.”

“Be careful, Bea, honey.”

We skirted the holes as we climbed. Mom held the beam steady on the stump. I tried to take her elbow but she shook me off. Five feet from the stump, Mom stopped and played the beam slowly back and forth again on the trees and the rising ground beyond. She stopped it on a pair of dying birches wrapped around each other.

“Like yesterday,” she said, to herself.

I thought I recognized the contours of the area from the piece of the map I had seen. Breck apparently hadn’t seen any of Mom’s map. He was guessing, based on the archdiocese’s interest in the land. More of the systematic digging eventually might have reached the spot where Mom now shone the flashlight. She shifted the beam down and moved it along the ground a few inches at a time until it stopped on a dark spot on the surface of the snow.

“No,” she said.

She rushed forward, the flashlight beam swinging wildly. “Mom,” I said. She was whispering, “No, no, no.” She dropped the flashlight and fell to her knees at the edge of the hole. Snow dusted the loose dirt at the bottom. The hole was fresh.

Mom reached down and dug her bare hands into the earth, tearing at it, throwing the cold dirt and snow up and out of the hole. Darlene and I got down on either side of her.

“No,” she said. “No, no.” She began to sob.

“Mom,” I said, putting my arm around her, feeling her shrug me off. “What is it?”

“She’s gone,” Mom said. “Somebody took her.” She stopped digging and covered her face with her hands, the sobs convulsing her body. “Nonny, Nonny, Nonny,” she cried. “Oh, Nonny, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry …”