The Maybe of Faith

THE MAYBE OF FAITH

By Mary P. Burns

mary.p.burns1@gmail.com

(This story concerns itself with the murder of a young woman, whose body left in a field is part of the setting; it also addresses cancer and the main character's mother's death from it) 

Trout Almandine scrambled up into the old oak tree, her toes finding familiar notches, her bare feet balancing easily on broad rough branches. She glanced over her shoulder as the blue-and-white patrol car rumbled onto the edge of the wooded area and stopped, its siren dying. Hunching down, she turned to look at the hillock well behind the tree to make sure she couldn’t see her bicycle on the other side of it. If she couldn’t see it from this height, the police wouldn’t see it, either. She didn’t want them to know she was up here.

A sturdy branch offering a full view of the overgrown field was just steps away. Trout sidled over and squatted down to straddle it. She pulled her cell phone out of her shorts pocket, silenced it, and gingerly returned it to the safety of the soft denim. When she looked down, the policemen were standing several yards away in the tall brush. Their voices didn’t carry to her aerie. If they had found the body that her father’s police scanner sent out the call for, she couldn’t see it because they were blocking her view. One officer had his hands on his hips, his hat tilted back, and he was gazing at the sky. The other went down on his haunches. He pointed and said something and both men circled around to the other side of what had captured their attention. And that’s when Trout saw her, the young woman lying in the knee-high ryegrass and Queen Anne’s lace, her long lithe body twisted in a peculiar position, her brown hair obscuring her face.

Trout had only seen one dead body before in her short twelve years. And the heartbreak that accompanied it when she’d awoken to hear her father crying the night her mother died after what the newspaper obituary would say was a long and valiant battle with cancer. She’d gone into the room the hospice nurses had set up earlier that summer, a glass of water in her hand for him. She hadn’t known what else to bring. She hadn’t known her mother was dead. She seemed to be sleeping peacefully. Miss Novena would later tell her that she was, that her nurses had seen to it that there was no pain as she left her life. It didn’t make Trout feel any better about her leaving. Her father didn’t try to shoo her out. He didn’t even know she was there. He just sat on the edge of the bed holding her mother’s hands, his head bowed, his shoulders stooped as though they’d given up at that precise moment. That was two years ago, on an equally warm August night.  

Trout shouldn’t have been listening to the police scanner; her father didn’t like her to, but it was far more interesting than television. She’d been finishing the dinner he’d left her, sitting at his desk reading all the papers strewn about while Mrs. Barry, the housekeeper, tidied the kitchen and then cut a piece of apple pie for her. The apple pie was world-famous in town. It sold out every night at Chef Almandine’s restaurant. She looked forward to Friday nights when he left half of one of Thursday night’s pies at home, but before Mrs. Barry could entice her with a slice, the police scanner had crackled alive, the voice of Mrs. Briggs traveling across the short waves and the long miles. Trout didn’t know much more about Mrs. Briggs than that she was a civilian, she worked the night shift, and her voice was steady and sharp like the staccato of the old Underwood typewriter her father used to compose his menus. Trout liked the no-nonsense command that it conveyed.

Most of her broadcasts were a catalogue of small-town nuisances but tonight, she spoke of a dead body someone had seen in the old Henderson fields. Electricity had shot through Trout. A dead body. That was far more enticing than the apple pie. She’d dropped her forkful of meatloaf Florentine, next week’s menu lists and the butcher’s invoice and headed for the screen door. Hastily telling Mrs. Barry that she was going to get a book she’d loaned Deirdre Ellicott and would be back soon, she was on her bike before the housekeeper could even raise her Eyebrow of Questionable Behavior at her.

From a distance, Trout now heard the wail of another siren and recognized the high pitch of the fire department’s ambulance. She wondered why the driver felt the need for a siren for a girl who was dead. And she wondered if now was the time to pray for her as she lay abandoned in the trampled weeds.

Miss Novena had told her that it was important to pray for all souls when they crossed over. She’d said it when Trout’s orange tabby Harry died. Trout had put him in a shoe box and brought him over to St. Joseph’s Church because she wanted a funeral for him, but she was turned away. So she took him to Miss Novena, and together they buried him under her willow tree. Then they shared a pitcher of lemonade in Harry’s honor, Miss Novena in her Bentwood rocker and Trout sitting on the ornate brocade couch. Everything in Miss Novena’s house was ornate, including the old woman herself. But Trout didn’t mind. There was a solid graciousness to it all, and a polished beauty, just like Miss Novena.

“The Church is wrong,” she’d said, simply and with finality in her gentle wisp of a voice. “Obviously he had a soul. Harry knew things, and he acted on them. He stayed with your mother in the last few months, didn’t he.” It wasn’t a question. Miss Novena never asked questions. Trout decided now was exactly the time for prayer and silently intoned the words learned at catechism class shortly before her mother’s funeral mass. It was a memory that was beginning to slip away from her, but the words stayed, as solid as the burnished casket in which her mother had been laid to rest. Usually she closed her eyes when she prayed. It helped her concentrate on the words. And then she could see the corresponding pictures from her catechism book. But she couldn’t close her eyes against this girl. It was hard to tell because she couldn’t see her face, but Trout thought she was only a few years older than she was. That scared her. It was a small enough town that she thought if the policemen brushed her hair away and she could see the girl’s face, she might know who she was. And if she knew who the girl was, then she’d know how the girl lived her life. And that might mean such a thing could happen to her.

Trout wished that she’d grabbed her rosary beads before racing out of the house because now she’d run out of prayers. It wasn’t that she needed them. Her mind could work the beads as well as her fingers. Miss Novena listed them as one of the comforts of religion, and had taught her the ritual of the beads. Miss Novena had a long list of comforts. She’d confided to Trout that when you were as old as she was, they helped you stay close to God.

They had been discussing God’s existence that afternoon, shortly after her mother died. Trout was doubting He was real, and weighing the fairness of life. It seemed to her like a cruel game with no dice to blow on for luck before rolling. No one wanted to talk about any of this with her, not Mrs. Barry and not her father. He had not even allowed her to repeat her hypothesis that if God was Up There, He could not be all merciful if He’d taken her mother. He’d said she didn’t understand anything as he poured two fingers of scotch into a glass he hadn’t let Mrs. Barry wash in days. He’d banished her to her room, but she’d climbed out the window and gone over to Miss Novena’s.

Everything Trout wanted to talk about the elegant old woman weighed with equal seriousness, from the lack of brains in boys to whether or not God was there. She had assured her that boys got smarter, but in fits and starts. As for the existence of God, that debate had not yet come to a close. Now she knew she had to go talk to her about this…murder. How it frightened her and what it meant about the existence of God. But she was stuck in this tree. With the police and the firemen and the girl below. And maybe with God. She leaned forward, her hands pressing the grooved bark, to get a better look at the events below now that the men from the ambulance were putting the girl on the bed with the collapsing wheels. They were careful not to move anything, not even her hair. A sadness came over Trout. “I will tell you this,” Miss Novena had said one day when they were examining why people departed when they did, even if their life didn’t seem like it should be over. “I think God opens His doors when people have completed their task on Earth, whatever that was. And how they lived and died is all part of that task.” Looking down at the young woman, Trout wondered what her task could possibly have been. Or if being murdered meant she hadn’t completed it. Murder was a surprise, after all. And she wondered what her own task was, and if maybe she’d already completed it and didn’t know. Like the young woman disappearing into the ambulance.

An unmarked car had arrived at the scene and two men in suits who had flashed badges at the firemen were talking with them. The policemen joined them. Trout took the opportunity to begin climbing down from the tree, careful to stay on the far side. When she reached a low branch, she looked at the scene below her again. The ambulance had left and the men were picking up things with gloved hands and putting them into bags. One of them had a Sharpie and he was writing things on the bags. This she knew from watching TV police shows was evidence. It would form the picture of the end of the girl’s life.

She gazed at the field around her. There were wooden stakes with tiny pink plastic pennants attached to them at many various spots in the field marking where construction crews would develop the land for new housing next summer. The sight of those stakes left Trout with a sense of the past before the future had happened. She descended the rest of the way to the ground, bent down low in the grasses and made her way to the hillock and her bike. The sun was setting now, too late to go to Miss Novena’s house. But she could call her and ask her where God had been in all of this. She already knew the answer, though. According to Miss Novena, He was everywhere, if you believed in Him. If you had faith. Trout was at that juncture where she didn’t know. What did you get for your faith? Miss Novena had said it was a quid pro quo. She’d pulled out her cell phone to search the term as Miss Novena spelled it for her. Latin in origin. Something that is given in return for something else. An exchange. Your faith, His existence. Not convinced, she had looked up the definition of faith later that night: ‘The assent of the mind to the truth of a proposition or statement for which there is not complete evidence; belief in general.’ So, in other words, you were either all in, or all out. Trout wondered which the girl had been. Or if she’d called for God or her mother.

She sat on her bike in the grass and thought that if she no longer had the one in her life, she ought to consider having faith in the other.

The sun was slipping below the horizon, lighting the sky pink and orange, and then purple and blue. Trout knew the science behind it. But there was something else about the spectacular majesty of it that made her wonder if God was there. And if he’d been there with her mother in her morphine-induced sleep. Or if He’d opened His door as the girl was murdered. It was a lot to take on faith. But maybe she could start with the sunset. And maybe, if God had been in the tree with her this afternoon, it wasn’t a far stretch to think he was with the girl, too. Trout had to believe the girl wasn’t alone in those last moments, even if she didn’t know. Even if it was just God’s quid pro quo.