Keepers of the Faith - Short Story - By Margaret Duda

 

Art by Alice Frey

                                                                             

Keepers of the Faith

Short Story 

By Margaret Duda

             

           It was much easier to be a pious Catholic child in 1948. There were all the rules and rituals, the mysticism and the monarchy. The priests were still shrouded in their Latin litanies, and the nuns were still cloistered and veiled.  When we stumbled and sinned, there was the Act of Contrition and indulgences for insurance. And we were never alone. God was always watching us, the saints were waiting for our requests, and our guardian angel was evermore by our side. There was safety, and there was security, and we never questioned a thing until that fateful day in early May when Mary Agnes O’Reilly made Sister Catherine cry.

Mary Agnes did not mean to do what she did. Only seven years old, she was standing on the street corner like the rest of us. The heat of the pavement burned the soles of my shoes, reminding me of the fires of Hell.

Most of us were waiting for the city bus, but Mary Agnes lived only three blocks away, so she was trying to cross the street. A second grader like me, she had thin, knobby knees and long braids the colour of the rust on the metal scraps in the empty lot next to the church. She cried easily and hung around Sister Catherine’s long black skirt during recess. Sister often reached down to give her a hug or pat her on the head, and sometimes she even held her hand, but the rest of us didn’t mind, because Mary Agnes didn’t have a mother. She told us once in her soft, shy voice that her mother had died when Mary Agnes was born and her grandmother did all the cooking and cleaning. That information did not make her grandmother sound like a real mother, so we didn’t mind when Sister held her hand.

          Actually, that afternoon I didn’t even see Mary Agnes. The bodies of the sixth-grade girls, like the massive tree trunks in the park, blocked my view.  I was also daydreaming.  Or maybe I was praying.  In those days, the two often seemed one and the same.

          Suddenly I heard the screeching of tires, then the high-pitched screams.  I peered through the dangling arms of the girls in front of me, but all I could see were the dark black skid marks of the semi that slid to a stop half a block away. All I could hear were the screams of the sixth-grade girls, one of whom said someone was under the front tire.

          We ran down the street, but by the time we reached the stopped vehicle, the grownups had surrounded the front of the truck. The only thing I could see was a single rust colored braid, but I knew whose it was. An adult said she was dead. Pacing back and forth, the truck driver kept crying out, “I didn’t see her.  Oh my God, I didn’t even see her.”

          The older girls began to cry. I did too. I cried as if I’d lost my one and only friend, and an older girl put her arm around me and said, “Shhhh, little girl, it’s going to be all right.”

          Then the policemen came and asked us if we’d seen anything. The older girls said they’d witnessed the disaster. When I explained that they’d blocked my view, the policeman sent me back to the bus stop.

          As I waited on the corner, my knees began to knock, and I felt as if the road was weaving back and forth. The bus finally came, and I didn’t even mind that the only seat left was next to an old bearded man in torn clothes who smelled like fruit gone bad. 

          At least Mary Agnes was baptized, I thought. At least she wouldn’t have to spend eternity in Limbo. But what about Purgatory? Even Jesus had to go there for three days. I took out my rosary and started to pray for the soul of Mary Agnes, and the old man wrinkled his brow and smirked in disapproval.

          When I got home, I found Mama in the kitchen scrubbing the linoleum floor. She looked up and pushed the wisps of grey hair off her forehead. I told her what I’d seen, and she got up off her knees and wiped her hands on her flowered apron before taking me into her arms.

“Oh, my baby, my poor baby.”

          I felt safe again and I let the tears come. “But why, Mama, why?”

          “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,” Mama insisted, quoting Father Kushner and holding me tighter as she kissed my forehead, “and it is not for us to understand why. Now how about if I tell you some stories from my childhood in Hungary?”

          In class the next day, everyone was talking about the accident. 

          “I was there,” I said to a large group of girls.

          They stopped talking and stared at me. “Was it awful?” one girl said.

          “Awful,” I agreed. I was spared from having to give details because Sister Catherine suddenly entered the classroom. We all hurried to our desks, but when we were seated, we could see the gaping hole in our midst. It was like a missing piece in a jigsaw puzzle, a piece that would never be found.   

Trying not to look at the empty seat, I stared at Sister Catherine. Her clear, blue eyes were swollen, and her round face appeared stuffed into the stiff white wimple that framed it. Her small, long-fingered hands were all you could see of Sister beside her face. I’d always had a secret desire to see her hair, to know what colour it was, how long it was. Did the nuns really shave their heads, as some of the older girls insisted. Was she bald beneath the starched crown? 

Sister crossed the room softly, as she always did, her long black habit gliding across the floor, and put her books on her desk. Only then did she look up and see the empty seat. She stared at it for several seconds and gave a long sigh.

          “Sister Catherine, is Mary Agnes really dead?” Johnny Farkas asked.

          Sister put a hand over her heart, drawing our attention to her gold ring,  the symbol of her marriage to Jesus. She continued to stare at the empty seat.  “Yes Johnny, Mary Agnes is now in Heaven with her mother and God.”

          But Johnny wasn’t satisfied. He tapped his pencil. He always did that  when something wasn’t clear. “So why did God let Mary Agnes die?”

          “Mary Agnes was too perfect for this world. God wanted her to join him in Heaven where she belonged.”

          Johnny tapped his pencil harder. “What if she didn’t want to go?”

          Sister sighed again. “We will now offer our morning prayers for the soul of Mary Agnes.”

          We all knelt on the hard wooden floor beside our desks and folded our hands, right thumbs over left, Heaven over Hell, but I knew Sister Catherine didn’t think Mary Agnes was in Heaven or we wouldn’t be praying for her soul.  When we were finished, Sister announced, “There will be a special service for Mary Agnes tomorrow, and the whole school will attend.”

          “Will the body be there?”

          “I believe the coffin will be there. Now, please turn to page seventy-eight in your spelling books.”

          Although we were not allowed to talk to each other in class, we made up for it on the playground at recess.

          “Do you think there will be much blood?”

          “I heard the truck ran over her head.”

          “I bet her guts were squeezed out of her.”

          I ate little that night and slept even less as nightmare after nightmare attacked me. I would wake up screaming, and Mama would rush to my side and try to comfort me.

          “I don’t think she should go to school,” Mama told Papa the next morning.

          “She was in my class, Mama,” I insisted. “I want to go.”

          Solemnly, everybody—children and nuns and school administrators—climbed the steps and entered the church. The smell of incense filled the vestibule as we dipped our fingers into the Holy water and crossed ourselves.  As we passed into the nave, the candlelight cast flickering shadows on the fourteen carved wooden plaques of the Stations of the Cross, which vividly dramatized the gruesome sacrifices Jesus had made for our sins. We filed past a life-sized statue of Saint Lucia, patron of the blind, who held a pair of eyeballs on a plate, and a tall wooden sculpture captioned the Sacred Heart of Jesus, with Our Lord pointing to his open heart dripping with blood.

          “I bet Mary Agnes sits up as I go by,” said the girl behind me.

          “If she does, I’ll faint,” someone else said.  “I’ll just faint.”

          I stayed in line, but as I neared the open casket, I closed my eyes. I’d told myself I wouldn’t look, but now I realized I couldn’t not look.  I just had to see how a person appeared when she had been run over by a truck. I opened my eyes just as I got to the coffin. I was disappointed.

          Mary Agnes seemed to be asleep. There wasn’t a scratch on her. No blood. No bruises. She had on the same good dress she wore to Mass every Sunday. It was as if she had tricked us. For a moment, I didn’t even think she was dead.

          “Move on now, Margaret,” Sister Catherine said, and a girl behind me pushed me into a hard wooden pew. 

We always had to kneel precisely, hands folded, our bodies touching neither the back of the pew in front of us, nor our seat behind us.

          “That was just her body,” Sister Catherine told us after Mass. “The soul of Mary Agnes left her body and went to Heaven as soon as she died. The body you saw today was an empty shell.”

          I thought of an egg and pictured the soul of Mary Agnes as the yellow yolk.

          “Margaret, why don’t you move down and sit in Mary Agnes’s seat?” Sister Catherine said. 

          “Me, Sister?”  I didn’t want to leave my desk. I loved the familiar gouges and grooves in the wooden top, the persistent squeak of the seat.

          “Yes, I never liked having you in the back like that.”

          I knew then that her invitation wasn’t a question, but an order. 

          “Yes, Sister,” I said softly. 

I gathered my books and pencil case and shuffled down the aisle. What if Mary Agnes’s ghost occupied the vacant seat?  What if whoever sat in that desk became marked to join God in Heaven?  I slid into the seat, but it was too tight for me, the tallest girl in the class. Mary Agnes had been the shortest. Sister didn’t seem to notice.

          “Splendid,” Sister said. 

          The whole school prayed for Mary Agnes every day, and I began to feel better.  Even if she was in Purgatory, all those Hail Marys and Our Fathers and Glory Be’s had to be helping her move on. And like the rest of us, she must have stocked up on indulgences for just this occasion. A Glory Be could save you an hour of suffering, a Hail Mary an hour, and an Our Father a whole day.  Of course those intervals were nothing compared to eternity, but I still donated half of my indulgences to Mary Agnes, hoping that I would have enough time left to rebuild my stores. Who kept track? I wondered. Did Saint Peter have a list at the Gate with all the Purgatory-free hours you had accumulated? Well, as Mama said, we weren’t meant to understand.

          By the end of the week, I was proud of how useful I’d become to my dead classmate.

          Suddenly Sister Catherine gazed intently at me.  “Mary Agnes, come to the board, dear, and tell us how much is fourteen minus eleven.”

          The class turned to stare, and I wriggled in my seat. 

          “Mary Agnes?” Sister repeated.

          “I’m Margaret, Sister Catherine.  Margaret Kovacs.”

          Sister stared at me, wrinkling her brow as if trying to add numbers in her head, but then she nodded her head and said, “Oh, of course. I’m so sorry, Margaret. Will you come to the board and take eleven from fourteen?”

          I breathed a sigh of relief. Sister had just forgotten.

          But several days later, she forgot again.  I was standing on the sidelines watching the others playing kickball on the playground when Sister suddenly appeared beside me. Her cloaked arm, like the wing of a giant black bird, enveloped me. The pressure of her arm held me fast. I tried to wriggle free, but she tightened her grip.

          “Stay, Mary Agnes,” she said in a monotone. “Stay and watch with me.”

          Wasn’t that similar to what Jesus said to the apostles in the Garden of Gethsemane?

          “I…I have to pee,” I lied.

          “Oh well, of course,” Sister conceded, loosening her hold. “Of course.”

          I sprang free and ran for the lavatory, hiding in the cubicle until I heard the bell clanging to signal the end of recess.

          “Are you all right, Margaret?” Sister asked me as I returned to my seat.

          “Yes, Sister, I’m fine,” I said, relieved that she remembered who I was.

The next day I joined in the game of kickball, getting kicked myself each time I got in the way of a better player, but that was preferable to sitting bored on the sidelines or held tight by Sister Catherine.

          Several days later, our class stopped praying for the soul of Mary Agnes.  The rest of the school continued easing her into Heaven, but Sister said we did not have to anymore. I wondered if she’d had a vision the way that the saints and martyrs often did, and God had told her that Mary Agnes was with God now and no longer needed our prayers. I was hoping she would tell us about her revelation, but Sister never raised the subject and no one had the courage to ask, not even Johnny Farkas. There were dark circles under her eyes now, her black habit was wrinkled, and she wore her wimple askew.

          After school, I slipped into the church and knelt before the statue of Saint Lucia, who still offered me eyeballs on a plate. I put a dime in the metal box and lit a candle in the rack at her feet, sending shadows dancing across her robes. Kneeling, I stared up into her sympathetic eyes.

          “Please, please help Sister Catherine understand I’m not Mary Agnes,” I pleaded.

          But the next day was no better. When I won the spelling bee, Sister Catherine said, “I’m so proud of you, Mary Agnes,” and gave me a holy medal tied to a small doily by a pink ribbon.

          I decided it took the saints awhile to answer prayers.

          Because we were second graders, our First Confession was imminent, and the big day finally arrived. After entering the church, we waited in line beneath stained-glass windows depicting famous saints. I concentrated on my sins, trying to remember how many times I’d committed each one. We were all anxious to get it over with before we forgot what to say, and we were impatient with anyone who took too long in the confessional.

          When my turn came, I swept aside the blue velvet curtain and knelt on the wooden kneeler in the murky darkness before the small square covered by a mesh screen. After the second grader on the far side had finished their confession, the wooden door behind my screen slid open. Father Kushner, with his black robe and heavy breathing, leaned toward the grating and said, “Yes, my child.”

          I told him how I’d disobeyed my parents three times, how I’d lied twice, and how once I’d failed to say my prayers before falling asleep.  Then, I confessed my worst sin. “And I was angry with Sister Catherine, Father,” I said quickly, hoping he wouldn’t make me elaborate.

          “Why were you angry, my child?” he prodded.

          It seemed to me that if Father Kushner was really filling in for Jesus, he should know this since Jesus knew everything, but maybe my penance included supplying the details. “Because she won’t remember I’m not Mary Agnes, Father.” And then I told him everything, going on and on, forgetting about the other second graders waiting in line.

          “I see,” said Father Kushner. Then he paused and I thought he might not give me absolution because my attitude was unforgivable, but finally he said, “You must not be angry with Sister, my child, and try to listen to everything your parents tell you. For your penance, say two Our Fathers and make a good Act of Contrition.”

Father Kushner gave me absolution after I recited the Act of Contrition, and when I left the confessional, I realized a huge weight had been lifted from my shoulders. In the pew, I prayed with all my heart, forcing myself to be sorry that I’d caused Jesus so much pain as I said my penance.

          The following day, Sister Catherine still had dark circles under her eyes, which seemed to look through us instead of at us. I also noticed a wisp of a curl had escaped the confines of her wimple. She had red hair just like Mary Agnes, so the nuns obviously didn’t have to shave their heads. When Sister called the roll, she included Mary Agnes’s name and looked at me for a reply.

          “Mary Agnes O’Reilly,” she repeated, staring right at me.  “Please answer when your name is called.”

          The class turned to look at me, waiting.

          I felt as if I was wearing a sweater much too small for me.

          “Mary Agnes!” Sister repeated.

          My heart was throbbing, and I imagined it might explode.

          “I’m not Mary Agnes, Sister,” I finally blurted out.  “I’m Margaret.  Margaret Kovacs. Mary Agnes is dead. She’s in Heaven with God.”

          “No, no, not dead,” Sister stammered. “Not dead. You mustn’t say...”

          “Sister Catherine,” a voice said, and everyone turned to see Mother Superior in the doorway. “You’re wanted in the office.”

          “But Mary Agnes…” Sister Catherine murmured, staring at me.

          “Mary Agnes is waiting for you in Monsignor’s office,” Mother Superior continued. “Now come, my dear.” She took Sister Catherine by the arm. “Sister Cecile will take over the class until you return.”

          But Sister Catherine never returned, and Sister Cecile was our teacher for the rest of the year. She always remembered who I was, let me sit at a larger desk, and had us pray for the soul of Mary Agnes O’Reilly every day.

Margaret Duda, the daughter of Hungarian immigrants, is a poet, short story writer, non-fiction author of five books and over a hundred articles in magazines, is working on the final draft of a novel, and will have a collection of poems published in May of 2023. She had her short fiction in the Kansas Quarterly, the University Review, the South Carolina Review, the Green River Review, the Michigan Quarterly Review, Crosscurrents, and Fine Arts Discovery. One of her stories made the distinctive list of Best American Short Stories.