the minnesota review n.s. 58-60 (2003)

May Hall

Faith Is Three Parts Formaldehyde, One Part Ethyl Alcohol

Mercy keeps her finger in a jar on the nightstand. In the morning, it twists to feel the lines of sunlight that slip through her blinds. She likes to watch its gentle convulsions and holds her other fingers up to share the warmth. Since she cut off her finger, she has worked in the diocese business office, filing and answering phones. Mostly, she answers questions from parents about the parish schools and fields requests for priestly appearances. While at work, she doesn't think about her finger too much. It is just her left pinkie finger, so it was never very useful anyway; she can still type seventy-five words a minute. In fact, some people don't even notice it is missing. Those who do usually look appalled and ask, almost reverently, how it happened. Then she has to lie, all the while praying for the Lord to forgive her, and tell them that she had her hand slammed in a screen door as a child and they had to amputate. This invariably provokes Oh, what a shame and you such a pretty young woman. Usually, she tries to keep her hand close to her side, hidden inside the loose cuff of her shirt because of the shame this falsehood causes her, but she comforts herself by thinking that the percentage of children carelessly leaving their appendages hanging out of car windows and wedged between hinges has probably dropped considerably since she came to work in the diocese.

She used to carry the finger with her in a large shoulder bag, the jar wrapped carefully in a bath towel. For a while, she needed it with her all the time. She would take it out at work when no one else was around and in restaurant bathrooms to assure herself that it was still there, that it hadn't dissolved, that the glass of the jar hadn't cracked, leaving it withered and thirsty. She never shows it to anyone. This is partly because she doesn't want anybody to know about it. Cutting it off had been enough to make the nuns expel her from the convent, even though she was, by their account, the most promising novice they'd seen in years. If the fathers found out she had kept it, she would probably be excommunicated. The other reason she never shows anyone is because she is afraid that sharing it will take away from its potency. Her severed finger is a miracle, a divine link. Every time she unwrapped it in the darkness under her desk or in the chill of a bathroom stall, it would glow love. It is a piece of her that is always praying, a sign of the preservative power of God's grace.

It was only a few months that she carried it with her before her anxiety over its safety outweighed her need for it. Now she waits until she is in the privacy of her apartment to indulge herself. During the day it drifts at the edge of her imagination, two and a half inches of waxy faith suspended in a globe of silvery liquid. At night, she removes the bath towel shroud so she can study its pale length until she falls asleep to dream of watery expanses and moons shaped like fingernails.

One Thursday in April, a man in his thirties enters the diocese office a few minutes before closing. He crosses to Mercy's desk and stands in front of her, apparently studying her nameplate. His silence makes her nervous, and she tucks her left hand under her thigh before asking how she can help him. He doesn't speak, and she wonders whether she should try to get past him to the outside door or dash into the copy room behind her where her most lethal weapon would be a five gallon bottle of toner. Just as she starts to pray to the Lord for divine intervention or at least a little timely guidance, the man pulls a small silver box from his pocket, parts the edges of his collar, and holds the box to the bit of clear tube that protrudes from his throat. Mercy what?

She thinks it is the most beautiful and terrifying sound she has ever heard. It is a cross between a whisper and a deep bass with overtones of metal, but it is not mechanical. It is a sound she imagines stones make when mating or dying. He repeats, Mercy what? Again the sound amazes and humbles her, provokes a feeling she has only experienced after praying for hours, late at night, when the other nuns were sleeping and she was alone in the cold arch of the chapel. There is an almost sexual tightening of her abdomen, a powerful contraction deep in her stomach that makes her breath catch and her eyes water.

Catherine Richardson, she gasps.

I didn't mean to frighten you; it's just that this is the only way . . .

She interrupts him to assure him that of course she wasn't reacting to his voice, that she had been doing some chair aerobics, perfect for toning hips and thighs while typing please forgive me Lord and because of that was out of breath, so probably should stop since that's supposed to be a sign that one is burning muscle instead of fat. She still has her hand pressed under her leg and thinks this might add verisimilitude to her story as she asks again how she can help him.

He says he has a spiritual problem. His voice still startles her, but she is becoming used to it and its effect on her; however, this question throws her into a panic because all of the priests are out of town for a convention on venial sin except for Father O'Rourke who doesn't approve of conventions and went to Las Vegas instead for the weekend. The man looks distressed by this.

Well, then maybe you can help me. I guess it is sort of an administrative matter.

I'm not really an expert, Mercy says. Don't you think you'd better wait for the fathers to get back?

The man plucks at his collar in agitation. If I don't resolve this now, I'm afraid I'll lose my nerve.

She wants to say something reassuring, but her stomach growls and the man starts and says, How rude of me. I'm keeping you from your dinner. My name is Gregory. He holds out his left hand because he is still clasping the silver box to his throat with the right, and she hesitates but finally gives him her left hand to shake and is surprised when he doesn’t say anything about her missing finger. That's when she finds herself asking him if he'd like to eat with her at the deli next door so they can talk more about his problem. As they walk to the restaurant, she wonders what has possessed her to ask this strange man to eat with her. She decides it must be his voice that has made her feel so safe with him, this voice that makes her think of large dark things moving against one another.

Over corned beef and coleslaw he asks about her missing finger, and because he doesn't sound awed or horrified, she tells him the truth. She feels like he deserves to hear about it for some reason, maybe because he seems like he would understand loss. He is the first person she has told the story. Everyone else who knows the truth heard it from the nuns who found her in the kitchen, on her knees, her severed finger beside her on the stone floor, her hands clasped, forehead pressed against the avocado metal of the refrigerator. They said she was in rapture; the doctors called it shock. She tells Gregory how it didn't bleed at all and how this disappointed her, how even at that time, even when she was having the most meaningful religious experience of her life, she felt somehow cheated by the absence of blood. She tells him without prompting, almost shyly, about the voice she heard before it happened, except it wasn't a voice. It was more a feeling, a shifting of weights and forms around her. That's how she explains it after Gregory asks if she wants cheesecake–it was as if her perception of everything slipped for a moment and she knew what she was supposed to do. He asks only one question about the incident.

What does it mean?

It's proof, of course.

It isn't until she has accepted his offer of a ride back to her nearby apartment that she realizes they haven't talked at all about his problem. He is quiet when she reminds him of it. The artificial voice box is a moth, still in his cupped palm. Then he says he was wondering if it was possible to bury objects, not a person, just an inanimate thing, in consecrated ground. She thinks for a long time before she has to say she doesn't know, but she doesn't think so. He sighs when she tells him this. The noise comes from his mouth, not his throat; it is a painful sound that makes her knuckles ache. When they reach her apartment, he asks if he can come in for a moment, says that there's something he'd like to show her. And because she feels this bond with him, this recognition, she doesn't even question him, just nods and leads him down the sidewalk to her door.

Do you have a tape player?

His voice seems weaker, more metallic than before, and she wonders if he isn't used to talking so much. So, as if her not speaking could conserve his strength, she simply nods again and points to the corner of the living room. He stands in front of the machine for a while, both hands pressed against it. When he does move, it is to reach into his pocket, but this time he brings out a cassette tape, not the silver box. He places it in the tape deck and presses play, and for a few minutes the room is quiet except for the murmur of the tape cycling into the machine. Mercy is still standing in the entranceway, the door open behind her, and she can see the dark form of his car in the mirror on the opposite wall, and strangely, she can see another reflection within that image. She recognizes the cold blur of the moon on his windshield as a voice comes out of the speakers and she knows without him telling her, for he is not talking or even looking at her, that this is his voice, was his voice. It is a child singing a song about a spider and a rainstorm, and as the rain starts falling, there is a click where the recording stops.

May I leave this with you?

This surprises her but she knows she will say yes, knows she won't be able to help herself, and the sound of the tape player continuing past the voice, scanning silence, brings back that feeling of praying in the empty chapel and another memory, the rasp of metal against stone tile, the smell of onions, the whine a bone makes when it is lost.

May Hall teaches at Hamilton College and is completing her first collection of short stories.