“Faith” – a short-short story

Faith

We rounded a bend, passed several farmhouses surrounded by bare-limbed trees, then crossed a low bridge. I kept thinking Barry was lost, that we’d never get there; Barry would simply keep driving until he stumbled upon a new direction.

We both still had on our suit pants and loafers. Mom went to lie down as soon as we got home from the funeral luncheon. I’d been sitting quietly in the basement long enough for light coming in the high window to go from white to grey when Barry came and told me to get my jacket — he had something to show me.

Before long, we came to the road that ran through bare fields to the highway.

Barry took the turn, drove to the road’s end, and pulled over, killing the engine. A lone pickup passed on the highway, headlights burning. Though daylight was failing, I could make out the long gash of a tire track cutting the grassy median like a tiller’s furrow.

After some time, Barry lit a cigarette.

“He was coming off the highway here,” he said.

I’d waited a long time to know what had happened. Each night since Dad’d died, I’d had dreams about it, from which I’d come to in the dark, sitting snap-upright in bed. The residue of the dreams would keep me awake. Barry and I shared a room, and while I lie awake, I’d listen to him tossing, turning, saying things in his sleep I could half-understand.

Anxious as I was to know, when I found myself sitting not fifty yards from the spot, enshrouded by the stiffening chill and my brother’s cigarette smoke, I managed only a bland “Okay.” 

Barry might have heard anguish or grief in my flat tone. Waving the hand that held his cigarette, he pointed at the path through the median. “He would’ve stopped right there and waited to turn.”

“Because of traffic?”

Barry ignored my question. “He must not have seen the other truck. I guess the guy had his headlights off.”

The musky tobacco cloud began to swirl, shoved and shaped by our exhalations. Barry pushed open his door, and for a moment I grew fearful he meant for me to follow him to the highway and across the eastbound lane to the tires-scarred grass. But he only flicked his cigarette away and pulled the door shut. 

He wondered aloud whether Dad had been answering a phone call, or daydreaming. Barry admitted to daydreaming himself a lot while driving. He’d start humming a tune or thinking and lose track of whole miles.

Part of me — the grown-up part, I think — hoped Barry’s rendition might lead me to see more clearly what until then was a blank space in my world.

But the kid part of me didn’t know connected Barry’s daydreaming to the tire-scored grass. What could Barry’s humming and losing track of miles tell me about the reasons our mother had been asleep all afternoon and would probably still be sleeping when we got home, or why, rather than missing my father, I felt silent inside? 

In that instant, my need to know got quashed by that silence.

Barry started the truck, jammed his foot on the gas, wheeled us around and sent us roaring back along the asphalt strip splitting the field. 

“I’m trying to show you what this means,” he said, louder than the rushing wind. “It could happen to anyone, anytime. It could happen to us on the way home. Don’t you get that?”

Squeezing my eyes shut, I grabbed the door handle, dug my toes into the soles of my loafers, and feared what might become of Barry’s rage.

The rumbling of the truck’s tires grinding to a halt at the intersection brought me little relief.

Snapping his fingers, Barry said. “Just like that. Does it make any difference to you?”

Reddish clots washed the backs of my eyelids while I squeezed them, struggling to find words. 

I could only find — can still only find — Barry’s question.