Andre Dubus, the writer whose death last year at age 63 was much  mourned by his many readers, was born in Louisiana but lived in Haverhill, Massachusetts for much  of his life. Many of his short stories found their setting in this latter region and breathed the distinctive atmosphere of the area. Among these stories is one that I keep returning to for its human pathos and, especially, its bold spirituality.

“A Father’s Story” centers on the life of a middle-aged man named Luke Ripley who owns a stable of thirty horses that he rents to riders. Since the time when his wife left, taking his three sons and one daughter with her, the man suffers from loneliness and a sense of continual unease.

At the same time, what he calls “my real life” brings him into daily contact with God. This contact comes through taking part in the Catholic Mass, along with five or six other people at St. John’s, his local parish. Speaking of the Eucharist that he receives, he describes “a feeling that I am thankful not to have lost in the forty-eight years since my first Communion. At its center is excitement; spreading out from it is the peace of certainty.”

To this character, faith is a vital reality, one that he defines by contrast with belief. “Belief is believing in God; faith is believing that God believes in you.”

Yet he feels his own inability to pay constant attention to God. For that reason he appreciates the liturgy in which he takes part. “Ritual,” he says, “allows those who cannot will themselves out of the secular to perform the spiritual as dancing allows the tongue-tied man a ceremony of love.”

Though he cares about his sons, he feels a special love for his twenty-year-old daughter Jennifer. For him, daughters are vulnerable and altogether precious in ways that male children are not. This father worries about her “the way fathers worry about daughters and not sons.”

Luke’s special friend is Father Paul LeBoeuf, his parish priest. The two of them talk together daily and often share meals. Theirs is a spiritual friendship, though it is grounded in manly interests. He can confide his deepest feelings to his priest friend, except the series of event that unfolded when his daughter came to visit.

As she was driving home, returning to her father’s house after a night out with a couple of girlfriends, Jennifer swerved to avoid something in the road. That something turned out to be a human being, though its shape was all a blur to Jennifer as her car hit this person. The car shuddered as she hit him but she continued on her way home, panicked into not stopping.

When she got home and talked with her father through her tears, she told him the horrible details as best she could remember. Later, Luke drove to the place of the accident himself and found the body of a young man in a ditch by the side of the road. He was dead, but it remained unclear whether death had come instantly from the impact.

The discovery plunged the father into a crisis of conscience. Should he, can he call the authorities and report what his daughter has done? After a sleepless night, he takes the keys to his daughter’s car, drives to church, and talks to Father Paul. The priest senses that something is wrong but Luke cannot tell him the secret. “To confess now would be unfair,” he tells himself. “It is a world of secrets, and now I have one from my from my best, in truth my only friend.”

Still, he receives the Eucharist and talks with God as before. However, now he has said good-bye to the peace that used to be his. Knowing that he would do it again, Luke tells himself that he acted as the father of a girl.

When God tells him that He is a father, too, Luke replies that God is not the father of a daughter but of a son. Then his poignant conversation with God ends this way:

“But you never had a daughter, and if You had, You could not have borne her passion.

“‘As you love me,’ I say, and I go with an apple or carrot out to the barn.”

Richard Griffin