Ordinary Grace

  “I knew I’d find you, you little shithole,” he said and tried to pull me into the gathering dark beyond the edge of the crowd.

  A huge hand shot out and wrenched Engdahl’s grip from my arm and Warren Redstone stepped between Engdahl and me. He said, “Are you the kind of man who fights only boys? Or would you be interested in fighting a man?”

  Danny’s great-uncle may have been old but he was tall and powerful looking and he glared down at Morris Engdahl with a look hard and pointed enough to split rocks. Engdahl took a step back as if he’d already been struck a blow and he stared up into Redstone’s dark unblinking eyes and it was clear that he had nothing in him to match the old man’s grit. He said, “This is between me and the kid.”

  “No, I’m between you and the kid. You want to get to the kid, you come through me.”

  For a moment I thought Engdahl might do something stupid. At least it seemed to me that taking on Warren Redstone would be stupid. But Engdahl’s cowardice was greater than his stupidity. He backed up a few steps and pointed a finger at me. “Dead,” he said. “You’re dead.” Then he turned and vanished into the dark in which he’d sought to drag me.

  Redstone watched him go. “A friend?” he said.

  “He wouldn’t let us swim in the quarry,” I replied, “so I shoved him in. Pissed him off pretty good.”

  “You shoved him in?” Redstone looked at Danny. “You were there?”

  “Yes, sir,” Danny said.

  He looked me over again, differently this time. “Drum,” he said as if my name pleased him. “You sure you don’t have any Sioux in you?”

  Fifty yards away the singers began to mount the stage of the band shell and take their positions on the risers. I didn’t do an exact count but there were easily three dozen. The crowd started to quiet and a few seconds later my mother led Emil Brandt by the hand up the steps to the grand piano placed there for him. This was a true rarity, Emil Brandt in a public performance, and the crowd broke into applause. He kept the scarred side of his face turned away from the audience and seated himself at the piano and my mother went to the center of the stage and everything grew quiet. I could still hear people laughing faintly at the food stands and someone shouting along Luther Avenue and from the Flats in the distance the howl of a horn as a train approached the crossing on Tyler Street but my mother’s voice rose above them all.

  “Thank you for turning out today to celebrate our nation’s birth. The history of this country has been written with the blood of patriots and the sweat of farmers and laborers and men and women no different from all of us here this evening. It began with a dream conceived by our forefathers, a dream every bit as alive and vibrant and promising today as it was to those brave patriots one hundred and eighty-five years ago. To celebrate that dream and the nation built upon it, my daughter Ariel has composed a chorale titled The Freedom Road, which the New Bremen Town Singers, accompanied by our town’s world-famous composer and piano virtuoso Emil Brandt, are proud to perform for you for the first time anywhere this evening.”

  My mother turned to her singers and raised her hands and held them poised a moment, then called out to Brandt, “Now, Emil.” The chorale began with Brandt doing a slow gallop of his fingers on the keyboard that gradually increased in tempo until it was a furious flight and the singers chimed in with the urgent cry, “To arms, to arms!” Ariel’s chorale covered the history of the nation from the Revolution through the Korean conflict and celebrated the pioneers and soldiers and visionaries who created a nation from, as Ariel had written for the chorus, the raw dirt of God’s imagination. My mother conducted with dramatic flourish and the music was electric and Brandt on the piano was inspired and the voices of the singers pouring from the white cup of that band shell made the whole thing intoxicating. It lasted twelve minutes and when it was finished the audience went crazy. They stood and applauded and added their cheers and whistles and the sound was like thunder off canyon walls. My mother signaled to Ariel who’d been standing with my father and Karl at the bottom step of the band shell. Ariel climbed the steps and took Emil Brandt’s hand to lead him to the center of the stage but he pulled back and remained seated at the piano with his smooth cheek to the audience and he spoke something into Ariel’s ear and she went on without him and stood with my mother and together they took their bows. That evening Ariel had worn a beautiful red dress. She wore a gold heart-shaped locket inset with mother-of-pearl and a mother-of-pearl barrette, both of which were heirlooms. She wore a gold watch that had been a graduation gift from my parents. And at that moment she wore a smile that could have been seen from the moon. I thought my sister must be the most special person on earth and I knew absolutely she was destined for greatness.

  Warren Redstone touched my arm. “That girl’s name is Drum,” he said. “Any relation?”

  “My sister,” I called above the din.

  He looked at her keenly and nodded. “Pretty enough to be Sioux,” he said.

  • • •

  After the fireworks had ended we drifted home, Jake and I. All over New Bremen the celebration continued and the sky was alive with burning blooms of color and from the dark down the cross streets came the rattle of strings of firecrackers. Gus’s motorcycle was gone and I suspected he would finish celebrating Independence Day in a bar. The light in my father’s church office was on and his windows were closed and the sound of Tchaikovsky bled through the glass. The Packard was not in the garage and I knew that my mother was at a post-chorale celebration with Ariel and Brandt and the New Bremen Town Singers and would not be home until late.

  We’d been instructed about our bedtime and we got into our pajamas and hit the sack at ten-thirty. Through the screen of our bedroom window I listened as the sounds died to an occasional distant pop or crackle and I heard my father return from the church and much later through the dim veil of sleep I dreamed the sound of the Packard crushing gravel in our drive and a car door slamming closed.

  And even later I woke and heard my father on the telephone and my mother’s worried voice prompting him and the dark outside was thick as tar and not even the crickets chirred. I got up and found them downstairs with their faces pinched and tired. I asked what was wrong and my father said that Ariel had not yet returned and go back to bed.

  Because of my father’s occupation I was used to late night urgencies and because I’d witnessed her comings and goings that summer I was used to Ariel sneaking off in the dark and returning safely before dawn and because I was little more than a child still wrapped in a soothing blanket of illusion I trusted that my mother and father together could handle anything and I went back to my bedroom and drifted selfishly into sleep listening to the distant distraught voices of my parents while they continued their telephone calls and waited anxiously for word of their daughter.

  18

  The next morning I woke to the threat of rain.

  I found my parents downstairs in the kitchen with Karl Brandt and Sheriff Gregor and a deputy named Zollee Hauptmann. The sheriff was dressed in jeans and a short-sleeved blue work shirt and his cheeks were red and shiny as if he’d just finished shaving. The deputy wore a uniform. They were drinking coffee at the table and Gregor had a small notebook in front of him, writing as my parents talked. I stood in the doorway to the dining room and they barely noticed me.

  Ariel had been with Karl Brandt, I learned as I listened, and with other friends who’d gathered on the river at Sibley Park and built a bonfire on the same stretch of sand where Doyle had blown up the frog with an M-80. There’d been alcohol and everyone was drinking and somewhere along the way they’d lost track of Ariel and no one knew, not even Karl, when she’d gone or where. She’d simply vanished.

  Gregor requested the names of the other friends and Karl gave him ten or twelve.

  “Was Ariel drinking too?” Gregor asked.

  Karl said, “Yes.”

  “You took her there? To the river?”

  “After the party,” he said.
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  “The party with the New Bremen Town Singers?”

  “Yes, that one.”

  “But you didn’t bring her home from the shindig at the river. Why not?”

  “She wasn’t around when I was ready to go.”

  “Did that concern you?”

  “Yes. But I just figured she got a ride with someone else. I was pretty drunk by then.”

  “You’re not old enough to be drinking,” Gregor said.

  “Yeah, well kind of late to worry about that now.”

  “Maybe if you hadn’t been drinking you’d know where Ariel is.”

  Karl looked guilty and clammed up.

  “Any of your friends that you also noticed gone?”

  Karl thought, then shrugged. “People were coming and going all night.”

  “And she said nothing to you before she left?”

  “No,” Karl said. “Not about leaving anyway.”

  “What time did you leave the party?”

  “I don’t know exactly. Two, two-thirty.”

  “Did you go straight home?”

  “Yes.”

  From his little notebook Gregor tore out the list he’d made of the names Karl had given him and he handed the sheet to Hauptmann. He said, “Start calling, Zollee.”

  Hauptmann went outside through the screen door and I heard the engine of his cruiser turn over and he left. To my parents Gregor said, “Does your daughter have any special friends she might have stayed with last night?”

  “Yes,” my mother said. “We’ve called them all. No one’s seen her.”

  “Could you give me their names? I’d like to talk to them myself.”

  “Of course.” My mother rattled off six names which Gregor wrote down.

  My father got up and went to the coffeepot on the stove and poured himself another cup. He saw me in the doorway and said, “Why don’t you go upstairs and get dressed, Frank.”

  I said, “Where’s Ariel?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “Hello, Frank,” Sheriff Gregor said to me like we were old friends and like he kind of meant it.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Ariel didn’t come home last night,” he said. “Your folks are a little worried. Do you have any idea where your sister might be if she’s not at home?”

  “Mr. Brandt’s,” I said without even thinking.

  “Emil!” My mother said this as if it was a revelation. She jumped up and hurried past me to the telephone in the living room.

  “Why Mr. Brandt?” The sheriff looked at me and then at my father.

  “They’re good friends,” my father said. “And he lives very near Sibley Park.”

  My father sounded hopeful. With his coffee cup in his hand he came to where I stood and looked beyond me to the living room and listened to the telephone conversation my mother had with Emil Brandt.

  “She didn’t come home last night, Emil,” my mother was saying. “I thought maybe she’d stayed at your place.” My mother listened and looked down at the floor. “No, no, Karl doesn’t know either. They were at Sibley Park, a bonfire on the river. She left and no one knows when or with whom.” Mother listened some more, this time with her eyes closed, and when she spoke there was a tremble to her voice that I was pretty sure would lead to tears. “I will, Emil,” she said. “When we know something.” She hung up and saw my father watching and shook her head and walked to him and laid her cheek against his shoulder and began to cry.

  Sheriff Gregor stood up and slipped his notebook into his shirt pocket. He said, “I’ll take a couple of men and go on down to Sibley Park and have a look around. Karl, I want you there to point out where all the activity took place. I’ll also talk to Ariel’s friends myself and see if they tell me anything different from what they’ve told you folks. And, listen, in my experience kids turn up. They’ve done something they’re ashamed of or something stupid or they just up and decide on the spur of the moment to drive to the Twin Cities and they come back. Honestly, they come back.” He offered us a smile meant to reassure.

  “Thank you,” my father said. Then he said, “Would you mind if I joined you at the river?”

  The sheriff said, “Fine by me. I’m going to stop by my office first. I’ll meet you at Sibley Park in half an hour. You too, Karl.”

  He left and Karl said to my parents, “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I should have, I don’t know, been more responsible, I guess. I just don’t know where she would have gone.”

  “We’ll start at the river,” my father said.

  I took a step into the kitchen. “Can I go, too?”

  My father considered the request, but distractedly. To my surprise he said, “All right.”

  My mother was drying her eyes and looking lost. “I don’t know what to do,” she said.

  “Pray,” my father advised. “And stay here by the phone in case she calls.”

  Upstairs I found Jake awake but still lying in bed. “What’s going on?” he asked.

  I slipped out of my pajamas. “Ariel’s gone,” I said.

  “Gone where?”

  “Nobody knows.” I began dressing from the pile of clothes I’d worn the day before and had left on the floor.

  Jake sat up. “Where are you going?”

  “Sibley Park. That’s where Ariel was last night.”

  Jake scooted off the bed and shed his pajamas and began to pull on clothes. “I’m coming too,” he said.

  • • •

  There was no sun or any promise of sun. The clouds lay thick and gray and gave the sky the feel of a flat rock pressing on the valley. We got to Sibley Park before the sheriff and we stood at the edge of the river where Ariel had last been seen. The sand was spotted with the cold black char of many previous fires. The one that had been kindled the night before was still smoldering. All around it the sand was pitted where people had sat and was littered with empty beer cans and beer bottles and looked like a place of wild revelry.

  “Quite a party,” my father said.

  Karl Brandt put his hands into his pockets and hung his head and didn’t reply.

  Me, I couldn’t conceive that Ariel might be gone for good and I still thought in the way of a child that we were part of an adventure whose end at the moment was a curtain of smoke from which Ariel would somehow emerge and return to us. I stood under that oppressive sky and eyed the disheveled sand and the smoldering char and knew we’d find something that would guide us to an answer. I knew this absolutely and I was eager to begin. I started to walk toward the fire and Jake followed, asking, “What are we looking for?”

  “Stop, boys,” my father said. “We’re not looking for anything yet. We wait for the sheriff.”

  Which seemed like a waste to me but my father had spoken and Jake and I obeyed.

  The sheriff came ten minutes later with two men. One wore a deputy’s uniform. The other was a town cop: Doyle. They strode down the path through the cottonwood trees and stood with us on the sand and surveyed the scene.

  “Christ, what a mess,” the sheriff said. He gave Karl Brandt a look of severe disapproval. “What were you kids thinking?”

  Karl shrugged. “It was a party.”

  “More like a rampage. When we’re finished, this gets cleaned up. You and your friends, understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “All right,” the sheriff said. “Let’s just take a look around the fire first, then we’ll spread out and see what we can find on the perimeter. Don’t disturb anything. If you find something of interest, give a holler but don’t touch it. Clear?”

  Everyone nodded including me and Jake.

  “Boys,” the sheriff said, “stick with your dad. Do what he tells you.”

  “Sure,” I said. And Jake’s head bobbed as if on a spring.

  For thirty feet in all directions of the burned-out fire the scene was basically the same. I could see where butts had nestled in the sand and feet had dragged and in one spot everything was kicked all to hell like there’d
been a fight.

  “Morris Engdahl and Hans Hoyle,” Karl said when the sheriff asked him about it. “They traded blows over cars.”

  “Cars?”

  Karl shrugged. “Important to them, I guess. They didn’t do any real damage.”

  At the mention of Morris Engdahl, Jake gave me a piercing look. “Tell them, Frank,” he said.

  “Tell me what?” the sheriff said.

  I didn’t want to say anything because I figured I’d have to go all the way back to the quarry incident and tell my father that we’d gone to a place we weren’t supposed to go but Jake gave my shoulder a nudge and my father and Doyle and the other two men stood looking at me and I knew there was no way around it so I told them pretty much everything. About the quarry and Engdahl chasing us and how at the celebration in Luther Park he’d tried to drag me off into the dark and for a reason I couldn’t explain I said, “He didn’t like Ariel.”

  “How do you know that?” the sheriff asked.

  “He called her names.”

  “What did he call her?”

  “Skag.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Harelip.”

  “All right,” the sheriff said.

  My father spoke to me from the other side of the fire char. “Frank, he said these things to you?”

  “Yeah. Me and Jake.”

  “Engdahl’s scum,” Doyle said.

  The sheriff said, “Let’s finish here, then we’ll worry about Morris Engdahl.”

  We fanned out and spread the search in a loose circle that reached the river and extended a hundred yards in both directions along the banks but found nothing the sheriff thought significant. We gathered back at the fire and the sheriff said, “Okay. I’m going to get Morris Engdahl down to my office and ask him a few questions. Mr. Drum, I’d like you there for that.”