Ordinary Grace

  We sat this way for several minutes in the nearly silent swelter of that July afternoon. The sky was a cloudless blue, the cornfields on the other side of the river deep jade, the distant hills a mottled green like turtle shells, and the water of the Minnesota River the color of cloudy cider. I was so used to the fertile smell of the valley that I barely noticed the raw fragrance drawn up from the wet black earth by the heat of the sun. What I did note was how, for a moment, things felt normal again. God, I wanted that moment to last forever. And with guilty clarity I realized that as much as I wanted Ariel to return to us I wanted even more for things simply to be as they’d been before.

  Jake threw a rock and said, “Every time I think about Ariel it feels like somebody punched me in the gut. Do you think she’ll ever come home, Frank?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I thought so at first but I don’t think so now.”

  “Why?”

  “I just have that feeling.”

  “Well get rid of it,” I said and threw a rock.

  “I’ve been dreaming about her.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I dream about her in heaven.”

  I’d been ready to throw another rock, even had my arm cocked, but I stopped and looked at my brother. “What’s it like?”

  “Mostly she’s just happy. I feel kind of good when I wake up.”

  “Jesus, I wish I had that dream.”

  “You said—” Jake began his usual complaint about my language but dropped it. He looked past me and looked down and said, “What’s that, Frank?”

  I turned my eyes to where he pointed at the little dam of debris the river had swept up and the trestle pilings had captured. Within the thick nesting of brush and branches which were all shades of brown and black was an undulation of bright red that couldn’t be seen from the riverbank but was quite visible from above. I stood and crept farther out onto the trestle where Jake was reluctant to follow and I reached the place directly above the debris. I peered down among the debris and branches where the brown cider water rushed through and obscured everything beneath the surface. It took me a moment to realize what I was looking at. And when I did the breath went out of me.

  “What is it, Frank?”

  I couldn’t look up. I couldn’t look away. I couldn’t speak.

  Jake said, “Frank?”

  “Get Dad,” I finally managed to say.

  “What is it?” Jake insisted.

  “Just get Dad. Now, Jake. Go. I’ll wait here.”

  Jake stood up and started out farther onto the trestle and I yelled at him, “Don’t you come out here. Don’t take another step. Just get Dad, goddamn it.”

  Jake stumbled back and almost fell from the trestle and picked himself up and turned and began to run along the tracks toward the Flats.

  Strength deserted every muscle of my body and I collapsed and stared down between the crossties at the rippling swatch of red which I’d realized was the fabric of a dress ruffling in the current. And beside it from the obscured depth of the river a little stream of a deeper color roiled up and fluttered along the surface and I knew this was Ariel’s long auburn hair.

  The day was hot and windless and the sky a hard china blue and I lay alone on the railroad bridge and cried my heart out above a river that seemed to have none.

  23

  Knowing was far worse than not knowing.

  Not knowing had offered hope. Hope that there was some possibility we’d overlooked. That a miracle might yet occur. That one day the telephone would ring and there would be Ariel’s voice on the other end like a bird singing at sunrise.

  Knowing offered only death. The death of Ariel and of hope and of something that I didn’t see at first but whose loss would reveal itself to me more and more as time went on.

  New Bremen was in Sioux County and like many basically rural counties had an elected coroner whose duty it was to certify cause of death. The coroner for our county was van der Waal, the mortician. This wasn’t a piece of information most kids my age would typically have known but because my father’s occupation often drew him to the deathbed I’d heard him on many occasions recount to my mother van der Waal’s pronouncements. In that summer with Bobby Cole and the itinerant already in the ground van der Waal was even more darkly familiar to me.

  He was tall with gray hair and a gray mustache that he often smoothed unconsciously as he talked. He spoke slowly and with great consideration in the words he chose and despite what I believed to be the gruesome nature of his occupation I thought of him as a kind man.

  I wasn’t allowed to be at the river when the sheriff’s people retrieved Ariel’s body for transport to van der Waal’s Funeral Home. My father was there and to this day he has never spoken of that experience. For my part I imagined it a hundred times that summer. It haunted me. Not Ariel’s death itself which was still a mystery but her rising from the river in the hands of my father and the other men and her repose as I envisioned it on the clean soft bed of a satin-lined coffin at van der Waal’s. I didn’t know then in the way I do now the details of death in a river, of a body submerged for three days, of the desecration of the flesh that occurs during an autopsy, and I will not tell you these things. I imagined Ariel as I’d last seen her, beautiful in her red dress with her long auburn hair brushed silky and held back with the mother-of-pearl barrette and about her throat a gold necklace with a heart-shaped locket and on her wrist a gold watch and in her eyes a tearful sheen of happiness as she accepted the applause for her music that Fourth of July night at Luther Park.

  When Jake asked me what I’d observed in the murky water beneath the trestle but wouldn’t let him see I described to him Ariel with her hair flowing and her dress aflutter as if she was simply standing in a strong summer breeze and he seemed satisfied with that and relieved. I have never asked him if now he understands the distasteful truth of what must surely have been the state of her body and I have tried my best not to imagine it myself.

  An awful hush settled over our house. My mother became nearly mute and more often than not the only sound from her was weeping. She kept the curtains drawn so that it felt as if permanent night had fallen. Never much concerned anyway with her mundane domestic duties she completely stopped cooking and cleaning and sat for hours in the quiet dark of the living room. She was flesh without spirit, eyes without sight. It felt as if I’d lost not only my sister but my mother as well.

  My grandfather and Liz came and stayed for the better part of every day. Liz took responsibility for the kitchen and for the phone which rang often with calls of condolence and she greeted those who came in person to offer the comfort of a few words and a prepared casserole and our kitchen became a wondrous buffet of midwest hot dish. Emil Brandt continued to be my mother’s constant companion but even his presence was insufficient to lift her from the dismal place into which she’d fallen.

  From the moment he looked down beside me where I stood on the trestle and saw what I saw, my father became a man I didn’t recognize. He had turned to me and said, “Come along, Frank,” as if what we’d seen was nothing more than an unpleasantness or a discourtesy best ignored. He didn’t speak to me the entire way home and once there guided me up to my room and from the telephone in the hallway called the sheriff. When he came to me afterward where I sat on my bed he said, “Not a word to your mother, Frank. Not a word until we’re sure.” His face was pale and stiff as if sculpted of beeswax and I knew he was just as sure as I was of what we’d seen. He left me and I heard him go downstairs and speak with my grandfather and then I heard the screen door open and close and I went to the window and although my heart had already broken for Ariel it seemed to break again as I watched him walk alone back to the trestle.

  In the days afterward Jake grew sullen and kept mostly to our bedroom. Ariel’s death devastated me and I broke into tears at odd moments but anger was Jake’s response. He lay on his bed and brooded and if I tried to talk to him he was liable to snap at me. He cried too b
ut they were hot tears and he wiped at them with his fists and flung them away. His anger spilled out at everyone and everything but it seemed especially directed at God. Prayers at night had been a routine all our lives yet after Ariel’s death Jake refused to pray. Nor would he bow his head for grace before meals. My father didn’t make a point of it. He had so much on his shoulders already I suppose that he simply decided to let Jake and God work out the trouble between them. But I tried to talk sense into my brother one night upstairs in our room. He told me just to l-l-l-leave him alone. I’d had enough of him at that point and I said, “The hell with you. Why are you so mad at me? I didn’t k-k-k-kill Ariel.” He looked up at me from the bed where he lay and said with what sounded like threat in his voice, “Somebody did.”

  Which was a possibility I’d chosen to reject entirely. In my thinking, Ariel had simply had too much to drink at the party and had stumbled into the river and drowned. She was a terrible swimmer. Her death was horrible beyond belief but it was an accident and accidents happened all the time even to the best of people. Or so I told myself. Looking back now, it’s easy to see what I was really afraid of. Which was that if Ariel’s death wasn’t accidental, then I had let the man most probably responsible for it get away and, oh Christ, I didn’t think I could live with that.

  So even after Jake threw the possibility at me I continued to blind myself to it. Until Gus and Doyle opened my eyes.

  Gus was a constant but quiet presence through much of the aftermath of Ariel’s death. When he entered the house he never ventured into the living room which had become like a cave where my mother brooded. He kept his presence to the kitchen where he talked with my father and ate the food which Liz dished from the contributions that poured in from friends and neighbors and members of my father’s congregations. I had the sense that he served as messenger and confidant and runner of errands in order to lessen my father’s burden.

  Late Saturday afternoon, Gus caught me alone in the front yard with a stick in my hand making life miserable for a colony of ants. He stood beside me and watched the rage I’d incited among the insects as a result of breaking open the little anthill they’d carefully constructed. “How’re you doing, Frank?” he asked.

  I watched the ants going berserk for a while before I answered, “Okay, I guess.”

  “Haven’t seen you out much.”

  “Too hot,” I said. Though the truth was that I didn’t feel like seeing anybody or being seen. I missed Ariel so much, felt so empty and hurting that I was afraid I might break down and cry at any moment and I didn’t want anyone seeing me if that happened.

  “Bet a tall root beer in a frosted mug would cool you off. What do you say we head up to Halderson’s Drugstore on my motorcycle?”

  A ride on Gus’s Indian Chief was always a treat and I was tired of the house and the darkness inside and Jake’s sullenness and the unsettling strangeness of everything that had been so preciously familiar and I said, “Sure.”

  “Think Jake might want to go?”

  I shook my head. “He just wants to be upstairs and be mad.”

  “All right if I ask him?”

  I gave a shrug and went back to poking at the ant colony.

  Gus returned a few minutes later without Jake. I was sure my brother had told him to get l-l-l-lost but Gus reported that Jake had just said he’d rather be alone right now. Gus lightly punched my arm and said, “Come on, Frankie. Let’s ride.”

  We didn’t go straight to Halderson’s. Gus took us out of town and over back roads. We flew between fields of corn that stood as high as my waist and that stretched away to the horizon on all sides with hot silver sunlight pouring over their leaves so that they glistened like the endless water of a green sea. And we dipped into the cool shade of hollows where creeks ran beneath leafy canopies of cottonwood and hackberry and birch. We climbed to the top of the ridge that marked the southern boundary of the river valley and below us spread a land full of the promise of a good fall harvest and cut by a river that I understood was the reason for the rich life there. And although I’d been angry at the river for Ariel’s death I understood the river was not to blame.

  All the while I sat in the little sidecar and let the wind and the sun and the beauty of the land wash over me. I felt cleaner and better than I had since Ariel first went missing. I didn’t want to go back. I wanted to stay with that big motorcycle and leave New Bremen behind forever. But eventually Gus guided us into town and pulled the Indian Chief up before Halderson’s Drugstore and killed the engine and I hopped out of the sidecar and we went inside.

  Cordelia Lundgren was behind the counter of the soda fountain. I knew her slightly. One of Ariel’s friends. She was heavy and suffered from a bad complexion and when she saw me her face took on a look of panic as if she had no idea what to say to me. So she said nothing at all.

  “A couple of root beers,” Gus said as we sat down on the stools. “And make sure those mugs are good and frosty.”

  Halderson came from behind the pharmacy window and leaned against the counter. “Those root beers are on the house,” he told Cordelia. He looked at me and said, “Frank, I’m sorry about your sister. It’s a crying shame.”

  “Thank you, sir,” I said and waited for my root beer.

  “Any more word, Gus?”

  “No,” Gus said, and out of the corner of my eye I saw him gesture to Halderson in a way that was meant to cut off any further questioning.

  “Well, I just wanted to say how sorry I am.”

  I studied the miscellaneous items lined up along the preparation area of the soda fountain—cherry and lime syrups for phosphates, chocolate and butterscotch and strawberry for sundaes, chopped nuts and bananas and whipped cream—and without looking at Halderson I said, “Yes, sir. Thank you.”

  “Anything you or your family need just let me know.”

  “I will, sir.”

  It was an awkward dance, with death calling the tune, and in a way I felt sorry for Halderson who was simply trying to be kind. I was relieved when Cordelia brought the root beers and Halderson returned to his pharmacy window.

  Ten minutes later Doyle walked in. He was in uniform and he came straight to Gus and me.

  “Saw your motorcycle out front,” he said.

  “Yeah, Frankie and me, we just had ourselves a great ride in the country.”

  “I’m really sorry about your sister, Frank. I promise you we’ll get the bastard who killed her.”

  “What do you mean? I thought she drowned in the river.” It was Halderson who said this. When Doyle walked in the pharmacist had come out again from behind his window.

  “According to the coroner’s preliminary report, there’s more to it than that,” Doyle said. He eased himself onto the stool next to Gus.

  “Not now,” Gus said and gave a nod in my direction.

  “I want to know,” I said.

  “I don’t think so,” Gus replied.

  Doyle said, “The boy has a right to know seems to me.”

  “That’s not for you to say,” Gus responded.

  “Hell, he’ll know sooner or later.”

  “Tell me,” I said.

  Doyle ignored the stern look from Gus. “The coroner says your sister drowned but it wasn’t the river that killed her. He believes she was hit on the head and probably knocked unconscious and thrown in. He wants some hotshot medical examiner from Mankato to come out and do a full autopsy.”

  Oh, God, please no, I thought.

  “Do they have any idea who might have done it?” the pharmacist asked.

  “Pretty sure it was the Indian,” Doyle said. “Redstone. He had her necklace.”

  A tidal wave of guilt swept me up and spun me around and dizzied me. Oh God oh God oh God, I thought. I let him get away.

  And then because I couldn’t bear the guilt I grabbed at the fading sense I’d had of Redstone that he was different from the way everyone else seemed to see him. I said almost breathlessly, “He told me he found the loc
ket.”

  “And you believed him? An Indian?” Doyle looked at me like I was an idiot.

  His interest was a policeman’s interest. He was concerned with facts. How could he understand my own sense of Warren Redstone? Still I stumbled desperately on. I said, “Why would he want to hurt Ariel? He didn’t even know her.”

  “I’m betting the autopsy’ll tell us why,” Doyle said enigmatically and I saw him shoot a knowing look at Gus.

  “He didn’t do it,” I insisted childishly, illogically.

  Maybe to save me from appearing any stupider or maybe simply to distract me from thinking too much about Doyle’s veiled reference to what the autopsy might reveal, Gus said to his friend, “What if it wasn’t the Indian?”

  Doyle shrugged. “My next choice would be Engdahl.”

  Which was an enormous relief to me and I jumped on the possibility. “That girl he was with, she’s a skag,” I said. “I bet everything she said about that night was a lie.”

  “A skag?” Doyle seemed to find that amusing. He grinned briefly and said, “When the sheriff finds them, I’ll make sure he knows that, Frankie.”

  “Finds them?” Halderson said.

  “He’s looking for them now,” Doyle told us. “Both kids just up and disappeared, Engdahl and his girlfriend.”

  “That doesn’t necessarily prove anything,” Halderson pointed out.

  “Maybe not but it sure doesn’t look good.” Doyle eyed me. “Your father probably knows all this. The way I understand it the sheriff’s been talking to him all along. Hell, Gus probably already knew, too.”

  I looked at Gus and could tell from his face that he did indeed know.