Ordinary Grace

  It was true that he never complimented us. He usually said something like, I pay you boys well. Be sure you do a good job now. And although we busted our butts in the work we did under his watchful eye and according to his constant direction he never once that I could recall had remarked favorably on our efforts.

  “Here,” he said. “I think a bonus is due.”

  We were usually paid two dollars apiece for the yard work but that day my grandfather gave us each a ten-dollar bill. I remember a heated discussion my parents once had in which my father said that my grandfather was a man who believed that money could buy you anything in life including love. Although I hadn’t really thought about it, I’d pretty much agreed with his assessment. That Sunday afternoon I saw something else. Whether my eyes had been opened by Ariel’s death or whether it was my grandfather’s understanding and behavior that had altered I couldn’t say, but in the shade of his porch with a glass of cold lemonade in my hand, I looked at him with greater appreciation and affection than I ever had before.

  Liz finally suggested that it was time we all get back. She needed to begin thinking about supper that night. My grandfather said, “You boys ready?”

  “I’d like to walk home,” I told him.

  “Are you sure? What about you, Jake?”

  “If Frank’s walking, I’ll walk too,” he said.

  “All right then.” My grandfather stood up from his rocker.

  Walking home was different from the day before. Easier somehow. It felt more normal with Jake beside me and the streets didn’t seem as strange. But everything was different, there was no mistaking that.

  Jake stopped suddenly and stood kind of slumped in the road as if all the air had suddenly gone out of him.

  I said, “What’s wrong?”

  His voice was choked. “I can’t stop thinking about how much I want her back.”

  “It’ll get better.”

  “When, Frank?”

  I knew nothing about death. We’d never even had a pet that died. But I thought about Bobby Cole’s parents who’d lost everything when they lost Bobby. And I thought about an evening only a week before when I’d walked past their house on my way home from goofing around with Danny O’Keefe. Mr. Cole had been in the yard and he’d been looking up at the evening sky and when he realized that I was passing on the sidewalk he smiled and said, “Beautiful evening, eh, Frank?” I thought if a man who’d lost everything could still see the beauty in a sunset then sooner or later things would look up for Jake and me and our family.

  I put my arm around my brother and said, “I don’t know. But it will.”

  When we got home Dad was gone. Gus was in the church parking lot sitting on his Indian Chief talking through the open window of Doyle’s cruiser. Jake and I drifted over.

  “Hey, guys, “Doyle said.

  I knew him in so many ways now that I felt a creepy kind of kinship with him.

  “I was just telling Gus here that they found Morris Engdahl and the Kleinschmidt girl.”

  “Where were they?” I asked.

  “Cozied up in a motel in Sioux Falls. The girl’s only seventeen so the sheriff over there’s holding Engdahl on violation of the Mann Act, but they’ll be bringing him back here for questioning.”

  I didn’t know what the Mann Act was and I didn’t care. All I wanted was to hear what Morris Engdahl knew about Ariel’s death. I believed absolutely that he was low enough to have done it and I was sure everyone else did too.

  But the next day the medical examiner from Mankato came to New Bremen and conducted a thorough autopsy and what he found changed the thinking of us all.

  25

  On Mondays, Jake went to Mankato for a weekly session of speech therapy designed to help him overcome his stutter.

  I didn’t know why my brother stuttered; I just knew he always had. The therapists who worked with him were nice folks, patient and encouraging. Jake told me he liked them. So far as I could tell in all the years they’d worked with him they hadn’t made much progress. He still stuttered when he was nervous or angry and just the thought of having to say something in a public way flustered him no end. Teachers seldom called on him in class because waiting out his halting answers was torture for everyone, Jake included. He always sat in the back of a classroom. Usually his therapy was scheduled for early afternoon and my mother would pick him up at lunch and he wouldn’t go back to school that day. He told me it was the one good thing that came of being a stutterer.

  If you weren’t around Jake all the time you would have had trouble gauging him. I know that he gave some people the creeps because of the way he held to silence and watched things. Maybe because he was content to observe he often took the measure of a situation and of people much more accurately than others might have. At night in our room I’d be going on and on about a circumstance we’d both been a part of and Jake would listen to me from his bed and when I was finished he’d ask me a question or make a simple statement that had the effect of pointing out something I’d missed in the dynamics of the situation but Jake had not.

  Normally my mother took Jake to his speech therapy but the Monday after Ariel died she didn’t. That morning, she’d left us. She had simply stood up at the breakfast table after I asked for some orange juice and had announced she couldn’t stand another minute in that goddamn house and she was going to Emil Brandt’s. She’d stormed out and the screen door had slammed behind her and she’d stomped across the yard heading toward the railroad crossing on Tyler Street while my father stood at the kitchen window watching her go.

  “What’s she mad at?” I’d asked.

  Without turning from the window my father had said, “Right now, Frank, I’d guess everything.” He’d left the kitchen and walked upstairs.

  Jake, who’d been trying to make a sentence with his Alpha-Bits cereal, stirred the letters back into incoherence and said, “She’s mad at Dad.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Nothing. But he’s God.”

  “God? Dad? That’s crazy.”

  “I mean for her he’s God.” Jake said this as if it should have been obvious then went back to making his sentence.

  I didn’t have the slightest idea what he was talking about, but I’ve thought about it since and I believe I understand. My mother couldn’t rail directly at God and so she railed instead at my father. Once again Jake had seen and understood something I hadn’t.

  My father returned to the kitchen and Jake asked listlessly, “Do I have to go to Mankato today?”

  This seemed to catch my father by surprise. He thought it over then said, “Yes. I’ll take you.”

  So I was home alone that afternoon when the sheriff showed up looking for Dad. He knocked at the front screen door. A Twins game was on the radio and I was slumped on the living room sofa dividing my time between the game and one of Jake’s comic books. The sheriff was dressed in his khaki uniform. He took off his hat which was something folks did respectfully when my parents came to the door but no one had ever done it for me. It made me nervous.

  “Is your father home, Frank? I tried the church,” he said, “but no one answered.”

  “No, sir. He’s in Mankato with my brother.”

  He nodded and looked past me into the dark at my back. I wondered if he thought I wasn’t telling the truth or if it was just something he’d become used to doing as part of his job.

  “Will you do me a favor, son? Will you have him call me when he gets back? It’s important.”

  “My mother’s at Emil Brandt’s house,” I told him. “If you want to talk to her.”

  “I think I’d rather discuss this with your father. You won’t forget?”

  “No, sir. I’ll remember.”

  He turned and put his hat on and took a couple of steps and paused and turned back. “You mind coming out here a minute, Frank? A couple of things I’d like to ask you.”

  I joined him on the porch wondering what answers I had that he could possibly want.
r />   “Let’s sit down,” he suggested.

  We sat together on the top step and looked out at the yard and the church on the other side of the street and beyond that the grain elevators mute beside the tracks. Everything was quiet in the Flats. The sheriff was not a tall man and sitting we were not that different in height. He spun his hat in his hands, fingering the sweatband inside.

  “Your sister, she was pretty sweet on the Brandt boy, is that right?”

  The Brandt boy? I thought. Karl Brandt had always seemed to me mature and sophisticated. Yet here was the sheriff calling him boy just as others called me.

  I thought about Ariel and Karl and how well they seemed to get on. I thought about all they did together. I thought about the nights Ariel sneaked from the house in the dark hours and slipped back just before dawn. But I also thought about the question I’d posed to Karl Brandt the day Jake and I had ridden in his fast little car: Are you going to marry my sister? And I thought about how he’d backed away.

  I finally said, “They had a complicated relationship.”

  Which was something I’d heard once in a movie.

  “Complicated how?”

  “She liked him a lot but I think he didn’t like her as much.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “He wouldn’t marry her.”

  The sheriff stopped turning his hat in his hands and his face swung slowly toward me. “She wanted him to?”

  “She was supposed to go to Juilliard in a couple of months, which was what she always wanted to do, but lately she was different. I got the feeling she wanted to stay here with Karl.”

  “But the Brandt boy’s going off to St. Olaf.”

  “Yes, sir. I guess he is.”

  With his mouth closed he made a sound that stayed mostly in his throat and then he went back to spinning the hat in his hands.

  “What do you think of him, Frank?”

  Again I thought about the car ride and what had struck me as his refusal to marry Ariel but instead of replying I simply shrugged.

  “You notice anything different about your sister lately?”

  “Yeah. She was sad for no reason. And mad sometimes too.”

  “Did she say why?”

  “No.”

  “Do you think it might have been because of Karl?”

  “Maybe. She really loved him.”

  I said that last part not because I knew it to be true but because it felt true. Or felt to me as if it should have been true.

  “She spent a lot of time with Karl?”

  “A lot.”

  “Did you ever see them argue?”

  I made a good show of thinking hard although I knew the answer immediately. “No,” I said.

  Which didn’t seem to be the answer he wanted.

  “Once,” I said quickly, “Ariel came back from a date pretty mad.”

  “At Karl?”

  “I guess. I mean, he was the guy she was on the date with.”

  “Recently?”

  “A couple of weeks ago.”

  “Did she talk to you, Frank? Maybe tell you things she wouldn’t tell your folks?”

  “We were very close,” I said trying to sound mature.

  “What did she tell you?”

  I realized suddenly that I’d made a trap for myself, suggesting a situation that wasn’t exactly true, and the sheriff was expecting something from me I didn’t know how to give, confidences Ariel might have shared.

  “She went out at night sometimes,” I said in a panic. “After everybody was asleep. And she didn’t come back until almost morning.”

  “Out? With Karl Brandt?”

  “I think so.”

  “She sneaked out?”

  “Yes.”

  “You knew? Did you tell your parents?”

  This was getting worse by the moment.

  “I didn’t want to rat on her,” I said, realizing even as the words tumbled out that it was probably not a great way to phrase what I meant because it sounded very James Cagney and I was feeling very Public Enemy.

  The sheriff looked at me a long time and although I couldn’t read his expression clearly I was afraid that what was there was complete disapproval.

  “I mean,” I stumbled on, “she was grown up and all.”

  “Grown up? In what ways?”

  “I don’t know. Big. An adult. Me, I’m just a kid.”

  I said this hoping like crazy that being just a kid would get me off the hook. Whatever the hook was. I didn’t know for sure. What I understood clearly was that I was in way over my head.

  “Grown up,” the sheriff repeated sadly. “That she was, Frank.” He rose slowly from the step and settled his hat on his head. “Don’t forget to tell your father to call me, you hear?”

  “I won’t,” I said.

  “All right, then.”

  He descended the stairs and went to his car which was parked in the gravel drive in front of our garage and he backed out and disappeared up Tyler Street and just after that a train came rumbling through and I sat on the steps while the porch boards shook and the engine whistle screamed and I realized I was shaking too and it had nothing to do with the passage of the train.

  • • •

  I stayed on the porch watching for the Packard and in the late afternoon I spotted it bumping over the tracks. As soon as my father had parked, Jake leaped out the passenger side and sprinted toward the house and ran past me and inside. I heard the hammer of his feet on the stairs then I heard the bathroom door on the second floor slam shut. Jake had a notoriously small bladder. My father came more slowly.

  “The sheriff was here,” I told him.

  His eyes had been on the old porch steps as he mounted but now he looked up. “What did he want?”

  “He didn’t say exactly. He just asked me some questions and then he said you should call him when you got back.”

  “What kinds of questions?”

  “About Ariel and Karl.”

  “Karl?”

  “Yeah. He was pretty interested in Karl.”

  “Thank you, Frank,” he said and went inside.

  I went in too and flopped on the living room sofa and picked up the comic book I’d been reading when the sheriff came. I was near enough the phone stand at the bottom of the stairs that I could hear my father’s end of the conversation.

  “It’s Nathan Drum. My son told me you stopped by.”

  I heard the toilet flush on the second floor and water ran through the pipe in the wall.

  “I see.” My father said this heavily and I could tell it wasn’t good. “I could meet you in my church office in a few minutes, if that’s convenient.”

  Upstairs the bathroom door opened and Jake clomped into the hallway.

  “Fine. I’ll be waiting for you.”

  My father put the receiver down.

  I asked, “What did he want?”

  The room was dark. Even though my mother hadn’t been home all day I’d left the drapes pulled shut. My father stood outlined in the rectangle of sunlight in the front doorway. His back was to me and I couldn’t see his face.

  “The autopsy’s finished, Frank. He wants to talk to me about it.”

  “Is it bad?”

  “I don’t know. Your mother, have you seen her?”

  “No, sir.”

  “I’ll be across the street if she calls.”

  He left the house and I followed to the screen door and watched him walk toward the church. Halfway there he stopped and stood dead still in the middle of the street. He seemed lost and I was afraid that if a car came by he would be hit because he wouldn’t even know it was coming. I pushed open the door thinking I should call to him but he pulled himself together and continued on.

  Jake galloped down the stairs and sidled up beside me.

  “We got milk shakes,” he said. “Dad and me. At the Dairy Queen in Mankato.”

  I knew he was baiting me but I had other things on my mind. I didn’t even bother to reply.


  He asked, “Where’s Dad?”

  I nodded toward the church and said, “He’s waiting for the sheriff to come back.”

  I stepped out onto the porch.

  Jake came too, glued to me, and said, “The sheriff was here? What did he want?”

  “Mostly to see Dad. But he asked me some questions about Karl and Ariel.”

  “What kind of questions?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  I spoke to Jake curtly in a way meant to cut off his probing because something else had captured my attention. In the aftermath of Ariel’s death I often found myself noticing some unusual convergence of natural circumstance that I took as a sign. Not necessarily from God but clearly from forces beyond my own constricted understanding. The night before, I’d observed two shooting stars whose paths crossed in the sky to the east and I knew it meant something extraordinary but what I couldn’t say. And after my father and Jake had left for Mankato as I listened to the Twins game on the radio I’d heard, during a few moments of transmission static, a voice speak from a different broadcast source and I thought I made out two words, though not clearly: The answer. The answer to what? I wondered at the time.

  Now as I stood on the porch I saw that the sun was behind the church steeple and the steeple shadow had fallen across the street and was pointing directly at me like a long proscriptive finger.

  “Frank, are you okay?”

  The sheriff’s car came down Tyler and swung onto Third and pulled into the church lot. The sheriff got out and walked to the front door of the sanctuary and went inside.

  Jake tugged on my arm. “Frank!”

  I pulled loose from his grip and started quickly down the porch steps.

  “Where are you going?”

  I said, “Nowhere.”

  In an instant he was at my side. I didn’t want to argue so I let him come. I raced to the church’s side door that opened onto the basement stairs. Gus’s motorcycle had been gone all day and as I descended into the cool under the church I knew he wouldn’t be there to stop me. I went to the disconnected furnace duct that ran up to my father’s office and pulled out the rags meant to block the flow of sound. Jake watched and his eyes told me he considered it an enormous transgression.