Ordinary Grace

  The sheriff was more forthcoming. He shared with my parents what he learned in his interviews of Karl Brandt which, because a lawyer was always present, wasn’t much. The young man would neither confirm nor deny his part in Ariel’s pregnancy and he was adamant in asserting that neither he nor Ariel had had any intention of getting married. He held to his earlier story that the night she disappeared he’d drunk too much and had lost track of her at the party on the river. The sheriff shared with my parents his own concern that Karl sounded as if he was repeating a script he’d memorized.

  Emil Brandt seemed to have dropped from our lives. He’d been my mother’s constant companion from the moment Ariel vanished, but once my sister’s pregnancy had been revealed and the Brandt name had been dragged into the thick of things and the family had sequestered themselves, my mother’s affections shifted away from anything Brandt. Which left her adrift in a way. She seemed angry all the time. Angry at my father. Angry at the Brandts. Angry at me and Jake if we happened to stray into her path. And as always those days angry at God. As best we could we stayed out of her way.

  Wednesday afternoon my father went to van der Waal’s to complete the arrangements for Ariel’s burial which was scheduled for Saturday. Jake and I were left home with our mother who sat in a rocker on the front porch smoking cigarettes in plain view of anyone who happened by and looking with a hard eye at the church across the street. Her hair was unbrushed and she wore slippers and her housecoat. Before he left my father had tried to talk her into dressing but had finally given up.

  When Gus pulled into the church lot and parked his motorcycle I was in the garage with my bicycle flipped upside down working on removing the tube of a flat tire. Gus walked across the street so focused on my mother that he didn’t see me. There were cobwebs across the garage window and the panes were in need of washing but even so I had a pretty good view of the front porch and could hear what transpired there.

  At the bottom step Gus stopped. “Nathan around, Ruth?”

  “Gone,” she said and blew a flourish of smoke.

  “Know when he’ll be back?”

  “I have no idea. He’s getting everything ready to bury Ariel. Do you have news from your friend Doyle? Is that why you’re looking for Nathan?”

  “I’d rather talk directly to Nathan.”

  “If you know something, I’d rather you talked to me.”

  Gus looked up at the woman rocking slowly in the shadow of the porch. “All right,” he finally said. He took the steps and faced her. “According to Doyle,” he said, “the sheriff had been hoping to find the instrument used to crack Ariel’s skull before she was thrown into the river. He believed it might be a tire iron and that Karl might still have it somewhere in his possession. But the county attorney has refused to petition a judge. Says there’s not enough evidence. The sheriff thinks it’s more a lack of backbone on the part of the county attorney.”

  Smoke vined from my mother’s nostrils as she spoke: “Arthur Mendelsohn has always been a toad. He was a toad as a child and he’s a toad as a man. He would never stand up to Axel Brandt.”

  She put her cigarette to her lips and her eyes held on Gus’s face.

  She asked, “What do you think of the tire iron?”

  Gus seemed to weigh his response or perhaps simply the advisability of any response. He said, “It’s handy and would be effective, I imagine.”

  “Have you ever wielded a tire iron as a weapon?”

  “No,” he said, “but I’d guess that it does a lot of damage.”

  “You’ve killed people, Gus. In the war.”

  He didn’t answer but watched her closely.

  “Is it a hard thing?”

  “I killed people at a distance. They were shapes to me, never faces. I imagine it would be a different thing killing someone whose face you could see.”

  “It would take a cold heart, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I imagine it would.”

  “People can fool you can’t they, Gus.”

  “I guess they can.”

  “Is there anything else you wanted to tell Nathan?”

  “No, that’s pretty much everything.”

  “I’ll let him know.”

  My father’s friend left the porch and went to the church where he disappeared through the side door that led to his basement room. My mother finished her cigarette and lit another.

  Within the hour my father returned from van der Waal’s. It was almost lunchtime and he went directly to the kitchen to prepare the meal. My mother followed him and I drifted in after them. My father was relaying the final plans for the funeral which my mother had refused to have any part in. I saw her—maybe we all saw her—retreating, her world daily becoming a smaller and smaller box. She sat with her elbows propped on the table and a cigarette in her hand and she listened as my father pulled items from the refrigerator and told her the details. He’d acknowledged my entrance but my mother paid me no heed.

  When she had apparently listened enough she said abruptly, “The sheriff tried to get a warrant to search the Brandt property for whatever it was that Karl used to shatter Ariel’s skull. The county attorney refused to help him.”

  My father turned from the refrigerator with a half-gallon bottle of milk in his hand. “How do you know this?”

  “Gus came by while you were gone.”

  “Doyle?”

  “Yes.”

  My father set the milk on the table. “Ruth, we don’t know at all Karl’s part in Ariel’s death.”

  She put a curtain of smoke in the air between them. “Oh, but I do,” she said.

  “Look, I’m going to give the sheriff a call.”

  “You do that.”

  When he’d left the room my mother finally looked where I stood by the screen door. She raised an eyebrow and said, “Do you know your Old Testament, Frankie?”

  I watched her but didn’t answer.

  She said, “Let the battle cry be heard in the land, a shout of great destruction.”

  She drew on her cigarette and breathed out smoke.

  28

  Mother disappeared after dinner and only a short while before dark. She said she was going for a walk. My grandfather, who along with Liz had taken to eating with us regularly, had asked where she was headed. They’d all been sitting on the front porch, my parents and Liz and my grandfather, trying to get some benefit from a cooling breeze that had blown in with the evening. I’d been lying in the yard grass watching the light dissolve from the sky above the valley. My mother had said, “Around the block.” And got up and just like that she was gone before anyone could object or offer companionship. Afterward my grandparents and my father talked about her. They were worried. Hell, we all were.

  When she didn’t come back by hard dark my father left in the Packard and my grandfather left in his big Buick and they went looking. Liz stayed with us. She kept near the telephone in case someone called with information. Jake had been upstairs all evening working on one of his model airplanes and after the men drove off he came down and when I told him what was going on he said that he’d seen Mother walking along the railroad tracks headed toward the trestle outside town.

  “Why didn’t you say something?”

  He shrugged and looked chagrined and answered, “She was just walking.”

  “Along the tracks? Have you ever seen her walk along the tracks? Jesus.”

  I hurried to the kitchen and told Liz and then I said I would go and find Mother.

  “No,” Liz replied. “I don’t want you on those railroad tracks at night.”

  “I’ll take a flashlight and I’ll be careful.”

  “I’ll g-g-g-go with him,” Jake stuttered and I figured he must be pretty scared.

  Liz clearly wasn’t happy with the idea but I pointed out that if somebody didn’t go soon who knew what might happen and she gave in.

  We both brought flashlights though once we were out of the Flats they were almost unnecessary beca
use the moon had risen nearly full before us and it was easy to see our way along the railbed.

  “She’s ok-k-kay,” Jake kept repeating.

  And I repeated to him, “She’s fine. She’s fine.”

  In this way we reassured ourselves because Ariel’s death had shattered any sense of normality, any firm sense that what any future

  moment held was predictable. If God could allow Ariel to die—allow little Bobby Cole to be so gruesomely slaughtered as well—then Mother who was not at all on good terms with the Almighty was, I feared, stepping directly into harm’s way.

  Moonlight turned the polished surface of each rail silver and we followed the tracks through the dark all the way to the trestle where we found our mother sitting above the flow of the Minnesota River. As soon as we saw her, I turned to Jake and said, “Go back and tell Liz where we are. I’ll keep Mom here and make sure she’s okay.”

  Jake looked back at the long dark tunnel of the night between us and town. He said, “Alone?”

  “Yeah, stupid. One of us has to go and I need to stay here.”

  “Why c-c-c-can’t I stay?”

  “What if Mom decides to jump or something? You want to go in after her? Go on. Hurry.”

  He thought about arguing some more but finally accepted his duty and headed back following the jerky finger of his flashlight beam.

  My greatest fear was that a train might at any minute come roaring toward us and, with Mother in the middle of the trestle in God knew what mental state, I wouldn’t be able to get her to safety in time. The good thing was that it was night and the headlight of an engine ought to be visible a long while before it reached the river. I crept out onto the railroad bridge. Mother didn’t look my way and I wasn’t certain if she even realized I was there. But when I was a few steps from reaching her she said to me, “This is the place isn’t it, Frankie?”

  I stood beside her and looked down where she looked. The river below us was all moonlight. I said, “Yes.”

  “What did you see?”

  “Her dress. Her hair. That’s all.”

  She looked up at me and I saw thin iridescent trails down her cheeks and I realized she’d been crying and still was.

  “I used to swim in this river,” she said. “When I was a girl. There’s a deep clear pool a couple of miles downstream where Cottonwood Creek comes in. Have you ever been there?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Sit down. Here.” She patted the crossties next to where she sat and I did as she asked.

  “I never thought of the river as dangerous, Frankie. But you found someone else dead here.”

  “Yeah, the itinerant.”

  “Itinerant.” She shook her head faintly. “Someone’s entire life reduced to a single word. And little Bobby Cole, didn’t he . . . ?”

  “Yeah. Him too.”

  “It’s pretty here,” she said. “You wouldn’t suspect all that death, would you? Do you and Jake come here often?”

  “We used to. Not anymore. I think we should go home, Mom.”

  “Are you worried about me, Frankie? I know everyone else is.”

  “You kind of scare me sometimes these days.”

  “I scare myself.”

  “Come home, Mom.”

  “See, it’s like this. I can’t talk to your father. I’m too angry with him. I’m angry with everybody.”

  “With God?”

  “Frankie, there is no God. I could jump right now into that river and there would be no divine hand reaching out to save me. It would simply be the end.”

  “Not for me or Jake or Dad.”

  “My point exactly. There is no God to care about us. We’ve got only ourselves and each other.”

  She reached her arm around me and pulled me gently against her and I remembered how when I was small and afraid she’d done the same thing.

  “But your father, Frankie, he cares more about God than he does about us. And to me that’s like saying he cares more about the air and I hate him for that.”

  I wanted to tell her about the night I’d seen him cry in Gus’s arms at the altar. And I wanted to tell her about his sermon the next day and how from that air she faulted him for caring about he’d somehow taken remarkable strength. Instead I just leaned into her and felt her weeping and looked up at the moon and listened to the frogs along the river’s edge and then I heard voices coming from the dark in the direction of town and I saw flashlight beams approaching along the railroad bed.

  “Damn,” my mother said quietly. “Saint Nathan to the rescue.” She looked at me, looked me straight in the eye. “Will you do something for me, Frankie, something that you can’t tell your father about?”

  The lights were not far down the tracks and in only a couple of minutes they would reach us. I had to decide and decide quickly. She seemed so alone, my mother. And because God and my father wouldn’t listen I figured I had to.

  I said, “Yes.”

  • • •

  In the dead of night I rose. When I was getting ready for bed I’d folded my clothes on a chair and because I was not known for my neatness Jake had watched me with suspicion. But it had been a strange evening and everything was strange those days and so Jake didn’t question me.

  I grabbed my clothes and went into the hallway where the door to my mother’s bedroom was closed. I wondered if she was awake listening for the sound of my leaving. I crept down the stairs careful to avoid the steps I knew would cry my presence to my father who had taken to sleeping on the sofa in the living room. In the kitchen I saw by moonlight that the hands of the wall clock read two-thirty-five. I slipped out the screen door into the yard where I put on my pants and shirt and socks and sneakers. I folded my pajamas and carried them to the garage and put them on a shelf beside an oilcan. I rolled my bicycle out, climbed on, and followed the road that was milk white in the moonlight into town.

  I’d lived other places before New Bremen, other towns where my father had been the pastor, and although I got to know them quickly and discovered easily what was special and fun about them none had been as close to my heart as New Bremen. Ariel’s death had changed that. The town became alien to me and at night especially threatening and I biked each deserted street with a sense that menace was all around me. The unlit house windows were dark eyes watching. Awful things lurked in the shadows cast by the moon. The whole two miles to the Heights I pumped hard on the pedals as if chased by demons.

  The Brandt estate was a football field of grass cut even as carpeting and set here and there with lush flower garden enclaves all of it tended by a groundskeeper, a man named Petrov whose son Ivan was in my class at school. A tall wrought-iron fence surrounded the entire property and the only way in was through a gate opening onto a long drive that led to the house. Ornately crafted into the iron of the gate was a great wrought-iron letter B. Two enormous stone pillars flanked the entrance and as I drew up before the gate I saw in the bright moonlight that a word had been spray-painted in black on one of the pillars: Murdrer.

  I stood before the gate and stared at that angry misspelling. A can of spray paint lay on the ground not far away. I looked down the street which ran empty through the ghostly light. The houses on the far side were large and sat upon substantial properties though none even began to approach the extent of the Brandt estate. They all stood completely dark.

  I continued a hundred yards farther to a place where a big maple grew outside the fence but with some branches that arched over the wrought iron. I laid my bike against the trunk, shinnied up the tree, scooted out along the thickest branch, and dropped into the Brandts’ yard. Across a broad lake of moonlight I raced toward the house that was all white stone and white columns and had been built in the days when New Bremen was young. I veered toward the garage, a converted carriage house. Parked on the drive in front was Karl’s little red sports car.

  I did as my mother had asked then I sprinted back to the fence. Without the tree to help me I had some difficulty scaling the wrought
iron but I finally made it over and leaped onto my bike and pumped hard toward home.

  I hadn’t gone far and was just turning a sharp curve in the road that led downhill toward the main part of town when headlights from an oncoming car blinded me. I swerved quickly and almost fell off my bike. I stopped and the car stopped too. I heard a door open and close. Because of the headlight glare, I couldn’t see who it was. Then Doyle’s big shadow fell over me and I figured I was dead.

  “Got a call someone was messing around the Brandt place,” he said. “Why am I not surprised it’s you? Off the bike, Frank, and let’s go.”

  I followed Doyle to the back of his cruiser. He opened the trunk and said, “Put your bike in there.” When I’d done what he asked, he pointed toward the passenger side and said, “Get in.”

  We continued up the road to the gate of the Brandt mansion where Doyle’s headlights illuminated the graffiti. He looked over at me but said nothing. He got out and picked up the can of spray paint and got back in. He turned his cruiser around and we descended slowly from the Heights. For a long time Doyle said nothing, just drove with his wrist draped over the top of his steering wheel. The radio of his cruiser squawked now and then but he didn’t bother to pick up his mic.

  I sat silent beside him, feeling doomed. I saw my father coming down to the jail in the middle of the night in just the way he’d come for Gus and I could already see the look on his face.

  At the junction with Main Street, instead of turning toward the town square and the jail, Doyle turned toward the Flats.

  He said, “A lot of folks around here, they think the Brandts are kind of big for their britches. You understand what I’m saying?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What happened to your sister, it’s got people upset. The Brandt boy, I’m betting he goes scot-free. I’m sorry to say that, Frank, but that’s the way the world works. The rich, they walk on stilts and the rest of us, we just crawl around under them in the dirt. So what do you do? Well, you spray-paint the truth where the world can see it, I guess that’s one thing. Rub their noses a little in the stink of what they’ve done and who they are, huh?” He smiled and laughed quietly.