Ordinary Grace

  in. The good scent of summer came with it. I was sure I smelled the wild daisies in the pasture behind our house and the fresh wet of the laundry Edna Sweeney had hung on her clothesline and the grapes in the arbor of the Hansons’ house two doors down and the almost sweet aroma of the grain in the elevators beside the tracks and even, I swore, the luscious mud smell of the river two blocks away. Jake stood in the sunlight that poured in. He glowed as if electrified and he wore a smile that stretched his cheeks until they nearly snapped.

  Gus came in the front door and put his hands on his hips and looked at us keenly. “What are you two up to now?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” I said, thinking he was going to chew our rear ends for what we’d done with the drapes.

  “Not anymore.” He held up the keys to my family’s Packard. “We’re going for a horseback ride.”

  • • •

  We drove north out of the valley and onto rolling farmland. We followed back roads that were a mystery to me and that threaded between fields of corn and soybean and cut alongside farmyards and skipped through towns that were there and gone in less than a breath and finally we dipped into a valley much smaller than the one carved by the Minnesota River and filled with emerald alfalfa fields outlined by clean white fences. We turned off the main road onto a long dirt lane that led to a house with a big barn and several outbuildings all canopied by the leaves of a dozen great elms. A woman stood in the shade near the house watching us come and when Gus pulled up she stepped forward to greet us.

  “Gentlemen,” Gus said after we’d piled out, “I’d like you to meet Ginger French. Ginger, my friends Frankie and Jake.”

  We shook her hand and I thought Ginger French was the prettiest woman I’d ever seen, tall and willowy, with long brown hair that fell straight down over her shoulders. She wore a light blue shirt that I thought of as Western because it had pearl snaps and she wore black leather riding boots.

  She kissed Gus on the cheek and said to us, “You boys care for some lemonade before we hit the trail?”

  “No, ma’am,” I replied. “Let’s ride.”

  She laughed and Gus did too and she took his arm and led the way to the barn where she had horses saddled and waiting.

  Ginger—she insisted we call her by her first name—I learned that afternoon had not grown up in Minnesota but was raised in Kentucky and had come west with her husband, a man who’d worked for a company called Cargill. They’d lived in the Twin Cities but she’d been lonesome for the horse country so her husband had bought the land in the little valley and they’d started a kind of ranch there where they spent weekends and much of the summer. Her husband had died two years earlier of a heart attack and she’d moved permanently to the ranch and ran it by herself. Gus, she said, had been a big help during the first haying that year, doing most of the alfalfa baling by himself. Fine muscles, she’d said and she’d given him a long smile.

  I knew some things about Gus. I knew that what living he made was done by working odd jobs all over the county. He did maintenance on the churches in my father’s charge, dug graves for the cemetery in New Bremen and helped keep the grounds, got calls sometimes from Monk’s Garage when they needed motorcycle work done, cleared jimsonweed from cornfields, strung wire for fences, put up rip rap along creeks prone to flood erosion, worked occasional construction jobs. And now I knew he did haying as well. Hell I’d’ve done haying for Ginger too and never asked a dime.

  I rode a mount called Smokie and Jake got a horse called Pokey. Gus rode a big tawny beast named Tornado and Ginger rode, of course, Lady. We followed a trail along the creek that threaded the bottom of the little valley. We passed a small tractor that had no wheels but was mounted on blocks. A belt ran from the back axle to an irrigation pump that drew water from the creek for the alfalfa fields.

  “Gus’s creation,” Ginger told us and reached out and touched his arm gently.

  Gus and she rode up front side by side, talking quietly. Jake and I brought up the rear. We’d been on horses before, a couple of summers when we both attended a church camp, and we figured that made us experienced riders and we wanted to gallop, but Ginger said that it was better to take things easy this time around and let the horses get to know us and for us to get to know them. I didn’t really care that much anyway. I loved being out on that beautiful day with butterflies like snow flurries over the alfalfa and the hills humped green against the blue sky and the air cool with the mist from the sprinklers that watered the fields. When we came back Ginger served us lemonade and sugar cookies on her porch and told us about the Kentucky Derby which she went to every year and it sounded to me like the most exciting thing imaginable. And too quickly it was time to go.

  We said our good-byes and Jake called shotgun and got in the front seat and I slid in the back and Gus and Ginger French spent a moment talking quietly several paces away from the car and then he kissed her on the lips and she held his arm as if she wouldn’t let him go and then the connection broke and she lifted her emptied hand and waved to us as Gus drove up the dirt lane and headed back to New Bremen.

  On the way home Gus stopped at a liquor store and bought beer. It was suppertime when we reached the house. He came in with us and said, “I’m going to fix dinner.” He didn’t ask what we might want, just opened the refrigerator and took a look and launched into things. He put Jake and me to work peeling potatoes. He pulled a carton of eggs from the fridge and a block of cheddar cheese and set them on the kitchen counter and took a can of Spam from the cupboard. He put a skillet on the stove and poured in some oil. He grabbed the potatoes as they were peeled and diced them and coated them with a little flour from the canister near the sink. He started the oil heating and when it was hot let Jake and me toss in the potatoes and gave us a spatula and told us not to let them burn. He grated a mound of cheese and set it aside on a plate. He put a frying pan on another burner and started the flame underneath and diced the Spam and threw it into the pan with a little butter. He beat eggs into a bowl with salt and pepper and poured the mixture over the frying Spam and rolled them all together as they cooked and at the end he sprinkled the cheese over the eggs and Spam and put a lid on the pan. The potatoes were done by then and he used the spatula to remove them to a paper towel that soaked up the excess oil. He told me to set the table and told Jake to go across the street and let my father know that dinner was ready. He put everything into serving dishes and then on the table and instructed me to pour milk for myself and Jake and he cracked the tops on two of the bottles of beer and my father when he walked into the kitchen stood there stunned.

  Gus held out an opened beer toward him. “I know it’s against your religion, Captain, but how about it, just this once?”

  We ate and my father and Gus drank their beer and we all talked, even Jake, and laughed and Christ for a while we were happy.

  31

  Karl Brandt came while Jake and I were doing the dishes. Like a beggar he appeared at the screen door off the kitchen. He stood there with his eyes downcast and when he asked for my father his voice wasn’t much above a whisper as if what he wanted was something he believed he had no right to ask for and no hope of getting.

  Gus had left after dinner, taken off on his motorcycle, and although he didn’t say where my own thinking was that he’d gone back to see Ginger French. My father had gone to his church office to tend to some details of Ariel’s funeral.

  I stood with the wet dishcloth still in my hand and told Karl where my father was and offered to go get him and asked if he wanted to come in and wait.

  Karl shook his head. “Thanks, Frank. I’ll find him myself.”

  When Karl had gone Jake and I looked at each other and it was clear we were both reading the same book. I put down the dishcloth and dried my hands on the legs of my pants and started for the door.

  “Wait,” Jake said. I thought he was going to argue with me but he said, “We should give him a minute.”

  We waited until we saw Karl enter t
he church then we broke from the house and ran across the street with the long yellow light of the low sun in our faces and hurried down the side stairs to the dark of the basement where I quickly pulled the rag stuffing from the furnace duct and we leaned close and barely breathed.

  “. . . I swear it,” Karl was saying. “I messed up I know. I shouldn’t have been drinking and I should have been watching out for Ariel, but I swear I would never hurt her, Mr. Drum. Ariel was my best friend. Sometimes I thought my only friend.”

  “I’ve seen the group you run with, Karl. It’s not insignificant.”

  “Nobody understood me like Ariel. Nobody.”

  “Did you father her child?”

  “No.”

  “Yet, as Ruth pointed out this morning, you apparently told your friends that you were having sexual relations with Ariel.”

  “I never said that, not outright. I said things that they took to mean that.”

  “They misinterpreted?”

  “Not exactly. Look, when you’re with guys, you’ve got to be a certain way, you know?”

  “And that way is to appear to be sleeping with your girlfriend?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “Even if it’s not true?”

  Karl was quiet a long moment, then he said so low we almost missed it, “Maybe especially if it’s not true.”

  “What do you mean?”

  We heard the floorboards above us give as someone stood and began to pace. Nothing came down the duct for a while. Me, I’d’ve been pressing for an answer but my father’s patience was remarkable. A bug with about a million legs crawled out from under the furnace. Normally I would have stomped it but the silence in that church at the moment was profound and I didn’t want to risk giving us away. I saw Jake looking at the bug too but he made no move to kill it.

  “It wasn’t me who got Ariel pregnant,” Karl said at last.

  The pacing above us had stopped far to my left and I figured Karl was at the window which looked toward the setting sun. In my mind’s eye I could see his face lit with that dying yellow light.

  “Ariel and I were friends but not that way,” he said.

  “I don’t understand, Karl.”

  “Mr. Drum, I . . .”

  He faltered and his voice broke and what came to us next was the sound of deep heartbreaking sobs.

  The floorboards above us gave again as my father crossed the room to where Karl Brandt stood.

  “It’s all right, Karl. It’s all right, son.”

  “No . . . it . . . isn’t,” Karl said between gasps. “It’s sick. It’s awful. It’s depraved.”

  “What is it, Karl?”

  “Don’t you understand?” Karl’s voice was suddenly vicious, a wet rage of tears. “I didn’t like Ariel that way. I’ve never liked girls that way. I don’t think of them at all that way. See? Now do you see?”

  “Ah,” my father said. And it was clear that he did.

  “I’m a faggot. I’m a freak. I’m a sick freak. I’m a—”

  “Karl, Karl, it’s all right.”

  “No, it’s not all right. All my life I’ve watched other boys to make sure I was acting just like them. I’d say to myself, ‘This is how a boy walks. This is how a boy talks. This is how a boy doesn’t notice other boys.’ When I was a kid, I didn’t understand what was going on with me. And when it finally dawned on me, I couldn’t stomach who I was. Who I am.”

  “You’re a child of God.”

  “A sick God.”

  “No, a God who loves you.”

  “If he loved me he’d have made me just like other boys.”

  “I don’t think you’re a freak. I don’t think you’re sick.”

  “No, you just think I’m a murderer.”

  “I don’t. I never did.”

  “Right.”

  “What I saw in you always was a young man who befriended my daughter and who entered my house respectfully. I know you made mistakes, but not once in all this horrible mess have I ever thought you might have killed Ariel. That’s the absolute truth.”

  My father spoke in a voice that held no heat of argument but only a gentle invitation to believe. It was the way he spoke about God in his sermons.

  “Karl, does anyone know about this?”

  “I’ve never told anyone, not even Ariel.”

  “But she knew?”

  “I think she figured it out, but we never talked about it.”

  “Did you know she was pregnant?”

  “The argument we had that everyone keeps bringing up, it was about the baby.”

  “What about the baby?”

  “I told her—Mr. Drum, I’m sorry about this, but I thought it was best—I told her I knew of a doctor in Rochester who could take care of the situation.”

  “An abortion?”

  “Yes, sir, an abortion. But she absolutely refused. She was going to have the baby and raise it here in New Bremen.”

  “Did she talk about the father?”

  “She never would tell me that.”

  “Do you have a speculation?”

  “No, sir, I don’t.”

  “She was sneaking out at night to see someone, but you have no idea who that was?”

  “I don’t, honestly. Ariel, when she wanted to, could be very secretive. That’s one of the things that I liked about her. She kept secrets, her own and those told to her. I guess you’d call it integrity. Mr. Drum, you won’t tell anyone what I’ve told you?”

  “No, Karl.”

  “I don’t know what I’d do if people knew. The only reason I told you was because you have integrity, like Ariel, and I didn’t want you to go on thinking I had anything to do with what happened to her, because I never would. I miss her, Mr. Drum. I miss her terribly.”

  “We all do.”

  The door at the top of the basement steps opened and I thought Gus had come back and because I was afraid he’d make noise and give us away I quickly stuffed the wadding back into the furnace duct. Jake and I turned and found to our surprise that it wasn’t Gus but Doyle. He wasn’t wearing his uniform. When he saw where we stood he didn’t have to be a genius to know what we were up to.

  “I’m looking for Gus,” he said.

  “He’s not here,” I replied.

  Doyle came toward us slowly. “That’s Karl Brandt’s Triumph in the church lot. He’s talking with your dad?”

  I said, “Yes.”

  “Have they finished?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “You boys get an earful?”

  Doyle kept coming and Jake took a step back.

  “Anything I should know?” Doyle looked at me first but what we’d just heard was something I knew my father wouldn’t want us to share. He moved between us, separating us, and he turned fully toward Jake and towered over him.

  “So tell me, Jakie, did he confess to killing your sister?”

  Jake squeezed his face together and whether it was an effort to hold words in or to get them out I couldn’t say.

  Doyle leaned down so that his face and Jake’s were separated by no more than the length of a Popsicle stick. “Well? Did he confess?”

  Jake’s lips trembled and his fists clenched and he finally spat out, “He’s not a m-m-m-murderer. He’s just a f-f-faggot, wh-wh-whatever that is.”

  Doyle’s eyes bloomed wide with surprise and he straightened up. “Faggot?” he said. “Jakie, you’re going to tell me everything.”

  • • •

  I lay in bed that night more confused than ever. Too many things had happened in the day—the altercation between Julia Brandt and my mother, Mother’s desertion of us, Karl Brandt’s astounding confession, and our buckling under the questioning of Doyle who’d hounded Jake and me until he knew the whole of what we’d heard—and I felt twisted and wrung out. I was almost able to make some sense of these things but something else had happened that day which was far worse and for which I had no explanation or understanding and that made me feel absolutely lousy. It
was simply this: For a little while I’d forgotten about Ariel and I’d been happy. Jesus, Ariel was dead only a week and not even in the ground yet and I’d forgotten her. It hadn’t been a long lapse in grieving, only the time with Ginger French and fixing dinner with Gus and eating and talking around the table and laughing. Her death had come back to me the moment Karl Brandt’s tragic face appeared at the screen door. Still I felt like a traitor, the worst kind of brother Ariel could have had.

  Jake said, “Frank?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’ve been thinking.”

  “About what?”

  “Karl. About him being a faggot and all.”

  That was the word Doyle had kept coming back to when he hounded us, using it like the word was a nail and his voice a hammer.

  “Don’t say that word,” I told him. “If you’ve got to say anything, say homosexual.”

  Which was the term my mother employed occasionally in her discussions of artists. She never said the word in a derogatory manner and I knew she didn’t care if someone was inclined that way. Among my friends, however, fag was the word you typically used and you used it like a sharp stick.

  Jake was quiet and I said, “Sorry, go on.”

  Jake said, “He’s afraid people will make fun of him, and that’s why he never told anyone.”

  “So?”

  “I don’t like to talk to people because I’m afraid I’ll stutter and they’ll make fun of me. I feel like a freak sometimes.”

  I rolled over and looked at his bed. The bulb over the bathroom sink was on and some of the light splashed off the wall in the hallway and fell into our room. Mostly all I could see was the gray outline of my brother under his sheet. There wasn’t much to him and I thought about all the times he’d taken crap from other kids when I was around and I realized it was probably only a small percentage of all the crap he’d taken over all the years for something that was not his fault and that he could not help. And I felt even more like a rotten brother and a rotten person in general, the kind who only let people down.