Ordinary Grace

  “You’re not a freak,” I said almost angrily.

  “Do you think Karl’s a freak?”

  I thought about that and decided there was probably something different about everybody and Karl’s way of being different was no worse than anybody else’s.

  “No,” I said.

  “Do you think he was telling the truth about him and Ariel?”

  “Yes.”

  We were quiet a long time. I didn’t know what he was thinking but I was thinking that I wanted desperately to be someone better than I was. Finally I heard him yawn and saw him turn toward the wall to sleep and the last thing he said to me that night was, “So do I.”

  32

  Friday was the day of the visitation before Ariel’s funeral. My father wanted us to look decent and he gave Jake and me money for haircuts and after breakfast we walked to the barbershop while he drove to my grandfather’s house to speak with my mother. Although I had no idea what he was going to say to her I figured it had to be about Karl Brandt. Maybe he was going to try to convince her to come home too. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. The house was a different place without her, and not necessarily in a bad way.

  The morning was sunny and the day promised to be hot. We walked into the barbershop and found it already busy. There was a customer in the barber’s chair. Two others waiting. I didn’t recognize any of the men. Mr. Baake barely glanced our way. He pointed with his scissors toward a couple of chairs near the window and said congenially, “Have a seat, boys. May be a while.”

  Jake picked up a comic book and sat down. I rummaged through the magazines until I found the issue of Action for Men that I’d started the day before. We sat down to read and the discussion that had been in progress among the men when we came in recommenced.

  “I don’t believe it for one minute,” one of the waiting men was saying. “Why, I saw that boy lead the Warriors to two regional championships. Coach Mortenson said he’d never seen a more natural athlete.”

  “I’m telling you,” Mr. Baake said. “The boy’s a fairy. Didn’t you ever think it was strange that he sings and acts pretty good?”

  The man in the barber’s chair said, “John Wayne acts pretty good, too, but I don’t see anybody calling him a faggot.”

  I looked up from the comic book. Jake looked up too.

  “If that boy’s a flit then I’m a zebra,” the waiting man said. “And, Bill, seems to me a dangerous thing spreading a rumor like that. Can do a lot of damage.”

  “Look, I got it from Halderson who claims he got it from a cop,” Mr. Baake said. “Cops know things, and they don’t lie.”

  The man in the chair said, “Ouch.”

  “Sorry, Dave,” Mr. Baake said.

  The man named Dave said, “How about you finish this discussion when my haircut’s done? I don’t want to end up missing an ear.”

  I put down the magazine and stood up. Jake followed my lead.

  “We’ll come back later,” I said.

  “Sure, boys. Any time.” The barber waved his scissors in good-bye.

  Outside we stood in the shade of the awning that overhung the barbershop window.

  Jake said, “What are we going to do, Frank?”

  I looked across the square to the police station, wondering if Doyle was inside, wondering who else Doyle had told. “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Maybe we should talk to Gus?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Maybe Gus.”

  Jake said, “I didn’t see his motorcycle at the church.”

  Which didn’t matter. I knew where he was that day.

  It was a long walk to the cemetery and we barely said a word the whole way. I was thinking how one bad thing seemed to lead miserably to another and how somehow I felt responsible for much of it. I hated Doyle who was not only a bully but a blabbermouth and I wished I was a lot bigger and could call him out. I figured we were going to have to tell my father everything and I wasn’t looking forward to that experience at all.

  We found Gus’s Indian Chief parked near the little building where all the equipment was kept. The cemetery was large and I didn’t know exactly where Ariel’s grave was to be and we wandered awhile. The whole valley basked under a cloudless sky. The distant fields were vibrant green. The call of birds was everywhere. I was in a place I’d been many times before—on Memorial Day or attending a burial service for some member of the congregation and most recently for the burials of Bobby Cole and the itinerant—and I’d always thought of it as peaceful, beautiful even. But this time was different. I saw it now for what it really was, a city of the dead, and even though a wrought-iron fence was all that separated me at the moment from the rest of New Bremen I felt as if I’d stumbled a million miles from anything familiar or comforting. We passed Bobby Cole’s grave which was still mounded and upon which sat bouquets of wilting flowers. I came to the grave of the itinerant and remembered the day I’d helped lower him into the ground and how I’d thought then that it was a lovely spot, but now I decided there could be no such thing as lovely in a place where headstones grew.

  “There he is,” Jake said.

  It was on a slope on the far end of the cemetery beneath a linden tree. I could see a wheelbarrow and a pile of fresh dirt and Gus in a hole that was already knee deep.

  Gus had once told us that he came from a long line of Missouri gravediggers. “Famous in that part of Missouri,” he said, only he pronounced it Missoura. “Folks would call on my grandpap or my dad to come dig the grave of a loved one. It’s not just digging, you know, boys. It’s carving a box in the earth that’s meant to receive and hold forever something very precious to someone. When it’s done right, folks look at it different from just a hole in the ground, and the time’ll come when you understand this for yourselves.”

  Gus was a good storyteller but you never knew, especially when he was drinking, what to believe.

  He wore a T-shirt soiled from the work and was so intent on his labor that he didn’t see us coming.

  “Hey, Gus,” I said.

  He looked up, the shovel gripped in his gloved hands and the blade cradling earth. He was startled and clearly not pleased. “What are you doing here?”

  “Could we talk to you for a minute?”

  “Now?”

  “Yeah, it’s important.”

  He added the dirt to the pile beside the hole and stuck the shovel there. He tugged off his leather gloves, stuffed them into the back pocket of his jeans, and stepped up to where we stood. “Okay,” he said.

  But I didn’t say anything right away. I stared at the dirt Gus had already dug and I saw movement there, the crawl of earthworms. And then I stared into the hole where Ariel would be laid the next day and it didn’t look at all like a carved box and I felt like crying. Jake stared dumbly where I stared and I figured maybe he was thinking pretty much the same thing and I was sorry I’d brought him.

  “Come on over here,” Gus said. He put a hand on Jake’s shoulder and turned him toward the linden tree and did the same with me. We sat on the grass in the shade and I told Gus everything. By the end he looked pretty unhappy.

  I asked, “What should we do?”

  “You’re going to have to tell your father,” he said.

  I nodded and said, “I figured.”

  “It’s not all your fault, guys. I should never have shown you that damn furnace duct.” Gus got up from the grass. “You two find your father, tell him everything.”

  “He’ll be pretty mad,” Jake said.

  “I guess he will. But it’s really Doyle he should be angry with.”

  I said, “What about Doyle?”

  Gus looked toward town. “I’ll deal with him,” he said.

  • • •

  Liz met us at the door and told us our father was no longer there and our mother was resting. She asked if we’d like something to eat, cookies and milk maybe. We said no thank you and left the shade of her porch and headed toward the Flats.

  Liz called to us a
s we walked away and we turned back.

  “This will pass, boys,” she said. “I promise.”

  But I’d just come from the city of the dead where everything that was lost was lost forever and although I replied, “Yes, ma’am,” I didn’t believe her at all.

  We walked to the Flats in perfect silence. The Packard was parked in the garage but my father was not at the house. We walked across the street to the church and found him in his office. He didn’t appear to be working on anything, just sat with his back to us staring out his window at the railroad tracks and the grain elevators. I knocked on the frame of the door and he swung around. Right off he noticed our hair.

  “Was Mr. Baake too busy to take you today?”

  “No, sir,” I said. “That’s not why we didn’t get our hair cut.”

  “No?” He waited.

  “We know about Karl.”

  His face didn’t change. “What do you know about Karl?”

  “That he’s a homosexual.”

  My father worked at not showing his surprise but I could see it. “Why do you think you know this?”

  “We heard him tell you.”

  I explained to my father about the furnace duct. And then I told him about Doyle.

  “Oh, dear God,” he said. “That poor boy.” He stood up and put a hand to his forehead. I heard a train coming and it rumbled by and all that time my father was deep in thought. When the freight cars had passed he leveled his eyes on us. “I’m not at all happy that you’ve been eavesdropping,” he said, “and we’ll deal with that. And I’ll have some words for Gus, too, but right now I need to talk to Karl.”

  He left the church and we followed him to the garage. He dug into his pocket for the car keys. “You boys fix yourselves some lunch and get cleaned up and dressed for the visitation this afternoon.”

  Jake said, “What about Mom?”

  “She’ll be there. You worry about yourselves right now.”

  He got in and backed the Packard out and headed up Tyler Street.

  We had bologna sandwiches for lunch and then went to our room to put on our good clothes for the visitation. If my mother had been there she’d have insisted we take baths but I figured we’d just wash our faces and Brylcreem our hair and put on clean shirts and ties and that would be okay.

  I was in the middle of tying Jake’s tie for him when the telephone rang. I went into the hallway and answered it. It was Officer Cleve Blake whom we’d met the night we picked up Gus at the jail after his fight with Morris Engdahl. He asked for my father.

  “He’s not here,” I said.

  “Your mother?”

  “She’s not here either. What’s wrong?”

  “Well, son, we’ve got your friend Gus down at the jail. We’re holding him for assault. He got into a fight with one of our officers.”

  I said, “Doyle?”

  “That’s right. He asked me to call your dad and let him know.”

  “Can we get him out?”

  “I’m afraid not, at least not right away. He’ll be our guest until municipal court convenes on Monday. You’ll tell your father?”

  “Yes, sir, I will.”

  I hung up and Jake said, “What’s wrong?”

  “Gus beat up Doyle.”

  “Good,” Jake said.

  “Except now he’s in jail.”

  “He’s been in jail before.”

  “He didn’t finish digging Ariel’s grave.”

  “Somebody will, won’t they?”

  “Maybe, but I don’t want just somebody digging Ariel’s grave. I want Gus.”

  “What do we do?”

  I thought a moment then said, “We spring him.”

  33

  The Indian Chief was parked in front of the drugstore. Because I knew Gus was in jail I figured maybe he’d tracked down and attacked Doyle at Halderson’s. Jake and I kept on going until we reached the police department on the other side of the town square. I started inside but Jake held back.

  “What are we g-g-going to s-s-say?”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll do the talking.”

  “Maybe we sh-sh-shouldn’t be here.”

  “Fine, you wait outside. I’ll take care of this.”

  “No, I’m c-c-coming.”

  I wasn’t nervous at all. Mostly I was angry and desperate. But it was different for Jake. He came because I came and walking into the jail was clearly something he didn’t want to do but he was doing it and I thought again how there was so much to him that people who heard only his stutter didn’t understand.

  There were two men inside. One I’d talked to on the phone, Officer Blake. The other was Doyle. Doyle wasn’t in uniform. He wore dungarees and a Hawaiian shirt red with yellow flowers. There was a purple bruise around his right eye leaking down his cheek, and his lip on that side looked puffy. He was drinking from a bottle of Coca-Cola. He made no comment, just watched us.

  Officer Blake said, “You boys come to talk to Gus?”

  When we entered he’d been pinning some papers to the bulletin board on the wall behind the main desk. He still held a couple of sheets in his hand and I saw that they were honest-to-God wanted posters.

  “Not exactly, sir,” I said approaching the desk. “There’s something important Gus needs to do.”

  “It’ll have to wait until Monday, son.”

  “It can’t wait. He has to do it now.”

  Officer Blake laid the remaining posters on the desk. “You’re Frank, right? What’s this important thing, Frank?”

  “Gus was digging our sister’s grave. He didn’t finish it.”

  “That’s important,” Officer Blake allowed. “Tell you what, boys. I’ll call Lloyd Arvin. He’s in charge of the cemetery. I’m sure he’ll get someone over there to finish the job.”

  “I don’t want someone else, sir. I want Gus.”

  The chair in which Doyle was sitting squeaked and I glanced his way and saw him sipping idly from his Coke. I figured he was probably enjoying the scene.

  “Look, boys, I can’t help you out here,” Officer Blake said. “I’m sorry.”

  “But, sir, this is really, really important.”

  “So’s the law, son. I told you, Lloyd Arvin’ll get someone else, and whoever that is will do a fine job, I’m sure.”

  “No, please,” I said. “It has to be Gus.”

  Doyle put his Coke down. “Why Gus?”

  I wished that Doyle weren’t there and wished that I was older and bigger and could have finished the job Gus had started on him. I didn’t even want to acknowledge him let alone actually talk to him. But I was desperate.

  I said, “Because he comes from a long line of gravediggers, and he won’t just dig a hole.”

  “But, son, that’s what a grave is,” Officer Blake said. “Just a hole.”

  “No, sir, it’s not. When it’s done well, it’s a box carved into the earth that will hold something precious. I don’t want just anyone carving Ariel’s box.”

  “I sympathize, Frank, I really do. But I can’t just let a prisoner go.”

  Doyle picked up his Coke bottle and said, “Why not, Cleve?”

  Officer Blake fisted his hands and leaned his knuckles on the posters on his desk and bent toward Doyle. “Because I’ve already done the paperwork. And I don’t have that authority. How do I explain it to the chief?”

  Doyle said, “What’s to explain? You let him go, he finishes the girl’s grave, he comes back.”

  “What makes you so sure he’ll come back?”

  “Ask him.”

  “Look, Doyle—”

  “Just bring him out here and ask him, Cleve.”

  “Bring him out?”

  “Are you afraid he’ll overpower you or something?”

  “You’re one to talk,” Officer Blake shot back.

  Doyle put fingers to his bruise. “Sucker punched me,” he said. “Bring him out, Cleve.”

  “Jesus,” Officer Blake said. He eyed Doyle and then me and then Jake
and finally shook his head and gave in. He took a ring of keys from the desk and unlocked the metal door in the back wall and went into the jail.

  Doyle didn’t say anything to us while the other cop was gone, just sat and idly drank his Coke as if a bruised face and a friend in jail and a couple of naïve kids on a hopeless mission were normal events for him.

  Me, I wondered if I should spit in his eye for causing all this trouble, or if I should offer him grudging thanks for helping us now.

  Gus who was still wearing his soiled T-shirt and who himself was sporting a black eye came out ahead of Officer Blake.

  “Hey, guys,” he said to us.

  Doyle said, “They came to spring you.” He could have laughed but he didn’t. He gave the words serious weight.

  “I explained the situation to him,” Officer Blake said.

  Doyle said, “What about it, Gus? Cleve lets you go so you can finish digging the Drum girl’s grave, will you come back?”

  Gus said, “I’ll come back.”

  Officer Blake didn’t look convinced. He opened his mouth to say something more but Doyle cut him off.

  “Gus says he’ll be back, he’ll be back. Let him go, Cleve.”

  “The chief—”

  “Screw the chief. It’s the right thing to do, and you know it.” Doyle looked at Gus. “You need a hand?”

  “No, I got it.”

  “All right.” Doyle dug into the pocket of his dungarees and brought out something he tossed to Gus. “The key to your motorcycle,” he said.

  “Thanks.”

  Doyle swung his eyes to Jake and me and I couldn’t read what was on his mind. Did he expect a thank you? Did he believe we were square now? He said, “Your old man know you’re here?”

  “No, sir.”

  Doyle lifted a big arm and checked his watch. “If I’m not mistaken, the visitation for your sister begins pretty soon. If I were you boys, I’d get my ass home.”