(2013) Ordinary Grace Read online

  The casket was set in front of the chancel rail with a profusion of flowers flanking it on either side. The church smelled of lilies. Bobby’s parents were in the front row. They were older people to whom Bobby had come late in life. I’d seen how they treated him with a great and gentle love. Now they sat together with their hands in their laps and stared dumbly beyond the casket toward the gold-plated cross on the altar.

  My father was nowhere to be seen.

  Jake leaned to me. “He’s in there?”

  I knew what he meant. “Yeah.”

  Until Bobby died I hadn’t thought a lot about death but as I imagined him laid in that small casket I was struck with an awful sense of wonder. I didn’t believe in heaven—the Pearly Gates version—so the question of what had become of Bobby Cole was mystifying and more than a little frightening.

  Gus entered the church. It was clear from his unsteady gait that he’d been drinking. He was dressed in his Sunday best which was a dark secondhand suit. His tie was askew and there was a cowlick in his red hair that stuck out at the back of his head. He sat in the pew across the aisle from Jake and me and he didn’t seem to notice us. He stared at Bobby’s coffin and I could hear the bellows of his lungs sucking air.

  My father finally appeared. He came from the door to his office, dressed in his black Wesley robe and wearing a white stole. He was a handsome man and impressive in his ministerial regalia. He paused as he passed the Coles and he spoke to them quietly and then he took his place in the chair behind his pulpit.

  Ariel ended her piece. My mother stood up. Ariel laid her hands again on the organ keyboard and paused and prepared herself then began to play. And my mother closed her eyes and composed herself to sing.

  When my mother sang I almost believed in heaven. It wasn’t just that she had a beautiful voice but also that she had a way of delivering a piece that pierced your heart. Oh when she sang she could make a fence post cry. When she sang she could make people laugh or dance or fall in love or go to war. In the pause before she began, the only sound in the church was the breeze whispering through the open doorway. The Coles had chosen the hymn and it seemed an odd choice, one that had probably come from Mrs. Cole whose roots were in southern Missouri. She’d asked my mother to sing a spiritual, Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.

  When my mother finally sang it was not just a hymn she offered, it was consummate comfort. She sang slowly and richly and delivered the heart of that great spiritual as if she was delivering heaven itself and her face was beautiful and full of peace. I shut my eyes and her voice reached out to wipe away my tears and enfold my heart and assure me absolutely that Bobby Cole was being carried home. It made me almost happy for him, a sweet boy who didn’t have to worry anymore about understanding a world that would always be more incomprehensible to him than not. Who didn’t have to endure anymore all the cruel mockeries. Who would never have to concern himself with what kind of man he would grow into and what would become of him when his aged parents could no longer protect and care for him. My mother’s singing made me believe that God had taken Bobby Cole for the best of reasons.

  And when she finished the sound of the breeze through the doorway was like the sigh of angels well pleased.

  My father stood and read scripture from the pulpit but he didn’t preach from up there. He came down the steps instead and passed through the opening in the chancel rail and stood finally beside the casket. In truth I didn’t hear much of what he had to say. Partly it was because my heart was already full from my mother’s singing and my head was already stuffed with too much wonderment about death. But it was also because I’d heard my father preach a thousand times. People said he was a good preacher though not as fiery as some of his congregation would have liked. He spoke earnestly, never passionately. He was a man of ideas and he never tried with overpowering rhetoric or dramatics to muscle people into believing.

  It was quiet in the church when he finished and the breeze that swept through the open doors cooled us and the flowers beside the coffin rustled as if someone had passed by.

  Then Gus stood up.

  He stepped into the aisle and walked to Bobby’s coffin. He put his hand on the polished wood. My father if he was surprised or concerned didn’t show it. He said, “Gus, is there something you’d like to say?”

  Gus stroked the coffin as he might have the soft fur of a dog. I saw that his body was shaking and I understood he was crying. Someone in the congregation gave a cough. It sounded phony, as if it had been done to break the moment. What it did was make Gus turn and face them.

  He said, “Bobby used to help me take care of the cemetery sometimes. He liked the quiet. He liked the grass and the flowers. To me and you he wasn’t much of a talker, but he used to whisper to the headstones like he was sharing a secret with the folks buried there. Bobby had a secret. You know what it was? It took nothing to make him happy. That was it. He held happiness in his hand easy as if he’d just, I don’t know, plucked a blade of grass from the ground. And all he did his whole short life was offer that happiness to anybody who’d smile at him. That’s all he wanted from me. From you. From anybody. A smile.”

  He looked back at the casket and anger pulled his face into sudden lines.

  “But what did people offer him? They made fun of him. Christian folks and they said things to him hurtful as throwing stones. I hope to Christ you’re right, Captain, that Bobby’s sitting up there in God’s hand, because down here he was just a sweet kid getting his ass kicked. I’ll miss him. I’ll miss him like I’d miss the robins if they never came back.”

  His face was a melt of tears. I was crying too. Hell, everybody was crying. My father held his composure and, when Gus had returned to his pew, said, “Would anyone else like to offer something in memory?”

  I thought about getting up. I thought maybe I could tell them about Bobby at the back of the classroom in first grade. The teacher didn’t work with him much. She gave him clay and Bobby spent his time at his desk carefully rolling out snakes which he arranged in rows, and every once in a while he would look up while the rest of us recited the alphabet and added two plus two, and his myopic eyes behind those thick, gold-rimmed lenses seemed contented. And I thought about telling them how I’d figured Bobby was hopeless but I was wrong and Gus was right. Bobby had a gift and the gift was his simplicity. The world for Bobby Cole was a place he accepted without needing to understand it. Me, I was growing up scrambling for meaning and I was full of confusion and fear.

  I didn’t stand up. I didn’t say anything. Like everyone else I sat there dumb until my father offered a final prayer and Ariel began playing the final hymn and my mother stood up in her red satin robe and gave voice to the finality of it all.

  And when she’d finished I heard the black hearse idling outside the open church door and everyone stood to follow Bobby to the hole Gus had already dug for him in the cemetery.

  3

  Something fishy about that boy’s death,” Doyle said.

  It was Saturday afternoon, the day after Bobby Cole was buried. Jake and I had spent all morning working on my grandfather’s yard. Mowing, clipping, raking. Chores we did every Saturday that summer. My grandfather had a big house on the Heights with a yard that was a beautiful green sea of thick grass. He was in real estate and claimed that the look of his own property said as much about him as any piece of advertising he put on a billboard. He paid us well but he oversaw our every move. By the time the job was done I never thought the money was enough.

  Always when we were finished—hot and sweaty and covered in grass clippings—we hit Halderson’s Drugstore where we could belly up to the soda counter for root beer served in a frosty mug.

  At the back of the drugstore was an open passage to a storeroom. More often than not a curtain hung across the doorway but not that afternoon. I could see three men in the yellow light of a bare bulb that hung from the ceiling of the back room. They sat on crates. Two of them drank from brown bottles which I was pretty sure held
beer. The one not drinking was Mr. Halderson. One of the other men was Gus. The third was the off-duty officer we’d met at the police station. Doyle. It was Doyle who was talking.

  “I mean the kid was slow sure. But he wasn’t deaf. He’d have heard that train coming.”

  “Maybe he fell asleep,” Halderson said.

  “On the railroad tracks? Be like lying down on a bed of nails like one of them sheiks.”

  “Fakirs,” Gus said.

  “What?”

  “They’re not sheiks. They’re fakirs.”

  “Whatever.”

  Doyle drank long and noisily.

  “All I’m saying is that there’s more to that kid’s death than anybody knows. I’ve picked up plenty of bums on those tracks. I mean guys no mother would claim. Got sickness in their heads you wouldn’t believe.”

  “Surely they’re not all like that,” Halderson said.

  “All it takes is the wrong one at the wrong place at the wrong time. That boy he was so simple he would have been easy pickings.”

  Gus said, “You really believe that?”

  “The things I’ve seen during my years in uniform would make your stomachs turn,” Doyle said. He tipped his bottle to his lips but caught sight of me and Jake at the counter, both of us clearly eavesdropping. He lowered his beer and waved us to him. “Come on over here, you two.”

  Jake looked at me. Joining these men was the last thing he wanted to do. I didn’t mind the possibility of getting in on that backroom conversation. I slid off my stool. Jake followed but he followed slowly.

  “You’re the preacher’s kids right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You ever play down on them railroad tracks?”

  It was the same question he’d asked a few nights before in the police station. I didn’t know if it was the two empty beer bottles sitting beside his crate that made him ask or if he’d forgotten that he’d asked or if he’d forgotten the answer I gave when he asked or if this was just what a cop did asking the same question over and over to see if he could confuse you. I wasn’t confused.

  “No,” I lied. Just as I had before.

  He had a wide jut of flat cliff for a forehead and in its shadow his eyes shifted to Jake. “You?”

  Jake didn’t answer.

  “Well, boy?”

  Jake’s mouth twisted and he tried to reply.

  “Come on, spit it out.”

  “He stutters,” Gus said.

  “I can see that.” Doyle spoke sharp. “Tell me the truth, boy.”

  Doyle must have scared the piss out of Jake. In a way that was painful to bear my brother tried to comply. He contorted his face and looked at Doyle out of deep creases filled with the dark anger that came from his frustration. He finally gave up and fiercely shook his head.

  “Yeah, right.”

  I hated the man for that. For putting Jake through torture and then dismissing the result.

  Gus said, “Their father doesn’t let them play on the tracks.”

  “You think they don’t go there anyway?” Doyle shot me a look that seemed to contain a whisper of conspiracy, as if he knew me and didn’t entirely condemn me for what he knew. As if in a way we were brothers.

  I took a step back, hating the man more every minute. “Can we go?”

  “Yes.” Doyle dismissed us as he might have a couple of suspects he’d decided not to collar.

  I put my arm around Jake who was staring angrily at the floor and I turned him. We left the men. Left Doyle laughing quietly and meanly at our backs.

  Outside the day sweltered. The sun threw heat from above and the sidewalks gathered it and roasted the soles of our sneakers. The tar that filled the cracks on the pavement had turned to black goo and we were careful to watch our step. We passed Bon Ton’s barbershop where the easy voices of men and the scent of hair oil drifted through the open door. We passed the bank which had been robbed by Pretty Boy Floyd and Ma Barker’s boys in the thirties and which had long been the source of a good deal of my own daydreaming. We passed store after store deserted in the drowse of that hot day in late June. We kept to the shade of the awnings and didn’t talk and Jake stared at the sidewalk and fumed.

  We left the shops behind and walked Main Street toward Tyler. The houses on the hills were old and many of them Victorian and, though the heavy curtains were drawn against the heat, every once in a while we caught the sound of a baseball game broadcast from the cool dark inside. We turned down Tyler toward the Flats. I could feel Jake’s anger hot as the concrete under our feet.

  “Forget him,” I said. “He’s an asshole.”

  “Don’t s-s-s-say that.”

  “But he is.”

  “That word I mean.”

  “Asshole?”

  Jake shot me a killing look.

  “You shouldn’t let him get to you. He’s nobody.”

  “Nobody’s n-n-nobody,” Jake said.

  “Hell everybody’s nobody. And I know I said hell.”

  Grain elevators rose beside the tracks on the Flats. Tall and white they were connected by catwalks and conveyor belts. There was a stark kind of beauty in the way they stood against the sky like sculptures made of bone. Next to them ran a siding where the hopper cars were rolled so they could be filled with grain but that afternoon the rails were empty and the elevators deserted. We strolled over the tracks at the crossing on Tyler. Jake kept walking toward home. I stopped and turned and began to follow my shadow stubby and black along the rails toward the east.

  Jake said, “What are you doing?”

  “What’s it look like?”

  “You’re not supposed to play on the railroad tracks.”

  “Not playing. Just walking. You coming or you going to stand there and cry?”

  “I’m not crying.”

  I walked a rail like a tightrope. Walked through waves of heat. Walked in the fragrance that rose up from the hot rock of the roadbed and the creosote of the crossties.

  “And you’re not coming either,” I said.

  “I’m coming.”

  “Then come on.”

  His shadow caught up with mine and he walked the other rail and together we walked out of the Flats and though we did not know it we were walking toward the second death that summer.

  • • •

  The valley of the Minnesota River was carved over ten thousand years ago by great floods released from the glacial Lake Agassiz which covered an area in Minnesota and North Dakota and central Canada larger than the state of California. The drain was called the River Warren and it cut deep and wide into the land through which it ran. What’s left now is only a wisp of that great river. In summer the land along its banks is green with soy beans and cornstalks and fields of rye that roll in the wind with the liquidity of an ocean. There are stands of old deciduous trees whose branches cup the nests of Forster’s terns and black terns and great blue herons and egrets and bald eagles and warblers and other birds so ordinary and profuse that they fill the air like dandelion fluff. The river runs nearly four hundred miles and it runs brown. It flows out of Lac qui Parle. The Lake That Speaks. At its end are the cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul.

  To this day for much of its length the river is shadowed by railroad. To a thirteen-year-old kid in 1961 that set of tracks seemed to reach to a horizon from beyond which came the sound of the world calling.

  We walked to a place half a mile outside the Flats where a long trestle bridged the river. Wild rye and blackberry thickets and thistle grew to the edge of the railroad bed. Sometimes people fished from the trestle though it was a dangerous thing to do. This was where Bobby Cole had been killed.

  I stopped and Jake said, “What do you want to do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The truth was that I was looking for evidence of a thing I hadn’t considered before. Bobby Cole was not a fisherman and so to my mind he’d come there looking to eat the blackberries that were ripe or to sit on the trestle and watch the river run bel
ow and look for the carp and catfish and gar that sometimes broke the surface. That’s what I did there and Jake when he came with me. Or we’d toss a stick into the river and try to hit it with a harvest of rocks gathered from between the railroad ties. But Officer Doyle had speculated there was something more sinister in what happened to Bobby than just the tragedy of a boy too lost in his daydreams to hear the thunder of death approaching. That had me wondering.

  Jake said, “Want to throw rocks?”

  “No. Hush. Listen.”

  From down the riverbank near the trestle came a snapping like the break of a million tiny bones. A large animal was forcing its way through the brush. We sometimes found places along the river where deer had bedded and the flattened vegetation still carried the outlines of their bodies. We didn’t move and our shadows roosted on the rails. From under a willow that overhung the bank and that was surrounded by bulrushes a man emerged plucking burrs from his clothing as he came. He seemed old to me because his hair was no longer black but the dull color of a long-circulated five-cent piece. He wore dirty khakis and a sleeveless undershirt and he swore at the burrs snagged in his clothing. He disappeared under the embankment where the rails crossed the river. I crept forward onto the trestle and knelt and peered down through the gap between the first two sets of crossties. Jake knelt beside me. Directly below us the man had seated himself on the dry clay of the riverbank and next to him was sprawled another man. The second man looked as if he was sleeping and the man who’d come from the bulrushes began going through the sleeping man’s pockets. Jake tugged at my sleeve and pointed back down the tracks indicating that he thought we ought to leave. I shook my head and returned to watching the activity below.