(2013) Ordinary Grace Read online

  Though it was a hot day, the sprawled man wore an overcoat. It was a dirty thing of pale green canvas much patched and mended. The first man dipped into one of the outside pockets and came up with a labeled bottle of amber liquid. He unscrewed the cap and sniffed the contents and tipped the bottle to his lips and drank.

  Jake whispered in my ear, “Come on.”

  The man below who’d lifted his head to drink must have heard Jake because he tilted his head a bit more and eyed us where we gazed at him through the crossties above. He lowered the bottle. “Dead,” he said. He nodded toward the man on the ground. “As a doornail. You boys want to, you come on down here and see.”

  It was not an order but an invitation and I stood to accept.

  I look back now and I wonder at this. I have raised children of my own and the thought of a child of mine or a grandchild descending to be with a stranger that way makes me go rigid with worry. I didn’t think of myself as a careless boy. What was inside me was a wonderment desperate to be satisfied. A dead man, that was a thing you didn’t see every day.

  Jake grabbed my arm and tried to drag me away but I shook him off.

  “We should g-g-g-go,” he said.

  “You go then.” I started down the slope of the railroad bed toward the riverbank.

  “F-F-F-Frank,” Jake said with fury.

  “Go on home,” I said.

  But my brother would not desert me and as I stumbled down the bank Jake stumbled after me.

  He was Indian the man who now held the bottle. This wasn’t unusual because many Indians lived in the valley of the Minnesota River. The Dakota Sioux had populated that land long before white people came and the white people had by hook and by crook stolen it from them. The government had created small reservations farther west but Indian families scattered themselves along the whole length of the river.

  He motioned us closer and indicated a place to sit on the other side of the body.

  He said, “Ever seen a dead man?”

  “Lots,” I said.

  “Oh?”

  I could tell he didn’t believe me. I said, “My father’s a minister. He buries people all the time.”

  “Laid out in fine boxes with their faces painted,” the Indian said. “This is how it is before they get them ready for the coffin.”

  “He looks like he’s sleeping,” I said.

  “This here was a good death.”

  “Good?”

  “I was in the war,” the Indian said. “The First World War. The war to end all wars.” He looked at the bottle and drank. “I saw men dead in ways no man should die.”

  I said, “How did he die?”

  The Indian shrugged. “Just died. Was sitting there talking one minute. The next he was lying there like that. Fell over. Heart attack maybe. Maybe a stroke. Who knows? Dead’s dead that’s all she wrote.” He drank some more.

  “What’s his name?”

  “Name? I don’t really know. Know what he called himself. Skipper. Like he was a sea captain or something. Hell, maybe he was. Who knows?”

  “Was he your friend?”

  “About as much friend as I got, I suppose.”

  “He doesn’t look old enough to die.”

  The Indian laughed. “It’s not like voting or a driver’s license, boy.”

  He began again to go through the dead man’s pockets. From inside the coat he pulled a photograph much handled and faded. He looked at it a long time then turned it over and squinted. “There’s writing on the back,” he said. “Lost my glasses a while back. Can you read it?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  He held it out toward me across the dead man’s body. I took it and looked at it and Jake who was next to me leaned over to look too. It was black and white and was of a woman with a baby in her arms. She wore a plain dress that appeared gray in the photo with a pattern of white daisies. She was pretty and was smiling and behind her was a barn. I turned the photograph over and read out loud the writing on the backside.

  October 23, 1944. Johnny’s first birthday. We miss you and hope you can be home for Christmas. Mary.

  I handed the photograph back. The Indian’s hand shook a little and I saw that his palms were dirty and his nails ragged. He said, “Probably called to service in the second war to end all wars. Hell, maybe he really was a sea captain.” The Indian drank some more and leaned his head back against the embankment and looked up at the trestle and said, “Know what I like about railroad tracks? They’re always there but they’re always moving.”

  “Like a river,” Jake said.

  I was surprised that he spoke and that he spoke without a stutter which was a thing he seldom did around strangers. The Indian looked at my brother and nodded as if Jake had spoken some great wisdom. “Like a steel river,” he said. “That’s smart, son, real smart.”

  Jake looked down, embarrassed by the compliment. The Indian reached across the dead man and across me and put his hand with its dirty palm and ragged nails on Jake’s leg. I was startled by the familiarity of the gesture and I looked at the stranger’s hand on my brother’s leg and the realization of the danger inherent in the situation descended on me like a flame and I leaped up dislodging the offending hand and grabbed my brother and yanked him to his feet and dragged him up the slope of the riverbank to the tracks.

  Behind us the Indian called out, “Didn’t mean anything, boys. Nothing at all.”

  But I was running then and pulling Jake with me and I was thinking about that Indian’s hand and seeing it in my mind like a spider crawling Jake’s leg. As fast as I could force us we returned to Halderson’s Drugstore. The men were still in the back room drinking beer from brown bottles. When we stumbled in and stood before them breathless they ceased talking.

  Gus frowned at me and said, “What is it, Frank?”

  “We were down on the tracks,” I said between gasps for air.

  Doyle gave a grin stupid and satisfied. “His old man don’t let them play on the tracks,” he said.

  Gus ignored him and said evenly, “What about the tracks, Frank?”

  I spoke with an urgency that had been building all the way from the trestle and that had been fed by my rumination on the Indian’s hand too familiar on Jake’s leg and by my own guilt at the danger in which I’d placed my brother. I said, “A stranger was there. A man.”

  The faces of all three men changed and changed in the same frightening way. The stupid satisfaction left Doyle. Gus’s dogged patience fled. Halderson abandoned his mild demeanor and his eyes became like chambered bullets. All three men stared at us and in their faces I could see my own fear reflected and magnified. Magnified to a degree I had not anticipated. Magnified perhaps by all the sick possibility that grown men knew that I did not. Magnified probably by the alcohol they’d consumed. Magnified certainly by the responsibility they felt as men to protect the children of their community.

  “A man?” Doyle stood up and took hold of my arm and forced me to come close to him where the smell of beer poured from his mouth, a stream on which his words were carried. He said, “What kind of man? Did he threaten you boys?”

  I didn’t reply.

  Doyle squeezed my arm so that it hurt. “Tell me, son. What kind of man?”

  I looked to Gus hoping that he could see the pain on my face. But he seemed lost in the confusion of that moment which probably came not only from the confounding influence of the alcohol but also from the betrayal of the trust he’d put in me. He said, “Tell him, Frankie. Tell him about the man.”

  Still I did not speak.

  Doyle shook me. Shook me like a rag doll. “Tell me,” he said.

  Halderson said, “Tell him, son.”

  “Tell him, Frank,” Gus said.

  Doyle shouted now. “Tell me goddamn it. What kind of man?”

  I stared at them, dumbed by their viciousness, and I knew I would not speak.

  It was Jake who saved me. He said, “A dead man.”

  4

 
On a minister’s salary we ate cautiously but we ate well. That didn’t mean the food was good; my mother was a notoriously bad cook. But she was a savvy shopper and made sure there was plenty to sustain us. Most Saturday nights my father made hamburgers and milk shakes and we ate these with potato chips. Salad was the lettuce and tomato and onion we put on our burgers though sometimes my mother would cut carrots and celery into sticks. We looked forward to dinner on Saturdays which we sometimes ate around a picnic table in our backyard.

  That Saturday things were different and they were different because of the dead man and because Jake and I had reported him. My father had come to pick us up at the police station where we waited with Gus. We’d answered the questions of the county sheriff who was a man named Gregor and who’d been called into town from the small farm he operated on Willow Creek. He didn’t look like a sheriff. He was dressed in overalls and his hair was stiff with hay dust. He treated us kindly though he was stern when it came to his admonition that the railroad tracks were no place for boys to play. He reminded us about the unfortunate Bobby Cole. He sounded truly sad when he spoke of Bobby’s death and I had the sense that it meant something to him and I was inclined to like him.

  Jake stuttered horribly when he was questioned and in the end I told the story for both of us. I didn’t mention the Indian. I don’t know why. The sheriff and the men in the police station hadn’t been drinking and they seemed reasonable and I wasn’t afraid that they’d do violence if they picked him up. But Jake in his utterance in the back room of the drugstore had omitted the Indian and in doing so had lied and the lie once spoken had taken shape as surely as if he’d chiseled it from a block of limestone. To undo it would be to put on my brother’s shoulders the impossible responsibility of trying to explain why he’d dissembled in the first place. Since the moment when with astonishing clarity he’d spoken the lie, Jake hadn’t been able to say a single word without stumbling through a long preamble of unintelligible utterances that were an embarrassment to him and to all who were present.

  My father when he arrived was fully informed. He and Gus stood together while our questioning was completed then he ushered us outside into the Packard. Although Dad had cleaned the car thoroughly after Gus puked in the back, there was still a faint unpleasant odor and we drove home with the windows down. He pulled into the garage and we climbed from the car and he said, “Boys, I’d like to talk to you.” He looked at Gus and Gus nodded and walked off. We stood in the open doorway of the garage. Across the street the church was bathed in the light of the late afternoon sun and its white sides had turned yellow as pollen. I stared at the steeple whose little cross seemed like a black brand against the sky and I was pretty sure of what was about to come. My father had never struck us but he could speak in a way that made you feel as if you’d offended God himself. That’s what I figured was our due.

  “The issue,” he said, “is that I need to be able to trust you. I can’t watch you every moment of every day nor can your mother. We need to know that you’re responsible and won’t do dangerous things.”

  “The tracks aren’t dangerous,” I said.

  “Bobby Cole was killed on those tracks,” he said.

  “Bobby was different. How many other kids have been killed playing on the tracks? Heck, streets are more dangerous. Me and Jake could be killed a whole lot easier just crossing the street in town.”

  “I’m not going to argue, Frank.”

  “I’m just saying that anything can be dangerous if you’re not careful. Me and Jake, we’re careful. That dead guy today wasn’t because we weren’t careful.”

  “Okay, then this is the issue. I need to know that when I ask something of you you’ll give it. If I ask you to stay away from those tracks, I need to know that you will. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Trust is the issue, Frank.” He looked at Jake. “Do you understand?”

  Jake said, “Yes s-s-s-sir.”

  “This is what’s going to happen in order that you remember. For one week, you won’t leave the yard without my permission or your mother’s. Am I clear?”

  All things considered I didn’t think it was such a bad deal so I nodded to show that I understood and I accepted. Jake did the same.

  I thought that was it but my father made no move to leave. He looked beyond us toward the dark at the back of the garage and was silent as if deep in thought. Then he turned and stared through the open door of the garage toward the church. He seemed to come to some decision.

  He said, “The first man I ever saw dead outside a coffin was on a battlefield, and I have never spoken of it until now.”

  My father sat on the rear bumper of the Packard so that his eyes were level with ours.

  “I was scared,” he said, “and I was curious and although I knew it was a dangerous thing to do, I stopped and considered this dead soldier. He was German. Not much more than a boy. Only a few years older than you, Frank. And as I stood looking down at this dead young man, a soldier who’d seen a lot of battle stopped and he said to me, ‘You’ll get used to it, son.’ Son, he called me, even though he was younger than I.” My father shook his head and took a deep breath. “He was wrong, boys. I never got used to it.”

  My father leaned his arms on his thighs and folded his hands in the way he sometimes did when he sat alone in a pew and prayed.

  “I had to go to war,” he said. “Or felt that I had to. I thought I knew more or less what to expect. But death surprised me.”

  My father looked at each of us. His eyes were hard brown but they were also gentle and sad.

  “You’ve seen something I would like to have kept from you. If you want to talk about it, I’ll listen.”

  I glanced toward Jake who was staring at the dirt floor of the old garage. I held my tongue though in truth there was much I wanted to know.

  My father waited patiently and gave no sign that he was disappointed in our silence. “All right,” he said and stood. “Let’s go inside. I’m sure your mother is wondering what’s become of us.”

  My mother was in a tizzy. She gathered us to her bosom and made a fuss over us and swung between chastisement for our actions and delirium over our safety. My mother was a woman of deep emotion and also of drama and in the middle of the kitchen she poured out both on Jake and me. She stroked our hair as if we were pets and she dug her fingers into our shoulders and gave us each a stern little shake to set us straight and in the end she kissed the tops of our heads. My father had gone to the sink to run himself a glass of water and when my mother asked him about what had gone on at the police station he said, “Go on upstairs, boys. Your mother and I need to talk.”

  We trudged up to our bedroom and lay down on our beds in the heat that lingered from the day.

  “Why didn’t you tell them about the Indian?” I said.

  Jake took his time answering. He had an old baseball that he’d grabbed off the bedroom floor and he tossed it and caught it as he lay. He said, “The Indian wasn’t going to hurt us.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I just do. Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “I don’t know. It didn’t feel right.”

  “We shouldn’t’ve been on the tracks.”

  “I don’t think it was wrong.”

  “But Dad said—”

  “I know what he said.”

  “You’re going to get us in big trouble someday.”

  “You don’t have to always follow me around like a sick dog.”

  He stopped tossing the ball. “You’re my best friend, Frank.”

  I stared up at the ceiling and watched a fly with a shiny green body crawl across the plaster and I wondered what it was like to walk upside down in the world. I didn’t acknowledge what Jake had said although it was something I’d always known. Except for me Jake didn’t have friends and I wasn’t sure the weight I should give the confession or the response I should offer.

  “Hey, you two desperadoes.”
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br />   My sister stood leaning against the doorframe with her arms crossed and a wry smile on her lips. Ariel was a pretty girl. She had my mother’s auburn hair and pillowy blue eyes and my father’s quiet and considered countenance. But what Morris Engdahl had said about her was true. She’d been born with a cleft lip and though it had been surgically corrected when she was a baby the scar was still visible. She claimed it didn’t bother her and whenever somebody who didn’t know asked her about it she gave a toss of her head and said, “It’s the mark left by the finger of an angel who touched my face.” She said it so sincerely that it usually ended the discussion of what some considered a deformity.

  She came into the room and nudged Jake over and sat on his bed.

  I said, “You just get home?”

  Ariel waitressed in the restaurant at the country club south of the Heights.

  “Yeah. Mom and Dad are having this big discussion about you two. A dead man? You really found a dead man? That must’ve scared you plenty.”

  “Naw,” I said. “He looked like he was sleeping.”

  “How did you know he was dead?”

  It was a question the sheriff had asked too and I told her what I’d told him. That we thought he might have been hurt and when he didn’t answer our calls from the trestle we went down to check on him and it was easy then to see that he was dead.

  “You said he looked like he was just sleeping,” Ariel said. “Did you poke him to find out or what?”

  I said, “Up close he looked dead. He wasn’t breathing for one thing.”