(2013) Ordinary Grace Read online

  “You investigated this dead man pretty carefully,” she said. She put her index finger to the scar on her lip which was something she did sometimes when she was deep in consideration and she looked at me a long thoughtful time. Then she turned to Jake.

  “How about you, Jakie? Were you scared?”

  He didn’t answer her. Instead he said, “We weren’t supposed to be there.”

  She laughed softly and said, “You’ll be lots of places you’re not supposed to be in your lives. Just don’t get caught.”

  “I saw you sneaking in the other night,” I said.

  The moment of her playfulness vanished and she looked at me coldly.

  “Don’t worry. I didn’t tell anybody.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said.

  But I could tell that it did.

  Ariel was my parents’ golden child. She had a quick mind and the gift of easy charm and her fingers possessed magic on the keyboard and we knew, all of us who loved her, that she was destined for greatness. She was my mother’s favorite and may have been my father’s too though I was less certain of his sentiments. He was careful in how he spoke of his children, but my mother with passionate and dramatic abandon declared Ariel the joy of her heart. What she did not say but all of us knew was that Ariel was the hope for the consummation of my mother’s own unfulfilled longings. It would have been easy to hate Ariel. But Jake and I adored her. She was our confidante. Our coconspirator. Our defender. She tracked our small successes better than our distracted parents and was lavish in her praise. In the simple way of the wild daisies that grew in the grass of the pasture behind our home she offered the beauty of herself without pretension.

  “A dead man,” she said and shook her head. “Do they know who he was?”

  “He called himself Skipper,” Jake said.

  “How do you know?”

  Jake shot me a look that was a silent plea for help but before I could respond Ariel said, “There’s something you guys aren’t telling me.”

  “There were two men,” Jake said in a rush and it was easy to see that he was relieved to have the truth spill from him.

  “Two?” Ariel looked from Jake to me. “Who was the other man?”

  Thanks to Jake the truth was already there in front of us like a puddle of puke. I saw no reason to lie anymore especially to Ariel. I said, “An Indian. He was the dead man’s friend.” Then I told her everything that had happened.

  She listened and the pillowy blue of her eyes rested sometimes on me and sometimes on Jake and in the end she said, “You guys could be in big trouble.”

  “S-s-s-see,” Jake hissed at me.

  “It’s okay, Jakie,” she said. She patted his leg. “Your secret’s safe with me. But, guys, listen to Dad. He worries about you. We all do.”

  “Should we tell someone about the Indian?” Jake asked.

  Ariel thought it over. “Was the Indian scary or dangerous?”

  “He put his hand on Jake’s leg,” I said.

  “He didn’t scare me,” Jake said. “I don’t think he was going to hurt us or anything.”

  “Then I think it’s okay to keep that part a secret.” Ariel stood up. “But promise you won’t goof around on the tracks anymore.”

  “Promise,” Jake said.

  Ariel waited for me to chime in and scowled until I gave her my word. She walked to the door where she turned back dramatically and gave a broad wave of her hand and said, “I’m off to the theater.” She pronounced the word as theatah. “The drive-in theater,” she said and finished by throwing an imaginary stole about her neck and exiting with a dramatic flourish.

  • • •

  My father didn’t fix hamburgers and milk shakes that night. He was called to van der Waal’s Funeral Home where the body of the dead man had been taken for disposition and where he discussed with van der Waal and the sheriff the burial of the stranger. He didn’t get home until late. In the meantime, my mother heated Campbell’s tomato soup and made grilled cheese sandwiches with Velveeta and we ate dinner and afterward watched Have Gun—Will Travel. The picture was snowy on the screen because of the poor reception in so isolated an area but Jake and I clamored to watch it every Saturday night anyway. Ariel left with some of her friends to go to the drive-in movies and my mother said, “Home by midnight.” Ariel kissed her sweetly on the forehead and said, “Yes, Mother dear.” We took our Saturday night baths and went to bed before my father returned and when

  he came home I was still awake and I heard my parents talking in the kitchen which was directly below our bedroom. Their voices came up through the grate in the floor and it was as if they were in the same room with me. They had no idea I was privy to every conversation that took place between them in the kitchen. They spent a few minutes talking about the burial service for the dead man which my father had agreed to perform. Then they moved on to Ariel.

  My father said, “Is she out with Karl?”

  “No,” Mother replied. “Just a bunch of her girlfriends. I told her midnight because I knew you’d worry.”

  “When she’s away at Juilliard and I have no say in the matter she can stay out as late as she wants but when she’s with us and under our roof she’s home by midnight,” he said.

  “You don’t have to convince me, Nathan.”

  “She’s been different lately,” he said. “Have you noticed?”

  “Different how?”

  “I get the feeling something’s on her mind and she’s about to speak and then she doesn’t.”

  “If something was bothering her she’d tell me, Nathan. She tells me everything.”

  “All right,” my father said.

  Mother asked, “When is the burial for that dead itinerant?”

  Mother used the word itinerant because she said it was kinder than hobo or bum, and so we’d all begun to use that term when referring to the dead man.

  “Monday.”

  “Would you like me to sing?”

  “It will be just me and Gus and van der Waal at the burial. No need for music I think. A few appropriate words will do.”

  Their chairs scraped on the linoleum and they drifted away from the table and I could no longer hear them.

  I thought about the dead man and I thought that I would like to be there when he was buried and I rolled over and closed my eyes thinking about Bobby Cole in his casket and about the dead man who would be in a casket too and I fell into a dark and unsettled slumber.

  In the night I woke to the sound of a car door closing on the street in front of our house and Ariel laughing. In my parents’ bedroom across the hall a dim light burned. The car drove away and a few moments later I heard the tiny cry of the hinges on the front screen door. The light in my parents’ bedroom blinked off and their door closed with a quiet sigh. Ariel came up the stairs and then I was asleep.

  Later I woke to thunder. I went to the window and saw that an electrical storm was sliding north of the valley and although the rain would miss us I could see quite well the silver bolts of lightning forged on the anvil of the great thunderhead. I slipped downstairs and out the front door and sat on the porch steps. A wind cooler than anything I’d felt in days breathed into my face and I watched the storm as I might have watched the approach and passing of a fierce and beautiful animal.

  The distant thunder was like the sound of cannon fire and I thought about my father and what he’d told Jake and me about the war, which was a good deal more than he’d ever shared with us. There’d been many things I wanted to ask and I wasn’t sure why I’d held back and though he’d done nothing to show it I knew my father was hurt by our silence which was the only return we gave for his difficult honesty. I’d wanted to ask about death and if it hurt to die and what awaited me and everyone else after our passing and don’t give me that crap about the Pearly Gates, Dad. Death was a serious subject on my mind and I wanted to talk to someone about it. Standing with my father and brother in the dirt of the garage I’d been offered the moment but I
’d let it pass.

  As I sat on the steps I saw someone dash across the yard from the back of the house and head toward Tyler Street and up to the Heights. We didn’t have streetlights on the Flats but I didn’t need a light to know who was sneaking away.

  I stood up to return to my bedroom and looked one last time where the lightning stabbed the earth that rimmed and isolated our valley.

  There’d been two deaths already that summer, and although I didn’t have a clue, there were three more yet to come.

  And the next would be the most painful to bear.

  5

  My father had three charges which meant that he was responsible for the spiritual needs of the congregations of three churches and every Sunday he presided over three services. As his family we were required to attend them all.

  At eight a.m. the worship for the church in Cadbury commenced. Cadbury was a small town fifteen miles southeast of New Bremen. They had a strong congregation that included a number of Protestants of different denominations who had no church of their own near enough to attend easily and preferred the more informal service of the Methodists to the religious rigor of the Lutherans, who were as ubiquitous in Minnesota as ragweed. My mother directed the choir of which she was quite proud. Every week she drew from the men and women of the Cadbury church choir a sound that was rich and melodious and a joy to the ear. In this enterprise she had help. One of the men possessed a beautiful baritone that under my mother’s tutelage he’d shaped into a fine instrument, and one of the women had a voice that was a strong alto complement to my mother’s lovely soprano. The music pieces that my mother put together for the choir and that relied on the strength of those three voices were reason enough to come to church. Ariel was icing on the cake. Her skillful fingers coaxed from the pipes of that modest little organ music that was like nothing the congregation of the tiny country church had ever heard before. Jake and I trudged along to every service and mostly did our best not to fidget. Because it was the first, the service in Cadbury was not so difficult. By the third Sunday service our butts were sore and our patience sorely tested. So the Cadbury service tended to be our favorite.

  My father was well liked in the rural churches. The sermons he preached, which were marked less by evangelical fervor than by a calm exhortation of God’s unbounded grace, were well received by congregations composed primarily of sensible farm families who in most aspects of their public lives were as emotionally demonstrative as a mound of hay. He was also gifted in inspiring the church committees that were a part of every Methodist congregation. Most weekday evenings he was gone from the house attending some committee meeting in Cadbury or New Bremen or Fosburg, the site of his third charge. He was ceaseless in the execution of what he saw as his duty and if he was often absent as a father that was part of the price of his calling.

  Cadbury lay in a hollow along Sioux Creek which was a tributary to the Minnesota River. As you crested the highway that dropped into town you were greeted by the sight of three church steeples rising above a thick green gathering of trees. Cadbury Methodist was the nearest of these steeples. From the front of the church you could look down the main street which was two blocks of businesses that in the boom of the post–World War Two years had prospered. The church was shaded by several tall elms and on summer mornings when we arrived the sanctuary was cool and quiet. My father unlocked the building and went to the office and Ariel went to the organ and my mother went to the choir room. Jake and I were responsible for putting out the offering plates for the ushers and if the sanctuary was stuffy we opened the windows. Then we sat in the back row and waited as the congregation gathered and the choir assembled.

  That morning shortly before the service was to begin my mother came out from the choir room and stood near the altar and scanned the sanctuary with a concerned look on her face.

  She came to me and said, “Have you seen Mrs. Klement?”

  I told her no.

  “Go outside and watch for her. If you see her coming, let me know right away.”

  I said, “Yes, ma’am.”

  I walked outside and Jake came with me and we stood looking both ways down the street. Mrs. Klement was the woman with the strong alto voice. She was my mother’s age and had a son named Peter who was twelve years old. Because his mother sang in the choir Peter was orphaned during the service and he usually sat with Jake and me. His father never came to church and I’d gathered through conversations I’d overheard that he was not much inclined toward religion but was a man of unfortunate excesses who could have benefited from a bit of good solid Methodist discipline.

  While we watched for Mrs. Klement a number of the congregation passed us on their way into the church and greeted us with pleasant familiarity. A man named Thaddeus Porter who was the town banker and a widower and who walked with a regal gait strode up to us and stopped and clasped his hands behind his back and looked down on us as a general might during inspection of his troops.

  “I heard you boys found yourselves a dead body,” he said.

  “Yes, sir,” I replied.

  “Quite a remarkable discovery.”

  “Yes, sir, it was.”

  “You seem well recovered.”

  “The truth is, sir, it didn’t bother me much.”

  “Ah,” he said and nodded as if not being much bothered wasn’t a bad thing. “Nerves of steel, eh? I’ll see you boys inside.” He turned from us and with measured strides mounted the steps.

  Mrs. Klement never showed that Sunday morning nor did Peter. The anthem and the offertory hymn, my mother said afterward, suffered greatly due to her absence. After the service we stayed briefly for the social time in the church fellowship hall during which I was questioned a good deal about the dead man Jake and I had found. Each time I repeated the story I embellished it just a bit more and as a result suffered Jake’s disapproving scowl. So much so that by the last telling I’d made him little more than a footnote in the tale.

  When my father had finished with the final service that day, which was held at noon in the church in Fosburg a dozen miles north of New Bremen, he drove us all home. As always it felt as if I’d just spent a long time in hell and had finally been granted a divine pardon. I raced to my bedroom and changed my clothes and got ready to enjoy the rest of the day. When I went downstairs I found my mother in the kitchen pulling food from the refrigerator. She’d put together a tuna casserole and Jell-O salad the night before which I figured would be our dinner. My father entered the kitchen after me and it was clear he thought so too. He said, “Dinner?”

  “Not for us,” my mother replied. “It’s for Amelia Klement. The ladies of the choir told me that she was quite ill and that was why she didn’t come to church today.” She pushed my father aside and walked to the counter with the pan of tuna casserole in hand. She said, “Amelia’s life is a prison cell presided over by Travis Klement, who, if he isn’t the worst husband in the world, is certainly in the running. She’s told me more times than I can count that choir practice on Wednesday and church on Sunday are the two things she looks forward to most in a week. If she couldn’t make it to church today, she must be very ill, and I intend to see that she doesn’t have to worry about feeding her family. I’m going to finish this casserole, and then I’m going to deliver it, and you’re coming with me.”

  “What about our dinner?” This slipped from my lips before I had a chance to think about the advisability of asking.

  My mother gave me a scathing look. “You won’t starve. I’ll put something together.”

  The truth was that it was fine with me. I wasn’t at all fond of tuna casserole. And I thought that if she and my father were driving out to Peter Klement’s house I might go along and tell Peter about the dead man. I was really warming to the effect this story seemed to have on those who heard it.

  Ariel came into the kitchen dressed for work at the country club.

  My mother asked, “Would you like a sandwich before you go?”

  “No, I
’ll grab something when I get there.” Ariel lingered and leaned against the counter and said, “What if I didn’t go to Juilliard this fall?”

  My father who’d plucked a banana from the bunch on the top of the refrigerator and was peeling it said, “We’d send you to work in the salt mines instead.”

  “I mean,” Ariel said, “it would be cheaper if I went to Mankato State.”

  “You’re on a scholarship,” my father pointed out and stuffed a good third of the banana into his mouth.

  “I know, but you and Mom will still have to pay a lot.”

  “Let us worry about that,” my father said.

  “I could continue to study with Emil Brandt. He’s as good as anyone at Juilliard.”

  Emil Brandt had been Ariel’s teacher since we’d come to New Bremen five years before. He was in fact much of the reason we’d come. My mother wanted Ariel to study with the best composer and pianist in Minnesota and that was Brandt. He happened also to be my mother’s good friend since childhood.

  I learned my mother’s history with Brandt gradually over the whole course of my life. Some things I knew in 1961, others were revealed to me as I grew older. In those days I understood that when she was hardly more than a girl my mother had been briefly engaged to Brandt who was several years her senior. I’d also gathered that by the standards of the staid German population in New Bremen, Emil Brandt was a wild one, both a prodigiously talented musician and one of the high and mighty Brandts who knew he was destined for greater things. Shortly after he’d proposed to my mother Brandt had left her flat, gone off to New York City to seek his fortune without so much as a by your leave. By the summer of 1961, however, all of that was ancient history and my mother counted Emil Brandt as one of her dearest friends. Partly this was due to the healing property of time but I believe it was also because when he finally came home to New Bremen, Brandt was a very damaged man and my mother felt a great deal of compassion for him.

  Mother stopped what she was doing and turned a stern eye on her daughter. “Is this about Karl? You don’t want to leave your boyfriend?”