(2013) Ordinary Grace Read online

  “That’s not it at all, Mom.”

  “Then what is it? Because it’s not about money. We settled that issue long ago. Your grandfather promised anything you need.”

  My father swallowed a mouthful of banana and said, “She doesn’t need anything from him.”

  My mother ignored him and kept her eyes on Ariel.

  Ariel tried again: “I don’t know that I want to go so far away from my family.”

  “That’s a feeble excuse, Ariel Louise, and you know it. What’s going on?”

  “I just . . . Never mind,” she said and rushed to the door and left the house.

  My father stood looking after her. “What do you suppose that was all about?”

  “Karl,” my mother said. “I never liked the idea of those two going steady. I knew he would end up a distraction.”

  “Everybody goes steady these days, Ruth.”

  “They’re too serious, Nathan. They spend all their free time together.”

  “She went out with other friends last night,” my father said.

  I thought about Ariel sneaking off after she’d returned from the drive-in theater and I wondered if it was Karl she’d gone to meet.

  My mother snatched up a pack of cigarettes from the windowsill over the sink and angrily tapped out a cigarette and struck a match and from behind a swirl of smoke said, “If Ariel’s thinking that she might marry instead of going to college, I’ll be happy to set that girl straight right now.”

  “Ruth,” my father said, “we don’t know anything of the sort. But it would be a good idea to sit down with her and find out what’s going on. Discuss it calmly.”

  “I’ll calmly tan her backside,” my mother said.

  My father smiled. “You’ve never hit the children, Ruth.”

  “She’s not a child.”

  “All the more reason to talk to her like an adult. We’ll do it tonight after she’s home from work.”

  When they were ready to drive to the Klements’ house I asked if I could go along to see Peter which meant that Jake would have to come too. My father saw no reason for leaving us behind especially in light of the constraint Jake and I were under not to go out of the yard without his permission. Jake didn’t mind going. He brought along the most recent issues of Aquaman and Green Lantern to read in the car. We piled into the Packard and headed for Cadbury.

  • • •

  Mr. Klement operated a small engine repair business out of a shop that was a converted barn next to his house. His father had owned two hundred acres just outside town and on his death had passed it to his son who had neither the disposition nor the inclination to be a farmer. Travis Klement sold the arable acreage but kept the house and outbuildings and established his business there.

  We arrived midafternoon and the heat lay oppressive on the land. We parked in the gravel drive in the shade of a big walnut tree. My mother took her casserole and my father took the bowl of Jell-O salad and they climbed the front steps and stood on the rickety porch and knocked at the screen door. Jake and I hung back. From the yard we could see the steeples of Cadbury just a quarter mile north. Between the Klements’ house and town Sioux Creek crossed the road. Under the narrow bridge, on those occasions when we were able to slip away from some dull church function, we’d hung out with Peter and caught crawdads and had once observed a family of foxes scurrying into a thicket along the creek bank.

  Peter came to the door and stood behind the screen and my father said, “Good afternoon, Peter. Is your mother home?”

  “Just a minute,” Peter said. He looked beyond my parents toward Jake and me in the yard and then he turned back and disappeared into the dark inside the house. A moment later his mother took his place. She was a woman plain of face but had long gold hair that she often wore in a braid and that hung like a silk rope down the middle of her back and that I always thought kept her from being in appearance completely unremarkable. She wore a simple sleeveless yellow dress which was something I’d heard my mother call a shift. She didn’t open the door or look directly at my parents but kept her face behind the dark of the screen and tilted downward as if fascinated by the unpainted porch boards and when she spoke it was in a voice so quiet that I could not hear what she said. This was odd behavior toward a minister and his family. People usually invited us in. I wandered onto the porch and stood near enough that I could hear the adults talking.

  “We so missed you this morning, Amelia,” my mother was saying. “The music isn’t at all the same without you.”

  Mrs. Klement said, “I’m sorry, Ruth.”

  “We made do of course. But, Amelia, I hope you recover and can be with us for practice on Wednesday.”

  “I’m sure I will,” Mrs. Klement said.

  “Well, anyway, we just wanted to bring over a little something for supper so that you wouldn’t have to worry about feeding your family and you could rest and recover. Nathan?”

  My father held out the bowl of Jell-O salad and my mother offered the tuna casserole. Mrs. Klement seemed uncertain about taking them. Finally she called for Peter and when he came she nudged the screen open only far enough for the dishes to be passed through. Then she stepped back quickly and let the screen door slap shut.

  “I’ve been thinking,” my mother said, “of a duet next Sunday. You and me, Amelia. I think it would be quite a lovely piece.”

  I edged back and descended the steps and let the adults continue talking. I walked around to the side of the old farmhouse. Most of the grass in the yard was already dead and had gone brittle and I crunched my way toward the open barn door with Jake close on my heels. We stood in the doorway peering inside at disemboweled lawn mowers and refrigerator condensers and motor parts that lay strewn about the dirt floor and that made the barn seem to me like a gladiatorial arena where the vanquished had been left dismembered. To the eyes of a boy it was fascinating but the disarray also signaled something vaguely unsettling to me.

  I heard the crush of gravel at our backs and turned to find Peter approaching. He wore a baseball cap pulled low as if to shield his face from the brutal bake of the sun.

  “Better come away from there,” he said. “My dad might get mad.”

  I bent and peered into the shadow cast by the brim of his cap. “Where’d you get that shiner?”

  He touched his eye and spun away. “I gotta go,” he said. “So do you.”

  Which was true. I saw my parents walking to the car and signaling us to join them. Peter headed toward the back door of his house and went inside without another word and without looking back.

  In the car on the way home we all were quiet. At the house my mother said, “Why don’t you boys go out and play awhile? When you come back in I’ll have Kool-Aid ready and some sandwiches.”

  We had a tire swing that hung on a rope from a branch of a big elm in the side yard and that’s where we went. Jake loved that swing. He could swing in it for hours talking to himself the whole time. He climbed into the tire and said, “Spin me.” I took hold of his shoulders and turned him and turned him until the rope was tightly twisted and then I let him go and stepped back and he spun like a top.

  Through the kitchen window at my back came snatches of my parents’ conversation.

  “They lied, Nathan. Every one of the ladies in choir told me Amelia was sick. I should have known.”

  “And what did you expect her friends and neighbors to say? That her husband had hit her and she was embarrassed to show the bruises in public?”

  “Not just her, Nathan. He hit Peter too.”

  Jake got out of the swing and began a wobbly walk, all dizzy from the spinning, and I lost track of the conversation in the kitchen for a moment. Jake fell down and I heard my mother’s voice again with a tautness near anger.

  “I don’t expect them to tell me the truth, Nathan. I’m sure in their minds it’s no one’s business but the Klements’. But they should tell you.”

  “Because I’m their pastor?”

  “Becaus
e you’re her pastor, too. And if she can’t turn to anyone else, she ought to be able to turn to you. People tell you their secrets, Nathan. I know they do. And not just because you’re their pastor.”

  Jake finally got up and went back to the tire. I would have spun him again but he waved me off and began to swing normally.

  I heard water run in the kitchen sink and a glass fill and then my father said, “He spent time in a North Korean POW camp. Did you know that, Ruth? He still has nightmares. He drinks because he thinks it helps him deal with the nightmares.”

  “You have nightmares. You don’t drink.”

  “Every man handles in a different way the damage war did to him.”

  “Some men seem to have put their wars behind them easily enough. I’ve heard some men say being in the army was the best time of their lives.”

  “Then they must have fought in different wars than I did and Travis Klement.”

  From the swing Jake called to me, “Want to play catch?”

  I said sure and started for the house to get the ball and our baseball gloves. My father came out the side door from the kitchen and walked toward the church. I quickly fell in step beside him and asked where he was going.

  “To get Gus,” he said.

  “Why?”

  I already suspected the answer. Gus was familiar with the drinking establishments in the valley of the Minnesota River and my father was not. If anyone would have an idea about where Mr. Klement was getting drunk it would be Gus.

  “I need his help,” he replied.

  “Can I go?”

  “No.”

  “Please.”

  “I said no.” My father seldom spoke sharply but his voice made it clear that on this subject he would brook no argument. I stopped and he walked alone to the church.

  Jake and I went inside the house where my mother had begun distractedly preparing lunch. Upstairs, my brother grabbed his ball glove from where it lay on the floor. I began digging through the closet in search of mine.

  Jake sat on his bed and put the glove to his nose as if inhaling the good aroma of the old leather and said, “He never talks about the war.”

  I was surprised because I thought he’d been so involved with his tire swing that he couldn’t have heard the kitchen conversation. Jake was always amazing me this way. I found my glove, an old Rawlings first baseman’s mitt, and put it on and slapped the soft palm with my hard fist.

  “Maybe he will someday,” I said.

  “Yeah, maybe someday,” Jake said but not necessarily because he believed it. Sometimes he just liked agreeing with me.

  6

  Karl was the only child of Axel and Julia Brandt. Axel Brandt owned the brewery in New Bremen which had been built by his great-grandfather and was among the first businesses established when the town was originally settled. For more than a hundred years the enterprise had prospered. The brewery employed a significant workforce and was part of the economic lifeblood of New Bremen. In a way it was the town’s crown jewel and the Brandts were about as near to royalty as you’d find in the Midwest. They lived of course on the Heights in a sprawling white-pillared mansion with a large marble patio in back that had a view of the town below and below that the Flats and beyond the Flats the broad crawl of the river.

  Karl Brandt and Ariel had gone steady for almost a year and although my mother didn’t like the idea, their relationship was more or less her doing. Every summer since we’d moved to New Bremen my mother had mounted a musical production that tapped the talent of the town’s youth and that was presented in the band shell in Luther Park the first weekend in August. The citizens of New Bremen turned out in extraordinary numbers. For some time after the last bow of the final show had been taken the talk of the town was prideful, not only because the young people had displayed such extraordinary talent but also because they were evidence that New Bremen was fostering in its youth the kinds of values that would serve both the community and the country well. In the summer when they were seventeen, Ariel and Karl had been chosen by my mother as the leads in a musical called The Boy Friend. By the end of the production the pair of stars were inseparable. For a while my mother looked on the relationship as a natural extension of the time and energy the two teenagers had invested in the production and she predicted it would not last beyond the turning of the leaves in autumn. But another summer had come to the valley of the Minnesota River and Karl and Ariel’s relationship seemed as consuming as ever. Its intensity alarmed not only my mother but also Julia Brandt who, whenever the two women happened to meet, was—my mother said in words that would have made the New York famous writers’ school proud—“cold as an Arctic winter.”

  Despite her disapproval of the intensity of his relationship with her daughter, my mother liked Karl and often invited him for dinner. Ariel had never once dined with the Brandts, a fact not at all lost on my mother. Karl was polite and funny and an athlete who’d lettered in football and basketball and baseball. He’d been accepted to St. Olaf’s which was a college in Northfield, Minnesota, where he intended to play football and get a degree and then return to New Bremen to help his father run the brewery. When I looked up the hill from town and saw the walls of the mansion white among the greenery I thought Karl Brandt’s future sounded pretty swell.

  That Sunday evening Karl and Ariel were going boating. Karl’s family owned a sailboat and a motor launch both docked at a marina on Lake Singleton. Ariel enjoyed boating. She said she loved the feel of the wind off the water and the clear blue circle of the sky overhead and the egrets and herons that walked stilt-like in the reedy shallows. She said she loved being freed from the stultifying solidness of dirt.

  After supper she sat on the porch steps waiting for Karl. I came out and sat with her. Ariel always seemed happy to have my company. For that alone I would have loved her. My father hadn’t yet returned from his search for Travis Klement and as we sat I watched Tyler Street for any sign of our Packard.

  Ariel was dressed in white shorts and a top with horizontal red and white stripes and she wore white canvas slip-ons. Her hair was tied with a red ribbon.

  “You look pretty,” I said.

  “Thanks, Frankie. With me a compliment’ll get you anywhere.” She lightly bumped my hip with her own.

  “What’s it like?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “Being in love. Is it all kind of gooey?”

  She laughed. “At first it’s lovely. Then it’s scary. Then . . .” She looked toward the hills of town, toward the Heights. “It’s complicated,” she said.

  “Will you marry him?”

  “Karl?” She shook her head.

  “Mom’s afraid you will.”

  “Mom doesn’t know everything.”

  “She says she worries because she loves you.”

  “She worries, Frankie, because she’s afraid I’ll end up like her.”

  I didn’t know what that meant exactly though I knew as well as any of us that Mother was less than delighted with her life as a minister’s wife. She’d said as much on a number of occasions. Her words usually went something like When I married you, Nathan, I thought I was marrying a lawyer. I didn’t sign on for this. More often than not it was said after she’d had a drink which was not something a minister’s wife was supposed to do but my mother did anyway. She had a fondness for martinis and sometimes would make a couple for herself in the evening and sip them alone in the living room while dinner bubbled over on the stove.

  “She made Dad go look for Mr. Klement,” I said. “Mr. Klement hit Mrs. Klement and Peter.”

  “I heard,” Ariel said.

  “I do a lot of stuff I figure I should get hit for but I never do. I just get yelled at. I deserve it. I’m not the greatest kid.”

  She turned to me and looked seriously into my face. “Frankie, never sell yourself short. You have remarkable strengths.”

  “I should be more responsible,” I said.

  “You have plenty of time to become
responsible. And believe me it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.” She spoke with a heaviness that weighed on me and I leaned against her and said, “I wish you weren’t going away.”

  “Maybe I’m not, Frankie,” she said. “Maybe I’m not.”

  Before I had a chance to press her further Karl drove up in his little sports car. For his eighteenth birthday his parents had given him a red Triumph TR3 and he drove it everywhere. He popped out of the car and bounded up the walk to where Ariel and I sat on the steps. He was tall and blond and smiling. He ruffled my hair and called me Sport and he said to Ariel, “You ready?”

  “Home by midnight,” my mother said through the screen door behind us. Then she said, “Hello, Karl.”

  “Hello, Mrs. Drum. Beautiful evening, don’t you think? And I’ll have her home before midnight, I promise.”

  “Enjoy yourselves,” my mother said though not exactly with a full heart.

  Ariel and Karl got into his car and sped up Tyler Street and out of sight. At my back I heard my mother sigh.

  My father didn’t return by suppertime and we ate without him. Mother had browned some hamburger and added to it a big can of Franco-American spaghetti and she kept this warm on the stove anticipating my father’s return. Jake and I ate on television trays and watched Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color, though for us it was in black and white, and on our old RCA console the world was a less-than-wonderful twenty-four-inches wide. The sun was down and the distant hills had taken on the blue look of twilight when there was a knock at the door and we found Danny O’Keefe standing on the porch scratching at a mosquito bite on his arm and telling us we should come outside and do something.

  Despite the impression given by his name Danny O’Keefe was Indian. Specifically he was Dakota but in those days they were known as Sioux. He didn’t like being called an Indian which was understandable given the image that had been acid-burned with ridicule and hatred into the minds of white Americans. In the valley of the Minnesota River—hell, maybe everywhere back then—it was dangerous to be an Indian. In 1862 the Sioux of the area had mounted a brief rebellion against the white settlers which all Minnesotans knew as the Great Sioux Uprising. New Bremen had been besieged and many of the buildings burned. In the end, unconscionable death and suffering was visited upon the Sioux, who’d already endured years of mistreatment and deception at the hands of the whites. Even so, the uprising was usually given a spin in the classrooms that made the Sioux look criminally ungrateful. When we were younger and played Cowboys and Indians, Danny refused to take the part his genetics dictated.