(2013) Ordinary Grace Read online

  My mother fixed cocktail martinis which my father, as always, declined and we all sat in the living room and the adults conversed. My grandfather spoke of the influx of Mexican farmworkers and how it was bringing an unwelcome element to the valley and my father asked how the farmers were supposed to get the work done without the help of the migrants. Liz said that when she saw the migrant families in town they were always clean and polite and the children well behaved and she felt bad that often the entire family, young children and all, had to labor in the fields to earn a living. My grandfather said, “If they’d just learn to speak English.”

  Jake and I often suffered through this kind of discussion in silence. No one asked our opinion and we didn’t feel obliged to offer it. My mother had prepared roasted chicken and stuffing and mashed potatoes and asparagus. The chicken was burned and dry and the gravy lumpy and the asparagus tough and stringy but my grandfather raved. After dinner he took Liz home in his big Buick. My mother and Ariel went to practice with the New Bremen Town Singers, a vocal group my mother had formed two years earlier. They were going to sing the chorale that Ariel had composed for the Fourth of July celebration. My father went to his office in the church and Jake and I were left to do the dishes. I washed and Jake dried.

  “What should we do?” Jake stood with a clean plate dripping water onto the old linoleum.

  “About what?”

  “Bobby’s glasses,” Jake said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe he found them. You know, just found them by the tracks where Bobby got hit.”

  “Maybe. If you don’t hurry up and dry that damn plate there’s going to be a lake on the floor.”

  Jake commenced to wiping with his dish towel. “Maybe we should tell somebody.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. Dad?”

  “Yeah and we’ll have to tell him we lied about how we found the body. You want to do that?”

  Jake looked sullen and then he looked at me as if I was responsible for the tough position we were in. “If you’d told the truth to begin with.”

  “Hey, you were the one who didn’t say anything about Danny’s uncle. I just played along. Remember?”

  “If we’d left when I wanted to, I wouldn’t’ve had to lie.”

  “Yeah, well, you did lie. And funny thing, you didn’t stutter at all while you were doing it. What do you think that means?”

  Jake put the dried plate on the counter and took the next in the drainer. “Maybe we could tell Ariel.”

  I worked an S.O.S pad over the bottom of the roasting pan my mother had used to cook the chicken and on which she had, in the process, grafted blackened skin. “Ariel’s got enough to worry about,” I said.

  I didn’t even think about telling my mother nor did Jake. She was a woman much consumed by the fiery passions of her own life and the truth anyway was that Ariel was her favorite and generally my mother left the business of dealing with her sons to their father.

  Jake said, “What about Gus?”

  I stopped scrubbing. Gus wasn’t a bad suggestion. He’d been kind of strange on Saturday in the back of Halderson’s Drugstore but that had been the effect of the beer and the other odd circumstances of that horrible moment which I would gladly have forgotten if I could. Maybe enough time had passed that Gus would be able to offer counsel that was more considered. “All right,” I said. “Hurry up and finish and let’s go see him.”

  By the time we crossed the street and approached the side door that led to the church basement and to the room where Gus slept it was twilight and the tree frogs and the crickets were kicking up a pleasant racket. Gus’s Indian Chief was parked in the church lot along with a couple of cars that I didn’t recognize. The light was on in my father’s office and through the window came the beautiful sweep of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1. My father kept a record player in his office and a shelf of recordings that he often listened to as he worked. This piano concerto was one of his favorites. We went in the door and at the bottom of the stairs we stopped cold. In the center of the basement under the glare of the unshielded bulb a card table had been set up and around it were Gus and three other men. There were cards on the table and poker chips and the air was full of cigarette smoke and beside each man’s stack of chips there was a bottle of Brandt beer. I knew all the men. Mr. Halderson, the druggist. Ed Florine, who delivered mail and was a member of my father’s congregation. And Doyle, the cop. The play stopped the moment the men saw us.

  Doyle smiled big. “Busted,” he said.

  “Come on in,” Gus said and beckoned us with his hand.

  I went right away but Jake hung back on the stairs.

  “Just a friendly poker game,” Gus said. He put his arm around me and showed me his cards. He’d taught Jake and me about poker and I could see that he had a good hand. A full house, deuces over queens. “No big deal,” he said, “except that it might be best if your father didn’t know about it. Okay?”

  He spoke quietly and I understood why. The furnace in the corner of the basement was in need of repair. Gus had been charged with fixing it but because we were in the middle of summer he was in no hurry. The ducts had all been disconnected and stuffed with rags to prevent basement noise from channeling into the sanctuary and community room and my father’s office. Between the rags and the Tchaikovsky the sound of the card game wouldn’t have reached my father but it was clear to me that Gus didn’t want to take chances.

  “Sure,” I said quietly.

  Gus looked at Jake. “How about you, buddy?”

  Jake didn’t reply but he gave a shrug that signaled his reluctant consent.

  Gus said, “Did you need something?”

  I looked at the men around the table who composed almost the same group as had been present in the drugstore the day we found the body and who seemed no more attractive to me as confidants now than they did then.

  “No,” I said. “Nothing.”

  “In that case best get along. And remember this game is between us. Hey, care for a sip of Brandt’s best brew?” The alliteration seemed to tickle Gus and he laughed.

  I took a swallow of the beer which was warm. It wasn’t the first time I’d tasted alcohol whose attraction I had yet to understand. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and Doyle clapped me on the back and said, “We’ll make a man of you yet, kid.”

  The sound of a knock on my father’s office door came to us. It must have been a loud knock to have carried to us below and was probably done so boldly in order to be heard above the strains of Tchaikovsky which ended abruptly. We heard the creak of the floorboards as my father crossed to the door.

  Gus put a finger to his lips, got up from the table, went to the heating duct that ran to my father’s office, and pulled out the rags. Very clearly we heard my father say, “Why, good evening. What a pleasant surprise.”

  “May we come in, Reverend?”

  I recognized the voice. It was Edna Sweeney whose amazing underwear Jake and I had admired on the line in her backyard the day Bobby Cole was buried.

  “Of course, of course,” my father said. “How are you, Avis?”

  Though he replied “Fair to middlin’,” Avis Sweeney didn’t sound so good.

  “Please, sit down.”

  Gus stuffed the rags back into the duct and said quietly, “Going to see a man about a horse,” and he headed to the bathroom. Above us chairs scraped the bare wood floor. Doyle put down his cards and got up from the table and went to the duct and removed the rags.

  My father said, “What can I do for you folks?”

  Quiet followed and then Edna Sweeney said, “You counsel married couples, right?”

  “I do under certain circumstances.”

  “We need to talk to you about a marital problem, Reverend.”

  “What sort of problem?”

  Another quiet and I heard Avis cough.

  “We need to talk about our sexual intimacy,” Edna Sweeney said.

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sp; “I see.” My father spoke with the same calm he might have employed if Edna had said, “We need to talk to you about prayer.”

  I thought I should do something. I thought I should go over and grab the rags from Doyle’s hand and stuff them back into the duct but I was a boy in the company of men and afraid to cross them.

  “I mean,” Edna Sweeney went on, “we need some marital advice about sex. In a Christian way.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” my father said.

  “It’s just this. Avis and me we don’t always see eye to eye about our physical relationship. The truth, Reverend, is that I want intimacy more often than Avis seems prepared to offer it. And Avis thinks that somehow my desire is an abnormality. That’s the word he used. Abnormality. Like I’m a freak or something.” Edna Sweeney had started the discussion in a moderate tone but her voice had rapidly intensified, especially when she spoke that final statement.

  Doyle shoved the rags back into the duct momentarily and whispered to the others, “If my ex had been that eager I’d still be married.” The others stifled laughs and Doyle once again removed the rags.

  “I see,” my father said. “And, Avis, would you like to say something?”

  “Yes, Reverend. I work hard at the grain elevator all day and I come home beat like a rug. I drag my ass—excuse me—I come in the house and there’s Edna all hot to trot when I ain’t got but two thoughts on my mind and that’s a cold beer and putting my feet up. I think she expects I’ll perform like a trained dog or something.”

  I imagined Avis Sweeney sitting there, toothpick thin, his big Adam’s apple bouncing up and down as if riding a pogo stick. Maybe the druggist imagined it too because he laughed quietly and shook his head. I knew we shouldn’t be listening and I thought that if Gus were there he would have stopped them. I knew if not Gus then the responsibility should have fallen to me but the truth was that I wasn’t just afraid of saying something to the men, I was also fascinated with the discussion taking place in my father’s office and so I held my tongue.

  “Just a little affection, Avis,” Edna Sweeney said. “That’s all I’m asking.”

  “No, Edna, you’re asking for a pony can do a trick when you snap your fingers. That ain’t me, woman. Now, Reverend, understand I’m as interested as the next guy but Edna she comes on like a she-bear in heat.”

  “There are men who’d value that in a woman,” Edna shot back.

  “Well, you ain’t married to one.”

  “Well, I wish to God I was.”

  “All right,” my father said calmly. He allowed a few moments of judicious silence to pass, then said, “The physical intimacy between a man and a woman is a delicate balance of needs and temperaments, and seldom do all the elements align easily. Edna, are you hearing Avis? He’s asking for a little time to relax at the end of a hard day before you engage in lovemaking.”

  “Relax? Hell, Reverend, he drinks his beer and nods off and he’s no good to me then.”

  “Avis, instead of a beer how about a glass of iced tea?”

  “Sometimes, Reverend, when I’m slaving away in the hot afternoon sun, all that gets me through the day is the idea of that cold beer sitting in the fridge with my name wrote all over it.”

  Edna Sweeney said, “And some men would be thinking about what’s waiting for them in bed.”

  “We been married thirteen years, Edna. Believe me, there ain’t no surprises waitin’ for me in bed.”

  “Thirteen years,” my father said. “That’s quite a history together. Tell me how you met.”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?” Avis Sweeney said.

  “We met at a picnic,” Edna said. “Out at Luther Park. I knew some of the people Avis works with and they invited us both. Kind of a setup, although we didn’t know it.”

  “What attracted you to Avis?”

  “Heck, he was so damn cute and kind of cocky. And we ended up talking while the others played softball, and at the end of the evening, when we were all getting ready to leave, he opened the car door for me. Like a real gentleman.” Edna Sweeney stopped talking for a few moments and when she began again I could hear that her voice was choked. “And I looked into his eyes, Reverend, and I saw a kindness there that I hadn’t seen in other men.”

  “That’s lovely, Edna. Avis, what made you fall in love?”

  “Hell, I don’t know.”

  “Take your time.”

  “Well. She was a damn fine looking woman. And she didn’t talk a lot of nonsense. I remember she talked about her family and especially about her mother, who was sickly. And I could tell she had a lot of heart to her. And then I got sick, too. Came down with a bad flu, and there she was every day on my doorstep with some kind of soup she’d made. She’s a real good cook, Reverend.”

  “So I’ve heard, Avis. It’s clear to me that you love each other and, as long as you have that love, everything else can be worked through. I’ll tell you what. I have a good friend. His name is Jerry Stowe. He’s also clergy but he specializes in counseling couples who are having difficulty with the physical intimacy in their relationship. He’s very good and I’m sure he could help you. Would you be willing to let me talk to him and set up a counseling session for you?”

  Avis said, “I don’t know.”

  My father said, “In coming to me, you’ve already taken the hardest step.”

  “I’d be willing,” Edna said. “Please, Avis.”

  At the card table the men sat stone still.

  “All right,” Avis finally said.

  I heard the toilet flush in Gus’s bathroom and a moment later the door opened and Gus came out buckling his belt. He looked up and spent a moment comprehending the situation.

  Upstairs my father said, “I’ll call him first thing tomorrow and then we’ll work out a time with you. Avis, Edna, I often see couples who are in real trouble, who’ve lost the strong foundation of their love. Clearly you’re not among them. Avis, take Edna’s hand. Let’s pray together.”

  Gus went quickly to where Doyle stood and grabbed the rags and stuffed them into the duct. In a harsh whisper he said, “What the hell are you doing, Doyle?”

  Doyle easily shrugged off Gus’s anger. “Just curious,” he said and sauntered back to the card table.

  We heard chairs scrape above and footsteps heading to the door and a minute later Tchaikovsky began again.

  Halderson shook his head. “Who would’ve thought being a preacher could be so interesting?”

  Doyle said, “Mark my words, boys. Avis doesn’t jump that woman’s bones, somebody else will.”

  Halderson asked, “You got a candidate in mind?”

  “I’m always thinking,” Doyle said. “Always thinking.”

  Gus returned to the table but didn’t immediately pick up his cards. It was clear he was still upset with Doyle. He looked at me and Jake and his anger seemed to spill out at us and he said, “Thought you two were leaving.”

  We started to back away.

  “Hey, boys.” Doyle held up his cards. “Like we said, all this is between you and us, okay? No sense getting your old man worked up over a friendly game. Ain’t that so, Gus?”

  Gus didn’t reply but his look told us it was so.

  We walked back to the house and went inside and said nothing. In terms of what to do about Bobby Cole’s glasses we were no better off than we’d been before. But something amazing had happened in the basement of my father’s church. We’d been among men and shared something with them that felt illicit and although I understood that it was somehow at the expense of my father I was thrilled to have been included in that confidence, to be part of that brotherhood.

  When Jake finally spoke it was clear that he had a different view.

  “We shouldn’t’ve been listening. That was private stuff,” he said. He was sitting on the sofa staring at a blank television screen.

  I was standing at a back window staring across the dark empty pasture at the Sweeneys’ house. There was a li
ght in a back room which I thought might be the bedroom. “We didn’t mean to,” I said. “It was sort of an accident.”

  “We could’ve left.”

  “Why didn’t you then?”

  Jake didn’t answer. The light went out at the Sweeneys’ and after that the house was totally dark.

  Jake said, “What do we do about Danny’s uncle?”

  I dropped into the easy chair my father usually occupied when he read.

  “We keep it to ourselves,” I said.

  My father came home soon after. He poked his head into the living room where we sat watching television. “I’m going to dish up some ice cream for myself,” he said. “You guys want any?”

  We both said yes and a few minutes later he delivered bowls with a mound of chocolate in each and sat with us and we ate in silence watching Surfside 6. When we were finished Jake and I took our bowls to the kitchen and rinsed them out and set them beside the sink to be washed and headed toward the stairs to go to bed. My father had set aside his empty bowl and turned off the television and moved to his easy chair. In his hands he held an opened book and when we passed through the living room and trooped toward the stairs he looked up from his reading and eyed us curiously.

  “I saw you two come over to the church earlier. I thought maybe you wanted to talk to me.”

  “No,” I said. “We just wanted to say hi to Gus.”

  “Ah,” he said. “And how was Gus?”

  Jake stood with one hand on the banister and one foot on the first stair. He gave me a worried look.

  “He was fine,” I said.

  My father nodded as if I’d offered a piece of sobering news then he said, “Was he winning?”

  His face was a stone tablet absolutely unreadable to me.

  If I’d been Jake I’d have probably stuttered to beat the band. As it was I collected myself and swallowed my surprise and said, “Yes.”

  My father nodded again and went back to his reading. “Good night, boys,” he said.

  9

  The Fourth of July was my third favorite holiday. Immediately ahead of it was Christmas which took second place to Halloween. What made the Fourth special was what makes the Fourth special for any kid: fireworks. Today in Minnesota most fireworks with any real bang to them are illegal, but in 1961 in New Bremen, provided you had the money, you could purchase anything your heart desired. In order to buy fireworks I’d been saving everything I could of my earnings from the yard work I did for my grandfather. A couple of weeks before the Fourth a number of stands appeared in town festooned with red, white, and blue ribbons and selling a tantalizing array of explosives and every time I passed one of them and saw all the possibilities laid out on the plywood counters or in the boxes stacked in the shade of the canvas tents I grew eager with anticipation. I couldn’t purchase anything without my father being present to approve each item and I didn’t want to buy too early because the temptation to blow up my arsenal would be too great, so I window-shopped the stands and made a mental list of everything I desired, a list I revised a hundred times as I lay in bed at night imagining the big day.