Ordinary Grace

11

Jake succeeded in coaxing Lise from her brother’s hospital room and Jake and my father and Axel all drove her home together in Mr. Brandt’s Cadillac. My mother followed in the Packard along with Ariel and me. In his sports car Karl returned his mother to her big mansion. Emil was left alone to get the rest everyone said he needed.

Because Ariel and Jake were familiar visitors to the house and because they were willing it was decided that they would stay with Lise until Emil was able to return home. My mother said she’d pack overnight bags for them. When everyone left I stuck around to keep Jake and Ariel company for a while.

There were curtains over the windows but the interior walls of Emil Brandt’s home were basically bare. The blind man, I figured, cared not at all about appearance and Lise Brandt was such a mystery to me that I didn’t know what to think about her. There was little furniture and it was placed far apart and Ariel had told me that because of Mr. Brandt’s blindness it was never moved. There were no bookshelves, no books. But there were flowers, a profusion of flowers arranged beautifully in vases set about every room. The center of the house seemed to be the grand piano that took up the entire space of what had probably once been the dining room. Ariel had told me this was where Emil Brandt practiced and composed. Near the piano sat expensive-looking reel-to-reel recording equipment which, according to Ariel, Brandt used while composing since he couldn’t see to write on a score sheet. There was a fine hi-fi system in the living room with enormous speakers and a whole wall of shelves filled with records. I considered the spare look of the house, and thought about the texture of the furniture upholstery which was soft as a flower petal, and about the fragrance of the flowers that perfumed the rooms, and about the piano and the stereo speakers that filled the house with music, and I realized that Emil Brandt had constructed a world of those senses he still possessed.

The kitchen was different from the rest of the house. This was Lise’s territory. It was large and neatly arranged and colorful and had a wide sliding door along the back wall that opened onto a beautiful deck that overlooked the gardens and the river.

It was late afternoon by the time we were settled and Lise Brandt set about making dinner. Ariel asked if she could help, facing Lise and enunciating clearly so Lise could read her lips. Lise shook her head and motioned Ariel out but she beckoned Jake to come and give her a hand. We ate at a table in the kitchen, ate a better meal than my mother had ever put together. Fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, buttered carrots, baked squash, all of it delicious. I thought that despite his blindness Emil Brandt was a lucky man. After dinner Ariel offered to do the dishes but once again Lise shooed her away and accepted help only from Jake.

It was nearing sunset when Lise put on her overalls and signed to Jake that there was still work to be done in the garden. I could tell he was not inclined but he said okay. He also asked if it would be all right if I helped and after a few moments of consideration Lise nodded. Ariel stayed inside and the music she played on the grand piano flowed out the windows of the house. From what I knew of the music of Emil Brandt I was pretty sure she was playing one of his compositions, a piece in a minor key, sad and beautiful. In the large toolshed Lise took a pick, a shovel, and a crowbar from where they hung on a wall and handed a tool to each of us. I got the pick, Jake the shovel, and Lise kept the crowbar. She led us to an area of recently turned earth along the back picket fence. It was clear she was expanding her garden but she’d encountered an obstacle, a rock the size of a prizewinning pumpkin near the center of the new plot. It was deeply embedded in a layer of clay and probably had been there since the Glacial River Warren tumbled it down from the Dakotas. We stood for a minute eyeing it from all angles.

I lifted my hand to get Lise’s attention. “Maybe you could just plant around it,” I suggested, speaking carefully so that she could read my lips.

She shook her head furiously and pointed at my pick and mimed digging.

“All right then,” I said. “Stand back.”

I hoisted the pick and chopped into the clay beside the boulder. Lise and Jake stood back and let me work. I broke the ground and worked my way completely around the stone and afterward Jake followed with his shovel and cleared away the big loose clods. We worked in this way for nearly half an hour while Lise stood by and watched. I was beginning to resent all this labor while she did nothing except shake her head as if our efforts didn’t meet with her approval. I was about to step away and say something when she tapped Jake’s shoulder and motioned us to stop. She laid her crowbar down and went to the shed and from a pile of rocks on the east side she took one that was roughly the size and shape of a loaf of bread. She brought it back and set it six inches from the boulder. She took up her crowbar and jammed the chiseled end under the big stone and using the smaller stone as the fulcrum of her lever she put the force of her whole body into prying the obstacle loose from the grip of the hard clay. Her face squeezed into intense lines of determination and I looked at her bare arms and marveled at how muscled they were and how the veins there ran in long thick tendrils under her skin. Jake and I dropped our tools and knelt on either side of the stone and gripped it and pulled with all our might. And finally the rock broke free. It was too heavy for us to lift so Jake and I slowly rolled the great pumpkin of a rock across the yard to the shed where it joined all the other rock and stone that Lise Brandt had cleared to have her gardens. When it was settled there Jake leaped up and cried out victoriously. Lise gripped her crowbar in one hand and shot her other hand into the air in a sign of triumph and sent forth a prolonged guttural intonation that sounded not at all human and that if I’d heard it alone at night would have made me freeze in my steps. But I understood what it was about and I joined in the celebration.

And that’s when I made my mistake.

In my excitement I clapped Jake on the shoulder in the way of comrades and then I did the same to Lise Brandt. The moment I touched her she swung around with the crowbar in her hand. If I hadn’t been so quick and leaped back out of reach, that iron bar would have crushed my skull. The sun in its setting had gone red and a long beam shot through a break in the branches of an elm and lit her face with a demon light. Her eyes held a wild look and she opened her mouth and began to scream in the way she had earlier when the fireman had restrained her.

I looked desperately to Jake and shouted above the screams, “What do we do?”

“There’s nothing we can do,” he said. He looked in pain himself as if Lise Brandt’s unfathomable misery were his own. “Just leave her alone and she’ll stop.”

I pleaded with her, saying desperately, “I’m sorry, Lise. I didn’t mean anything.” But she didn’t hear. I put my hands over my ears and backed away.

Ariel rushed from the house calling as she came, “What happened?”

“Nothing,” Jake said. “Frank touched her, that’s all. It was an accident. She’ll calm down in a while. She’ll be fine.”

“I’ve got to get out of here,” I said.

“Go,” Jake said. “Go.” And he furiously motioned me away.

There was a gate in the back fence and I pushed through it. Beyond was the thread of a path that ran down the hill toward the railroad tracks that lay between the Brandt property and the river. I fled the screaming but it followed me all the way down the slope and across the tracks and through the cottonwood trees and it wasn’t until I slid down the riverbank and was on the sandy flat that the terrible sound finally ceased. My heart beat wildly, not just from the running but from the panic of Lise’s awful scream, and I understood only too well why Axel and Julia Brandt had sent her into exile in a place that was far beyond the hearing of most people in New Bremen.

In the blessed quiet of evening I walked along the river toward home. Black terns cut sharp curls above the channel, snatching insects from the air. In the sky the clouds had gone the color of flamingo feathers. I came to the first houses of the Flats and heard Danny O’Keefe and some other kids calling out to one another beyond the cottonwood trees but I didn’t want to join them. I made my way across the dry mudflats and approached the sandy area covered with bulrushes where Danny’s uncle had built his lean-to. From deep in the tall reeds came the rustling of someone headed my way and I slipped into the cover of the bulrushes and laid myself down trying to be inconspicuous. In a few moments a figure passed a dozen feet from where I lay. I saw that it was Warren Redstone. He walked slowly toward Danny’s house, climbed the riverbank, and disappeared. I waited a little while to be sure he was gone for good then stood up and began to make my way through the bulrushes trying to move more quietly than Danny’s great-uncle had. Which turned out to be a good idea because when I reached the clearing where Warren Redstone had built his little lean-to I caught sight of a dark shape lurking at the makeshift structure. I crept forward and once again lay on the sand among the reeds, and in the fading light of evening I watched.

A man was crouched on all fours with his torso deep in the lean-to and his rear end outside. He spent a moment rummaging in the inner shadow then backed out and stood up. The light was dim and he kept his back to me and I couldn’t see who he was. It seemed to me that he was studying something he held cupped in his hands. He knelt again and crawled back inside and this time the beam of a flashlight shot into the dark there. I still couldn’t see exactly what the man was doing but after a couple of minutes he backed out and stood and brushed sand from his hands and from the knees of his trousers. He broke a few of the bulrushes and gathered them into a kind of broom and swept away all sign of his presence and kept sweeping as he backed to the reeds. He reached to his belt and a moment later the beam of the flashlight shot out and played across the sand as if to be certain he’d erased all evidence of his presence there. Then he turned and disappeared in the direction of town.

In the wash of the flashlight beam I’d seen his face. It was Gus’s friend Officer Doyle.

By the time I left my hiding place night was almost upon me. I went to the lean-to and tried to see inside but the dark was nearly absolute now and whatever it was that had so intrigued Doyle was hidden to me. I thought about erasing my tracks in the way Doyle had done but didn’t see any reason and as the bullfrogs began their deep-throated courting I headed home.