Ordinary Grace

13

Jake and I did our Saturday yard work at my grandfather’s house and when we got home Danny O’Keefe called and asked if we wanted to come over to his house to play Risk. Danny was there and another kid named Lee Kelly who was okay but never brushed his teeth so his breath always smelled like sour cabbage. We played at the dining room table which was unusual. Usually we played in the basement. In Risk, Jake always conducted himself with conservative fervor, holing up in Australia and stacking an Everest of armies on Indonesia so that only the very foolish would attempt to take his continent. That would be me. I spread myself over Asia and then viciously tried to breach Jake’s stronghold. I didn’t succeed and the next turn he decimated me before retiring to his little Australian sanctuary. After that Danny and Lee attacked me from America and Africa and less than half an hour later I was out of the game and Jake got all my cards. I generally played a little fast and loose with my resources but I figured hell, a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, especially in a stupid board game.

I hung around for a while watching the others play then asked Danny if I could get a grape Nehi out of the refrigerator. When I got the bottle of soda pop I heard the broadcast of a Twins game coming up the basement stairs and I drifted that way. The basement of the O’Keefes’ house had been finished in dark wood paneling. There was a sofa and some end tables that looked as if they’d been reconstructed from old wagon wheels and a couple of lamps with shades that turned and had pretty women on them in skimpy clothing, one of the reasons we liked playing Risk and other games down there. Seated on the sofa watching the ball game on television was Danny’s great-uncle. His hair was neatly combed and he was dressed in a clean plaid shirt and chinos and loafers. He looked very different from the day I’d seen him sitting beside the dead man.

When I hit the bottom of the stairs he glanced away from the screen and said, “Twins are getting shellacked.” There was no emotion in his dark eyes, no sign of recognition.

“What inning?” I asked.

“Bottom of the eighth. Barring a miracle it’s all over.” He was holding a can of Brandt beer and he took a sip. He didn’t seem to mind me being there, busting in on his solitude. He said, “What’s your name?”

“Frank Drum.”

“Drum.” He took another sip of beer. “What kind of name is Drum? Sounds like it could be Indian.”

“It’s Scottish.”

He nodded then Killebrew hit a home run and Danny’s great-uncle seemed to forget about me.

I waited until the excitement in the ballpark had passed then I said, “What did you do with the picture?”

“Picture?” He squinted at me.

“The one we found on the dead guy.”

“What difference does it make to you?”

“I just wondered. When we buried him nobody knew his name. I thought maybe the photograph might help.”

He put his beer down. “Did you say anything to anyone about it? About me?”

“No, sir.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know.”

“You think I had something to do with that man dying?”

“No.”

He stared at me and I stood there with the grape Nehi growing warm in my hand. He finally asked, “Do you want the photograph?”

“Maybe.”

“What would you do with it? Give it to the police?”

“Maybe.”

“And when they ask where you got it what would you say?”

“I found it. Down by the trestle.”

“In a place you’re not supposed to be?”

“I can be there.”

“That’s not what Danny tells me.”

I thought about Danny reporting my activities to his great-uncle. It gave me the creeps.

“I heard you were in jail,” I said.

“Who told you that?”

“I just heard. Is it true?”

“Only part of the truth.”

“What’s the rest?”

“Did you hear why I was in jail?”

“No.”

“The rest of the truth is why.”

“Okay why?”

“Wo iyokihi.”

“What’s that?”

“It means responsibility. We who are Sioux have a responsibility to make sure the past isn’t distorted by the lies whites tell each other and try to tell us. Do you know about the war the Dakota fought against the white people here in eighteen sixty-two?”

“Sure. Your people attacked New Bremen and killed a bunch of settlers.”

“Do you know why our people did that?”

The truth was I didn’t. I pretty much figured that’s just what Indians did, but I didn’t say that.

“Our people were starving,” Redstone said. “The whites trespassed on our land, feeding our grass to their animals, cutting our trees for their houses, shooting what little game we still had. Our crops failed, and the winter was hard, hard. We asked for the food the whites had promised us in the treaty we’d signed. Know what they said to our starving people? They said, ‘Let them eat grass.’ Sure we fought. We fought for food. We fought because promises were broken. We fought because we refused to be crushed under the boots of the whites. The man who told us to eat grass, he was killed, and our warriors stuffed grass into his mouth. It was a hopeless thing we tried to do, because the whites, they had soldiers and guns and money and newspapers that repeated all the lies. In the end, our people lost everything and were sent away from here. Thirty-eight of our warriors were hung in one day, and the whites who watched it cheered.”

I didn’t know what to believe. I’d heard a different spin in school when they taught us about the uprising but I was always ready to discount what was fed to us in the classroom. School had never been my favorite place and I’d never been a favorite of my teachers many of whom said I asked too many questions and asked them in a way that sometimes sounded disrespectful. Parent-teacher conferences could be dicey. Ariel and Jake were different. All they ever got was praise.

“What does that have to do with you and jail?” I asked.

He finished his beer, stood up, and went to a small refrigerator in the corner where he pulled out another can of Brandt which he opened with a church key. He took a long draw. It was the first time I’d seen him up close standing to his full height and I suddenly realized how tall he was and how despite his age which must have been at least sixty he looked powerful. He wiped his mouth with the back of a huge hand the color of faded red brick.

“I spoke the truth. And for that I was labeled a troublemaker and put in jail.”

“In America, people don’t get thrown in jail just for being troublemakers,” I shot back.

He stared down at me and I thought I understood how disconcerting it must have been for one of those slaughtered settlers to have faced an angry Sioux warrior. He said in a flat voice, “That’s how they get away with it.”

Danny called from upstairs, “Hey! Game’s over. Want to go swimming?”

Warren Redstone held me paralyzed for a moment with the anger in his dark stare. Then he said, “Go on and play, white boy.” And he turned his back to me.