Ordinary Grace

27

In a small town nothing is private. Word spreads with the incomprehensibility of magic and the speed of plague. It wasn’t long before most of New Bremen knew about Ariel’s condition and the sheriff’s suspicions regarding Karl Brandt.

Karl’s friends were interviewed and the males among them revealed that Karl had said things lately that made them believe he’d been sleeping with Ariel.

Ariel’s friends confirmed that she’d been upset but whatever had bothered her she’d kept fiercely to herself. They all suspected it had something to do with Karl and a couple of them indicated they’d suspected the possibility of a pregnancy.

Karl Brandt’s parents, Axel and Julia, were keeping quiet and keeping their son out of public sight in their mansion on the Heights. My father tried his best to arrange the meeting that he believed was absolutely necessary to everyone’s understanding of the situation but he never got past Simon Geiger who worked for Brandt and who’d been tapped to screen all calls coming into their home. He tried the direct approach and with my mother drove to the Brandt mansion but was refused entrance. Though he believed absolutely in God’s good guidance my father was clearly upset at being stonewalled.

The sheriff was more forthcoming. He shared with my parents what he learned in his interviews of Karl Brandt which, because a lawyer was always present, wasn’t much. The young man would neither confirm nor deny his part in Ariel’s pregnancy and he was adamant in asserting that neither he nor Ariel had had any intention of getting married. He held to his earlier story that the night she disappeared he’d drunk too much and had lost track of her at the party on the river. The sheriff shared with my parents his own concern that Karl sounded as if he was repeating a script he’d memorized.

Emil Brandt seemed to have dropped from our lives. He’d been my mother’s constant companion from the moment Ariel vanished, but once my sister’s pregnancy had been revealed and the Brandt name had been dragged into the thick of things and the family had sequestered themselves, my mother’s affections shifted away from anything Brandt. Which left her adrift in a way. She seemed angry all the time. Angry at my father. Angry at the Brandts. Angry at me and Jake if we happened to stray into her path. And as always those days angry at God. As best we could we stayed out of her way.

Wednesday afternoon my father went to van der Waal’s to complete the arrangements for Ariel’s burial which was scheduled for Saturday. Jake and I were left home with our mother who sat in a rocker on the front porch smoking cigarettes in plain view of anyone who happened by and looking with a hard eye at the church across the street. Her hair was unbrushed and she wore slippers and her housecoat. Before he left my father had tried to talk her into dressing but had finally given up.

When Gus pulled into the church lot and parked his motorcycle I was in the garage with my bicycle flipped upside down working on removing the tube of a flat tire. Gus walked across the street so focused on my mother that he didn’t see me. There were cobwebs across the garage window and the panes were in need of washing but even so I had a pretty good view of the front porch and could hear what transpired there.

At the bottom step Gus stopped. “Nathan around, Ruth?”

“Gone,” she said and blew a flourish of smoke.

“Know when he’ll be back?”

“I have no idea. He’s getting everything ready to bury Ariel. Do you have news from your friend Doyle? Is that why you’re looking for Nathan?”

“I’d rather talk directly to Nathan.”

“If you know something, I’d rather you talked to me.”

Gus looked up at the woman rocking slowly in the shadow of the porch. “All right,” he finally said. He took the steps and faced her. “According to Doyle,” he said, “the sheriff had been hoping to find the instrument used to crack Ariel’s skull before she was thrown into the river. He believed it might be a tire iron and that Karl might still have it somewhere in his possession. But the county attorney has refused to petition a judge. Says there’s not enough evidence. The sheriff thinks it’s more a lack of backbone on the part of the county attorney.”

Smoke vined from my mother’s nostrils as she spoke: “Arthur Mendelsohn has always been a toad. He was a toad as a child and he’s a toad as a man. He would never stand up to Axel Brandt.”

She put her cigarette to her lips and her eyes held on Gus’s face.

She asked, “What do you think of the tire iron?”

Gus seemed to weigh his response or perhaps simply the advisability of any response. He said, “It’s handy and would be effective, I imagine.”

“Have you ever wielded a tire iron as a weapon?”

“No,” he said, “but I’d guess that it does a lot of damage.”

“You’ve killed people, Gus. In the war.”

He didn’t answer but watched her closely.

“Is it a hard thing?”

“I killed people at a distance. They were shapes to me, never faces. I imagine it would be a different thing killing someone whose face you could see.”

“It would take a cold heart, don’t you think?”

“Yes, ma’am, I imagine it would.”

“People can fool you can’t they, Gus.”

“I guess they can.”

“Is there anything else you wanted to tell Nathan?”

“No, that’s pretty much everything.”

“I’ll let him know.”

My father’s friend left the porch and went to the church where he disappeared through the side door that led to his basement room. My mother finished her cigarette and lit another.

Within the hour my father returned from van der Waal’s. It was almost lunchtime and he went directly to the kitchen to prepare the meal. My mother followed him and I drifted in after them. My father was relaying the final plans for the funeral which my mother had refused to have any part in. I saw her-maybe we all saw her-retreating, her world daily becoming a smaller and smaller box. She sat with her elbows propped on the table and a cigarette in her hand and she listened as my father pulled items from the refrigerator and told her the details. He’d acknowledged my entrance but my mother paid me no heed.

When she had apparently listened enough she said abruptly, “The sheriff tried to get a warrant to search the Brandt property for whatever it was that Karl used to shatter Ariel’s skull. The county attorney refused to help him.”

My father turned from the refrigerator with a half-gallon bottle of milk in his hand. “How do you know this?”

“Gus came by while you were gone.”

“Doyle?”

“Yes.”

My father set the milk on the table. “Ruth, we don’t know at all Karl’s part in Ariel’s death.”

She put a curtain of smoke in the air between them. “Oh, but I do,” she said.

“Look, I’m going to give the sheriff a call.”

“You do that.”

When he’d left the room my mother finally looked where I stood by the screen door. She raised an eyebrow and said, “Do you know your Old Testament, Frankie?”

I watched her but didn’t answer.

She said, “Let the battle cry be heard in the land, a shout of great destruction.”

She drew on her cigarette and breathed out smoke.