Ordinary Grace

33

The Indian Chief was parked in front of the drugstore. Because I knew Gus was in jail I figured maybe he’d tracked down and attacked Doyle at Halderson’s. Jake and I kept on going until we reached the police department on the other side of the town square. I started inside but Jake held back.

“What are we g-g-going to s-s-say?”

“Don’t worry, I’ll do the talking.”

“Maybe we sh-sh-shouldn’t be here.”

“Fine, you wait outside. I’ll take care of this.”

“No, I’m c-c-coming.”

I wasn’t nervous at all. Mostly I was angry and desperate. But it was different for Jake. He came because I came and walking into the jail was clearly something he didn’t want to do but he was doing it and I thought again how there was so much to him that people who heard only his stutter didn’t understand.

There were two men inside. One I’d talked to on the phone, Officer Blake. The other was Doyle. Doyle wasn’t in uniform. He wore dungarees and a Hawaiian shirt red with yellow flowers. There was a purple bruise around his right eye leaking down his cheek, and his lip on that side looked puffy. He was drinking from a bottle of Coca-Cola. He made no comment, just watched us.

Officer Blake said, “You boys come to talk to Gus?”

When we entered he’d been pinning some papers to the bulletin board on the wall behind the main desk. He still held a couple of sheets in his hand and I saw that they were honest-to-God wanted posters.

“Not exactly, sir,” I said approaching the desk. “There’s something important Gus needs to do.”

“It’ll have to wait until Monday, son.”

“It can’t wait. He has to do it now.”

Officer Blake laid the remaining posters on the desk. “You’re Frank, right? What’s this important thing, Frank?”

“Gus was digging our sister’s grave. He didn’t finish it.”

“That’s important,” Officer Blake allowed. “Tell you what, boys. I’ll call Lloyd Arvin. He’s in charge of the cemetery. I’m sure he’ll get someone over there to finish the job.”

“I don’t want someone else, sir. I want Gus.”

The chair in which Doyle was sitting squeaked and I glanced his way and saw him sipping idly from his Coke. I figured he was probably enjoying the scene.

“Look, boys, I can’t help you out here,” Officer Blake said. “I’m sorry.”

“But, sir, this is really, really important.”

“So’s the law, son. I told you, Lloyd Arvin’ll get someone else, and whoever that is will do a fine job, I’m sure.”

“No, please,” I said. “It has to be Gus.”

Doyle put his Coke down. “Why Gus?”

I wished that Doyle weren’t there and wished that I was older and bigger and could have finished the job Gus had started on him. I didn’t even want to acknowledge him let alone actually talk to him. But I was desperate.

I said, “Because he comes from a long line of gravediggers, and he won’t just dig a hole.”

“But, son, that’s what a grave is,” Officer Blake said. “Just a hole.”

“No, sir, it’s not. When it’s done well, it’s a box carved into the earth that will hold something precious. I don’t want just anyone carving Ariel’s box.”

“I sympathize, Frank, I really do. But I can’t just let a prisoner go.”

Doyle picked up his Coke bottle and said, “Why not, Cleve?”

Officer Blake fisted his hands and leaned his knuckles on the posters on his desk and bent toward Doyle. “Because I’ve already done the paperwork. And I don’t have that authority. How do I explain it to the chief?”

Doyle said, “What’s to explain? You let him go, he finishes the girl’s grave, he comes back.”

“What makes you so sure he’ll come back?”

“Ask him.”

“Look, Doyle-”

“Just bring him out here and ask him, Cleve.”

“Bring him out?”

“Are you afraid he’ll overpower you or something?”

“You’re one to talk,” Officer Blake shot back.

Doyle put fingers to his bruise. “Sucker punched me,” he said. “Bring him out, Cleve.”

“Jesus,” Officer Blake said. He eyed Doyle and then me and then Jake and finally shook his head and gave in. He took a ring of keys from the desk and unlocked the metal door in the back wall and went into the jail.

Doyle didn’t say anything to us while the other cop was gone, just sat and idly drank his Coke as if a bruised face and a friend in jail and a couple of naive kids on a hopeless mission were normal events for him.

Me, I wondered if I should spit in his eye for causing all this trouble, or if I should offer him grudging thanks for helping us now.

Gus who was still wearing his soiled T-shirt and who himself was sporting a black eye came out ahead of Officer Blake.

“Hey, guys,” he said to us.

Doyle said, “They came to spring you.” He could have laughed but he didn’t. He gave the words serious weight.

“I explained the situation to him,” Officer Blake said.

Doyle said, “What about it, Gus? Cleve lets you go so you can finish digging the Drum girl’s grave, will you come back?”

Gus said, “I’ll come back.”

Officer Blake didn’t look convinced. He opened his mouth to say something more but Doyle cut him off.

“Gus says he’ll be back, he’ll be back. Let him go, Cleve.”

“The chief-”

“Screw the chief. It’s the right thing to do, and you know it.” Doyle looked at Gus. “You need a hand?”

“No, I got it.”

“All right.” Doyle dug into the pocket of his dungarees and brought out something he tossed to Gus. “The key to your motorcycle,” he said.

“Thanks.”

Doyle swung his eyes to Jake and me and I couldn’t read what was on his mind. Did he expect a thank you? Did he believe we were square now? He said, “Your old man know you’re here?”

“No, sir.”

Doyle lifted a big arm and checked his watch. “If I’m not mistaken, the visitation for your sister begins pretty soon. If I were you boys, I’d get my ass home.”

To Officer Blake I said, “Thank you, sir.”

“Go on,” the policeman said. “Gus, you’re not back in two hours, you’ll regret it.”

Gus followed Jake and me outside. “I’d give you a lift on my motorcycle,” he said, “but I need to get to the cemetery.”

“We can walk,” I told him.

“I’ll give Ariel a grand grave, I swear,” he promised. He loped across the square to his Indian Chief, swung a leg over, and was quickly gone.

Jake and I were halfway home just turning onto Tyler Street toward the Flats when the Packard pulled to a stop alongside us. My father leaned out the driver’s window. “Get in,” he said. The iron in his voice was a dead giveaway that he wasn’t happy. I figured it was because of our mysterious absence from home but knew it could also have been because of whatever had gone on at the Brandts’ home.

For once Jake didn’t call shotgun and I sat up front with my father.

“I’ve been driving all over town looking for you two,” he said shifting into gear and taking off.

I explained what had happened. He listened without interrupting. At the end he looked at me with what seemed like amazement and said, “Well, I’ll be.”

And as for any anger he might have felt toward his sons that was that.

I asked, “Did you talk to Karl?”

“I couldn’t get past the front gate, Frank.”

“Do you think they know?”

“I’m sure someone has told them. I just wish I could talk to that boy.”

“Maybe when things quiet down?”

“Maybe, Frank,” he said but didn’t sound hopeful at all.

At home we finished getting ready for the visitation while my father called my grandfather’s house to tell him we’d been found. Then we piled back into the Packard and headed to van der Waal’s.

We arrived at four o’clock and Mother was already there with my grandfather and Liz. She was different from when she’d stormed from the house because my father had once too often said the name of God in her presence. The hardness was gone and maybe, I hoped, the anger. She looked frailer, fragile somehow, and it made me think of those hollowed eggs that sometimes people elaborately painted. She’d always been a powerful force in our family, a kind of empowering fury, and it was hard seeing her this way.

She smiled gently and straightened my tie. “You look very nice, Frank.”

“Thanks.”

“You guys doing okay?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Sure.”

“I’ll be back,” she said. “I just need. . oh time, I guess.” She looked away, across the room where the closed coffin sat flanked by two great displays of flowers. “Well, here we go.”

She took my hand unexpectedly as she walked toward the casket and so I walked with her thinking that it should have been my father’s hand she was holding. And I understood that something had been lost between them, something that had kept my mother anchored to us and now she was slipping away and I understood too that we hadn’t just lost Ariel, we were losing each other. We were losing everything.

I had been to visitations before and have been to many since and I’ve come to understand that there’s a good deal of value in the ritual accompanying death. It’s hard to say good-bye and almost impossible to accomplish this alone and ritual is the railing we hold to, all of us together, that keeps us upright and connected until the worst is past.

They came in great numbers, the people of Sioux County, to pay their respects. They came because they knew Ariel or they knew my father and mother or they knew us as a family. Jake and I stood mostly in a corner and watched as our parents received the public condolences person after person and were offered only the best of words about their daughter. My father as always was a pillar of respectfulness. My mother continued to be a hollow egg and it was painful to watch her and feel as if I was waiting for her to break. Liz stood with Jake and me and I appreciated her presence. After we’d been there for what seemed a very long time and yet there was still a very long time to go I said to Liz, “I need some fresh air.”

And Jake said quickly, “Me, too.”

“I think it would be all right,” Liz said.

“Would you tell Mom and Dad?”

“Of course. Don’t go far.”

We slipped from the room and out the front door and into the peach-colored evening sunlight that bathed New Bremen. The funeral home was a beautiful old structure that had once belonged to a man named Farrigut who’d very early on built a big cannery in the Minnesota River valley and had got rich. We drifted far away from the porch where those who came and went might notice us and feel obliged to say something. I didn’t feel like talking to anyone.

Jake reached down into the thick grass at the edge of van der Waal’s property and pulled up a four-leaf clover. He had an uncanny knack for spotting them. He idly plucked the leaves and said, “Think Mom’ll come home tonight?”

I was watching a couple of older people totter up the walk and slowly mount the funeral home steps and I was thinking it probably wouldn’t be long before one or the other or both would be lying in coffins inside and I said, “Who knows?”

Jake threw the denuded clover stem back into the grass. “Everything’s different.”

“I know.”

“I’m afraid sometimes.”

“Of what?”

“That Mom won’t come back. I mean she might come home but she won’t come back.”

I knew exactly what he meant.

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s take a walk.”

We left van der Waal’s and drifted down the street and took a left at the next corner and after another block came to Gleason Park where a dozen kids were playing baseball. Jake and I stood at the edge of left field and watched the game for a while. I knew a few of the players, kids younger than me, Jake’s age mostly. He probably knew them too and maybe they were kids who gave him a hard time for stuttering because he wasn’t paying much attention to the game. One of the kids, Marty Schoenfeldt, hit a double and slid into second and kicked up dust and Jake said, “I saw Mr. Redstone.”

“Redstone? Jesus! Where?”

The summer had done much to change us and Jake didn’t even flinch at the name I’d taken in vain.

“I dreamed him,” he said.

“Like a nightmare, you mean?”

“It wasn’t really a nightmare. Ariel was in it, too.”

I never dreamed about Ariel but she haunted my waking hours. Although we kept the door to her bedroom closed I sneaked in sometimes and just stood there. The smell that lingered most powerfully was the scent of Chanel No. 5, a perfume which she could never have afforded herself but was one of the gifts my grandfather and Liz gave her on her sixteenth birthday and which she dabbed on for special occasions. She’d worn it the night she disappeared. When I closed my eyes in her room and drew in the scent of her it was as if she’d never left us. Usually I ended up crying.

Warren Redstone was another matter. I often chased him in my nightmares, stumbling across the railroad trestle trying to tackle him before he escaped.

I said, “What were they doing in the dream?”

“Ariel was playing the piano. Mr. Redstone was dancing.”

“Who with?”

There was some sort of altercation between Marty Schoenfeldt and the kid who was playing second base. We watched for a few seconds, then Jake said, “Alone. They were in this big place like a ballroom. Ariel seemed happy but he didn’t. He kept looking behind him like maybe he was afraid somebody was sneaking up on him.”

Since that moment in the rain when I’d chosen to let the man who’d probably killed my sister get away I’d wanted desperately to tell someone what I’d done. It was a secret whose weight I carried every minute of every hour of every day and I longed to be free from it. Sometimes I thought that if I just confessed, the burden would be gone, and for a second I thought I would tell my brother because maybe if anyone could understand it would be Jake. But I didn’t. I kept the sin to myself and said bitterly, “I wish you’d dream him burning in hell.”

Marty Schoenfeldt shoved the second baseman and the players from both teams came running to gather around them. I watched what looked like a fight developing, the two kids taking stances.

“I talk to Ariel,” Jake said.

I looked away from the coming fight. “What do you mean?”

He shrugged. “It’s like praying only it’s not exactly. I just talk to her sometimes like she’s in the room and listening, like she used to, you know? I don’t know if she can hear me, but I feel better, like she’s not really gone.”

I wanted to say, She’s gone, Jake, she’s really gone, because that’s how I felt but I held my tongue and let Jake hold to his own imagining.

The kids pulled Marty Schoenfeldt and the second baseman apart and it looked like the game would resume. For some reason I felt an enormous sense of relief.

“Come on,” I said to Jake. “We better get back. They’ll be missing us.”

In the middle of the long dark of the night that followed, I woke to the brittle ring of the telephone. My father came from his bedroom and I got up too and stood in the doorway and watched him as he shuffled to the telephone in the upstairs hallway and answered. As he listened, I saw his face change and throw off all sleepiness and I heard him whisper, “Oh, dear God.” He shook his head in disbelief and then he said, “Thank you, Sheriff.”

He put the receiver in the telephone cradle and stood dumbstruck staring into the dark at the bottom of the stairs.

“What is it, Dad?”

His eyes swung slowly toward me and when he didn’t speak immediately I knew it was bad.

“Karl Brandt,” he finally said. “He’s dead.”