Ordinary Grace

2

She wore a white terry-cloth robe and her feet were bare. On the table in front of her sat a cup of black coffee. Against the cup she’d propped a pamphlet. In her right hand she held a mechanical pencil. A stenographer’s notebook was open on the red Formica tabletop. Beside it lay half a cigarette smoking in a ceramic ashtray on which the four presidents of Mount Rushmore were embossed in gold. Periodically she put her pencil down and took up the cigarette, inhaled thoughtfully, and slowly released a plume of smoke that hung over the kitchen table.

“Nervous as a loose shutter in a storm,” she said. She mulled the words as she watched the smoke gradually dissolve. Satisfied she took up her pencil and wrote in the notebook.

This was during the period my mother was enamored of the work of Ayn Rand and had decided she too could be a world-famous author. She’d sent off to a writers’ school in New York City for a test that would confirm she had the right stuff.

Jake ate his Sugar Pops and watched the diver he’d pulled from the cereal box slowly sink in a glass of water. Moments later it returned to the surface, lifted on an air bubble created by the baking soda he’d put in a tiny compartment on the diver’s back. I ate a piece of toast covered with crunchy peanut butter and grape jelly. I hated the crunchy kind of peanut butter but because it was on sale my mother had dismissed my complaints.

My mother said, “The cat crept across the floor like. .” She took up her cigarette and thought deeply.

“An assassin stalking prey,” I said.

“Finish your breakfast, Frankie.”

“Like a robber after some money,” Jake said. His eyes never left the diver in his glass.

“Thank you, I don’t need your help.”

She thought a moment longer then wrote on the pad. I leaned over and saw that she’d written. . like love entering a heart.

My father came in. He was dressed in his good black suit and white shirt and blue tie. “The service is at noon, Ruth.”

“I’ll be ready, Nathan.” She didn’t look up from her pamphlet.

“People will start gathering much earlier, Ruth.”

“I’ve been to funerals before, Nathan.”

“You boys, you see that you look sharp.”

“They know what to do, Nathan.”

My father stood a moment and stared at the back of my mother’s head then walked to the door and went outside. As soon as he was gone my mother closed her notebook and laid the pamphlet on top. She stubbed out her cigarette and said, “Two minutes, then breakfast is over.”

An hour later she came downstairs wearing a black dress. She had on a black hat with a black veil and black pumps. She smelled of bath powder. Jake and I were dressed for the service. We had the television on and were watching a rerun of The Restless Gun. My mother was beautiful. Even we her thoughtless sons knew that. Folks were always saying she could have been a movie star. Pretty as Rita Hayworth they said.

“I’m going to the church. You two be there in half an hour. And, Frankie, you see that you both stay clean.”

We wore the only suits we had. I’d tied my tie and I’d tied Jake’s. We’d washed our faces and wetted our hair and slicked it back. We looked presentable.

As soon as she was gone I said, “You stay here.”

Jake said, “Where are you going?”

“Never mind. Just stay here.”

I left through the back door. Behind our house was a small pasture. When we’d first moved in, a couple of horses had grazed there. The horses were gone now but the pasture was still filled with grass where wild daisies and purple clover grew. On the far side stood a house set off by itself, an old yellow structure surrounded by willows. A wood fence separated the backyard from the pasture. I crept through the wild grass. Like an assassin stalking prey. I sidled up to the fence which was a slapped-together affair full of gaps where the warped boards refused to meet. I put my eye to the space created by one of those refusals.

The house belonged to Avis and Edna Sweeney. Avis worked at the grain elevators at the edge of the Flats. He was a toothpick of a man with a huge Adam’s apple. Edna was a blonde with a bosom like the prow of an aircraft carrier. The Sweeneys had a nice yard with lots of plants and flowers and Edna did the yard work. She did it dressed in tight shorts and a halter top that barely contained her breasts. I don’t remember how I discovered the delight of Edna Sweeney but I was much addicted to the sight of her dressed that way and bent to her labor. I spent a lot of time that summer with my eyeball glued to a gap in the fence.

That morning Edna Sweeney was not in her yard but she’d done laundry. Among the whites hanging on her line were a couple of bras with enormous cups and some lacy underwear that I was pretty sure didn’t belong to Avis. I didn’t hear Jake coming up behind me. His hand on my shoulder made me jump.

“Jesus,” I said.

“You said Jesus in the bad way.”

“What are you doing here?”

“What are you doing here?”

“Nothing,” I said. I grabbed him and tried to turn him back toward our house. “Let’s go.”

He shrugged off my hand and plastered his eye to the fence.

“Damn, Jake.”

“You said damn. What are you looking at?”

“Nothing.”

“You’re looking at her underwear.”

“Okay I’m looking at her underwear. You’re looking at her underwear too.”

He moved his head around a little and tried to position his eye for a better view.

“Come on.” I took hold of his sleeve and gave a yank. He didn’t budge but the seam along the suit coat shoulder split in a heartbreaking rend. “Oh, Christ.”

Jake straightened up. “You said-”

“I know what I said. Lemme see.” I turned him and took a long look at the damage I’d done. If I told the truth, the circumstances of the accident would be hard to explain. So the truth was not an option. But a lie would depend on Jake and that was a problem. Even if I was able to convince him to go along with some goofy story, he’d stutter and stammer so awful that our guilt would quickly be obvious.

Jake craned his neck so that he could see the tear. “We’re going to get in t-t-trouble.”

“No we’re not. Come on.”

I ran across the pasture through the grass and wild daisies and purple clover. Jake was right behind me. We raced through the back door and went upstairs to my parents’ bedroom. I pulled my mother’s sewing basket from the closet shelf and selected a spool of tan thread. I bit off a long section and speared the eye of a needle.

“Give me your coat,” I said and got to work.

I was a Boy Scout. Not a good one. I liked the general idea of being trustworthy and loyal and thrifty and brave and clean and reverent but the effort it took to hang in there with all those weighty virtues was usually more than I cared to muster. I learned some pretty good stuff though. Like how to sew onto my uniform the patches that went along with being a scout. I wielded a mean needle. I did a quick baste so that unless you looked closely you wouldn’t notice anything amiss.

“There,” I said and handed the coat to Jake.

He looked at it skeptically and put it on and shoved his finger through one of the gaps between the loose stitching. “It’s still b-b-broken.”

“It’ll be fine as long as you don’t go poking it all the time.” I put Mom’s sewing basket back in the closet and checked the clock on the nightstand. I said, “We better hurry. The service is about to start.”

• • •

My sister Ariel had turned eighteen in May and in June had graduated from New Bremen High School and was planning to attend Juilliard in the fall. When Jake and I entered the church she was at the organ playing something beautiful and sad that sounded as if it might have been by Handel. The pews were already pretty full. Mostly people we knew. Members of the congregation. Friends of the family. People from the neighborhood. A lot of folks who came regularly to my father’s church weren’t members. They weren’t even Methodist. They came because it was the only church on the Flats. Jake and I took places in the last pew. My mother was up front where the choir usually sat. She wore a red satin robe over her black dress. She was listening to Ariel play and she was staring at the stained-glass window in the west wall with that same faraway look she’d had at the kitchen table when she was searching for inspiration. Part of it was the music itself but it was also the way Ariel played. To this day there are pieces I cannot hear without imagining my sister’s fingers shaping the music every bit as magnificently as God shaped the wings of butterflies.

The casket was set in front of the chancel rail with a profusion of flowers flanking it on either side. The church smelled of lilies. Bobby’s parents were in the front row. They were older people to whom Bobby had come late in life. I’d seen how they treated him with a great and gentle love. Now they sat together with their hands in their laps and stared dumbly beyond the casket toward the gold-plated cross on the altar.

My father was nowhere to be seen.

Jake leaned to me. “He’s in there?”

I knew what he meant. “Yeah.”

Until Bobby died I hadn’t thought a lot about death but as I imagined him laid in that small casket I was struck with an awful sense of wonder. I didn’t believe in heaven-the Pearly Gates version-so the question of what had become of Bobby Cole was mystifying and more than a little frightening.

Gus entered the church. It was clear from his unsteady gait that he’d been drinking. He was dressed in his Sunday best which was a dark secondhand suit. His tie was askew and there was a cowlick in his red hair that stuck out at the back of his head. He sat in the pew across the aisle from Jake and me and he didn’t seem to notice us. He stared at Bobby’s coffin and I could hear the bellows of his lungs sucking air.

My father finally appeared. He came from the door to his office, dressed in his black Wesley robe and wearing a white stole. He was a handsome man and impressive in his ministerial regalia. He paused as he passed the Coles and he spoke to them quietly and then he took his place in the chair behind his pulpit.

Ariel ended her piece. My mother stood up. Ariel laid her hands again on the organ keyboard and paused and prepared herself then began to play. And my mother closed her eyes and composed herself to sing.

When my mother sang I almost believed in heaven. It wasn’t just that she had a beautiful voice but also that she had a way of delivering a piece that pierced your heart. Oh when she sang she could make a fence post cry. When she sang she could make people laugh or dance or fall in love or go to war. In the pause before she began, the only sound in the church was the breeze whispering through the open doorway. The Coles had chosen the hymn and it seemed an odd choice, one that had probably come from Mrs. Cole whose roots were in southern Missouri. She’d asked my mother to sing a spiritual, Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.

When my mother finally sang it was not just a hymn she offered, it was consummate comfort. She sang slowly and richly and delivered the heart of that great spiritual as if she was delivering heaven itself and her face was beautiful and full of peace. I shut my eyes and her voice reached out to wipe away my tears and enfold my heart and assure me absolutely that Bobby Cole was being carried home. It made me almost happy for him, a sweet boy who didn’t have to worry anymore about understanding a world that would always be more incomprehensible to him than not. Who didn’t have to endure anymore all the cruel mockeries. Who would never have to concern himself with what kind of man he would grow into and what would become of him when his aged parents could no longer protect and care for him. My mother’s singing made me believe that God had taken Bobby Cole for the best of reasons.

And when she finished the sound of the breeze through the doorway was like the sigh of angels well pleased.

My father stood and read scripture from the pulpit but he didn’t preach from up there. He came down the steps instead and passed through the opening in the chancel rail and stood finally beside the casket. In truth I didn’t hear much of what he had to say. Partly it was because my heart was already full from my mother’s singing and my head was already stuffed with too much wonderment about death. But it was also because I’d heard my father preach a thousand times. People said he was a good preacher though not as fiery as some of his congregation would have liked. He spoke earnestly, never passionately. He was a man of ideas and he never tried with overpowering rhetoric or dramatics to muscle people into believing.

It was quiet in the church when he finished and the breeze that swept through the open doors cooled us and the flowers beside the coffin rustled as if someone had passed by.

Then Gus stood up.

He stepped into the aisle and walked to Bobby’s coffin. He put his hand on the polished wood. My father if he was surprised or concerned didn’t show it. He said, “Gus, is there something you’d like to say?”

Gus stroked the coffin as he might have the soft fur of a dog. I saw that his body was shaking and I understood he was crying. Someone in the congregation gave a cough. It sounded phony, as if it had been done to break the moment. What it did was make Gus turn and face them.

He said, “Bobby used to help me take care of the cemetery sometimes. He liked the quiet. He liked the grass and the flowers. To me and you he wasn’t much of a talker, but he used to whisper to the headstones like he was sharing a secret with the folks buried there. Bobby had a secret. You know what it was? It took nothing to make him happy. That was it. He held happiness in his hand easy as if he’d just, I don’t know, plucked a blade of grass from the ground. And all he did his whole short life was offer that happiness to anybody who’d smile at him. That’s all he wanted from me. From you. From anybody. A smile.”

He looked back at the casket and anger pulled his face into sudden lines.

“But what did people offer him? They made fun of him. Christian folks and they said things to him hurtful as throwing stones. I hope to Christ you’re right, Captain, that Bobby’s sitting up there in God’s hand, because down here he was just a sweet kid getting his ass kicked. I’ll miss him. I’ll miss him like I’d miss the robins if they never came back.”

His face was a melt of tears. I was crying too. Hell, everybody was crying. My father held his composure and, when Gus had returned to his pew, said, “Would anyone else like to offer something in memory?”

I thought about getting up. I thought maybe I could tell them about Bobby at the back of the classroom in first grade. The teacher didn’t work with him much. She gave him clay and Bobby spent his time at his desk carefully rolling out snakes which he arranged in rows, and every once in a while he would look up while the rest of us recited the alphabet and added two plus two, and his myopic eyes behind those thick, gold-rimmed lenses seemed contented. And I thought about telling them how I’d figured Bobby was hopeless but I was wrong and Gus was right. Bobby had a gift and the gift was his simplicity. The world for Bobby Cole was a place he accepted without needing to understand it. Me, I was growing up scrambling for meaning and I was full of confusion and fear.

I didn’t stand up. I didn’t say anything. Like everyone else I sat there dumb until my father offered a final prayer and Ariel began playing the final hymn and my mother stood up in her red satin robe and gave voice to the finality of it all.

And when she’d finished I heard the black hearse idling outside the open church door and everyone stood to follow Bobby to the hole Gus had already dug for him in the cemetery.