Ordinary Grace

7

Monday was my father’s official day off. After breakfast he usually took what he called a constitutional which was a walk from the Flats to the home of Emil Brandt. Because Brandt had a sister, Lise, whom Jake had long ago befriended, my brother often accompanied Dad. I didn’t mind going with them on that particular Monday, as I was bound by my father’s stricture to stay in the yard unless given permission to do otherwise. Accompanying him was like receiving a prison pass. Ariel went along but she was often at the home of Emil Brandt anyway, not only under his tutelage for her piano and organ keyboard work and her musical composition but also working with him to complete a memoir he’d been dictating for more than a year.

Although Emil and Lise Brandt were part of the royalty that was the Brandt family-they were the brother and sister of Axel Brandt and, therefore, uncle and aunt to Karl-they lived in a kind of exile in a beautifully renovated farmhouse on the western edge of New Bremen overlooking the river. They were Brandts in name and in fortune but they were different from the others. Emil was a piano virtuoso and a composer of significant reputation and in his youth he’d been a carouser of great celebrity. After he’d proposed to my mother and then left her, he’d gone to study music in New York City and had become friends with Aaron Copland. Copland had just returned from Hollywood where he’d hit it big with a score for the film version of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. The composer had encouraged the struggling Emil to seek his fortune on the West Coast, and the young man had followed that advice. From the very beginning he did well, found easy work in the music side of the film business, and fell in with a good-time Hollywood crowd. He befriended Scott Fitzgerald in the author’s final years of near obscurity, and the Andrews Sisters who were originally from Minnesota, and Judy Garland, nee Frances Gumm, also of Minnesota. Until the war cut short his carousing with the stars he was a young musician with two roads before him: one that led to the glamour of continuing to compose for the big screen and the other that wound its way back to the land from which he came and the music that rose from black soil and strong wind and deep root. All this Ariel told me from what she’d learned typing the memoir he dictated.

Lise Brandt was another story. She’d been born ten years after Emil, born deaf and difficult. She was the child of whom the Brandts, if they spoke of her at all, spoke in somber tones. She hadn’t attended school but had received what schooling could be given from special tutors who’d resided in the Brandt home. She was subject to tantrums and to fits of rage and only Emil seemed able to tolerate her outbursts and she for her part adored him. When Emil returned from the Second World War blind and disfigured and wanting only to feed in isolation on the meat of his bitterness, his family had purchased and completely renovated a farmhouse that was a stone’s throw from the edge of town. For companionship they’d given him Lise who was in her midteens then and had no future that anyone could see. This union had served both damaged Brandts well. Lise took care of her brother and her brother offered Lise a place where, in all the isolated silent years ahead, she would have purpose and protection.

This too Ariel told me, but it would be a while before I understood the importance of these things.

When we approached the white picket fence Lise Brandt was already at work among the rows of her vegetable garden wearing soiled gloves and working the damp earth with the sharp edge of her hoe. Emil Brandt sat in a wicker chair on the porch and next to him was a white wicker table and another chair and on the table was set a chessboard with all the pieces arranged and ready for play.

“Will you have coffee, Nathan?” Brandt called out to us as we entered the gate.

He knew we were coming and the sound of the hinges had probably alerted him to our arrival but he loved to give the impression that although he was as blind as one of the fence posts he could somehow see us. He smiled as we advanced up the walk and he said, “Is that Ariel with you and those two hooligans you claim as your sons?” How he knew the exact makeup of my father’s entourage was a mystery to me but my father spoke of him as the most intelligent man he knew and clearly Emil Brandt had his ways. Lise left off her hoeing and stood tall and plain and still as a scarecrow as she watched us intrude. Intrusion but for Jake who peeled away and ran to her where they communicated in signs and gestures and Jake followed her to the toolshed and came out with a garden rake and shadowed her as she began again the work in the garden.

My father mounted the steps and said, “I’d love some coffee, Emil.”

The blind man said, “Would you mind getting it, Ariel? You know where everything is. And get whatever you’d like for yourself. I’ve left the tape recorder on my desk and there’s plenty of paper for you at the typewriter.”

“All right,” Ariel said. She went inside in a way that seemed to me as familiar as entering her own house.

I sat on the porch steps. My father took the second wicker chair and said, “How is the memoir coming?”

“Words are different from musical notes, Nathan. It’s a hell of an undertaking and I’m not sure I’m very good at it. That said, I’m having a fine time with the project.”

The property of Emil and Lise Brandt was among the most beautiful in all of New Bremen. Along the fence Lise had planted butterfly bushes that bloomed red and yellow all summer long. Here and there about the lawn she’d created enclaves of flowers like islands that she’d edged with red brick and that exploded with blossoms of a dozen varieties in color and form. Her vegetable garden occupied a space as large as the foundation of our whole house and by the end of every summer the tomatoes and cabbage and carrots and sweet corn and squash and other vegetables grew huge and heavy on vine and stalk. Lise could not communicate well with the human world but she and plants seemed to understand each other perfectly.

Ariel brought my father coffee and said, “I’ll just get started now.”

“Fine,” Brandt said and offered a smile that curled smoothly into the normal flesh of his right cheek but crinkled the thick scar tissue of his left.

Ariel went back inside and a few minutes later through the window of a room at the corner of the house came Brandt’s voice on the tape recorder followed by the rapid tap of typewriter keys. As my father and Emil Brandt talked and began their weekly game of chess I listened to Ariel’s fingers flying over the typewriter keyboard. My father had insisted that she take business courses and learn typing and shorthand because he thought that regardless of her dreams and intentions such training would stand a woman in good stead.

“E-four,” Brandt said offering the opening move of the game.

My father advanced Brandt’s pawn. He made all the moves for Brandt who could not see the board with his eyes but who had the marvelous ability to visualize the game as it progressed.

My father had grown up in the rough port city of Duluth, the son of a seaman who was often gone on long voyages, not a bad circumstance apparently because when the man was home he was prone to drinking and throwing an angry fist at his wife and son. I never met this grandfather of mine because along with twenty-nine other hands he’d been lost at sea when the coal carrier he was working on had gone down in a gale off the coast of Nova Scotia. My father was the first Drum to go to college. He planned to be an attorney, a litigator. My mother told us that when she met him he was whip smart and cocksure and she knew absolutely he would be the best lawyer in the Gopher State. She’d married him at the end of her junior year at the University of Minnesota, where she was majoring in music and drama. He was, her sorority sisters agreed, quite a catch. My father had just finished his final year of law school. This was 1942. He’d already enlisted and was preparing to go off to war. By the time he left to fight-beginning in North Africa, then through numerous campaigns all the way to the Battle of the Bulge-my mother was pregnant with Ariel. The war changed Nathan Drum, changed him dramatically, and completely altered his plans. He came home with no desire to fight battles in a courtroom. He went instead into the seminary and was ordained. By the time he took charge of the Third Avenue Methodist Church on the Flats, we’d lived in four other towns in Minnesota. A minister’s family never stayed long in one place, a difficult aspect of the job we were all expected to accept without complaint. But because my mother had grown up in New Bremen and we came often to visit my grandparents we already knew the town well. Although my father and Emil Brandt were acquainted, it was the weekly chess that brought them close. The games had evolved gradually and were mostly an opportunity, it seemed to me, for my father and Brandt, two men of the same age and scarred by the same war, to relate in a manner that didn’t require my mother’s presence. Though Brandt had loved her and abandoned her, that didn’t appear to be an issue. Or so I believed then.

“E-five,” my father announced and moved his own pawn. “Ariel says it’s fascinating. Your memoir, I mean.”

“Ariel is a young woman and young women fascinate easily, Nathan. Your daughter is gifted in many ways but she has a lot to learn about the broader world. Nf-three.”

My father lifted Brandt’s knight and moved him to the proper square. “Ruth believes she’s destined for greatness. What do you think, Emil? D-six.”

“D-four. Ariel’s a fine musician, there’s no doubt about that. As talented as any I’ve heard her age. After Juilliard I suspect that she could audition and secure a position in any fine symphony orchestra. She’s also a gifted composer. She still has a great deal to learn, but that will come with time and maturity. Hell, if she wanted, she could even be a fine teacher. What I’m saying, Nathan, is that she has enormous potential in so many areas. But greatness? Who can say? That’s something, it seems to me, that depends more on God and circumstance than on our own efforts.”

“Ruth has such hopes for her. Bg-four,” my father said and moved his bishop.

“All parents hope greatness for their children, don’t they? Or maybe not. I don’t have children so what do I know? D takes E-five.”

“B takes F-three. It may be a moot point. Ariel’s talking about not going to Juilliard.”

“What?” Brandt’s sightless eyes seemed full of amazement.

“I’m sure she’s just dragging her feet. Last-minute doubts.”

“Ah,” Brandt said and nodded his understanding. “Natural I suppose. I have to say, I’ll miss her when she goes. I’m not sure I’ll be able to trust my memories to someone else. Q takes F-three.”

The work Ariel did for Brandt was part of the arrangement struck to compensate him for his time working with her to improve her playing and her music composition. My parents could in no way afford to pay properly for such a service. For a man of Brandt’s stature it was paltry payment but his help was clearly offered as a favor because of his affection for my mother and his friendship with my father.

“What did Ruth say when Ariel dropped this bomb?”

“She went through the roof,” my father said.

Brandt laughed. “Of course. And you?”

My father studied the board. “I only want her to be happy. D takes E-five.”

“Bc-four. And what is happiness, Nathan? In my experience, it’s only a moment’s pause here and there on what is otherwise a long and difficult road. No one can be happy all the time. Better, I think, to wish for her wisdom, a virtue not so fickle.”

“Nf-six,” my father said hesitantly.

“Qb-three,” Brandt immediately responded.

My father studied the board a minute, then said, “Qe-seven. Do you know Travis Klement, Emil?”

“No. Nc-three.”

“He lives in Cadbury. His wife is a member of one of my congregations. He’s a vet. Korea. Had a tough time over there. It’s eating at him, I believe. He drinks. He’s hard on his family. C-six.”

“Sometimes, Nathan, I think that it wasn’t so much the war as what we took into the war. Whatever cracks were already there the war forced apart, and what we might otherwise have kept inside came spilling out. You and your life philosophy, for example. You may have gone to war thinking you were going to be a hotshot lawyer afterward, but I believe that deep inside of you there was always the seed of a minister.”

“And in you?”

“A blind man.” Brandt smiled.

“I don’t know how to reach Travis.”

“I don’t know that everyone you reach out to you can help, Nathan. A lot to expect of yourself, it seems to me. Bg-five.”

My father sat back and stroked his cheek. “B-five,” he said but not with great conviction.

“Dad,” Jake shouted and came running from the garden. He had a rake in one hand and in the other he held a wriggling garter snake.

“Don’t hurt it, Son,” my father said.

“I won’t. Neat huh, Frank.”

“A snake? Big deal,” I said. “When you find a rattler, let me know.”

Jake’s enthusiasm wasn’t dulled by my response. He returned happily to the garden where Lise waited. They gestured to each other and Jake put the snake down and they both stood and watched it glide swiftly away among the stalks of sweet corn.

There seemed something preternatural about the relationship between the two of them and I have always believed it was because neither could communicate easily with the rest of the world. Though deaf, Lise had been trained to speak but was greatly reluctant to mouth the utterances that sounded odd and flat to the rest of us. Jake could barely complete a coherent utterance at all. They communicated in signs and gestures and facial expressions and perhaps even on a level that superseded the physical plane. With everyone else except her brother and Jake, Lise could be difficult. I believe now that it may have been a form of autism but in those days she was called touched. People thought of her as slow or simple because she would not look at them directly when she spoke, and on those rare occasions when she was forced to leave the safety of her yard and enter town, she would cross the street to avoid contact with someone approaching her on the sidewalk. Mostly she stayed inside the white picket fence and took care of the flowers and the garden and her brother.

“Lise is fortunate to have Jake as a friend,” Brandt said. “N takes B-five.”

“Jake seems pretty happy with the arrangement. C takes B-five.”

“Lise has no other friends. Really she has no one but me. And I rely on her for so much. I wonder sometimes what will happen to her when I’m gone. B takes B-five. Check.”

“That’s years away, Emil. And she has family besides you.”

“They ignore her. They’ve ignored her all her life. Sometimes I think that when I came home blind they were ecstatic. It created a situation that bound their two misfits together in a controllable fashion. Here we reside inside this fence, which, for all intents and purposes, is the extent of our world. And you want to know the odd part of it, Nathan? We’re happy. I have my music and Lise. Lise has her garden and me.”

“I thought you said happiness was fleeting.”

Brandt laughed and said, “Trapped with my own words. But if you look at the board carefully, Nathan, I think you’ll see that I have laid a trap for you there.”

My father spent a few moments studying the game and then said, “Ah, I see what you mean. Clever, Emil. I resign.”

They continued to talk and I watched Jake and Lise in the garden and listened to Ariel clicking away on the typewriter in the study, and the world inside that picket fence seemed like a good place, a place in which all the damaged pieces somehow fit.

In the early afternoon my father got himself ready for the burial of the man we’d all begun calling simply the itinerant and I told him I wanted to go along. He asked my reason and I tried to articulate my thinking although the truth was that I didn’t really know. It simply felt right. I had been the one to bring the body to light and it seemed fitting that I be there when it was delivered into a darkness eternal. I tried to say as much but knew even as I spoke that I was saying it all wrong. In the end my father studied me a long time and finally allowed as he saw no reason for me not to be there. His only requirement was that I dress as I would for the funeral of someone we knew which meant my Sunday best.

Jake was odd about the dead man. He wanted nothing to do with the burial and went so far as to accuse me of using the whole episode to my advantage. “You just like being a big man,” he said looking up at me from the card table he’d set up in the living room where he was at work on a paint-by-number. The picture on the box cover showed a rocky beach in an idyllic place that was maybe Maine and looked inviting but it was clear that Jake’s rendering, despite the guidance of lines and numbers, would end up a good deal less than he or anyone but a moron or a monkey would have hoped for.

“Fine,” I said and I dressed alone.

My father drove the Packard to the cemetery which was set on a hill on the east side of town. The hole was already dug and Gus was waiting and Sheriff Gregor was there though I didn’t know why and moments after we arrived Mr. van der Waal drove up in the hearse and my father and Gus and the sheriff and the mortician slid the coffin from the back. It was a simple box of pine planed and sanded smooth and it had no handles. The men lifted and carried it on their shoulders to the grave. They laid it on wooden two-by-fours that Gus had arranged across the opening along with canvas straps for the eventual lowering into the earth. Then the men stood back and I with them and my father opened his Bible.

It seemed to me a good day to be dead and by that I mean that if the dead cared no more about the worries they’d shouldered in life and could lie back and enjoy the best of what God had created it was a day for exactly such. The air was warm and still and the grass of the cemetery which Gus kept watered and clipped was soft green and the river that reflected the sky was a long ribbon of blue silk and I thought that when I died this was the place exactly I would want to lie and this was the scene that forever I would want to look upon. And I thought that it was strange that a resting place so kingly had been given to a man who had nothing and about whom we knew so little that even his name was a mystery. And though I didn’t know at all and still do not the truth of the arrangement, I suspected that it was somehow my father’s doing. My father and his great embracing heart.

He read the Twenty-Third Psalm and then he read from Romans ending with: “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor present things, nor future things, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

He closed the book and said, “We believe too often that on the roads we walk we walk alone. Which is never true. Even this man who is unknown to us was known to God and God was his constant companion. God never promised us an easy life. He never promised that we wouldn’t suffer, that we wouldn’t feel despair and loneliness and confusion and desperation. What he did promise was that in our suffering we would never be alone. And though we may sometimes make ourselves blind and deaf to his presence he is beside us and around us and within us always. We are never separated from his love. And he promised us something else, the most important promise of all. That there would be surcease. That there would be an end to our pain and our suffering and our loneliness, that we would be with him and know him, and this would be heaven. This man, who in life may have felt utterly alone, feels alone no more. This man, whose life may have been days and nights of endless waiting, is waiting no more. He is where God always knew he would be, in a place prepared. And for this we rejoice.”

My father led us in the Lord’s Prayer and we stood in silence for a few moments staring down at the simple coffin which was pale yellow against the black of the hole beneath. And then my father said something that amazed me. He said, “It’s a good day to be dead.” Which were almost the exact words I’d been thinking. And he said, “Let this man in this place of beauty rest forever in peace.” Which was also very nearly what I’d been thinking. And he nodded to the other men and they each took a strap end.

The mortician said, “Frank, when we lift, would you please remove the boards?”

They lifted and I bent and slid the two-by-fours from underneath and the men slowly lowered the coffin. When it was settled they drew the straps back up and my father said, “Gus, would you like a hand?”

“No, Captain,” Gus said. “I’ve got all day and I intend to take my time.”

My father shook hands with the sheriff and with the mortician and we returned to our vehicles and left Gus to the duty of sealing the grave with the dirt he’d removed to create it.

At home my father said, “I’m going back into town. I have some details to take care of with Sheriff Gregor and with Mr. van der Waal.” He left again in the Packard. Jake was nowhere to be seen. From the church across the street came the sound of Ariel playing the organ and my mother singing. I changed my clothes and went to the church and asked about Jake.

“Apparently Danny O’Keefe’s great-uncle wandered off,” my mother said. “Jake went to help Danny find him. Where’s your father?”

I was surprised to hear that Danny had a great-uncle in New Bremen. He’d told me most of his relatives lived near Granite Falls. I said, “He had to go back into town.” Then I said, “You let Jake go out of the yard? He was grounded, same as me.”

She was studying the music sheets in her hands and not really paying attention to me. They were working on a piece, a chorale that Ariel had composed for the Fourth of July celebration which would take place in another week. “His friend needed help,” Mother said. “I told him it was all right.”

“Can I help them, too?”

“Hmmmm?” She frowned at something on the sheets.

Ariel sat on the organ bench and smiled at me in a conspiratorial way. “You should let Frankie help,” she said. “The search will go faster.”

“All right, all right,” my mother said waving me away. “Go.”

I looked to Ariel and asked, “Where’d they head?”

“Danny’s house,” she said. “Fifteen minutes ago.”

And I was gone before my mother could change her mind.

I ran to Danny O’Keefe’s house which stood at the western edge of the Flats and was in sight of the river. His mother was hanging laundry on the line in the backyard. She was a small woman not much taller than I with black hair and almond eyes and the shading and bone structure of the Sioux. Although Danny never talked about his lineage I’d heard that his mother came from the Upper Sioux community, which was along the Minnesota River well to the west. She wore tan Capris and a sleeveless green top and white sneakers. She was a teacher. I’d been in her fifth-grade classroom and I liked her. As I came into the yard she was bending to her laundry basket.

“Hi, Mrs. O’Keefe,” I said cheerfully. “I’m looking for Danny.”

She lifted a blue towel and pinned it to the line. She said, “I sent him to find his great-uncle.”

“I know. I came to help.”

“That’s very nice of you, Frank, but I think Danny can handle it.”

“My brother’s with him.”

I could tell that surprised her and for some reason didn’t seem to please her.

I said, “Do you know which way they went?”

She frowned and said, “His uncle likes to fish. I sent him to look along the river.”

“Thank you. We’ll find him.”

She didn’t look particularly encouraged.

I ran off and in a couple of minutes I was walking the river’s edge.

I didn’t much like fishing but I knew a lot of guys who did and I knew where they fished. There were a couple of favorite places depending on what you were after. If it was catfish there was a long deep channel that ran behind an old lumberyard. If it was northern pike there was a sandbar a quarter mile farther on that half dammed the river and created a pool favored by those big fleshy fish. And of course there was the trestle half a mile outside of town. The north side of the river opposite the Flats was all cultivated fields with farmhouses hunkered in the shade of cottonwoods and poplars. At a distance ran the highway that connected the valley towns with the city of Mankato forty miles to the east. Beyond the highway rose the hills and bluffs that marked the extremes of the ancient Glacial River Warren.

I rounded a bend and heard voices and laughter and on the other side of a stand of tall bulrushes I found Jake and Danny skipping rocks. The stones as they touched the brown water left rings on the surface like a series of copper plates. When they saw me Danny and Jake stopped what they were doing and stood with their backs to the sun and squinted at me from the shadows of their faces.

“Find your uncle?” I asked.

“Naw,” Danny said. “Not yet.”

“Won’t find him standing here throwing rocks.”

“You’re not our b-b-b-boss,” Jake said. He picked up a flat stone and flung it angrily. It bit the water at an angle and slid beneath without skipping once.

“Why are you so mad at me?”

“B-b-b-b. .” His face twisted painfully. “B-b-b. .” He squeezed his eyes shut. “Cuz you’re a liar.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You know.” He eyed Danny who stood fingering a stone that he did not throw.

“Okay, I’m a big fat liar. Happy? We should find your uncle, Danny.” I pushed past them and kept walking downriver.

Danny caught up and sauntered beside me and when I looked back I saw Jake still standing where we’d left him, sullenly considering his options. Finally he followed but he stayed behind us at a distance. As much as possible we kept to the sand beaches and to the bare clay flats that had baked and cracked in the heat. Sometimes we had to break our way through stands of tall reeds and brush that grew right to the edge of the river. Danny told me about a book he’d just read in which a guy bitten by a vampire bat was the last human on earth. Danny read a lot of science fiction and he liked to tell you the whole story. He told it pretty well and just as he was finishing we beat our way through a stand of bulrushes covering a stretch of sand where we stumbled into a little clearing with a lean-to at its center. The structure was made of driftwood lashed into a frame with scavenged pieces of corrugated tin as roof and siding. A man sat in the deep shade created by the lean-to. He sat erect with his legs crossed and he stared at us where we stood on the far side of the clearing.

“That’s my uncle Warren,” Danny said.

I looked at Jake and Jake looked at me because we both recognized Danny’s uncle. We’d seen him before. We’d seen him with the dead man.

Danny’s uncle called out from the shade, “Your mother send you after me?”

Danny said, “Yeah.”

The man’s hands were laid flat on his bent knees. He nodded thoughtfully. He said, “Any chance I could bribe you to tell her you couldn’t find me?”

Danny walked across the sand leaving the prints of his sneakers behind him. I followed Danny’s prints and Jake followed mine.

“Bribe me?” Danny said. He seemed to think about it seriously. Whether he was seriously considering the offer or considering whether the offer was serious I couldn’t say. In any event he shook his head.

“Didn’t think so,” his uncle said. “How about this then? How about you tell her I’ll be around for dinner. Until then, I’m fishing.”

“But you’re not.”

“Fishing, Danny boy, is purely a state of mind. Some men when they’re fishing are after fish. Me, I’m after things you could never set a barbed hook in.” He looked up at Jake and me. “I know you boys.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“I heard they buried Skipper.”

“Yes, sir. Today. I was there.”

“You were? Why?”

“I don’t know. It seemed kind of right.”

“Kind of right?” His lips formed a grin but his eyes held no humor. “Was anybody else there?”

“My father. He’s a minister and said the prayers. And our friend Gus. He dug the grave. And the sheriff. And the undertaker.”

“Sounds surprisingly well attended.”

“It was fine. They buried him in a real nice place.”

“No kidding? Well, I’ll be. A lot of kindness shown there. A little late, though, don’t you think?”

“Sir?”

“You boys know what itokagata iyaye means? You, Danny?”

“Nope.”

“It’s Dakota. It means the spirit has gone south. It means that Skipper’s dead. Your mom or dad ever try to teach you our language, Danny?”

“Our language is English,” Danny said.

“I suppose it is,” his uncle said. “I suppose it is.”

“You got a letter,” Danny said. He pulled it folded from his back pocket and handed it to his great-uncle.

The man took the envelope and squinted. He reached into his shirt pocket and drew out a pair of glasses with thick lenses and with rims that looked made of gold. He didn’t put them on but used the lenses instead in the way you might use a magnifying glass and painstakingly read the return address. Then he slid his finger under the flap, carefully tore it open, pulled out the letter, and read it with the glasses in the same slow fashion.

I stood uncomfortably waiting to be dismissed. I was eager to be gone.

“Shit,” Danny’s uncle said at last and crumpled the letter and threw it into the yellow sand. He looked up at Danny. “Well, didn’t I tell you what to say to your mother? What are you waiting for?”

Danny backed away and turned and hightailed it out of the clearing with Jake and me at his heels. When we were a good distance away and the wall of bulrushes blinded his uncle to us I said, “What’s with him?”

Danny said, “I don’t know him very well. He’s been gone a long time. There was some kind of trouble and he had to leave town.”

“What kind of trouble?” Jake asked.

Danny shrugged. “Mom and Dad don’t talk about it. Uncle Warren showed up last week and my mom took him in. She told my dad she had to. He’s family. He’s not really so bad. Sometimes he’s kind of funny. He doesn’t like staying in the house though. He says walls make him feel like he’s in jail.”

We walked back to where the river ran near Danny’s house and we climbed the bank and Jake and I went our way toward home and Danny went to deliver his uncle’s message to his mother. I wondered what exactly he would tell her.

We reached our yard and Jake started up the front steps but I hung back.

Jake said, “What’s wrong?”

“Didn’t you see?”

“See what?”

“Those glasses Danny’s uncle had.”

“What about them?”

“They don’t belong to him, Jake,” I said. “They belonged to Bobby Cole.”

Jake stared at me a moment dumb as a brick. Then the light came into his eyes.