Ordinary Grace (10 page)

That evening after dinner I got together a pickup game of softball with some of the other kids in the neighborhood. We played until the evening light turned soft blue and we couldn’t see to hit or to field anymore and suggestions were made of other games we could play that would prolong our easy camaraderie. But some had to go and so our gathering dissolved and we drifted away each of us to our own home. Jake and I walked together. With every step he slapped his ball glove against his thigh as if beating time with a drum.

You still got all your fingers, he said.
What?
I figured you’d blow yourself to kingdom come.
I knew what he was talking about. I thought of telling him the

story of the exploded frog but I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing that he’d been right in believing I had no business going with Gus and Doyle.

M-80s? Even in the dark I could see that the huge pools of his eyes reflected both envy and censure.
When we reached the house my father was standing on the porch smoking his pipe. The ember in the bowl glowed brightly as he drew on the stem and I smelled the sweet drift of Cherry Blend. Gus was with him. They were talking quietly as friends do.
My father called to us as we came up the walk. How’d the game go, boys?
Fine, I said.
Gus said, You win?
We played workup, I replied in a cold tone. Nobody won.
Hey, Frankie, Gus said. Could we talk? I told your dad about this afternoon.
I looked at my father for any sign of reproof but in the shadow of approaching night with the warm light through the windows at his back he looked unconcerned. He said, It would be a good idea.
All right, I said.
Jake had paused on the steps and his eyes skipped back and forth between Gus and our father and me, and his own face was clouded with confusion.
Gus said, Let’s take a walk.
My father said, How about a game of checkers, Jake?
Gus left the porch and I turned from the house and side by side we walked into the twilight beneath the limbs of the elms and maples that arched the unlit and empty street.
We walked for a while before Gus said anything. I’m sorry, Frankie. I shouldn’t have let that happen today.
It’s okay, I said.
No, it isn’t. Doyle, he’s a certain kind of man. Not a bad man really but an unthinking man. Hell, so am I for that matter. The difference between us is that I have some responsibility for you and I let you down today. That won’t happen again, I promise.
The crickets and the tree frogs had started to clip at the silence that came with the evening and above us through the breaks in the canopy of leaves the sky had begun to salt with stars. The houses set back from the street were charcoal gray shapes with windows like uninterested yellow eyes observing our passing.
I said, What did Doyle mean, Gus, that Dad cracked during the war?
Gus stopped and eyed the sky then tilted his head as if listening to the growing chorus that accompanied the approach of night. He said, You ever talk to your dad about the war?
I try sometimes. I keep asking him if he killed any Germans. All he ever says is that he shot at a lot of them.
Frank, it’s not my place to talk to you about what your father experienced in the war. But I’ll tell you about the war in general. You talk to a man like Doyle and he’ll tell you a lot of bullshit. You watch John Wayne and Audie Murphy in the movie house and it probably seems easy killing men. The truth is that when you kill a man it doesn’t matter if he’s your enemy and if he’s trying to kill you. That moment of his death will eat at you for the rest of your life. It’ll dig into bone so deep inside you that not even the hand of God is going to be able to pull it out, I don’t care how much you pray. And you multiply that feeling by several years and too many doomed engagements and more horror, Frankie, than you can possibly imagine. And the utter senselessness and the total hopelessness become your enemy as much as any man pointing a rifle at you. And because they were officers, some men like your father were forced to be the architects of that senselessness, and what they asked of themselves and of the men they commanded was a burden no human being should have to shoulder. Frankie, your father someday may tell you about the war or he may not. But whatever you hear from Doyle or from anyone else will never be your father’s truth.
You’re not afraid of fireworks, I said.
I’ve got my own devils. And Doyle, he’s got his.
We’d walked to the end of a street with a guardrail and thirty yards beyond it ran the river. In the pale thin light that was all that was left of the day the water had become blue-black and looked like a satin ribbon torn from a dress. Far off along the highway to Mankato car headlights flew across the face of the hills and blinked off and on as they were obscured occasionally by trees and barns and outbuildings and they reminded me of fireflies. I sat on the guardrail and looked back at the Flats where the lights of the homes held constant.
I’ve got twenty-seven dollars saved, Gus. I was going to buy a bunch of fireworks. I don’t want fireworks anymore.
Gus sat down beside me. I’m guessing you’ll find something to spend it on, Frankie. Hell, if you can’t think of anything else, I could always use a loan. He laughed and bumped my leg playfully with his own and then he stood. He glanced back at the river where bullfrogs sang a chorus so loud you could barely hear yourself think.We’d best be getting home, he said.

n Sunday morning Jake complained that he wasn’t feeling well and asked if he could stay home. For me skipping church was always a delightful daydream. The idea of missing out

on three services and lounging around the house in my pajamas was enough to make me drool. If the request had come from me my mother would have suspected something but my brother didn’t fake things. She felt his head with the back of her hand then used a thermometer. He didn’t have a fever. She gently probed his neck feeling for swelling and found none. When she asked him what specifically were his symptoms he gave her a lackluster stare and said that he just felt really lousy. She talked it over with my father and they agreed that he should stay in bed. The plan was that we’d do the service in Cadbury and check on him when we came back for the worship in New Bremen.

During the service in Cadbury I sat with Peter Klement. He came with his mother who sang in the choir.The black eye that he’d sported the afternoon we visited his house was little more than a shadow now and neither of us said anything about it. During the social time after church we chucked rocks at a telephone pole where someone had stapled a poster for a circus coming to Mankato and we talked about the Twins. Ariel finally called to me and I left with my family to return to New Bremen for the second service of the morning.

When we pulled up to the house Jake was waiting on the front porch and Gus was with him. They hurried down the steps and it was clear something was wrong.

I got the details from Jake who stayed behind with me while my father and mother and Ariel drove to the hospital. It had happened like this. Jake had been in bed and trying to sleep. We hadn’t been gone fifteen minutes when there was a furious pounding at the front door. He got up and went downstairs and found Lise Brandt on the porch. He said her face looked like something out of a monster movie it was so distorted and frightening. She babbled and gesticulated and he stepped outside and told her to calm down even though his own heart was galloping because he could see that whatever she was trying to communicate, it was something horrific. She gripped his head in her hands and squeezed so hard that he thought his eyes would pop out. It took him a few minutes but in the end he understood. Emil was in trouble. Emil was dying.

He’d run across the street to the church with Lise at his side and he’d gone downstairs where Gus was sitting on the toilet. Gus had sworn at them and reached out and slammed shut the door to his little bathroom and Jake had knocked on it hard and hollered that Emil Brandt was dying and they needed Gus’s help. Gus was out quickly and ushered them back to the house and grabbed the phone and called the fire department and told them to get their asses to Emil Brandt’s place, the man was dying. Then he mounted his motorcycle with Jake behind him and Lise in the sidecar and they shot up the road to Brandt’s house. By the time they got there the fire department ambulance was parked in front.

One of the firemen told Gus that it looked like Brandt had swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills. They were pumping his stomach. They wouldn’t let Lise into the bedroom but she tried to shove her way inside and the fireman who’d talked to Gus held her back. The moment he touched her she went berserk. It was as if his hands were fire. She leaped back and folded herself into a corner of the living room and began to scream uncontrollably.The fireman reached out to her again but Jake told him no, don’t touch her, she can’t stand being touched by strangers. He told the fireman to wait and she would calm down eventually. Brandt was brought out on a gurney while Lise screamed in her corner and they loaded him into the ambulance and they rushed him to the hospital. When Lise calmed down as Jake had predicted he made her understand what had happened and although she was frantic about her brother she didn’t commence again to screaming.

Someone had called Axel Brandt and he arrived minutes after the firemen had sped away with Emil. Gus explained things to him and he signed to his sister and told Gus they were going to the hospital. And when they were gone the house was silent and empty, a place that felt as if a tornado had swept past and sucked out the air and neither Gus nor Jake wanted to linger. They came back on the motorcycle to wait for my parents and to deliver the news.

My father charged Gus with the responsibility of explaining the situation to Albert Griswold, a deacon who usually came early to help set up the worship. Griswold was a town councilman who could talk your brain numb. When Gus laid things out for him and made it clear that he needed to conduct the service, I saw the man puff up with pleasure at the opportunity. His wife was in the choir and was a fair organist and my mother left instructions with Gus that Lorraine Griswold was to lead the music for the service.

Whatever illness had afflicted Jake seemed to have been cured by the events of that morning and after my parents left he dressed in his Sunday clothes and was prepared to attend church. For a brief time I weighed the delicious possibility of skipping the service. In all the confusion who would notice? But under the circumstances it seemed that my presence and Jake’s would be judicious and I steeled myself for what I knew would be a long grind. Jake turned out to be a bit of a celebrity and much to his dismay he was assaulted with questions about what had happened. He tried to answer but his stutter was painful to him and to everyone listening and he looked to me for help. I was only too happy to oblige and in the story I told I made him a hero, insisting that it was only because of Jake’s quick action that our most famous citizen was saved from death by his own hand.

That’s certainly how it looked, I told them. If Jake had come a few minutes later, Mr. Brandt would have been dead.
Their eyes were full of amazement at both Brandt’s unthinkable behavior and young Jake’s valiant action.
I thought I might in this way, making him a hero, redeem myself in my brother’s opinion for turning him into such a vague and unimportant figure in my telling of the story of our discovery of the dead man. Not so. As I told and retold the events of that morning, each time inflating just a bit more the importance of Jake’s role, his scowl grew more profound and he finally grabbed the sleeve of my suit coat and pulled me out the church door and stuttered at me, Just st-st-st-stop it.
What? I said.
Just t-t-tell the tr-tr-truth.
I am.
Bullshit, goddamn it!
The sun stopped in its rising. The earth ceased to turn. I stood dumbfounded, staring at Jake, amazed at this blasphemy there on the very steps of the church and said with such clarity and power and without stumble that everyone inside could have heard. I felt the eyes of my father’s entire seated congregation shift to the church steps where we stood and I felt the wave of censure roll out from the sanctuary. Jake’s own eyes grew huge with fear and shame at the realization of what he’d just done and they held on my face and I knew he was terrified to look through the door at the people gathered inside who’d been stunned to silence.
Then I laughed. Oh, Christ, did I laugh. I couldn’t help myself it was all so unexpected and surreal. Jake fled, running from the church to our house across the street. And I turned back and entered the shadow of the sanctuary still smiling and suffered the glaring condemnation of the congregation and sat through the long service in which Albert Griswold held forth in his impromptu and interminable sermon about the need to impress godly values on the youth of the day and when it was over I walked back to the house and found Jake upstairs in our room and I apologized.
He stared sullenly at the ceiling and didn’t answer.
It’s okay, Jake. It’s no big deal.
Everyone heard.
So?
They’ll tell Dad.
He won’t care.
He should. It was awful. And it was all your f-f-fault.
Don’t get mad at me. I was just trying to help.
I don’t n-n-need your help.
I heard the creak of the floorboards just outside our room and when I turned there was Gus leaning against the doorway eyeing Jake with a grim countenance. Bullshit, goddamn it, he said repeating the words that were Jake’s transgression. Bullshit, goddamn it, right there in the church doorway. His lips went into a thin line like a little whip and he said again, Bullshit, goddamn it. He shook his head then a broad grin broke across his face and he laughed mightily. Jakie, I can’t remember enjoying a moment in church more. No, sir, I can’t. You punched ’em square in the face of their piety. Bullshit, goddamn it.
Jake’s mood didn’t improve much. Dad’ll be mad, he said.
I’ll talk to your dad, Gus said. And, Jake, there’s going to be lots in this world you’re going to feel bad about. Save your regret for the important things, okay?
Gus turned around and I heard the dance of his footsteps down the stairs and the last of his laughter and when he was gone the blessing that had been the lightness of his spirit seemed to have brightened Jake’s mood a bit and my brother looked like a man reprieved.

In the late afternoon my father came home from the hospital looking for Jake. He found us together in our room. Jake was reading one of his comic books and I was reading the book that Danny O’Keefe had told me about, a book called
I Am Legend
. My father had long ago made a purchase that did a good deal of damage to his chronically battered bank account. He’d invested in a fifty-four-volume set of books published by Encyclopaedia Britannica and called Great Books of the Western World. It included the works of Homer and Aeschylus and Sophocles and Plato and Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas and Dante and Chaucer and Shakespeare and Freud. It offered much of the most enlightened thinking by the greatest Western minds of the last two or three thousand years. When he walked into our room that afternoon and saw us reading instead comic books and pulp novels, he may well have been disappointed but he said nothing. He addressed Jake: I need your help, guy.

Jake put down the comic book and sat up. What with? he said. Lise Brandt. She won’t leave the hospital without Emil and they want to keep him for a while. She won’t listen to him or Axel or be reasoned with. Emil suggested that she might listen to you, especially if you were willing to stay with her until he could come home. What do you say?
All right. Jake scooted off his bed.
Can I come too? I asked.
My father nodded and motioned for me to be quick about it.
The Minnesota Valley Community Hospital was a new structure of stunningly red brick built on a hill overlooking New Bremen. Its construction had been largely underwritten by the Brandt family. Emil’s room was on the second floor and the waiting area of that level was crowded. Brandt’s immediate family was there: his brother, Axel; Axel’s wife, Julia; his nephew, Karl, who sat with his arm protectively around Ariel’s shoulders. Some people had come from the small college on the hill where Emil was the crown jewel of the music faculty. My mother was there sitting on a windowsill smoking a cigarette in her Sunday finery and looking pensive.The only one I expected to see and did not was Lise.
Axel strode forward the moment Jake appeared. He was a tall handsome athletic man with thinning blond hair and eyes whose blue was so intense it was as if he’d purchased pieces of the sky for their making. He possessed an overall countenance that every time I saw him struck me as regretful.
Thank you, Jake, he said with great sincerity.
Jake nodded and I understood that in this gathering he was reluctant to speak.
My father said, Where is she?
In Emil’s room. I can’t go near her. Nobody can. Jake, she won’t leave. But it’s important that she does. Emil badly needs rest. Will you talk to her?
Jake looked down the corridor which at the moment was empty.
We could remove her forcibly, Axel went on, but it would create such a scene and upset Emil further and I don’t want that. Please, will you talk to her?
Jake looked up at Brandt and nodded.
Ariel left Karl and came to Jake and knelt down. Her eyes were feverish looking. Oh, Jakie, please get her out of there without a scene. He needs his rest so.
I heard him whisper, I’ll try.
Ariel kissed his cheek and he turned and walked away and on either side of him walked my father and Axel Brandt. I watched him keeping pace between those two men who towered above him and although it wasn’t as if Jake was walking toward a firing squad I understood nonetheless that a heavy yoke had been laid upon his small shoulders. I had tried that morning to make my brother out to be a hero and in doing so had stretched the truth. As he disappeared into Emil Brandt’s room I understood with great affection that I needn’t have done so.
I sat beside my mother on the windowsill which had a marvelous view of the town. The hill was high and steep and below us New Bremen lay quiet on that Sunday afternoon. The streets platted so carefully by those early German immigrants reminded me of the squares on the chessboard that my father and Emil Brandt used for their weekly game which would probably not be played this Monday. My mother put her hand on my leg and squeezed. She didn’t look at me and I wasn’t sure if it was some kind of non-verbal signal or if I was simply a touchstone that helped to ground her in the face of the uncertainty at hand.
After a moment she asked, Did the music go well at church?
Yes, I said. But not as good as when you’re there.
She nodded and although she didn’t smile I could tell she was pleased.
Is he going to be okay? Mr. Brandt, I mean.
She stubbed out her cigarette in a square glass ashtray beside her and stared at the black smudge and answered slowly, Emil is complicated. But I’m sure he’ll recover.
Why’d he do it? I spoke quietly so that the others wouldn’t hear. I mean, he’s famous and everything. Is it because of his face?
He’s a beautiful man, Frankie, she said. His face isn’t important.
Maybe to him it is
, I thought but didn’t say.
Julia Brandt stood up and walked toward us. She wore a pink dress with black piping and her high heels were black and pink to match. Around her neck was a string of pearls and her earrings were pearl too. Her hair was as black as a moonless night and her eyes dark as cold cinders. I didn’t like Julia Brandt and I knew my mother didn’t like her either.
Ruth, Mrs. Brandt said looking pained, this is all so horrible.
Yes, my mother said.
Mrs. Brandt reached into the purse she carried and pulled out a gold cigarette case and snapped it open. She held it out to my mother in offering and my mother shook her head and said, No, thank you, Julia. Mrs. Brandt slipped a cigarette free and tapped it on the lid of the gold case and put the case away and brought out a gold lighter with a little sapphire in the center. She slid the cigarette between her rubied lips and flipped the lighter open and thumbed the striker and touched the flame to the tip of her cigarette and lifted her head high like a wild animal about to howl and blew out a flourish of smoke.
Tragic, she said. She looked toward the corner where Karl and Ariel sat together, and deep in the dark cinders of her eyes little flames seemed to have been kindled. She said, Though it’s fortunate in a way.
Fortunate? My mother’s voice and face were taut.
For Ariel and Karl, I mean. That it’s happened now while they still have each other for comfort. In a few weeks, they’ll be off in different worlds, very far from each other.
Julia, my mother said, there is nothing fortunate about this except that Emil didn’t succeed.
Mrs. Brandt drew on her cigarette and smiled and smoke escaped slowly from her lips. You and Emil have always been close, she said. I remember when we all thought you might marry. We might have been sisters. She carefully eyed my mother’s Sunday dress and shook her head. I can’t imagine being married to a minister, always having to dress so . . . She drew on her cigarette again, let out a billow of smoke, and finished, . . . sensibly. But then you have a wonderful life, a very spiritual life, I suppose.
And I’m sure you have a very different life, Julia.
It can be a trial, the responsibility of being a Brandt, Ruth.
A terrible burden, my mother agreed.
You have no idea, Mrs. Brandt said with a sigh.
Oh but I do, Julia. It’s clear from all those worry lines on your face. Excuse me, she said sliding from the sill. I need to get some air.
My mother walked from the waiting area and Mrs. Brandt took another long draw on her cigarette and said under her breath, You perfect bitch. Then she looked down at me and smiled and turned away.