Ordinary Grace (29 page)

here’s a math problem everyone is familiar with. It involves two trains. One leaves from one location, New York, for example, and the other from another location, say San Francisco. The

trains are traveling toward each other at different speeds. The idea is to calculate how far each train will have traveled by the time they meet. I was never any good at math and didn’t waste time trying to solve this problem but I did spend a lot of time thinking about it. Not about how many miles the trains would have covered but about the travelers on them. Who were these people and why were they leaving New York and San Francisco and what were they seeking at the other end of the line? Most especially I wondered if they had any idea what awaited them when the two trains met. Because I thought of them as traveling on the same set of tracks, I imagined their meeting as a catastrophic collision. So it always struck me not as a math problem but rather a philosophic consideration of life, death, and unhappy circumstance.

In my own life, the two trains of this problem are the summer of 1961 and the present. And they collide every year on Memorial Day in the cemetery in New Bremen.

This year my father is waiting for me in the shade, sitting patiently on the porch of his condominium in Saint Paul, staring at the world from under the brim of a clean white ball cap. A tall man, slender all his life, he’s grown thin and fragile over the last few years, with a heart that worries us both. When I pull into the drive, he rises from the bench and hobbles to my car. He walks like a man built of toothpicks, afraid that the connections will not hold. He opens the door and eases this body, this awkward construction of brittle bone and loose flesh, into the passenger side.

Good afternoon, sir, he says with chipper energy, and he gives me a smile, telling me with that flash of stained enamel that he’s happy to see both me and another day.

As we head south out of the Twin Cities toward New Bremen, we talk about things that in the grand scheme matter not at all. Baseball: The Twins are playing well this year, but it’s still a long season ahead.The French Open: Who’s out, who’s still in, and why aren’t there any Americans who can play on clay? And of course the weather. In Minnesota weather tops all other topics of conversation. My father, once a voracious reader, seldom picks up a book anymore. His hands tremble, he complains, and he has trouble concentrating. He’s well over eighty. Things fall apart.

At Mankato, we turn west and follow the broad valley of the Minnesota River. It’s been a good spring, plenty of rain but not too much, and the crops have all been planted and the fields are green. My father comments on their appearance with approval, as if he has a personal stake in the harvest still far ahead. I know him and I know that it’s more than idle talk. He hopes good things for these farmers whose lives are so helplessly bound to the whim of nature. Too much rain, too little rain, a devastating hailstorm, a plague of locusts, blight, they’ve all swept through this valley like the horsemen of the Apocalypse and the only recourse for those who stand and watch the sky is prayers or curses.

A few miles outside New Bremen we grow quiet, as we always do, and our thoughts begin to slide into a consideration of the past.
It seems to me that when you look back at a life, yours or another’s, what you see is a path that weaves into and out of deep shadow. So much is lost. What we use to construct the past is what has remained in the open, a hodgepodge of fleeting glimpses. Our histories, like my father’s current body, are structures built of toothpicks. So what I recall of that last summer in New Bremen is a construct both of what stands in the light and what I imagine in the dark where I cannot see.
Entering town we drive a new road across a recently built bridge spanning the river. Only a hundred yards east stands the trestle that is one of the solid fixtures of both past and present. The grain elevators along the tracks are gone but I can see down Tyler Street all the way to the Flats.The church, remodeled and enlarged over the years, is still there and in late afternoon the shadow of the steeple still falls across the house where the Drums once lived.
Halderson’s Drugstore is now a video store and tanning salon. The shop where Mr. Baake once held forth with barber scissors and gossip is now called The Shear Delight and caters mostly to women. The police department still borders on the square, housed inside the same stone walls that were laid when the town was first platted. The interior, I’ve been told, has been modernized but I have no desire to see it. For me it will always exist as it did that long ago summer night I first saw it when Jake and I went with our father to bring Gus home.
My grandfather and Liz passed from this world nearly twenty years ago and the family that bought their house has never taken particularly good care of the property, a circumstance that would have had my grandfather spewing forth a few choice expletives.
The Brandt mansion is still the Brandt mansion and is still occupied by someone who bears the family name. Axel and Julia Brandt adopted a child, a little boy from Korea, and raised him and loved him and willed to him the brewery. His name is Sam and on the few occasions I’ve met him I’ve found him pleasant but patronizing in the way of many people of wealth.
When we arrive at the cemetery Jake is waiting at the gate. He’s driven from Winona where he’s pastor of a Methodist church. He’s grown into a tall, graceful man and is just beginning to bald. He greets us both with a powerful hug.
With a nod toward his station wagon he says, I’ve got the flowers.
He drives ahead of us on the lane among the gravestones which are decorated with flower bouquets and various items of tribute and memory. We come every year on this day to pay our respects. In earlier times our families often accompanied us but our children are grown and our wives have made this trip too many times and today have made other plans so it’s just the three of us. It’s our intention after we’ve finished in the cemetery to head to a German restaurant in town and drink some Brandt beer and have a good German dinner.
Every year we visit a lot of graves. A number of them were dug in the summer of 1961. We lay flowers at the headstone of Bobby Cole and the headstone with no name where the itinerant is buried and the headstone of Karl Brandt. We always lay a small bouquet and spend a moment at the graveside of Morris Engdahl. It’s clear every year that we’re the only ones who bother but my father insists. We lay flowers on the graves of Emil and Lise Brandt who are buried side by side. Emil Brandt died first, a relatively young man at age fifty-one. Lise Brandt lived to be nearly seventy and after the summer of 1961 spent the rest of her life in the Minnesota Security Hospital in Saint Peter. She claimed not to remember actually killing Ariel. She’d found my sister on the lawn at the farmhouse that night and had gone outside to shoo her away. Ariel had reached out, touched her—who knew why?—and the next thing she remembered was standing with the bloodied crowbar in her hand and Ariel on the grass at her feet. She’d panicked, carried Ariel to the river, and delivered her to the current, hoping it would take the whole problem away. In truth she was not unhappy at the hospital in Saint Peter. She worked a garden and had a room to herself and, until his death, her brother visited regularly. Jake never deserted her and was with her at the end praying her into a peaceful final rest.
We spend time at my grandfather’s grave. He’s flanked by my grandmother on one side and Liz on the other and we lay flowers for them all.
We visit the graves of Ginger French and Gus who were married a year after we moved away. They were a happy couple, given to adventure. Ginger loved to ride with Gus on his Indian Chief. They both eventually took up flying and bought their own little Piper Cub and would take off for the Black Hills or Yellowstone or Door County at a moment’s notice. A dozen years into their marriage, on a flight to Valentine, Nebraska, they ran into severe weather and crashed in a cornfield and were killed. At their funeral my father delivered a moving eulogy.
There’s another grave I would visit if it were here, the grave of Warren Redstone. When I was in college at the University of Minnesota I ran into Danny O’Keefe. We recognized each other immediately and I was happy to find that he held no grudge because of the events that summer which drove his family from New Bremen. He told me his great-uncle had returned and was living near Granite Falls and he gave me an address and a telephone number. I went to see the man I’d wrongly condemned in my sister’s death. I found him fishing on a stretch of the Minnesota River, a spot where meadow ran along the bank and poplar trees gave shade.
He nodded for me to sit beside him and he said, You’re a couple of heads taller, boy. Damn near a man now.
I said, Yes, sir, I guess I am.
He watched where his fishing line disappeared in the cider-colored sweep of water. He wore a black hat with a wide, round brim and a colorful band. He’d let his hair grow long and it lay in two gray braids, one over each shoulder.
I figure I owe you my life, he said.
Which surprised me because mostly I’d come to apologize for having put him in jeopardy.
Always been grateful you kept your mouth shut while I crossed that trestle, he said. Those policemen, they’d’ve shot first and asked later.
I didn’t necessarily agree with him but it seemed pointless to say so.
I asked, Where’d you go?
Family on the Rosebud rez. Thing about family is they got to take you in.
We didn’t say much more. With the exception of that summer in which our lives had converged in a few dramatic moments, we had almost nothing in common. But when I left, Warren Redstone offered something I’ve never forgotten. As I walked away he called to me and when I turned back he said, They’re never far from us, you know.
Who? I asked.
The dead. No more’n a breath. You let that last one go and you’re with them again.
It was an odd thing to say in parting and I thought it probably had more to do with where Redstone was in the declining arc of his own life than anything to do with me.
Our final cemetery stop always is the small section beneath a linden tree where Ariel and my mother lie and where my father’s body will rest someday too.
I’m a teacher of history in a high school in Saint Paul and what I know from my studies and from my life is that there is no such thing as a true event. We know dates and times and locations and participants but accounts of what happened depend upon the perspective from which the event is viewed. Take the American Civil War. The residents of the beleaguered Confederacy recounted a very different history from the one touted by the victorious Union. It’s the same with the history of a family. Whenever we talk about New Bremen I’m aware that Jake and my father recall things I don’t and what we remember together we often remember differently. I’m sure that each of us has memories that for reasons our own we don’t share. Some things we prefer remain lost in the shadows of our past. My father, for example, has never said a word about the incident in the war in which both he and Gus played some terrible part and although I have often wondered I have never asked. And of that summer in New Bremen in which so much death occurred we hardly speak at all.
We stand the three of us where an important part of our lives lies buried. We can see the river brown with silt and on the far side the patchwork of fields and beyond them the wooded hills that long ago channeled the glacial flood of the River Warren. The sun is low in the sky and the light is pollen yellow and the afternoon is blessedly still.
It’s been a good day, my father says with satisfaction. It’s been a good life. In the way he did as a child whenever my father finished a sermon, Jake whispers, Amen.
Me, I throw an arm around each of them and suggest, Let’s go have a beer.
We turn, three men bound by love, by history, by circumstance, and most certainly by the awful grace of God, and together walk a narrow lane where headstones press close all around, reminding me gently of Warren Redstone’s parting wisdom, which I understand now. The dead are never far from us. They’re in our hearts and on our minds and in the end all that separates us from them is a single breath, one final puff of air.