“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 so
mebody 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.”
34
On Saturday afternoon we buried Ariel. The sky was nearly cloudless yet something heavy hung in the air over New Bremen and the valley of the Minnesota River. It was a hot day, another in a long line, and windless and I breathed the stale heat and felt the weight and could barely move.
By then I knew some of the details of Karl Brandt’s death. He’d been out in his beloved Triumph, driving back roads, the way he’d driven Jake and me on a day that seemed very long ago. He’d been going way too fast, had missed a turn, and had run into a big cottonwood tree. The impact had thrown him through the windshield and he’d died instantly. He’d been drinking from a bottle of his father’s scotch and there was no sign that he’d tried to make the turn in the road where the cottonwood stood. Whether the tragedy occurred because of the drink or the dark design of his own confused thinking no one could say.
Ariel’s funeral service was scheduled for two o’clock and was to be held in the Third Avenue Methodist Church across the street from our house. My father had requested that his district superintendent, Conrad Stephens, preside at both the full service at the church and the brief graveside ceremony after. He’d chosen music and made arrangements for Lorraine Griswold to be the organist and had asked Amelia Klement if she would lend her fine alto in leading the songs. He’d spoken with Florence Henne about arrangements for a meal after the burial for those who would be attending. He’d been through this dozens of times as a minister and knew exactly what he was doing although I’m certain that this time was quite different for him.
The visitation seemed to have drained my mother of what strength remained to her and she had not come home afterward. On Saturday morning my father drove to my grandparents’ house and talked with her, probably about Karl Brandt among other things, and when he came back he looked tired and empty but he assured us that we would see our mother at the service. Which was something I wasn’t convinced was necessarily a good idea. Funerals weren’t just about the dead. They were about the dead leaving this world to reside with God, someone Mother wasn’t seeing eye to eye with at the moment, if she ever had, and I couldn’t shake the concern that in the middle of the service she would spring from her pew and find some way to spite him.
People began to gather half an hour before the service began. They drove into the parking lot and got out of their cars and entered the church and stood inside the sanctuary and visited. I was pretty sure what they were talking about—Ariel, Karl, the whole mess. I figured it would be a story people in New Bremen would tell for a hundred years, in the same way they told about the Great Sioux Uprising, and they would use words like skag and faggot and bastard child and they wouldn’t remember at all the truth of who these people were. I watched them from the porch of our house where I sat with Jake. It was just him and me at home. My father had gone in the Packard to get my mother. He wanted us to enter the church together as a family.
Jake had been quiet that day, even quieter than usual, and I wondered if it was because of what had happened to Karl, something I was still trying to make sense of. I was praying that it had been an accident due to the scotch he’d been drinking because if I thought he’d really killed himself then I knew I’d had a hand in it. And Jake too, though I hoped like crazy my brother didn’t see it that way. I should have been the one to stand up to Doyle and refuse to tell him what we’d overheard but I’d knuckled under and Jake had talked and now Karl Brandt was dead. I argued with myself: Karl didn’t have to do what he did. Some people lived with dark secrets all their lives, secrets that threatened to crush them. Something had happened to my father in the war, something terrible, but he’d found the strength to continue on. And me, I was living with the knowledge that I’d let the man who’d probably killed my sister go free, a secret that at moments was almost unbearable, but I’d never think of killing myself. It seemed to me that if a place or situation bothered you, became intolerable, you could find a way to deal with it. Talk to someone maybe or maybe just go somewhere where no one knew you and start a new life. Killing yourself seemed like the worst possible choice.
Out of nowhere Jake said, “There are some things you can’t run from, Frank.”
He was staring into the sun which from our perspective seemed to be hanging directly over the steeple of the church. I thought if he didn’t look away soon he’d blind himself.
“What do you mean?”
“Who you are. You can’t run from that. You can leave everything behind except who you are.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’ll always stutter. People will always make fun of me. Sometimes I think I should just kill myself.”
“Don’t say that.”
He finally turned from the sun and swung his eyes toward me and his pupils were like dots made with a pencil point. “What do you think it’s like?”
“What do I think what’s like?”
“Dying. Being dead.”
What I thought was that they were two different things. Dead was one thing. But dying, that was another. I said, “I don’t want to think about it.”
“That’s all I’ve been thinking about all day. I can’t stop.”
“You better.”
“It scares me. I wonder if Karl was scared.” Jake held still a moment then looked back into the sun and said, “I wonder if Ariel was scared.”
Which was something I’d managed up to that point not to think about. It was the difference between being dead and dying. Being dead was a thing and not a horrible thing because it was finished and if you believed in God, and I did, then you were probably in a better place. But dying was a terribly human process and could, I knew, be full of pain and suffering and great fear and because I didn’t want to think about it I felt
like grabbing Jake and shaking all those awful thoughts out of his head.
The Packard came down Tyler Street and thumped over the tracks and right behind it was my grandfather’s Buick. The two cars pulled into the church lot in an area outlined with yellow tape to reserve the spots for them. My father helped my mother from the car and even at a distance I could tell that if a solid wind blew it would tumble her.
“Come on,” I said with a sigh and stood up.
We entered the church together as my father wished. My mother took his arm and walked ahead and then Jake and I and then my grandparents. Deacon Griswold handed us programs and people broke off their conversations and made way for us. We walked to the first pew up front and filed in and sat down. Ariel’s casket had been laid before the altar rail, flanked with flowers that looked much like those that had accompanied the visitation. Although I’d had no trouble looking at the casket the day before, on that Saturday I did my best to keep my eyes averted. I stared instead at the stained-glass window behind the altar and imagined shooting the panes out with a slingshot. Lorraine Griswold came in from the side door and sat down at the organ. Pastor Stephens entered from the same door and took his seat behind the pulpit. Amelia Klement came up the aisle from where she’d been sitting with her husband and her son and sat alone in the choir section next to the organ. A hush fell over the church and Lorraine began to play, something soft and sad and classical, and I could have looked at the program to see what my father had chosen but I was already distancing myself from the whole experience. All day I’d been thinking that if something became intolerable you could simply remove yourself from it and that’s what I did. I thought about the things that had happened that summer, played them over in my head—sweet Bobby Cole and the dead itinerant and the day I pushed Morris Engdahl into the quarry and Warren Redstone slipping away across the trestle in the rain and riding horses with Ginger French and Karl Brandt plowing his little Triumph into a cottonwood tree—and the result was that I remember almost nothing about the funeral service except that it went on forever. People came to the pulpit and said things—later I learned that they’d shared wonderful memories of Ariel—but I wasn’t present and didn’t hear them. Everyone sang and I suppose I must have sung too because the music, what penetrated, was familiar. I don’t remember a word of what Pastor Stephens said but I had the sense that it was appropriate though dry.
(2013) Ordinary Grace Page 27