“Did she?”
“I suppose so but I don’t really know. It was right after that that I tried to kill myself. And then so much happened.”
“Did she come the night she disappeared?”
“I’m sure she didn’t. If she had, Lise would have said something to me. Look,” he pleaded, “I didn’t kill Ariel. I couldn’t have killed Ariel. In my wounded way, I loved her. Not as she would have liked, but in the only way I was able. You have to believe that, Nathan.”
My father closed his eyes and in the gathering dark sat in silence and I believed he was praying. “I do,” he finally said.
Brandt looked as if he was in physical pain. “You’ll have to tell Ruth, I suppose.”
“No. That’s something you’ll have to do, Emil.”
“All right. I’ll talk with her tomorrow. Will that do, Nathan?”
“Yes.”
“Nathan?”
“What is it?”
“We’re finished as friends, aren’t we?”
“I’ll pray for the strength to forgive you, Emil. But I have no wish to see you again.” My father rose. “Frank?”
I stood too.
“God be with you, Emil,” my father said in parting. He didn’t say it in the way he sometimes did to a congregation as a blessing at the end of a service. This sounded more like a criminal sentence. I followed him to the Packard and we got in. I looked back before we drove away and Emil Brandt and the dark of the coming night were merging and if he stayed there long I figured you wouldn’t be able to tell one from the other.
At home my father parked in the garage and turned off the engine and we sat together in the stillness.
“Well, Frank?”
“I’m glad I know the truth. But I kind of wish I didn’t. It doesn’t make anything better.”
“There was a playwright, Son, a Greek by the name of Aeschylus. He wrote that he who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain, which cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”
“Awful?” I said.
“I don’t think it’s meant in a bad way. I think it means beyond our understanding.”
“I guess there are graces I like better,” I said.
My father slipped the car keys into his pocket. He put his hand on the door handle but didn’t get out. He turned back to me. “There’s something I haven’t told you yet, Frank. A congregation in Saint Paul would like me to be their pastor. I’m going to accept.”
“We’re moving?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“In a month or so. Before school begins.”
“I guess that would be all right,” I said. “Does Mom know?”
“Yes, but not your brother. We should go inside and tell him.”
“Dad?”
“Yes?”
“I don’t hate Mr. Brandt. In a way, I feel sorry for him.”
“That’s a good beginning. It would be nice to leave this place with a heart that’s not full of enmity.”
I saw a firefly blink in the dark of the garage and I realized it was getting late but I didn’t move.
“Is there something else, Frank?”
There was and it was Warren Redstone. Although I knew the sheriff intended to question Morris Engdahl and Judy Kleinschmidt further about the night Ariel was killed, I didn’t believe anymore that they had something to do with her death. Redstone had murdered my sister. I accepted that now. I’d fought against believing it, a battle whose real purpose was simply to keep me from being overwhelmed by guilt because I didn’t do anything to stop Danny’s great-uncle when he made his escape across the river. I was finished with blame, finished with feeling lousy, and so I told my father everything. The whole horrible story spilled from me in a torrent I couldn’t stop, a complete unburdening. I’d been afraid that he would be angry, that he would condemn me. In my worst imaginings, he ceased to love me. Instead he held me and pressed his cheek to the top of my head and said, “It’s okay, Son. It’s okay.”
“No, it’s not,” I insisted between sobs. “What if they never catch him?”
“Then I suppose God’ll have a lot to say to him when they meet face-to-face, don’t you think?”
I drew away a little and looked into his eyes. They were brown and sad and gentle.
“You’re not mad at me?”
“I’m ready to be done with anger, Frank. I’m ready to be done with it forever. How about you?”
“Yeah, I guess I am.”
“Then let’s go inside. I’m kind of tired.”
I opened my door and walked with my father toward the house where Jake and Gus were waiting and where my mother at her piano filled the night with music.
39
The days came hot one after another but there was decent rain and by mid-August the farmers in my father’s congregations were commenting guardedly to one another that the crops in the valley all looked pretty good. What they really meant but would not allow themselves to say openly was that they were anticipating the best harvest in years.
My mother began to organize for our move. The most difficult part, I suspect, was clearing Ariel’s room. She did this alone and over a long period and I often heard her crying as she boxed. Most of what had been Ariel’s we didn’t take with us to Saint Paul. My father donated her things to an agency that distributed clothing and other items of necessity to the migrant families who came in large numbers to work the harvests.
We weren’t the only ones who left New Bremen for good that summer. Danny O’Keefe’s family moved too. His mother got a job teaching in Granite Falls and they put their house up for sale and by the second week in August, Danny and his family were gone.
In those final days New Bremen for me had a different feel. Whether this was because of our move or because of all that had happened that summer I couldn’t say. It seemed as if the town and everything in it was already a part of my past. At night sometimes I tried to reach out and grab hold of what exactly I felt toward the place but everything was hopelessly tangled. I’d lived there five years, the longest I would live anywhere until I married and had my own family and settled down. I’d been a child there and had crossed the threshold, perhaps early, into young manhood. In the daylight I walked a lot, usually alone, visiting the places that would become monuments in my memory. The trestle that had been the scene of so much tragedy that summer. The quarry where I’d taken such childish pleasure in challenging and besting Morris Engdahl. Halderson’s Drugstore with its frosted mugs of root beer. I walked along the river, passed the place where Warren Redstone had built his little lean-to. The sides were already collapsed and I knew that in the flooding which came every spring all sign of the man’s presence would be washed away. I lingered at the place below the home of Emil Brandt and his sister where the trail threaded up the rise through the cottonwoods, the trail I’d been so certain was the way my sister had been carried to the river. And a little farther on I stood below Sibley Park where the cold black ash of many bonfires lay on the sand like leprous sores and where Ariel had last been seen alive on this earth. If understanding was what I sought, I was disappointed.
After Ariel’s funeral my mother took Jake to only one more session of speech therapy. He told me afterward that they questioned him mercilessly about the inexplicable disappearance of his impediment. When he insisted that it was the result of a miracle they looked at him as if he said he’d kissed a frog and been granted three wishes. Then my mother calmly told them it was the absolute truth, a miracle by the grace of God, and they had no reply.
Gus spent more and more time away and although he was reluctant to talk I knew because my father told me that he was helping Ginger French at her ranch. He’d put the brakes on his drinking and didn’t hang out anymore with Doyle.
As the day of our departure drew nearer we had a lot of visitors, folks stopping in to say their good-byes. Many were a part of
my father’s congregations but others were a surprise. Edna Sweeney came with cookies. I had no idea if she and Avis were finally doing okay in the sack but she was such a good woman at heart that I hoped so. I knew I would miss the view of her underthings drying on the line, swinging a little in the summer breeze as if beckoning. The Klem-
ents dropped by one evening and while our parents talked on the porch Peter and Jake and I spent an hour sitting in the pasture behind our house kicking around the Twins and The Twilight Zone and speculating on what living in Saint Paul would be like. Peter was not hopeful. He thought a place like Cadbury—or even a town like New Bremen—was infinitely preferable. There were streets in Saint Paul, he warned, where people couldn’t walk safely at night. And everybody locked their doors. Before he left he repeated his invitation to come anytime for a visit and he’d teach us about motors and things. The Coles visited, too, briefly. They’d been old when they had Bobby and his death had made them even older. They were not much more than fifty then but in my memory they are always ancient. They held hands as they walked away and I thought that although they’d lost Bobby they were lucky. They still had each other.
A week before we left town Morris Engdahl was killed in an accident at the cannery where he worked. He was out on bail, awaiting his hearing on the Mann Act charges that had been filed against him. He’d gone to work drunk and the foreman had told him to go home and Engdahl had taken a couple of swings at his boss. He’d missed and, off-balance, had tumbled from the platform where the altercation took place and had broken his neck in the fall to the cannery floor below. In a kind of irony, Engdahl’s father, who was not a churchgoing man, requested that my dad preside at the burial service. I asked if I could be there and my father allowed it. It was one of the saddest funerals I’ve ever attended. Engdahl had no mourners at all, not Judy Kleinschmidt or even his father, who we later found out was dead drunk in a town bar.
Two days out from the move to Saint Paul the house already had the feel of abandonment. Mother had directed Jake and me to pack up our things in the boxes she provided and we emptied our dresser and our closet. Jake had carefully packed his model airplanes and his comic books. I had nothing special that I cared about in the same way and threw in my own collected junk haphazardly. Walking through the house we negotiated a path between stacks of boxes: linens and towels and tablecloths; my father’s books; table lamps and vases and framed pictures; kitchen utensils and pots and pans. We still had curtains on the windows but not much else to cozy the place.
In those last days Jake had begun to divide his time between our house and the home of Lise Brandt. My parents had severed their relationship with Emil. When Brandt told her the truth about his relationship with Ariel my mother had been outraged but she hadn’t held long to that useless emotion. “What’s done is done,” I heard her tell my father, and I believe she meant it. I don’t know that she ever forgave Emil Brandt. Maybe like Jake she was simply tired of being angry. As far as I know she never saw Brandt socially again. I suppose that in its way this, too, was a loss she suffered.
But with Jake it was different. He told me he felt sorry for Lise. As far as he could tell, the only people in the world who cared about her at all were him and Emil, and although Lise seemed fine with the company of her brother her face lit up with undeniable delight whenever she saw Jake. He visited often using the garden as an excuse to offer his companionship. He told me that he sometimes saw Emil Brandt sitting on the porch or heard the music of his playing drift from the house but he never talked to the man. It wasn’t because he felt any anger. He claimed that he sensed something coming from Brandt that was like strong waves pushing him away. I figured Jake was onto something. The Brandt family had always seemed a kind of island, separate and distant and a little forbidding, and there had never been, as far as I could see, the kind of energy, whether love or the yearning for simple human connection, that held them together or drew the larger world to them. As a family they seemed to have no center and I figured they would fall apart. Because my own family was healing and because wholeness seemed possible again, I kept the Brandts in my prayers.
On the day before we were to leave New Bremen my brother asked if I would help him and Lise with a project. She wanted to build a little wall around one of her flower beds using the rocks she’d pulled and piled when creating all her garden spots. Jake said it would be easier with three of us, especially because some of the rocks were big. I wasn’t excited about returning to the Brandt home but I agreed to give a hand.
We arrived after lunch and found Lise at work loading a wheelbarrow with the smaller stones from the huge pile beside the shed. The flower bed itself was in the middle of the yard, positioned in a sunny area between deep pools of shade that lay beneath a couple of tall hackberry trees. It was circular and at its center was a birdbath. Jake had explained that what Lise had in mind was to use the smaller stones to build the wall maybe a foot high and to put the large rocks inside, placing them carefully among the flowers so that the effect in the end would be a touch of wildness within the circular geometry of the wall.
She wore a loose short-sleeved yellow blouse and dungarees and tennis shoes and had soiled gardening gloves on her hands. It was hot and the blouse clung to her sides and back. We came from the river, through the gate in the back fence. She was intent on her work and didn’t know we were there until Jake circled so that she could see him. She clapped her hands together like a child pleased at a new toy and she signed something to Jake who signed something back and then he said, “Frank came too.” He pointed toward me and she turned and although she didn’t beam as brightly as she had with Jake she nonetheless looked pleased to see me. In her drone she said, “Thang you, Frang.”
We got to work. Mostly it was a question of transport, hauling the rocks from the pile to the garden thirty yards distant. Jake and I did this part while Lise constructed the wall. We filled the wheelbarrow half full because any more was impossible for us to handle and crossed the yard through the hackberry shade and dumped the stones in jumbles spaced along the edge of the garden. Lise carefully fitted the stones together with a bit of mortar that she’d mixed in a bucket.
We worked late into the afternoon. Toward the end I heard the swell of a piece I recognized as Rachmaninoff coming through the windows of the house and saw Emil Brandt step onto the front porch and sit down in his rocker and I figured he was playing a record on his stereo or maybe a tape on his reel-to-reel. Not long afterward the wall was complete. Jake and I were sweating like a couple of pack mules. Lise put down her mortar trowel and pulled off her garden gloves and said, “Wan pop?”
“Yes,” Jake and I answered together.
She smiled and made gestures to Jake who understood clearly. When she turned to go, he said, “She wants us to get the crowbar out of the shed. We’ll need it to pry the big rocks loose that she wants to put in with the flowers.”
“I’ll get it,” I offered.
The door of the shed was open and I stepped inside. Sunlight streamed in at my back. The shed smelled of damp soil and faintly of a mechanical odor like cutting oil. Lise kept the little place neatly organized. Clay pots and potting soil stood stacked beside each other against the far side. The tools of her yard work—rake, hoe, edger, clippers, shears, shovel, spade, pick, trowels—all hung neatly from hooks or nails set into a row of two-by-fours that ran horizontally along the inside of the wall midway between floor and roof. To the right was a narrow workbench with a vise and above the bench a Peg-Board that was hung with hand tools—hammer, screwdrivers, hacksaw, wrenches, chisels—and beneath the bench was a small cabinet with half a dozen drawers. The cabinet was honey-colored and decorated with hand-painted flowers. Leaning in one corner of the shed was a long pry bar and cradled across a couple of nails next to it lay the smaller crowbar. The crowbar I remembered well. That day in early summer when without thinking I’d touched her and she’d gone berserk, I’d’ve been dead if I hadn’t been so quick to dodge her wil
d swing. I reached for the crowbar and as I pulled it off the wall I cut my finger on the head of one of the nails. The cut wasn’t bad but it was bleeding and my hands were dirty. I took the crowbar out to Jake and showed him my wound.
“Lise keeps a box of Band-Aids in one of the drawers in the shed,” he said. “I don’t know which one.”
I returned to the honey-colored cabinet and began opening drawers. Mostly they held nails and screws and washers. But when I opened the middle drawer something else caught my eye. Amid a collection of bolts and nuts lay a delicate gold watch and a mother-of-pearl barrette.
Jake was stretched out on the grass. As I walked to him he glanced at my face and then he sat up. “What’s wrong?”
I held out my hands that were soiled with dirt and blood.
Jake looked at what I held in my palms, the little treasures that had gone missing with Ariel, and his eyes crawled up and met my gaze and I saw something in them that made me go cold.
“You knew,” I said.
“No.” Then he said, “Not for sure.”
He looked away toward the house where Emil Brandt rocked on the porch like a metronome keeping time with Rachmaninoff. I moved closer to him and leaned down. “Tell me.”
“I didn’t know,” he said.
“You said you didn’t know for sure.”
“I thought . . .” He stopped and I was afraid he was going to commence to stuttering but he just spent a few seconds collecting himself and then he went on. “That day you told me Mr. Brandt killed Ariel I began to think about it, and I thought probably it wasn’t him.”
“Why not him?”
“Jesus, Frank, he’s blind. But Lise, she’s strong and can see, and she never liked Ariel. But I figured if she did it, it had to be an accident. Like when she almost hit you with this crowbar,” he said and picked up the iron tool. “You remember?”
“Yeah, I remember. But maybe it wasn’t an accident.”
Jake looked down. “I thought about that too,” he said.
“Why didn’t you say something?”
(2013) Ordinary Grace Page 30