William Krueger - Ordinary Grace

“I’ve been thinking,” my mother said, “of a duet next Sunday. You and me, Amelia. I think it would be quite a lovely piece.”

I edged back and descended the steps and let the adults continue talking. I walked around to the side of the old farmhouse. Most of the grass in the yard was already dead and had gone brittle and I crunched my way toward the open barn door with Jake close on my heels. We stood in the doorway peering inside at disemboweled lawn mowers and refrigerator condensers and motor parts that lay strewn about the dirt floor and that made the barn seem to me like a gladiatorial arena where the vanquished had been left dismembered. To the eyes of a boy it was fascinating but the disarray also signaled something vaguely unsettling to me.

I heard the crush of gravel at our backs and turned to find Peter approaching. He wore a baseball cap pulled low as if to shield his face from the brutal bake of the sun.

“Better come away from there,” he said. “My dad might get mad.”

I bent and peered into the shadow cast by the brim of his cap. “Where’d you get that shiner?”

He touched his eye and spun away. “I gotta go,” he said. “So do you.”

Which was true. I saw my parents walking to the car and signaling us to join them. Peter headed toward the back door of his house and went inside without another word and without looking back.

In the car on the way home we all were quiet. At the house my mother said, “Why don’t you boys go out and play awhile? When you come back in I’ll have Kool-Aid ready and some sandwiches.”

We had a tire swing that hung on a rope from a branch of a big elm in the side yard and that’s where we went. Jake loved that swing. He could swing in it for hours talking to himself the whole time. He climbed into the tire and said, “Spin me.” I took hold of his shoulders and turned him and turned him until the rope was tightly twisted and then I let him go and stepped back and he spun like a top.

Through the kitchen window at my back came snatches of my parents’ conversation.

“They lied, Nathan. Every one of the ladies in choir told me Amelia was sick. I should have known.”

“And what did you expect her friends and neighbors to say? That her husband had hit her and she was embarrassed to show the bruises in public?”

“Not just her, Nathan. He hit Peter too.”

Jake got out of the swing and began a wobbly walk, all dizzy from the spinning, and I lost track of the conversation in the kitchen for a moment. Jake fell down and I heard my mother’s voice again with a tautness near anger.

“I don’t expect them to tell me the truth, Nathan. I’m sure in their minds it’s no one’s business but the Klements’. But they should tell you.”

“Because I’m their pastor?”

“Because you’re her pastor, too. And if she can’t turn to anyone else, she ought to be able to turn to you. People tell you their secrets, Nathan. I know they do. And not just because you’re their pastor.”

Jake finally got up and went back to the tire. I would have spun him again but he waved me off and began to swing normally.

I heard water run in the kitchen sink and a glass fill and then my father said, “He spent time in a North Korean POW camp. Did you know that, Ruth? He still has nightmares. He drinks because he thinks it helps him deal with the nightmares.”

“You have nightmares. You don’t drink.”

“Every man handles in a different way the damage war did to him.”

“Some men seem to have put their wars behind them easily enough. I’ve heard some men say being in the army was the best time of their lives.”

“Then they must have fought in different wars than I did and Travis Klement.”

From the swing Jake called to me, “Want to play catch?”

I said sure and started for the house to get the ball and our baseball gloves. My father came out the side door from the kitchen and walked toward the church. I quickly fell in step beside him and asked where he was going.

“To get Gus,” he said.

“Why?”

I already suspected the answer. Gus was familiar with the drinking establishments in the valley of the Minnesota River and my father was not. If anyone would have an idea about where Mr. Klement was getting drunk it would be Gus.

“I need his help,” he replied.

“Can I go?”

“No.”

“Please.”

“I said no.” My father seldom spoke sharply but his voice made it clear that on this subject he would brook no argument. I stopped and he walked alone to the church.

Jake and I went inside the house where my mother had begun distractedly preparing lunch. Upstairs, my brother grabbed his ball glove from where it lay on the floor. I began digging through the closet in search of mine.

Jake sat on his bed and put the glove to his nose as if inhaling the good aroma of the old leather and said, “He never talks about the war.”

I was surprised because I thought he’d been so involved with his tire swing that he couldn’t have heard the kitchen conversation. Jake was always amazing me this way. I found my glove, an old Rawlings first baseman’s mitt, and put it on and slapped the soft palm with my hard fist.

“Maybe he will someday,” I said.

“Yeah, maybe someday,” Jake said but not necessarily because he believed it. Sometimes he just liked agreeing with me.

Karl was the only child of Axel and Julia Brandt. Axel Brandt owned the brewery in New Bremen which had been built by his great-grandfather and was among the first businesses established when the town was originally settled. For more than a hundred years the enterprise had prospered. The brewery employed a significant workforce and was part of the economic lifeblood of New Bremen. In a way it was the town’s crown jewel and the Brandts were about as near to royalty as you’d find in the Midwest. They lived of course on the Heights in a sprawling white-pillared mansion with a large marble patio in back that had a view of the town below and below that the Flats and beyond the Flats the broad crawl of the river.

Karl Brandt and Ariel had gone steady for almost a year and although my mother didn’t like the idea, their relationship was more or less her doing. Every summer since we’d moved to New Bremen my mother had mounted a musical production that tapped the talent of the town’s youth and that was presented in the band shell in Luther Park the first weekend in August. The citizens of New Bremen turned out in extraordinary numbers. For some time after the last bow of the final show had been taken the talk of the town was prideful, not only because the young people had displayed such extraordinary talent but also because they were evidence that New Bremen was fostering in its youth the kinds of values that would serve both the community and the country well. In the summer when they were seventeen, Ariel and Karl had been chosen by my mother as the leads in a musical called The Boy Friend. By the end of the production the pair of stars were inseparable. For a while my mother looked on the relationship as a natural extension of the time and energy the two teenagers had invested in the production and she predicted it would not last beyond the turning of the leaves in autumn. But another summer had come to the valley of the Minnesota River and Karl and Ariel’s relationship seemed as consuming as ever. Its intensity alarmed not only my mother but also Julia Brandt who, whenever the two women happened to meet, was-my mother said in words that would have made the New York famous writers’ school proud-“cold as an Arctic winter.”

Despite her disapproval of the intensity of his relationship with her daughter, my mother liked Karl and often invited him for dinner. Ariel had never once dined with the Brandts, a fact not at all lost on my mother. Karl was polite and funny and an athlete who’d lettered in football and basketball and baseball. He’d been accepted to St. Olaf’s which was a college in Northfield, Minnesota, where he intended to play football and get a degree and then return to New Bremen to help his father run the brewery. When I looked up the hill from town and saw the walls of the mansion white among the greenery I thought Karl Brandt’s future sounded pretty swell.