William Krueger - Ordinary Grace

I listened until the radio clicked off and I began to drift into sleep and then I heard the return of the Packard and I woke up. Below me the screen door opened and I knew Mother had gone out onto the porch to greet my father. I went to the window and watched him walk from the garage with Gus at his side.

“Thanks, Gus,” my father said.

“A good day’s work, Captain. Let’s hope it takes. Good night.”

Gus left him and headed for the church. My father joined my mother on the porch and they came inside and went to the kitchen where I knew she would dish out the warmed-over spaghetti. I lay back down on my bed. Through the heat grate I heard the chairs scrape the linoleum as my parents settled at the table and the quiet that followed as my father ate.

“We finally found him in Mankato drinking in a bar,” Dad said. “He was pretty drunk. We did our best to sober him up. Fed him something. We talked and I tried to convince him to pray with me, which he refused to do. In the end, though, he was better. He was ready to go home. He felt pretty bad about how he’d treated Amelia and Peter. He said things have been tough lately. He swore it would never happen again.”

“And you believed him?”

I heard my father slide his fork across his plate as he gathered the last of his supper. “Ruth, I don’t know that God can reach everyone. Or maybe it’s just that I don’t know how to deliver everyone to God. Travis isn’t out of the woods. I worry about him and about his family. And I don’t know what more I can do at the moment except pray for them.”

I heard water run in the sink and the clatter of plate and fork as my mother laid them there and I heard silence and I imagined her turning back to my father still sitting at the table and the last thing I heard that night was her soft voice telling him, “Thank you, Nathan. Thank you for trying.”

Monday was my father’s official day off. After breakfast he usually took what he called a constitutional which was a walk from the Flats to the home of Emil Brandt. Because Brandt had a sister, Lise, whom Jake had long ago befriended, my brother often accompanied Dad. I didn’t mind going with them on that particular Monday, as I was bound by my father’s stricture to stay in the yard unless given permission to do otherwise. Accompanying him was like receiving a prison pass. Ariel went along but she was often at the home of Emil Brandt anyway, not only under his tutelage for her piano and organ keyboard work and her musical composition but also working with him to complete a memoir he’d been dictating for more than a year.

Although Emil and Lise Brandt were part of the royalty that was the Brandt family-they were the brother and sister of Axel Brandt and, therefore, uncle and aunt to Karl-they lived in a kind of exile in a beautifully renovated farmhouse on the western edge of New Bremen overlooking the river. They were Brandts in name and in fortune but they were different from the others. Emil was a piano virtuoso and a composer of significant reputation and in his youth he’d been a carouser of great celebrity. After he’d proposed to my mother and then left her, he’d gone to study music in New York City and had become friends with Aaron Copland. Copland had just returned from Hollywood where he’d hit it big with a score for the film version of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. The composer had encouraged the struggling Emil to seek his fortune on the West Coast, and the young man had followed that advice. From the very beginning he did well, found easy work in the music side of the film business, and fell in with a good-time Hollywood crowd. He befriended Scott Fitzgerald in the author’s final years of near obscurity, and the Andrews Sisters who were originally from Minnesota, and Judy Garland, nee Frances Gumm, also of Minnesota. Until the war cut short his carousing with the stars he was a young musician with two roads before him: one that led to the glamour of continuing to compose for the big screen and the other that wound its way back to the land from which he came and the music that rose from black soil and strong wind and deep root. All this Ariel told me from what she’d learned typing the memoir he dictated.

Lise Brandt was another story. She’d been born ten years after Emil, born deaf and difficult. She was the child of whom the Brandts, if they spoke of her at all, spoke in somber tones. She hadn’t attended school but had received what schooling could be given from special tutors who’d resided in the Brandt home. She was subject to tantrums and to fits of rage and only Emil seemed able to tolerate her outbursts and she for her part adored him. When Emil returned from the Second World War blind and disfigured and wanting only to feed in isolation on the meat of his bitterness, his family had purchased and completely renovated a farmhouse that was a stone’s throw from the edge of town. For companionship they’d given him Lise who was in her midteens then and had no future that anyone could see. This union had served both damaged Brandts well. Lise took care of her brother and her brother offered Lise a place where, in all the isolated silent years ahead, she would have purpose and protection.

This too Ariel told me, but it would be a while before I understood the importance of these things.

When we approached the white picket fence Lise Brandt was already at work among the rows of her vegetable garden wearing soiled gloves and working the damp earth with the sharp edge of her hoe. Emil Brandt sat in a wicker chair on the porch and next to him was a white wicker table and another chair and on the table was set a chessboard with all the pieces arranged and ready for play.

“Will you have coffee, Nathan?” Brandt called out to us as we entered the gate.

He knew we were coming and the sound of the hinges had probably alerted him to our arrival but he loved to give the impression that although he was as blind as one of the fence posts he could somehow see us. He smiled as we advanced up the walk and he said, “Is that Ariel with you and those two hooligans you claim as your sons?” How he knew the exact makeup of my father’s entourage was a mystery to me but my father spoke of him as the most intelligent man he knew and clearly Emil Brandt had his ways. Lise left off her hoeing and stood tall and plain and still as a scarecrow as she watched us intrude. Intrusion but for Jake who peeled away and ran to her where they communicated in signs and gestures and Jake followed her to the toolshed and came out with a garden rake and shadowed her as she began again the work in the garden.

My father mounted the steps and said, “I’d love some coffee, Emil.”

The blind man said, “Would you mind getting it, Ariel? You know where everything is. And get whatever you’d like for yourself. I’ve left the tape recorder on my desk and there’s plenty of paper for you at the typewriter.”

“All right,” Ariel said. She went inside in a way that seemed to me as familiar as entering her own house.

I sat on the porch steps. My father took the second wicker chair and said, “How is the memoir coming?”

“Words are different from musical notes, Nathan. It’s a hell of an undertaking and I’m not sure I’m very good at it. That said, I’m having a fine time with the project.”

The property of Emil and Lise Brandt was among the most beautiful in all of New Bremen. Along the fence Lise had planted butterfly bushes that bloomed red and yellow all summer long. Here and there about the lawn she’d created enclaves of flowers like islands that she’d edged with red brick and that exploded with blossoms of a dozen varieties in color and form. Her vegetable garden occupied a space as large as the foundation of our whole house and by the end of every summer the tomatoes and cabbage and carrots and sweet corn and squash and other vegetables grew huge and heavy on vine and stalk. Lise could not communicate well with the human world but she and plants seemed to understand each other perfectly.