William Krueger - Ordinary Grace

Ariel brought my father coffee and said, “I’ll just get started now.”

“Fine,” Brandt said and offered a smile that curled smoothly into the normal flesh of his right cheek but crinkled the thick scar tissue of his left.

Ariel went back inside and a few minutes later through the window of a room at the corner of the house came Brandt’s voice on the tape recorder followed by the rapid tap of typewriter keys. As my father and Emil Brandt talked and began their weekly game of chess I listened to Ariel’s fingers flying over the typewriter keyboard. My father had insisted that she take business courses and learn typing and shorthand because he thought that regardless of her dreams and intentions such training would stand a woman in good stead.

“E-four,” Brandt said offering the opening move of the game.

My father advanced Brandt’s pawn. He made all the moves for Brandt who could not see the board with his eyes but who had the marvelous ability to visualize the game as it progressed.

My father had grown up in the rough port city of Duluth, the son of a seaman who was often gone on long voyages, not a bad circumstance apparently because when the man was home he was prone to drinking and throwing an angry fist at his wife and son. I never met this grandfather of mine because along with twenty-nine other hands he’d been lost at sea when the coal carrier he was working on had gone down in a gale off the coast of Nova Scotia. My father was the first Drum to go to college. He planned to be an attorney, a litigator. My mother told us that when she met him he was whip smart and cocksure and she knew absolutely he would be the best lawyer in the Gopher State. She’d married him at the end of her junior year at the University of Minnesota, where she was majoring in music and drama. He was, her sorority sisters agreed, quite a catch. My father had just finished his final year of law school. This was 1942. He’d already enlisted and was preparing to go off to war. By the time he left to fight-beginning in North Africa, then through numerous campaigns all the way to the Battle of the Bulge-my mother was pregnant with Ariel. The war changed Nathan Drum, changed him dramatically, and completely altered his plans. He came home with no desire to fight battles in a courtroom. He went instead into the seminary and was ordained. By the time he took charge of the Third Avenue Methodist Church on the Flats, we’d lived in four other towns in Minnesota. A minister’s family never stayed long in one place, a difficult aspect of the job we were all expected to accept without complaint. But because my mother had grown up in New Bremen and we came often to visit my grandparents we already knew the town well. Although my father and Emil Brandt were acquainted, it was the weekly chess that brought them close. The games had evolved gradually and were mostly an opportunity, it seemed to me, for my father and Brandt, two men of the same age and scarred by the same war, to relate in a manner that didn’t require my mother’s presence. Though Brandt had loved her and abandoned her, that didn’t appear to be an issue. Or so I believed then.

“E-five,” my father announced and moved his own pawn. “Ariel says it’s fascinating. Your memoir, I mean.”

“Ariel is a young woman and young women fascinate easily, Nathan. Your daughter is gifted in many ways but she has a lot to learn about the broader world. Nf-three.”

My father lifted Brandt’s knight and moved him to the proper square. “Ruth believes she’s destined for greatness. What do you think, Emil? D-six.”

“D-four. Ariel’s a fine musician, there’s no doubt about that. As talented as any I’ve heard her age. After Juilliard I suspect that she could audition and secure a position in any fine symphony orchestra. She’s also a gifted composer. She still has a great deal to learn, but that will come with time and maturity. Hell, if she wanted, she could even be a fine teacher. What I’m saying, Nathan, is that she has enormous potential in so many areas. But greatness? Who can say? That’s something, it seems to me, that depends more on God and circumstance than on our own efforts.”

“Ruth has such hopes for her. Bg-four,” my father said and moved his bishop.

“All parents hope greatness for their children, don’t they? Or maybe not. I don’t have children so what do I know? D takes E-five.”

“B takes F-three. It may be a moot point. Ariel’s talking about not going to Juilliard.”

“What?” Brandt’s sightless eyes seemed full of amazement.

“I’m sure she’s just dragging her feet. Last-minute doubts.”

“Ah,” Brandt said and nodded his understanding. “Natural I suppose. I have to say, I’ll miss her when she goes. I’m not sure I’ll be able to trust my memories to someone else. Q takes F-three.”

The work Ariel did for Brandt was part of the arrangement struck to compensate him for his time working with her to improve her playing and her music composition. My parents could in no way afford to pay properly for such a service. For a man of Brandt’s stature it was paltry payment but his help was clearly offered as a favor because of his affection for my mother and his friendship with my father.

“What did Ruth say when Ariel dropped this bomb?”

“She went through the roof,” my father said.

Brandt laughed. “Of course. And you?”

My father studied the board. “I only want her to be happy. D takes E-five.”

“Bc-four. And what is happiness, Nathan? In my experience, it’s only a moment’s pause here and there on what is otherwise a long and difficult road. No one can be happy all the time. Better, I think, to wish for her wisdom, a virtue not so fickle.”

“Nf-six,” my father said hesitantly.

“Qb-three,” Brandt immediately responded.

My father studied the board a minute, then said, “Qe-seven. Do you know Travis Klement, Emil?”

“No. Nc-three.”

“He lives in Cadbury. His wife is a member of one of my congregations. He’s a vet. Korea. Had a tough time over there. It’s eating at him, I believe. He drinks. He’s hard on his family. C-six.”

“Sometimes, Nathan, I think that it wasn’t so much the war as what we took into the war. Whatever cracks were already there the war forced apart, and what we might otherwise have kept inside came spilling out. You and your life philosophy, for example. You may have gone to war thinking you were going to be a hotshot lawyer afterward, but I believe that deep inside of you there was always the seed of a minister.”

“And in you?”

“A blind man.” Brandt smiled.

“I don’t know how to reach Travis.”

“I don’t know that everyone you reach out to you can help, Nathan. A lot to expect of yourself, it seems to me. Bg-five.”

My father sat back and stroked his cheek. “B-five,” he said but not with great conviction.

“Dad,” Jake shouted and came running from the garden. He had a rake in one hand and in the other he held a wriggling garter snake.

“Don’t hurt it, Son,” my father said.

“I won’t. Neat huh, Frank.”

“A snake? Big deal,” I said. “When you find a rattler, let me know.”

Jake’s enthusiasm wasn’t dulled by my response. He returned happily to the garden where Lise waited. They gestured to each other and Jake put the snake down and they both stood and watched it glide swiftly away among the stalks of sweet corn.

There seemed something preternatural about the relationship between the two of them and I have always believed it was because neither could communicate easily with the rest of the world. Though deaf, Lise had been trained to speak but was greatly reluctant to mouth the utterances that sounded odd and flat to the rest of us. Jake could barely complete a coherent utterance at all. They communicated in signs and gestures and facial expressions and perhaps even on a level that superseded the physical plane. With everyone else except her brother and Jake, Lise could be difficult. I believe now that it may have been a form of autism but in those days she was called touched. People thought of her as slow or simple because she would not look at them directly when she spoke, and on those rare occasions when she was forced to leave the safety of her yard and enter town, she would cross the street to avoid contact with someone approaching her on the sidewalk. Mostly she stayed inside the white picket fence and took care of the flowers and the garden and her brother.