William Krueger - Ordinary Grace

“Frank, it’s not my place to talk to you about what your father experienced in the war. But I’ll tell you about the war in general. You talk to a man like Doyle and he’ll tell you a lot of bullshit. You watch John Wayne and Audie Murphy in the movie house and it probably seems easy killing men. The truth is that when you kill a man it doesn’t matter if he’s your enemy and if he’s trying to kill you. That moment of his death will eat at you for the rest of your life. It’ll dig into bone so deep inside you that not even the hand of God is going to be able to pull it out, I don’t care how much you pray. And you multiply that feeling by several years and too many doomed engagements and more horror, Frankie, than you can possibly imagine. And the utter senselessness and the total hopelessness become your enemy as much as any man pointing a rifle at you. And because they were officers, some men like your father were forced to be the architects of that senselessness, and what they asked of themselves and of the men they commanded was a burden no human being should have to shoulder. Frankie, your father someday may tell you about the war or he may not. But whatever you hear from Doyle or from anyone else will never be your father’s truth.”

“You’re not afraid of fireworks,” I said.

“I’ve got my own devils. And Doyle, he’s got his.”

We’d walked to the end of a street with a guardrail and thirty yards beyond it ran the river. In the pale thin light that was all that was left of the day the water had become blue-black and looked like a satin ribbon torn from a dress. Far off along the highway to Mankato car headlights flew across the face of the hills and blinked off and on as they were obscured occasionally by trees and barns and outbuildings and they reminded me of fireflies. I sat on the guardrail and looked back at the Flats where the lights of the homes held constant.

“I’ve got twenty-seven dollars saved, Gus. I was going to buy a bunch of fireworks. I don’t want fireworks anymore.”

Gus sat down beside me. “I’m guessing you’ll find something to spend it on, Frankie. Hell, if you can’t think of anything else, I could always use a loan.” He laughed and bumped my leg playfully with his own and then he stood. He glanced back at the river where bullfrogs sang a chorus so loud you could barely hear yourself think. “We’d best be getting home,” he said.

On Sunday morning Jake complained that he wasn’t feeling well and asked if he could stay home. For me skipping church was always a delightful daydream. The idea of missing out on three services and lounging around the house in my pajamas was enough to make me drool. If the request had come from me my mother would have suspected something but my brother didn’t fake things. She felt his head with the back of her hand then used a thermometer. He didn’t have a fever. She gently probed his neck feeling for swelling and found none. When she asked him what specifically were his symptoms he gave her a lackluster stare and said that he just felt really lousy. She talked it over with my father and they agreed that he should stay in bed. The plan was that we’d do the service in Cadbury and check on him when we came back for the worship in New Bremen.

During the service in Cadbury I sat with Peter Klement. He came with his mother who sang in the choir. The black eye that he’d sported the afternoon we visited his house was little more than a shadow now and neither of us said anything about it. During the social time after church we chucked rocks at a telephone pole where someone had stapled a poster for a circus coming to Mankato and we talked about the Twins. Ariel finally called to me and I left with my family to return to New Bremen for the second service of the morning.

When we pulled up to the house Jake was waiting on the front porch and Gus was with him. They hurried down the steps and it was clear something was wrong.

“You better get up to the hospital, Captain,” Gus said. “Emil Brandt tried to kill himself this morning.”

I got the details from Jake who stayed behind with me while my father and mother and Ariel drove to the hospital. It had happened like this.

Jake had been in bed and trying to sleep. We hadn’t been gone fifteen minutes when there was a furious pounding at the front door. He got up and went downstairs and found Lise Brandt on the porch. He said her face looked like something out of a monster movie it was so distorted and frightening. She babbled and gesticulated and he stepped outside and told her to calm down even though his own heart was galloping because he could see that whatever she was trying to communicate, it was something horrific. She gripped his head in her hands and squeezed so hard that he thought his eyes would pop out. It took him a few minutes but in the end he understood. Emil was in trouble. Emil was dying.

He’d run across the street to the church with Lise at his side and he’d gone downstairs where Gus was sitting on the toilet. Gus had sworn at them and reached out and slammed shut the door to his little bathroom and Jake had knocked on it hard and hollered that Emil Brandt was dying and they needed Gus’s help. Gus was out quickly and ushered them back to the house and grabbed the phone and called the fire department and told them to get their asses to Emil Brandt’s place, the man was dying. Then he mounted his motorcycle with Jake behind him and Lise in the sidecar and they shot up the road to Brandt’s house. By the time they got there the fire department ambulance was parked in front.

One of the firemen told Gus that it looked like Brandt had swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills. They were pumping his stomach. They wouldn’t let Lise into the bedroom but she tried to shove her way inside and the fireman who’d talked to Gus held her back. The moment he touched her she went berserk. It was as if his hands were fire. She leaped back and folded herself into a corner of the living room and began to scream uncontrollably. The fireman reached out to her again but Jake told him no, don’t touch her, she can’t stand being touched by strangers. He told the fireman to wait and she would calm down eventually. Brandt was brought out on a gurney while Lise screamed in her corner and they loaded him into the ambulance and they rushed him to the hospital. When Lise calmed down as Jake had predicted he made her understand what had happened and although she was frantic about her brother she didn’t commence again to screaming.

Someone had called Axel Brandt and he arrived minutes after the firemen had sped away with Emil. Gus explained things to him and he signed to his sister and told Gus they were going to the hospital. And when they were gone the house was silent and empty, a place that felt as if a tornado had swept past and sucked out the air and neither Gus nor Jake wanted to linger. They came back on the motorcycle to wait for my parents and to deliver the news.

My father charged Gus with the responsibility of explaining the situation to Albert Griswold, a deacon who usually came early to help set up the worship. Griswold was a town councilman who could talk your brain numb. When Gus laid things out for him and made it clear that he needed to conduct the service, I saw the man puff up with pleasure at the opportunity. His wife was in the choir and was a fair organist and my mother left instructions with Gus that Lorraine Griswold was to lead the music for the service.

Whatever illness had afflicted Jake seemed to have been cured by the events of that morning and after my parents left he dressed in his Sunday clothes and was prepared to attend church. For a brief time I weighed the delicious possibility of skipping the service. In all the confusion who would notice? But under the circumstances it seemed that my presence and Jake’s would be judicious and I steeled myself for what I knew would be a long grind. Jake turned out to be a bit of a celebrity and much to his dismay he was assaulted with questions about what had happened. He tried to answer but his stutter was painful to him and to everyone listening and he looked to me for help. I was only too happy to oblige and in the story I told I made him a hero, insisting that it was only because of Jake’s quick action that our most famous citizen was saved from death by his own hand.