William Krueger - Ordinary Grace

People looked aghast. “His own hand? He tried to kill himself?”

“That’s certainly how it looked,” I told them. “If Jake had come a few minutes later, Mr. Brandt would have been dead.”

Their eyes were full of amazement at both Brandt’s unthinkable behavior and young Jake’s valiant action.

I thought I might in this way, making him a hero, redeem myself in my brother’s opinion for turning him into such a vague and unimportant figure in my telling of the story of our discovery of the dead man. Not so. As I told and retold the events of that morning, each time inflating just a bit more the importance of Jake’s role, his scowl grew more profound and he finally grabbed the sleeve of my suit coat and pulled me out the church door and stuttered at me, “Just st-st-st-stop it.”

“What?” I said.

“Just t-t-tell the tr-tr-truth.”

“I am.”

“Bullshit, goddamn it!”

The sun stopped in its rising. The earth ceased to turn. I stood dumbfounded, staring at Jake, amazed at this blasphemy there on the very steps of the church and said with such clarity and power and without stumble that everyone inside could have heard. I felt the eyes of my father’s entire seated congregation shift to the church steps where we stood and I felt the wave of censure roll out from the sanctuary. Jake’s own eyes grew huge with fear and shame at the realization of what he’d just done and they held on my face and I knew he was terrified to look through the door at the people gathered inside who’d been stunned to silence.

Then I laughed. Oh, Christ, did I laugh. I couldn’t help myself it was all so unexpected and surreal. Jake fled, running from the church to our house across the street. And I turned back and entered the shadow of the sanctuary still smiling and suffered the glaring condemnation of the congregation and sat through the long service in which Albert Griswold held forth in his impromptu and interminable sermon about the need to impress godly values on the youth of the day and when it was over I walked back to the house and found Jake upstairs in our room and I apologized.

He stared sullenly at the ceiling and didn’t answer.

“It’s okay, Jake. It’s no big deal.”

“Everyone heard.”

“So?”

“They’ll tell Dad.”

“He won’t care.”

“He should. It was awful. And it was all your f-f-fault.”

“Don’t get mad at me. I was just trying to help.”

“I don’t n-n-need your help.”

I heard the creak of the floorboards just outside our room and when I turned there was Gus leaning against the doorway eyeing Jake with a grim countenance. “Bullshit, goddamn it,” he said repeating the words that were Jake’s transgression. “Bullshit, goddamn it, right there in the church doorway.” His lips went into a thin line like a little whip and he said again, “Bullshit, goddamn it.” He shook his head then a broad grin broke across his face and he laughed mightily. “Jakie, I can’t remember enjoying a moment in church more. No, sir, I can’t. You punched ’em square in the face of their piety. Bullshit, goddamn it.”

Jake’s mood didn’t improve much. “Dad’ll be mad,” he said.

“I’ll talk to your dad,” Gus said. “And, Jake, there’s going to be lots in this world you’re going to feel bad about. Save your regret for the important things, okay?”

Gus turned around and I heard the dance of his footsteps down the stairs and the last of his laughter and when he was gone the blessing that had been the lightness of his spirit seemed to have brightened Jake’s mood a bit and my brother looked like a man reprieved.

In the late afternoon my father came home from the hospital looking for Jake. He found us together in our room. Jake was reading one of his comic books and I was reading the book that Danny O’Keefe had told me about, a book called I Am Legend . My father had long ago made a purchase that did a good deal of damage to his chronically battered bank account. He’d invested in a fifty-four-volume set of books published by Encyclopaedia Britannica and called Great Books of the Western World. It included the works of Homer and Aeschylus and Sophocles and Plato and Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas and Dante and Chaucer and Shakespeare and Freud. It offered much of the most enlightened thinking by the greatest Western minds of the last two or three thousand years. When he walked into our room that afternoon and saw us reading instead comic books and pulp novels, he may well have been disappointed but he said nothing. He addressed Jake: “I need your help, guy.”

Jake put down the comic book and sat up. “What with?” he said.

“Lise Brandt. She won’t leave the hospital without Emil and they want to keep him for a while. She won’t listen to him or Axel or be reasoned with. Emil suggested that she might listen to you, especially if you were willing to stay with her until he could come home. What do you say?”

“All right.” Jake scooted off his bed.

“Can I come too?” I asked.

My father nodded and motioned for me to be quick about it.

The Minnesota Valley Community Hospital was a new structure of stunningly red brick built on a hill overlooking New Bremen. Its construction had been largely underwritten by the Brandt family. Emil’s room was on the second floor and the waiting area of that level was crowded. Brandt’s immediate family was there: his brother, Axel; Axel’s wife, Julia; his nephew, Karl, who sat with his arm protectively around Ariel’s shoulders. Some people had come from the small college on the hill where Emil was the crown jewel of the music faculty. My mother was there sitting on a windowsill smoking a cigarette in her Sunday finery and looking pensive. The only one I expected to see and did not was Lise.

Axel strode forward the moment Jake appeared. He was a tall handsome athletic man with thinning blond hair and eyes whose blue was so intense it was as if he’d purchased pieces of the sky for their making. He possessed an overall countenance that every time I saw him struck me as regretful.

“Thank you, Jake,” he said with great sincerity.

Jake nodded and I understood that in this gathering he was reluctant to speak.

My father said, “Where is she?”

“In Emil’s room. I can’t go near her. Nobody can. Jake, she won’t leave. But it’s important that she does. Emil badly needs rest. Will you talk to her?”

Jake looked down the corridor which at the moment was empty.

“We could remove her forcibly,” Axel went on, “but it would create such a scene and upset Emil further and I don’t want that. Please, will you talk to her?”

Jake looked up at Brandt and nodded.

Ariel left Karl and came to Jake and knelt down. Her eyes were feverish looking. “Oh, Jakie, please get her out of there without a scene. He needs his rest so.”

I heard him whisper, “I’ll try.”

Ariel kissed his cheek and he turned and walked away and on either side of him walked my father and Axel Brandt. I watched him keeping pace between those two men who towered above him and although it wasn’t as if Jake was walking toward a firing squad I understood nonetheless that a heavy yoke had been laid upon his small shoulders. I had tried that morning to make my brother out to be a hero and in doing so had stretched the truth. As he disappeared into Emil Brandt’s room I understood with great affection that I needn’t have done so.

I sat beside my mother on the windowsill which had a marvelous view of the town. The hill was high and steep and below us New Bremen lay quiet on that Sunday afternoon. The streets platted so carefully by those early German immigrants reminded me of the squares on the chessboard that my father and Emil Brandt used for their weekly game which would probably not be played this Monday. My mother put her hand on my leg and squeezed. She didn’t look at me and I wasn’t sure if it was some kind of nonverbal signal or if I was simply a touchstone that helped to ground her in the face of the uncertainty at hand.