William Krueger - Ordinary Grace

Gus was in and out. I heard the growl of his motorcycle arriving and leaving. He was in touch with Doyle who was deeply involved in the effort to locate Ariel and he often slipped into the house and spoke with my father in low tones and then left without a word to the rest of us. I found out later he was bringing my father information about the reports the sheriff’s people and the town’s chief of police were receiving concerning Ariel’s disappearance. A girl fitting her description had been seen in the company of some boys down in Blue Earth or someone thought they saw her walking along the road near Morton or she’d been spotted at a truck stop in Redwood Falls.

It was an awful time and Jake and I frequently sought sanctuary in our room. Jake would lie on his bed with one of his comic books open but more often than not instead of reading he stared silently at the ceiling. Or he sat at his little workbench and tried to focus on his plastic airplane models and our room was filled with the dizzying smell of glue. Much of the time I sat on the floor by the window looking at the church across the street and wondering about my father’s God. In his sermons my father often talked about trusting God and trusting that no matter how alone we might feel God was always with us. In all that terrible waiting I didn’t feel the presence of God, not one bit. I prayed but unlike my father who seemed to believe that he was being heard, I felt as if I was talking to the air. Nothing came to me in return. Not Ariel or any relief from the worry about her.

All day the rain continued and the hours passed in a deep fog of fear and waiting. Since Ariel had gone missing my parents had had almost no sleep and they looked terrible. That night as Jake and I lay in bed my father received a telephone call from the sheriff. He took the call in the hallway outside our room and I got up and stood in the doorway and listened to his end of the conversation. He was grim and clearly upset. When the call was finished he told me to go back to bed and he went downstairs where my mother and Emil Brandt and my grandfather and Liz sat together in the living room. As quietly as I could I crept to the top of the stairs and listened.

We were not the only family suffering in the wake of Ariel’s disappearance, my father reported. Because of Warren Redstone, Danny O’Keefe’s family was being harassed. They’d received a number of threatening calls and had stopped answering their telephone. That very night their living room window had been shattered by a rock thrown from the dark outside. My father said he was going to the O’Keefes’ house and apologize to them.

“Apologize for what?” my grandfather asked.

“For the ignorance of others,” my father said.

“What ignorance?” my grandfather persisted. “Those people housed and fed Redstone. My god, Nathan, do you believe that they didn’t know what kind of man he is?”

“And what kind of man is he, Oscar?”

My grandfather sputtered. “He. . he. . well he’s a troublemaker.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“Well,” my grandfather said, “it was a long time ago.”

“Oscar, the only thing I know for sure about Warren Redstone is that he intervened when Morris Engdahl tried to hurt Frank.”

“He had Ariel’s locket,” my mother said in a stone voice.

“Yes,” my grandfather chimed in. “What about that?”

“Frank says Redstone claimed to have found it.”

“And you believe the lies of an Indian?” my grandfather shot back.

“An Indian.” My father’s voice was stern but not cold. “If you ask me, Oscar, I’d say that’s the whole point of this harassment. It has nothing to do with Ariel. Ariel is simply the excuse some people are using to let loose their prejudice and their cruelty. So I’m going to the O’Keefes’ and I’m going to tell them I’m sorry for their ordeal.”

My grandfather said bitterly, “And if Mr. Redstone is responsible for Ariel being missing?”

“There’s a good explanation why Ariel is gone,” my father replied. “I truly believe that. And I believe she’ll be coming back to us. There’s no reason in the world why the O’Keefes should have to suffer.”

I heard him cross the room and from the dark at the top of the stairway where I sat hidden I caught a glimpse of him as he left through the front door.

“A fool,” my grandfather said.

“Yes, but a great one,” Emil Brandt replied.

Loss, once it’s become a certainty, is like a rock you hold in your hand. It has weight and dimension and texture. It’s solid and can be assessed and dealt with. You can use it to beat yourself or you can throw it away. The uncertainty of Ariel’s disappearance was vastly different. It surrounded us and clung to us. We breathed it in and breathed it out and we were never sure of its composition. We had reason to be afraid yes, but without any real idea of what had happened or was happening to Ariel we had every reason to hope as well. Hope was what my father held to. My mother chose despair. Emil Brandt was a constant presence and a great comfort to her and was sometimes able to discuss with her in a way my father could not the darker possibilities of the situation. Jake turned to silence which because of his stuttering was a familiar shelter for him. Gus just looked grim all the time.

Me, I dreamed the best of scenarios. I imagined Ariel sick of life in the valley and eager for experience and I saw her on the seat beside a friendly trucker rolling across the high plains with her eyes on the Rocky Mountains that rose like a dark blue wave out of yellow wheat fields and somewhere beyond those mountains was Hollywood and greatness. Or I saw her bound for Chicago or New Orleans where she would also make a name for herself. Sometimes I saw her frightened and desperate in her flight which in a way was hopeful because it meant that we would get a call from her from a phone booth in the middle of somewhere she didn’t want to be asking my father to please come and bring her home. I believed that one way or another we would hear from her and she would return. I believed it with all my heart and when I prayed that was my prayer.

For two days the sheriff’s department and the town police conducted dozens of interviews with the kids who’d been at the party on the river and with Ariel’s friends but they learned nothing that helped clear up the mystery.

By the third afternoon the atmosphere of our house so oppressed me that I began to think I would suffocate or go crazy. My father had gone to a meeting with the other clergy in town to discuss the concern about the possibility of violence, not just against the O’Keefes but also against several Sioux families in the area who’d received overt threats though they had nothing to do with my sister. I’d heard that the other kids on the Flats were keeping away from Danny and

I thought that was wrong and I wanted to show him that as far as I was concerned there was nothing between us but the friendship that we’d always shared. I told Jake I was going to Danny’s house and he said he wanted to go along and I said that was okay by me. My mother was with Brandt in the living room where the drapes were drawn and I spoke into the cool dark there. “Jake and me are going to Danny O’Keefe’s house,” I said. “He’s been having a tough time, I heard.”

“Just like your father,” my mother said. I couldn’t see her face but her voice sounded displeased.

“Can we go?”

She didn’t answer immediately but Emil Brandt whispered something and she said, “Yes, but be careful.”

The rain had stopped sometime in the night and was followed by a hot and windless summer day. Everything was soaked and the ground was soggy and because of the humidity the air we breathed sat heavy in our chests. On the Flats nothing moved. The drapes were drawn against the heat and nowhere did we hear the sound of kids at play. My father said that parents were watching their children carefully, keeping them close to home until the mystery of Ariel’s disappearance was solved. It felt like an episode from The Twilight Zone in which everyone except Jake and me had vanished from the world.