William Krueger - Ordinary Grace

He was tall with gray hair and a gray mustache that he often smoothed unconsciously as he talked. He spoke slowly and with great consideration in the words he chose and despite what I believed to be the gruesome nature of his occupation I thought of him as a kind man.

I wasn’t allowed to be at the river when the sheriff’s people retrieved Ariel’s body for transport to van der Waal’s Funeral Home. My father was there and to this day he has never spoken of that experience. For my part I imagined it a hundred times that summer. It haunted me. Not Ariel’s death itself which was still a mystery but her rising from the river in the hands of my father and the other men and her repose as I envisioned it on the clean soft bed of a satin-lined coffin at van der Waal’s. I didn’t know then in the way I do now the details of death in a river, of a body submerged for three days, of the desecration of the flesh that occurs during an autopsy, and I will not tell you these things. I imagined Ariel as I’d last seen her, beautiful in her red dress with her long auburn hair brushed silky and held back with the mother-of-pearl barrette and about her throat a gold necklace with a heart-shaped locket and on her wrist a gold watch and in her eyes a tearful sheen of happiness as she accepted the applause for her music that Fourth of July night at Luther Park.

When Jake asked me what I’d observed in the murky water beneath the trestle but wouldn’t let him see I described to him Ariel with her hair flowing and her dress aflutter as if she was simply standing in a strong summer breeze and he seemed satisfied with that and relieved. I have never asked him if now he understands the distasteful truth of what must surely have been the state of her body and I have tried my best not to imagine it myself.

An awful hush settled over our house. My mother became nearly mute and more often than not the only sound from her was weeping. She kept the curtains drawn so that it felt as if permanent night had fallen. Never much concerned anyway with her mundane domestic duties she completely stopped cooking and cleaning and sat for hours in the quiet dark of the living room. She was flesh without spirit, eyes without sight. It felt as if I’d lost not only my sister but my mother as well.

My grandfather and Liz came and stayed for the better part of every day. Liz took responsibility for the kitchen and for the phone which rang often with calls of condolence and she greeted those who came in person to offer the comfort of a few words and a prepared casserole and our kitchen became a wondrous buffet of midwest hot dish. Emil Brandt continued to be my mother’s constant companion but even his presence was insufficient to lift her from the dismal place into which she’d fallen.

From the moment he looked down beside me where I stood on the trestle and saw what I saw, my father became a man I didn’t recognize. He had turned to me and said, “Come along, Frank,” as if what we’d seen was nothing more than an unpleasantness or a discourtesy best ignored. He didn’t speak to me the entire way home and once there guided me up to my room and from the telephone in the hallway called the sheriff. When he came to me afterward where I sat on my bed he said, “Not a word to your mother, Frank. Not a word until we’re sure.” His face was pale and stiff as if sculpted of beeswax and I knew he was just as sure as I was of what we’d seen. He left me and I heard him go downstairs and speak with my grandfather and then I heard the screen door open and close and I went to the window and although my heart had already broken for Ariel it seemed to break again as I watched him walk alone back to the trestle.

In the days afterward Jake grew sullen and kept mostly to our bedroom. Ariel’s death devastated me and I broke into tears at odd moments but anger was Jake’s response. He lay on his bed and brooded and if I tried to talk to him he was liable to snap at me. He cried too but they were hot tears and he wiped at them with his fists and flung them away. His anger spilled out at everyone and everything but it seemed especially directed at God. Prayers at night had been a routine all our lives yet after Ariel’s death Jake refused to pray. Nor would he bow his head for grace before meals. My father didn’t make a point of it. He had so much on his shoulders already I suppose that he simply decided to let Jake and God work out the trouble between them. But I tried to talk sense into my brother one night upstairs in our room. He told me just to l-l-l-leave him alone. I’d had enough of him at that point and I said, “The hell with you. Why are you so mad at me? I didn’t k-k-k-kill Ariel.” He looked up at me from the bed where he lay and said with what sounded like threat in his voice, “Somebody did.”

Which was a possibility I’d chosen to reject entirely. In my thinking, Ariel had simply had too much to drink at the party and had stumbled into the river and drowned. She was a terrible swimmer. Her death was horrible beyond belief but it was an accident and accidents happened all the time even to the best of people. Or so I told myself. Looking back now, it’s easy to see what I was really afraid of. Which was that if Ariel’s death wasn’t accidental, then I had let the man most probably responsible for it get away and, oh Christ, I didn’t think I could live with that.

So even after Jake threw the possibility at me I continued to blind myself to it. Until Gus and Doyle opened my eyes.

Gus was a constant but quiet presence through much of the aftermath of Ariel’s death. When he entered the house he never ventured into the living room which had become like a cave where my mother brooded. He kept his presence to the kitchen where he talked with my father and ate the food which Liz dished from the contributions that poured in from friends and neighbors and members of my father’s congregations. I had the sense that he served as messenger and confidant and runner of errands in order to lessen my father’s burden.

Late Saturday afternoon, Gus caught me alone in the front yard with a stick in my hand making life miserable for a colony of ants. He stood beside me and watched the rage I’d incited among the insects as a result of breaking open the little anthill they’d carefully constructed. “How’re you doing, Frank?” he asked.

I watched the ants going berserk for a while before I answered, “Okay, I guess.”

“Haven’t seen you out much.”

“Too hot,” I said. Though the truth was that I didn’t feel like seeing anybody or being seen. I missed Ariel so much, felt so empty and hurting that I was afraid I might break down and cry at any moment and I didn’t want anyone seeing me if that happened.

“Bet a tall root beer in a frosted mug would cool you off. What do you say we head up to Halderson’s Drugstore on my motorcycle?”

A ride on Gus’s Indian Chief was always a treat and I was tired of the house and the darkness inside and Jake’s sullenness and the unsettling strangeness of everything that had been so preciously familiar and I said, “Sure.”

“Think Jake might want to go?”

I shook my head. “He just wants to be upstairs and be mad.”

“All right if I ask him?”

I gave a shrug and went back to poking at the ant colony.

Gus returned a few minutes later without Jake. I was sure my brother had told him to get l-l-l-lost but Gus reported that Jake had just said he’d rather be alone right now. Gus lightly punched my arm and said, “Come on, Frankie. Let’s ride.”

We didn’t go straight to Halderson’s. Gus took us out of town and over back roads. We flew between fields of corn that stood as high as my waist and that stretched away to the horizon on all sides with hot silver sunlight pouring over their leaves so that they glistened like the endless water of a green sea. And we dipped into the cool shade of hollows where creeks ran beneath leafy canopies of cottonwood and hackberry and birch. We climbed to the top of the ridge that marked the southern boundary of the river valley and below us spread a land full of the promise of a good fall harvest and cut by a river that I understood was the reason for the rich life there. And although I’d been angry at the river for Ariel’s death I understood the river was not to blame.