William Krueger - Ordinary Grace

“Here,” he said. “I think a bonus is due.”

We were usually paid two dollars apiece for the yard work but that day my grandfather gave us each a ten-dollar bill. I remember a heated discussion my parents once had in which my father said that my grandfather was a man who believed that money could buy you anything in life including love. Although I hadn’t really thought about it, I’d pretty much agreed with his assessment. That Sunday afternoon I saw something else. Whether my eyes had been opened by Ariel’s death or whether it was my grandfather’s understanding and behavior that had altered I couldn’t say, but in the shade of his porch with a glass of cold lemonade in my hand, I looked at him with greater appreciation and affection than I ever had before.

Liz finally suggested that it was time we all get back. She needed to begin thinking about supper that night. My grandfather said, “You boys ready?”

“I’d like to walk home,” I told him.

“Are you sure? What about you, Jake?”

“If Frank’s walking, I’ll walk too,” he said.

“All right then.” My grandfather stood up from his rocker.

Walking home was different from the day before. Easier somehow. It felt more normal with Jake beside me and the streets didn’t seem as strange. But everything was different, there was no mistaking that.

Jake stopped suddenly and stood kind of slumped in the road as if all the air had suddenly gone out of him.

I said, “What’s wrong?”

His voice was choked. “I can’t stop thinking about how much I want her back.”

“It’ll get better.”

“When, Frank?”

I knew nothing about death. We’d never even had a pet that died. But I thought about Bobby Cole’s parents who’d lost everything when they lost Bobby. And I thought about an evening only a week before when I’d walked past their house on my way home from goofing around with Danny O’Keefe. Mr. Cole had been in the yard and he’d been looking up at the evening sky and when he realized that I was passing on the sidewalk he smiled and said, “Beautiful evening, eh, Frank?” I thought if a man who’d lost everything could still see the beauty in a sunset then sooner or later things would look up for Jake and me and our family.

I put my arm around my brother and said, “I don’t know. But it will.”

When we got home Dad was gone. Gus was in the church parking lot sitting on his Indian Chief talking through the open window of Doyle’s cruiser. Jake and I drifted over.

“Hey, guys, “Doyle said.

I knew him in so many ways now that I felt a creepy kind of kinship with him.

“I was just telling Gus here that they found Morris Engdahl and the Kleinschmidt girl.”

“Where were they?” I asked.

“Cozied up in a motel in Sioux Falls. The girl’s only seventeen so the sheriff over there’s holding Engdahl on violation of the Mann Act, but they’ll be bringing him back here for questioning.”

I didn’t know what the Mann Act was and I didn’t care. All I wanted was to hear what Morris Engdahl knew about Ariel’s death. I believed absolutely that he was low enough to have done it and I was sure everyone else did too.

But the next day the medical examiner from Mankato came to New Bremen and conducted a thorough autopsy and what he found changed the thinking of us all.

On Mondays, Jake went to Mankato for a weekly session of speech therapy designed to help him overcome his stutter.

I didn’t know why my brother stuttered; I just knew he always had. The therapists who worked with him were nice folks, patient and encouraging. Jake told me he liked them. So far as I could tell in all the years they’d worked with him they hadn’t made much progress. He still stuttered when he was nervous or angry and just the thought of having to say something in a public way flustered him no end. Teachers seldom called on him in class because waiting out his halting answers was torture for everyone, Jake included. He always sat in the back of a classroom. Usually his therapy was scheduled for early afternoon and my mother would pick him up at lunch and he wouldn’t go back to school that day. He told me it was the one good thing that came of being a stutterer.

If you weren’t around Jake all the time you would have had trouble gauging him. I know that he gave some people the creeps because of the way he held to silence and watched things. Maybe because he was content to observe he often took the measure of a situation and of people much more accurately than others might have. At night in our room I’d be going on and on about a circumstance we’d both been a part of and Jake would listen to me from his bed and when I was finished he’d ask me a question or make a simple statement that had the effect of pointing out something I’d missed in the dynamics of the situation but Jake had not.

Normally my mother took Jake to his speech therapy but the Monday after Ariel died she didn’t. That morning, she’d left us. She had simply stood up at the breakfast table after I asked for some orange juice and had announced she couldn’t stand another minute in that goddamn house and she was going to Emil Brandt’s. She’d stormed out and the screen door had slammed behind her and she’d stomped across the yard heading toward the railroad crossing on Tyler Street while my father stood at the kitchen window watching her go.

“What’s she mad at?” I’d asked.

Without turning from the window my father had said, “Right now, Frank, I’d guess everything.” He’d left the kitchen and walked upstairs.

Jake, who’d been trying to make a sentence with his Alpha-Bits cereal, stirred the letters back into incoherence and said, “She’s mad at Dad.”

“What did he do?”

“Nothing. But he’s God.”

“God? Dad? That’s crazy.”

“I mean for her he’s God.” Jake said this as if it should have been obvious then went back to making his sentence.

I didn’t have the slightest idea what he was talking about, but I’ve thought about it since and I believe I understand. My mother couldn’t rail directly at God and so she railed instead at my father. Once again Jake had seen and understood something I hadn’t.

My father returned to the kitchen and Jake asked listlessly, “Do I have to go to Mankato today?”

This seemed to catch my father by surprise. He thought it over then said, “Yes. I’ll take you.”

So I was home alone that afternoon when the sheriff showed up looking for Dad. He knocked at the front screen door. A Twins game was on the radio and I was slumped on the living room sofa dividing my time between the game and one of Jake’s comic books. The sheriff was dressed in his khaki uniform. He took off his hat which was something folks did respectfully when my parents came to the door but no one had ever done it for me. It made me nervous.

“Is your father home, Frank? I tried the church,” he said, “but no one answered.”

“No, sir. He’s in Mankato with my brother.”

He nodded and looked past me into the dark at my back. I wondered if he thought I wasn’t telling the truth or if it was just something he’d become used to doing as part of his job.

“Will you do me a favor, son? Will you have him call me when he gets back? It’s important.”

“My mother’s at Emil Brandt’s house,” I told him. “If you want to talk to her.”

“I think I’d rather discuss this with your father. You won’t forget?”

“No, sir. I’ll remember.”

He turned and put his hat on and took a couple of steps and paused and turned back. “You mind coming out here a minute, Frank? A couple of things I’d like to ask you.”

I joined him on the porch wondering what answers I had that he could possibly want.