William Krueger - Ordinary Grace

“Let’s sit down,” he suggested.

We sat together on the top step and looked out at the yard and the church on the other side of the street and beyond that the grain elevators mute beside the tracks. Everything was quiet in the Flats. The sheriff was not a tall man and sitting we were not that different in height. He spun his hat in his hands, fingering the sweatband inside.

“Your sister, she was pretty sweet on the Brandt boy, is that right?”

The Brandt boy? I thought. Karl Brandt had always seemed to me mature and sophisticated. Yet here was the sheriff calling him boy just as others called me.

I thought about Ariel and Karl and how well they seemed to get on. I thought about all they did together. I thought about the nights Ariel sneaked from the house in the dark hours and slipped back just before dawn. But I also thought about the question I’d posed to Karl Brandt the day Jake and I had ridden in his fast little car: Are you going to marry my sister? And I thought about how he’d backed away.

I finally said, “They had a complicated relationship.”

Which was something I’d heard once in a movie.

“Complicated how?”

“She liked him a lot but I think he didn’t like her as much.”

“Why do you say that?”

“He wouldn’t marry her.”

The sheriff stopped turning his hat in his hands and his face swung slowly toward me. “She wanted him to?”

“She was supposed to go to Juilliard in a couple of months, which was what she always wanted to do, but lately she was different. I got the feeling she wanted to stay here with Karl.”

“But the Brandt boy’s going off to St. Olaf.”

“Yes, sir. I guess he is.”

With his mouth closed he made a sound that stayed mostly in his throat and then he went back to spinning the hat in his hands.

“What do you think of him, Frank?”

Again I thought about the car ride and what had struck me as his refusal to marry Ariel but instead of replying I simply shrugged.

“You notice anything different about your sister lately?”

“Yeah. She was sad for no reason. And mad sometimes too.”

“Did she say why?”

“No.”

“Do you think it might have been because of Karl?”

“Maybe. She really loved him.”

I said that last part not because I knew it to be true but because it felt true. Or felt to me as if it should have been true.

“She spent a lot of time with Karl?”

“A lot.”

“Did you ever see them argue?”

I made a good show of thinking hard although I knew the answer immediately. “No,” I said.

Which didn’t seem to be the answer he wanted.

“Once,” I said quickly, “Ariel came back from a date pretty mad.”

“At Karl?”

“I guess. I mean, he was the guy she was on the date with.”

“Recently?”

“A couple of weeks ago.”

“Did she talk to you, Frank? Maybe tell you things she wouldn’t tell your folks?”

“We were very close,” I said trying to sound mature.

“What did she tell you?”

I realized suddenly that I’d made a trap for myself, suggesting a situation that wasn’t exactly true, and the sheriff was expecting something from me I didn’t know how to give, confidences Ariel might have shared.

“She went out at night sometimes,” I said in a panic. “After everybody was asleep. And she didn’t come back until almost morning.”

“Out? With Karl Brandt?”

“I think so.”

“She sneaked out?”

“Yes.”

“You knew? Did you tell your parents?”

This was getting worse by the moment.

“I didn’t want to rat on her,” I said, realizing even as the words tumbled out that it was probably not a great way to phrase what I meant because it sounded very James Cagney and I was feeling very Public Enemy .

The sheriff looked at me a long time and although I couldn’t read his expression clearly I was afraid that what was there was complete disapproval.

“I mean,” I stumbled on, “she was grown up and all.”

“Grown up? In what ways?”

“I don’t know. Big. An adult. Me, I’m just a kid.”

I said this hoping like crazy that being just a kid would get me off the hook. Whatever the hook was. I didn’t know for sure. What I understood clearly was that I was in way over my head.

“Grown up,” the sheriff repeated sadly. “That she was, Frank.” He rose slowly from the step and settled his hat on his head. “Don’t forget to tell your father to call me, you hear?”

“I won’t,” I said.

“All right, then.”

He descended the stairs and went to his car which was parked in the gravel drive in front of our garage and he backed out and disappeared up Tyler Street and just after that a train came rumbling through and I sat on the steps while the porch boards shook and the engine whistle screamed and I realized I was shaking too and it had nothing to do with the passage of the train.

I stayed on the porch watching for the Packard and in the late afternoon I spotted it bumping over the tracks. As soon as my father had parked, Jake leaped out the passenger side and sprinted toward the house and ran past me and inside. I heard the hammer of his feet on the stairs then I heard the bathroom door on the second floor slam shut. Jake had a notoriously small bladder. My father came more slowly.

“The sheriff was here,” I told him.

His eyes had been on the old porch steps as he mounted but now he looked up. “What did he want?”

“He didn’t say exactly. He just asked me some questions and then he said you should call him when you got back.”

“What kinds of questions?”

“About Ariel and Karl.”

“Karl?”

“Yeah. He was pretty interested in Karl.”

“Thank you, Frank,” he said and went inside.

I went in too and flopped on the living room sofa and picked up the comic book I’d been reading when the sheriff came. I was near enough the phone stand at the bottom of the stairs that I could hear my father’s end of the conversation.

“It’s Nathan Drum. My son told me you stopped by.”

I heard the toilet flush on the second floor and water ran through the pipe in the wall.

“I see.” My father said this heavily and I could tell it wasn’t good. “I could meet you in my church office in a few minutes, if that’s convenient.”

Upstairs the bathroom door opened and Jake clomped into the hallway.

“Fine. I’ll be waiting for you.”

My father put the receiver down.

I asked, “What did he want?”

The room was dark. Even though my mother hadn’t been home all day I’d left the drapes pulled shut. My father stood outlined in the rectangle of sunlight in the front doorway. His back was to me and I couldn’t see his face.

“The autopsy’s finished, Frank. He wants to talk to me about it.”

“Is it bad?”

“I don’t know. Your mother, have you seen her?”

“No, sir.”

“I’ll be across the street if she calls.”

He left the house and I followed to the screen door and watched him walk toward the church. Halfway there he stopped and stood dead still in the middle of the street. He seemed lost and I was afraid that if a car came by he would be hit because he wouldn’t even know it was coming. I pushed open the door thinking I should call to him but he pulled himself together and continued on.

Jake galloped down the stairs and sidled up beside me.

“We got milk shakes,” he said. “Dad and me. At the Dairy Queen in Mankato.”

I knew he was baiting me but I had other things on my mind. I didn’t even bother to reply.

He asked, “Where’s Dad?”

I nodded toward the church and said, “He’s waiting for the sheriff to come back.”