William Krueger - Ordinary Grace

She put her cigarette to her lips and her eyes held on Gus’s face.

She asked, “What do you think of the tire iron?”

Gus seemed to weigh his response or perhaps simply the advisability of any response. He said, “It’s handy and would be effective, I imagine.”

“Have you ever wielded a tire iron as a weapon?”

“No,” he said, “but I’d guess that it does a lot of damage.”

“You’ve killed people, Gus. In the war.”

He didn’t answer but watched her closely.

“Is it a hard thing?”

“I killed people at a distance. They were shapes to me, never faces. I imagine it would be a different thing killing someone whose face you could see.”

“It would take a cold heart, don’t you think?”

“Yes, ma’am, I imagine it would.”

“People can fool you can’t they, Gus.”

“I guess they can.”

“Is there anything else you wanted to tell Nathan?”

“No, that’s pretty much everything.”

“I’ll let him know.”

My father’s friend left the porch and went to the church where he disappeared through the side door that led to his basement room. My mother finished her cigarette and lit another.

Within the hour my father returned from van der Waal’s. It was almost lunchtime and he went directly to the kitchen to prepare the meal. My mother followed him and I drifted in after them. My father was relaying the final plans for the funeral which my mother had refused to have any part in. I saw her-maybe we all saw her-retreating, her world daily becoming a smaller and smaller box. She sat with her elbows propped on the table and a cigarette in her hand and she listened as my father pulled items from the refrigerator and told her the details. He’d acknowledged my entrance but my mother paid me no heed.

When she had apparently listened enough she said abruptly, “The sheriff tried to get a warrant to search the Brandt property for whatever it was that Karl used to shatter Ariel’s skull. The county attorney refused to help him.”

My father turned from the refrigerator with a half-gallon bottle of milk in his hand. “How do you know this?”

“Gus came by while you were gone.”

“Doyle?”

“Yes.”

My father set the milk on the table. “Ruth, we don’t know at all Karl’s part in Ariel’s death.”

She put a curtain of smoke in the air between them. “Oh, but I do,” she said.

“Look, I’m going to give the sheriff a call.”

“You do that.”

When he’d left the room my mother finally looked where I stood by the screen door. She raised an eyebrow and said, “Do you know your Old Testament, Frankie?”

I watched her but didn’t answer.

She said, “Let the battle cry be heard in the land, a shout of great destruction.”

She drew on her cigarette and breathed out smoke.

Mother disappeared after dinner and only a short while before dark. She said she was going for a walk. My grandfather, who along with Liz had taken to eating with us regularly, had asked where she was headed. They’d all been sitting on the front porch, my parents and Liz and my grandfather, trying to get some benefit from a cooling breeze that had blown in with the evening. I’d been lying in the yard grass watching the light dissolve from the sky above the valley. My mother had said, “Around the block.” And got up and just like that she was gone before anyone could object or offer companionship. Afterward my grandparents and my father talked about her. They were worried. Hell, we all were.

When she didn’t come back by hard dark my father left in the Packard and my grandfather left in his big Buick and they went looking. Liz stayed with us. She kept near the telephone in case someone called with information. Jake had been upstairs all evening working on one of his model airplanes and after the men drove off he came down and when I told him what was going on he said that he’d seen Mother walking along the railroad tracks headed toward the trestle outside town.

“Why didn’t you say something?”

He shrugged and looked chagrined and answered, “She was just walking.”

“Along the tracks? Have you ever seen her walk along the tracks? Jesus.”

I hurried to the kitchen and told Liz and then I said I would go and find Mother.

“No,” Liz replied. “I don’t want you on those railroad tracks at night.”

“I’ll take a flashlight and I’ll be careful.”

“I’ll g-g-g-go with him,” Jake stuttered and I figured he must be pretty scared.

Liz clearly wasn’t happy with the idea but I pointed out that if somebody didn’t go soon who knew what might happen and she gave in.

We both brought flashlights though once we were out of the Flats they were almost unnecessary because the moon had risen nearly full before us and it was easy to see our way along the railbed.

“She’s ok-k-kay,” Jake kept repeating.

And I repeated to him, “She’s fine. She’s fine.”

In this way we reassured ourselves because Ariel’s death had shattered any sense of normality, any firm sense that what any future moment held was predictable. If God could allow Ariel to die-allow little Bobby Cole to be so gruesomely slaughtered as well-then Mother who was not at all on good terms with the Almighty was, I feared, stepping directly into harm’s way.

Moonlight turned the polished surface of each rail silver and we followed the tracks through the dark all the way to the trestle where we found our mother sitting above the flow of the Minnesota River. As soon as we saw her, I turned to Jake and said, “Go back and tell Liz where we are. I’ll keep Mom here and make sure she’s okay.”

Jake looked back at the long dark tunnel of the night between us and town. He said, “Alone?”

“Yeah, stupid. One of us has to go and I need to stay here.”

“Why c-c-c-can’t I stay?”

“What if Mom decides to jump or something? You want to go in after her? Go on. Hurry.”

He thought about arguing some more but finally accepted his duty and headed back following the jerky finger of his flashlight beam.

My greatest fear was that a train might at any minute come roaring toward us and, with Mother in the middle of the trestle in God knew what mental state, I wouldn’t be able to get her to safety in time. The good thing was that it was night and the headlight of an engine ought to be visible a long while before it reached the river. I crept out onto the railroad bridge. Mother didn’t look my way and I wasn’t certain if she even realized I was there. But when I was a few steps from reaching her she said to me, “This is the place isn’t it, Frankie?”

I stood beside her and looked down where she looked. The river below us was all moonlight. I said, “Yes.”

“What did you see?”

“Her dress. Her hair. That’s all.”

She looked up at me and I saw thin iridescent trails down her cheeks and I realized she’d been crying and still was.

“I used to swim in this river,” she said. “When I was a girl. There’s a deep clear pool a couple of miles downstream where Cottonwood Creek comes in. Have you ever been there?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Sit down. Here.” She patted the crossties next to where she sat and I did as she asked.

“I never thought of the river as dangerous, Frankie. But you found someone else dead here.”

“Yeah, the itinerant.”

“Itinerant.” She shook her head faintly. “Someone’s entire life reduced to a single word. And little Bobby Cole, didn’t he. .?”

“Yeah. Him too.”

“It’s pretty here,” she said. “You wouldn’t suspect all that death, would you? Do you and Jake come here often?”

“We used to. Not anymore. I think we should go home, Mom.”