William Krueger - Ordinary Grace

“I wanted to, but. .” Mr. Brandt didn’t finish. Instead he cast an accusing glare at his wife.

“I saw no reason,” Julia Brandt said. “Karl didn’t hurt your daughter. Nor did he impregnate her. Nor, despite speculation to the contrary, did he ever intend to marry her.”

“And how do you know all this, Julia?” My mother stood up from the piano bench. “You’re privy to Karl’s every action and every thought?”

“I know my son.”

“I thought I knew my daughter.”

“We all know about your daughter, don’t we?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“She’s had her eye on Karl for a long time. Why do you think she got herself pregnant?”

“Julia,” Mr. Brandt said horrified.

“It needs to be said, Axel. Ariel got herself pregnant in order to force Karl into a marriage he didn’t want. None of us wanted. The truth, Ruth, is that we would never have allowed such a union.”

“Julia, will you just shut up,” Mr. Brandt said.

My mother said quietly, “And why would you have objected, Julia?”

“What kind of family would Karl have married into? Look at the risk,” Mrs. Brandt replied. “Just look at your children, Ruth. A girl with a harelip. A son with a stutter. Another son wild as an Indian. What kind of children would Ariel have produced?”

“Nathan, Ruth, I’m sorry,” Axel Brandt said. He strode across the room and grabbed his wife’s arm. “Julia, I’m taking you home now.”

“Just a minute, Axel,” my mother said with unnerving calm. “Julia, that horse you’re on is pretty high. But I remember when you were the daughter of a drunkard who fixed other people’s automobiles. And everyone in this town knew you had your eye on Axel, and we’ve all done the calculations regarding your marriage and the birth of your son so don’t you say one more word to me about Ariel’s condition, you of all people.”

“I’m not going to stand here and listen to this. Axel,” Julia Brandt said and spun away from my mother.

“Whatever it is you’re hiding, Julia, I’ll find out,” my mother said to the woman’s back.

Axel Brandt mumbled more apologies and followed his wife out the front door.

A great quiet was left in their wake, the kind I imagined that might have fallen on a battlefield after the guns had been silenced. We all stood looking at the screen door.

“Well,” my mother finally said brightly, “I think we should be grateful to whomever it was that flushed out the Brandts.”

My father turned to her. “Flushed out? Ruth, they’re not quails we’re hoping to shoot.”

“No, but they are adults and they should be accepting responsibility.”

“Responsibility for what? We don’t know anything for certain.”

“Don’t you feel it, Nathan? There’s something they’re holding back, something they know and aren’t telling.”

“The only thing I feel is great dismay at how the Brandts are being treated by the people of this town.”

“That’s because you didn’t grow up here. The Brandts have always sidestepped responsibility for their trespasses and everyone in this town knows it. But not this time.”

My father looked truly distressed. “How can I help you let go of this anger, Ruth?”

“I suppose you could pray for me, Nathan. Isn’t that what you do best?”

“Ruth, God isn’t-”

“If you mention God to me one more time, I’ll leave you, I swear I will.”

Now my father looked startled as if she’d struck him with her fist and he held out empty hands, offering her nothing. “I don’t know how to do that, Ruth. For me, God is at the heart of everything.”

Mother walked past him to the telephone, lifted the receiver, and dialed. “Dad,” she said, “it’s Ruth. I wonder if I could stay with you and Liz for a while. No, just until. . well for a while. No, Dad, everything’s fine. And, yes, I could use a ride, the sooner the better.”

She hung up and the room was a fist of silence.

Mother left with a suitcase full of her things. After she’d made the phone call, my father didn’t try to talk her out of her decision. He offered to help carry the suitcase but she refused and hauled it to my grandfather’s car herself. The two men shook hands and then stood awkwardly and watched while my mother settled herself in the big Buick.

Jake and I hung back in the porch shade and after my mother had gone my father walked to us and looked at us bewildered as if he had no idea what to say. Finally he shrugged. “I guess she needs some time, boys,” he said. “It’s been hard for her.”

Hell it’s been hard for us all, I thought but didn’t say.

“I’ll be in my office,” he said. He left us and walked slowly toward the church in a drifting way that made me think of a man wandering lost.

Jake kicked idly at the post that supported the porch roof and asked, “What do you want to do now?”

“Let’s find Gus.”

Because it was a hot day and still early I figured the pharmacy and we found Gus’s Indian Chief parked in front. We went inside. No Gus. Mr. Halderson was talking with a customer but when he saw Jake and me he excused himself and came right over. Like we were special or something.

“Well, boys,” he said. “What can I do for you this morning?”

“We’re looking for Gus, sir,” I said.

“He was in here earlier but he left a while ago. Went next door for a haircut, I believe. Say, I heard there was some vandalism up at the Brandt place last night.”

“We heard that too,” I said.

He gave me the same kind of conspiratorial smile Doyle had offered me the night before and it was clear he didn’t at all condemn the guilty party and it was just as clear whom he considered the guilty party to be. I wondered if Doyle had been spreading the word.

I thanked him for directing us to Gus and went next door. Sure enough, he was sitting in the chair with a white sheet draped over him and his head bent while Mr. Baake ran an electric razor over the back of his neck. The barber looked up and said, “Come on in, boys.”

Mr. Baake cut our hair too and my father’s. Once a month or so we’d all troop down to his barbershop on a Saturday morning and get the deed done. I liked the barbershop, the way it smelled of hair oil and bay rum and had a million comic books and magazines of the kind my father would never let us read. I liked how men gathered there and talked and joked and seemed to know each other in the same way Jake and I knew our friends when we met on the ball field for a game of workup and afterward sat on the grass and learned what was what in New Bremen and to a smaller extent the world.

“Hey, Frankie, Jake,” Gus said with a grin. That was one thing I loved about Gus. He was never not happy to see us. “What are you two up to?”

“There’s something we wanted to talk to you about,” I said.

“Okay, go ahead.”

I looked past Gus’s face to the face of Mr. Baake behind him and Gus saw and interpreted correctly the flick of my eyes and said, “Tell you what. Why don’t you guys sit there for a few minutes and do some reading and when I’m finished here we’ll talk, okay?”

Jake and I sat down. Jake picked up one of the Hot Stuff comic books which was about a little devil whose temper was always getting him into trouble. Me, I picked up a magazine called Action for Men that had on the front cover an illustration of a guy in a safari outfit holding a powerful looking rifle and with a voluptuous blonde at his side who wore a very short khaki skirt and a blouse ripped away enough to show a lot of bare skin and a little bit of her bra and they both were facing a lion that looked pretty damn hungry. The woman was clearly scared. The guy looked cool of nerve, exactly how I imagined myself reacting in that situation. I opened to an article that was supposed to be true about a man who’d been attacked by killer spiders in the Amazon. But I didn’t read much because within a couple of minutes Gus was finished and striding out the door with Jake and me at his heels. On the street he turned to us.