William Krueger - Ordinary Grace

I drew away a little and looked into his eyes. They were brown and sad and gentle.

“You’re not mad at me?”

“I’m ready to be done with anger, Frank. I’m ready to be done with it forever. How about you?”

“Yeah, I guess I am.”

“Then let’s go inside. I’m kind of tired.”

I opened my door and walked with my father toward the house where Jake and Gus were waiting and where my mother at her piano filled the night with music.

The days came hot one after another but there was decent rain and by mid-August the farmers in my father’s congregations were commenting guardedly to one another that the crops in the valley all looked pretty good. What they really meant but would not allow themselves to say openly was that they were anticipating the best harvest in years.

My mother began to organize for our move. The most difficult part, I suspect, was clearing Ariel’s room. She did this alone and over a long period and I often heard her crying as she boxed. Most of what had been Ariel’s we didn’t take with us to Saint Paul. My father donated her things to an agency that distributed clothing and other items of necessity to the migrant families who came in large numbers to work the harvests.

We weren’t the only ones who left New Bremen for good that summer. Danny O’Keefe’s family moved too. His mother got a job teaching in Granite Falls and they put their house up for sale and by the second week in August, Danny and his family were gone.

In those final days New Bremen for me had a different feel. Whether this was because of our move or because of all that had happened that summer I couldn’t say. It seemed as if the town and everything in it was already a part of my past. At night sometimes I tried to reach out and grab hold of what exactly I felt toward the place but everything was hopelessly tangled. I’d lived there five years, the longest I would live anywhere until I married and had my own family and settled down. I’d been a child there and had crossed the threshold, perhaps early, into young manhood. In the daylight I walked a lot, usually alone, visiting the places that would become monuments in my memory. The trestle that had been the scene of so much tragedy that summer. The quarry where I’d taken such childish pleasure in challenging and besting Morris Engdahl. Halderson’s Drugstore with its frosted mugs of root beer. I walked along the river, passed the place where Warren Redstone had built his little lean-to. The sides were already collapsed and I knew that in the flooding which came every spring all sign of the man’s presence would be washed away. I lingered at the place below the home of Emil Brandt and his sister where the trail threaded up the rise through the cottonwoods, the trail I’d been so certain was the way my sister had been carried to the river. And a little farther on I stood below Sibley Park where the cold black ash of many bonfires lay on the sand like leprous sores and where Ariel had last been seen alive on this earth. If understanding was what I sought, I was disappointed.

After Ariel’s funeral my mother took Jake to only one more session of speech therapy. He told me afterward that they questioned him mercilessly about the inexplicable disappearance of his impediment. When he insisted that it was the result of a miracle they looked at him as if he said he’d kissed a frog and been granted three wishes. Then my mother calmly told them it was the absolute truth, a miracle by the grace of God, and they had no reply.

Gus spent more and more time away and although he was reluctant to talk I knew because my father told me that he was helping Ginger French at her ranch. He’d put the brakes on his drinking and didn’t hang out anymore with Doyle.

As the day of our departure drew nearer we had a lot of visitors, folks stopping in to say their good-byes. Many were a part of my father’s congregations but others were a surprise. Edna Sweeney came with cookies. I had no idea if she and Avis were finally doing okay in the sack but she was such a good woman at heart that I hoped so. I knew I would miss the view of her underthings drying on the line, swinging a little in the summer breeze as if beckoning. The Klements dropped by one evening and while our parents talked on the porch Peter and Jake and I spent an hour sitting in the pasture behind our house kicking around the Twins and The Twilight Zone and speculating on what living in Saint Paul would be like. Peter was not hopeful. He thought a place like Cadbury-or even a town like New Bremen-was infinitely preferable. There were streets in Saint Paul, he warned, where people couldn’t walk safely at night. And everybody locked their doors. Before he left he repeated his invitation to come anytime for a visit and he’d teach us about motors and things. The Coles visited, too, briefly. They’d been old when they had Bobby and his death had made them even older. They were not much more than fifty then but in my memory they are always ancient. They held hands as they walked away and I thought that although they’d lost Bobby they were lucky. They still had each other.

A week before we left town Morris Engdahl was killed in an accident at the cannery where he worked. He was out on bail, awaiting his hearing on the Mann Act charges that had been filed against him. He’d gone to work drunk and the foreman had told him to go home and Engdahl had taken a couple of swings at his boss. He’d missed and, off-balance, had tumbled from the platform where the altercation took place and had broken his neck in the fall to the cannery floor below. In a kind of irony, Engdahl’s father, who was not a churchgoing man, requested that my dad preside at the burial service. I asked if I could be there and my father allowed it. It was one of the saddest funerals I’ve ever attended. Engdahl had no mourners at all, not Judy Kleinschmidt or even his father, who we later found out was dead drunk in a town bar.

Two days out from the move to Saint Paul the house already had the feel of abandonment. Mother had directed Jake and me to pack up our things in the boxes she provided and we emptied our dresser and our closet. Jake had carefully packed his model airplanes and his comic books. I had nothing special that I cared about in the same way and threw in my own collected junk haphazardly. Walking through the house we negotiated a path between stacks of boxes: linens and towels and tablecloths; my father’s books; table lamps and vases and framed pictures; kitchen utensils and pots and pans. We still had curtains on the windows but not much else to cozy the place.

In those last days Jake had begun to divide his time between our house and the home of Lise Brandt. My parents had severed their relationship with Emil. When Brandt told her the truth about his relationship with Ariel my mother had been outraged but she hadn’t held long to that useless emotion. “What’s done is done,” I heard her tell my father, and I believe she meant it. I don’t know that she ever forgave Emil Brandt. Maybe like Jake she was simply tired of being angry. As far as I know she never saw Brandt socially again. I suppose that in its way this, too, was a loss she suffered.

But with Jake it was different. He told me he felt sorry for Lise. As far as he could tell, the only people in the world who cared about her at all were him and Emil, and although Lise seemed fine with the company of her brother her face lit up with undeniable delight whenever she saw Jake. He visited often using the garden as an excuse to offer his companionship. He told me that he sometimes saw Emil Brandt sitting on the porch or heard the music of his playing drift from the house but he never talked to the man. It wasn’t because he felt any anger. He claimed that he sensed something coming from Brandt that was like strong waves pushing him away. I figured Jake was onto something. The Brandt family had always seemed a kind of island, separate and distant and a little forbidding, and there had never been, as far as I could see, the kind of energy, whether love or the yearning for simple human connection, that held them together or drew the larger world to them. As a family they seemed to have no center and I figured they would fall apart. Because my own family was healing and because wholeness seemed possible again, I kept the Brandts in my prayers.