Ordinary Grace (3 page)

It was Saturday afternoon, the day after Bobby Cole was buried. Jake and I had spent all morning working on my grandfather’s yard. Mowing, clipping, raking. Chores we did every Saturday that summer. My grandfather had a big house on the Heights with a yard that was a beautiful green sea of thick grass. He was in real estate and claimed that the look of his own property said as much about him as any piece of advertising he put on a billboard. He paid us well but he oversaw our every move. By the time the job was done I never thought the money was enough.

Always when we were finished—hot and sweaty and covered in grass clippings—we hit Halderson’s Drugstore where we could belly up to the soda counter for root beer served in a frosty mug.

At the back of the drugstore was an open passage to a storeroom. More often than not a curtain hung across the doorway but not that afternoon. I could see three men in the yellow light of a bare bulb that hung from the ceiling of the back room. They sat on crates. Two of them drank from brown bottles which I was pretty sure held beer. The one not drinking was Mr. Halderson. One of the other men was Gus. The third was the off-duty officer we’d met at the police station. Doyle. It was Doyle who was talking.

I mean the kid was slow sure. But he wasn’t deaf. He’d have heard that train coming.
Maybe he fell asleep, Halderson said.
On the railroad tracks? Be like lying down on a bed of nails like one of them sheiks.
Fakirs, Gus said.
What?
They’re not sheiks. They’re fakirs.
Whatever.
Doyle drank long and noisily.
All I’m saying is that there’s more to that kid’s death than anybody knows. I’ve picked up plenty of bums on those tracks. I mean guys no mother would claim. Got sickness in their heads you wouldn’t believe.
Surely they’re not all like that, Halderson said.
All it takes is the wrong one at the wrong place at the wrong time. That boy he was so simple he would have been easy pickings.
Gus said, You really believe that?
The things I’ve seen during my years in uniform would make your stomachs turn, Doyle said. He tipped his bottle to his lips but caught sight of me and Jake at the counter, both of us clearly eavesdropping. He lowered his beer and waved us to him. Come on over here, you two.
Jake looked at me. Joining these men was the last thing he wanted to do. I didn’t mind the possibility of getting in on that backroom conversation. I slid off my stool. Jake followed but he followed slowly.
You’re the preacher’s kids right?
Yes, sir.
You ever play down on them railroad tracks?
It was the same question he’d asked a few nights before in the police station. I didn’t know if it was the two empty beer bottles sitting beside his crate that made him ask or if he’d forgotten that he’d asked or if he’d forgotten the answer I gave when he asked or if this was just what a cop did asking the same question over and over to see if he could confuse you. I wasn’t confused.
No, I lied. Just as I had before.
He had a wide jut of flat cliff for a forehead and in its shadow his eyes shifted to Jake. You?
Jake didn’t answer.
Well, boy?
Jake’s mouth twisted and he tried to reply.
Come on, spit it out.
He stutters, Gus said.
I can see that. Doyle spoke sharp. Tell me the truth, boy.
Doyle must have scared the piss out of Jake. In a way that was painful to bear my brother tried to comply. He contorted his face and looked at Doyle out of deep creases filled with the dark anger that came from his frustration. He finally gave up and fiercely shook his head.
Yeah, right.
I hated the man for that. For putting Jake through torture and then dismissing the result.
Gus said, Their father doesn’t let them play on the tracks.
You think they don’t go there anyway? Doyle shot me a look that seemed to contain a whisper of conspiracy, as if he knew me and didn’t entirely condemn me for what he knew. As if in a way we were brothers.
I took a step back, hating the man more every minute. Can we go?
Yes. Doyle dismissed us as he might have a couple of suspects he’d decided not to collar.
I put my arm around Jake who was staring angrily at the floor and I turned him. We left the men. Left Doyle laughing quietly and meanly at our backs.
Outside the day sweltered. The sun threw heat from above and the sidewalks gathered it and roasted the soles of our sneakers. The tar that filled the cracks on the pavement had turned to black goo and we were careful to watch our step. We passed Bon Ton’s barbershop where the easy voices of men and the scent of hair oil drifted through the open door. We passed the bank which had been robbed by Pretty Boy Floyd and Ma Barker’s boys in the thirties and which had long been the source of a good deal of my own daydreaming. We passed store after store deserted in the drowse of that hot day in late June. We kept to the shade of the awnings and didn’t talk and Jake stared at the sidewalk and fumed.
We left the shops behind and walked Main Street toward Tyler. The houses on the hills were old and many of them Victorian and, though the heavy curtains were drawn against the heat, every once in a while we caught the sound of a baseball game broadcast from the cool dark inside. We turned down Tyler toward the Flats. I could feel Jake’s anger hot as the concrete under our feet.
Forget him, I said. He’s an asshole.
Don’t s-s-s-say that.
But he is.
That word I mean.
Asshole?
Jake shot me a killing look.
You shouldn’t let him get to you. He’s nobody.
Nobody’s n-n-nobody, Jake said.
Hell everybody’s nobody. And I know I said hell.
Grain elevators rose beside the tracks on the Flats. Tall and white they were connected by catwalks and conveyor belts. There was a stark kind of beauty in the way they stood against the sky like sculptures made of bone. Next to them ran a siding where the hopper cars were rolled so they could be filled with grain but that afternoon the rails were empty and the elevators deserted. We strolled over the tracks at the crossing on Tyler. Jake kept walking toward home. I stopped and turned and began to follow my shadow stubby and black along the rails toward the east.
Jake said, What are you doing?
What’s it look like?
You’re not supposed to play on the railroad tracks.
Not playing. Just walking. You coming or you going to stand there and cry?
I’m not crying.
I walked a rail like a tightrope. Walked through waves of heat. Walked in the fragrance that rose up from the hot rock of the roadbed and the creosote of the crossties.
And you’re not coming either, I said.
I’m coming.
Then come on.
His shadow caught up with mine and he walked the other rail and together we walked out of the Flats and though we did not know it we were walking toward the second death that summer.

The valley of the Minnesota River was carved over ten thousand years ago by great floods released from the glacial Lake Agassiz which covered an area in Minnesota and North Dakota and central Canada larger than the state of California. The drain was called the River Warren and it cut deep and wide into the land through which it ran. What’s left now is only a wisp of that great river. In summer the land along its banks is green with soy beans and cornstalks and fields of rye that roll in the wind with the liquidity of an ocean. There are stands of old deciduous trees whose branches cup the nests of Forsters and black terns and great blue herons and egrets and bald eagles and warblers and other birds so ordinary and profuse that they fill the air like dandelion fluff. The river runs nearly four hundred miles and it runs brown. It flows out of Lac qui Parle.The Lake That Speaks. At its end are the cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul.

To this day for much of its length the river is shadowed by railroad. To a thirteen-year-old kid in 1961 that set of tracks seemed to reach to a horizon from beyond which came the sound of the world calling.

We walked to a place half a mile outside the Flats where a long trestle bridged the river. Wild rye and blackberry thickets and thistle grew to the edge of the railroad bed. Sometimes people fished from the trestle though it was a dangerous thing to do. This was where Bobby Cole had been killed.

I stopped and Jake said, What do you want to do?
I don’t know.
The truth was that I was looking for evidence of a thing I hadn’t

considered before. Bobby Cole was not a fisherman and so to my mind he’d come there looking to eat the blackberries that were ripe or to sit on the trestle and watch the river run below and look for the carp and catfish and gar that sometimes broke the surface. That’s what I did there and Jake when he came with me. Or we’d toss a stick into the river and try to hit it with a harvest of rocks gathered from between the railroad ties. But Officer Doyle had speculated there was something more sinister in what happened to Bobby than just the tragedy of a boy too lost in his daydreams to hear the thunder of death approaching. That had me wondering.

Jake said, Want to throw rocks?
No. Hush. Listen.
From down the riverbank near the trestle came a snapping like

the break of a million tiny bones. A large animal was forcing its way through the brush. We sometimes found places along the river where deer had bedded and the flattened vegetation still carried the outlines of their bodies. We didn’t move and our shadows roosted on the rails. From under a willow that overhung the bank and that was surrounded by bulrushes a man emerged plucking burrs from his clothing as he came. He seemed old to me because his hair was no longer black but the dull color of a long-circulated five-cent piece. He wore dirty khakis and a sleeveless undershirt and he swore at the burrs snagged in his clothing. He disappeared under the embankment where the rails crossed the river. I crept forward onto the trestle and knelt and peered down through the gap between the first two sets of crossties. Jake knelt beside me. Directly below us the man had seated himself on the dry clay of the riverbank and next to him was sprawled another man. The second man looked as if he was sleeping and the man who’d come from the bulrushes began going through the sleeping man’s pockets. Jake tugged at my sleeve and pointed back down the tracks indicating that he thought we ought to leave. I shook my head and returned to watching the activity below.

Though it was a hot day, the sprawled man wore an overcoat. It was a dirty thing of pale green canvas much patched and mended.The first man dipped into one of the outside pockets and came up with a labeled bottle of amber liquid. He unscrewed the cap and sniffed the contents and tipped the bottle to his lips and drank.

Jake whispered in my ear, Come on.
The man below who’d lifted his head to drink must have heard Jake because he tilted his head a bit more and eyed us where we gazed at him through the crossties above. He lowered the bottle. Dead, he said. He nodded toward the man on the ground. As a doornail. You boys want to, you come on down here and see.
It was not an order but an invitation and I stood to accept.
I look back now and I wonder at this. I have raised children of my own and the thought of a child of mine or a grandchild descending to be with a stranger that way makes me go rigid with worry. I didn’t think of myself as a careless boy. What was inside me was a wonderment desperate to be satisfied. A dead man, that was a thing you didn’t see every day.
Jake grabbed my arm and tried to drag me away but I shook him off.
We should g-g-g-go, he said.
You go then. I started down the slope of the railroad bed toward the riverbank.
F-F-F-Frank, Jake said with fury.
Go on home, I said.
But my brother would not desert me and as I stumbled down the bank Jake stumbled after me.
He was Indian the man who now held the bottle. This wasn’t unusual because many Indians lived in the valley of the Minnesota River. The Dakota Sioux had populated that land long before white people came and the white people had by hook and by crook stolen it from them. The government had created small reservations farther west but Indian families scattered themselves along the whole length of the river.
He motioned us closer and indicated a place to sit on the other side of the body.
He said, Ever seen a dead man?
Lots, I said.
Oh?
I could tell he didn’t believe me. I said, My father’s a minister. He buries people all the time.
Laid out in fine boxes with their faces painted, the Indian said. This is how it is before they get them ready for the coffin.
He looks like he’s sleeping, I said.
This here was a good death.
Good?
I was in the war, the Indian said. The First World War. The war to end all wars. He looked at the bottle and drank. I saw men dead in ways no man should die.
I said, How did he die?
The Indian shrugged. Just died. Was sitting there talking one minute. The next he was lying there like that. Fell over. Heart attack maybe. Maybe a stroke. Who knows? Dead’s dead that’s all she wrote. He drank some more.
What’s his name?
Name? I don’t really know. Know what he called himself. Skipper. Like he was a sea captain or something. Hell, maybe he was. Who knows?
Was he your friend?
About as much friend as I got, I suppose.
He doesn’t look old enough to die.
The Indian laughed. It’s not like voting or a driver’s license, boy.
He began again to go through the dead man’s pockets. From inside the coat he pulled a photograph much handled and faded. He looked at it a long time then turned it over and squinted. There’s writing on the back, he said. Lost my glasses a while back. Can you read it?
Sure, I said.
He held it out toward me across the dead man’s body. I took it and looked at it and Jake who was next to me leaned over to look too. It was black and white and was of a woman with a baby in her arms. She wore a plain dress that appeared gray in the photo with a pattern of white daisies. She was pretty and was smiling and behind her was a barn. I turned the photograph over and read out loud the writing on the backside.
October 23, 1944. Johnny’s first birthday. We miss you and hope you can be home for Christmas. Mary.
I handed the photograph back.The Indian’s hand shook a little and I saw that his palms were dirty and his nails ragged. He said, Probably called to service in the second war to end all wars. Hell, maybe he really was a sea captain. The Indian drank some more and leaned his head back against the embankment and looked up at the trestle and said, Know what I like about railroad tracks? They’re always there but they’re always moving.
Like a river, Jake said.
I was surprised that he spoke and that he spoke without a stutter which was a thing he seldom did around strangers. The Indian looked at my brother and nodded as if Jake had spoken some great wisdom. Like a steel river, he said. That’s smart, son, real smart.
Jake looked down, embarrassed by the compliment. The Indian reached across the dead man and across me and put his hand with its dirty palm and ragged nails on Jake’s leg. I was startled by the familiarity of the gesture and I looked at the stranger’s hand on my brother’s leg and the realization of the danger inherent in the situation descended on me like a flame and I leaped up dislodging the offending hand and grabbed my brother and yanked him to his feet and dragged him up the slope of the riverbank to the tracks.
Behind us the Indian called out, Didn’t mean anything, boys. Nothing at all.
But I was running then and pulling Jake with me and I was thinking about that Indian’s hand and seeing it in my mind like a spider crawling Jake’s leg. As fast as I could force us we returned to Halderson’s Drugstore. The men were still in the back room drinking beer from brown bottles. When we stumbled in and stood before them breathless they ceased talking.
Gus frowned at me and said, What is it, Frank?
We were down on the tracks, I said between gasps for air.
Doyle gave a grin stupid and satisfied. His old man don’t let them play on the tracks, he said.
Gus ignored him and said evenly, What about the tracks, Frank?
I spoke with an urgency that had been building all the way from the trestle and that had been fed by my rumination on the Indian’s hand too familiar on Jake’s leg and by my own guilt at the danger in which I’d placed my brother. I said, A stranger was there. A man.
The faces of all three men changed and changed in the same frightening way. The stupid satisfaction left Doyle. Gus’s dogged patience fled. Halderson abandoned his mild demeanor and his eyes became like chambered bullets. All three men stared at us and in their faces I could see my own fear reflected and magnified. Magnified to a degree I had not anticipated. Magnified perhaps by all the sick possibility that grown men knew that I did not. Magnified probably by the alcohol they’d consumed. Magnified certainly by the responsibility they felt as men to protect the children of their community.
A man? Doyle stood up and took hold of my arm and forced me to come close to him where the smell of beer poured from his mouth, a stream on which his words were carried. He said, What kind of man? Did he threaten you boys?
I didn’t reply.
Doyle squeezed my arm so that it hurt. Tell me, son. What kind of man?
I looked to Gus hoping that he could see the pain on my face. But he seemed lost in the confusion of that moment which probably came not only from the confounding influence of the alcohol but also from the betrayal of the trust he’d put in me. He said, Tell him, Frankie. Tell him about the man.
Still I did not speak.
Doyle shook me. Shook me like a rag doll. Tell me, he said.
Halderson said, Tell him, son.
Tell him, Frank, Gus said.
Doyle shouted now. Tell me goddamn it. What kind of man?
I stared at them, dumbed by their viciousness, and I knew I would not speak.
It was Jake who saved me. He said, A dead man.