During the service in Cadbury I sat with Peter Klement. He came with his mother who sang in the choir. The black eye that he’d sported the afternoon we visited his house was little more than a shadow now and neither of us said anything about it. During the social time after church we chucked rocks at a telephone pole where someone had stapled a poster for a circus coming to Mankato and we talked about the Twins. Ariel finally called to me and I left with my family to return to New Bremen for the second service of the morning.
When we pulled up to the house Jake was waiting on the front porch and Gus was with him. They hurried down the steps and it was clear something was wrong.
“You better get up to the hospital, Captain,” Gus said. “Emil Brandt tried to kill himself this morning.”
• • •
I got the details from Jake who stayed behind with me while my father and mother and Ariel drove to the hospital. It had happened like this.
Jake had been in bed and trying to sleep. We hadn’t been gone fifteen minutes when there was a furious pounding at the front door. He got up and went downstairs and found Lise Brandt on the porch. He said her face looked like something out of a monster movie it was so distorted and frightening. She babbled and gesticulated and he stepped outside and told her to calm down even though his own heart was galloping because he could see that whatever she was trying to communicate, it was something horrific. She gripped his head in her hands and squeezed so hard that he thought his eyes would pop out. It took him a few minutes but in the end he understood. Emil was in trouble. Emil was dying.
He’d run across the street to the church with Lise at his side and he’d gone downstairs where Gus was sitting on the toilet. Gus had sworn at them and reached out and slammed shut the door to his little bathroom and Jake had knocked on it hard and hollered that Emil Brandt was dying and they needed Gus’s help. Gus was out quickly and ushered them back to the house and grabbed the phone and called the fire department and told them to get their asses to Emil Brandt’s place, the man was dying. Then he mounted his motorcycle with Jake behind him and Lise in the sidecar and they shot up the road to Brandt’s house. By the time they got there the fire department ambulance was parked in front.
One of the firemen told Gus that it looked like Brandt had swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills. They were pumping his stomach. They wouldn’t let Lise into the bedroom but she tried to shove her way inside and the fireman who’d talked to Gus held her back. The moment he touched her she went berserk. It was as if his hands were fire. She leaped back and folded herself into a corner of the living room and began to scream uncontrollably. The fireman reached out to her again but Jake told him no, don’t touch her, she can’t stand being touched by strangers. He told the fireman to wait and she would calm down eventually. Brandt was brought out on a gurney while Lise screamed in her corner and they loaded him into the ambulance and they rushed him to the hospital. When Lise calmed down as Jake had predicted he made her understand what had happened and although she was frantic about her brother she didn’t commence again to screaming.
Someone had called Axel Brandt and he arrived minutes after the firemen had sped away with Emil. Gus explained things to him and he signed to his sister and told Gus they were going to the hospital. And when they were gone the house was silent and empty, a place that felt as if a tornado had swept past and sucked out the air and neither Gus nor Jake wanted to linger. They came back on the motorcycle to wait for my parents and to deliver the news.
My father charged Gus with the responsibility of explaining the situation to Albert Griswold, a deacon who usually came early to help set up the worship. Griswold was a town councilman who could talk your brain numb. When Gus laid things out for him and made it clear that he needed to conduct the service, I saw the man puff up with pleasure at the opportunity. His wife was in the choir and was a fair organist and my mother left instructions with Gus that Lorraine Griswold was to lead the music for the service.
Whatever illness had afflicted Jake seemed to have been cured by the events of that morning and after my parents left he dressed in his Sunday clothes and was prepared to attend church. For a brief time I weighed the delicious possibility of skipping the service. In all the confusion who would notice? But under the circumstances it seemed that my presence and Jake’s would be judicious and I steeled myself for what I knew would be a long grind. Jake turned out to be a bit of a celebrity and much to his dismay he was assaulted with questions about what had happened. He tried to answer but his stutter was painful to him and to everyone listening and he looked to me for help. I was only too happy to oblige and in the story I told I made him a hero, insisting that it was only because of Jake’s quick action that our most famous citizen was saved from death by his own hand.
People looked aghast. “His own hand? He tried to kill himself?”
“That’s certainly how it looked,” I told them. “If Jake had come a few minutes later, Mr. Brandt would have been dead.”
Their eyes were full of amazement at both Brandt’s unthinkable behavior and young Jake’s valiant action.
I thought I might in this way, making him a hero, redeem myself in my brother’s opinion for turning him into such a vague and unimportant figure in my telling of the story of our discovery of the dead man. Not so. As I told and retold the events of that morning, each time inflating just a bit more the importance of Jake’s role, his scowl grew more profound and he finally grabbed the sleeve of my suit coat and pulled me out the church door and stuttered at me, “Just st-st-st-stop it.”
“What?” I said.
“Just t-t-tell the tr-tr-truth.”
“I am.”
“Bullshit, goddamn it!”
The sun stopped in its rising. The earth ceased to turn. I stood dumbfounded, staring at Jake, amazed at this blasphemy there on the very steps of the church and said with such clarity and power and without stumble that everyone inside could have heard. I felt the eyes of my father’s entire seated congregation shift to the church steps where we stood and I felt the wave of censure roll out from the sanctuary. Jake’s own eyes grew huge with fear and shame at the realization of what he’d just done and they held on my face and I knew he was terrified to look through the door at the people gathered inside who’d been stunned to silence.
Then I laughed. Oh, Christ, did I laugh. I couldn’t help myself it was all so unexpected and surreal. Jake fled, running from the church to our house across the street. And I turned back and entered the shadow of the sanctuary still smiling and suffered the glaring condemnation of the congregation and sat through the long service in which Albert Griswold held forth in his impromptu and interminable sermon about the need to impress godly values on the youth of the day and when it was over I walked back to the house and found Jake upstairs in our room and I apologized.
He stared sullenly at the ceiling and didn’t answer.
“It’s okay, Jake. It’s no big deal.”