“Well get rid of it,” I said and threw a rock.
“I’ve been dreaming about her.”
“Yeah?”
“I dream about her in heaven.”
I’d been ready to throw another rock, even had my arm cocked, but I stopped and looked at my brother. “What’s it like?”
“Mostly she’s just happy. I feel kind of good when I wake up.”
“Jesus, I wish I had that dream.”
“You said—” Jake began his usual complaint about my language but dropped it. He looked past me and looked down and said, “What’s that, Frank?”
I turned my eyes to where he pointed at the little dam of debris the river had swept up and the trestle pilings had captured. Within the thick nesting of brush and branches which were all shades of brown and black was an undulation of bright red that couldn’t be seen from the riverbank but was quite visible from above. I stood and crept farther out onto the trestle where Jake was reluctant to follow and I reached the place directly above the debris. I peered down among the debris and branches where the brown cider water rushed through and obscured everything beneath the surface. It took me a moment to realize what I was looking at. And when I did the breath went out of me.
“What is it, Frank?”
I couldn’t look up. I couldn’t look away. I couldn’t speak.
Jake said, “Frank?”
“Get Dad,” I finally managed to say.
“What is it?” Jake insisted.
“Just get Dad. Now, Jake. Go. I’ll wait here.”
Jake stood up and started out farther onto the trestle and I yelled at him, “Don’t you come out here. Don’t take another step. Just get Dad, goddamn it.”
Jake stumbled back and almost fell from the trestle and picked himself up and turned and began to run along the tracks toward the Flats.
Strength deserted every muscle of my body and I collapsed and stared down between the crossties at the rippling swatch of red which I’d realized was the fabric of a dress ruffling in the current. And beside it from the obscured depth of the river a little stream of a deeper color roiled up and fluttered along the surface and I knew this was Ariel’s long auburn hair.
The day was hot and windless and the sky a hard china blue and I lay alone on the railroad bridge and cried my heart out above a river that seemed to have none.
23
Knowing was far worse than not knowing.
Not knowing had offered hope. Hope that there was some possibility we’d overlooked. That a miracle might yet occur. That one day the telephone would ring and there would be Ariel’s voice on the other end like a bird singing at sunrise.
Knowing offered only death. The death of Ariel and of hope and of something that I didn’t see at first but whose loss would reveal itself to me more and more as time went on.
New Bremen was in Sioux County and like many basically rural counties had an elected coroner whose duty it was to certify cause of death. The coroner for our county was van der Waal, the mortician. This wasn’t a piece of information most kids my age would typically have known but because my father’s occupation often drew him to the deathbed I’d heard him on many occasions recount to my mother van der Waal’s pronouncements. In that summer with Bobby Cole and the itinerant already in the ground van der Waal was even more darkly familiar to me.
He was tall with gray hair and a gray mustache that he often smoothed unconsciously as he talked. He spoke slowly and with great consideration in the words he chose and despite what I believed to be the gruesome nature of his occupation I thought of him as a kind man.
I wasn’t allowed to be at the river when the sheriff’s people retrieved Ariel’s body for transport to van der Waal’s Funeral Home. My father was there and to this day he has never spoken of that experience. For my part I imagined it a hundred times that summer. It haunted me. Not Ariel’s death itself which was still a mystery but her rising from the river in the hands of my father and the other men and her repose as I envisioned it on the clean soft bed of a satin-lined coffin at van der Waal’s. I didn’t know then in the way I do now the details of death in a river, of a body submerged for three days, of the desecration of the flesh that occurs during an autopsy, and I will not tell you these things. I imagined Ariel as I’d last seen her, beautiful in her red dress with her long auburn hair brushed silky and held back with the mother-of-pearl barrette and about her throat a gold necklace with a heart-shaped locket and on her wrist a gold watch and in her eyes a tearful sheen of happiness as she accepted the applause for her music that Fourth of July night at Luther Park.
When Jake asked me what I’d observed in the murky water beneath the trestle but wouldn’t let him see I described to him Ariel with her hair flowing and her dress aflutter as if she was simply standing in a strong summer breeze and he seemed satisfied with that and relieved. I have never asked him if now he understands the distasteful truth of what must surely have been the state of her body and I have tried my best not to imagine it myself.
An awful hush settled over our house. My mother became nearly mute and more often than not the only sound from her was weeping. She kept the curtains drawn so that it felt as if permanent night had fallen. Never much concerned anyway with her mundane domestic duties she completely stopped cooking and cleaning and sat for hours in the quiet dark of the living room. She was flesh without spirit, eyes without sight. It felt as if I’d lost not only my sister but my mother as well.
My grandfather and Liz came and stayed for the better part of every day. Liz took responsibility for the kitchen and for the phone which rang often with calls of condolence and she greeted those who came in person to offer the comfort of a few words and a prepared casserole and our kitchen became a wondrous buffet of midwest hot dish. Emil Brandt continued to be my mother’s constant companion but even his presence was insufficient to lift her from the dismal place into which she’d fallen.
From the moment he looked down beside me where I stood on the trestle and saw what I saw, my father became a man I didn’t recognize. He had turned to me and said, “Come along, Frank,” as if what we’d seen was nothing more than an unpleasantness or a discourtesy best ignored. He didn’t speak to me the entire way home and once there guided me up to my room and from the telephone in the hallway called the sheriff. When he came to me afterward where I sat on my bed he said, “Not a word to your mother, Frank. Not a word until we’re sure.” His face was pale and stiff as if sculpted of beeswax and I knew he was just as sure as I was of what we’d seen. He left me and I heard him go downstairs and speak with my grandfather and then I heard the screen door open and close and I went to the window and although my heart had already broken for Ariel it seemed to break again as I watched him walk alone back to the trestle.