Marty Schoenfeldt shoved the second baseman and the players from both teams came running to gather around them. I watched what looked like a fight developing, the two kids taking stances.
“I talk to Ariel,” Jake said.
I looked away from the coming fight. “What do you mean?”
He shrugged. “It’s like praying only it’s not exactly. I just talk to her sometimes like she’s in the room and listening, like she used to, you know? I don’t know if she can hear me, but I feel better, like she’s not really gone.”
I wanted to say, She’s gone, Jake, she’s really gone, because that’s how I felt but I held my tongue and let Jake hold to his own imagining.
The kids pulled Marty Schoenfeldt and the second baseman apart and it looked like the game would resume. For some reason I felt an enormous sense of relief.
“Come on,” I said to Jake. “We better get back. They’ll be missing us.”
• • •
In the middle of the long dark of the night that followed, I woke to the brittle ring of the telephone. My father came from his bedroom and I got up too and stood in the doorway and watched him as he shuffled to the telephone in the upstairs hallway and answered. As he listened, I saw his face change and throw off all sleepiness and I heard him whisper, “Oh, dear God.” He shook his head in disbelief and then he said, “Thank you, Sheriff.”
He put the receiver in the telephone cradle and stood dumbstruck staring into the dark at the bottom of the stairs.
“What is it, Dad?”
His eyes swung slowly toward me and when he didn’t speak immediately I knew it was bad.
“Karl Brandt,” he finally said. “He’s dead.”
34
On Saturday afternoon we buried Ariel. The sky was nearly cloudless yet something heavy hung in the air over New Bremen and the valley of the Minnesota River. It was a hot day, another in a long line, and windless and I breathed the stale heat and felt the weight and could barely move.
By then I knew some of the details of Karl Brandt’s death. He’d been out in his beloved Triumph, driving back roads, the way he’d driven Jake and me on a day that seemed very long ago. He’d been going way too fast, had missed a turn, and had run into a big cottonwood tree. The impact had thrown him through the windshield and he’d died instantly. He’d been drinking from a bottle of his father’s scotch and there was no sign that he’d tried to make the turn in the road where the cottonwood stood. Whether the tragedy occurred because of the drink or the dark design of his own confused thinking no one could say.
Ariel’s funeral service was scheduled for two o’clock and was to be held in the Third Avenue Methodist Church across the street from our house. My father had requested that his district superintendent, Conrad Stephens, preside at both the full service at the church and the brief graveside ceremony after. He’d chosen music and made arrangements for Lorraine Griswold to be the organist and had asked Amelia Klement if she would lend her fine alto in leading the songs. He’d spoken with Florence Henne about arrangements for a meal after the burial for those who would be attending. He’d been through this dozens of times as a minister and knew exactly what he was doing although I’m certain that this time was quite different for him.
The visitation seemed to have drained my mother of what strength remained to her and she had not come home afterward. On Saturday morning my father drove to my grandparents’ house and talked with her, probably about Karl Brandt among other things, and when he came back he looked tired and empty but he assured us that we would see our mother at the service. Which was something I wasn’t convinced was necessarily a good idea. Funerals weren’t just about the dead. They were about the dead leaving this world to reside with God, someone Mother wasn’t seeing eye to eye with at the moment, if she ever had, and I couldn’t shake the concern that in the middle of the service she would spring from her pew and find some way to spite him.
People began to gather half an hour before the service began. They drove into the parking lot and got out of their cars and entered the church and stood inside the sanctuary and visited. I was pretty sure what they were talking about—Ariel, Karl, the whole mess. I figured it would be a story people in New Bremen would tell for a hundred years, in the same way they told about the Great Sioux Uprising, and they would use words like skag and faggot and bastard child and they wouldn’t remember at all the truth of who these people were. I watched them from the porch of our house where I sat with Jake. It was just him and me at home. My father had gone in the Packard to get my mother. He wanted us to enter the church together as a family.
Jake had been quiet that day, even quieter than usual, and I wondered if it was because of what had happened to Karl, something I was still trying to make sense of. I was praying that it had been an accident due to the scotch he’d been drinking because if I thought he’d really killed himself then I knew I’d had a hand in it. And Jake too, though I hoped like crazy my brother didn’t see it that way. I should have been the one to stand up to Doyle and refuse to tell him what we’d overheard but I’d knuckled under and Jake had talked and now Karl Brandt was dead. I argued with myself: Karl didn’t have to do what he did. Some people lived with dark secrets all their lives, secrets that threatened to crush them. Something had happened to my father in the war, something terrible, but he’d found the strength to continue on. And me, I was living with the knowledge that I’d let the man who’d probably killed my sister go free, a secret that at moments was almost unbearable, but I’d never think of killing myself. It seemed to me that if a place or situation bothered you, became intolerable, you could find a way to deal with it. Talk to someone maybe or maybe just go somewhere where no one knew you and start a new life. Killing yourself seemed like the worst possible choice.
Out of nowhere Jake said, “There are some things you can’t run from, Frank.”
He was staring into the sun which from our perspective seemed to be hanging directly over the steeple of the church. I thought if he didn’t look away soon he’d blind himself.
“What do you mean?”
“Who you are. You can’t run from that. You can leave everything behind except who you are.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’ll always stutter. People will always make fun of me. Sometimes I think I should just kill myself.”
“Don’t say that.”
He finally turned from the sun and swung his eyes toward me and his pupils were like dots made with a pencil point. “What do you think it’s like?”
“What do I think what’s like?”
“Dying. Being dead.”
What I thought was that they were two different things. Dead was one thing. But dying, that was another. I said, “I don’t want to think about it.”