“Did she come the night she disappeared?”
“I’m sure she didn’t. If she had, Lise would have said something to me. Look,” he pleaded, “I didn’t kill Ariel. I couldn’t have killed Ariel. In my wounded way, I loved her. Not as she would have liked, but in the only way I was able. You have to believe that, Nathan.”
My father closed his eyes and in the gathering dark sat in silence and I believed he was praying. “I do,” he finally said.
Brandt looked as if he was in physical pain. “You’ll have to tell Ruth, I suppose.”
“No. That’s something you’ll have to do, Emil.”
“All right. I’ll talk with her tomorrow. Will that do, Nathan?”
“Yes.”
“Nathan?”
“What is it?”
“We’re finished as friends, aren’t we?”
“I’ll pray for the strength to forgive you, Emil. But I have no wish to see you again.” My father rose. “Frank?”
I stood too.
“God be with you, Emil,” my father said in parting. He didn’t say it in the way he sometimes did to a congregation as a blessing at the end of a service. This sounded more like a criminal sentence. I followed him to the Packard and we got in. I looked back before we drove away and Emil Brandt and the dark of the coming night were merging and if he stayed there long I figured you wouldn’t be able to tell one from the other.
At home my father parked in the garage and turned off the engine and we sat together in the stillness.
“Well, Frank?”
“I’m glad I know the truth. But I kind of wish I didn’t. It doesn’t make anything better.”
“There was a playwright, Son, a Greek by the name of Aeschylus. He wrote that he who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain, which cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”
“Awful?” I said.
“I don’t think it’s meant in a bad way. I think it means beyond our understanding.”
“I guess there are graces I like better,” I said.
My father slipped the car keys into his pocket. He put his hand on the door handle but didn’t get out. He turned back to me. “There’s something I haven’t told you yet, Frank. A congregation in Saint Paul would like me to be their pastor. I’m going to accept.”
“We’re moving?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“In a month or so. Before school begins.”
“I guess that would be all right,” I said. “Does Mom know?”
“Yes, but not your brother. We should go inside and tell him.”
“Dad?”
“Yes?”
“I don’t hate Mr. Brandt. In a way, I feel sorry for him.”
“That’s a good beginning. It would be nice to leave this place with a heart that’s not full of enmity.”
I saw a firefly blink in the dark of the garage and I realized it was getting late but I didn’t move.
“Is there something else, Frank?”
There was and it was Warren Redstone. Although I knew the sheriff intended to question Morris Engdahl and Judy Kleinschmidt further about the night Ariel was killed, I didn’t believe anymore that they had something to do with her death. Redstone had murdered my sister. I accepted that now. I’d fought against believing it, a battle whose real purpose was simply to keep me from being overwhelmed by guilt because I didn’t do anything to stop Danny’s great-uncle when he made his escape across the river. I was finished with blame, finished with feeling lousy, and so I told my father everything. The whole horrible story spilled from me in a torrent I couldn’t stop, a complete unburdening. I’d been afraid that he would be angry, that he would condemn me. In my worst imaginings, he ceased to love me. Instead he held me and pressed his cheek to the top of my head and said, “It’s okay, Son. It’s okay.”
“No, it’s not,” I insisted between sobs. “What if they never catch him?”
“Then I suppose God’ll have a lot to say to him when they meet face-to-face, don’t you think?”
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.
39
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.