Ordinary Grace

by William Kent Krueger

Outside the crickets were kicking up a frenzy. Fireflies hung in the still black air flickering on and off like the slow blink of dreamy eyes.

“What are you looking at, retard?” “He’s not retarded,” I said. “Yeah and your sister’s not a harelip and your old man’s not a friggin’ pussy.”

I was a Boy Scout. Not a good one. I liked the general idea of being trustworthy and loyal and thrifty and brave and clean and reverent but the effort it took to hang in there with all those weighty virtues was usually more than I cared to muster.

And what is happiness, Nathan? In my experience, it’s only a moment’s pause here and there on what is otherwise a long and difficult road. No one can be happy all the time. Better, I think, to wish for her wisdom, a virtue not so fickle.”

Much of the time I sat on the floor by the window looking at the church across the street and wondering about my father’s God. In his sermons my father often talked about trusting God and trusting that no matter how alone we might feel God was always with us. In all that terrible waiting I didn’t feel the presence of God, not one bit. I prayed but unlike my father who seemed to believe that he was being heard, I felt as if I was talking to the air. Nothing came to me in return. Not Ariel or any relief from the worry about her.

“Good-bye, Frank.” She looked at Jake and I thought she was going to say good-bye to him as well but she didn’t and I realized that she probably couldn’t remember his name which was a common result of Jake’s tendency toward silence in the company of others.

When he’d left the room my mother finally looked where I stood by the screen door. She raised an eyebrow and said, “Do you know your Old Testament, Frankie?” I watched her but didn’t answer. She said, “Let the battle cry be heard in the land, a shout of great destruction.” She drew on her cigarette and breathed out smoke.

“Just look at your children, Ruth. A girl with a harelip. A son with a stutter. Another son wild as an Indian. What kind of children would Ariel have produced?”

I had been to visitations before and have been to many since and I’ve come to understand that there’s a good deal of value in the ritual accompanying death. It’s hard to say good-bye and almost impossible to accomplish this alone and ritual is the railing we hold to, all of us together, that keeps us upright and connected until the worst is past.

“They’re never far from us, you know.” “Who?” I asked. “The dead. No more’n a breath. You let that last one go and you’re with them again.”