Ordinary Grace

It’s mid-August and the Drums are preparing to leave New Bremen for a move to St. Paul, Minnesota. Danny O’Keefe and his family also move, with Danny’s mother taking a teaching job in Granite Falls. Frank’s final days are filled with nostalgia and “[he] walked a lot, usually alone, visiting the places that would become monuments in [his] memory” (292). Gus spends more time at the ranch, with Ginger; he quits drinking, we learn, and stops associating with Officer Doyle. On the side of the river, Warren Redstone’s lean-to has collapsed.

The Klements come to visit and Peter, Frank’s friend, says that in St. Paul life is very different: “[t]here were streets in St. Paul, he warned, where people couldn’t walk safely at night. And everybody locked their doors” (293).

A week before the Drums are to leave, Morris Engdahl is killed in a work accident at the cannery. Out on bail and awaiting sentencing on statutory rape charges, Engdahl gets in a fight with his foreman while drunk and falls from a platform to the cannery floor, breaking his neck.

Emil tells Ruth about sleeping with Ariel (we are not witness to this in-scene), and while Ruth is angry at first, she lets go of that rage, though Frank remains sure Ruth never forgives Emil for what he has done.

The day before the Drums are to leave for the city, Jake asks Frank to help him and Lise Brandt with a garden project. The boys go to the Brandt farmhouse to help arrange a rock boundary around part of Lise’s yard. The trio work through to late afternoon then Lise asks if they’d like a soda. Lise goes into the house to get sodas while Frank goes to the garden shed, to grab a crowbar to assist with moving some of the rocks around. He cuts his finger pulling the crowbar off its spot on the wall; Jakes tells Frank that Lise keeps a box of Band-Aids in a shed drawer. Frank opens the drawer and finds Ariel’s barrette and watch.

Frank confronts Jake, saying that Jake knew this whole time. Jake admits that he suspected as much, but remains sure that if Lise did do it, it was an accident. When Frank says that Lise must be punished for her crimes, Jake counters, saying “‘Putting [Lise] in prison won’t bring Ariel back’” (297). Frank finally convinces Jake that something must be done when he brings up Warren Redstone, and that the wrong person could be convicted of the crime.

Lise returns to the yard and Frank shows her Ariel’s things. Lise feigns not knowing what the items are. Frank says he has to tell someone and begins walking toward the house, to tell Emil. Jake screams, “‘Lise, no!’”; Lise is rushing at Frank with the crowbar, “wailing like a wounded beast” (299). Frank dodges the blow, twists his ankle, and Jake grabs Lise, who stops trying to attack Frank. Emil calls out from inside the house and asks what’s going on.

Lise gets free from Jake and stands over him, crowbar raised. Frank and Jake are both sure Jake is about to be hurt or injured but something, “only God knows what,” stops Lise from striking Jake (299). Lise apologizes; Jake remains with herwhile Frank walks toward the house, to tell Emil about what’s happened. 

The narrative returns to the present day; it is 2001, Frank is 53, forty years older than he was in 1961, and still living in St. Paul. He offers an iteration of the common “two trains” math problem: one train leaves one place at a certain speed, while the other leaves a second place at a different speed: when will they meet? Frank says that for him, “the two trains of this problem are the summer of 1961 and the present. And they collide every year on Memorial Day in the cemetery in New Bremen” (301).

Frank drives his father, who also lives in St. Paul, to New Bremen. Nathan is now very elderly, and infirm. In New Bremen, things have changed: the church has been renovated and added on to; Halderson’s Drugstore is gone, replaced by a video store and tanning salon. We learn that both Ruth’s father and Liz have passed away. Axel and Julia Brandt have adopted a Korean boy, “and raised him and loved him and willed to him the brewery” (303). Jake has become a pastor and resides in Winona. The trio visit the graves of Bobby Cole, Morris Engdahl, Emil Brandt, and Lise Brandt. Emil dies at fifty-one; Lise lives to be “nearly seventy” (304), and has spent her time since 1961 in the Minnesota Security Hospital:

[Lise] claimed not to remember actually killing Ariel. She’d found my sister on the lawn at the farmhouse that night and had gone outside to shoo her away. Ariel had reached out, touched her—who knew why?—and the next thing she remembered she was standing with the bloodied crowbar in her hand and Ariel on the grass at her feet. She’d panicked, carried Ariel to the river, and delivered her to the current, hoping it would take the whole problem away (304).

Frank says that Lise was not unhappy in the prison hospital, that she had a garden to tend to, and that Jake visited her on a regular basis, and “was with her at the end praying her in to a peaceful final rest” (304).

Frank, Jake and Nathan then visit the graves of Gus and Ginger French. The two married and “took up flying and bought their own little Piper Cub…a dozen years into their marriage, on a flight to Valentine, Nebraska, they ran into severe weather and crashed in a cornfield and were killed” (304).

We learn that Frank and Danny O’Keefe both attended the University of Minnesota. From Danny, Frank procures contact information for Warren Redstone, who lives near Granite Falls. Frank goes to see him while still in college. Warren thanks Frank for not turning him in. Before Frank leaves, Warren says, “‘They’re never far from us, you know…[t]he dead. No more’n a breath. You let that last one go and you’re with them again” (305).

The last grave the trio visit is Ruth’s, who is buried next to Ariel. Ruth has died at sixty from breast cancer.

Frank is now a high school history teacher in St. Paul. The three leave the cemetery:

bound by love, by history, by circumstance, and most certainly by the awful grace of God, and together walk a narrow lane where headstones press close all around, reminding me gently of Warren Redstone’s parting wisdom…[t]he dead are never far from us. They’re in our hearts and on our minds and in the end all that separates us from them is a single breath, one final puff of air” (307).