Ordinary Grace

It’s the summer of 1961, and the Drum household has no air conditioning. Frank Drum is thirteen years old and shares a bedroom with this younger brother, Jake. Frank can’t sleep, due to the night’s heat. The phone rings. Frank’s father, Nathan, answers. We learn that a war buddy of Nathan’s, Gus, is in jail for a bar fight. Nathan is a Protestant minister; Guslives in the basement of Nathan’s church, which is across the street from the Drum household.

Frank, his father, and his younger brother get into their 1955 Packard Clipper (which Frank’s mother has named Lizzie) and head down to the town jail. The car is a gift from Frank’s mother’s father, who has deemed Nathan, his son-in-law, a failure, after giving up his law career and becoming a man of the cloth.

The Drums live in the middle-class part of New Bremen, called the Flats; New Bremen’s wealthy, by contrast, live literally above them, in the Heights. The trio reach the town jail. In one of the jail cells is town tough Morris Engdahl: “A bad sort. Black hair slicked in a ducktail and fond of black leather jackets” (7). Frank goes on to say that Engdahl “drove the coolest set of wheels [he’d] ever seen. A black 1932 Ford Deuce Coupe with suicide doors and shiny chrome grille and big whitewall tires and flames painted along its sides so that fire ran the length of the car” (7).

Engdahl mocks Jake’s stutter; Nathan, his father, quietly defends his son. While talking to the duo of officers, we learn that Officer Doyle questions whether or not the death of Bobby Cole, who was developmentally-disabled, was an accident: “‘I’ve seen that kid on those tracks hundreds of times. He loved trains, I guess. Can’t figure out how he came to get himself killed by one’” (8). We learn that Cole had just been sitting on the tracks when the train that killed him arrived. Officer Doyle tells Frank to stay away from the train tracks because “‘there are bums down there. Men not like the decent folks of New Bremen’” (10).

Gus stumbles out drunk from a back room of the jail. Frank looks back at Engdahl, and offers: “Now, forty years later, I realize that what I saw was a kid not much older than me. Thin and angry and blind and lost and shut up behind iron bars not for the first time or the last. I probably should have felt for him something other than I did which was hatred” (10).

Gus, who calls Frank’s father, Nathan, “Captain” throughout the novel, asks Nathan why “‘God…takes the sweet ones’” (11), in reference to the death of Bobby Cole. Nathan responds that he doesn’t know. Gus vomits in the car, prompting Nathan to say that Frank and his brother, Jake, have to walk home. Frank asks for the tire iron from the trunk, for protection. Frank and Jake stop by Rosie’s Bar on the way home, and Frank takes the tire iron to the front headlights of Engdahl’s car, then offers the iron to his brother, who, with reluctance, smashes out the rear brake lights.

Frank and Jake meet up with their father in the church; Gus is still vomiting, and Nathan attends to him. Gus says to Nathan, “‘They’re all dead because of you, Captain. Always will be’” (15). While the reader never gets the full details about what transpired in the war, it’s implied here that a decision by Nathan, as captain of his men, led to mass loss of life.

Jake and Frank go outside and sit on the church steps. It’s pre-dawn, and they watch their older sister, Ariel, sneak across their lawn and into their house by the backdoor. Chapter One closes with the same reference to “the awful grace of God” (16) that the book’s prologue closes with. 

Chapter 2 begins with a long description of Frank’s mother, Ruth, sitting at the kitchen table, smoking a cigarette and attempting to write. We learn Ruth is “enamored of the work of Ayn Rand and had that she [Ruth] too could be a world-famous author” (17). Ruth goes upstairs to get ready for church. Frank and Jake watch TV then get dressed in their church clothes. Frank then leaves to spy on a neighbor, Edna Sweeney, who he is “blonde with a bosom like the prow of an aircraft carrier” (19). Adolescent hormones raging, Frank stares at Edna’s undergarments drying on a laundry line through a gap of fence. Jake startles Frank while Frank gawks; both the boys stare a bit longer, then Frank says they have to go. He pulls on Jake’s suit and its coat splits at the shoulder. Frank sews the suit and the two brothers hurry to church service.

We get background on Ariel, Frank’s older sister, “who turned eighteen in May and in June graduated from New Bremen High School and was planning to attend Juilliard in in the fall” (21). Ariel plays organ at the church service and is also a talented singer. We learn the church and congregation are Methodist. Frank says of Ariel’s organ playing: “To this day there are pieces I cannot hear without imagining my sister’s fingers shaping the music every bit as magnificently as God shaped the wings of butterflies” (21).

This specific service is to honor the life of Bobby Cole, the boy who has died on the train tracks. Ruth sings; Frank says, “When my mother sang, I almost believed in heaven” (22). Nathan Drum speaks; Frank offers, “People said he was a good preacher, though not as fiery as some of his congregation would have liked. He spoke earnestly, never passionately. He was a man of ideas and he never tried…to muscle people into believing” (23).

Gus gets up and gives words of remembrance about Bobby that make the congregation cry. Frank, watching on in silence, offers, “Bobby had a gift and the gift was simplicity. The world for Bobby Cole was a place he accepted without needing to understand it. Me, I was growing up scrambling for meaning and I was full of confusion and fear” (24).

Frank and Jake are at Halderson’s Drugstore, a setting that will continually function through the novel as a place for Frank to obtain gossip from adults. Officer Doyle is in a backroom with Gus and Mr. Halderson and says once more he thinks that Bobby Cole’s death was more than just an accident. Doyle and Gus are both drinking. Doyle motions for Frank and Jake to approach, asking them if they’ve ever play by the railroad tracks. Frank lies and says no; Jake, due to his anxiety associated with his stutter, is unable to talk and shakes his head no.

Frank and Jake leave and walk through the town, passing “Bon Ton’s barbershop where the easy voices of men and the scent of hair oil drifted through the open door” (27). Frank describes the area between town and the Flats: “Grain elevators rose beside the tracks on the Flats. Tall and white they were connected by catwalks and conveyor belts. There was a stark kind of beauty in the way they stood against the sky like sculptures made of bone” (28). Frank stops walking then heads toward the railroad tracks. Jake follows.

Frank gives ample background on the Minnesota River and its valley, including that “The river runs nearly four hundred miles and it runs brown. It flows out of Lac qui Parle. The Lake that Speaks. At its end are the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul” (29). Frank and Jake walk “to a place half a mile outside the Flats where a long trestle bridged the river” (29.) Frank admits he’s looking for evidence relating to the death of Bobby Cole. Frank and Jake are on the trestle when they hear noises below: “From under a willow that overhung the bank and that was surrounded by bulrushes a man emerged plucking burrs from his clothing” (30). Frank describes him as “old to [Frank] because his hair was…the dull color of a long-circulated five-cent piece” (30). The man disappears under the trestle then reappears at the riverbank, where Frank and Jake spot a second man, who “looked as if he were sleeping” (30). This will be the second of the four deaths in New Bremen that summer.

The first man goes through the dead man’s pockets. The dead man has on an overcoat and the second man takes out a bottle of alcohol from the coat’s pocket, sniffs it, then drinks. Jake whispers to Frank and the man hears him, then tells the boys to come down and see the dead man. Frank says, “It was not an order but an invitation and I stood to accept” (31).

The man who asks them down to look at the dead man is Warren Redstone, a Dakota Sioux whose people “had populated that land long before white people came and the white people had by hook and crook stolen it from them” (31). Redstone says he was in the World War One and identifies the dead man as “Skipper.” Redstone continues going through the dead man’s pockets, and finds a faded photo, on the back of which is written, “October 23, 1944. Johnny’s first birthday. We miss you and hope you can be home for Christmas. Mary” (32). Redstone speculates Skipper served in World War Two.

Redstone puts his hand on Jake’s leg and the two boys flee, returning to Halderson’s Drugstore. Frank reports to Gus and Doyle that there’s a dead man near the railroad tracks but does not mention anything about Redstone. 

The county sheriff, Gregor, questions the boys. Frank talks more about not mentioning Redstone: “But Jake in his utterance in the back room of the drugstore had omitted the Indian and in doing so had lied and the lie once spoken had taken shape as surely as if he’d chiseled it from a block of limestone” (36).

Nathan arrives and tells the boys to stay away from the tracks, citing the issue as one of trust. In regard to seeing Skipper (the dead man), Nathan Drum says, “‘You’ve seen something I would like to have kept from you. If you want to talk about it, I’ll listen’” (38).

The boys go up to their bedroom. Ariel is home, and talks with them: “Ariel was a pretty girl. She had my mother’s auburn hair and pillowy blue eyes and my father’s quiet and considered countenance…[s]he’d been born with a cleft lip and though it had been surgically corrected when she was a baby the scar was still visible” (39). Frank goes on to say that Ariel has said about her cleft lip that “‘It’s the mark left by the finger of an angel who touched my face’” (39). Franks adds that Ariel “was my parent’s golden child. She had a quick mind and the gift of easy charm and her fingers possessed magic on the keyboard and we all knew, all of us who loved her, that she was destined for greatness” (40). Ariel is further described as the brothers’ “confidante” and “defender” (40).

Nathan Drum is called to the funeral home to discuss burial arrangements for Skipper. After, Frank listens to his parents discuss Ariel; Ruth is concerned that Ariel has appeared different lately. Later that night, Frank wakes to Ariel returning home, shutting a car door and laughing. Still later, during a thunderstorm, Frank states, “I’d wanted to ask about death and if it hurt to die and what awaited me and everyone else after our passing…[d]eath was a serious subject on my mind and I wanted to talk to someone about it” (43). The chapter concludes with Ariel sneaking back out of the house, after her curfew, and heading toward the Heights, the wealthy part of town.