Ordinary Grace

“In New Bremen, a town platted and populated by Germans, rules were abided by.”

This passage reinforces the notion that heterodoxy has little place in towns like New Bremen; if one is not white, straight, and Christian, one is automatically other. These figurative, societal rules are adhered to throughout the novel, especially by authority figures like Officer Doyle. On the more optimistic and literal side, New Bremen, perhaps because of the above, also remains a place where things like murders usually don’t happen and people don’t lock their doors. 

“Part of it was the music itself but it was also the way Ariel played. 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.”

Here, Frank recalls his sister playing the church organ. Ariel’s murder is the novel’s chief plot point, and also what tests the faith of every member of the Drum family. Even while Frank rebels against his own beliefs, Ariel’s musical abilities attain and retain a godly quality for him, one reinforced by the fact that Frank is recalling her playing from forty years after the fact. 

“And I thought about telling them how I’d figured Bobby was hopeless but I was wrong and Gus was right. Bobby had a gift and the gift was his 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.”

Bobby Cole, developmentally-disabled, personifies the collective consciousness of New Bremen: simple is better, and being overly analytical is in many ways an impediment to leading a happy life. Frank, by contrast, has a personality that is out of step with New Bremen: he is analytical, curious, cynical, and questioning. These traits will push the plot of the book forward while consistently getting Frank in hot water with those around him. His “confusion and fear” are part of his coming-of-age.

“‘Because you’re her pastor, too. And if she can’t turn to anyone else, she ought to be able to turn to you. People tell you their secrets, Nathan. I know they do. And not just because you’re their pastor.”

Here, Ruth Drum talks to Nathan about Amelia Klement, the woman who is being abused by her husband. The passage typifies Nathan Drum’s personality; throughout the novel, he is even and decent in every encounter with those around him, even when that person harbors the potential to be his daughter’s killer. 

“Her words usually went something like, When I married you, Nathan, I thought I was marrying a lawyer. I didn’t sign on for this.”

This passage details the difficulty Ruth Drum has had adjusting to life as the wife of a minister. Ruth drinks, smokes, has thoughts of being a writer, and is generally less than thrilled that her marriage to Nathan has returned her to the small town where she grew up, and has left her overseeing choir arrangements for church services. In her scene with Frank on the train trestle, she admits that she is a non-believer, and after Ariel’s death briefly leaves Nathan to stay with her father. 

“Although Emil and Lise Brandt were part of the royalty that was the Brandt family—they were brother and sister of Axel Brandt and, therefore, uncle and aunt to Karl—they lived in a kind of exile in a beautifully renovated farmhouse on the western edge of New Bremen overlooking the river. They were Brandts in name and fortune but they were very different from the others.”

Both Emil and Lise Brandt harbor sensory impairments—Emil is blind, while Lise is deaf. It would seem that because of this, both of these characters are disallowed access to status quo New Bremen society. Further, Emil and Lise wind up the two most despicable characters in the novel, with Emil turning out to be the father of Ariel Drum’s child and Lise being Ariel’s killer. 

“‘Frank, it’s not my place to talk to you about what your father experienced in the war. But I’ll tell you about the war in general. You talk to a man like Doyle and he’ll tell you a lot of bullshit. You watch John Wayne and Audie Murphy in the movie house and it probably seems easy killing men. The truth is that when you kill a man it doesn’t matter if he’s your enemy and if he’s trying to kill you. That moment of his death will eat at you for the rest of your life. It’ll dig into bone so deep inside you that not even the hand of God is going to be able to pull it out, I don’t care how much you pray.’”

Here, Gus discusses (and talks around) what happens in war. The way in which Gus talks about war and killing typifies the type of person he is: his allegiance lies first with Nathan Drum, but, not being an actual parent or relative to Frank, Gus is also able to discuss real-life matters in a way that a father might not feel comfortable doing. Gus consistently works as go-between for Frank and Nathan throughout the novel. 

“I thought I might in this way, making him a hero, redeem myself in my brother’s opinion for turning him into such a vague and unimportant figure in my telling of the story of our discovery of the dead man. Not so. As I told and retold the events of that morning, each time inflating just a bit more the importance of Jake’s role, his scowl grew more profound and he finally grabbed the sleeve of my suit coat and pulled me out the church and stuttered at me, ‘Just st-st-st-stop it.’”

Frank has a tendency to embellish the truth in his retellings of events. Here, he attempts to make his younger brother into more of a hero than he is. Jake, a voice of conscience in the novel, stops him. Repeatedly, we see Frank attempt to reconcile situations through his own will and intellect, and, repeatedly, we see such attempts ultimately be counterproductive. 

“In my excitement I clapped Jake on the shoulder in the way of comrades and then I did the same to Lise Brandt. The moment I touched her she swung around with the crowbar in her hand. If I hadn’t been so quick and leaped back out of reach, that iron bar would have crushed my skull. The sun in its setting had gone red and a long beam shot through a break in the branches of an elm and lit her face with a demon light. Her eyes held a wild look and she opened her mouth and began to scream in the way she had earlier when the fireman had restrained her.”

Here, we see the trauma- and anxiety-driven rage that Lise Brandt harbors. On two separate occasions, Lise almost bludgeons Frank with blunt objects, and it’s Lise who kills Ariel, after Ariel forgets that Lise can’t stand to be touched by anyone other than Emil or Jake. In using the phrase “demon light,” Krueger proactively moves Lise farther away from possessing wholesome Christian virtues; she lives in a godless house with a godless man: her brother, Emil. 

“Ariel had been with Karl Brandt, I learned as I listened, and with other friends who’d gathered on the river at Sibley Park and built a bonfire on the same stretch of sand where Doyle had blown up the frog with an M-80. There’d been alcohol and everyone was drinking and somewhere along the way they’d lost track of Ariel and no one knew, not even Karl, when she’d gone or where. She’d simply vanished.”

Here, Frank learns the details of Ariel’s last known moments prior to her disappearance. Ariel has come from the Independence Day recital in New Bremen, partied with friends, and vanished. 

“The sheriff leaned back and crossed his arms over his chest and for a full minute sat in silence and appraised Morris Engdahl. Over the course of that minute Engdahl went from his slouch to an erect posture and then to a twitching of his shoulders in a nervous way and finally said, ‘Look I told you everything. I don’t know anything about Ariel Drum. I saw her at a party on the river, that’s all. Hell, I don’t think I even said a word to her. She was sitting on the other side of the fire and just staring into it like maybe she was too good to talk to the rest of us. She’s like that. Doesn’t matter she’s got a harelip.’ He stopped blathering and shot my father a guilty look.”

This passage recounts the interrogation of Morris Engdahl, after he’s brought in by authorities to be questioned in the death of Ariel Drum. Engdahl is innocent, but is perpetually under suspicion due to his role as town tough and nonconformist. Tellingly, Ariel Drum, like Emil Brandt, is (albeit slightly) disfigured—she has a harelip—and Krueger thereby shows physical overlap and sameness between Brandt and Ariel. 

“He didn’t move. He didn’t speak. He simply lay flat on the trestle and looked at me with eyes as brown and old and worn down as two stones that tumbled along the glacial river over ten thousand years ago…{h]e stood…[h]e looked back at me once as if gauging my intent then returned his attention to making his escape. The last I saw of him he’d crossed the trestle and slipped behind the veil of the heavy rain.”

This passage details Frank seeing Warren Redstone on the train trestle, as a group of men, led by Nathan Drum and Officer Doyle, hunt for him. Frank decides to let Redstone go, a fact that haunts him for much of the novel, as it seems clear, at least off and on to Frank, that Redstone actually is Ariel’s killer, a fact that proves to be untrue. 

“I knew nothing about death. We’d never even had a pet that died. But I thought about Bobby Cole’s parents who’d lost everything when they lost Bobby. And I thought about an evening only a week before when I’d walked past their house on my way home from goofing around with Danny O’Keefe. Mr. Cole had been in the yard and he’d been looking up at the evening sky and when he realized that I was passing on the sidewalk he smiled and said, ‘Beautiful evening, eh, Frank?’ I thought if a man who’d lost everything could still see the beauty in a sunset then sooner or later things would look up for Jake and me and our family.”

This passage speaks to how the events of the summer of 1961 serve as Frank’s coming-of-age moment: over the course of those months, Frank effectively grows up, learning much about how life works. Part of this would seem to be that there’s a way to find beauty in the commonplace and the natural, and that people must go on, even in the face of true tragedy. 

“In the aftermath of Ariel’s death I often found myself noticing some usual convergence of natural circumstance that I took as a sign. Not necessarily for God but clearly forces beyond my own constricted understanding.”

Frank’s relationship with God is a complicated one. At moments, he is either questioning of God’s existence or angry with God for allowing events to occur. Here, we see Frank decoupling coincidence from the theological, which does not necessarily disallow the existence of God. Fitzgerald once said that the sign of true intelligence was the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. Frank might be seen as applying such an idea here, and his general outlook toward the Christian deity might follow suit—he remains skeptical and argumentative, and largely secular, while also still believing. 

“In a small town, nothing is private. Word spreads with the incomprehensibility of magic and the speed of plague. It wasn’t long before most of New Bremen knew about Ariel’s condition and the sheriff’s suspicions regarding Karl Brandt.”

Here, Frank illustrates how New Bremen, like many small towns, is a natural conductor for drama-laden gossip. Further, each time the greater New Bremen community learns of such facts, the true nature of the town’s collective consciousness is brought to light, and its phobic tendencies revealed. 

“In this way we reassured ourselves because Ariel’s death had shattered any sense of normality, any firm sense that what any future moment held was predictable. If God could allow Ariel to die—allow little Bobby Cole to be so gruesomely slaughtered as well—then Mother who was not at all on good terms with the Almighty, was, I feared, stepping directly into harm’s way.”

This quote, from Frank, comes in the moments leading up to his conversation about God and death with his mom, Ruth, after Frank and Jake find her depressed and detached on the train trestle. Here, Frank’s faith seems solid, while Ruth admits to being a non-believer. Indeed, there are multiple points in the novel where Frank’s belief seems largely comparative—when others don’t believe, Frank seems to believe more; by contrast, when others seem devout, Frank becomes cynical or disbelieving. 

“I’d lived other places before New Bremen, other towns where my father had been pastor, and although I got to know them quickly and discovered easily what was special and fun about them none had been as close to my heart as New Bremen. Ariel’s death had changed that. The town became alien to me and at night especially threatening and I biked each deserted street with a sense that menace was all around me.”

The trauma and grief of losing his sister changes New Bremen for Frank. Importantly, the town ultimately arrives to the reader as being no less safe; that is, the actions of New Bremen townspeople do not change at all, following Ariel’s murder and the three other deaths. The “menace” Frank feels, then, has the potential to be viewed as Frank, in his coming of age, realizing how classist, racist, and selfish the actions of all adult society have the potential of being. 

“‘The rich, they walk on stilts and the rest of us, we just crawl around under them in the dirt. So what do you do? Well, you spray-paint the truth where the world can see it, I guess that’s one thing. Rub their noses a little in the stink of what they’ve done and who they are, huh?’”

These words are spoken by Officer Doyle, after he comes upon Frank biking back from the Brandt residence, and in the wake of someone writing the word Murderer (spelled incorrectly) on a pillar at the Brandt’s house. It reinforces New Bremen’s classism (also seen through the running feud between Ruth Drum and Julia Brandt) while at the same time illustrating that agents of law enforcement are able to abuse power and project their own biases onto what would otherwise be objective procedural action. 

“I was pretty sure of 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 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.”

Here, Frank observes the townspeople talking at Ariel’s funeral service. He speculates that the New Bremen community will remain just as misinformed and phobic a century from now as Frank perceives them as being in 1961. 

“In that silence while my father’s head filled with the word he deemed proper, my mother spoke. She said, ‘For God’s sake, Nathan, can’t you, just this once, offer an ordinary grace?’”

Here, Ruth delivers the lines that serve as the title for the novel. Nathan, flustered by her comments and unable to offer a simple grace at Ariel’s funeral reception, watches on as Jake fills in, delivering an “ordinary grace” without stuttering. 

“I stared back at the path I’d blindly walked, at the thread that was visible only if you knew where to look, and I understood with icy clarity how Ariel had come to be in the river.”

Here, Frank is sure that he’s deduced who killed Ariel—Emil Brandt. Frank walks blindly through the Brandt’s farmhouse yard and down the hill to the park where Ariel was last seen. His ability to do this successfully proves to him that Emil is the killer. That Frank is wrong functions as Krueger’s commentary for the shortcoming of humankind’s intellect, when compared to the omniscient knowledge of the Christian god. 

“‘Miracles happen, Frank. But they’re not the kinds of miracles I thought they’d be. Not like, you know, Lazarus. Mom’s happy again, or almost, and that’s kind of a miracle. And yesterday I didn’t stutter, and you want to know something, I think I never will.’”

Jake’s return to the flock through his deliverance of a grace at Ariel’s funeral reception reignites his broader devoutness. Here, Jake, more world-wise, nonetheless confirms his belief, one that will remain with him for the full of his life, as he goes on to become a minister and follow in Nathan Drum’s footsteps. 

“I returned to the honey-colored cabinet and began opening drawers. Mostly they held nails and screws and washers. But when I opened the middle drawer something else caught my eye. Amid a collection of bolts and nuts lay a delicate gold watch and a mother-of-pearl barrette.”

Here, Frank, through accident (or, perhaps the will of God), discovers that Lise Brandt is Ariel Drums’ actual killer. He does so by accidentally (or through the will of God) cutting his finger while helping the godless Lise Brandt in her garden.