Free Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger Page B

never do. I just get yelled at. I deserve it. I’m not the greatest kid.
She turned to me and looked seriously into my face. Frankie, never sell yourself short. You have remarkable strengths.
I should be more responsible, I said.
You have plenty of time to become responsible. And believe me it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. She spoke with a heaviness that weighed on me and I leaned against her and said, I wish you weren’t going away.
Maybe I’m not, Frankie, she said. Maybe I’m not.
Before I had a chance to press her further Karl drove up in his little sports car. For his eighteenth birthday his parents had given him a red Triumph TR3 and he drove it everywhere. He popped out of the car and bounded up the walk to where Ariel and I sat on the steps. He was tall and blond and smiling. He ruffed my hair and called me Sport and he said to Ariel, You ready?
Home by midnight, my mother said through the screen door behind us. Then she said, Hello, Karl.
Hello, Mrs. Drum. Beautiful evening, don’t you think? And I’ll have her home before midnight, I promise.
Enjoy yourselves, my mother said though not exactly with a full heart.
Ariel and Karl got into his car and sped up Tyler Street and out of sight. At my back I heard my mother sigh.
My father didn’t return by suppertime and we ate without him. Mother had browned some hamburger and added to it a big can of Franco-American spaghetti and she kept this warm on the stove anticipating my father’s return. Jake and I ate on television trays and watched Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color , though for us it was in black and white, and on our old RCA console the world was a less-than-wonderful twenty-four inches wide. The sun was down and the distant hills had taken on the blue look of twilight when there was a knock at the door and we found Danny O’Keefe standing on the porch scratching at a mosquito bite on his arm and telling us we should come outside and do something.
Despite the impression given by his name Danny O’Keefe was Indian. Specifically he was Dakota but in those days they were known as Sioux. He didn’t like being called an Indian which was understandable given the image that had been acid-burned with ridicule and hatred into the minds of white Americans. In the valley of the Minnesota River—hell, maybe everywhere back then—it was dangerous to be an Indian. In 1862 the Sioux of the area had mounted a brief rebellion against the white settlers which all Minnesotans knew as the Great Sioux Uprising. New Bremen had been besieged and many of the buildings burned. In the end, unconscionable death and suffering was visited upon the Sioux, who’d already endured years of mistreatment and deception at the hands of the whites. Even so, the uprising was usually given a spin in the classrooms that made the Sioux look criminally ungrateful. When we were younger and played Cowboys and Indians, Danny refused to take the part his genetics dictated.
Outside on our lawn there was a gathering of a bunch of the other kids from the Flats all of whom wanted to hear the story of how Jake and I had stumbled onto a dead man. I did the talking. By then I was reciting embellishments of the story that made it terribly exciting and full of moments of danger and suspense: We thought we heard voices. Arguing maybe. We were sure someone else had been there. Had foul play been involved in his death and were we in danger because we’d found the body? Jake eyed me with mild consternation but said nothing to contradict my version of the events and in the eyes of the others I saw a look of envy and respect that was intoxicating.
We played softball in the pasture behind our house until it was too dark to see and the others scattered back to their own homes and Jake and I went inside. My father still had not returned from his search for Travis Klement. My mother was standing at the kitchen sink smoking a cigarette and staring through the window toward Tyler Street. We asked for a