Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger Page B

of that modest little organ music that was like nothing the congregation of the tiny country church had ever heard before. Jake and I trudged along to every service and mostly did our best not to fidget. Because it was the first, the service in Cadbury was not so difficult. By the third Sunday service our butts were sore and our patience sorely tested. So the Cadbury service tended to be our favorite.
    My father was well liked in the rural churches. The sermons he preached, which were marked less by evangelical fervor than by a calm exhortation of God’s unbounded grace, were well received by congregations composed primarily of sensible farm families who in most aspects of their public lives were as emotionally demonstrative as a mound of hay. He was also gifted in inspiring the church committees that were a part of every Methodist congregation. Most weekday evenings he was gone from the house attending some committee meeting in Cadbury or New Bremen or Fosburg, the site of his third charge. He was ceaseless in the execution of what he saw as his duty and if he was often absent as a father that was part of the price of his calling.
    Cadbury lay in a hollow along Sioux Creek which was a tributary to the Minnesota River. As you crested the highway that dropped into town you were greeted by the sight of three church steeples rising above a thick green gathering of trees. Cadbury Methodist was the nearest of these steeples. From the front of the church you could look down the main street which was two blocks of businesses that in the boom of the post-World War Two Years had prospered. The church was shaded by several tall elms and on summer mornings when we arrived the sanctuary was cool and quiet. My father unlocked the building and went to the office and Ariel went to the organ and my mother went to the choir room. Jake and I were responsible for putting out the offering plates for the ushers and if the sanctuary was stuffy we opened the windows. Then we sat in the back row and waited as the congregation gathered and the choir assembled.
    That morning shortly before the service was to begin my mother came out from the choir room and stood near the altar and scanned the sanctuary with a concerned look on her face.
    She came to me and said, Have you seen Mrs. Klement? I told her no.
Go outside and watch for her. If you see her coming, let me know
right away.
I said, Yes, ma’am.
    I walked outside and Jake came with me and we stood looking both ways down the street. Mrs. Klement was the woman with the strong alto voice. She was my mother’s age and had a son named Peter who was twelve years old. Because his mother sang in the choir Peter was orphaned during the service and he usually sat with Jake and me. His father never came to church and I’d gathered through conversations I’d overheard that he was not much inclined toward religion but was a man of unfortunate excesses who could have benefited from a bit of good solid Methodist discipline.
    While we watched for Mrs. Klement a number of the congregation passed us on their way into the church and greeted us with pleasant familiarity. A man named Thaddeus Porter who was the town banker and a widower and who walked with a regal gait strode up to us and stopped and clasped his hands behind his back and looked down on us as a general might during inspection of his troops.
    I heard you boys found yourselves a dead body, he said. Yes, sir, I replied.
Quite a remarkable discovery.
Yes, sir, it was.
You seem well recovered.
The truth is, sir, it didn’t bother me much.
Ah, he said and nodded as if not being much bothered wasn’t a bad
thing. Nerves of steel, eh? I’ll see you boys inside. He turned from us and with measured strides mounted the steps.
    Mrs. Klement never showed that Sunday morning nor did Peter. The anthem and the offertory hymn, my mother said afterward, suffered greatly due to her absence. After the service we stayed briefly for the social time in the church