Ordinary Grace

“All the dying that summer began with the death of a child, a boy with golden hair and thick glasses, killed on the railroad tracks outside New Bremen, Minnesota, sliced into pieces by a thousand tons of steel speeding across the prairie toward South Dakota.”

Here, Krueger describes Bobby Cole, the novel’s first death. His hair ties him to the region’s past—Germans and Scandinavians comprise a large portion of the Anglo population of the Upper Midwest; in neighboring North Dakota, German remains the second-most-spoken language even today. The images of the train, the tracks and the prairie place New Bremen while also tying it to agriculture- and rail line-based economies, both of which will matter less as the century progresses. Bobby is seated with his back to the train; he literally never sees it coming, just as the community of New Bremen can’t possibly anticipate the changes that await it and the country, as the 60s progresses. 

“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.