Frank Drum

Quick Facts

• Role: Thirteen-year-old narrator-protagonist recalling the summer of 1961 from adulthood; the novel’s lens on faith, death, and community
• First appearance: Opening pages in New Bremen, Minnesota, as his adult voice begins the tale
• Family and anchors: Father Nathan Drum (Methodist minister); mother Ruth; siblings Ariel Drum and Jake Drum
• Defining qualities: Restless curiosity, impulsive justice, loyal protectiveness, an observant mind skeptical yet searching
• Physical snapshot: Thirteen and “two heads shorter” than his younger brother; often “hot and sweaty and covered in grass clippings” from chores—more defined by motion and mind than looks

Who They Are

Bold, inquisitive, and not yet governed by an adult’s caution, Frank Drum is the story’s clear-eyed witness and its conscience under construction. Through his adult retrospective voice, he becomes the human scale for the novel’s large questions—what grace is, what it costs, and how a child’s moral world cracks and reforms across a single, terrible summer. His perspective drives the book’s coming-of-age and loss of innocence arc: the boy who sought mischief becomes the young man who recognizes the weight of truth.

Personality & Traits

Frank’s nature is both engine and hazard. Curiosity propels him toward forbidden places and knowledge, while loyalty and a budding sense of justice push him to act before he fully understands the consequences. As narrator, he pairs a sharp observational eye with a later wisdom that interprets what the boy couldn’t name—especially around death and grief and the ache of faith, doubt, and spirituality.

• Curious and adventurous: His “sinful thrill” at prowling the night sends him to the river trestle and into adult conversations he has no business hearing—choices that expose him to corpses, secrets, and the irreversibility of what one learns.
• Impulsive and rebellious: He lies about the railroad tracks and smashes Morris Engdahl’s headlights in a flare of righteous anger, revealing a boy who conflates justice with payback—and then has to live with that blur.
• Protective and loyal: He teases Jake but shields him from bullies and insults, absorbing slights to Ariel and Nathan as if they were blows to himself; fraternity and family become his moral compass when rules fail.
• Observant and introspective: Frank notices the telling detail—the overheard fragment, the missing trinket—and later, as an adult, reassembles them into meaning; his sensitivity becomes a tool for truth rather than mere nosiness.
• Skeptical but searching: Immersed in church yet unconvinced by easy answers, he’s unsettled by death and uneasy about heaven; his struggle with belief is less rebellion than hunger for a faith that can hold reality.

Character Journey

Frank begins the summer as a restless kid chasing thrills and dodging chores, but the first death—Bobby Cole’s—pries open his curiosity to darker knowledge. Finding the itinerant’s body by the river makes mortality immediate; Officer Doyle’s casual cruelty with an M-80 deepens his distrust of adult authority; Engdahl’s taunts trigger a retaliatory act that stains his conscience. Ariel’s disappearance and death then rupture his family’s center. In the grief’s aftermath, Frank shifts from opportunistic eavesdropper to purpose-driven investigator, following threads of love, betrayal, and family secrets and bonds until he confronts the truth behind Ariel’s fate. By summer’s end, he hasn’t gained certainty so much as earned a language for sorrow and mercy—what he later names “the terrible price of wisdom,” or the “awful grace” that survives in the ruins.

Key Relationships

Jake Drum: Frank is ringleader and shield in one—pulling Jake into capers, then standing between him and danger. Their conspiracies (smashed headlights, trestle explorations) cement a bond that becomes Frank’s moral touchstone, reminding him that courage means protecting someone smaller, even when you’re smaller yourself.

Nathan Drum: Frank’s view of his father grows from awe-distant preacher to flawed, formidable man. He witnesses Nathan’s openhanded compassion and unswerving faith when the family shatters, and from that steadiness Frank learns that grace isn’t sentiment—it’s strength in mourning.

Ariel Drum: He adores Ariel’s talent and light, and her death is the book’s pivot from boyhood to responsibility. Chasing the truth of what happened to her becomes, for Frank, a way of learning who his sister really was—and who he must be in a world where such things can happen.

Ruth Drum: Frank registers her artistic hunger and restlessness, as well as the tension between her desires and Nathan’s calling. Through her volatility and courage, he glimpses the costs of love and the fractures no sermon can mend.

Gus: Frank sees Gus as an “errant older brother,” a scruffy counterpoint to churchly order—motorcycles, beer, blunt wisdom. Gus offers unsanctimonious kindness and shows Frank that flawed people can still be ferociously good.

Defining Moments

Even before he can name it, Frank builds a moral code from experience—impulse, consequence, remorse—and the summer’s crucibles are where that code is forged.

• Vandalizing Engdahl’s car: He and Jake smash Morris Engdahl’s headlights after Engdahl slanders their family. Why it matters: it’s Frank’s first taste of vigilante justice—the rush of payback followed by the weight of having become what he despises.
• Discovering the itinerant’s body: Drawn by curiosity, Frank goes down to the riverbank against Jake’s pleas and finds death at close range. Why it matters: he learns that knowledge cannot be unlearned, and that bravery isn’t the same as wisdom.
• Witnessing Doyle kill the frog: Officer Doyle’s M-80 cruelty shocks Frank into seeing the rot beneath authority’s uniform. Why it matters: it fractures his trust in the adult world and forces him to judge character by actions, not titles.
• Finding Ariel’s body: The most devastating moment of his life, ending one childhood and inaugurating another. Why it matters: grief galvanizes him; the investigation becomes a rite of passage from thrill-seeking to truth-bearing.
• Confronting Lise Brandt: When Frank pieces together Ariel’s missing watch and barrette, he faces Lise Brandt with what he knows. Why it matters: it is the final step from boyish daring to moral responsibility—carrying a truth that will scar everyone it touches.

Essential Quotes

Night was the dark of the soul and being up in an hour when the rest of the world was dead with sleep gave me a sinful thrill.

Frank’s nocturnal thrill captures his defining curiosity—rebellion without a plan, appetite without comprehension. Night becomes both playground and moral frontier, a space where he crosses thresholds he can’t uncross.

I was a sinner. I knew that without a doubt. But I was not alone. And the night was the accomplice of us all.

Here, Frank frames wrongdoing as communal rather than exceptional. It’s an early intuition of shared fallibility—the first plank in his later understanding of grace as something addressed to everyone.

What was inside me was a wonderment desperate to be satisfied. A dead man, that was a thing you didn’t see every day.

The bluntness of “a dead man” shows how his wonder outruns his caution. The line also indicts his curiosity: the very drive that makes him a keen observer ushers him into traumas he’s unready to bear.

I look back now and I wonder at this. I have raised children of my own and the thought of a child of mine or a grandchild descending to be with a stranger that way makes me go rigid with worry. I didn’t think of myself as a careless boy.

The adult narrator revisits the boy’s risks with parental terror. This retrospective distance is crucial: wisdom doesn’t erase the past but reframes it, turning rash adventure into a sober lesson about vulnerability.

In the end maybe that’s what the summer was about. I was no older than Bobby and didn’t understand such things then. I’ve come four decades since but I’m not sure that even now I fully understand. I still spend a lot of time thinking about the events of that summer. About the terrible price of wisdom. The awful grace of God.

Frank names the novel’s thesis: understanding is partial, wisdom costly, grace both terrible and necessary. His humility—admitting he still doesn’t “fully understand”—is itself the sign of growth the summer demanded.