by Amy Scheibe
“Preston Love’s Orchestra,” Pete replied, tugging on her hand and folding her into a rapid embrace.
“I’ve never seen a Negro,” Emmy said, trying to get a better look at the one woman in the band over Pete’s shoulder. She was tall and deeply brown, swaddled in a sheath of bright copper silk. Her hair was swept into a high crown of large curls, with a short straight bang sharply cut one inch above perfectly arched eyebrows. Her lips were painted a hot shade of red that matched the color on her nails, and a pair of ruby gems hung from her ears. The song slowed, and the woman began to sing low and soft, putting Emmy into an instant trance. “She’s so otherworldly.”
Pete laughed, saying, “She’s not the first colored person to step foot in North Dakota, you know. Though compared to the Cities, Fargo’s a little backward.”
“So what does that make Moorhead?” Emmy asked, snapping with defensive pride that masked her deeper embarrassment of being exactly what Pete meant. “Or Glyndon, for that matter.” She stopped dancing. “And who are you to say?”
Pete lightly grasped her arm as couples swirled around her and the lead singer moved her voice through a throaty ballad. “Look, girl,” he said, pointing toward the stage. “Not one member of that band is allowed to stay in the Cooper Hotel downtown because of the color of their skin. They travel in an old school bus with seats that fold into beds when they encounter hicks out here that don’t want their pretty white sheets sullied. For as far north as we may be, there are those around here who would fit in just fine down in Dixie.”
Emmy held his stare as long as she could, knowing exactly the kind of people Pete meant. Her family’s association with the Branns burned a guilty hole in her racing memory. She shrugged his hand off to stop the flow of unwanted images. “I’m not them,” she said plainly. “It’s why I left.”
Pete tipped his chin over her shoulder and she turned just as Bobby handed them a couple of Cokes.
“Your friend here thinks we’re backward,” she said in an attempt at levity, and poured the sweet liquid into her mouth. It was shockingly cold and deliciously spiked.
Bobby shook his head. “We are,” he said, punching Pete in the arm. “We like it that way.”
“We do, don’t we?” she echoed, focusing on Pete’s face, which fired with its own high color. “I get it, you’re jealous!” She pointed her finger, gunlike, at him. Pete put his hands up in surrender.
“You got me,” he said, moving his right hand to his heart, pretending to be shot. “I envy your freedom. Wait until you’re married with a kid on the way. It’s all downhill from here!”
The ballad ended and the band went right into a hard-edged version of something called “Country Boogie,” and the crowd erupted with shouts of approval as farm kids and town kids alike packed the floor. It felt to Emmy that everyone there was dancing with everyone else; that there was complete abandon erupting all around her. Bobby set the Cokes on a table and grabbed her right hand as Pete pulled her on the left.
“So this is why it’s bad to dance,” she said, letting out a delirious laugh. Her mind floated away as she let her body do whatever it wanted, sweating and laughing some more and feeling Pete’s arm around her waist, then it wasn’t there, then Bobby was spinning her and the three of them were flowing together, the friction she’d earlier felt all but forgotten.
* * *
There were many trips to the car that night, and around midnight Emmy leaned against the Fairlane next to Pete, smoking and passing the bottle between them. She wasn’t sure where Bobby was, but they had run into boys from Shanley High, so it was likely he was off reliving their glory days.
“That’s quite a moon, huh?” she said, finally feeling some sort of ease in Pete’s company.
“Sure is,” Pete said, handing her the bottle. “Look, Emmy, I need to talk to you about something.”
She took a drink. “If it’s about that backwards comment, I forgive you,” she said, looking at him. It required effort due to the tilt of the road and the spin of the stars. She smiled.
“Never mind that.” Pete drew a circle in the dirt with the heel of his shoe. “Well, it’s about Bobby, see.”
She nodded. Stilled her head, considering the sudden movement a bad idea.
“He’s about the best guy in the world, and I don’t think you should hold him back, is all.” Pete put a fresh cigarette into his mouth and flipped open his lighter, roughly engaging the potent-smelling flame. “He’s too young to be tied down.”
Emmy stopped smiling.
“You don’t know him like I do,” Pete continued. “He’s just not ready for anything serious. He needs to get out there and see things, become someone, before getting married and having kids.”
She stood up and ground her cigarette under her heel. “What are you trying to say?” she asked, fear blaring in her head. “I’m not good enough. Is that it?”
Pete shook his head. “I’m trying to tell you that he’ll never love you the way you think he will, so it’d be best for you to let him go now.”
“Pete,” she said, laying a hand on his forearm and forcing a laugh. “Don’t tease me. You can’t be at all serious.”
“That’s just it, Emmy. I’m as serious as a heart attack.”
Emmy forced a composure that wove itself against the grain of her doubt. The effort resulted in an acridly benevolent smile brewed in hard liquor and insecurity. “It’s very kind of you to intervene on my behalf,” she slurred. “But we’ll be just fine.”
“He’s got big dreams, bigger than marriage.” Pete took a swig and offered her the bottle of gin. She refused. He finished it and threw it into the ditch. “Look, you’re a nice kid. I don’t mean any offense. I just think you should have your eyes open if you won’t look at what I’m trying to show you. He doesn’t really love you, Emmy. He never will.”
“For someone who never means offense, you sure are offensive,” she said, her laugh now bitter and too high for her own taste. She knew that he’d won whatever game he was playing at, and it took all of her restraint not to slap him. Instead, she pushed away from the car, hoping the weakness in her legs was due to fatigue and not defeat. “I’m quite certain I didn’t ask for your advice.”
Pete grabbed her arm and moved close to her face. She realized he was far more drunk than she thought.
“You know what you are? You’re the kind of girl who breaks hearts.” He let her go and she tripped backward into the road just as a car went flying past, laying on the horn and causing her to stumble forward into Pete, who caught her. In a rage, she threw off his arm and ran blindly across the road, tears of acute humiliation clouding her sight. As she reached the front doors, a pair of large men carried out a much smaller man who was throwing his elbows in an attempt at release and yelling words that Emmy didn’t understand. All she knew was that they sounded ugly. It was Frank Halsey, but none of the other kids were with him now.
“My grandfather used to preach against this,” he shouted. “Thirty years ago he warned that the wolf would be at our door!”
“Go on home, son,” the man on the left said. “You’re drunk.”
Emmy backed quickly into the shadow of the barn before Frank could see her and draw her into his drama. Up a back staircase she slipped, clumsily pushing through the crowd only to see Pete already at the pop stand, laughing and gesturing to Bobby. Humiliated, she hurried out of the barn and found a quiet spot out back. She sat down on a bale of hay, pushing away the spectacle and replaying Pete’s words over and over again in her head. He doesn’t love you. He never will. The music and laughter from inside the barn rose and fell and overlapped as Emmy’s thoughts hurtled down a tunnel, plunging her into the starry darkness that had earlier held such promise. Her frustration broke open the nut of mistrust she had tried so hard to squirrel away. The image of the fireworks over Bobby’s strong shoulders retreated, only to be replaced with the one of him standing inside the barn, drinking a pop and laughing with Pete at her stupidity. Poison
can seep in two directions, she thought. Emmy wanted to vomit, to purge the entire evening along with the alcohol that was blurring her senses. When that didn’t happen, she instead began to breathe more deeply, and counted to sixty over and over again while she waited for the full moon above her head to cast a stiller shadow on the ground at her feet.
It took about thirty counts to collect enough sense and stand up without feeling the need to sit back down. She’d tried once at fifteen, and then again at twenty. The worst of her imaginings had come and gone along with a number of couples looking for a spare bale on which to neck.
“There you are,” Bobby said, in front of Emmy before she’d seen him coming. Her eyes must have been closed. She looked up at him and wrapped her arms around her waist.
“Here I am,” she said softly, unable to see the expression on his face or calm her paralyzing fear of imminent rejection.
“What did you say to Pete?” Bobby asked.
Emmy stood, a stamp in her feet against the soft earth. “What did I say to Pete? What did Pete say to you?”
“Slow down,” Bobby said, placing his hands on her shoulders. “He just said that you’d had a fight. Wouldn’t tell me about what.”
“If you must know, it was about you.” She pushed his arms away. “Your good friend Pete doesn’t seem to think that you love me.” The music was quietly hammering on, and she could hear some people hanging about in the parking lot around the side of the barn.
Bobby took a step back, a cloud of compromise shading his face. “I think maybe you’ve had too much to drink.”
Emmy scoffed. “I’ve had too much to drink? That’s your answer?”
“Of course not,” Bobby said, his voice sounding a higher note than she was accustomed to hearing from him. She waited through his silence, determined to find her answer in his words, and not by picking through the million furies of doubt that were flying through her head.
“I should get home,” she said, gathering her emotions in order to hold it together long enough to be clear of this place. Then she remembered how they’d gotten there.
“Now you’re being ridiculous, like Pete said.” Bobby kicked at the dirt and straw. “I don’t know how to get it into your head how I feel.”
Emmy caught on the first part of Bobby’s words: like Pete said. She pressed her lips into a hard line and walked past Bobby, her eyes blurring again but not failing. He caught her by the wrist. She stopped. Didn’t turn.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said, moving behind her and speaking over her shoulder. “I wonder if I might call on your father, and if he would see me.”
Emmy felt a sharp pain in her heart, in the very place where her love for her father bumped up against the way she felt about Bobby. She didn’t reply.
“I want all of this to be done right, in a moment of well-planned surprise. Not in a pile of hay behind someone else’s barn.” He drew his other arm around her waist and she let her head fall against his shoulder. “You’re the only reason I get up in the morning, the last thing I think about when I fall asleep at night. I know we’ve only known each other a short while, but I felt it from the first time I saw you at the back door of the church, that you could be my salvation.” He kissed her softly below the ear. “So tell me, Emmaline Nelson, will you grant me a bit of patience?”
Bobby’s jeans felt rough against Emmy’s calves where they were bare, and it was all she could think of as she let the question drift. If she didn’t move, didn’t respond, didn’t breathe, then this moment would never go away, and Pete’s words would disappear. If she died in this embrace, then this is where she would live forever—in the before time. For even as he asked her to be patient, what she couldn’t help hearing was that his request was balanced on a fulcrum of doubt, with her on one side and Pete’s influence on the other. Try as she may, it was impossible to peel away the residue of Pete’s words that now shook her confidence in Bobby. She closed her eyes and inhaled the sweet smell of climbing roses, and hay and pigs and Bobby and her own stale breath all around her, palpable, real. But then there was another smell, darker, growing stronger. Bobby moved his hands suddenly to her waist, turned her around. He was looking off at a distant light, commotion seeming to erupt all over the farm.
“Something’s burning,” he said, and grabbed her hand, running with her to the edge of the barn. The music had stopped, sirens could be heard in the distance, and patrons were pouring out of the building. Emmy couldn’t see any smoke yet, at least not from the windows or doors. As they turned the front corner, down past the high silo obscuring the moon, she stopped and gasped, her hand covering her mouth. There, in the middle of the adjacent wheat field, a wooden cross at least six feet high was aflame against the dark sky. By the time they reached the semicircle of onlookers, only the arriving fire trucks made any sound as the clumps of huddled crowd tried to make sense of an object they had only read about in history books or seen in the newspapers related to things happening far away down south. Pete ran past them, tossing his car keys in a large arc to Bobby.
“Get her out of here,” Pete yelled as he loped off toward a wailing fire truck. Bobby barred an arm across Emmy’s chest and pushed her away from the scene. As she turned in the direction he led, she saw the reflections of the evil deed splintered among the trumpets, trombones and saxophones resting, silenced, in the hands of the musicians who had all gathered in a tight knot near the edge of the field. Emmy gazed upon the sheath of copper silk in the middle of the band, momentarily meeting the singer’s dark brown eyes, weary-struck against the warm prairie night.
Fourteen
Unseen Feet
As Bobby drove the convertible down the straight rural roads with their high-grass shoulders, Emmy tilted her head back in the warmth of the night air and stayed silent, grateful for the noisy wind that baffled her thoughts. The police had questioned them at length, but Emmy hadn’t seen or heard anything useful, and Bobby’s answers had been even less informative than hers. As they’d moved to the car she’d seen Jim arrive with Cal Olson, but Bobby had steered her away from any more conversations.
Emmy looked out into the dark night speeding past and closed her eyes. She’d read about burning crosses in Little Rock and the firebombing of churches in Alabama. Her brain curved around its illusive logic and wound past the theater fire, and just as quickly took a sharp turn back in time, to the long-ago conversation in Ambrose’s truck and the newspapers she’d thrown away without curiosity. How he’d carried on about segregation and the Negro “problem” heading north. It wasn’t hard to know what kind of person could strike such a match of hatred. Could it be Ambrose? she asked herself, falling more steadily into her memories of childhood, searching for any indication that Ambrose had such a thing in him. She came up empty. She pressed on, feeling keenly that something else was at work here, something connected to the other fire. Jim hadn’t brought it up again, and suddenly she wondered if he’d been humoring her when he said she had a nose.
Pete’s car quieted as they glided into the yard, and Bobby slid the gear into neutral, letting the engine purr under the soles of Emmy’s shoes. She felt his palm warm her cheek.
“You’re home,” he said, clearing his throat. Emmy turned her head but left her eyes closed.
“Thanks,” she murmured, somewhat lost in her maddening chase. “It just doesn’t make sense.”
He coughed. “I want you to stop thinking about it,” he said.
“I can’t.” Her eyelids strained against the weight of the scene. “I won’t,” she whispered.
“You can’t do anything,” Bobby said. “Leave it to Pete and the police. They’ll know what to do.”
Emmy frowned at the mention of Pete’s name. Where had he been when they were talking behind the barn? “How can you be so unmoved?”
“I’m not,” Bobby said, looking out the window. “It’s just not our place to get involved.”
“I disagree,” Emmy said. She opened her door. “I should go in.”
He clutched at her hand. “You didn’t answer my question about your father.”
Emmy looked at Bobby’s night-darkened eyes and felt the first shiver of dew. “I’d like to not talk about anything happy tonight. It’s not right.” She thought about the musicians, standing around the lead singer in the tall grass, weathered disappointment sloping their shoulders. Bobby’s haste to move past the worst of it unsettled her. “Can you imagine growing up with that kind of hatred?”
“Of course I can’t imagine,” Bobby said. “Nor should you want to.” He sighed and opened his door, walking through the shaft of insect-stippled light cast by the headlamps and around to Emmy’s side of the car. He swung the door and held out a hand, lifting her up and out. “Will I see you tomorrow?”
“I’m going to the lake with Dot, remember?” She put her arms around his neck and softly kissed his lips. He smelled smoky. “Call me Monday?”
“I’ll call you Sunday,” he said, and released her. She was relieved to hear the telephone begin to jangle from inside of the house.
“I should get that,” she said, running up the tiled walk, surprised to find the door ajar and the kitchen lights on. As she picked up the receiver, she peered into the parlor, where Josephine lay on the couch, snoring softly with a small glass of wine wrapped in a hand that rested daintily upon her chest. “Hello?” Emmy said into the phone, out of sorts with the sobering challenges of the evening.
“Hi, it’s Jim. I saw you out in Arthur.” The phone line crackled around his voice. “What happened?”
“Oh, Jim, wasn’t it horrible?” Emmy asked, taking a quick inventory of the dishes her aunt had left: a plate with uneaten fried chicken, a second glass of wine, an ashtray full enough to indicate two people smoking. Emmy held it in midair, noting a small red circle around the words Lucky Strike on some of the stubs. Josephine smoked Camels.
“Looks like another act of juvenile delinquency, like that M on the Fargo South lawn last winter,” Jim said. “The mayor wants a citywide curfew. Thinks kids have too much time on their hands.”
