A Fireproof Home for the Bride

by Amy Scheibe

  “Stephen Davidson,” Christian said, cutting Jim off.

  “No, sir,” Jim replied. “His name was Curtis. He was very helpful.”

  “Whatever he calls himself,” Christian said, an unusual sarcasm spiking his words. “That’s him. Helpful.”

  “I take it you don’t care much for him,” Jim said. Emmy handed the receiver to her father but stayed within listening distance, less confused by the mix-up with Mr. Davidson’s name that she would have liked, her grandmother’s words flowing into her head: I loved Stephen, but he loved Josie, and she loved Ray.

  Christian grimaced. “Let me just say that anything he tells you is probably a lie.”

  “Good to know,” Jim said. “What else?”

  “Look,” Christian said, covering his forehead with the palm of his hand as though checking for fever. “It doesn’t matter what I know, but if the police don’t find that migrant first, you’ll be reporting a whole different story.”

  “Got it,” Jim said. “Emmy, stay clear of this, okay?”

  Emmy shook her head. “But what’s happened?” she asked again.

  “John Hansen’s dead,” Jim said without softening his voice or the blow of his words. “Shot in the back with his own gun.”

  Emmy sat down on the chair next to the telephone table and heard her father ask Jim to call Irv Randall and send him over. The shock roiled through her body and settled in her ears, hot and unrelenting, until she felt her father’s hands on her arms, easing her up and into the kitchen, where he placed her in a chair. The glare of the overhead light did nothing to improve upon Emmy’s sense of being in a cruel new world, one where people die at the point of a gun while dreaming of better things.

  “Svenja came to me last month,” Emmy said. “She was scared. I gave her money for the bus to Saint Paul.”

  “You did good.” Christian squeezed Emmy’s shoulder. She shook her head, trying to make the axis of her childhood tilt back to where it had always been.

  “I can’t just sit here,” she finally said, hushing her voice in an attempt to calm her nerves. “We should go out there, help.”

  Christian made a sound deep in his throat, a strangled gasp of air that could have been a mirthless laugh. “It’s not safe for you.”

  Emmy widened her eyes, taking on as much light as possible to fight the dark thoughts swimming in her head. “Do you think the Mexican is still out there?”

  “No.” Christian folded a hand over his mouth and pulled down on his stubbled cheeks until his fingertips rested lightly on his chin. “I hope not.”

  “But Jim said they think he did it.”

  “Jim doesn’t know these people.” Christian took a neatly folded handkerchief from his front pants pocket and mopped his damp brow. “Any of them.”

  “You don’t mean the Mexicans, do you?” Emmy asked, the spent rush of adrenaline leaving sorrow aching in her joints.

  “There’s something I need to tell you,” Christian said, and Emmy’s body started to hum as though she might catch fire from the dismay his voice instilled. “A very long time ago, well before you were born, back when I was a boy.” He began to cough and covered his mouth with the handkerchief. Emmy fetched a glass of water from the tap, pausing as it ran cold enough over her wrist to revive her stunned senses. She screwed the tap closed and took the glass to Christian, who drank it between racks of coughing.

  “It’s okay, whatever it is,” Emmy said in an effort to calm her father. He held up his hand and shook his head, and as Emmy purposefully set aside the ugly imaginings of John Hansen’s death, she focused on her father’s words. Without pause, he told her about her grandfather’s profound faith, his love of the land, his service to his country—all things that Emmy knew well, but she found this new telling tinged with confession rather than soaring with pride for a man who fought in the Great War and returned with hardened notions about true patriotism.

  “He’d seen things, I suppose,” Christian said. “Things that to him were un-American, and he found plenty of other men who shared his views.” Christian scratched Coffee’s muzzle and the dog licked at the droplets of water that had clung to his hand as he told Emmy of a preacher in Grand Forks who drew men like her grandfather in with his rhetoric—the fire of angels on his tongue—named Frederick Ambrose Halsey.

  “Ambrose?” Emmy asked. “Halsey?”

  “Reckon that’s where they got the name,” Christian said. “I went with my parents to meetings, and then to rallies, and even marched in parades. Around the time I was sixteen we went to a big gathering where I first saw Davidson speak.”

  “Curtis?” Emmy asked. “Or is it Stephen?”

  “It’s Stephen Curtis Davidson.” Christian blinked and then closed his eyes as though he were describing from a picture in his mind, painting for Emmy the details of how Mr. Davidson had arrived from Indiana as the mouthpiece of this poisonous patriotism, talking of the Negro diaspora from the South, and how they were headed north to take over the land, the guns, and the women. Mr. Davidson had preached about how the local government was being infiltrated by papists and Jews, and that the good God-fearing Christians needed to form an army of the Lord to defend what was rightfully theirs. Lida, in particular, had sparked to Davidson’s notions of liquor prohibition, and saw him as some sort of savior.

  “And there, in the front row, was your mother,” Christian said. “Looking up at Davidson as he spoke about God, country, and the sanctity of womanhood.” He frowned. “She couldn’t have been more than fourteen.”

  “Where was she from?” Emmy asked, eager to know more of history he’d never before shared.

  “Down toward Fergus Falls,” he replied. “Her mother had run off with a sewing machine salesman.” Christian pressed his lips together in debate. “Her father took it out on Karin. My mother found out and hired Karin as a maid to make it stop.”

  Emmy swallowed the dryness in her mouth and touched her father’s shaking hand. “I always thought you’d met at church.”

  “She prefers that story,” he said.

  “Yes.” Emmy thought about her mother’s words, This is what happens, on the night of Ambrose’s assault. Karin’s response suddenly seemed less cruel.

  Christian cleared his throat and spit something into the handkerchief before carefully folding it away beneath the table. “Davidson came and went, and when he wasn’t around, my father was in charge, holding secret meetings in the middle of the night, sometimes leaving the house and not coming back until daylight. I don’t know what all they did back then, but there is nothing good about the Klan.”

  Emmy felt a new pounding in her ears, as though her brain were trying desperately to keep this last word from entering any more deeply. “I once saw him in a robe,” she volunteered, in an attempt to share her father’s burden. “The day he yelled at me and I went up the tree.”

  A light tapping on the kitchen door—almost the scratch of a leafless branch—startled the two of them. Coffee barked harshly, a throaty attempt at a growl sounding more puppyish than possibly intended. Christian went to the door as though he expected Irv on the other side, though he couldn’t have possibly arrived so quickly. Emmy stood, gripping the top of the chair in one hand.

  “Good,” Christian said as he ushered three heavily bundled people into the small space. They were all somewhat slight in stature, and as a white bun of hair emerged from the unwrapped scarf of the first, Emmy instantly recognized Maria Gonzales from the Brann house. “You were right to come here. What happened?”

  “It’s bad, señor,” Maria said to Christian. He turned to Emmy as he bolted the door behind the two men, one of whom was Maria’s son Pedro, and the other Emmy had never seen before. His eyes were trained on the floor, his hands buried in the pockets of his brown cotton coat.

  “Go call Dot and make sure Irv’s on the way,” Christian said to Emmy. “But not why.” She could hear the scraping of chairs against the linoleum as she quickly executed her task, returning to the kitche
n and pouring out coffee for everyone.

  “What happened?” her father asked Pedro, who squeezed his cap as he talked.

  “Carlos didn’t do nothing,” Pedro said in heavily accented English, his closely cropped dark hair making him look a great deal younger than his mother. “Milked the cows and heard noises out behind the barn, and then he hear a gun. When he goes out there, young Mr. Hansen is on the ground, not moving. So Carlos, he turn him over, and there’s blood on his back.”

  Carlos started coughing from where he still stood near the door, a rasping sound that made Emmy jump. She stared at his hands for a moment, realizing that they were speckled with dried blood. Instinctively, she went to the sink and turned on the faucets, gesturing for Carlos to place his hands under the tap, but he didn’t move.

  “This is his first year in Minnesota,” Maria said, her usual lilting accent hoarsely grating. “My sister’s grandson.”

  “Hush now, cielito,” Pedro whispered to Maria. “Mr. Nelson will help us.”

  “Was there a gun?” Christian asked Carlos directly. He looked at Pedro, who nodded.

  “He pick it up,” Pedro said, and Maria started to cry.

  “Did anyone see him?” Christian asked. Pedro nodded once more, as though through a noose.

  “Mr. Davidson was there.”

  Emmy heard the distinct sound of a car door shutting from the driveway beside the house. She turned off the faucet and brushed past Carlos and out the door. Relief flooded her as she saw Irv headed her way. As quickly as the three Mexicans had arrived, they were smuggled into the back of Irv’s car, their destination known to all but Emmy. She cleared the untouched coffee cups as Christian paced a figure eight around her.

  “I should have known,” he said, his voice matching his contorted expression. He flattened his hand, letting it hover an inch above the counter next to the sink, lightly patting the edge as he spoke. “When my father first took me to hear Davidson speak—I couldn’t have been more than fifteen—it was in a church down near Sabin. That’s what they did, they used the pulpit to sow fear, talking about the Negroes coming north to rob our homes and defile our women.” Emmy couldn’t move from her father’s stare as he continued. “There were picnics and rallies and parades, and over time more people joined up, all in the name of patriotism. Then it stopped, all of it, almost in the night. Until he came back last winter and started over with this new group—”

  “The Citizens’ Council?” Emmy asked.

  Christian shook his head. “It doesn’t matter what they call it. He’s gathered a new group of impressionable men to share his message of hatred and fear. Last time it was the riots in Chicago we had to worry about, now it’s the Mexicans who have worked hard and lived peacefully here for decades.”

  “I’ve heard Mr. Davidson speak,” Emmy said. “Against low-rent housing in Fargo.”

  “Low-rent,” Christian scoffed. “He showed up at the beet plant last week, demanding the union deny jobs to out-of-state workers—Mexicans. We’d have to close the plant without them.”

  Emmy pulled at a loose string along the hem of the tablecloth, trying to think of something she could do that would help. “What if I talk to Jim about this?” she said. “He could do a story on Mr. Davidson, expose the council.”

  “There were stories in the twenties and it didn’t matter,” Christian said, halfway between defiance and defeat. “They still managed to get their people elected to local offices. They don’t do anything illegal, see, at least not that anyone can ever prove. They burn all the evidence.”

  Maybe not all, Emmy thought. “There’s a green metal box in the cellar of the farmhouse,” she said, her jaw aching from being clenched. “Grandfather might have kept something.”

  “It’s worth a look,” Christian said. “But I doubt there’s anything there. They were very careful.” He eased himself up to standing, a hand pressing at his lower back as though to force it straight like a rusty hinge. Emmy followed him to the front hall, where he took his coat from the hook.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “To move your sister.” He knotted a thick red scarf around his neck. “She can stay with your mother for the time being.”

  Emmy hugged her father tightly, a thing she hadn’t done since she was twelve and Karin had told her that it was improper for girls to be so close to their fathers. In this moment it felt as though those nearly seven years had never passed. She leaned her head against his and felt his voice rumble in her ear the way it used to do.

  “I should have done something when they burned that cross in Arthur.”

  “The police covered it up,” she whispered, feeling his head shaking against her own. “It was lit by Frank Halsey. And now he’s joined the council.” Emmy thought back past the terrible night to her own innocent run around a snowy schoolyard with a sack of potatoes, and saw how her stupidity had been appropriated to explain away a far less innocent deed. Everything mattered, she realized. There was no such thing as harmless in a world that was impervious to the slaughter of lambs. “I want to go with you,” she said, collecting her things and clucking for Coffee to heel.

  “I’ll walk you to your car,” he said, leaving no room for argument. Coffee clattered across the living room with her clumsy paws and shuddered with the stretch of finding her way upright, then shook in a half spiral from the tip of her white-specked nose to the down of her tail. “By the way,” Christian said as he settled the earflaps of his flannel hat over his large ears. Emmy turned. “Your boy came to see me.”

  “Bobby?” she asked, completely unprepared for this sudden change of topic. His name sounded as though it were from a long-ago place of innocence, and it took Emmy a moment to understand what it was that Christian was trying to tell her.

  “Did he ask for my hand?” she asked without decoration.

  “I want you to go directly home now, little sister,” Christian said, helping her straighten the back of her collar as if she were on the verge of no longer needing that sort of parental help. “I’ll take care of Birdie and call you in the morning.” He nodded at Emmy to open the door. She hesitated as Christian passed her and cleared the threshold, taking the small, single step in stride. Coffee stood with her nose in the air, shivering, already at the curbside, waiting to leap into the back of the Crestliner. As Christian glanced over his shoulder at Emmy, she hurried to catch up, tilting her head downward, out of the wind. She wrapped her surging heart in the assurance that her father knew exactly what needed to be done, and so she set about doing as he had asked, without hesitation.

  Nineteen

  Darkness Illuminated

  When dawn broke on Sunday, Emmy felt as though she had not shut her eyes firmly all night, having spent much of the time contemplating the horrible circumstances on the Hansen farm and the slim variables of who might have killed John. When Emmy had arrived home, the house was quiet and the Jeep house was dark, adding to her jumpy unease. Emmy stared at the ceiling and listened intently for any sounds of morning movement. There were none, and she had to assume that her aunt had slept out in the smaller cabin.

  Emmy’s racing thoughts picked up the loop where it had stalled during sleep, skidding along recklessly between whether the police had yet determined what had happened on the Hansen farm, whether Christian and Birdie were safe, and whether the contents of her grandfather’s box could reveal anything useful, until she forced her thinking down the murky road of this last one, feeling her way along carefully as she tried once more to remember what she had seen all those years ago. Maybe there were just a few scraps of the past, trinkets and ticket stubs, and the objects she had actually touched. In the center of her open palm she could still conjure the weight of the large silver ring sunk down into her skin. Rolling it between her thumb and finger, she imagined holding it in front of her eyes, just as she had when she was nine, her mind filling in the time-gapped blanks. The embossed surface with its knighted prince sitting astride a silver horse was clearly somet
hing much less pure and innocent than she had once assumed. The words Ku Klux Klan ricocheted around in her head like three ball bearings, bruising her memories wherever they landed, but she could derive no more meaning from the discovery than she had the night before. No matter how she tried, Emmy could not reconcile the ruthlessness she knew to be the methodology of the Klan with her stern but loving grandfather.

  It was still a couple of hours before Emmy was due to join Bobby at church, but there was no use trying to sleep with so much pounding against her skull. The Doyles had welcomed her into their pew every Sunday since she and Bobby had started going together, and Emmy had come to look forward to the routine of the sedate Mass followed by the chaos of the Doyle family dinner. Her father’s revelation the night before about Bobby’s visit trickled into Emmy’s jumbled thoughts, a distraction that promised something more, and very soon. The idea of an imminent shift in her relationship with Bobby catapulted her out of bed. Was it giddy expectation or the opposite? She wasn’t certain, but all Emmy could think about was whether she would have time before church to drive past work and learn more about the Hansen investigation. Emmy rose and dressed, fussed with her hair, and hurried down through the cold house and into the warm kitchen, where Coffee lay curled around Flossie, next to the coal burner. They lifted their heads at Emmy’s entry, then laid them back down with the satisfaction of having already been fed and walked.

  “Aren’t you the lazy girl,” Emmy said, scratching the dog across her withers. She gave Emmy’s hand a slight comforting lick and went back to snoozing.

  The coffee was on the stove, but Josephine’s dishes had long been used and washed. As Emmy stood at the sink, looking out at the warm lights from the Jeep house piercing the dark gray morning, she attempted to eat a piece of dry toast with her cup of coffee going cold on the counter. It was snowing again beyond the window, the kind of flakes that Emmy had always thought of as angel wings. How could it be so beautiful outside, she thought, when so much of the world felt harsh? Realizing exactly how cold the air would be based on the size of the flakes, she shivered and decided to put a pair of wool stretch pants on under her skirt, tucking them firmly into her snow boots, and slipping her dress shoes into the pockets of her heavily burled coat.