by Amy Scheibe
Emmy found her voice less and less accessible as dinner wore on into the early afternoon, and her itch to be at work intensified. The switching of chairs next to her became dizzying, with every guest paying court—commenting on the ring, giving bits of marital advice, or showing her some sort of boyhood treasure that included a Roger Maris baseball card. At least when a Doyle sibling engaged her she was able to find something to say, but eventually the amount of food and the calamity of the noise, and the clattering of the coffee cups and the cakes plates, and the “little bit of sherry,” and the endless questions took their toll as the clock struck three and Emmy’s newly fitted bit strained against the grinding of her molars. It struck her that even with all of the obvious improvements, this dinner wasn’t all that much different from a typical Sunday at the Branns’ for how it made her feel invisible even as she was the one being celebrated. None of these people were interested in her. They were curious, sure, but apart from how her pieces fit into the Doyle architecture, no one attempted to discover any details of her life.
She noted the time and excused herself from the table. Once she reached the muffled peace of the upstairs bathroom, she opened the window and contemplated leaving to meet Jim early. Never in her life had she been the center of any kind of attention, and she had already had more than enough. The thought of venturing back into the fray for another round of dream dress or embarrassing ribbing about child-making was too unbearable. She lit a cigarette and tried to calm down, blowing the smoke out of the house like a detention-seeking schoolgirl.
A car door slammed somewhere down the block and Emmy glanced in its direction. In the middle of steadily falling snow stood Pete, wildly gesturing at the house as he talked; whatever he was saying was frequently punctuated with finger poking at Bobby’s snow-dusted chest. When had he left? Emmy backed away from the view and held her breath for a second, nearly catching the delicate lace curtain on fire with the end of her forgotten smoke.
“Oh, dear,” she whispered, dropping the cigarette into the toilet.
The men’s argument drifted toward the window, but she could not hear them clearly. From the tone of Pete’s voice, though, she could tell it was some sort of disappointment—even though Bobby didn’t seem to be doing any apologizing. He stood there with his arms across his chest, stoically taking whatever anger Pete was throwing at him.
“Hello in there,” a woman called against the closed door, rattling the doorknob.
“Just a minute,” Emmy said, quickly collecting her things.
“Oh, Emmy,” the unknown woman said. “Take your time, dear. I’ll use the one downstairs.”
“Thank you,” Emmy said, and then turned back to the window in time to see Bobby getting into Pete’s car. She checked her watch. It was three fifteen. Disappointment bubbled in her as she watched the car pull away from the curb. Here she was, worried about leaving early, and yet Bobby was gone without notice. Her dismay turned to anger, and Emmy eased out of the bathroom, grabbed her coat off the bed across the hall, scurried down the stairs, and slipped out the front door. She sprinted across the thickly blanketed front yard to where Bobby had parked her car. Hearing an engine rev down the block, Emmy immediately ducked into the Crestliner just as Pete sped off down North Terrace. She grabbed her windshield brush and quickly dusted the front and back windows clean of the powdery snow.
“Please just start,” she whispered to the cold car, coaxing the engine once, and then it turned over and began to purr. As she threw it into first gear and let up on the clutch, she glanced at the Doyle house in the rearview mirror and felt a pang of guilt over how relieved she was to be driving away.
The streetlamps came on as she turned north on Elm, following Pete’s car at a distance. The fading of the light and onslaught of thicker snow slowed her pace to a conflicted crawl. She switched on the wipers as the heavy flakes began to clump and blur her view. It was then she realized that she was shaking uncontrollably in the freezing cold car, her teeth chattering over the noise of the full-blowing heater. The red dots of Pete’s taillights brightened as he turned onto a treeless road on the edge of town, just beyond Hector Airport. Emmy downshifted into second to maintain her cautious pace behind as she watched the white-and-red lights of his car trace slowly down the horizontal expanse, her many memories of parking with Bobby along that same road raising an alarm in her that she couldn’t quite hear or understand. She took the turn and just as soon saw Pete’s car roll into a spot a ways down. As she carefully bumped along the dirt road, following the double brown tracks Pete’s tires had made in the whitened gravel, her vision blurred with the rising feeling of having been left behind.
Emmy stopped the Crestliner and backed into a spot between two other cars, their windows opaque with the fog of necking, and she waited there for Pete’s car to pass on its way back out of the area. Nobody came here to talk, she knew all too well. Clearly Pete was interfering again, telling Bobby that Emmy wasn’t good enough, and whittling away at Bobby the same way he’d done with her. Fighting against the desire to weep, Emmy opened her eyes as wide as she could, and tried to imagine going to Pete’s car, knocking on the window, and demanding of Bobby that he make a choice between Pete’s friendship and hers. But what if he chose Pete? Then again, what if he didn’t? Was Emmy really so in love with Bobby that she could say for certain the wound she was nursing had been cut by anything other than her own pride?
Resting the back of her head against the top of the seat, she stared at the car’s ceiling in the dark, letting the tears streak down her temples and pool in her ears until she finally wrenched from her heart the bittersweet truth she no longer had any reason to deny: She didn’t want to go to the other car; she didn’t care what they were doing. Pete had been right that hot summer night: She was the kind of girl who broke hearts. It just so happened that the heart she was breaking this time was her own. There was no point in denying that she had to end things before her love for Bobby strangled her ambition to grow and learn. Being his wife would mean kids and cleaning, cooking, and smiling. A vision of her wearing one of Mrs. Doyle’s housedresses and a head scarf appeared in Emmy’s mind, a child glued to each hip, a glint of whom she’d once been dying away in the light of her eyes. It wasn’t what she wanted.
More than anything else, Emmy wanted to go to the office and sit at a table with Jim, digging into her dead grandfather’s possessions. Being Bobby’s girl had become a part of a routine that filled the hours between leaving work and going back again. The hum of the printing presses called to her from miles away; the way the paper was rolled around and cut and stacked and folded by the many well-oiled machines created a rhythm in her heart that nothing else could match. It was where she belonged—a cog in those clockworks—neatly turning in the service of a greater hour. I don’t have to do this, she thought, and the ringing of reason quieted her panic. I don’t have to do this, I can do what I want.
Emmy slowed her breathing and wiped her face with a handkerchief from her purse, rolling the damp cloth into a rope before taking off the ill-fitting ring and tying the two objects together. She dropped the entire mess into the small bag and threw it into the backseat, knowing that she would eventually have to return the diamond, and all it promised, to Bobby. The car eased back onto the dirt road as Emmy drove away from the sparkling disappointments of the day and off into the alluring gloom of the falling night.
Twenty
A Collection of Order
When Emmy arrived in the newsroom, she expected to see more people still at work. Instead, she was surprised to find only Jim and a handful of others, most of whom had already donned their coats and were headed for the door.
“You’re late,” Jim said without looking up as Emmy approached his desk. She checked the large clock on the far wall.
“By only thirty minutes,” she said, brushing the snow from her hair with the tips of her fingers.
“Gordon’s sending everyone home ahead of the storm.” Jim picked up a pencil and st
uck the blunt end between his teeth. “Though I doubt we’ll get more than another inch.”
“You want coffee?” she asked, somewhat enervated by her time spent thinking in the car.
He studied the bottom of an empty mug on his desk and shook his head. “Your crate’s in the morgue.”
“Thanks.” Emmy walked over to the vacant switchboard and dialed the Doyle house.
“Hello?” a young boy’s voice asked.
“Thomas?” Emmy said, her heart suddenly beating faster due to the nature of placing the call.
“Mike,” the boy answered. Emmy could hear the soft rumble of the party in the background.
“It’s Emmy,” she said, coughing into her hand. She thought for a second of lying, blaming illness for her ungracious departure, but felt the Doyles deserved better from her. “Would you tell your mother that I’m sorry to have left, but I needed to be at work?”
“Okay,” Michael said, and hung up the phone, clearly absent the concern of an adult.
Emmy hung the headset over its hook, and as she moved through the newsroom and down the narrow hallway to the break room, the events of the day scattered like field mice behind her, all of the emotion spent and gone, the talk of house building, converting, and marrying of no more interest to her than which cup on the counter would hold enough coffee for the night in front of her. Here, in this sanctuary, Emmy felt safe to explore the truth. Truth. Such a childish concept, she thought, clearly created by adults in order to make children believe that innocence has a home in the world. As far as Emmy could see, innocence was the biggest lie of all.
Mug in hand, Emmy went quickly to the archive room, where she found the box set squarely in the middle of the long table. She sat in one of the barrel-shaped wooden chairs and took a careful sip of the blistering coffee. Jim had placed a notepad and pencil next to the box. Emmy smiled at his thoughtfulness, picked up the pencil, and wrote the date at the top of the page before carefully listing the characteristics of the box itself, noting in particular her grandfather’s stenciled name on the top.
This time the lid swung open without effort, flipping out of Emmy’s hands from the force she had expected to exert. It groaned on its hinges, and the stale odor of old papers and mothballed fabric rose from inside. Neatly folded and laid across the top like a protective blanket was the white cotton robe Emmy remembered, a circle of red surrounding a white cross carefully sewn over the left breast. The material was thinner than she would have thought, more like a bedsheet and quite possibly made from one. She placed it at the far right corner of the big oak table, wanting the robe to be safely out of reach.
Under the robe was another article of clothing that unfolded into a cape, then a pointed hat with a long train that would hang halfway down a tall man’s back, tied off by a black tassel at the tip. A white cord with fringe that might have served as a belt completed the uniform. Emmy shaped the objects into the facsimile of a man and tried to imagine a young version of her grandfather filling out these clothes. She trembled as the wind howled outside the window, rattling the thick panes against their heavy wooden frames. The lights dimmed once overhead and Emmy went to the window and looked out at the raging storm. She could see her car next to Jim’s down in the lot, a slight drift of snow like a giant’s finger caressing the front fender of the Crestliner. An updraft blew a flurry across her view, blinding in its force and breathtaking in its rapid falling away. In the shift, her reflection sharpened next to a man standing behind her.
“Oh!” she exclaimed, whirling around to find Jim at the table. He whistled low and widened his eyes. The robe lay there as though the spirit of Emmy’s grandfather had just slipped out of the costume, the dingy fabric glowing in the dim yellow lighting.
Jim took a step toward the robe, laying just the fingertips of one hand on a sleeve. “I’ve never seen one of these. Was it in there?” he said, gesturing toward the box and trying to look over the lip from where he stood.
“It was my grandfather’s,” she said. “All of this. He was a member of the Klan.” She said it plain and fast, prodding at the fragile balloon of her associated guilt with blunt observation. Her shaking hands belied the calm she was trying to display to Jim, and she wrung them together until they stopped. “Maybe we can find something in here that we can use to expose the council’s real agenda. Some kind of link back to the Klan through my grandfather’s relationship with Mr. Davidson.”
“What makes you think there’s a link?” Jim asked, making room for her to pass between him and the table.
“My father told me,” she said, taking a chance that Jim would be on her side if she told him everything. “Right before he helped Carlos leave the state.”
“Okay,” he said, his expression unchanged. “Tell me more.”
“There was a pastor in Grand Forks in the twenties,” Emmy said, plunging into the pertinent details as she lifted the next item from the box: a large, folded piece of green satin.
“I’ve heard a bit about all that.” Jim took hold of one end of the rectangle between his fingertips, as though trying not to leave his prints upon the cloth, or in some way not wanting to touch it at all. Emmy noticed how clean and closely cut his nails were, how on the middle finger of his left hand there was a knobby callus from where his pen pressed while he wrote.
“He started a group up there, with the help of Davidson.” She took a step back, and the cloth unfolded between them like a sheet fresh from the line, revealing a large white shield in the center of a four-foot-long banner. “And then Davidson came here and started one with my grandfather.” In the middle of the shield was a bloodred cross, and above it were the words GOLDEN LAMB KLAN NO. 16; below it, WKKK TROBORG, MINNESOTA.
“The Golden Lamb Klan, apparently,” Jim said.
“Where’s Troborg?” Emmy asked as they placed the banner on the table next to the robe. Jim went to the bookshelf and pulled down a local atlas, flipping to the city index and furrowing his brow. He replaced the book and took down another from the same section, but five books to the left.
“There you are.” He tapped on the open page, then flipped open a map of Clay County. “Look at that.”
Emmy leaned over his bent shoulder, her neck brushing the soft wool of his cardigan sweater as she followed his gaze and registered with shock what he was pinning under his finger. “That’s our farm,” she whispered. Jim turned his head, bringing his face within inches of hers. She could hardly breathe. “Good Lord.”
“Why don’t I get you more coffee,” he said, pulling up a chair and easing her into it before picking up their mugs and leaving her alone with her thoughts. Emmy gazed at the familiar bend of the creek, the straight line of the old dirt road that intersected it, the light hash marks showing the original railroad tracks, the ones that had been long abandoned when she was a girl, and pulled up and plowed under when she was a little more than that. They’d had a stack of the old wooden ties out behind the barn that her grandfather had used for posting fences; she supposed the rails themselves went back to the shipping companies to be used on other tracks. She closed her eyes, the flood of memory bending her thoughts into a painful reverie that ended with the burning cross in Arthur. She could see it plainly etched against her eyelids now, how the wood was square and carefully mitered together in a way that showed a love of craft, dedication to the dark art of hatred. Wood that taken apart looked exactly like railroad ties.
Jim returned with fresh coffee, and they wordlessly continued the excavation together, side by side, as the wind howled louder outside the archive room, pelting filthy bits of snow and dirt against the windowpanes. The cold early evening wore on into the night, and they bent to the objective of separating the contents into three discrete areas on the large table: objects, photos, and printed materials. There were black-leather bound journals and three large ledgers with some information spelled out in her grandfather’s tight script, and yet other information in an unidentifiable language.
“Code,” Jim sa
id. “I saw some of this in the war. It’s a pretty basic one, but it’ll still take some time to unscramble.”
Emmy neatly stacked the books together on top of the collected Klan newspapers from around the country, with names like Call of the North, The Protestant, and MN Fiery Cross. In one they’d pored over a map of the country, showing the number of Klan members in each state in 1924—from the low number of 417 in Minnesota, to the shockingly high 70,999 in Indiana. Emmy had been taught in school that the Klan was a problem in the South, but from the look at the map, she could tell that during the twenties, the South was hardly involved at all.
In another they found a list of Klan qualifying characteristics: “Am I a Real American? The Test Is Simple. Do You…?”
Believe in God and in the tenets of the Christian religion and that a godless nation cannot long prosper.
Believe that a church that is not founded on the principles of morality and justice is a mockery to God and man.
Believe that a church that does not have the welfare of the common people at heart is unworthy.
Believe in the eternal separation of church and state.
Hold no allegiance to the Stars and Stripes next to your allegiance to God alone.
Believe in just laws and liberty.
Believe that our free public school is the cornerstone of good government and that those who are seeking to destroy it are enemies of our republic and are unworthy of citizenship.
Believe in the upholding of the Constitution of these United States.
Believe in freedom of speech.
Believe in a free press uncontrolled by political parties or by religious sects.
Believe in law and order.
Believe in the protection of pure womanhood.
Believe that laws should be enacted to prevent the causes of mob violence.
Believe in a closer relationship of capital and labor.
Believe in the prevention of unwarranted strikes by foreign labor agitators.
