A Fireproof Home for the Bride (46 page)

“Poor Cindy,” Emmy said. “It could have been anyone’s cigarette.” As Jim set to work cracking the encryption, Emmy returned to the half-empty box, pulling more newspapers and other memorabilia out and adding them to the various stacks. She began to think that the only real evidence linking the past to the present might be found in one of the ledgers, but even if it were something as stunning as recorded proof of arson, she doubted it would be enough to implicate a man as deceptive as Mr. Davidson. The ease with which a man with his charisma could gather fresh patriots frightened her, yet it also sharpened her desire to get to the bottom of the box, to find evidence that could stem his influence. In all the materials they had examined so far, there wasn’t a single mention of the man. Not a picture, not a note, not even an entry in the ledger. It was as though he were a ghost in the white robes, pulling the strings of bigotry from a lofty, invisible platform.

Emmy fished the next document from its depth, unprepared for the horrible image that confronted her. The photo was small, in amber tones, of a tight group of white men circled around a lamppost from which hung two half-naked Negroes; a third lay at their feet. By her estimation there were about thirty men gathered for the event—many of them smiling. Her eyes stopped at one of the faces and darted to the next. She felt a bubble of acrid bile rise in her throat, and the picture fell to the table as she clamped both hands over her mouth in order not to vomit. Jim picked up the image and flipped it over.

“It’s a postcard,” he said grimly. “Professionally printed. ‘Duluth, June 16, 1920.’”

Emmy dropped her face into her hands and slowly shook her head from side to side. “That’s my grandfather,” she said. “He’s
smiling.
” All pretense of Benjamin Nelson’s having been a good man drained from her along with the wish that the blood that tied her to him could go with it. She slumped in her chair, immobilized. “I can’t look at any more,” she said. “Not tonight.”

“It’s up to you,” Jim said. “But I’d like to take this home with me if you don’t mind. Try to figure out what they’re hiding behind this code. I’ll call the
Trib
tomorrow about this, see what they know.” He closed the ledger and lifted it by the spine, causing a folded piece of paper to fall out of it and onto the floor. Emmy regarded it without moving until Jim leaned over and picked it up, unfolding it to find two sheets instead of one. “Huh,” he said. “That’s strange.”

Emmy sat up. “What is?”

“Birth certificates.” He laid them side by side on the table, smoothing the creases and sliding them in tandem in front of Emmy. The one on the right had barely any writing on it; the other was completely filled in and stamped with the word
duplicate
in smudged black ink. Emmy’s eyes darted between them, until everything clicked into place.

“It’s my father,” she said, placing a finger where his name was fully and clearly written on the official form. “Christian Forrest Nelson, born March 5, 1915. Father, Olafur Benjamin Nelson. Mother, Adelaide Randall Nelson. Attended by Michael Jensen.” Emmy pushed the paper aside and squinted at the odd bits of information on the other certificate. “Baby boy, born March 5, 1915,” she slowed her speech. “Father, unknown. Mother, Josephine Catherine Randall. Illegitimate. That’s my aunt.”

“Does your father have a cousin?” Jim asked, his voice restrained but kind.

“No,” Emmy said, not even trying to pretend there might have been two babies born to sisters on the same day. She stood as though the revelation had no effect, or that her act of wishing away her grandfather’s claim on her could have no other result than a granting of her whimsy. “I wish I could say I’m surprised,” she finally said, handing the records to Jim. “But I’m not. My aunt was in love with her cousin, and they weren’t allowed to be together.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time a baby was privately adopted and the records changed,” Jim said. Emmy smiled ruefully.

“Or the last,” she said. “I think I need to go home now.”

“Let’s put everything away,” he said, handing the birth certificates back to her and looking at the window. “The storm’s let up.”

“Oh, no,” she said as she felt a slight tremor break through her shock. “I doubt the storm’s even begun. There’s so much here.” Her voice cracked with the strain of trying to sound normal. Absolutely nothing inside of Emmy felt the same as it had twenty-four hours before.

“Listen,” Jim said, and placed a firm hand on each of her arms. “You need to let this all sink in. Now go home and get some sleep. We’ll start again tomorrow, and I’ll help you figure out what to do about it.”

Emmy looked where he held her. “You should be getting home,” she said, barely above a whisper. “Elise will be worried.”

He frowned and dropped his hands. “I’m surprised she didn’t call. She’s not good in storms.”

Emmy laughed, trying to numb the thrill she had felt in his slight embrace. “I guess none of us are after last year.”

Jim nodded, the distraction of Elise’s name floating between them. He raised a hand in Emmy’s direction but stilled it just short of her shoulder, then let it drop again. “You’re … different,” he said.

“Than Elise?” Emmy asked, rubbing her palms together and crossing her arms over her chest.

“Than anyone.” He looked at her from the top of her head down to her toes, measuring something within her that she could guess at but dearly wanted to fit. He suddenly turned toward the table. “We need to pack this up.”

“Oh, of course.” Emmy nodded as a bright needlepoint of hope pricked the darkness that had settled over the day. She turned to repacking the materials, closed her notebook, and pulled on her coat, placing the birth certificates in her pocket. All the while a heightened awareness of Jim’s quietly synchronized movements made her heart race a beat faster. She was
different.
The sound of Jim saying that one word had given her fresh purpose. As she went through the door he held for her and into the night, she ducked her head down against the brittle wind, pressing forward with all her resolve.

Part III

A Child of Solitude

Twenty-one

A Cold Day Gone Hot

The wind howled all night, but Emmy heard it only the one time she awoke, parched and confused as to her whereabouts. At first she thought she was at the farm and fumbled the wrong direction in the darkness, searching for the glass of water she always left beside her bed. When she realized her mistake, she dropped back onto the pillow, chasing away the demons that had plagued her as she had drifted off, poked by their pitchforks and the pointed tail of her grandfather’s sins, until sleep once again found her.

The sun rose directly through the window and fell cruelly upon her closed eyes. She threw her crooked arm over the bridge of her nose and listened to the marked silence of the house.

“I’m not him,” she said aloud as she sat up and pressed a finger to her breastbone, where a sharp pain had come and gone ever since she had left the office, particularly whenever she thought about her grandfather and tried to remember him as kind. Far worse, though, were the tormenting moments when she would play out the way her life would have been had the marriage to Ambrose gone through—and how desperately she wanted to go to Birdie and fix the mess that had collected at her feet instead. The sun crept an inch higher in the sky and Emmy squinted at it. This is what I need, she thought: light. Clarity. She gingerly placed her stocking-clad feet on the cold floor and rubbed the flannel sleeves of her nightdress, hearing the clink of silver in the sink downstairs, followed by the swift creak of the front door opening and closing. Emmy went to the window, hand to brow, in time to see Josephine walk briskly up the road toward the open field past the tree line. The temperature had risen overnight, and the snow was mostly gone, or blown into dingy striated heaps along the sides of the outbuildings. Emmy noticed how the edges of the drifts were already seeping down into puddles before disappearing altogether, returning the dirt that had become airborne during the gusts back to the ground.

Emmy dressed quickly in the clothes she had kept from her days on the farm, covering herself in a layer of familiarity. Her red plaid shirt smelled of hay, and her heavy denim overalls still carried a slight stain from the night she’d helped deliver the calf. What kind of girl was I then? she thought as she pulled on her work boots and laced them as swiftly as her fingers would go. She retrieved the birth documents from her coat pocket and folded them small enough to stick into the breast pocket of the shirt, secured by the bib of her overalls. Without pausing for a cup of coffee, she bolted through the kitchen, drawing the barn jacket from the rack and double-clucking her tongue at Coffee to heel. Out the door they went together, noses pointed high in the crisp air. The long strides Emmy took set the pace of her thoughts as her determination to eradicate all of the mysteries rose up in her and created an almost canny stillness in her soul. The time for listening had finally come to an end, and a new phase needed to begin. She knew by now who would help and who would hinder, and so she cut through the line of nearly bare apple trees, pausing only long enough to snatch a low-hanging fruit from a gnarled branch, and marched off in search of her aunt’s slight figure, stooped toward the earth a dozen yards across from the main road. Glancing in both directions but without slowing, Emmy crested the median of the highway and loped down the ditch on the other side, taking in the landscape while best measuring her approach. To the far left, a boy helped his father stack baskets of gourds around the front of the small white building that bore the words
TRAIL MARKET
in severe red letters. To the far right, Josephine plucked her way through the tangled dying vines of pumpkins and squash, pushing away the exhausted vegetation and lifting out the fruit. She then stacked the green, orange, and buff orbs onto a flatbed wagon that sat parked along one of the remaining proliferative rows. Coffee looked up at Emmy, and she nodded at the dog to run ahead and alert Josephine to their presence. Emmy rubbed the small apple against the soft cotton of her coat sleeve and took a crisp bite as she slowed her pace in order to give her aunt time to straighten and stretch. As Josephine caught Emmy’s face, her smile fell flat but then pulled tightly upward again, as though preparing to catch some unknown piece of bad news waiting to besmirch the oddly warm day. She pressed a palm to her brow and walked over to the flatbed with an acorn squash coddled in the other hand as though she were offering it to Emmy as a sign of peace, or trinket of trade.

“You look like you woke up on the wrong side of the bed,” Josephine said, the squash still suspended between them. Emmy looked at it, and then away at the horizon, surprised by the narrowing of her own eyelids as she fought to suppress unexpected tears.

“I know something,” Emmy said, clearing the emotion from her throat. “I’m sorry.”

Josephine set the fruit on the wagon, keeping it from rolling by leaning it carefully between a pale white cheese pumpkin and a tan-colored, elongated nutter butter. “About what?” she said more than asked. There was a shortness to Josephine’s speech, a sigh steeped in a soupy mixture of expectation and evasion.

“It’s this,” Emmy said. She drew the two birth certificates from her pocket and handed the folded papers to her aunt. Emmy studied Josephine’s face as she unfolded the sheets and separated them, looking from one to the other as though trying to translate what she was seeing. A tiny ripple of relief started at her bottom lip and moved slowly to her eyelids, which fluttered and lifted as she stood straight and met Emmy’s gaze dead-on, the papers clutched in her right hand, which she let fall to her side. “I’ve never actually seen these,” Josephine said sadly. “Where?”

“In a box from the farm,” Emmy replied, the mix of confusion and anticipation she’d had bottled up inside her suddenly pouring out into simple compassion. “I’m your granddaughter.”

Josephine nodded and handed the papers back to Emmy. “I know.”

“And Raymond was my grandfather?” Emmy asked, the last piece of the first puzzle within her reach.

Josephine turned away sharply without an answer, and bent back to her harvest. Coffee licked at her cheek, which Emmy could see was damp with tears.

“I’m sorry he died,” Emmy said, and stuffed the documents into her coat pocket. “I wish I’d had the chance to meet him.”

Josephine stood and walked away from Emmy, wiping at her face with both hands. She made it to the far end of the row, where she stopped, a solitary figure against the severe blue sky. Emmy stayed frozen in the untilled black soil of mid-row, waiting for her aunt’s sorrow to pass through her and bring her around to the happy coincidence that had comforted Emmy. Instead, Josephine turned to her left and walked deeper into the next field, Coffee close at her heels. A net of wild imaginings rapidly descended over Emmy’s brain, and she broke into a diagonal run across the field as Lida’s words chased after her.

“Tell me,” Emmy said, arriving at her aunt’s side and taking her hand. “I want to know.”

“It happened so fast,” Josephine said, still staring at the horizon but grasping Emmy’s hand harder. “So long ago…”

“It’s okay,” Emmy said, certain that it wasn’t.

“He was a charmer.” The word was harsh in Josephine’s tear-strained voice. “‘Pastor Davidson’s perfect for you,’ Lida told me, ‘a man of God.’ It all happened
so fast
.” Josephine blinked a tear down her cheek and brushed at it angrily, her shoulders quivering as she told Emmy about the summer of the third Chautauqua, after their mother had died. “Lida couldn’t have imagined what would happen, of course,” Josephine said, her voice rising in that curious way it always did when she talked about the past, as though she needed to take on helium to sail above the sadder memories. “We all got along so well those handful of days, and I had taken a liking to Stephen. The last afternoon, we had a beautiful picnic by the lake and had our picture taken.” She stopped and looked down at Emmy’s hand trapped by her own.