We Hope for Better Things

by Erin Bartels

  They cut through yards and stopped in shadowy alleys as the rioters ran by and more police poured in, called back from their summer vacations. What sunlight had been breaking through the shroud of smoke that covered the city had finally disappeared below the horizon. With no light and no flash, William wound up his finished film, inserted a new roll into the camera, and tucked it back into his bag. But when they neared Taylor Avenue, the light from the fires was so bright that he took it out again.

  A volley of shots rang out, followed by the sound of a helicopter taking off.

  “Let’s get outta here,” J.J. said. “I ain’t heard so many gunshots all day. Cops musta got the okay to shoot.”

  William shook his head. “National Guard. I saw them rolling in earlier. Whole line of tanks. They’re all up at your school.”

  “Man, we gotta go that way,” J.J. moaned.

  William put the camera back in the bag. “Then we better just go and get it over with.”

  The farther they went, the more obvious the presence of the Guard became. Tanks creaked down streets, lines of men in drab uniforms carrying rifles marching behind. J.J. felt that every one of them must know about his shoes.

  A long column was nearly past when a guardsman near the end of the pack spotted them. “Hey! You there!”

  William put his hand out in front of J.J. to stop his forward motion, then pushed his nephew behind him. “What?” he said.

  The guardsman trotted over to him, followed by another. “What you got there?” He was pointing to William’s bag.

  “Camera.”

  “Just pick that up?” The man shifted the rifle on his shoulder.

  “I’ve had it for four years.”

  “That so?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  J.J. seethed inside to watch his uncle call this guy sir. He couldn’t have been more than a few years older than J.J. himself.

  “You want to take it out of the bag for me?”

  William pulled the camera out and handed it over.

  The man slung his gun across his back, dropped the lens cap to the ground, and held the camera up to his face. He spun the focus ring. “You there, what are you hiding back there?”

  J.J. stepped out. “Ain’t hidin’.”

  “Well, come on out here then. Move in a little.” He waved his hand at them.

  William and J.J. stood close together.

  “Say cheese!”

  Click.

  His companion laughed. “Take ours now.”

  The first man handed the camera back to William.

  “Look mean,” the second guardsman told his partner.

  The young men put on the expressions of hardened war veterans. William adjusted the settings, focused, and took their picture.

  A shouted order filtered back through the noise.

  “We gotta go, man.” The second man started up the street.

  “Hey,” said the first, “if you make it out of this alive, look me up so I can see that picture.” He began to run after his companion. “Name’s Ryan Sharpe! From Davison!”

  William retrieved the lens cap and put the camera away. “Maybe you should carry this, J.J.” He handed the bag to his nephew. “Run and hide if it comes to it. Can’t lose those pictures.”

  J.J. slung the bag across his shoulder.

  Twenty minutes later they made it to Aunt Dee’s house. Or what had been her house. In the orange glow of the fire and the spinning red lights of the fire truck, J.J. could see that the house was past saving. Half a dozen firemen were spraying three burning houses with fire hoses. Each was attended by two guardsmen. There were too many fires and not enough men or equipment to put them out. J.J. thought of the fires he and Arnold had tried to start earlier that day and was grateful for the ignorance that had kept their faulty Molotov cocktails from working.

  “Hey, you! Back up!” a familiar voice shouted. It was the guardsman who had stopped them less than a half hour earlier.

  “Here, give me that.” William reached for the bag on J.J.’s shoulder.

  “Hey!” came another shout.

  William put his hands up. “It’s just the camera.”

  A shot rang out from a window behind William and J.J. The guardsmen returned fire. J.J. ducked and ran, straight into a waiting guardsman who knocked him over the head with the butt of his rifle. He fell to the ground and felt blood oozing down his forehead and into his eyes.

  The last thing he saw was a bullet rip through William’s body as cinders from Aunt Dee’s house rained down around them.

  fifty-four

  Lapeer County, April

  As Mr. Rich drew his story to a close, I looked down at my plate, surprised to find it empty. I didn’t remember eating anything.

  “Are you sure you’re remembering that name right?” I pressed him. “Ryan Sharpe? As in, Judge Ryan Sharpe?”

  He looked grave. “I’ll never forget it.”

  My mind raced. Ryan Sharpe had been in the middle of a firefight that resulted in the deaths of at least two men—a supposed sniper and a firefighter. “What happened to William?”

  Mr. Rich looked over at Nora. “His body was never found. The city started a project to locate missing people in the months following the riot, but lots of people were still unaccounted for. We held a memorial service that fall, without a body. But we can’t know for sure what happened. My belief has always been that his body was burned. That entire block was destroyed.”

  “I never found a death certificate when I was looking into it,” I said.

  “After seven years of being missing, Nora could have filed to have him declared deceased,” he said. “She never did.”

  Nora was shaking her head and staring at the tablecloth.

  Mr. Rich nodded at his son, who pushed the box toward his father.

  “These are the photos that William took that night,” he said. “Everything I had on me was collected as evidence. I’m sure they thought I had stolen the camera, though if they stopped a minute to think about it, they’d know a camera that nice wouldn’t have been sold in any of the stores in that neighborhood. Someone at the station had the film developed, probably thinking they could use the photos to identify looters.” He pushed the box toward Nora. “They’re really yours. I think you’ll want to see them.”

  Nora made no move for the box. With every fiber of my being I silently begged her to open it. If there was truly a photo of a young Ryan Sharpe just minutes before the firefight that could place him in the proximity of the incident . . .

  Mr. Rich leaned in. “Nora, I know you hate me. I don’t blame you. You have every reason to. If it wasn’t for me, William would never have been in Detroit that day. I was angry. All I could see was how life had done me wrong and would continue to do me wrong. But I have regretted the rash words and actions of my youth since that day—bitterly regretted them. Only I can’t change them. If I could go back in time, I would, but I can’t. I can only move in one direction—forward. I wish you could do the same. I wish you could forgive me.”

  Nora looked at him with tired eyes. “There are three people in this world I have not been able to forgive. My mother, my father, and you. It would have been easy to forgive my parents. I was so close the day I came looking for William. It took a force of will to keep myself from doing it then, or any time in the years that followed. Even when they deeded this house to me. Even when they died. It took effort and sacrifice not to forgive them. But it has cost me no great effort not to forgive you.”

  Mr. Rich pursed his lips and shut his eyes, looking very much like a man on the verge of tears.

  “I want to,” Nora continued. “I do. I don’t want to be an angry old woman. But . . .”

  Mr. Rich nodded and regained control over his emotions.

  “Nora,” I ventured, “maybe Linden and I should give you two some time alone.”

  Linden was out of his chair in a flash. We walked through the kitchen and out the back door. I took a deep breath of spring and
leaned on the remains of the woodpile Tyrese had created with William’s tree.

  Linden put his hands in his pockets. “Man. This is rough.”

  I nodded my agreement.

  He looked up at the house. “This is a cool old place. You’re lucky to live here. It’s hard to see everything falling apart all over Detroit. Places from my parents’ childhood—houses, schools, the places they worked—all getting wiped off the map.”

  “I know. The history of millions of people, just rotting away until some wrecking crew comes to put it out of its misery.”

  “Or some hipsters buy it and turn it into a brewery.”

  We were both quiet a moment, reflecting on the struggling city we called home. The city Vic Sharpe had been investing in. The city he was helping to save. I thought of Mr. Rich inside the house, doing the hard work of reconciliation. Maybe I needed to call Vic.

  At the sound of gravel crunching under tires, I headed for the front yard, rounding the house just as a pickup emblazoned with the Perkins logo pulled up. My stomach did a flip when I saw Tyrese at the wheel.

  He rolled down the window. “Special delivery.” He was smiling as he said it, but his eyes strayed to Linden.

  “Are you working on Sundays now?” I stepped up on the running board and gave him a kiss.

  “Not normally. But I’m glad I got here when I did. Before Linden Rich ran off with my girl.”

  I laughed and jumped down to the ground.

  “No, no, man,” Linden said, approaching the cab of the pickup. “It ain’t like that.”

  The men clasped hands through the open window.

  I craned my neck to see into the bed of the pickup. “Is that my tree?”

  “That’s it,” Tyrese said. “A beautiful three-year-old catalpa.”

  “Oh! Bring it around back!”

  Tyrese and Linden fought with some rope and dragged the tree down onto a dolly as I led the way to the spot I had picked out for it.

  I looked at Linden’s impeccable Sunday clothes. “I don’t suppose you want to help us plant this.”

  He smiled. “Sure.”

  For the next hour, the three of us dug, carried, poured, positioned, and covered. As the work progressed, I shared with Linden the history of his great-uncle—my great-uncle, I now fully realized—planting the first catalpa, of its struggle to survive only to succumb to the ice storm, of my work restoring the garden and the graves. I told him about Mary and Nathaniel, and about the cots in the attic and the men and women who had found shelter here. All stories Tyrese had already heard, but he seemed content to hear them again.

  By the time the tree was snug in the ground, we all sported rolled-up sleeves, dirty hands and knees, and soiled shoes. I stood for a moment in the chill spring air and regarded our small accomplishment—one tree planted in good soil. It was young and supple. It would weather the storms to come in a way the old tree could not. It might live beyond my lifetime.

  What might change in that time? Would things be better? Or worse?

  “I should go,” Tyrese said. “Give Nora a hug for me.”

  Linden hung back a little as I walked Tyrese back to the truck.

  “Now don’t go falling for that guy,” Tyrese said.

  I smiled at the thought that he could be jealous. “I won’t. He’s practically family, anyway.”

  Tyrese and Linden shared a wave, and then the pickup slowly inched back through the pines and onto the road.

  Back in the kitchen, Linden and I removed our shoes, and I took a good look at him. “I think your clothes might be ruined.”

  “That’s what dry cleaners are for.”

  “They won’t clean your shoes.”

  “They’re just shoes. It’ll come off. And if not, it’s a good excuse to buy new ones.”

  We crept to the dining room, but no one was at the table. The box of photos was gone, but the lunch plates were still there. I started to stack them.

  “Leave those, Elizabeth, and come in here,” came Nora’s voice from the parlor.

  Nora and Mr. Rich were on the settee, open box between them, photographs covering the coffee table.

  “Come in here and look at these,” she said.

  “We’re kind of dirty.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Linden was helping me in the garden.”

  “Heavens, you just met him and you’re putting him to work?”

  “I was a willing helper,” Linden said. “And this isn’t the first we’ve met.”

  “Never mind the dirt,” Nora said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “Just come look.”

  Linden and I pulled chairs in close to the coffee table. Among the photos spread out before me were a few of what you might expect when looking at photos of a riot—burning buildings, abandoned cars, groups of agitators facing down the police. But most were close-ups of individual people. Given the situation in which they were shot, they had to be candid, but many had the quality of portraits.

  “Look at this.” Nora handed one to me. A small black girl stood on the sidewalk, watching men push a mattress out of a second-story window and into a waiting pickup truck below. Behind the men, the block was going up in flames.

  “Are they stealing it?”

  “They’re saving it.”

  I picked up a close-up of an elderly woman through a window, the trail of a tear running down her dark cheek. In the glass, a reflection of a house burning across the street. Then a frightened young boy holding a fat white cat, its legs looking for solid ground. I shuffled through photo after photo of boys and old men, mothers and grandmothers, displaying the full range of human emotion from despair to anger to heights of ecstatic mania. The one thing missing was joy.

  “He was an amazing photographer.”

  “Yes, he was,” Nora and Mr. Rich said in unison.

  “This is the best work I’ve ever seen of his,” Nora said in a voice thick with emotion.

  I came to the last two photos. In one, two young white National Guardsmen looked steely-eyed at the camera. One of them was most definitely Ryan Sharpe. His expression was almost identical to one in a formal portrait I’d seen of him that had been taken right before he left for Vietnam. In the last photo, two black men stared out of the past. In the eyes of the younger was anger mingled with fear. In the older, a quiet strength.

  “That’s J.J.,” Nora said. “And that’s William.”

  My first glimpse of William Rich, a man whose ghost had haunted my aunt for fifty years. The man behind the lens. He was strikingly handsome and exuded confidence and dignity and grace.

  He was the genius behind the photos I’d just seen, behind the ones down in the darkroom. Eyes that saw past the surface of a person to what was deep inside. The beauty and the pain. History being made. It wasn’t the fires burning around them that captivated me, but the ones William had exposed burning within them, the interior crucible of past and present that would make them into new people, different people. One moment in time that would define all the moments that came after.

  “These really should be in a book,” I said when I could speak again. “And I’m not saying that for the reason you’re thinking, Linden.”

  “He always wanted to make a book,” Nora said.

  “Too bad they’re such small prints.”

  “All the negatives are there,” Mr. Rich said, “in an envelope. You could have someone make more prints of any size you wanted.”

  “Actually, you could do that right downstairs—”

  Nora looked up.

  “If you knew how,” I continued feebly.

  “I know how,” Linden said.

  “You do?”

  “Sure, it’s a hobby of mine. Always done digital, but I was learning manual on Uncle William’s camera. I’m not as good as he was, but I’m coming along. You’ve got a darkroom here?”

  “It hasn’t been used in decades,” Nora said. “I’m sure the chemicals wouldn’t work.”

  “Probably not. But do you
mind if I take a look?”

  Nora rubbed her forehead. “I suppose you may as well. After looking through all of these, I guess there’s no reason to hold back any longer.”

  I retrieved the key and showed Linden to the basement. He had to hunch over the entire way to keep from hitting his head on the low ceiling. Inside the darkroom, he pulled the chain of an overhead light I hadn’t seen before. It glowed a dim red. He sat on the stool so he could straighten his back and took stock of the room, fiddling with bottles and opening drawers I hadn’t noticed during my candlelight expedition.

  “It’s pretty dusty down here,” he said. “We’d have to clean everything first, but I don’t see any reason we couldn’t try it out. Probably need to get new developer and stop and fixer. There’s an enlarger and a chrome dryer.”

  “That thing dries them? I thought people hung them up. There are some right behind you.”

  He spun around on the stool. “These weren’t hanging up to dry. They’re just for decoration.”

  “How do you know?”

  “They’re glossy. When they’re hung dry, they end up with a matte finish. These were just here for William to look at.” He took down one of the photos. “Wow, she was beautiful.”

  “I kind of thought that maybe the room was locked because William wanted to keep these photos a secret, but it turns out Nora’s the one who locked it.”

  Even in the dim red light I could see that Linden was looking at me the same way he had when I ate my coney dog with a fork.

  “What?” I said.

  “That’s Nora.”

  “No it isn’t.”

  “Yes it is, just look at her.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “It’s her eyes. Same blue eyes. Remember? You’ve got them too.”

  “How can you tell the color of someone’s eyes in black-and-white?”

  “I may be an amateur, but I know what blue looks like in a black-and-white photo. Anyway, I told you I’ve seen photos of her. And that is undeniably Nora.”

  I was quiet a moment. “Do you really think we could make a book of his photos? Not for me. For him. Those photos up there are pictures of an event that changed Detroit forever, and no one has seen them. And he didn’t take them for no one to see them.”