by Amy Scheibe
“Do you mind if I borrow your satchel?” she asked, standing suddenly, his faith in her abilities trumping her hesitation. “I left mine at home.”
“You’re going now?” he asked, with more than a hint of pride. He stood and followed her to the door, reaching an arm in front of her in order to open it as she strode through to the hallway.
She nodded. “I shouldn’t be long.”
Twenty-two
Life with God Forever
Enveloped by the blue gloaming of early evening, Emmy headed east. As dusty snow began to scatter in its headlight beams, the Crestliner rumbled over the Second Avenue Bridge, through the barren streets of Moorhead, and out past the town limits. Dilworth came and went without Emmy so much as noticing the hulking gas station on one end of town, nor the smattering of blank-eyed houses as she cruised past them. Another mile, two, and then she turned onto the road that led through Moland Township, past the town hall, past the old schoolhouse, its weathered paint gray in the increasing swirl of snow. She imagined these landmarks on the plat map, their tiny representatives cartoonish and quaint. The last light of day was doused by the time she turned left again, past the cemetery, the church, the Branns’ drive, over the creek bridge, and to the farm.
Emmy eased the car into the sharp left turn after the bridge and cut the engine, letting the Crestliner roll to a stop a brief distance from the farmhouse. A light was on in the kitchen, another in Lida’s room. Emmy tapped a finger on the steering wheel, searching through the many pockets of possibility her mind kept emptying, sorting the reasons she had for showing up unexpected. Ultimately, she knew that none of them mattered until she saw Karin’s reaction, and so Emmy took a deep breath and stepped a foot into the snowy gravel. The kitchen door opened, casting a yellow slant of light onto the powdered yard, and there stood Karin in one of Lida’s old black dresses.
“Who’s out there?” she asked plainly, and took one step forward.
“It’s me, Emmy,” Emmy said, her voice unintentionally sweet and small. She was overcome by her desire to embrace her mother, yet held in place by the fear of seeking something that would not be there. That had never been there.
Karin moved into the shaft of light. “Emmy?” she whispered, as if to a person she had thought long dead, only to find alive.
“Yes,” Emmy said, encouraged by the echo of longing, and fumbling for more.
“Come inside, child,” Karin said in a slightly sterner tone while nodding toward the house. The rush of yearning Emmy had felt dissipated like bees caught in a strong wind.
“Thank you,” Emmy said, following her mother into the warm kitchen. The smells hit her like a wall built out of memories: the pungency of boiling cabbage slightly muted by the more seductive sizzling of roasting chicken and potatoes shot through with the hot vinegar of sautéed pickled beets. Over these, Emmy could detect the ammonia of the spotless floor and the faintest whiff of an odor she’d always related to her grandmother without having considered it before—one that she was incapable of identifying as created by any object in the room. It just smelled like Lida, a pillowy combination of flour, coffee, vanilla, wool, and roses that made Emmy’s eyes water as though she were cutting onions instead of simply standing in the middle of the room, not knowing where to turn in order to restrain the press of nostalgia. The table was set for two, as though her mother had been waiting seven months for this dinner, maybe even preparing it every night in case her prodigal daughter should return. But Emmy knew better. “Is Birdie okay?”
“She’s upstairs, lying down,” Karin said, casting her eyes to the floor between her and Emmy, focusing on it as though she had missed a spot of grime and was considering rushing to the sink to fetch a rag.
“Oh,” Emmy said, and took a step back. “Is it the baby?”
“She’s fine.” Karin’s voice cut through the room. “She just needs time.”
The clock ticked into the awkward silence that draped between them, neither seeming to know how to put down the first stone of the bridge that needed to be rebuilt. Karin sighed and turned away to the stove, and picking up a wooden spoon, she first stirred the cabbage, then the beets, and swiftly opened the oven with a thick cloth. She jerked the roasting pan from the interior, lifting it with one hand to the open burner, where it slammed to a rest. Emmy observed the wiry diligence of Karin’s form, wondering if perhaps her mother had been living solely on coffee and air. Nothing about the meal seemed to give Karin any appearance of appetite.
“Marriage is never easy,” Karin said without turning her head. Emmy studied her mother’s profile. Deep lines had etched themselves along the sides of Karin’s mouth, and her skin was stretched up across her sharp cheekbones to where it dipped into a hollow at the brow. It was equally tight and translucent at her jawline, where a blue vein meandered down to her neck and disappeared at the collar of the dark dress. It was almost as though the skull bones were patiently asserting their push toward revelation and after, the grave.
“I suppose it isn’t,” Emmy said, having only been a witness to two marriages up close, neither of which had seemed to her filled with joy or ease. It occurred to her that this might be a piece of her disillusion with Bobby. Perhaps she needed a better example on which to build a married life. “Will she stay here through the birth?”
Karin pressed the hand holding the dish towel to her lower back and hip, closing her eyes against whatever pain was surfacing there. “God willing. The baby will come and she’ll go back. I’m praying for them.” Karin went to the table and sat, lifting the family Bible into her lap and opening it, casting her eyes along a passage.
Emmy held quiet, gazing at her mother’s sunken eyelids. The world kills us through our children, Emmy thought, draining a mother’s love through a sieve of constant concern.
“I’m sorry,” Emmy said, surprised by how compulsively the words came out of her, and the great relief she felt upon saying them. “I disappointed you, and Father, and I know that.”
Karin’s eyes glistened as she folded her hands together on top of the Good Book. “I prayed for you, too, Emmaline,” she said, and Emmy glimpsed in her mother’s fixed gaze the depths to which all the loss had trenched inside of her, the gaping wound of it raw but dry. “The Lord has His ways.”
“I’m just sorry if I caused you pain,” Emmy said, fighting against the pangs of guilt that gathered into a thick clump in her throat, making it hard to talk.
Karin smiled, a slight turning up of the corners of her narrow mouth. “Rejoice with me,” she said, holding a liver-spotted hand out to Emmy. “For I have found my sheep.”
Emmy took the hand and folded it into both of hers, hoping some of her warmth might seep into Karin and shore her up. “Let me help you with dinner,” she offered. “Like I used to do.”
Karin smiled a bit wider, releasing Emmy’s hand and smoothing the pages of the Bible. “I forgive you,” she said plainly. “As God directs.”
Emmy slung Jim’s satchel onto a chair, unbuttoned her coat, and moved to the cupboards, instinctively locating a platter for the chicken and bowls for the vegetables, setting about her work as though the months since Easter hadn’t passed. Even so, a kaleidoscope of images crowded into her head piecemeal: Svenja’s tearstained face; Lida’s last words; Christian’s confession; Josephine’s story; John Hansen’s murder; Jesse’s death.
“He was so young,” Karin said, as though reading the tail end of Emmy’s thoughts. A beet slipped off the wooden spoon and onto the floor, where it splattered its scarlet stain against the pale linoleum, the white cabinets, and Karin’s light blue apron. Karin moved to the sink for a damp rag to swipe up the trailing stain.
Emmy knelt beside her. “Who?” she asked quietly.
“Daniel.” Without physical alteration, Karin’s smile turned sad. “I know that Jesus needed him in Heaven. I’m just sorry that He didn’t give me back my heart. It’s the one thing I’ll never have, no matter how much I pray or how much good I try to do. He gave
me you, and then Birdie, and you were both as beautiful, but I just didn’t … have anything for you other than ordinary affection. I did my best, though, didn’t I?”
“Yes, you certainly did,” Emmy said, and wrapped her mother in a firm embrace, feeling Karin’s hands flutter against her back like small birds lost in the wrong hemisphere, in the wrong season. “I have enough heart for us both,” Emmy whispered in her mother’s ear. When the awkward hug ended, Emmy was moved to see her mother’s eyes were still dry. How broken must a person be not to mourn the thing that did the breaking? Emmy lifted Karin’s hand to her own cheek. The phone rang, startling them both into standing.
“Please answer that?” Karin asked as she returned the beet-red rag to the sink. “It’s probably your father.”
Emmy grabbed Jim’s satchel from the chair and reached the telephone table in the living room on the fourth shrill ring, lifted the heavy handset, and said hello.
“Emmy?” Jim asked.
“Yes.”
“Look.” His voice stopped and then rushed. “I want you to come back here right away.”
Emmy turned away from the kitchen. “I haven’t gone upstairs yet. What is it?”
“I talked to Stan Lewis down at the Trib in Chicago,” Jim said, the urgency in his voice thinning Emmy’s blood. He cleared his throat and continued, “In 1929, Davidson kidnapped his secretary, and it gets worse from there.”
“Just tell me,” Emmy whispered. She wound the phone’s cord tightly around her free hand.
“He allegedly drugged her. Bit her numerous times. Raped her. Left her body on her parents’ doorstep.” Jim cleared his throat again. “She died before they could get a statement, and he claimed that anti-Klan socialists within the Cleveland government framed him. But there were teeth marks.”
Emmy pressed a hand to her mouth and swallowed hard. She thought she heard a car in the yard, and she lifted the phone from its small table and moved to the window with it while Jim continued.
“By the time they arrested him, he’d had all of his teeth pulled, and they couldn’t find his dentist.” Jim cleared his throat. “Served some time for obstruction of justice, but nothing else. His supporters never faltered in their faith in him.”
The memory of Mr. Davidson’s perfectly aligned smile made Emmy flinch as she looked out the window. Her car sat where she’d left it next to Karin’s in the snow-blown yard. There were no other vehicles in the yard. Still, Emmy couldn’t shake the feeling of another presence on the farm.
“I’ll be there as soon as I can,” she said, placing the phone’s base back on the table and slinging the strap of Jim’s bag over her head. The weight of the worn leather pressed on her shoulder like a steady hand, giving Emmy renewed confidence to complete her assignment. Jim’s urgent voice had rattled her.
“Good,” Jim said. “I don’t want you anywhere near the council.”
“Okay,” Emmy said, cradling the phone and heading to the stairs. “I’m going up to see Birdie,” she said to her mother. Emmy glanced through the open kitchen door as she swiftly made her way to and up the stairs, down the hallway on quiet feet, and into her grandmother’s bedroom, closing the door carefully behind her. The lumpy shape of her sister’s form lay still on the bed. Emmy tiptoed over to the edge and looked at Birdie’s flushed face in the low light of the lamp. The carefree innocence was still there in sleep, though Emmy suspected it to be merely a slumbering mask that would fall away upon waking. Checking her watch, Emmy hurried over to the rolltop desk and lifted the wooden shutter front up noiselessly, searching the little drawers and pockets for any usable clues in the dim light, but finding only random collections of coins, tacks, ink bottles, and other casual inhabitants of the desk’s warrens. She opened the flap of Jim’s satchel and quickly tucked a couple of rubber stamps and a tiny black address book—the only items of interest—into the bag. After another minute of investigation, she grasped the handle of the drawer where she knew the cigar boxes to be. As before, the wood was stuck, and she had to jiggle, lift, and jerk the drawer while sweat began to dampen her brow. The drawer flew open on the third, more rigorous attempt, leaving its rails entirely and crashing to the floor, the contents tipping and scattering across the rug.
“Emmy?” Birdie said, the bed groaning under her shifting weight. “What are you doing? Why are you here?”
“I’m looking for something I left here,” Emmy said, rifling through the drawer. She had no idea what she could possibly find that could help them write a story that would put an end to Mr. Davidson’s influence, but a quick inventory of the mess in front of her revealed six boxes, the inside lid of each scrawled with a different year, and containing the same types of square pieces of yellowed paper slips. Emmy heard Karin’s feet on the stairs. Emmy looked at the paper on top of the stack, raking it for information that might mean something. It was a driver’s license, in the name of Julio Alvarez. Emmy frowned.
“Everything okay?” Karin called out.
“We’re fine,” Emmy said toward the door. “I just dropped something. We’ll be right down.” The footsteps retreated, and Emmy pushed the boxes and cards back together as neatly as she could, stowing a handful of the small papers in the satchel before lifting the drawer onto its runners and pushing it closed. She turned to see her sister sitting up, her bare legs dangling over the edge of the bed. There were a number of small dark marks on her shins, and tiny red lines on her arms. Birdie followed Emmy’s stare with her own, and flinched, throwing the chenille bedcover over her exposed bruises.
“The belly makes me clumsy,” she said, her eyes turned to the floor. “I keep bumping into the furniture.”
Emmy approached the bed slowly. “And your arms?” she asked.
Birdie rubbed at the marks and laughed nervously. “Ambrose was trying to teach me how to whittle, and I slipped a few times.”
“Did he hurt you?” Emmy asked, dismay sharpening her vision. Birdie’s face registered shock at the suggestion.
“Oh, God, no,” she said, with her hands shaking. “He would never.” The girl’s sweet mask crumbled, leaving the map of heartbreak etched underneath. Emmy drew her sister into an embrace, stroking her soft hair and shushing.
“I’ve missed you so much,” Birdie said through her heaving. “I’m so alone now.”
Emmy withdrew from the hug but held her sister’s face between her hands. “Hush,” Emmy said, wiping away a tear with one of her thumbs. “It’s okay, I’m here.”
Birdie’s eyes crinkled shut, and a line of water leaked from her nose. “He doesn’t love me,” she cried, as much plaintive as befuddled. “I’ve done everything I can, but he still loves you.”
“I’m sure you have,” Emmy said, knowing it was true but incapable of adding to her sister’s misery by agreeing with her assessment. “Who wouldn’t love you more?”
Birdie clasped Emmy’s wrists. “He follows you. Everywhere.”
Emmy glanced at the window, darkened by the lamp. “Nonsense,” she said. “You’re mistaken.”
“He’s convinced himself that he’s not the father.” Birdie shook her headful of limp, matted hair and pulled Emmy’s hands together. “He goes on and on about John Hansen, but it isn’t true,” she said. “None of it.”
“But John’s dead,” Emmy said.
Birdie’s round eyes went wider, and Emmy thought she detected a hint of knowledge too terrible to share.
“I’m glad Dad brought me here,” Birdie said.
“Why, what happened?”
The sound of a truck door slamming cut through the quiet in the yard. Emmy jumped and went to the window in time enough to see Ambrose approaching the house. She patted at the satchel, making sure it was closed.
“Nothing,” Birdie said. “He said he forgave me, but there’s nothing to forgive.”
“Maybe it’s just nerves about the baby,” Emmy soothed, eager now to be done with the emotional ramblings of her sister and back to the abandoned exhumation. “Marriage
isn’t easy.” Karin’s words were thin syrup in her mouth, but she had none that were better. “He’ll come around.”
“No, he won’t,” Birdie said sharply. She pulled a flannel robe around her shaking shoulders and drew her feet up into the covers. “He’s so wrapped up in the council and Mr. Davidson. And you. There isn’t time for me.” The kitchen door opened and closed downstairs, causing the air pressure in the room to expand and contract. Emmy swallowed the lump of anxiety rising in her throat. She honed her last bit of focus on Birdie’s claims.
“What do they do?” Emmy asked in a whisper. “This council?”
“I’m not allowed at the meetings,” Birdie said, glancing at the door as though it might spring open. She picked absently at one of the scratches on her arm, reopening the cut with a ragged fingernail. “But I’ve seen them training in the Branns’ backyard, and they’ve got a press in the kitchen where they make the election flyers, and other things. Ambrose is running for the township board.”
“So I’ve heard,” Emmy said. “What kind of training?”
“Like the army,” Birdie said. “With guns. And sometimes they stack up piles of wood and then blow them up.”
“Emmy?” Karin’s voice traveled up the stairs. “Birdie? Ambrose is here.”
The girls looked at each other for a suspended moment in which Emmy ardently wished to be back in their room in the small house. She sensed her sister was wishing the same. “Stay here,” Emmy said, moving toward the door. “I’ll tell him you’re too tired to come down.”
Birdie wrapped her arms around her belly under the covers and grimaced. “It’s true,” she said. “Be careful.”
Emmy stopped short. “Careful?”
Birdie nodded. “They’ve been meeting a lot. At odd hours.” Her eyes widened as though seeing something in her memory loom larger. “And I’ve heard strange sounds since John died.”
“The wind’s been howling lately,” Emmy said, her hand on the doorknob.