A Fireproof Home for the Bride (45 page)

“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 said. “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.

Believe in the limitation of foreign immigration.

Believe your rights in this country are superior to those of foreigners.

Jim tapped the top of the list. “This right here is about Catholics—see how carefully worded the
Christian
religion distinction is?”

Emmy nodded. “But why single them out?”

“Because the pope is bigger than the president, if you hew to the faith. It’s unpatriotic to put the requirements of a foreign—in this case Italian—head of church or state before the needs of this country.”

“You believe that?” Emmy said, confused by what she herself believed.

“Look, kid,” Jim said. “It’s not about what you believe with these people, it’s about what they think you believe, and how they word it in a way that you can’t
disagree.
Look at this one, about ‘a free press uncontrolled by political parties or by religious sects.’ This is specifically about Jews and the paranoid belief that all the newspapers in this country are controlled by us.”

“By you?” Emmy said. “You’re a Jew?”

“Wanna see my horns?” He smirked.

“I’m sorry,” Emmy said. She’d never met a Jew, and had considered them something that existed only in the Bible or in Nazi Germany. The thought made her cringe at her own stupidity. “I didn’t mean…”

Jim picked up the paper and shook it, glossing over Emmy’s blunder. “Now how could that be true if I’m the only Jew at the
Forum
—other than the society columnist, and I assure you, Esther is no more controlling the comings and goings of polite Fargo society than I’m slanting the good kind opinions of our community by reporting on a movie theater fire. It’s hate talk dressed as patriotism.” He held up the paper in front of Emmy’s wide eyes. “Look here, is this the preacher?”

Emmy studied the black-and-white photo of a minister behind a pulpit, with a weasel-sharp profile and wavy black hair. Her eyes dropped to the caption even as her brain pushed out the word
Halsey
: “Rev. Ambrose Halsey, delivering a sermon on God, Country, and Patriotism.” “That looks like Frank,” she said, the conclusion snapping together on its own. “I’m beginning to think he’s capable of quite a lot.”

“Probably,” Jim said, carefully folding the old newspaper with the photo showing and laying it aside from everything else. “But we can’t just jump to conclusions.” He tapped an advertisement below the photo. “Check this out: Karl’s Kustom Kars. Look at the way the
K
s line up.” Jim leaned closer to the page and put his finger under the fine print, which Emmy read aloud over his shoulder.

“Proprietor, Karl Hansen.” Emmy flinched. “That’s John’s grandfather.” She held still, thinking about old Mr. Hansen and his crippled right hand—caught in a thresher belt when he was a teen. How he would wave that claw at hospitality hour in the church basement, railing against the German prisoners of war that had been brought to Clay County in the forties to do the field work of American farm men fighting abroad. His seething words about two in particular who’d had the nerve to stay once the war was over and who were granted citizenship. She folded back the memory and found another, hazier one, something to do with two local men and their wives having to move to Ohio after the barn they shared burned to the ground, animals, machinery, and all.

“The sins of the grandfathers?” Jim pondered.

“There you go again with your clichés,” Emmy said, trying to find humor somewhere in the situation.

“It’s a proverb, not a cliché.” He smiled and they stood there for a moment, looking at each other.

“I wonder,” she said, taking a step back in order to try to assemble a bigger picture out of the pieces they had so far pulled out of the box. “The theaters.” As soon as the idea was in the air, Jim snapped his fingers and hurried out of the room. Emmy shone this new light over the Moorhead fire, how Ambrose had been there, without explanation, and any doubt left in her as to just how far Ambrose would go to please Mr. Davidson disappeared.

Jim returned. “I can’t believe this didn’t occur to me,” he said, studying the clippings of the two separate fires that Emmy had given him months before. “Your nose was right after all. There are glaring similarities: both Easter fires, both theaters owned by Jews. The Strand burned in 1923…” Jim selected the encoded ledger and opened it, running his index finger down a column of dates, flipping pages until he found what he was looking for. “April 2, 1923. I’m guessing this entry translates into something interesting.”