A Fireproof Home for the Bride (38 page)

“Okay,” Emmy said, hesitating, and yet recognizing in Svenja the kind of rickety decisiveness Emmy had once clung to herself. “On the condition that you write me the minute you get where you’re going, and call this number if you ever need anything. I’m on the switchboard most nights, so make the call collect.” Emmy pulled on her coat. “Let me go with you to the bus station.”

A ghost of a smile drifted across Svenja’s face and she hugged Emmy tightly, the protrusion of Svenja’s stomach jarring in its hard fullness. “It’s only a few blocks,” she said, looking at her watch and working out a silent timetable. “I’ll be fine now. They won’t be back for an hour, at least.”

Jim returned. “We’re in,” he said excitedly to Emmy as Svenja slipped past him through the door. “We can go into the Acevedo house.” He watched Svenja go, perplexed.

Emmy grabbed her satchel and started to follow Svenja as Jim’s words sunk in and she stopped short. She’ll be all right, Emmy told herself, and went back for her notebook before hastening with Jim to his car. She saw Svenja already a block away. The bus station was only three blocks farther south. There would be an aunt at the other end. Svenja would be fine.

“You want me to tail her?” Jim asked as he started the car.

“If you don’t mind,” Emmy replied, unable to quell her doubt. They crawled along a fair distance behind Svenja, and when she slipped into the heavy wooden door of the station, Emmy relaxed and turned her thoughts to Golden Ridge.

Seventeen

By a Soft Whisper

“It hasn’t changed much in a year,” Jim said as they drove back into the heart of Golden Ridge. “After the cleanup, that is. You should have seen it, Em, trees everywhere, cars upturned, houses flattened, bodies…” He blew smoke against the fogging windshield. “I was in the war, you know, and it looked like that. Devastation. Eerie quiet.” He pointed at an empty yard to the left, where a small group of people was gathered. “That’s where Minnie Campbell’s house was blown off its foundation and turned on its side before collapsing entirely.” Emmy could hear some sort of chanting rising from the crowd as the car drew closer, and she rolled down her window.

“What’s going on?” she asked. Jim slowed the car to the curb and leaned across to see out of her window. She caught a mix of menthol, Brylcreem, and something else—boiled chicken?—whose blend seemed oddly comforting.

“Looks like some sort of protest.” He shifted the car into park and pulled the brake. “Let’s go have a look.”

The closer they walked to the circle of onlookers, the clearer the chant became:

“Solstad for mayor!”

Emmy rubbed her arms of a sudden chill as she began to recognize various boys she’d known in Glyndon, all dressed in Ambrose’s recent uniform of black pants, white short-sleeved shirts, and thin black neckties. The chant stopped and a loud, instantly recognizable voice boomed through the cool September air.

“My good people,” Curtis Davidson said from his perch atop what was once Minnie Campbell’s front stoop but was now just a stack of concrete steps to nowhere. “Thank you for coming out here today. As concerned citizens, we must stand together against the infiltration of lower-income housing development designed for the ceaseless flow of immigrants into our fair city, such as the one proposed for this very spot by, lessee here…” He looked down at a piece of paper. “Some outfit by the name of Robertson. This sort of pandering to outsiders seems un-American to me.” Mr. Davidson paused as a murmur of agreement rose from the crowd. “My friends, where once stood an elderly woman’s tidy home, there will be a concrete ghetto of shabby apartments designed specifically for luring cheap labor to the valley—labor that was once done with our own hands, alongside our sons, while our wives and daughters kept the hearth fires burning. That work is no longer valuable to the young men of our community. And the young women?” Mr. Davidson looked straight at Emmy. “They want
careers.
The old ways, where God and family came first, aren’t good enough for our youth. Instead they drive around without purpose in cars every night, getting up to no good—from the rampage of two teenagers in Wyoming to the defacement of school property last winter, our children have lost their way, and we need to bring them on home.”

A number of spectators began to chant again, and Mr. Davidson let them until he raised a hand and they went silent. His skin looked waxed and polished in the bright daylight; his eyes squinted to dots.

“Listen, my friends. This path of delinquency can be altered, but we need to take a hard look at where we place our own values, and say no to the influence of foreign ideas. Where once there stood the dream of a hardworking, native-born American son, there will soon be an immigrant family stealing our homes along with our jobs. The more this happens, the more dangerous our neighborhoods become. Why, right down the road here apiece a Mexican boy was found dead in the basement of his former home—
this
is their idea of taking care of their own. Mayor Lashkowitz’s regime can talk all they want about rebuilding and how this project will create new jobs for Americans, but let’s call it what it is: Herschel’s betrayal.”

“He doesn’t even say how Jesse died,” Emmy said to Jim.

“These types don’t care about the truth,” he replied. “Just what gets votes.”

An older lady in front of them made a shushing sound, and Emmy quieted, turning her attention onto the crowd, where she noted a scattering of young men dressed in black slacks and white shirts, their skinny black ties and dark armbands easily setting them apart from the rapt, primarily elderly audience. She caught sight of John Hansen, who clearly had no idea that Svenja had just boarded a bus to Saint Paul. His expression was as open and simple as it ever had been, too lit from Mr. Davidson’s words for Emmy’s taste. She tried to imagine what he must have done to cause Svenja’s agitation and her flight.

“Some say that being mayor isn’t enough,” Mr. Davidson continued. He wiped his dry brow with a handkerchief. “That Lashkowitz fellow has his eyes on governor, maybe even—” He stopped to laugh. “President.” A unified gasp rose from parts of the audience. “Now, now, I say, that’s all well and good, but when he’s sitting all sheeny up in the White House, we’ll be mopping up after his itinerant houses, and the inevitable destruction they’ll bring to the peaceable homogeneity of Fargo and Moorhead.”

Emmy glanced at Jim and was struck by how pale and angry his expression had become, almost as though he’d been slapped in the face and was preparing to throw his own punch.

“We should go,” she said to Jim, covering her anxiety. “Before we lose the daylight.” He didn’t move.

“My friends,” Mr. Davidson continued, his voice louder. “Right now, all over this Red River Valley, our good friends from Texas are hard at work in the beet fields. Why should they have to travel so far from home and do the work that our own sons are more than capable of doing? We’ve gotten soft, brothers and sisters, and our children softer, turning delinquent because they’ve forgotten how to work, because they haven’t gone to war.”

Someone in the crowd shouted, “Amen,” and Mr. Davidson took a moment to smile and nod. Emmy looked in the direction of the voice and was startled to see Frank Halsey dressed the same as the other young men. She stared at his weaselly features as Davidson thundered on. “Of course, we welcome our friends from the border every season, but they are far happier living in Texas during our inhospitable winters. Why tempt them with some phony sense of capturing the American Dream through year-round affordable housing? Shouldn’t we give those opportunities to bona fide, U.S.A.-born men and women? If we don’t stand against these developments now, it’s only a matter of time before the
pachucos
are in our midst, bringing their gang terror from Los Angeles, Chicago, even as close as Saint Paul. Organizing.” He paused. Adjusted his tie slightly. “Dating our
daughters.
”

Another voice yelled out, “What can we do?” Emmy snapped her head in its direction and saw Ambrose, a complicit smile of concern on his face. She took a step backward, desiring more than ever to be out of the sphere of Davidson’s ugly influence and yet drawn to understand its heady power to attract so many acolytes.

“I’m glad you asked, brother,” Mr. Davidson said. “Because I’d like to introduce you all to my friend Harvey Solstad. He’s boldly thrown his hat into the ring for mayor, and I’d like you to get to know him. See, he’s like you and me, a patriotic fellow who, through his hard work and God-fearing decency, has gone from being a lowly plumber to running his own pipe company. That’s what the American Dream looks like. Let’s give him a warm welcome.”

Over the scattered applause, Jim said to Emmy, “I’ve heard enough. Solstad’s a bigoted hack. Runs every year for something. Never wins.”

Emmy turned for the car, staying out of Ambrose’s view. “I know that other man,” she said. “I don’t much care for what he was saying.”

“Imagined danger. It’s classic fear-mongering,” Jim said, opening Emmy’s door. “The bread and butter of politics. If they can scare you enough, you’ll vote for them to keep you safe. You get numb to it after a while, even though we shouldn’t.”

Emmy sat in the quiet car and looked out at the clutch of people, unable to shake a feeling of apprehension. Jim slipped into the car and started the engine. “Well, I hope I never get numb to it,” she said. “It seems dangerous to me.”

“It can be.” He gave Emmy a thoughtful glance. “What’s this fellow’s name?”

“Curtis Davidson,” she said. “He was my grandfather’s friend.”

“You know what they say, with friends like that…” Jim replied.

Emmy shook her head. “Did you see Frank Halsey?”

“Doesn’t surprise me a bit. Water seeks its own level.”

“Isn’t that a cliché?” Emmy asked.

“When you write.” Jim smiled as he pulled up in front of the Acevedo house. “Let’s get back to work.”

*   *   *

Daylight was softening through the four-foot-wide opening above Emmy’s head as she reached the bottom of the steep cellar steps and waited for her eyes to adjust to the dim glow of the lantern Jim handed down to her.

“Take your time,” he said. “I want you to get your own impressions.” She nodded up at him and shivered against the chill emanating from the unfinished earthen walls as she slowly turned toward the layout of the small space and stopped. The basement had mostly kept its seal, preserving the contents in the state they had been when the tornado hit. Why Mrs. Acevedo had chosen the bathroom over the basement, Emmy couldn’t guess, but the tragedy of that choice knocked Emmy’s breath into short bursts.

There was a rack of untouched dusty canned beans to the left, a pile of clothes dented by the shape of a sleeping boy to the right. Emmy put aside her feelings and opened her notepad, documenting the assortment of rags Jesse had chosen—almost as though he’d selected one garment from each family member in an attempt to reconstruct their life in the broken house above.

Emmy carefully lifted the lace-trimmed baby gown and felt the weight of each subsequent piece of Jesse’s morbid inheritance—a flannel shirt, a floral housedress edged in bright orange now faded to brown except at the floured seams, where its cheery print hinted at happier days. A young girl’s violet-bedecked sundress and a smaller version fit for a doll, both homemade. From slightly deeper in the pile, Emmy unearthed the doll, its broken head carefully glued and yet missing one blue eye. On the wall Emmy saw a colored drawing of a small blond child wearing white-and-red robes, his hands held out to the sides and a glowing halo crowning his golden hair.

She blanched at the idea of what must have happened that horrible June day—the images came to her of their own accord: a woman half pinned and paralyzed by the majestic oak that also destroyed her house; a man running toward the exploding homes, crying the names of his wife and children; a silent boy stumbling in the street, a shard of picket fence sticking through the front of his striped T-shirt. It had been an unbearably hot afternoon that turned ugly in less than an hour, the massive black clouds closing in on the western prairie and congregating like a ghostly herd of buffalo enraged and wild with fear.

Here in the cramped space inhabited by an unhappy boy, it was clear that Jesse had returned to the place where he last felt safe. He had constructed a utopia where his mother was about to serve them chicken she had fried in the early morning hours, before the heat of the day had seeped into the stuffy little kitchen. There would have been pickles and potato salad and other standard Midwestern fare—and perhaps a side of rice, or a pot of garlicky beans. Maybe someone from church would stop by to gossip about the latest inhabitants of the old Jenkins house on the corner—
Did you hear they’re having another baby?

The images came alive for Emmy, and she began to write the newspaper story in her mind; sitting at the oilcloth-covered table, watching as the smallest Acevedo slipped into the room to sneak a small chicken leg from the cooling basket only to get a sharp rap on the knuckles and a scolding yelp from the mama, who would perhaps have just enough time to get to the bathtub with her wailing children before being knocked in the head by a flying kitchen chair from three blocks away. Did she have a moment to think that perhaps she should have mellowed her voice, let the poor child eat, chosen a different place to hide from the storm? Or did she simply say the prayers of childhood, the Ave Maria, the Pater Noster, again and again? Emmy’s image of the dream house grew ever darker and then just as quickly half imploded, glass and chairs and chicken and people flying, swirling, shearing up and away in an awful locomotion of grotesque spectacle.

Emmy heard the stairs behind her creak, and she turned to see Jim.

“Anything out of the ordinary?” he asked.

“There’s plenty of food,” she said, wiping the corner of one eye with her coat sleeve. “He didn’t come here to live, he came here to die. To stop the pain.”

“Then that’s the story,” Jim said softly. “Survivor Starves in Destroyed Home One Year Later.”