What the Dead Want(55)

Gretchen felt stunned, proud of how strong and loving her mother was.

“What do you want me to do with . . . ?”

“My body?” Mona asked matter-of-factly. “Whatever you decide, sweets. The world belongs to the living.” Then Mona Axton kissed her daughter on the forehead and faded into the drizzling June night.

By the time Gretchen made it back to the bonfire of photographs, Hope was nose-to-nose with a long-haired man wearing a vintage top hat and a fancy batik shirt. Hawk was trying to intervene, pulling her back from him. A crowd of people from Shadow Grove surrounded them.

“You’re destroying evidence!” the man shouted. “You’re destroying our history!”

“Oh, believe me,” Hope was shouting, “we’ve got plenty of evidence stored in a nice, safe place. But you wouldn’t want to see that, would you? Be afraid your great-grandpa is front and center wearing a white sheet.”

“People need to see those photographs of the dead,” he said. “They’re proof.”

“We’ve saved any that are important. The rest were trophies!” Simon shouted. “Trophy pictures taken by criminals.”

“Who the hell are you?” someone from the crowd yelled at Simon.

“Excuse me?” Simon yelled. “EXCUSE me? No. Who the hell are you? Don’t you even get up in my face!”

Gretchen pushed her way through the crowd. She rushed up to Hope and threw her arms around her. Hope breathed a sigh of relief and returned the hug. The crowd seemed to take a step back.

“It’s the Axton girl,” someone in the crowd yelled.

“Esther,” a crazy-eyed woman in a flowing skirt with ridiculously short bangs and rhinestone-edged glasses called out. “Speak to us, Esther!”

Gretchen looked up at the crowd of people standing around them in the light of the fire. Then she laughed.

“I’m not Esther,” she said. “Esther is dead. The whole Axton family is dead now. Except for me.”

She looked out at the field, once full of ghosts walking among the living. Now all she could see were the people from Shadow Grove.

She looked over at Hawk. He had a strange smile on his lips, and for the first time he looked relaxed.

“They’re moving on,” he said, and it was as if a great burden was being lifted from his shoulders. “It’s really happening.”

A white flash of lightning followed by a clap of thunder rang out, and suddenly the place where the lynching tree once stood was nothing but a scorched and smoldering patch of grass.

There was a sudden hush among the crowd. The only sound was the crackling from the dying fire. Ashes from the photos floated up into the sky, fluttering, glittering in the moonlight.





EPILOGUE


GRETCHEN AND HOPE HELD THE OVERSIZE SCISSORS between them and smiled for the camera. Then they leaned in together and cut the ribbon that hung in front of the door of the Green Moore Museum for the Living.

Hope, who was now studying history at Columbia University like her mother did, had driven Gretchen, Hawk, and Simon from New York to Mayville the night before for the ceremony. Hawk had to leave the city directly after his concert, and was still dressed for it. People from Shadow Grove were lined up to enter the museum, as were several school groups, their yellow buses parked in the lot across the field.



Cameras flashed and reporters moved forward to ask their questions.

“Gretchen,” a woman with perfect teeth and shoulder-length blond hair said, “have you retained any part of the Axton fortune?”

“No,” Gretchen said. “None. The house was ruined beyond repair. I made a decision to have it demolished, and used the remaining inheritance for this project, instead of keeping up an old country house where no one lived.”

“You said in an interview on Good Morning America that the museum preserves a quintessential American story; how so?”

“The photographs and journals and letters kept in this archive hold my family accountable for an atrocity,” she said, “and I’m seeing to it that we pay. And to make sure the town can’t forget. But others in my family were also the victims of atrocity,” she said, gesturing to Hope and Hawk. “The three of us were related to Fidelia Moore and Valerie Green, whose lives were cut short because of hatred. They were murdered in the Calvary Church Fire along with their daughters and friends.”

“But the photographs of the victims in this museum celebrate their lives, not their deaths,” Hawk said. “There are dozens of pictures of people happy and getting along. Like Celia Axton and Rebecca Green, who were our ancestors. They were best friends, little girls when they died. Living in a world where people hated women and African Americans. There are pictures of them, and pictures of the first integrated congregation, having picnics, swimming in the creek.”

“The only ugly pictures or documents you will see,” Gretchen said, “are those from the White Christian Patriots, the Klan, and from Axton Cotton. You can see the faces of the men who decided to do these things, and who carried them out. We’ve identified nearly all of them and listed their names.”

A man wearing a blue blazer elbowed his way to the front of the crowd.

“What do you think your mothers would have said if they were here today?” he asked.