The Office of Historical Corrections(44)
The sign was there for decades, long enough that it went generally unnoticed. Then Genevieve spotted it. She issued a correction and took the additional liberty of not just stickering but replacing the existing plaque: hers added to Josiah’s name the names of those known to have participated in the mob, names known because they had identified themselves in a surviving photograph of the spectacle. Eight of Cherry Mill’s adults, seven men, two with small children sitting on their shoulders, and one woman, smiling and holding an infant, had posed and smiled for a photograph that someone had captioned The Cherry Mill Defenders: Fire Purifies. Their names and the date were on the back, in neat cursive penmanship. This, I gathered, was what had set Genevieve digging, what had made her upset enough to go looking for the sign to amend it.
“Let me guess,” I said to the director, once I had scanned the file. “Someone is sure there’s been an error and their dear grandfather who wouldn’t have hurt a fly wasn’t a part of this ugliness. It was his doppelg?nger in the photo and his name on the sign is a mistake and they want it taken down.”
“Not quite. A guy—one Andy Detry—did go looking because his grandfather was named, but he says his grandfather was a right bastard and he was looking to see what became of the victim’s family afterward, and whether there was anything he could do to help set things right. What he found, he says, was the victim might not have been killed. Says his digging turned up two death certificates and some living relatives to suggest the victim escaped very much alive and went back to Illinois, where he went on to have a big family. Josiah’s surviving relatives joined the clarification request.”
“Can’t we just correct it then?” I asked.
“Well there’s a problem,” he said.
“We need to know whose body they claimed was Josiah’s?”
“Not exactly. There’s no record that there was a body. Total structural collapse and a town full of people who were eager to reclaim the land. Under those circumstances I imagine the word of witnesses would be enough for a death certificate and probably some shenanigans about the deed or the next of kin—after he died, the property somehow turned up in the name of the husband of the woman in the picture. But I’m not asking you to solve an eighty-year-old hypothetical property crime. The body I’m worried about is very much alive. Genevieve has been emailing the office and threatening FOIA requests on this one if we don’t keep her updated. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s still asking questions of the people of Cherry Mill too. Her sign kicked up some fuss there, and there could be media on this one.”
“You’re sending me so if there’s news footage of an agent taking down a memorial sign with Genevieve screaming in the background, it’s two Black women yelling at each other and not a white guy in a suit tearing down the evidence of a crime?”
“I’m sending you because you have good sense and you’re not looking for the attention. You can wear a suit if you’d like. Whether or not we list the killers is a philosophical question that I know we don’t all see the same way. Whether someone forged a will or a deed or a death certificate to acquire the property is out of our jurisdiction entirely. But whether they declared a living man dead and we doubled down on their mistake—that’s facts. And if you find it to be true that the sign is a mistake, Genevieve will take it better coming from you than from anyone else in this office.”
“Genevieve will or the Post will?”
“It is very much my hope that this clarification is so simple and boring and handled without drama that the Post takes absolutely no interest in it no matter how many times Genevieve calls them. Do you get me?”
“I do,” I said.
“Can you handle this for me?”
“I can,” I said.
* * *
—
I carried the cake home on Metro and practiced ways to tell Daniel I was leaving for Wisconsin in a few days. I didn’t trust the state: my first job had been in Eau Claire; I had felt dazzled by its beauty and also claustrophobic the whole time, charmed by and hostile toward a region I had never entirely forgiven for its commitment to civility and conflict avoidance. Midwest nice was a steady, polite gaslighting I found sinister, a forced humility that prevented anyone from speaking up when they’d been diminished or disrespected, lest they be labeled an outsider. I was bewildered by the pride the region took in these pathologies. I didn’t trust my role at IPH, or at least I didn’t trust anymore my assumption that as long as I didn’t openly defy the agency, I’d be left alone to do work that mattered. I didn’t trust my own motivations. I wanted for once to get something right when Genevieve was wrong, but I also wanted my assignment to the case to be because I was careful and thorough and would ask the right questions, not because my friendly brown face would make good damage control when the agency discredited Genevieve, again. I didn’t trust my impulse to call Nick, my last serious ex, who was still in Milwaukee so far as I knew, and tell him I was coming to town, and I didn’t trust myself to explain any of it to Daniel.
Daniel and I had met three years earlier, at a happy hour that Elena dragged me to. I’d been restless, nostalgic for the work I’d left: my nearly finished manuscript nagged at me, and it was disorienting having just experienced the second fall in my lifetime that I didn’t answer to an academic calendar. I still missed having an ongoing research project, and I had begun to design whimsical minor empirical studies, including one surrounding my wardrobe. When I was teaching, I’d been alert to which classes trusted me most when I was drab, dressed in blacks and grays and covered in a blazer, hair locked into place and makeup subdued, and which trusted me most when I looked eccentric, when my dresses and scarves and jewelry blazed and dangled and my lipstick was always red. There was always a question of how my appearance affected my credibility, but the answer was never the same from semester to semester. When I began at IPH, I tried out different styles on the general public: formal versus informal, eclectic versus reserved, cleavage versus covered. That day’s experiment, an elegant blue dress with a moderately interesting neckline and a jaunty scarf, hair pressed flat and then curled again for body, had me looking more than usual the young professional. It fell into the people were happier to speak with me, but more likely to argue with me about whether I knew what I was talking about quadrant of my wardrobe chart, and it made me feel out of place at Elena’s neighborhood bar, which pulled its crowd from artists and grad students and NGO workers, people who wouldn’t recognize me as one of their own in my current ensemble. It was a small thing, but I thought of it often lately: how out of character I’d looked when Daniel and I met, how unlike myself.