The Office of Historical Corrections(51)
He leaned forward again and started to say more, but seemed to lose the words, instead raising himself from the table and saying his goodbyes. He offered a beer on him if we made it by his tavern. I thanked him and watched him walk out into the sunlight, squinting and shielding his eyes with his palm.
“Not bad people,” said Genevieve after he’d left. “What would a white person actually have to do to lose the benefit of the doubt? How many murders would they have to cover up?”
“Six, I think. But we might not even have one here.”
“You’re talking to Josiah’s family next?”
“It’s none of your business what I’m doing next. This isn’t your case. It’s not even appropriate for you to be here. Take a breath. Have brunch. Let me do my job.”
“Do you know how I ended up here in the first place? Originally, I mean. I was in Madison catching up with an old colleague. We went to brunch. Cute little place with sunny windows and red-checked tablecloths and cocktails and mocktails and home-style breakfast foods with ample vegan options. Besides the tablecloths, the decor is all old photographs and postcards that they scrounged up from wherever, because you know how white people love their history right up until it’s true. So I’m sitting at my adorable checkered table, minding my business, drinking my basil mimosa, and under the glass I see this photograph. All these smiling faces you see before you. And a burnt building, so that’s weird. So I slide the photo out from under the table glass and I see this bit about fire and purification and Cherry Mill and now I’m guessing it’s nothing good, and it’s such small news, really, just one life out of so many, that I can’t even figure it out on my phone at first, I have to go digging in the archives to find the controversy from the ’90s, and it’s only because someone went digging then that the rest of what I was looking for was even there to be found, and all that’s with so much evidence that a whole town knew what happened and a year after it did, the motherfuckers took a group photo and signed their names. That’s how easy it is to think you’re a person having brunch and realize you’re actually a hunting trophy. So, I will wait if you want me to, but come back when you need me, because like it or not we are always all we got.”
“Do you think I don’t know by now how to be careful?” I asked.
“You know how to be careful and you know how to do the right thing, but you’ve never known how to do both,” Genevieve said.
“Neither have you,” I said. “Both may be undoable.”
“Strength in numbers,” said Genevieve.
I was searching for the way to most emphatically tell her that this was not an argument, that our discussion had in fact concluded, when I heard a commotion outside and looked out the window, where Nick was gesturing frantically. I waved him in. He had gone into a used bookstore at the end of the block and when he reemerged there was a commotion at the end of the block. He said we needed to see it. While he was explaining, Susan at the counter’s cell phone dinged; she propped up a wooden be right back sign near the register and walked outside to see what was happening. We followed her, back toward the candy shop and the parking lot where we’d left Nick’s car. The sun had picked up and I felt pinned by it even before I saw what everyone was looking at.
Where not an hour earlier there had been an unmolested sign, there was now an enormous red X covering it in spray paint, with we will erase you written and underscored beside it. A smaller, stylized tag beneath the graffiti read white justice in jagged capital letters. To the right of the lettering was a nearly person-size rendering of the Free Americans’ elk symbol, in the same virulent red. The display covered most of the side of the store.
The woman we’d met at the candy store earlier was at the front of the small crowd, shaking her head and smoking a cigarette. Up close I could see her name tag read kim. Susan joined her and asked for a light.
“Stupid kid,” Susan said, after her first drag.
“You know who did this?” I asked.
“I mean, I didn’t see it, I was inside same as you, but I wouldn’t need three guesses,” said Susan. “Though he’s not really a kid anymore—twenty-seven, but for all the sense he’s got, he’s been sixteen for over a decade now, my mother would say. You heard of Free Americans?”
“Unfortunately.”
“Well, there’s less for them to do around here than when they first got started up. So they got worked up about the sign when it went up and had a protest outside of the store. Seven of them, marching around in a circle looking stupid. A few years back they had enough of them to look impressive, but like I said, it’s died down. I haven’t heard much about it since, but outside of them, well, some people didn’t like it, but no one else was really angry enough to do this. The guy who calls himself in charge of the group here is my idiot nephew. His real name is Chase.”
“Your nephew?”
“Don’t hold it against me. I didn’t raise him.”
“But Ella Mae was his grandmother? Yours too?”
“She was, may she rest in peace. I didn’t know about that picture or anything with the store until the first sign went up, which wasn’t until after she died, so I don’t know what to make of it. To me, she was kind. He was young when she died, and I don’t think she has anything to do with whatever Chase is up to. The family reputation has never really been his calling. Kind of killed that the first time he went to juvie. His dad—my uncle—died when he was a kid and hadn’t been around too much before that, and his mom—well, she does the best she can. Both of them have a lot of ideas about politics that we don’t talk much about to avoid the arguing. We’ve been thinking for a while he might outgrow it. But doesn’t look like he’s planning on it.”