The Office of Historical Corrections(53)
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The Robinsons, Josiah Wynslow’s nearest living descendants, lived in a modest split-level ranch across from a strip mall between Racine and Kenosha. Though the drive was over an hour, I was still an hour early, so I waited in my car in the strip mall parking lot, contemplating the dollar store’s window display. I had done my best to downplay that the morning had made me afraid, but now the fear had settled. The whole drive down I was worried that someone was following me, and that if someone was following me, I wouldn’t know what to look for, wouldn’t count on help to come if I asked for it. Now that I felt certain I was alone, the tension broke into quiet panic, a general anxiety replacing the specific. The bright yellow dollar sign in the store’s window appeared to be floating toward me the longer I stared at it, and I looked back and forth between it and the scrolling red marquee of the check-cashing place next door, as if what I was really looking for would present itself in the juxtaposition, like in one of those 3-D images where you had to find the angle that would reveal a picture that made sense.
I felt unmoored, and so I called the person who made me feel most grounded. When Daniel didn’t pick up, I texted him to say that I was here safely and sorry I’d ruined his birthday and that I was a little shaken up because the local white supremacist fuckboys apparently knew I was in town. I sent him a picture of the graffiti. My phone didn’t ding. I pushed down the seat and lay in the car, waiting to cry but feeling mostly depleted.
At two, I composed myself and left the car to ring the bell at Ms. Adelaide Robinson-formerly-Wynslow’s house. A teenage boy answered the door. He had wide bright eyes and a soft smile. He was wearing a wave cap and a jersey and a brand of jeans and sneakers I hadn’t seen in the wild since the late nineties. I had the disorienting sense I had around teenagers lately, that because they looked like they had walked out of the malls of my childhood, they were speaking to me from the past. He introduced himself as Anthony and led me to the living room, where I felt my breath calm. It looked like a living room I had been in before. The furniture was floral and leather, all of it covered in knit slipcovers; the walls were studded with every child in the family’s school pictures, on one side an old family portrait, and on the other side, framed portraits of this household’s trifecta of Black saviors, Jesus, MLK, and Barack Obama. On the table there was a tin of butter cookies, open to show it still had cookies in it and had not yet been turned into a sewing kit. A box fan sat in an open window and they had left me the seat directly in its path. Anthony introduced me to his mother, June, and his grandmother Ms. Adelaide. His father lived there too, but was still at work, driving a city bus. June was Ms. Adelaide’s youngest, in her forties, and already in salmon-pink scrubs for her shift as an orderly that started in a few hours. Her hair was tucked back, but her face was radiant, her eye makeup impeccable, and her lipstick a darker shade of pink that picked up on the color of the scrubs and, like a photo filter, turned them from sickly to elegant. Ms. Adelaide was nearly eighty, I knew from her birthdate, but she was sprightly, quite dressed up for a weekday afternoon, which I briefly flattered myself by thinking might be on my account. I worried that she’d gone through too much trouble for me, until she confessed she was hoping Anthony would run her to the casino after we were done, a request it seemed his initial refusal would do little to impede. June offered me a glass of iced tea and went to the kitchen to get it for me even though I told her she didn’t need to. I made small talk until June returned with the glass, cold but already gathering condensation. She sat in one of the wooden chairs and scooted it forward until she was almost between me and her mother, not hostile, but protective.
“Grandpa Joe’s been dead going on twenty years now,” June said. “So if the law’s looking for him you can tell them they’re too slow.”
I laughed. “I’m not here about anything he did wrong. I am here about when he died.”
“I know I don’t look it,” said Ms. Adelaide. “But I was born in 1947 and my daddy was a Josiah Wynslow who got run out of Wisconsin before he was my daddy, so he certainly couldn’t have died there, could he now? So, now that we got that covered, is someone finally about to do something about that crazy white boy before he kills somebody?”
“What boy?” I asked.
“First I even heard about any sign or any Cherry Mill was a fool sending me evil letters. Called me everything but a child of God and said he would not let us defile his family name. I hadn’t the slightest what he was on about until Anthony talked to that other man. Meantime, June took one of the letters to the police, but, you know police. Lord knows what his mama calls him, but the boy calls himself White Justice.”
“I believe his mama calls him Chase,” I said. “I haven’t met him and hope not to, but we think he spray-painted the memorial sign this morning. How long has he been bothering you?”
June explained that he’d been sending them threatening letters for months. I asked to see them, and she sent Anthony to fetch them, and the family records while he was at it. I looked at the letters first, wanting to get the ugly part out of the way. They were vile, but written in perfect penmanship. It frightened me how neat they were—the kind of letters that for all their crazy had clearly been drafted first, the kind of neat readable letters a person wrote if he expected there to be a reason for them to be public someday. It seemed characteristic of the present that everyone, even the worst of us, was practicing being famous. I had no jurisdiction, and no reason to believe the local police would care if the director of the institute called them, but I photographed them anyway, for Genevieve if for no one else, and told June and Ms. Adelaide I wasn’t sure if it would help any but I would have my boss follow up.