“We’re running out of time,” Hawk said, looking through the shattered pane into the fields.
The force of the branch had also knocked pictures from the walls, shattering their frames.
Just then the wind picked up and blew through the empty pane. The light bulb in the ceiling lamp popped and burst, and then the lamp came crashing down as if the cord had been cut, hitting Gretchen on the back, just missing her head. She fell to the ground, gasping and wincing in pain.
On the ground next to her were pictures that had come loose from the shattered frames. Blood was trickling down her face.
First the bite, then the gouge out of her shoulder, then the stings, the scratch on her face. And now this. If certain people were marked for death on this anniversary, Gretchen thought, it was beginning to look like she was one of them.
She crouched there shivering, Simon at her side putting pressure on the wound. Though her vision was blurred she was certain she saw something new among the wreckage. A beautiful bucolic landscape shot, the forest and church steeple visible in the distance. She reached out for it and then held it.
“I didn’t notice this before,” she said; she felt dizzy, and steeled herself against losing consciousness.
“It’s a photograph my mother got from the Chautauqua County Historical Society,” Hawk said. “They had a sale of all their damaged or duplicated photos.”
Gretchen stared at it, transfixed. The land was so lovely; even though the photograph was black-and-white, it gave off a lush sense of everything being untouched; no roads, the tall forest, the plain white steeple and the high grass and wildflowers.
“Let me help you up,” Simon said. But she pushed him away. Turned the photograph over in her hands. On the back there was a square brittle piece of cardboard that seemed to be stuck or glued there.
Gretchen gently peeled the square back from the photo, careful not to damage it. Fortunately it was only the edges that were adhered, and the center seemed untouched. And the humidity had made it easier to peel them apart. She turned it over, then peered at a horrible scene.
It was like something Esther had taken in Vietnam.
Hope squinted at the photograph, and then crouched down beside her.
In the center of the frame were two little girls maybe six years old wearing matching white dresses, looking up at a man dressed in a dark suit. He was holding a bottle of liquor over their heads—in the other hand a lit candle—which had already set light to one of the girls’ hair and dress, flames partly engulfing her.
“It’s Rebecca,” Gretchen whispered.
“And Celia,” Hope said, staring transfixed at the photograph, her eyes bright with tears. “They were used to start the fire. He burned them first.”
Beneath the picture in looping cursive handwriting were the words First Communion.
Behind this picture were two more, which came apart in brittle pieces. One in which the girls were being doused in alcohol, their faces looking simply confused. One in which both girls’ mouths were open in a horrified scream, and another where they were entirely engulfed in flame—their hands outstretched, reaching for help that would never come.
1864
He was changing. I knew once Adam was born. He would stay late with the hunting club, come back smelling of liquor and campfires. He thought I didn’t suspect. Like I didn’t know when a cross had been burned. Under James’s influence he’d denounced the ways of his friends. But with James off fighting he’d begun going to meetings again, new meetings he said. Just for business. Why, the whole town’s there, it’s not so bad. How could he keep doing business if he wasn’t in the club? Why should we be ashamed of our race? he’d asked. And then I knew he was too far gone. There was a new group, up from the South, like the White Christian Patriots, called the Ku Klux Klan. I knew he was going to their meetings. I knew he had turned.
I’d heard them talking, his friends from the “hunt club,”—people saying there was so much to be gained from “cleansing the town.” It made me sick. Then there was the lynching all but advertised in the newspaper—the war was coming to an end but a new kind of war felt like it was beginning. Three times in a row in the past months, people we were bringing to safety were captured on the road, hung, killed—strung up in the trees—and that had never happened before. Someone was telling those cowards where we’d be, what route we’d take.
He was like two different people. Our church had always been like an island in a sea of brutality. But just a week before, drunk after a “meeting,” he’d said the most horrible thing: Can’t you keep that little goddamn black ragamuffin away from our daughter? and I said to him: I married the wrong brother.