A Fireproof Home for the Bride (2 page)

Emmy stayed in her crouch next to the doe’s head as Ambrose unrolled a length of leather he’d pulled from the haversack, revealing an assortment of knives and a small saw. He anchored his knees between the upended hind legs of the doe, then picked up the largest knife, slipped it from its leather sheath, and pointed the serrated tip into the lowest part of the doe’s belly. “Give me your hand,” he said, and Emmy complied, feeling the bumpy calluses that dotted his palm scrape across her knuckles as they grasped the smooth white handle of the heavy knife. He drew her hand quickly and with precision up the tender front of the animal until the blade reached the rib cage, at which point Ambrose gripped her hand tightly enough to make her wince as he forced the knife through the hard sternum. The cracking sound their effort produced caused Emmy to shift her eyes elsewhere, taking in the rising steam from the gaping incision, the milky sack of odd-shaped organs pressing out of the animal and jiggling with the pull of Ambrose’s intent. Where is all the blood? Emmy wondered. Where is proof that a living thing is now dead? She slouched back onto her heels as he released her and reached into the cavity, drawing into the daylight a bright red misshapen ball still connected to the interior of the animal by snarly cords. Emmy flinched slightly as she imagined the heart beating in his large bloodstained hand; saw the tear of metal into flesh where he pressed his thumb and glanced at her with more reserved approval. He handed it to her, richly warm with the last unpumped, unspilled fluid. Here was the evidence she had sought, the warrant for her crime. Ambrose cut free the veins and arteries, and her hand jolted away from the deer, sending the bloody orb into the air.

“Pay attention,” he said, sticking a curved knife into the cavity with a practiced twist.

This is not me, she told herself as the resolve to be like them abandoned her and she stood up. A dozen yards away in the trees something moved. The girl stumbled blindly toward the sound, feeling a burning need to relieve herself of the coffee and all else it had washed down. So much of her life had been like this: slow until it was fast, right until it was wrong. She would cautiously pad forward on kitten feet only to find the milk pail overturned and empty. This is how it felt—the anticipation of joy shifted in a moment to regret. As she neared the edge of the field, a resettled brace of pheasants flushed at her feet and caught her up in their swirling ascent. She spun away from the towering line of elms and waved her hands above her head, shooing the lifted birds in an empathetic panic, tired of the world proving her place was not where she thought it to be.

“Stop playing,” he shouted, the deer now draped over his shoulders, the entrails mounded next to the darkened patch of ground where the animal had bled out. Ambrose held two twiggy legs in each hand, and his arms were speckled a rusty red up to the elbows, where he’d pushed his jacket sleeves out of the way. “We need to get her skinned before church.”

“Of course,” Emmy whispered, her voice an empty honeycomb, brittle in the cooling wind. She would be more cautious, she resolved as she watched his deer-slung figure move away, more patient and careful. She followed him slowly, gathering her coat, the guns, and the haversack as she went, hoping that this thing now done—this deer now dead—would be the last by her own hand.

Part I

Disinheritance

January 1958

One

Faith Alone

The day after her eighteenth birthday, Emmaline Nelson sat with her spine hovering a good two inches away from the straight, cold back of an oaken pew, her feet planted next to each other on the pine floor, knees pressed together as she’d been taught. Her wool serge skirt should have been cozy, but the nylon slip her mother had insisted she wear crackled like electric ice against her dark stockings from its contact with the charged January air. Her coat hung cold and useless out in the makeshift foyer, where her mother had made her leave it, even though the inside of the church was not much warmer than the air outdoors.

Emmy worked hard at achieving what she hoped would look like a good Christian demeanor—eyes focused on the front of the church, Bible open to the day’s scripture reading on her lap, hands folded on the Good Book, mouth slightly open and whispering along with the Nicene Creed. She knew these words so well she no longer had to parse their meaning. She knew the service so well that she barely kept her thoughts on God. No, Emmy’s mind was quite understandably drawn over her right shoulder, pondering instead the man who would soon officially become her betrothed.

The prayer over, Emmy cocked her head to the left and turned it just enough to steal a glance of Ambrose Brann. She could feel his steady gaze warm on her neck, even as the congregation stood to sing another hymn. It seemed as though Ambrose had always been there, somewhere, in and out of her memories of youth. They had played together when she was small, endless indulgent games of hide-and-seek at one farm or the other on Sunday afternoons while the grown-ups visited over coffee and her sister toyed with dolls on a flannel blanket stretched out in the grassy sunshine. At times inseparable, Emmy and Ambrose had walked through muddy spring-dense fields of ankle-deep black soil in order to place a penny on the railroad track down at the end of the farm’s quarter section, returning later in the day to find the bright copper disc pressed flat and smooth. He had taught her how to hunt, to clean a gun, to shave a piece of soft wood into a palm-sized cross, and after Grandfather Nelson died when she was ten, Ambrose’s economy of words had made her feel her loss less keenly, even though the few things he did share revealed little of his heart.

Ambrose was a good deal older—nearly ten years—and yet he never seemed to mind his young companion, always extending to Emmy a level of familial love that promised to keep her comfortable the rest of her life. She tried to imagine what the weight of his silence might feel like in the stretch of time about to be set before them, and an unexpected feeling rose against it, a slight hiccup of concern.

The Brann family’s status was considered a significant step up from her family, with Delmar Brann’s vast acreage of sugar beet fields and hundred head of fine beef cattle comprising the largest farm in the township. Unlike her Norwegian-born grandfather, Mr. Brann was second-generation American—a fact he frequently worked into conversation. Still, the two men had been the kind of friends who were more often seen together than apart, and it had been Grandfather Nelson’s dying wish for Emmy to marry Ambrose. She could learn to live in a quiet house, she supposed, or fill it with the noise of children by and by.

Emmy waited to join in the singing a moment too long and felt a quick, sharp pinch delivered with dogged expertise to her upper left arm by her mother. As Emmy slowly stood, she took quiet note of the increase of her stature, for she recently had cleared the brim of her mother’s hat by a solid three inches. Emmy’s life up to now had been constrained by her mother’s views, her instructions, her limits. Yet somehow, a strange miracle had happened in September: Her father moved them from a shack on her grandmother’s farm near the sleepy town of Glyndon and into a small, tidy house in the much bigger city of Moorhead, Minnesota, across the Red River and in the shadow of Fargo, North Dakota. Emmy had entered her final year of high school surrounded by the kinds of ideas and knowledge that unfolded a crumpled sheet of possibility inside of her, and Karin’s influence had started to pull away from Emmy like warm taffy. The move had revealed tiny windows that were now opening onto new opportunities.

On Emmy’s right the bright singing of her sister, Birdie, cut through Emmy’s preoccupations. Birdie had burst into the Nelson household three years after Emmy, a gift of uncomplicated grace and laughter among a previously glum trio. Sometimes Emmy wondered what would have become of them if Birdie hadn’t been born. Emmy’s own arrival had been less auspicious, coming as it had three months after their brother, Daniel, had died. With so much grief in such a small house how could anyone joyfully greet a red-faced, colicky girl? Instead, Emmy had slept in her grandmother’s bed, fed from a bottle and carried around on the older woman’s hip until Emmy was big enough to walk. When Karin had come home with Birdie, three-year-old Emmy eagerly accepted the role of mother’s helper, happy to be useful and wanted. She couldn’t remember much from those early years, and besides, she had quickly learned to appreciate the feeling of being needed more than loved. Now that she was eighteen, Emmy was ever more mindful of what kind of wife and mother she wanted to be, itching to cook meals the way she preferred, keep her own house, and create for her children a pocket of happiness that no one would fill with the pebbles of grim self-sacrifice. Marriage to Ambrose was not merely a promise to be fulfilled, it also seemed the only way forward, a destination she knew as well as any other, a place she could feel finally at home.

Once the blessing was given, Karin quickly slipped past Emmy’s father in order to join the women serving coffee in the basement, and gave him a look that suggested he keep a close eye on the girls. Christian frequently deferred to Karin, even after their own small farm had failed when Emmy was ten, and they’d had no choice but to move into a three-room shack on Grandfather Nelson’s farm. It had once been used by the
betabeleros
who took the trains north every spring to plant sugar beets and back down south to the Texas border once the harvest was completed late in the fall. The interior walls of the outhouse ten feet behind the shack were still papered in Mexican movie magazines featuring Rita Hayworth’s toothy smile.

As much as she had wondered why they couldn’t just live in the farmhouse with her grandmother, Emmy knew that there was some strength behind Christian’s quiet pride. Rather than replace his newly dead father as head of the farm, Christian took a mechanic’s job at the sugar factory. It took seven long years of taxing work, but Emmy could tell that Christian was never happier than when he unloaded their possessions into the small house in Moorhead that fall. Even so, they all continued to help Grandmother Nelson maintain what little was left of her enterprise: a handful of milking cows, a half-blind hunting dog, a dozen laying hens, and an old inedible hog named Sausage. Lida wouldn’t hear of selling one feather of the place, and it had been made plain to Emmy that the farm would be given to her and Ambrose, finally joining the two families as Grandfather Nelson had desired.

Task-driven blood in her veins, Karin Nelson looped her arm through Grandmother Nelson’s, helping the much older woman out of the pew and down the short aisle toward the stairs. Lida Nelson was the center of the church’s universe. She had left her family early in order to create her own place in this loop of the river, and she took on the history of every parishioner as though it were her own. The Nelsons had all been baptized in this room, they would all be married here, and God willing at the end of their lives receive the blessing of rejoining their relatives in the attached graveyard of good Lutherans. Emmy touched the smooth pew, finding the slight dent where she’d cut her first tooth. She imagined what the low-shouldered country church must have looked like from the sky, set back from the meandering creek just far enough to stay high in flood years, close enough to hold picnic suppers in the late afternoon shade of early September harvests. Since she was very small, she’d been told stories about the great Norwegian settlers who had staked out this land and constructed a sod lean-to from the densely packed soil, slicked the sides with paint made from quicklime and chalk, and retained the services of a traveling preacher until they could afford a full-time recruit. Soon after, a suitable wooden building was constructed.

All that hard work was swept up into the spinning maw of a tornado in 1929, leaving only the organ untouched. Twice more, twisters had descended on them, the most recent coming late on a cloudless day the past June, when the deadliest cluster ever seen had ripped its way through a speckled swath of the county. One tremendous funnel that looked like an upside-down birthday cake had flattened areas of Fargo, while a group of three smaller spirals barely missed the little church as the storm made its devastating way into their valley, leaving pieces of houses from as far away as North Fargo scattered about the farm. Emmy had found a dollar bill, the wheel from a child’s wagon, and the cracked head of a porcelain doll, among other displaced treasures. Even now, in the dead of winter, when the sky turned black, a shiver of trepidation would come over Emmy, reminding her of how scared she had been as they huddled in the disused coal bin, listening to the howling winds encompass her grandmother’s home.

Emmy rubbed the gooseflesh from her arms as she stood between her father and Birdie in the crowded aisle. She gazed up at the stained-glass depiction of Christ ascendant, wondering what He thought of the poor souls from the Golden Ridge area of Fargo who had been killed in the storm. Had He opened his arms to the five Acevedo children taken alongside their mother? Did it make sense that God chose to leave behind the father and one son? She’d read their stories in the local paper, and had wept over the picture of the baby of the family being carried away from the wreckage by a fireman who had either lost or discarded his hat—his limp slant of bangs obscured the horror he must have felt—until her heart couldn’t stand any more of it.

The feel of her father’s hand on the middle of her back brought Emmy’s thoughts around to the sturdy brick church, and she let her questioning melt away, as she often had when the wall of God’s reason seemed too high for her to scale. Christian roped his other arm around Birdie’s shoulders and engaged Ambrose’s father as he moved out of his own pew.

“Good morning, Del,” her father said, offering his hand to the dark-suited gentleman. Delmar Brann, reed thin and yet a good head taller than Christian, took the slighter man’s hand in both of his as he grunted a greeting. An older, squatter, and unfamiliar man moved out of the pew, nodding solicitously at them as he slid past and broke into the line waiting to greet the pastor at the door. Emmy noticed her father’s look of irritated surprise before she cast her eyes to the floor, while Birdie used the moment to sprint out from under her father’s arm and rush off to join her friends at the back of the church. There was something in Mr. Brann’s stature that always made Emmy feel small, insignificant: almost breakable. He was closer in age to her grandfather than to Christian, and had been married late, but widowed early, to a woman rumored to have come from a wealthy Chicago family.