The Story of the Murder of Josephine Grove as I Imagine It

It is the middle of the night. William and Josephine are still awake, maybe lying in their tent, maybe talking, probably fighting—but they are not visible to the rest of the camp should people happen to be awake.

Georgianna Grove who is four years old is sleeping in the tent with the camp nurse far away from her parents and close to the water.

Josephine is in a vicious humor because William is in love with Clementine, who is beautiful and strong. Contrary to Josephine, who is overweight and unhappy.

I should mention that next to William’s sleeping bag is a rope used to anchor the canoes.

William is lying in his sleeping bag on his back, his arm like a pillow under his head. He is thinking about his father standing in the street in his village in front of his house in a line with other neighbors waiting to be assassinated.

I have seen photographs of Jews lined up, their backs to the firing squad, their arms over their heads in brave surrender.

Josephine is lying in her sleeping bag, her hands folded on her stomach, and she is thinking about the beautiful Clementine kissing William on the lips, the way I used to watch my father kiss my mother after they danced in the dining room in Chicago.

“William,” she says, interrupting his misery. “You are a disgusting man.”

William keeps his eyes tight shut and does not respond.

“I wish you were dead,” she says. “I want to be the one to shoot you in the head and watch as your brain splashes out all over the sleeping bag.”

William opens his eyes just in case she suddenly has access to a rifle.

“You smell of skunk,” she says.

William sits up in his sleeping bag ready to spring in case she attacks.

“I want to shoot Clementine McCrary and watch her bleed though her shirt, writhing in agony on the ground.”

That is what Josephine says.

William’s hands are in a fist, his body tight-wired for action.

“Jew,” she says.

William leaps up and without thinking, he grabs the thick rope beside his sleeping bag, wraps it around Josephine’s neck and holds it tight until she is dead.

He is tired, but he cannot get any sleep with his dead wife lying next to him, so he picks her up and carries her to the edge of the forest, where he drops her in the root bed of a pine tree. She is discovered the following morning by James Willow, the head counselor.

Walking back to his tent in the middle of the dark night, he is not sorry about Josephine. He knows that he will admit to killing her because he is an honorable man. He imagines that in Lithuania, his father, Dr. Geringas, has been assassinated.

What breaks his heart is Georgianna. His daughter. His only child.

THIS IS THE story I imagine to have happened at Missing Lake, June 17, 1941.

It is the story I will tell when I go back to Alice Deal Junior High in September.

Georgie will not be upset that I tell this story.

She believes the imagination is the truth.

BEFORE WE LEAVE Camp Minnie HaHa, I plan to give this journal to Roosevelt McCrary. I’ll ask him to bury it at the campsite at Missing Lake. He’ll need to bury it deep so the archeologists digging hundreds, maybe thousands of years from now (probably a huge city will have developed on the banks of the Bone River), will discover the journal and put it in a glass case at the Smithsonian Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., with a sign under the glass which reads:

The Journal of Thomas Davies, grandson of Georgianna Grove, in the year 2008 A.D.