On Christmas Day 1929, tobacco farmer Charlie Lawson took his wife and seven children into town for new clothes and a rare family portrait. Hours later, six of those kids and their mother were dead on the farm, posed like they were already in coffins, and Charlie’s body was found in the woods with a shotgun and a half-written note.

This is the story of a holiday that curdled into a massacre, and a family portrait that feels more like a premonition than a memory.