A Book of American Martyrs

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Edna Mae said that the women—and girls—did not want to be burdened with children because they did not want to give up their selfish lives and because (she thought) they did not actually understand that a baby is a living soul from God if nobody had explained to them.

  Also, they did not want a baby for reasons of having to work, or for reasons of money; or because they were not married, and did not want to raise a child alone; or because they were not married and were ashamed to be having a child alone, without a father, or a husband . . .

  “Wait,” Dawn protested. “How’d they have a baby if there wasn’t no father?”

  Now Edna Mae was deeply embarrassed. She’d been glancing away from Dawn toward the kitchen doorway as if expecting that someone would step through and interrupt the exchange.

  Dawn did not know exactly how mothers and fathers brought forth babies. From sly remarks made by her brother, and by other boys, she knew that there was something forbidden about it, that only grown-ups would know, and that it might be wrong to ask. But she had to ask her mother how a baby could be, if there was not a father. That did not make sense!

  But Edna Mae was flushing crimson, and could not speak.

  Dawn demanded, “Then why wouldn’t Jesus stop them?”

  Edna Mae glanced again wincingly toward the doorway. But no one had appeared.

  Reluctantly she said, “Well—Jesus stops some of them. The bad women. Jesus punishes them. After getting rid of their babies they are never right in their minds again, can’t have babies when they want to have babies, and are ninety percent more likely than other women to—to die of . . .”

  “What, Mawmaw? Die of—what?”

  Edna Mae could not bring herself to murmur the awful words aloud but leaned down, to whisper in the rapt child’s ear what sounded to Dawn like breath cancer, and cancer of the worm.

  YEARS LATER after Dawn’s father had been arrested and taken from them and no one in Muskegee Falls was talking of anything else than what Luther Dunphy had done in the driveway of the Broome County Women’s Center on an ordinary weekday morning Dawn would ask her mother again why Jesus let such things happen and Edna Mae would say that that was why their father had acted as he had: to stop innocent babies from being killed.

  “There was no one else to act for Jesus. Only your father.” Edna Mae paused as if searching for more words then said in a breathless exhalation: “‘This—this day you shall be with me in Paradise.’”

  What did these words mean? Did Edna Mae even know? They had burst from her like something long pent-up.

  She was not the young Mawmaw of just a few years before but a worn and anxious woman with tremors in both eyelids and in both hands. Because she could not sleep at night otherwise Dr. Hills prescribed for her a certain kind of pill—Oxie-con-tin—that made her sleepy much of the time and, when she was not sleepy, agitated and short-tempered. It would seem to Dawn that, when her daddy shot the two baby killer men in the driveway across town, he had somehow shot Mawmaw too; you would hear of such accidents when men were hunting out in the fields, how a spray of bird shot would (somehow) strike another hunter though (the shooter would claim) he had not aimed anywhere near. Accounts afterward were always vehement—such misfirings were accidental. No one was to blame for they were accidental. And now often in the midst of talking, even in the midst of eating a meal the older children had prepared, their distracted mother might cease talking and slip into a light doze, embarrassing to behold, her eyelids shutting, and her mouth easing open like a fish’s mouth agape.

  But at this time, when the effect of the powerful pill seemed to have worn off, and an agitation of the nerves had not yet set in, Edna Mae spoke to her older daughter with passion. Her eyes were clear and alert and focused upon Dawn’s face in a way so fierce that Dawn felt pride in Mawmaw, that she had not felt in some time. And Mawmaw was smiling in a kind of triumph. Dawn had no actual idea what Mawmaw’s words meant but she recognized them from the Bible, the words of Jesus on the cross crying out to His Father in heaven, or from one of Reverend Dennis’s sermons, and understood that the meaning was good news, rejoicing and not lamentation.

  This day you shall be with me in Paradise.

  THE CHRISTIAN GIRL

  Trust Jesus. If Jesus abides in your heart, you can do no evil. And no evil will be done unto you.”

  This was told to her. Visiting Daddy in the detention facility and the chaplain there who was a retired Baptist minister and a former missionary in the dark continent of Africa (he said proudly) said these words which were familiar to her though she could not have recollected them herself—she had not a “way with words” as others did. But she understood the chaplain, and understood by the quiet in her daddy’s face, that was a tired face, yet a calm face, a face that had passed beyond the fretfulness of ordinary people, this was the bond between them, and among all of the Dunphys, that would abide forever.

  (BUT—WAS IT TRUE? When she was alone, and sad-feeling, she could not remember the consoling words of the adults. Could she trust Jesus?)

  SHE TOLD NO ONE, she’d begun to be afraid. For there was doubt in her heart, that she could trust Jesus.

  It was like on TV, she’d used to see at a neighbor girl’s house (for Mawmaw and Daddy did not allow the small-screen TV in their house to be turned to such programs), you heard people speaking in a normal-seeming way but then came music, scary music, that the TV people did not seem to hear, that should have warned them that something was wrong, and something very bad would happen in another few minutes. So scary you could hardly bear it, but wanted to press your hands over your eyes.

  For consider: Jesus had urged her daddy to shoot the baby killers with his shotgun but now (it seemed) Jesus had abandoned Daddy in the Broome County Men’s Detention Center where they could visit him for just one hour once a week on Saturdays. And if something went wrong and the facility was “in lockdown” they could not visit Daddy even then but were turned away at the front entrance by smirking guards.

  Just one visit to the ugly detention facility on a hill above the Mad River looking like one of the old shut-down textile mills and you understood that Jesus was nowhere near such a crummy place! Only just prisoners, guards who couldn’t get decent jobs elsewhere, and sad-faced visitors thrown together as in a smelly anteroom of Hell.

  Crummy was a new word Luke used often in this new place where they’d had to come to live. What Luke said Dawn was likely to pick up like those little thistle thorns that catch on your clothes, then catch everywhere.

  Shitty was another word. But it was a bad word.

  The Dunphy children pleaded with their mother: when was Daddy going to come back to live with them?

  Except not Luke. Luke who was the oldest did not plead with Edna Mae or with anyone. In silence Luke listened to whatever faltering words their distraught mother said to placate them but the expression on Luke’s face of profound sadness and rage suggested that he did not believe a word poor Mawmaw said.

  “Daddy will be home soon. There will be a trial—and then Daddy will come home.” Edna Mae paused, lightly panting. She smiled and her damp eyes moved in their sockets with halfhearted levity. “It’s a secret just now but Reverend Dennis is saying the Governor can ‘commute’ the sentence—if there is one. The Governor is a strong Christian believer in Right-to-Life.”

  More than once over a period of months and eventually over a year following their father’s arrest Edna Mae would utter these thrilled words in more or less the same way evoking the Governor of the State of Ohio; and Dawn would crease her young forehead into a deep-ribbed frown asking, “And then—what? Daddy will come home?”

  “Daddy will come home.”

  “But what does ‘commute’ mean, Mawmaw?”

  Commute. It was a strange word you would never hear except possibly on TV, or in a courtroom. Com-mute.

  “It means what it says! The Governor has the power to bring Daddy home even if there’s a trial. No matter how the trial turns
out.”

  Edna Mae was exasperated. The subject was closed.

  And yet, Edna Mae’s words hovered in the air. For there was something fearful in these words which the children did not want to consider—the thought that, in this new crowded place where they’d moved to stay with Edna Mae’s aunt Mary Kay Mack in her one-story shingleboard house on the outskirts of Mad River Junction, there was no room for a man of Daddy’s size.

  There was no room for a man at all.

  “WHY DO THEY DO THAT?”—it made her angry for some reason, possibly it was a joke, some stupid joke of boys, like when the boys at school waggled their tongues in their mouths in-out, in-out and burst into monkey laughter the girls did their best to ignore.

  “Do what?”

  “That.”

  Angrily she pointed overhead. In Mad River Junction in her aunt’s neighborhood on a stupid steep hill she stared upward at the offensive sight in the power lines: frayed old sneakers attached by their laces, flung over the power lines and dangling like disembodied feet.

  First days they’d moved here, on Depot Street, one two three she’d counted them, fucking stupid sneakers, four five times she counted them, craning her neck, grinning upward and her heart racing in fury.

  “Yah, it’s kind of weird. Stupid.”

  “Who does it?”

  “Who? How’d I know?”

  No one could explain. Dawn was exasperated, for the sneakers drew her eyes upward repeatedly and involuntarily and appeared to be perfectly good sneakers no filthier or more frayed than her own.

  Also she had reason to dislike Mad River Junction for the air smelled of creosote from the sprawl of a train yard at the foot of their aunt’s hill. And no one knew them here as they’d been known in Muskegee Falls before what had happened to their father so all that was said of them was Those new people, you know—Luther Dunphy’s family that had to move here.

  Or—That crazy guy who killed people in Muskegee Falls with a shotgun, they put away in the nuthouse. His wife and kids.

  SHE WAS THIRTEEN years old. And then she was fourteen.

  Made to transfer from the Muskegee Falls school to the Mad River school she’d been kept back a year. She had hated the Muskegee Falls school but after Mr. Barron had been shot (it was explained to her) there was such dislike of the Dunphys in Muskegee Falls they could not continue to live in their old house even though (it was not exactly explained to Dawn but she understood) the St. Paul Missionary Church and “donors” from Army of God were helping out financially while their father was not able to provide for his family.

  But Dawn had worse problems in the new town with “reading comprehension” and “writing skills” than she’d had back in Muskegee Falls. Arithmetic was now called math, a dizzying swirl of numerals that made her feel nauseated.

  It will be best for your daughter to repeat eighth grade. That way she will have a solid foundation to build upon, to advance.

  Luke too would’ve been made to take his year over, tenth grade in high school, but Luke was sixteen which was the legal age to quit school in Ohio and so shrugged and told them fuck it he was quitting, he’d had enough of crummy shitty school.

  Dawn did not want to quit school—not yet. She did not want to displease Daddy at such a time.

  And yet: fourteen years old and in eighth grade (which she’d already finished in Muskegee Falls) so she towered over the girls and was of a height with the taller boys.

  She’d begged the woman in the principal’s office with the prissy eyeglasses could she take the test again, thinking she would remember the answers the second time, but it did not work out that way for the second test was all different questions and her score was even lower than the first.

  “Eighth grade will not be so bad. You will be a little ahead of the other students, Dawn. Look at it that way!”

  She had grown inches in a single year. She stood five feet five inches tall. She weighed 130 pounds. All that worry about Daddy—her stomach was always empty-feeling, needing to be filled. She was solid-built as a young heifer with hard-muscled shoulders, arms, thighs, legs that wanted to lower her into a crouch, for better protection. Her feet were large as her brother Luke’s feet and held the grip of the earth firm as hooves.

  Luke and Dawn watched TV boxing when everyone else was in bed at Aunt Mary Kay’s house. In their aunt’s house Edna Mae did not have such control over the TV as she’d had in Muskegee Falls where, when their crummy old set no longer worked, Edna Mae hadn’t gotten it repaired for months and there was nothing of interest they were allowed to watch anyway.

  TV boxing came on late on one of the cable channels—10:00 P.M. to midnight. Her and Luke’s favorite boxers were Roy Jones Jr., Floyd Mayweather, Arturo Gatti, and Mike Tyson—who wasn’t heavyweight champion any longer but in film clips you saw him, Ironman Mike Tyson.

  They cheered the winning boxers. Sneered at the losers dripping blood onto the canvas.

  “I could box as good as some of these guys,” Dawn said. “I bet I could.”

  “Bet you could not.”

  “There’s girls boxing now. I could be one of them.”

  “Women’s boxing is such shit. People just like to see their titties jiggle and their asses. Don’t kid yourself.”

  Dawn’s face flamed. Her brother was like most of the boys she knew, he could say nasty things to shock and silence you, and to wound you deeply, without seeming to know what he did. Or, if he knew, not giving a damn.

  Seemed like, now their father was gone, and their mother sick or sleeping most of the time, there was no one to hear Luke say crude nasty things right inside the house where he’d never have dared, before. And Dawn was more and more saying bad words, like her tongue was too big for her mouth and could not be controlled.

  Shitty. Fuck. These words came into her head to suffuse her with shame and dismay, that Jesus would hear such nastiness.

  But Jesus understood. Jesus would not judge.

  Stubbornly she said to Luke: “Still, I bet I could. If I tried.”

  “Tried what?”

  “Tried to be a boxer.”

  Luke laughed, dismissively. He said:

  “A boxer uses his feet, to move around fast. A boxer uses his brains, to figure out what to do. You’d stand there like some half-ass and get hit in the face and go down in a heap—knockout.” Luke laughed meanly as if seeing this spectacle on TV right now.

  “If I was trained, I’d know better what to do. They use their ‘jab’—see?” Dawn jabbed with her left arm, fiercely.

  Just holding her arm in such a way, and “jabbing”—it did feel like an effort. Just in a second or two her arm felt heavy.

  Luke sneered: “Y’think Mawmaw would let you show yourself half-naked in some little T-shirt and shorts—in public? Or him?”

  All the time now it seemed, Luke referred to their father as him. Since the arrest when they’d taken him away to the detention it was rare for Luke to speak of Daddy, or my father.

  This was so disrespectful! It just made Dawn feel sad, when talk turned onto him.

  “Anyway,” Luke said, “it’s against what Jesus teaches. ‘Turn the other cheek.’”

  You’d have thought that Luke was joking. But Luke never joked about Jesus. He’d told Dawn that Reverend Dennis had taken him aside, after their father was arrested, and said now that their father was away—“for a while, we don’t know how long”—it was up to Luke to take his place, as best he could. It would be a time of trial for them all, not just the Dunphys but also their friends and neighbors and the church congregation, all put to the test. Terrible things would be said to them and of them but they must not weaken and lower themselves to the level of their enemies who hated Jesus.

  “‘Turn the other cheek is the hardest test a Christian must face’”—Luke spoke in a way strangulated with emotion and with fury, you could not have said which.

  JESUS WALKED BESIDE HER. Climbing the Depot Street hill she would realize he was with her, with a
little shock. For Jesus was so quiet.

  Alone and feeling sorry for herself like some sniveling silly girl and there came Jesus at her left side, for always it was her left side, where there was some cloudiness in the edge of her vision; and Jesus would nudge her left arm light as a curtain stirred in the breeze and say in his gentle voice Rejoice rejoice! and she would say Oh—why? and Jesus would say Because this day you shall be with me in paradise. In that instant all doubt and suspicion melted away and it was like long ago before her father was taken from them and before Daphne was taken from them and they’d never seen their baby sister again.

  These were words like music. These were words she’d heard at church on Good Friday. At the time of hearing she had not fully comprehended the words for anything at church gave her trouble to comprehend, any public utterances, meant for others to hear and so floating over her head. For somehow she found it difficult to concentrate when others were around, it was like riding in a car—someone was driving, but it was not you; so you didn’t pay attention to where you were going.

  Luke had his license and was driving the car. Not Edna Mae, not often now. And Luke was a skilled driver, maneuvering into a parking place, backing up the car in cautious little surges as if he’d been driving all his life.

  Now he’d quit school Luke had a job with the county. This meant outdoor work repairing and clearing roads, cleaning up storm debris, snow removal. If it wasn’t for tax deductions he’d have made very good money. Dawn was disappointed, her brother moved out of Aunt Mary Kay’s house as soon as he could.

  Because this day. With me in Paradise.

  Meaning that Dawn Dunphy was singled out for some special reason as Luther Dunphy had been singled out. The choice had been made and was out of her hands.

  Still she had to ask if her father would come back home soon?—and Jesus whispered to her Your father will come back home when there is a home for him. Pray.

  OUR FATHER who art in Heaven.

  She began to pray as soon as she woke in the morning. Falling asleep at night was stepping down stairs and each step a prayer until the bottom step just—vanished!