A Book of American Martyrs

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Yet, the abortion clinic was not shut for the day. Through the windows the enemy watched them covertly and at the door security guards stood.

  Did they fear fire? Firebombs? Gunfire? A deserved conflagration as of hellfire, did the murderers fear?

  In the street were TV camera crews, adding to the congestion and confusion.

  Edna Mae had been brought to the abortion clinic (somewhere in inner-city Cleveland) with others from the Mad River Junction church. This was her first prayer vigil and she would not tire easily. With Dawn, Anita, and Noah she knelt, prayed, chanted. All around them was an army of the faithful who would not tire easily. But soon the younger Dunphy children were dazed with exhaustion and Edna Mae had no choice but to allow them to nap on the walkway. Sulky-faced Dawn knelt beside Edna Mae with her picket sign over her shoulder at an insolent angle.

  In a whiny voice Dawn said they needed to go home. Anita and Noah needed to go home.

  Edna Mae said snappishly that they were not going home until the Day of Remembrance was over. Of the volunteers from Reverend Trucross’s church, she was not going to weaken and withdraw.

  “Momma, for God’s sake!”

  “Don’t you ‘for God’s sake.’ Watch your mouth.”

  “Maybe you don’t care but Anita and Noah are tired . . .”

  “The murdered babies are more than tired. The rest of us should be ashamed.”

  From time to time there were shouts, screams. It wasn’t clear what was happening but you might catch a glimpse of Cleveland police officers dragging volunteers away. Had they dared to approach the front entrance of the clinic? Had they tried to prevent a pregnant woman or girl from entering? So often had Dawn been told that police favored right-to-life picketers, it was disconcerting to see how roughly the officers treated them, how angrily they shouted at them—“Keep back! Keep the way clear!”

  At last, at dusk, the clinic was darkened.

  “MOMMA? Why aren’t we leaving?”

  “Why? Because we are not.”

  Dawn was baffled why Edna Mae, and some others, were not leaving the Cleveland County Planned Parenthood Women’s Surgical Clinic. The last of the clinic staff had quickly departed, to a chorus of cries—Murderers! Cowards!

  Edna Mae plucked at the children’s arms. Hurry! Reverend Trucross was leading them.

  Dawn was very tired. Dawn could not comprehend. Where were they going? The clinic was shut for the night. There was no one to pray over, or to harass or threaten. One TV camera crew remained in the street.

  Only a few volunteers remained—fewer than twenty. But these appeared to be members of Reverend Trucross’s church.

  They were led to the rear of the clinic. In the alley behind the clinic where there were trash cans and Dumpsters. It was dark here. Flashlights were lighted. Dawn could not see well. The younger children stumbled and whimpered. Edna Mae spoke in a voice trembling with excitement. One of the TV crew was speaking to Reverend Trucross. A pair of headlights flared in the alley and Dawn saw the sharply shadowed faces of volunteers. Mostly they were strangers but there was Edna Mae Dunphy among them. They had the look of persons who did not know their surroundings, where they were or why. Dawn did recognize Jacqueline, a heavyset girl with asthma, from Mad River Junction, of whom it was said that Jesus had “saved” her when her throat had closed up as a younger girl and she’d been unable to breathe. At the Pentecostal church it had happened, dozens of witnesses would testify that Jesus had “breathed” life into Jacqueline and restored her to the world.

  Edna Mae had acquired a flashlight. There was a smell in the alley of rotted fruit, rotted meat. Something sour and rancid. Dawn swallowed hard not wanting to be sick to her stomach. Edna Mae was reaching for her, gripping her hand with surprising strength. “Dawn! Come with me.”

  She would not come with her mother! She dug her heels into the ground.

  Yet still, somehow her mother pulled her. Who would have thought that Edna Mae Dunphy was so strong.

  In the alley behind the clinic amid the sickening stench they had overturned trash cans to poke in the debris. Boldly they had thrown open Dumpster lids to poke inside and to peer with flashlights.

  A cry went up—they had discovered a cache of cardboard boxes in one of the Dumpsters. The first was removed and seen to be secured tight by duct tape neatly wrapped. With a knife they cut the duct tape, and opened the box. Inside were five or six Ziploc bags and in each bag a small star-shaped thing . . . More cries went up, of anguish and jubilation.

  Edna Mae said fiercely, “You see? Babies—that didn’t get born as you did.”

  Though Edna Mae was very frightened too, Dawn could see. Her face was drawn and ashen and her mouth was set in a fixed half-smile like the smile of a mannequin. Her fingers were very cold.

  In the quivering flashlight beam the first of the babies was examined. For (as Reverend Trucross said) you had to determine if indeed the baby was truly dead.

  Though it was clear, the poor thing had never lived. A tiny kitten-sized creature with a disproportionately large head. Its limbs were stunted, and one of its arms was missing.

  Dawn tried to pull away from Edna Mae’s grip. Her heart was beating very fast. She was close to hyperventilating. Yet she could not look away from the tiny, dead baby being removed from the stained Ziploc bag.

  In a quavering voice Dawn said to Edna Mae, “The babies are dead. They don’t know what you’re doing for them.”

  (Where were Anita and Noah? Dawn hoped they were not near, and that someone was watching over them, for Edna Mae seemed to have forgotten them.)

  Edna Mae looked at Dawn with disgust. “You are so ignorant! It’s pathetic how ignorant you are. Why do we bury the dead?—because they are dead. But their souls are not dead. We are honoring the babies’ souls, not their poor, broken bodies. For shame, you.”

  “But—they never lived . . .”

  “Of course they lived! They were all alive, in their mothers’ wombs. As you were alive, before you were born.” Edna Mae spoke to Dawn with a savage sarcasm Dawn had never heard before in her mother though (it seemed to Dawn) Edna Mae was trembling too, with fear and dread.

  The volunteers exclaimed in shock, pity, horror. Dawn steeled herself against what she might see. Reverend Trucross was praying loudly.

  “Merciful God help us. God who taketh away the sins of the world help us in our rescue of these holy innocents . . .”

  In the beam of the flashlight another tiny creature was exposed. This one had been shaken out of the Ziploc bag, in which it had been stuck. It was larger than the first baby, fleshy, meat-colored, damp with blood. You could see the tiny curved legs, the tiny fingers and toes, the misshapen head. You could see the eyes that appeared large and were tight-shut. You could see the miniature pouting mouth, that had never cried.

  Other babies appeared to have been dismembered. Their overlarge heads were intact but their bodies had been broken into pieces.

  All lay very still on the ground. It seemed wrong to Dawn, that even a dead baby should lie on the ground.

  Though the eyes of the dead babies were shut tight, tight as slits, and the faces shriveled into grimaces, yet you did expect the eyes to open suddenly. You could not look away from those eyes.

  Dawn begged Edna Mae to let her go.

  “Let you go where? You will wait for me. We are all going home together in the morning.”

  In horror Dawn stood as Edna Mae and the others lifted boxes out of the Dumpsters with their bare hands. (At Home Depot, Dawn and her co-workers, unloading merchandise, all wore gloves. And if you did not wear gloves, your supervisor would hand a pair of gloves to you!) Some of the boxes were upside down, all were toppled as if they’d been dumped hastily.

  Carefully the boxes were placed in the rear of a minivan in the alley. The plan was to bury the aborted infants in a consecrated cemetery a few miles away with a proper Christian burial, Christian prayers.

  As Edna Mae insisted, Dawn helped stack the box
es. She could not breathe for the stench, and was feeling light-headed.

  (Where was Jesus? Had it been His plan all along, for Dawn to help bury the babies?)

  (He had not warned her beforehand. It had been a terrible shock!)

  (Since the hammer with the black-taped grip, that had struck the fleeing screaming boys with such power, Dawn had come to respect Jesus in another, unexpected way. Jesus was an ally but you could not take Jesus for granted as an ally, it was that simple.)

  In all, there were fourteen boxes secured with duct tape, retrieved from the Dumpsters. In each box, five or six Ziploc bags with aborted babies inside.

  Thrown away like garbage! God have mercy on the murderers.

  When it was time to drive to the cemetery for the burial Dawn begged Edna Mae again to let her go home and Edna Mae said sharply that she could not go home, how on earth would she get home, she had no idea how to get home from this unfamiliar city and it would be dangerous for a girl of her age to be alone on the streets here—“You are coming with us. You can take care of your sister and brother.”

  Dawn saw how the others were watching her. In her nylon jacket with dull-silver threads, dungaree-style jeans both badly stained from the Dumpster. She was the youngest person in the alley helping with the boxes.

  “Dawn, come. Get in here with us.”

  Edna Mae was pulling at her, urging her toward the minivan in which Anita and Noah were already huddled. But Dawn jerked her arm away.

  Suddenly, she was free of her mother’s grip. She was taller than Edna Mae, and stronger.

  As Edna Mae called after her Dawn fled past the glaring lights of the minivan. She saw the shining eyes of strangers on her and she saw Reverend Trucross and his wife Merri gaping at her—“Dawn? Where are you going, Dawn?” She’d come to hate it, the Trucrosses called her Dawn as if she was their daughter too. If there was one truth Jesus had been drumming into her it was—She was not anyone’s daughter.

  At the end of the alley was a TV minivan and camera crew whose lights blinded her as she ran toward them and past them shielding her face with her hands paying them no heed hearing Edna Mae calling after her in an angry pleading voice—“Dawn! Dawn! Come back here at once!”

  But Dawn swayed, stumbled, ran. And ran.

  IT WAS THE GREATEST SHOCK of my life I think! More even than the call telling us that my brother-in-law Luther Dunphy had shot two men in cold blood back in November 1999.

  Well, this was a call, too—our neighbor! Noreen, quick turn on your TV, June Gallagher said. Channel forty-nine.

  And there was this “prayer vigil” in a cemetery in Cleveland, at night, and people kneeling at a large grave site clasping their hands at their hearts and praying with bowed heads and one of them was Edna Mae—my sister!

  I just stared and stared. What was Edna Mae doing there, in a cemetery in Cleveland? And why was she being televised?

  It was explained that this was a particular area of a Baptist cemetery reserved for “aborted fetuses”—“preborn children of God”—as they were called. The fetuses had been discarded as medical waste from abortion clinics and had been “rescued” by members of a right-to-life organization for Christian burial in consecrated soil and my sister Edna Mae was one of these evidently. We had known that Edna Mae belonged to a new church in Mad River Junction where the family had had to move after the trial but none of us had heard anything about this—National Day of Remembrance for Preborn Infants Murdered by Abortion.

  Almost, I would not have recognized Edna Mae. She’d cut her hair, and she looked different than I remembered—a high-strung kind of person that you’d get a little shock from if you touched her. She wasn’t aware of the TV camera, or didn’t give any sign. With the others she was kneeling and praying and then they were setting some small objects into the grave while a minister said a blessing over them—looked like Ziploc bags, with something in them—the remains of fetuses!—but where the bags were, the screen was blurred like something underwater or in a dream—too raw to show on TV, I guess.

  There were close-ups of a few faces. But the camera didn’t linger on Edna Mae.

  The TV announcer was a blond woman sympathetic with the ceremony but also horrified, you could see. With her microphone in her hand she didn’t get too close to the grave site and she was keeping her eyes averted from what was inside it. In a breathless voice she spoke of the faithful coming hundreds of miles from churches “all over Ohio” to rescue the aborted fetuses from being “thrown away like trash.” The minister she interviewed was from a Pentecostal church in Mad River Junction—had to be Edna Mae’s church—a putty-faced man of about fifty with a strange sad smile and teary eyes squinting into the TV lights saying, “Ma’am, these are holy innocents of God like you and me except they were not allowed to be born as we were. That is the only difference between us!—we were born, and they were not. And they were not even granted Christian burials. And so some of us are stepping in where the mainstream Christian churches have failed in their ministry to protect the least of us.”

  The blond TV woman tried to think what to say to these words, that were uttered in a low, urgent voice like the voice of someone who has gripped your elbow to make you stop and hear. But all she could reply was—“Ohhh! Yes”—“Thank you, Reverend!”

  Already there were 103 aborted infants buried in this cemetery, the minister said. After tonight the number would near 150.

  The camera moved onto the gaping grave site again, though still you could not see clearly what was inside the Ziploc bags, only just pale-shadowy outlines. And there was my sister Edna Mae kneeling at the edge with her head bowed and her face shining tears.

  These were the strangest minutes in my life. Seeing my sister there on TV, as distant to me as if we’d never known each other. And I had to realize, Edna Mae and I had been out of contact for most of our adult lives. Since the death sentence of my brother-in-law, it had been hard to speak to any Dunphy. What do you say? What can you say? I had tried to keep in contact with Edna Mae but Edna Mae never answered the phone and never returned my calls. And when I called and got Dawn on the phone, Dawn would say she’d tell Edna Mae that I called, but Edna Mae never called back. And if I asked how they were Dawn would say, How’d you think we are?—in this sarcastic voice.

  Oh yes. We gave Edna Mae money. What we could afford.

  Later we heard how many thousands of dollars had come to Luther Dunphy’s defense fund, that was posted online. People would send money, cash, in envelopes, and only God knows how much of this money actually made its way to Luther Dunphy’s family.

  The scene in the cemetery ended with a close-up, of dirt being shoveled onto the grave. The somber words of the minister—“May God have mercy on our souls.” I felt an almost unbearable sadness. I thought—they are mad, to give themselves up to such futility. And I thought—they all know that it is futile, to provide a Christian burial for infants who have never lived. To pray to God for mercy, when it is God who has shown no mercy, for if God had shown mercy the infants would not have been murdered in their mothers’ wombs.

  They know that it is futile—but they act as they are bid to do by conscience. Like Luther Dunphy, too. Their faith has made monsters of them—and this too, they accept.

  By this point I could no longer make out Edna Mae, among the others. I had lost Edna Mae.

  LATER ON THAT TV CHANNEL there was a feature on right-to-life “martyrs” and these included Shaun Harris, Michael Griffin, Terence Mitchell, James Kopp and now Luther Dunphy—my brother-in-law!

  All of these men had shot and killed abortion providers at abortion clinics in the United States. Their brooding faces filled the TV screen if but fleetingly. A (male) voice-over spoke of them in reverent summary terms.

  At the time, all of the men had been convicted of murder and were incarcerated, three of them on Death Row. And at the time, all were still alive and their cases under appeal.

  DEATH WARRANT

  Do not sign a petit
ion for me. Do not even pray for me. I do not protest my death any more than my life, it is in the hands of God.

  THESE WERE LUTHER DUNPHY’S own words released to the media in the week of February 21, 2006, in reference to his execution, now scheduled for March 4, 2006.

  These words painstakingly he had composed. He had written these words syllable by syllable. On yellow lined paper given to him by his lawyer he had written these precisely chosen words gripping a pencil awkwardly in his fingers.

  He was not accustomed to writing. He had written virtually nothing in the years since he’d left school. He had not read a book in those years except (of course) the Holy Bible which he read every day of his life and always with a sense of breathless urgency to know what will happen next as a child is breathless to know how a story will end even if the end of a story is but the prelude to another story, and the end of that story the prelude to yet another; and even if everything is known beforehand, nothing is truly known. Luther could read again and again the first several books of the New Testament that filled him with wonder, hope, terror and joy and each time be surprised, that Jesus would be nailed to the cross as He was, having made no effort to escape His captors; that Jesus would say to the thief crucified beside Him—Truly I tell thee, today you will be with me in paradise; that Jesus would despair on the cross, and suffer and die as an ordinary man might suffer and die, and be laid in the tomb, and yet revive, and ascend to Heaven.

  A lightness passed through Luther’s brain, like heat lightning. He was struck blind, and found himself on the floor of his cell, having fallen without realizing, and yet there was joy in his heart.

  Truly I tell thee, today you will be with me in paradise.

  “LUTHER, ARE YOU SURE?”—his lawyer was not happy with the statement Luther had written.