A Book of American Martyrs

by Joyce Carol Oates

  She asked if she might have a telephone number for Reverend Dennis, or an email address, and was told these were “private.”

  (How did they know who she was? she wondered. Had word spread in Muskegee Falls, another “journalist” from out of town had arrived?)

  Several times it had been assured her: no one with the name of Dunphy lives here now.

  Circling the church, camera in hand. Grasses rustled dryly beneath her feet.

  Behind the church was a small graveyard. Grave markers amid tufts of spiky grass, wooden crosses and stone slabs and artificial flowers in clay pots. It came over her in a rush, Luther Dunphy must be buried here! But when she investigated the more recent graves she did not see the name Dunphy.

  She had learned that Luther Dunphy’s immediate family, wife and children, had moved to a small town not far away called Mad River Junction. But she had no plans to pursue them there. She had no wish to interfere with their lives. Even Dawn Dunphy, whom she particularly disliked, was of no interest to her any longer.

  Once, she and Darren had fantasized “revenge” upon the Dunphys. But that was long ago, when they’d been young adolescents, deranged by grief.

  “Hello? Hello? Hel-lo? No one here?”—her voice lifted lightly, sadly.

  No one was here. No one saw. No one turned into the gravel drive in a vehicle, incensed at her trespassing and demanding to know who she was.

  No sound but autumnal insects and the random cries of birds. Bat-like birds she supposed must be cliff swallows or swifts, swooping and diving near the river. On her way to the St. Paul Missionary Church of Jesus driving beside the river she’d seen the falls where a shimmering vapor arose, evaporating as it lifted.

  At the peak of the church roof was an aluminum cross not prominent or showy, about five feet in height.

  Daddy help me. I am failing, I am drowning. I don’t know what to do, to reach you.

  She turned off the camera. She had recorded all there was to record.

  THAT NIGHT IN her room in the Muskegee Falls Inn she dreamt of her father as she had not seen him in a long time. With urgency he’d been speaking to her, half-angrily as one might speak to a stubborn child who is in danger.

  “Honey, look: let me go.”

  And a voice meant to be her voice, yet not issued from her exactly: “Let you go, Daddy—where?”

  And he says, “Where the dead go, honey. Let me go there.”

  “But—I can’t do that. How can I do that?”

  And he says, “I wasn’t so special, honey. Except that I was your dad, I wasn’t so special.”

  Her heart begins to pound violently. She wakes, sick with horror, and she will not sleep for the rest of the night.

  KATECHAY ISLAND:

  OCTOBER 2011

  At the motel on Katechay Island they waited.

  “She’d said she was definitely coming.”

  “‘Definitely’? I don’t think so. She’d said she hoped to come.”

  “Hoped to come. Not to me, she didn’t say that.”

  Naomi spoke with more certainty than she felt. Almost, a kind of defiance.

  Darren had brought the urn containing their father’s ashes. On a table it stood like a primitive artifact generating its own dark shadow.

  In the confusion of her life at the time (in the early months of 2000) Jenna had not buried the urn in an Ann Arbor cemetery but had entrusted it to one of Gus’s oldest friends in Ann Arbor who’d kept it on a shelf in his book-lined study for years.

  There’d been some bitterness between them—between the brother and sister, and their mother.

  Naomi and Darren had wanted to scatter the ashes on Katechay Island, but Jenna had resisted. Why?—had not ever been clear.

  Much in those months after their father’s death had not been clear and even to recall that time now, or to attempt to recall it, made Naomi uneasy as if the earth were shifting beneath her.

  Naomi had assumed that the ashes had been buried in Ann Arbor. Darren had assumed that the ashes had been buried in Ann Arbor. It had been something of a shock to learn only just recently from Jenna that their father’s ashes had been with someone outside the family for more than a decade—“For safekeeping.”

  Safekeeping. What did this mean?

  They’d decided that it was not a good idea to look too closely into their mother’s motives. Still, this was a startling revelation. And it was a happy revelation, for now, at last, their father’s ashes could be scattered on Katechay Island as he’d wished.

  “You’d think if Mom was going to leave the urn with anyone, she’d have left it with Grandpa Voorhees . . .”

  “Or just given it to us, and we could have scattered the ashes . . .”

  A pang in the heart. Conjoined twins. Each felt the fleet tremor, the shiver of a fierce shared emotion, they might have imagined they’d outgrown by now.

  Our mother doesn’t love us. Our mother has abandoned us.

  But it was ridiculous, at their ages! To feel that old hurt, bewilderment. As Darren was lately saying they should have been more protective of her.

  There was a new maturity in Darren. The older brother who had his own life now, totally separate from hers.

  She missed him! She missed her young, furious self, that had long abided in her brother.

  It was something of a shock to realize that Darren was almost thirty years old. He’d given up comic strips and graphic novels (for the time being at least) and was in his second year of medical school at the University of Washington, in Seattle; he intended to specialize in public health, as Gus had done. He was living with a woman named Rachel, a speech therapist, whom Naomi had not (yet) met but with whom she’d spoken on the phone—“Naomi? Hello! I almost feel that I know you, Darren has told me so much about you.” Naomi had been struck dumb with wonder what this could possibly be, that her brother had told a stranger.

  Hey we were just your ordinary older brother, kid sister plotting mayhem against the enemy like freaks joined at the hip. Did we actually hurt anyone?—no. Just ourselves.

  And what a surprise, her first glimpse of Darren! Her brother had been awaiting her that noon at the Katechay Inn, where he’d arrived the previous evening; when Naomi turned her rented car into the parking lot there came at a run a tall smiling young man in khaki shorts, T-shirt, dark glasses and hiking shoes. A wide smile as if he’d been watching from a window.

  “Hey! Hiya.”

  Her first impression was—He is not wary, guarded. He has changed.

  He’d hugged her so hard she winced. The change in her brother was obvious—He is happy.

  Of course she’d recognized Darren at once. The changes in his appearance were superficial. His thick dark hair was threaded with premature gray like their father’s at a young age and was not so long and straggly as it had been. Nor was he quite so lanky-lean as he’d been, his face was fuller, on his jaws a short-trimmed beard that reminded Naomi of their father’s beard in one of its incarnations, in some long-ago time.

  Why does a man wear a beard? Naomi had once asked their father. Gus had laughed and said it was a more appropriate question why a man might shave off his beard. D’you think “clean-shaven” is natural, sweetie? Why would you think such a thing?

  She’d have liked to search through old family photos, to see if she could locate precisely the beard of their father’s that Darren’s beard emulated . . . It would have been gratifying to see Darren’s face, when he realized it.

  But she didn’t have the cache of photographs with her. Some were at the grandparents’ house in Birmingham, Michigan. Some were with her things in New York City, in the room that was “hers” in Madelena Kein’s apartment.

  (If Naomi was living anywhere, it was with her grandmother Madelena Kein. She’d lived with Madelena while attending film school at NYU and she’d returned to live with her after Madelena was diagnosed with cancer in the spring of 2010, in order to see Madelena through the ordeal of surgery and chemotherapy.)

>   Behind the Katechay Inn, a wooden deck overlooking a shallow marshy shore of Wild Fowl Bay at the southernmost tip of Saginaw Bay/Lake Huron. A sound of red-winged blackbirds, bullfrogs. In sunlit autumnal mud flats, remnants of monarch butterflies and dragonflies. So vividly Naomi remembered hiking in this area with her father, her eyes were constantly filling up with tears.

  (Did Darren notice? If he did, he was tactful and said nothing.)

  “If she’s late, she would call . . .”

  “Would she!”

  Brother, sister laughed together. Pleasure in this shared exasperation over their (eccentric, difficult) mother.

  Certainly there was a new ease between them, that they didn’t have to depend upon Jenna for what they’d come here to do: scatter their father’s ashes. This they could do without her as they’d been living their lives without her for more than a decade.

  Yet, they waited. As Darren said another fifteen minutes would not hurt.

  And when fifteen minutes passed, and no vehicle appeared on the roadway as far as they could see into the distance, Naomi said, “Well. Another five minutes won’t hurt.” She paused. (Should she make a joke of this? Was humor appropriate?) “Ten.”

  It was quite possible, Jenna’s airplane had arrived late at the Detroit airport. Or, Jenna had had trouble with the car rental. Though neither of these could explain why Jenna wasn’t calling them, unless—“Her phone might be dead. You know how distracted she can be.”

  They smiled remembering the house on Salt Hill Road. They’d hear the teakettle whistling manically in the kitchen—and there was their mother (whom they would not have dreamt of calling Jenna in those years) upstairs in the drafty room she called her office, typing on the keyboard of an outsized computer, oblivious to the shrieking below.

  So cold upstairs, sometimes she’d worn a jacket and gloves.

  “Fingerless gloves. Remember?”

  “‘Fingerless.’ That was weird.”

  “It was. It was weird.”

  “Where’d she get them?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “D’you think—children can’t grasp the concept of fingerless gloves . . .”

  “I remember us like ghost children . . .”

  “D’you think the house is haunted—by us?”

  Each was thinking—We can drive to see the house. Salt Hill Road. Huron Township. After scattering the ashes, we can drive there.

  But neither spoke. The prospect of revisiting the house in which their father had not died but in which news of his death had come was too awful.

  The smell of death had permeated the house. Some living thing had (literally) died in the basement of the house and the smell had never faded . . .

  “D’you remember, the flies in that terrible place?”

  “Flies? I’m not sure . . .”

  “Upstairs. Inside the walls. You must remember . . .”

  “I remember a smell.”

  They were silent, shuddering.

  In bright autumnal sunshine they were sitting on the wood-plank deck behind their (adjacent) rented rooms in the motel. (Adjacent rooms had been deliberate. Jenna had rented a room in another wing.) They were staring toward the road that curved through marshy mudflats in the direction of the bridge to the mainland on which Jenna would be sighted in her rented car, if Jenna were coming to join them.

  A few vehicles had appeared on the bridge, and driven past the motel. Minivans, recreational vehicles. No car with just a single passenger.

  Jenna was just slightly more than an hour late. Considering how far she’d had to come from Bennington, Vermont, this was not really late.

  And what of Melissa?—it was painful to speak of Melissa.

  Very regretful their young sister had been. In terse emails explaining I am so sorry. I am not able to take time from school so far away from Michigan. I will be thinking of you.

  It was like Melissa not to sign love, Melissa but only just Melissa.

  For a while it had seemed that Melissa would join them, to scatter their father’s ashes on Katechay Island. She had not exactly said yes, but she had not exactly said no.

  But it was a long distance to come, from California. This was so. She’d only just flown out the previous month to start the fall term at UC-Berkeley. And it may have been that the prospect of scattering their father’s ashes in this beautiful desolate place didn’t mean so much to Melissa as to the others.

  Initially it had seemed that Melissa would go to Bennington College for a liberal arts degree, and live with Jenna in the small town of Bennington, in a house now owned by Jenna and a companion. (Who was this companion? A man? The name was ambiguous—it sounded like Noy.) But then, suddenly it came about that Melissa had been accepted at the University of California at Berkeley with the intention of studying molecular biology.

  No one in the family had known that Melissa had even applied to Berkeley. Nor that she had an interest in molecular biology.

  As soon as she’d arrived at Berkeley (Naomi had learned) Melissa had joined the Asian Christian Students Association and was living in a residence comprised largely of Asian Christian students. Naomi had not known that such residences existed at Berkeley. She had not known that her sister was so emphatically religious. She had been surprised to learn that Melissa had told their grandparents that she’d been in touch, through the Internet, with her birth mother in Shanghai, and hoped to visit this woman, a stranger to all of the Voorhees, within a few years.

  Melissa had been studying Mandarin Chinese in high school. She’d been going to a Baptist church with a school friend, in a suburb of Detroit called Oak Park. She told her grandparents that she felt “most comfortable” with other Christians and “not so comfortable” with non-Christians. In an email to all of the family Melissa had written We accept Jesus as our savior. Jesus is not always pushing, He does not judge us except by our intentions.

  Naomi was thinking of how, that day, the last time they’d gone hiking with their father on Katechay Island, she and Melissa had fallen behind. They had not been able to keep up with Daddy and Darren hiking along the coarse pebbly shore where cold soapy-looking waves broke.

  Oh Daddy!—wait.

  Wait for us. Daddy!

  Melissa had clutched at Naomi’s hand. Naomi had held the little hand tight.

  But it hadn’t been enough, somehow. Their love for Melissa had not been enough and they had not ever understood why.

  Because she was adopted? Because she was of another ethnic background? These were such obvious reasons, you rejected them irritably.

  It wasn’t known what Jenna thought about this. Naomi had felt a small twinge of jealousy, that, for a while, Melissa was planning to live with their mother in Bennington; which meant that Jenna had invited her, and had made a place for her in her (new) life. But that had not happened.

  That day they’d had lunch at the Light House Restaurant on the island, that was of particular interest to children. You could climb an outdoor stairway, and see a long distance over Lake Huron—(though you could not ever see the Canadian shore only just the Michigan shore on both sides). Daddy and Mommy had spoken sharply to each other as sometimes they did but Daddy and Mommy had laughed and whispered together, and had linked fingers in a playful manner. But Mommy had decided not to accompany them on the hike along the shore.

  It was not easy walking in the coarse sand. The dunes were hard-packed and cold even in the sun. The beach had been littered with kelp, rotted pieces of wood, long-rotted little fish and bodies of birds you did not want to step on with your bare feet, that were scary to see, and emitted a sour smell. A blinding-bright day to be near the water, a cold day, and a windy day, so that the water was like something shaken, sharp as tinfoil.

  He’d said it, then. Words they had not comprehended.

  Promise me you will scatter my ashes here after I die.

  They’d had no idea what he meant. Even Darren who was the oldest had no idea. And it was something of a joke—wasn�
�t it? Daddy had been smiling, his eyes wet with tears. But if you’d ask him why, why were his eyes wet, Daddy would say Because I am so happy. Because I love you kids, and I love your mother. That’s why.

  IT WAS FOOLISH TO WAIT. Yet, in a kind of torpor they waited, drinking scalding-hot black and tasteless coffee from a vending machine in the motel lobby.

  Neither wanted to think what was obvious—of course, their mother wasn’t coming. How naive, how foolish, to imagine that Jenna would join them in this task she had not wished to confront for eleven years.

  Darren said: “Five more minutes. No more.”

  So long they’d been waiting for Jenna, God-damned self-centered unreliable Jenna, Naomi had to use the bathroom in her motel room another time, and while she was in the room she made a call on her cell phone, and left a message; and when she returned to the deck she heard voices—and her heart leapt.

  There stood a woman with feathery gray-white hair, embracing Darren. At first Naomi didn’t recognize her—“Jenna?”

  “Naomi! Honey.”

  No one, not even Madelena, called Naomi honey. Only her parents whom (almost) she’d come to think were both deceased.

  “Oh honey! Hel-lo.”

  They embraced. Jenna’s grasp was hard, fierce. Naomi was dazed with surprise, happiness and surprise, a kind of profound relief—Now I don’t have to hate my mother. Now, all that is over. She was feeling the thinness of her mother’s back, the lightness of her mother’s bones, through Jenna’s clothing. It seemed strange to her, Jenna was as tall as she, and not shorter, shrunken as Naomi had been imagining.

  And her arms were strong, in this first, breathless embrace.

  Jenna was swiping at her eyes with both hands. Her face was pale as alabaster that has been worn smooth. She did not look old, Naomi thought. This was a relief.

  But her hair had faded and seemed dry, brittle. A curious sort of silvery-white, not distinctive and glamorous as Madelena’s hair, though attractive in its way, very light, feathery, brushed back behind her ears in no discernible style.

  Clutching at Naomi’s hand, and at Darren’s hand, Jenna was murmuring how sorry she was to be late—“I’ve made you wait. I’ve made Gus wait.”