A Book of American Martyrs(111)
In Dawn’s homeroom the teacher Mrs. Lichtman had to sit at her desk, suddenly faint, very white in the face. Terrifying to see a teacher so frightened, and not to know what was happening and what would come next. The usually smirking boys were as quiet as the others, abashed and apprehensive. Amid them Dawn Dunphy sat entranced as if Jesus had answered her prayer in a way she had not expected and could not comprehend, just yet.
We listened for airplanes, we believed that bombs were being dropped. We were led to believe that an invasion had begun from a foreign country. Our principal Mrs. Morehead kept repeating what she’d said like that was all she knew and all she could say and she did not know how to stop. And then at last, the loudspeaker was switched onto radio news, and we were listening to radio news without knowing what any of it meant, still we were waiting for bombs to fall on our school, and for airplanes to crash into our school, and it was only after parents began to arrive at the school to take kids home that we could leave, and all of us went home to watch TV with our parents all that day September 11, 2001, when the World Trade Center was destroyed and we watched the twin towers explode and collapse and explode and collapse a thousand times in a flaming cataclysm like the wrath of God.
IN MUSKEGEE FALLS at the Broome County Courthouse the trial of Luther Dunphy was interrupted. Jurors were dismissed until further notice, the courtroom and the courthouse were cleared, the defendant Dunphy was returned in handcuffs and ankle shackles to men’s detention. The trial would not resume until the following Tuesday by which time it was determined by Broome County law enforcement that the likelihood of a terrorist attack in Muskegee Falls was not high.
Nationwide the United States remained in a state of high emergency.
The Broome County Courthouse would be secured with extra Ohio State Police guards both in the courtroom and outside the building. Each person who entered the courthouse and passed through the metal detector was scrupulously examined and many were questioned at length. There were (unsubstantiated) rumors of bombs set to explode inside and near the courthouse but it was never made clear whose bombs they were supposed to be—Muslim terrorists or Right-to-Life activists.
AFTERNOON, EVENING, and into the night of September 11, 2001, they watched TV news in the house on Depot Street. At first they shifted restlessly from channel to channel but settled finally on the familiar cable-news channel that broadcast The Tom McCarthy Hour.
Never had Edna Mae been so riveted by the TV screen. Never had she allowed the younger children to watch the kind of TV she feared would give them “bad thoughts” and “nightmares.” But things seemed different now, a curious excited calm to Mawmaw observed by Dawn and by Luke (who’d come to his aunt’s house to watch news of the “terrorist attacks” with his family, when his workhours were cut short) as if all that Mawmaw had feared and hoped-for had come true and there was no point in trying to shield her young children from knowledge of God’s terrible wrath.
The flaming explosions of the World Trade Center twin towers were many times replayed. Footage of the chaotic streets of New York City, shocking sights you were not meant to see—human figures falling from high buildings, bodies indistinguishable from the rubble in which they lay. Fires, sirens. Though it was midday, it was twilight at Ground Zero. Long after the original explosions the air was aswirl with something like ashes, shredded paper and pulverized bone. A news commentator stunned by what he was seeing made a clumsy joke about rats, supposed to be millions of rats in New York City, what’s become of the rat population?—but no one laughed. Cut to another replay of the falling of the twin towers. Overlapping and contentious voices.
The United States has been attacked by a foreign country.
Which country?
One of the Arab countries. Or maybe more than one. In the Middle East.
Why?—because Arabs are followers of Mohammed and not Jesus Christ. These are “Mohammedans” who hate our U.S. democracy and want to kill us.
They are called “Muslims . . .”
They are sometimes called “Mohammedans”—that is a term that is used.
Generally they are called “Muslims.” Their religion is “Islam.”
“Is-lam”—is that their name for themselves, or is it our name for them? They are worshippers of a “prophet”—Mohammed . . .
They have a hatred of Christianity and a hatred of Jews and it has been their goal since 1948 to destroy the State of Israel.
Why?—there is a hatred in the Muslim world of an open freedom-loving society that is educated like the United States.
There is a hatred of Jews because Jews are superior to their Arab neighbors as demonstrated in the Six-Day War . . .
Today’s terrorist attacks are just the beginning. If they are not stopped by U.S. airpower they will destroy the “free world.” They hate all Christians. They are enemies of Jews as well and it is their goal to destroy the State of Israel before the coming of Christ and the conversion of the Jews.
Another time they saw the tower burst into flames. And another time, the second tower struck by the careening airplane. And—(it was always a miracle, if but a miracle of horror)—another time, as they stared, the towers collapsed in flame and rising dust like clouds of vapor.
Edna Mae suddenly realized. This had to be the beginning of the “last days”—the start of the Great Tribulation.
She recalled to Dawn and Luke how the last time she’d taken them to visit Luther in the detention facility, they’d been surprised at how much leaner he’d become, and his hair grayer and sparser; how hard-muscled his shoulders and upper arms, as if he’d been exercising in his cell. And how quiet Luther was, a new calmness in him, seeming just to smile at them without hearing much of what they said, for Edna Mae chattered nervously at such times, and even Dawn heard herself say inane things. But then, when they’d been about to leave, Luther leaned forward to touch the opened palm of his hand on the Plexiglas barrier, in silence—“Like he was blessing us. Like Jesus would do. He didn’t say a word. But—maybe—he knew.”