A Book of American Martyrs(112)
By this time Aunt Mary Kay had gone to bed. The younger children had fallen asleep on the sofa exhausted. Dawn and Luke exchanged a glance, and a shudder.
Edna Mae continued, with a vague smile: “He was thinking maybe he wouldn’t see us again. In our earthly selves. But he didn’t want to scare us . . .”
Luke said: “You think Dad was predicting the future? That’s crazy.”
Edna Mae protested: “You know how your father is. He worries about us and not about himself.”
“Christ, Mom! That is so weird.”
“It is not weird. What do you think is happening now, these bombs, and ‘terrorists’—and your father—what happened to him . . . All at the same time.”
“Jesus!”
“You watch your mouth, Luke! Taking the Lord’s name in vain . . .”
“Jesus is not the ‘Lord.’ Jesus is the ‘son.’ Just so’s you know, Mawmaw.”
Luke did not pronounce Mawmaw with any of the childish tenderness with which he’d once pronounced it but rather with an air of disdain. Stricken by his rudeness Edna Mae slapped his shoulder with the flat of her hand, and Luke laughed.
“Jesus forgive you. I hope He will.”
“I wouldn’t hold my breath, Mom. Jesus has plenty of work cut out for him without giving a damn about us.”
“That’s a terrible thing to say.”
“It’s a true thing to say.”
Dawn was helping the younger children to bed. First Noah, then Anita. She hoped that, in the morning, they might have forgotten much of what they’d seen on the TV; she did not think it was a good idea for Edna Mae to have let them watch.
When she came downstairs Edna Mae and Luke were still bickering. Luke was on his way out—why didn’t he just leave? And Edna Mae was so exhausted she could barely keep her balance swaying and staggering like a drunk woman—why didn’t Mawmaw just go to bed?
Dawn thought how strange it was, how embarrassing almost—(she wouldn’t have wanted Miss Schine to know!)—at this late hour of this terrible day her mother and her brother were standing there bickering about something so profound as the end of the world.
NOT SINCE HE’D ARRIVED in Muskegee Falls seventeen years before as an ardent young minister had anyone in the St. Paul Missionary congregation seen Reverend Dennis so emotional in the pulpit.
It was as if the hell-fires of the World Trade Center towers were lapping at the very roof and windows of the church. Almost, you could see in Reverend Dennis’s ruddy face and wet glaring eyes the gleam of these fires. He had removed his preacher’s dark formal coat and he had torn open the collar of his white cotton shirt at the throat; he had rolled the sleeves to his elbows and it was fascinating to see how, when he waved his arms, the sleeves inched downward, and he had to push them up again, impatiently. His graying dark hair was damp with perspiration like gel. His voice was piercing as a horn you could not escape even if you dared press your fingers over your ears.
Enthralled Dawn listened. She was squeezed in close between Anita and Noah and gripped the hands of each tightly for she knew that they were very frightened and that their mother seemed often to be forgetting them in this confused time. She would afterward not recall much of what Reverend Dennis said but she would never forget the elation of the man’s voice and how badly she had wanted, during the sermon, which careened and lurched like a drunken boat, the minister’s eyes to fix upon her.
“‘After these things I looked, and behold a door was opened in heaven, and the first voice which I heard was of a trumpet speaking with me saying, “Come up hither, and I will show you these things which must be done hereafter” ’—my brothers and sisters in Christ, could any words be more timely than these words of St. John the Divine—of the Book of Revelation? This ‘terrorist attack’ is God’s warning to us, we cannot ignore as we have ignored such warnings as rising tides, rising temperatures, the tides of hell—abortions, birth control—the rise of homosexuality and such abominations and anathema to the Lord— ” In a quavering voice Reverend Dennis spoke for more than an hour, raging, and weeping; his fingers plucked at the collar of his shirt, that was dark now with perspiration, so that you could see the shadow of his chest hair beneath, that made Dawn’s breath quicken, as if she’d had a glimpse of something forbidden—her father part-unclothed, in the shadows of her parents’ bedroom at the old house; her brother Luke shoving a bare foot into the leg of his jeans, his face fixed in concentration so that he had not noticed her staring at his supple body, the small bulge of his tight-fitting white shorts between his legs, the taut muscles of his thighs.
After the sermon, Reverend Dennis appeared to be exhausted. All who heard him were exhausted. Dawn had been waiting for him to speak of her father as sometimes he spoke of Luther Dunphy in the pulpit, to ask the congregation to “send prayers” his way; but today in his excitement over the terrorist attack Reverend Dennis seemed to have forgotten Luther Dunphy.
Edna Mae tried to speak to the minister but could not get through to him past others who were crowded about him.
It was unfair! She was the wife of Luther Dunphy, and they would not let her through to speak with Reverend Dennis.
Luke had driven the family to church, and now drove them home. In the passenger’s seat Edna Mae was fretting and weeping as a baffled child might weep.