A Book of American Martyrs(123)
Mary Kay was a generous person but a careless and often rude and profane person. She was in her mid-fifties, at least thirty pounds overweight but shapely rather than fat, and brimming with “personality” like a TV weather woman. She favored cheaply glamorous clothes—purple suede, black leather, colorful blouses and shoes with straps. Her hair was dyed red-brown. She spoke chidingly of Edna Mae for “letting herself go” and for being “skinny as a broomstick” as if to be thin was a moral failing.
Worse, Mary Kay was likely to be sharp-tongued if you suggested the slightest criticism of her lifestyle. Her choice in clothes, her choice in friends. Her casual attitude toward religion. If you remarked that a carpet needed to be cleaned, or replaced, or that stairs needed repair; if you dared to remark that the single bathroom (that was used by six people) needed a thorough cleaning, Mary Kay was likely to say, “Really! Well, you know what to do, Edna. You’re not crippled.”
Edna Mae was not crippled. That was so.
But she was not strong. It was unfair and unjust of her solidly-built aunt to suggest that she was shirking her responsibilities in the household.
Often, Edna Mae could barely breathe as if a steel band were tightening around her chest. She could not sleep without medication—if she tried, her brain buzzed like a hornets’ nest. Her pulse raced, her eyes flooded with tears, a dull ache throbbed in her head. Always she was hearing the terrible word Guilty. She was hearing the words Sentenced to death by legal injection.
(Though in fact, Edna Mae had not heard these words uttered aloud by the trial judge in the Broome County Courthouse. They had been repeated to her. But she seemed to recall them as if she’d been there, and had heard, and could not now forget.)
She’d had to find another doctor in Mad River Junction. Dr. Hills had refused to continue to prescribe the medication she required so she’d gone to another, elderly doctor whose hearing was so poor she had to repeat her symptoms several times but who was willing at least to prescribe medication for her—“nerve pills”—“sleeping pills.” It was a relief that Luther had ceased asking after her pill dependency as he’d called it, as if he’d forgotten, when she visited him at Chillicothe.
At first Edna Mae had tried gamely to keep the house reasonably clean despite her health problems, but Mary Kay’s old-fashioned vacuum cleaner was not only inefficient but very heavy, and dragged at Edna Mae’s arms. She’d tried to keep the kitchen clean, and the bathroom—the most disgusting, relentless of chores. The children were supposed to help but were not reliable. Dawn could be depended upon only to a point—then, rudely, she rebelled and said terrible things to her mother. For always there was the strain of their father in prison. Always the anxiety that weighed upon them all like a heavy overcast sky.
Edna Mae knew that the children were teased, taunted, tormented on account of their father Luther Dunphy. She knew, and was heartstricken for them, but she did not know what to do about it, and so she tried not to think about it.
Waking each morning in the unfamiliar house on Depot Street startled and confused not knowing for a moment where she was, and why. And then the thought would rush at her—Your husband is in prison. Your husband is on Death Row.
No longer did Edna Mae attend Reverend Dennis’s church in Muskegee Falls. All that was over—her old life that seemed now to have existed for her on the far side of a rushing river. In this new place she’d joined a new church, the Mad River Junction Pentecostal Church of Christ. Reverend Trucross and his wife Merri had sought Edna Mae out to offer commiseration and sympathy—“Our prayers are with you and your family and with your courageous husband Luther in your hour of need, Mrs. Dunphy.” When Merri Trucross embraced her with a sob of sisterly emotion Edna Mae had stiffened in surprise though afterward she’d been deeply moved. No one in her family including her sister Noreen had embraced her in such a way after Luther had been transferred to Death Row. Soon it happened that Reverend Trucross arranged for one of the congregation to pick up Edna Mae and the children to bring them to Sunday services, since Edna Mae no longer drove a car.
She hadn’t been able to visit Luther at Chillicothe in months. Illnesses—(flu, pneumonia, shingles)—swept through the prison facility and visitation hours were canceled. On Death Row the prisoners were relatively protected from the general population yet seemingly susceptible to contagions spread by guards and other prison personnel.
Edna Mae continued to hear from the Chillicothe chaplain Reverend Davey who told her how “bravely” and “steadfastly” Luther bore up under the stress of Death Row.
There were eleven men on Death Row awaiting execution. All, including Luther Dunphy, had been granted temporary “stays” pending appeals and clemency hearings. So far as Edna Mae knew, and she did not really want to know such information, just two men had been executed since Luther had been sentenced to death, after delays and postponements of many years; but these were murderers, who had deserved to die, and nothing like Luther Dunphy.
“This gives us hope, Edna Mae. We must always have hope!”—so Reverend Davey consoled her.
AT LAST, she found an old, badly stained flyswatter in a closet. With this, she would hunt down flies.
Yet, more flies appeared. The more Edna Mae swatted, the more appeared as if out of nowhere. Not only in the kitchen but in the hallway, and on the living room walls.