A Book of American Martyrs(124)

She had never seen so many flies since childhood on her grandparents’ farm! Every kind of fly including gigantic horseflies, buzzing about manure heaps. The farmhouse doors were always being left open, the screens were ill-fitted to the windows, or torn; flies crawled over kitchen counters and table, stovetop, anything left out and uncovered. And if covered, flies crawled over the covers. As a fastidiously clean girl Edna Mae had been dismayed by the flies and their insolent buzzing that roused in her now a sensation of shame and nausea.

“Damn you! Damn.”

She was becoming adept wielding the flyswatter which was more lethal than a rolled-up newspaper though its surface was smaller.

Yet it was a delicate matter not to stain a wall by smashing a fly against it and leaving a smear, and Edna Mae did not always succeed. She was becoming reckless, impatient. It angered her that the flies struggled so for their lives—escaping her frantic wild swings as if with their microscopic eyes they could envision beforehand the imprecise trajectory of her blows, and were mocking her. Much of the morning she’d been groggy after a poor night’s sleep but by quick degrees she was wakened by the exertion and challenge of flyswatting. Yet, no matter how many flies she swatted, more flies were appearing.

Jesus was sending a sign. Jesus was not pleased with Edna Mae Dunphy this morning. Your place of refuge is unclean.

It had to be, the flies were hatching. Disgusting as this was to contemplate, it had to be true. Edna Mae squatted to determine the source of the flies, somewhere near the baseboard of the kitchen. Then, she saw that a fly was emerging from a corner of the kitchen nearest the hall—near a hall closet. And when she timorously opened the closet door several flies flew at her face. She gave a cry, swung wildly and nearly dropped the swatter.

The closet was crammed with her aunt’s things. Old clothing, old boots and shoes, dirt-stiffened mittens. Badly rusted steel wool cleaning pads. An old, filthy wooden-handled mop, plastic buckets, rags needing laundering. Carelessly folded paper bags from the grocery store. An ancient box of dog biscuits from a time, years before, when Mary Kay had owned a dog—out of this box of dog biscuits small moths emerged, fluttering at Edna Mae’s face.

The stench here was sickening. By poking and prying with a broom handle Edna Mae discovered to her disgust something soft and furry wedged into a corner on the floor, at the shadowy rear: what appeared to be the desiccated corpse of a small rodent.

“Oh, God . . .”

She felt faint. She felt that she might vomit. She would have slammed the closet door except there was no one else in the house to deal with the emergency situation.

The flies had to be hatching out of the corpse. Or perhaps there was more than one corpse.

How shameful this was! If Luther knew how they were living now . . .

How could you have done this to us!

I will never forgive you.

In the closet, she found an aerosol can of insect spray. She sprayed the corner thoroughly. A few flies fluttered toward her dazed, lurching. On the walls and ceiling of the closet was a small platoon of flies now beating their tiny wings, stricken. She felt a thrill of satisfaction—Now you know what it is like!

Creatures had often crawled beneath farmhouses to die, in her childhood. The older farmhouses like her grandparents’ had not had basements but only crawl spaces. Mice, rats, gophers, even raccoons, larger animals. Dogs. Cats. The stench would be overpowering for days, it would linger for weeks. The smell of poverty, helplessness. And flies—of course. Everywhere flies and other insects. Just one of any number of signals that God has abandoned you.

Each time she’d visited with Luther he had asked her how she and the children were managing in his absence and each time Edna Mae had said with a brave smile—“Well! We are managing.”

Thinking—He does not want to know. He must be shielded.

Luther had never relented about the “defense fund” on his behalf posted on the Army of God website. In prison, Luther could not access the website; inmates were not allowed computers, as they were not allowed private phones. So Luther had no idea that the defense fund was still posted, though (as Edna Mae had been informed by the Army of God organizers) contributions had dropped to almost nothing, since other Right-to-Life activists had more recently captured followers’ attention with women’s center protests, vandalism, arson, and attempted shootings of abortion providers.

The new Right-to-Life martyr was James Kopp. Kopp had shot an abortion doctor in Buffalo, New York, in 1998 but had only recently been tried and convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment with no possibility of parole. Much of Kopp’s online glamour was, he’d been on the FBI’s list of Ten Most Wanted Fugitives. No other Right-to-Life soldier had been elevated to this list, since most were captured or surrendered to police at once. Kopp was affiliated with a militant Roman Catholic anti-abortion organization called The Lambs of Christ but had many admirers in the Army of God and Operation Rescue which were primarily Protestant.

At their last visit, as if reading her thoughts Luther had said quietly, “Don’t despair, Edna Mae. God will not take me from you.”

“I know. I know that.”

“If you despair, our enemies will exult.”

“Our enemies . . . Yes. I know.”

“You know. But you must have faith, and communicate your faith to our children. You must not allow them to sink into despair.”