A Book of American Martyrs(129)

In horror Dawn stood as Edna Mae and the others lifted boxes out of the Dumpsters with their bare hands. (At Home Depot, Dawn and her co-workers, unloading merchandise, all wore gloves. And if you did not wear gloves, your supervisor would hand a pair of gloves to you!) Some of the boxes were upside down, all were toppled as if they’d been dumped hastily.

Carefully the boxes were placed in the rear of a minivan in the alley. The plan was to bury the aborted infants in a consecrated cemetery a few miles away with a proper Christian burial, Christian prayers.

As Edna Mae insisted, Dawn helped stack the boxes. She could not breathe for the stench, and was feeling light-headed.

(Where was Jesus? Had it been His plan all along, for Dawn to help bury the babies?)

(He had not warned her beforehand. It had been a terrible shock!)

(Since the hammer with the black-taped grip, that had struck the fleeing screaming boys with such power, Dawn had come to respect Jesus in another, unexpected way. Jesus was an ally but you could not take Jesus for granted as an ally, it was that simple.)

In all, there were fourteen boxes secured with duct tape, retrieved from the Dumpsters. In each box, five or six Ziploc bags with aborted babies inside.

Thrown away like garbage! God have mercy on the murderers.

When it was time to drive to the cemetery for the burial Dawn begged Edna Mae again to let her go home and Edna Mae said sharply that she could not go home, how on earth would she get home, she had no idea how to get home from this unfamiliar city and it would be dangerous for a girl of her age to be alone on the streets here—“You are coming with us. You can take care of your sister and brother.”

Dawn saw how the others were watching her. In her nylon jacket with dull-silver threads, dungaree-style jeans both badly stained from the Dumpster. She was the youngest person in the alley helping with the boxes.

“Dawn, come. Get in here with us.”

Edna Mae was pulling at her, urging her toward the minivan in which Anita and Noah were already huddled. But Dawn jerked her arm away.

Suddenly, she was free of her mother’s grip. She was taller than Edna Mae, and stronger.

As Edna Mae called after her Dawn fled past the glaring lights of the minivan. She saw the shining eyes of strangers on her and she saw Reverend Trucross and his wife Merri gaping at her—“Dawn? Where are you going, Dawn?” She’d come to hate it, the Trucrosses called her Dawn as if she was their daughter too. If there was one truth Jesus had been drumming into her it was—She was not anyone’s daughter.

At the end of the alley was a TV minivan and camera crew whose lights blinded her as she ran toward them and past them shielding her face with her hands paying them no heed hearing Edna Mae calling after her in an angry pleading voice—“Dawn! Dawn! Come back here at once!”

But Dawn swayed, stumbled, ran. And ran.


IT WAS THE GREATEST SHOCK of my life I think! More even than the call telling us that my brother-in-law Luther Dunphy had shot two men in cold blood back in November 1999.

Well, this was a call, too—our neighbor! Noreen, quick turn on your TV, June Gallagher said. Channel forty-nine.

And there was this “prayer vigil” in a cemetery in Cleveland, at night, and people kneeling at a large grave site clasping their hands at their hearts and praying with bowed heads and one of them was Edna Mae—my sister!

I just stared and stared. What was Edna Mae doing there, in a cemetery in Cleveland? And why was she being televised?

It was explained that this was a particular area of a Baptist cemetery reserved for “aborted fetuses”—“preborn children of God”—as they were called. The fetuses had been discarded as medical waste from abortion clinics and had been “rescued” by members of a right-to-life organization for Christian burial in consecrated soil and my sister Edna Mae was one of these evidently. We had known that Edna Mae belonged to a new church in Mad River Junction where the family had had to move after the trial but none of us had heard anything about this—National Day of Remembrance for Preborn Infants Murdered by Abortion.

Almost, I would not have recognized Edna Mae. She’d cut her hair, and she looked different than I remembered—a high-strung kind of person that you’d get a little shock from if you touched her. She wasn’t aware of the TV camera, or didn’t give any sign. With the others she was kneeling and praying and then they were setting some small objects into the grave while a minister said a blessing over them—looked like Ziploc bags, with something in them—the remains of fetuses!—but where the bags were, the screen was blurred like something underwater or in a dream—too raw to show on TV, I guess.

There were close-ups of a few faces. But the camera didn’t linger on Edna Mae.

The TV announcer was a blond woman sympathetic with the ceremony but also horrified, you could see. With her microphone in her hand she didn’t get too close to the grave site and she was keeping her eyes averted from what was inside it. In a breathless voice she spoke of the faithful coming hundreds of miles from churches “all over Ohio” to rescue the aborted fetuses from being “thrown away like trash.” The minister she interviewed was from a Pentecostal church in Mad River Junction—had to be Edna Mae’s church—a putty-faced man of about fifty with a strange sad smile and teary eyes squinting into the TV lights saying, “Ma’am, these are holy innocents of God like you and me except they were not allowed to be born as we were. That is the only difference between us!—we were born, and they were not. And they were not even granted Christian burials. And so some of us are stepping in where the mainstream Christian churches have failed in their ministry to protect the least of us.”