A Book of American Martyrs(185)

Maybe that is so. You hear all kinds of things.





THE CONSOLATION OF GRIEF


SEPTEMBER 2011–FEBRUARY 2012





“TRUE SUBJECT”


When you encounter your true subject, you will know it.

She had faith. She had not ceased waiting.





MUSKEGEE FALLS, OHIO:


SEPTEMBER 2011


Sun-splotched Muskegee River, dazzling the eye.

The hue of the river was tarnished pewter. Patches of reflected sun like fire in the choppy waves.

A strange beauty in the sound: “Mus-kee-gee.”

She’d been driving through Ohio farmland for hours. Rolling hills like those sculpted hills in the paintings of Thomas Hart Benton. Acres of cornfields dun-colored, and the cornstalks dried and broken, fields of harvested wheat, stubble.

Early autumn. Beauty of slanted light, desiccated things.

Beside the highway the river’s current was quickened, there had been a heavy rain the previous day.

Slow-circling hawks high overhead. She’d been noticing, glancing skyward. Did hawks hunt together? There were several wide-winged birds soaring, dipping, gliding on wings that scarcely moved. Like those drifting thoughts of which you are not altogether aware.

He’d have driven this route, she thought. When he’d driven south and east from Michigan.

Exiting the interstate at Bowling Green, or Findlay. South through Upper Sandusky to Broome County south of Wyandotte. On two-lane state highways through rural Ohio (hilly, farmland, dense-wooded) to Muskegee Falls where he’d begun his new life.

She’d learned that Gus Voorhees’s life had been threatened many times. She had not known, and didn’t believe that Darren had ever known, that their father had been verbally attacked numerous times in public places, and physically attacked several times; when they’d lived in Grand Rapids he’d been accosted in the parking lot of the women’s center, beaten so badly he’d had to be taken to the ER. (Yet, when Naomi tried to remember anything like this, her father visibly injured, hospitalized, she could not remember a thing. Possibly, there’d been a pretense that Daddy was out of town for a while.) Fires had been started at virtually all of the women’s centers in which he had worked—there’d been vandalism to the buildings, and to vehicles parked outside. Not just doctors but nurses and other staffers had been threatened. It was shocking to learn belatedly that they’d all been threatened—Gus Voorhees’s wife, children.

All this had been kept secret from the children. Perhaps some of it had been kept secret from the wife.

Madelena had said But that’s why he moved away, Naomi. And Jenna had refused to go with him. To protect you. The children.

She hadn’t wanted to think that this might be true. That her father had known he might be killed, and had continued with his medical work nonetheless.

Gus Voorhees had not given into his enemies, as he’d insisted. But his enemies had had their revenge nonetheless.

How lonely the countryside was, in this part of rural Ohio! Farmhouses were far apart, and set far back from the road; the communities through which she drove were just a few scattered houses, a gas station and a few stores, churches.

(Did this part of Ohio remind her of Huron County, Michigan? Any of these country roads might have been the Salt Hill Road.)

Thinking such thoughts she almost missed her turn to Muskegee Falls. Turning left, to the east, to cross the Muskegee River.

And this route too, her father had taken. Carefully she’d mapped out the routes he must have driven.

The bridge to Muskegee Falls (population 26,000) was an old, dignified, single-span bridge of another era. It was narrow: barely two lanes. Speed limit fifteen miles an hour.

If she hadn’t known she (probably) could not have guessed: the choppy pewter-colored river was flowing north to south, perpendicular to the bridge she crossed in her small rented vehicle. The falls for which the town was named was a quarter mile upstream shrouded in mist.

A rapid succession of shadows cast by the bridge’s rusted girders fell onto the vehicle. Across the hood, fleetingly onto the windshield (insect-and seed-flecked, that needed washing—she must stop for gas soon), invisibly then onto the roof, and gone.

Splotched sunlight, the moving shadows of the girders, the gleam of the car hood—Naomi recalled how strobe lighting can trigger epileptic fits. Rapid patterned flashes of light can have a narcotic effect upon the brain. Her (half-)uncle Karl Kinch, her grandmother’s invalid son, could not tolerate ordinary daylight still less electric or fluorescent lighting. If Kinch ventured outside he wore dark glasses to protect his brain from further poisoning but mostly he did not venture outside. He’d had to hide himself from the world in order to save himself.

But she did not want to think of Kinch, not now. Not in Muskegee Falls, Ohio, where (at last) she’d traveled, alone.

Clearly visible now were the falls, that spanned the width of the river, approximately thirty feet high, whitely churning, sending up spray and froth. There is a fascination in cascading water, Naomi had to wrench her eyes away for fear of becoming entranced behind the wheel of her car. She’d affixed the video recorder to the window beside her to record the view her father would have seen in the last months of his life.

She was determined to make a video of the place in which Gus Voorhees had briefly lived, bravely worked, died. The circumstances of his life in Muskegee Falls. So many years had passed, she believed that she must be strong enough now.