A Book of American Martyrs(186)

Madelena had said Just go, dear. Take as long as you need. It will take courage. Do what you need to do. Call me.

She had come to love her grandmother. This love had happened without her wishing it to have happened and now that Madelena was not well, she felt her love for the woman with a particular sort of desperation. She felt like one who has had a vast quantity of time and so has squandered much of that time, feeling now the horror of time rapidly passing like water through her fingers.

But please call me. We will miss you!

At first Madelena had not thought that Naomi’s intention of creating an archive of her father’s life was a good, or even a workable idea. How long would such a project be? How could she bring it to a reasonable end? And what would she do if and when she uncovered damaging things about her father?

She didn’t expect to discover “damaging” things about her father—Naomi said.

Amending then, of course she understood: all lives are imperfect. Even Gus Voorhees was imperfect.

She was twenty-four years old—which seemed to her no longer young. She must hurry.

For the past two years she’d been working as an assistant to a documentary filmmaker attached to the New York Institute—her first real job. The project was tracking the lives of a family of Somalis living in New York City and in Minnesota. The work had been exacting, and exciting; she had learned a great deal. She believed that she was ready to prepare a documentary of her own.

She parked her car, a rented Nissan she’d acquired at the Detroit airport, on a service road just off the bridge. On a pedestrian walkway she walked about one-third of the way back across the bridge, to position her camera atop the railing, and record the small city of Muskegee Falls from this perspective. Later, she would add a voice—commentary.

This is the Muskegee River in central Ohio. There, Muskegee Falls.

The Muskegee Bridge was originally built in 1939.

My father Gus Voorhees moved here to live and to work—temporarily he believed—in the late summer of 1999.


ON THE PHONE often he’d been guilty-sounding. He’d laughed a good deal. He’d called her sweetheart. He’d extracted from her a vague promise to Come visit Daddy, OK? Some weekend?

That weekend had never come. But now, she was here.

But she’d been angry at Daddy! They all were.

They were not angry at Daddy, that was silly. If they’d been angry at anyone it was at Mommy—(with the cruel acuity of children they knew this)—for her failure to be sufficiently loved, to keep a man like Gus Voorhees at home.

For a long time she had not liked to speak the name aloud—“Muskegee Falls.” The very sound “Ohio”—the mocking drawl of the vowels—was repugnant to her.

She’d composed a detailed timeline of that year 1999. The last year. Her files had grown voluminous and had become difficult to peruse at a single sitting.

That her father had come here, to this place out of all the places of the world—he had died here.

No answer to the plaintive query—Why?

She’d done research. She’d become adept at using the Internet in pursuit of (at least) a statistical and computational notion of the environment in which her father had lived for those brief months before he’d died.

So she’d known, before seeing the shuttered mills and factories along the riverfront, and the shabbiness of the riverfront, that Muskegee Falls had not recovered from an economic crisis dating back to the mid-1990s. A branch of General Motors had shut down, a women’s-wear manufacturer had shut down, homes had been foreclosed in a wave of bankruptcies. The small city had lost approximately one-fifth of its population.

On a pot-holed roadway along the river recording with her camera stretches of abandoned riverfront buildings, docks, warehouses and trucking companies, vacant lots piled with rubble, open grassy lots that had become fields in which (she saw through the magnified camera eye) dust-colored rats scavenged energetically amid dumped trash. She felt her skin crawl. The rats were visually exciting, in the camera eye.

Baltimore & Ohio railway yard, railroad tracks, freight cars that looked old, battered, abandoned. A sharp smell of creosote.

And the Muskegee River beyond, splotched with sunlight like small flaring fires startling and beautiful to the eye.

Her father had seen these sights, she was sure. Especially the river—beautiful despite the ugliness on shore.

He had so loved Katechay Island!—the morning mist over Lake Huron. Loons on the lake, a high whistling wind. Hiking along the shore, prints of Daddy’s bare feet deep-impressed in the hard-packed sand, and his young daughter trotting along behind earnestly trying to fit her small feet into those prints . . .

On Main Street, slow afternoon traffic. Slow traffic lights. Turn onto Center Street, to First Avenue, to Capitol Square—the Broome County Courthouse that was a dour-faced sandstone municipal building with a brighter, beige-brick wing at the rear.

It was something of a mild shock to encounter this building, so abruptly.

Jenna had attended the first trial of Luther Amos Dunphy here—the “mistrial.”

Their poor distraught mother, alone in this place! She had not wanted Naomi or Darren to accompany her.

Jenna had hidden from her children her terrible despair, her grief that was a kind of bone-marrow cancer draining her soul. She had hoped to spare them.

They had not realized at the time. Like children they’d thought mostly of themselves. Yet they’d never quite forgiven her. Almost, it was getting to be too late.