A Book of American Martyrs(58)

Your father was afflicted with the sort of blindness that some religious visionaries are afflicted. I wouldn’t call it “hubris”—he was never proud or arrogant. He was unknowing.

Your mother understood, I think. Jenna always understood. But she couldn’t convince Gus—no one could.

That there was a religious war in the United States for the hearts and minds of citizens—voters. There is a war.

And in a war, innocent people die.





JIGSAW


Yes? Oh Gus! Thank God! Where are you?

Our mother on the phone. Through the floorboards we might hear her, the lift of her voice, the eager-girl relief. If there was something craven in it, something desperate, we did not hear for we felt the same relief ourselves.

Daddy! Daddy calling home.


FLINT. BATTLE CREEK. KALAMAZOO.

Bay City (south of Saginaw Bay, an inlet of Lake Huron). South Haven (western Michigan, on Lake Michigan). Traverse City (south of Grand Traverse Bay, Lake Michigan).

Cheboygan in the northern part of the state, on Lake Huron.

Petoskey, on Lake Michigan.

Sault Ste. Marie at the northernmost point of Michigan, at the Canadian border; to the west, Whitefish Bay (on Lake Superior), to the east, Lake Huron.

Port Huron at Sarnia (Ontario), at the southernmost point of Lake Huron.

Lansing. East Lansing. Midland. Jackson.

Owosso. Ypsilanti. Ann Arbor.

Detroit and suburbs: Hamtramck, Livonia, Ferndale, East Detroit.

Grand Rapids. Saginaw. St. Croix.

It will help to think of a jigsaw puzzle in the ovoid shape of Michigan. Square-cut or rectangular counties—placement of cities and towns—near-symmetrical arrangement of the major lakes: Lake Michigan to the west, Lake Huron to the east, embracing the thumb-shape of Michigan, meeting at the Mackinaw Bridge in the north.

A jigsaw puzzle that was also a game board. And the piece, the single player, moved tirelessly about the game board.

Often he called us en route, from an interstate restaurant, or from the house of a friend—“Hey. It’s me. Just checking in.” Always he called us when he arrived at his destination, and had checked into a motel.

It is Michigan I recall. Shut my eyes and the map of the state surfaces like something glimpsed in rippling water. Though it was in Ohio that our father died.





“LIKE A CANDLE BLOWN OUT”


She was alone when the call came.

Alone because the children were in school. Alone in the dingy clapboard house on Salt Hill Road in Huron County, Michigan.

Alone, alone! Long she would recall the strangeness of the word, an echo aerated by melancholy vowels—alone.


AT 9:18 A.M., November 2, 1999, when the call came she was alone because the children were at school in the small rural town of St. Croix, and because her husband was away in Ohio.

We are living separately for the time being. But we are not separated.

If you are curious, ask Gus. It was his decision.

The surprise, the shock of the call. It is a stranger’s voice that will bring you the news to tear your life in two.

Like an arm torn out of its socket—first there is disbelief, then a throb of pure astonished being, then immeasurable pain and gushing blood.

That first instant, of disbelief.

The soul crying No! No.

She’d been alone. Always she would remember.

He had abandoned her. He had not been with her, to comfort and console. To hold her flailing limbs, her body like the body of a twitching frog as the scalpel cuts the beautiful delicate belly-skin toward the beating heart.

Oh Gus! Gus.


CALM AND QUIET of the austere old farmhouse in the morning after the children were gone.

After she’d driven them to their schools in St. Croix, and returned to the house alone.

She did not mind driving the children into town five mornings a week—not so much. Between wintry fields where frost glinted amid broken cornstalks and ravaged acres of wheat. Overhead, circling hawks they were still excited to identify—red-tailed, marsh-hawk. And picking the children up in the mid-afternoon, when she might have errands to do, truly she didn’t mind.

It was a time to be alone with them. When Darren could not drift off distant, disengaged.

Melissa always sat in the passenger’s seat, beside Jenna. Between them was a (magical, thrilling) rapport Jenna did not—(she had to admit)—feel for the older children much, any longer. Though of course she loved Naomi and Darren as much as she loved Melissa.

Why had they adopted the little Chinese-girl orphan?—a question that everyone who knew Gus and Jenna Voorhees had wanted to ask.

She could not have said. Not clearly.

For it was wrong to say—We felt it is our duty.

Crude and misleading to say—It is the duty of some of us, who can afford to take into our homes a child who, otherwise . . .

More accurate to say—Because we wanted to love—another child.

More accurate—Because we could. Because it was time for another. Because another baby of our own was not practical. Because we had love to spare.

She did not want to think that Gus’s wish for another child, an adopted child, preferably Chinese, had something in it deeply irrational, unexamined.

She did not want to think that her acquiescence to her husband’s wish had something in it deeply craven, insecure. Or that her fear of displeasing Gus Voorhees in virtually any way, small, large, petty, profound was a fear that was justified.