A Book of American Martyrs(63)

Thinking again in exasperation, or in mounting alarm: it would not ever be Gus calling at this prime time of morning nor would it be a call from the children’s schools, she was sure.

She was sure!

Hearing the phone again. Nervously pushing back her chair.

Oh hell. All right. I will see what it is.

Rapidly descending the (steep, narrow, creaking) stairway, brushing her hair out of her face, daring to think This had better be worth it.


UNKNOWING. NOT-YET-KNOWING.

For the remainder of her life my mother will recall herself in those minutes suffused in wet-glistening light from a window.

She will try to reconstruct the scene. Envisioning the woman who imagines herself Gus Voorhees’s wife, annoyed with her husband, uncertain of her husband, rehearsing words with her (absent) husband while not knowing that she isn’t his wife any longer but his widow, descending the stairs to the first floor of the house.

A woman who is (not yet) a widow at 9:18 A.M. of November 2, 1999, in the old clapboard house on the Salt Hill Road.

Where we’d thought we were not so happy. Where we’d complained, whined. Flies in the walls! Only imagine.

In the kitchen my mother pauses, listening. The voice mail mechanism in the telephone has been activated. A woman whose voice she doesn’t recognize is addressing her urgently.

Mrs. Voorhees? If you are home please call us immediately. There has been an emergency. Our number is—

It is the number of the Broome County Women’s Center in Muskegee Falls, Ohio, which my mother recognizes at once.

And so quickly she picks up the receiver while the woman is speaking.

“Hello? Hello?”

“Mrs. Voorhees? Is that—you?”

“Yes of course. What is it?”

“Mrs. Voorhees—are you sitting down? Please?”

A nurse. Has to be. Someone with medical training.

Sharply my mother says yes. She is sitting down. (Though in fact, in her confusion, in mounting panic my mother is not sitting down; she is leaning onto a chair, awkwardly, one knee on the chair and her trembling body off balance.)

The voice is a distraught voice. Breathless and uncomfortably close. My mother grips the receiver tight unable to stop the hemorrhaging words.

“I’m afraid that—that—your husband has been injured—badly injured . . . Mrs. Voorhees? Are you still there?”

Through a roaring in her ears she hears herself murmur impatiently yes.

“—emergency situation, an attack—single assailant—shotgun—”

And then, somehow I was on the floor.

I was standing with the phone in my hand and I was listening and understanding every word but then came the word shotgun which I heard like a gun going off close beside my head—SHOTGUN. And I was on the floor, my head struck the counter by the sink as I fell. I was on the cold linoleum floor of a room I would not have been able to identify as a kitchen still less the kitchen of the rented house on Salt Hill Road in Huron County, Michigan; and the phone receiver was beside me swinging on its cord. I remember that I could hear a voice coming out of the receiver—a little voice. And then I was lifting myself dazed feeling the strain in my shoulders you feel when you are doing push-ups. And my head was throbbing and I was thinking—Did I faint? Is that what happened?—the first time in my life, such a thing had happened to me.

It was amazing. It was an astonishment. Relief swept over me like warm water—It isn’t so bad. Like a candle blown out. I will never be afraid of dying again.





THE ARCHIVIST INTERVIEWED


Are you Naomi Anne Voorhees, daughter of Jenna and Gus Voorhees, born in 1987 in Ann Arbor, Michigan?

Are you undertaking this “archival research” with the blessing of your mother, or is it undertaken out of pure selfishness, and desperation, to know your slain father?

If you are Naomi, and no one else, how can you claim to appropriate your mother’s voice? Her most private, fleeting thoughts?

Are you aware that your mother Jenna Matheson has refused to speak to interviewers about such private matters in the more than six years since your father’s death?

Will you acknowledge that your mother has steadfastly refused to speak to you on this subject?—that she does not care to “heave her heart into her mouth” as you have done?

Will you acknowledge that you have violated your mother’s privacy, as you have violated the privacy of your sister Melissa and your brother Darren, and others? Have you no shame?

How as a university dropout can you imagine you have the intellectual ability required to be a thorough and disinterested archivist of your father Gus Voorhees’s complicated life?

How can you claim to know what you have not personally experienced? How do you dare?

Indeed, how can you claim at the age of nineteen to recall in such detail what you’d (allegedly) experienced as a child in a time of upheaval and distress when by the account of others you’d suffered a kind of “traumatic amnesia” following your father’s death?

Do you really know even “Naomi Anne Voorhees”—or is she a desperate construct, like the others?





LAW OF EXPONENTS


Naomi.”

In seventh-grade math, first period. She is hunched over her desk fiercely concentrating on a pre-algebra math problem the teacher has written on the blackboard. Clack, clack!—the sound of chalk striking like a sharp-beaked bird against a window.