A Book of American Martyrs(71)
Debate! The kind of adult idealism you took for granted, without questioning. (Possibly) you rolled your eyes, it was so schoolteacherish. But a good kind of schoolteacherish.
Now Darren was discovering a looking-glass world where the murderers of abortion providers were honored as “heroes”—“martyrs.” These were “soldiers of God” or “soldiers of Jesus” who had traded their lives to “defend the defenseless.” These were men named Griffin, Greene, Mitchell—and now Dunphy. In the looking-glass world of the anti-abortion movement, in the glossier publications their faces were made luminous as the faces of saints.
Just ignore, Darren. There is much garbage printed, as there is much garbage in the world, which you can’t change. But you can live your life without having to know.
But was this true? His father had been mistaken in such a belief.
His parents would never have allowed him to read such material, in the days before Gus had been killed. They’d feared “brain-rot” in all their children and so had not even owned a television set. Religious propaganda, anti-Socialist and anti-Communist publications, popular pornographic magazines like Hustler—all were equally abhorrent to them though (as Darren teased) they believed in free speech, freedom of the press and opposed censorship. It had been an innocent era, Darren would one day realize, before the Internet brought the depths of the human psyche into the household—from the infinitely precious to the unspeakably filthy, soul-withering.
For what remained of the Voorhees family it was the aftermath of life. A posthumous life. There was no one to monitor a boy as shrewd, calculating, and devious as Darren. His devastated mother had become transformed into a personage acclaimed in the world as Gus Voorhees’s widow—the more ravaged Jenna appeared, the more of a martyr. The effort of performing as Gus Voorhees’s widow required all her strength and so she had little time for such petty concerns as censoring her children’s reading materials and she was not often in close proximity to her teenaged son in any case.
He was sickened by the anti-abortion propaganda but mesmerized as well. Where other boys his age were discovering pornography Darren had discovered a very special pornography just for him.
It was like touching himself—his genitals. He did not want to, such weakness disgusted him, but in his half-sleep he found himself doing so, his hand moved of its own eager volition. And in his private hiding places for reading forbidden material his fingers moved of their own perverse volition turning pages.
Like refuse bobbing in water, the celebration of his father’s murder went on and on. Like excrement, among the refuse. Who could have predicted, there would be so much rejoicing?—so many strangers with strong opinions? Individuals who had (evidently) (without knowing him) detested Gus Voorhees and rejoiced in his murder.
And all of them self-identified Christians, rejoicing in the deaths of abortion doctors.
Of course, there had been other deaths—“executions” as they were called. Voorhees was only the most recent triumph.
And since Voorhees’s death, and the removal of his name from WANTED: BABY KILLERS AMONG US, the abortion doctors listed below him had been moved up. At number four, where Voorhees had been, was a Dr. Friedlander aligned with an abortion clinic in Tallahassee.
The list was an invitation to “execute.” Darren wondered if Friedlander and the others knew about it, and if they monitored the anti-abortion sites. Probably, yes. For how could they resist?
Yet, his father had insisted that he did not look at these publications. He had (surely) not allowed Jenna to look. (But Jenna would not have wished to look.) But now, Darren was alone. No one to observe.
There was a particular fascination with the murderer—Luther Dunphy.
His father’s murderer! His mouth went dry.
Luther Dunphy, 39. Muskegee Falls, Ohio. Lay minister, St. Paul Missionary Church of Jesus. Roofer, carpenter. Wife Edna Mae, two sons and two daughters. Formerly of Sandusky, Ohio. “Pray for me.”
In these pictures Dunphy was smiling faintly, shyly. He had the guarded look of a man who does not smile often or easily. In one picture taken outdoors on a summer day he stood with his family—wife, children. The scrawny grinning wife held a baby in her arms. The elder of two daughters, thick-set, plain-faced, about ten years old, smirked at the camera. There was a thin-faced boy—in the photo, about Darren’s age. Darren felt a thrill of sheer hatred for this boy, whose father was alive and not dead.
Luther Dunphy was a tall hulking slope-shouldered man who in several photographs wore a baseball cap pulled low over his forehead. His head appeared small in proportion to his body. His upper arms were muscled. His face did not suggest the face of a murderer and was in fact a face of no distinction except that on his cheek was a discoloration like a mashed red berry.
Staring at Dunphy, Darren felt hatred like black acid rising at the back of his mouth. It filled him with rage, that his father’s murderer was still alive and that, in some quarters, among avid Christians, Dunphy was revered as a kind of hero, a “soldier of Jesus” and a “martyr.”
Luther Dunphy is currently incarcerated in the Muskegee Falls Men’s Detention as police investigate the alleged shootings attributed to him. So far, Dunphy is said to have “cooperated” with the investigation. There have not yet been discovered any co-conspirators in the alleged shootings. Dunphy is not available for interviews and has indicated that he will refuse most requests. The Broome County Court has appointed a lawyer to represent him but Luther Dunphy is said to have declined legal counsel. Through his minister Reverend Dennis Kuhn of the St. Paul Missionary Church of Jesus, Muskegee Falls, Dunphy has stated that he does not consider his alleged actions of November 2, 1999, “murder” or “homicide” but “an act of God” as he was “defending the defenseless”—he was preventing the abortion-doctor Voorhees from performing abortions “that day and all days to follow.”