A Book of American Martyrs(76)
Another message clicked on the voice mail, a stranger’s voice, which Darren deleted.
“Turn it off for now, Darren. Please.”
Darren switched off the machine. The little red light vanished.
In the freezing kitchen of the rented farmhouse on Salt Hill Road which we had not ever imagined we would reenter we were waiting, we had no idea what we would do next.
“NEW IDEA”
How many times we would ask ourselves what had Gus meant by a new idea—what did this new idea have to do with the end of the school year in June?
Darren said it was obvious: Dad was planning to leave Ohio and move back to Michigan to live with us.
Naomi said, less certainly: Dad was (possibly) going to quit working in women’s centers and clinics, and become another kind of doctor (that people didn’t hate!).
Melissa said: Oh, Did Daddy have a surprise for us?
Overhearing, Jenna would say bitterly: Better for your father not to have called us at all than to have called and left that message, to fester in our hearts.
LAUGHTER
They tried to tell me you were—dead! Of course I didn’t believe it, we know how people exaggerate.
Often, she had this dream. She and Gus laughing together. Except it was the sound of a harsh wind rustling and not true laughter. Except when she could see clearly, it wasn’t Gus.
THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF OHIO V. LUTHER AMOS DUNPHY
DECEMBER 2000
Greedy and self-punishing her eyes fastened upon him. It was her strategy to sit in the Broome County Courthouse where she could observe the defendant Luther Dunphy more or less continuously yet not conspicuously for she knew (of course she knew) how others observed her.
A widow exists in the eyes of beholders. In her own eyes she is likely to be invisible.
And so she knew how they were measuring her. Is that her?—the doctor’s wife?
Or, less friendly—The abortionist’s wife?
Those individuals in the crowded courtroom who were on Gus Voorhees’s side and those who were on the side of the enemy.
Most days the defendant wore a sand-colored corduroy jacket that fitted his broad shoulders tightly though sometimes he wore a dark-hued jacket of a synthetic-seeming material like acrylic fiber. His trousers were dark and lacked a discernible crease. His shirt was white and appeared wrinkled. (Worn with a necktie most days but if without a tie, the shirt remained unbuttoned at the throat as if the collar was too tight for the man’s muscular neck.) Dunphy’s faded hair had been buzz cut like a military haircut and was sharply receding from his forehead. His negligently shaved jowls sagged. In profile she saw him. A heavy face, the face of an aged and baffled boy. Cheeks flushed and lined, dull-red blemish or birthmark in the creased skin and indentations beneath his eyes that were rigidly fixed on the judge, the witnesses, the gesticulating and quarrelsome attorneys as if he dared not glance to the side—dared not glance toward her.
If Jenna hadn’t known that on his most recent birthday Luther Dunphy was forty years old she’d have guessed that he was ten years older. His muscled-softening body was a slow landslide. His hands were a workingman’s hands, now useless. Mornings at the defense table he was able to sit reasonably straight but by mid-afternoon his shoulders began to slump, his head began to sink toward his chest. It was not possible to imagine what Dunphy was thinking as he heard, or gave the appearance of hearing, a succession of prosecution witnesses describing the shootings on the morning of November 2, 1999, and identifying him as the “lone shooter”—whether the man was righteous, defiant, indifferent, resigned. Though more than once, in the afternoon, his eyes nearly closed and a warning remark of the judge provoked Dunphy’s attorney to nudge him awake.
“Not in my courtroom, sir. Witness will continue.”
Jenna was keenly disappointed, Dunphy would not testify in his own defense. At least, that was what the Broome County prosecutor had told her.
He’d told her that no competent defense attorney would have allowed this (guilty) defendant to be cross-examined. In fact, very few witnesses would be called to testify on Luther Dunphy’s behalf while the prosecution would present more than thirty witnesses of whom most were eyewitnesses to the homicides and would describe what they’d seen with dramatic intensity.
The prosecutor had charged Luther Dunphy with two counts of first degree homicide and he was (he’d informed Jenna) determined not to settle for less: not a lesser degree of homicide, and not manslaughter.
Manslaughter!—Jenna was incensed. How could such a lesser charge even be considered.
“It won’t be manslaughter, Mrs. Voorhees. Don’t worry. The jury will vote unanimously for first degree homicide, I am certain. And if they do, they will deliberate again to decide whether to send Dunphy to prison for life without parole or to the death chamber.”
Death chamber. The archaic words evoked a shiver. As if death were waiting in a chamber, and the condemned man is made to enter the chamber. Jenna felt a flush of excitement and dread—He should die, for what he did to Gus and to that other innocent man. He does not deserve to live.
(URGENTLY SHE WAS ASKING HIM, what did he want. Did he want the man who’d killed him to die. And Gus allowed her to know, not in words precisely, for the dream was blurred as a windshield in pelting rain, that he did not want Luther Dunphy to die of course—he did not believe in the death penalty, he did not want anyone to die at the hands of the State. And she felt a rush of fury for him, for her dear lost husband, that he should be so forgiving even now, when his enemies did not care for his forgiveness and did not regret his death.)