A Book of American Martyrs(87)

And now, as he returned to his seat in the courtroom, he dared to look at Luther Dunphy who had been listening to his testimony with something like wonder, and yearning. Jenna steeled herself.

The priest will take his hand now. He will bless him!

But this didn’t happen. Stockard passed close by Luther Dunphy unsteady on his feet as if exhausted.


SOON AFTER THIS, the trial ended.

The defense called few witnesses, and all of these were individuals attesting to Luther Dunphy’s “character”—the most persuasive was the minister of Dunphy’s church who claimed that Luther Dunphy was the “most devout Christian” he knew, and that Luther Dunphy would not have “willingly” done any harm to any living thing.

How was it possible, then, the prosecutor asked him, that Luther Dunphy had shot two unarmed men, in cold blood, without warning?—and Reverend Kuhn said humbly that he did not know.

He’d visited Luther Dunphy in the detention house, he said. They prayed together but they didn’t talk much about what had happened—“Mostly we just pray to God for the strength to understand. We are waiting for that strength to suffuse us.”


THE TRIAL ENDED. The jury deliberated. She waited.

In the Muskegee Falls Inn, in her room on the fourth, top floor she waited.

Alone she waited. In terror of the jury’s decision she waited.

The prosecutor had assured her, there could be no verdict other than guilty. Under the law, jurors had to convict. The argument that Luther Dunphy had committed two murders as a kind of “self-defense” was unacceptable.

On the fourth morning of waiting she wakened before dawn with the sudden wish to see where Gus had died.

She had not seen the Broome County Women’s Center which was (she’d been told) a ten-minute walk from the hotel. She had not been driven past the Center. She had not requested this, and no one had offered.

Quickly she dressed, in her dark, heavy clothes, and tied a scarf around her head, and walked out along the deserted street. Main Street, Third Street, Ferry Street, Howard Avenue . . . Her eyes blurred with moisture as she tried to read the street signs in the cold air. When she saw the Women’s Center at Howard Avenue and Ventor she felt a sensation of vertigo—had her husband died for that?

The Broome County Women’s Center was slightly larger than the Huron County Women’s Center. A single-story building you would identify as a clinic or community center subsisting on public funds. Its windows had been bricked up. Graffiti had been scrawled on its walls, and inexpertly painted over. It was set back from the street in a grassless space into which litter had drifted and was partly covered by snow. She had been told that since the assassinations, and subsequent threats and vandalism at the Center resulting in a loss of staff, the Center had been “struggling” to stay open; at the front entrance was a prominent sign CLOSED.

Did CLOSED mean temporarily, or permanent? Jenna did not want to know.

She did know that Gus and the volunteer-escort Timothy Barron had been shot down in the asphalt driveway beside the Center, not at the street but nearer the parking lot at the rear.

Bravely she walked up the driveway. She was trembling badly. Her eyes were now leaking tears from the cold. The asphalt pavement was covered with a thin layer of ice and powdery snow, in some places rippled, ribbed. It was dangerous to walk here without caution. Did she dare to peer closely at the driveway, in the area where it was likely Gus had died; did she dare to pause, to stare at the ground, steeling herself to see . . .

Gus why did you come to this forlorn place? I hate you, I will never forgive you. Oh Gus.

She saw nothing beneath the ice. She wiped at her eyes, still she saw nothing. She had been imagining the figure of a man imprinted in the pavement, arms spread like the wings of an angel, a large man, Gus’s size, but she saw nothing.

She’d been imagining dark stains in the pavement. But the pavement itself was dark, beneath the ice crust. Splotches of mud. Cracks in the asphalt, through which sinewy weeds had pushed, now dead. Blown against a chain-link fence nearby was a lacework of shredded paper, debris. She had been told (Gus had told her) that the Women’s Center property was “well maintained” but this did not appear to be the case, if it had ever been. Other properties on the block were in disrepair, some were vacant. The largest property was a sprawling lumberyard. Had her husband really died here?—and another man, here? A place so empty of meaning? It did not seem possible.

Awkwardly she knelt. Not to pray but to peer more closely at the pavement. The rippled, ribbed ice obscured her vision. With a gloved hand she rubbed away snow—nothing was revealed beneath.

Inside her heavy clothes she was beginning to perspire imagining the minivan turning into the driveway and proceeding to the rear—stopping, and parking, and out of the passenger’s side Gus climbed—and out of the driver’s side Timothy Barron climbed—and there came rushing at them a man with a double-barreled shotgun, already lifting the gun, aiming and firing at their heads . . .

It had been over within seconds. The men’s lives extinguished, within seconds.

“God, don’t abandon these men. They need you, too.”

These pleading words leapt from her. She would have been embarrassed to recall afterward and soon she would forget entirely.

She returned to the hotel. She would postpone for another time a trip to 81 Shawnee Street which was the address of the one-bedroom apartment Gus had rented in Muskegee Falls, where there were belongings of his to be removed . . . She had no idea how to “remove” these belongings, she could not bear to think of it. Her brain went blank and dead at the prospect.