A Book of American Martyrs(98)

For at this time, Mawmaw was a loving mother. She was a young mother, not thirty years old. With her pregnancies she had gained as much as twenty pounds filling out her hips, her breasts, her cheeks. Her face was a plain-pretty face round as a dinner plate and the faint creases at the corners of her mouth were the result of eager smiles, for as a young mother, and a young wife, and a young daughter-in-law hopeful of making a good impression on her husband’s parents, Edna Mae was one aiming to please. Her skin was naturally rosy.

But she was a shy young girl. Even as a woman, she remained a girl. There were some things you did not speak of, not even between husband and wife, and certainly you did not speak of such things to your children, as you would not (comfortably) speak of such things to your own parents. And so now deeply embarrassed, not meeting her daughter’s eye, Edna Mae told Dawn in a lowered voice that the women did not actually kill their babies that had been born but rather their babies that had not yet been born.

“How’d they do that,” Dawn demanded with incredulous laughter. “Where’s the baby at if it isn’t born?”

With great awkwardness Edna Mae tried to explain to her that a baby was inside its mother’s belly before it was born. (For hadn’t Dawn seen Aunt Noreen’s fat old momma cat Smoky who was “bulging” with kittens half the time? It was like that.) A baby was inside its mother’s belly for nine months before it was born and at any time before that, it could be injured if its mother was injured or (Edna Mae could scarcely bring herself to utter such words) did something to herself, to her belly, to the baby in her belly, that caused it to die.

Dawn stood very still. Dawn heard these astonishing words without quite registering all of them, just yet.

Slowly as if she were groping her way in a darkened room Edna Mae said that—she believed— these mothers did not really understand that a baby was being killed. The women—(oh, some of them were mere girls!)—believed that they would be causing to die something that was not a baby but—(Edna Mae was unclear about this)—some little stunted thing like a kitten that does not have a soul.

This too was perplexing to Dawn. For why’d anybody want to kill a kitten?

Edna Mae hesitated not knowing if she should reveal that many people (including Dawn’s Dunphy grandfather up in Mad River) got rid of unwanted kittens—and puppies—all the time because, well—they did not want them; but she decided not to tell her already agitated daughter this fact, Dawn would learn all too soon for herself.

Edna Mae said that the women—and girls—did not want to be burdened with children because they did not want to give up their selfish lives and because (she thought) they did not actually understand that a baby is a living soul from God if nobody had explained to them.

Also, they did not want a baby for reasons of having to work, or for reasons of money; or because they were not married, and did not want to raise a child alone; or because they were not married and were ashamed to be having a child alone, without a father, or a husband . . .

“Wait,” Dawn protested. “How’d they have a baby if there wasn’t no father?”

Now Edna Mae was deeply embarrassed. She’d been glancing away from Dawn toward the kitchen doorway as if expecting that someone would step through and interrupt the exchange.

Dawn did not know exactly how mothers and fathers brought forth babies. From sly remarks made by her brother, and by other boys, she knew that there was something forbidden about it, that only grown-ups would know, and that it might be wrong to ask. But she had to ask her mother how a baby could be, if there was not a father. That did not make sense!

But Edna Mae was flushing crimson, and could not speak.

Dawn demanded, “Then why wouldn’t Jesus stop them?”

Edna Mae glanced again wincingly toward the doorway. But no one had appeared.

Reluctantly she said, “Well—Jesus stops some of them. The bad women. Jesus punishes them. After getting rid of their babies they are never right in their minds again, can’t have babies when they want to have babies, and are ninety percent more likely than other women to—to die of . . .”

“What, Mawmaw? Die of—what?”

Edna Mae could not bring herself to murmur the awful words aloud but leaned down, to whisper in the rapt child’s ear what sounded to Dawn like breath cancer, and cancer of the worm.


YEARS LATER after Dawn’s father had been arrested and taken from them and no one in Muskegee Falls was talking of anything else than what Luther Dunphy had done in the driveway of the Broome County Women’s Center on an ordinary weekday morning Dawn would ask her mother again why Jesus let such things happen and Edna Mae would say that that was why their father had acted as he had: to stop innocent babies from being killed.

“There was no one else to act for Jesus. Only your father.” Edna Mae paused as if searching for more words then said in a breathless exhalation: “‘This—this day you shall be with me in Paradise.’”

What did these words mean? Did Edna Mae even know? They had burst from her like something long pent-up.

She was not the young Mawmaw of just a few years before but a worn and anxious woman with tremors in both eyelids and in both hands. Because she could not sleep at night otherwise Dr. Hills prescribed for her a certain kind of pill—Oxie-con-tin—that made her sleepy much of the time and, when she was not sleepy, agitated and short-tempered. It would seem to Dawn that, when her daddy shot the two baby killer men in the driveway across town, he had somehow shot Mawmaw too; you would hear of such accidents when men were hunting out in the fields, how a spray of bird shot would (somehow) strike another hunter though (the shooter would claim) he had not aimed anywhere near. Accounts afterward were always vehement—such misfirings were accidental. No one was to blame for they were accidental. And now often in the midst of talking, even in the midst of eating a meal the older children had prepared, their distracted mother might cease talking and slip into a light doze, embarrassing to behold, her eyelids shutting, and her mouth easing open like a fish’s mouth agape.