A Book of American Martyrs

  DEDICATION

  For Chase Twichell

  and Russell Banks,

  and

  for my husband

  and first reader,

  Charlie Gross

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  SOLDIER OF GOD: LUTHER AMOS DUNPHY: NOVEMBER 2, 1999 Muskegee Falls, Ohio

  Turns

  The Miracle of the Little Hand

  Defending the Defenseless

  The Lost Daughter

  Sin

  The Calling

  A Soldier of Christ

  THE LIFE AND DEATH OF GUS VOORHEES: AN ARCHIVE Abortionist’s Daughter

  Memory, Undated

  Memory, Undated: Flying Glass

  “Rot in Hell”

  Interview(s)

  Revenge

  “Evil”—“Heaven”

  Special Surgery

  “Would Daddy Hurt Me?”

  “Adopted”

  The White Box

  “So Clumsy”

  “A Baby Killer Lives in Your Neighborhood”

  Application, University of Michigan School of Arts and Sciences

  “False Alarm”: June 1997

  “No Good Deed Goes Unpunished”: A Personal Testimony, August 2006

  Jigsaw

  “Like a Candle Blown Out”

  The Archivist Interviewed

  Law of Exponents

  “Remains”

  Rejoice!

  Children of the Deceased

  Voice Mail

  “New Idea”

  Laughter

  The People of the State of Ohio v. Luther Amos Dunphy: December 2000

  “Mistrial”: Widow of the Deceased

  “Mistrial”: Children of the Deceased

  “Just for You”

  “No More”

  The Ant

  THE HAMMER: DECEMBER 18, 2000–MARCH 4, 2006 Broome County Courthouse: December 18, 2000

  “This Day You Shall Be With Me in Paradise”

  The Christian Girl

  Trial

  The Great Tribulation: September 2001

  Verdict

  Sentence

  Bad News

  Mud Time

  The Stay

  Lethal

  Unclean

  Holy Innocents

  Death Warrant

  THE EMBRACE: MARCH 2006–MARCH 2010 Autoimmune

  Alone

  Aftershock

  Hatefuge

  “Emptiness”: January 2007

  “Unwanted”—“Wanted”

  “Hammer of Jesus”: March 2008–February 2009

  “Jesus Is Lord”

  THE CONSOLATION OF GRIEF: SEPTEMBER 2011–FEBRUARY 2012 “True Subject”

  Muskegee Falls, Ohio: September 2011

  Katechay Island: October 2011

  Fight Night, Cincinnati: November 2011

  Family

  The Consolation of Grief: February 2012

  About the Author

  Also by Joyce Carol Oates

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  SOLDIER OF GOD:

  LUTHER AMOS DUNPHY

  NOVEMBER 2, 1999

  MUSKEGEE FALLS, OHIO

  Only say the word and my soul shall be healed.

  The Lord commanded me. In all that befell, it was His hand that did not waver.

  Cries rang out—“Stand back!”

  It was Voorhees at whom the shotgun was first aimed. The abortion doctor in a hoarse voice sternly saying, “Stand back! Put down that gun!”

  And others crying, “No! No!”

  So swiftly the Lord executed my movements, there was not time in the eyes of the enemy to register fear or alarm. There was no terror but only raw surprise. As I strode into the driveway in the wake of the abortion providers’ Dodge minivan with the shotgun to my shoulder and barrels uplifted there were many who stared at me in astonishment and awe for protesters had been forbidden by law to assemble in the driveway as for several years we had been forbidden to assemble with our picket signs or even in prayer in the grassless yard in front of the Broome County Women’s Center and yet here was one of these, of the Army of God, who some of them knew to be Luther Dunphy, disobeying this law boldly striding past the barrier and following the abortion providers’ minivan up the driveway faster than you would expect a man of his size to move, and without hesitation.

  God guide my hand! God do not allow me to fail.

  The one of the enemy known as Augustus Voorhees had just climbed out of the van. It was 7:26 A.M. The Women’s Center did not open to admit the clientele (that is, pregnant girls and women who believed they did not wish to become mothers) until 8:00 A.M. The abortion doctor (of my height almost exactly which is six foot one inch and his disheveled graying hair resembling my own) had thought to arrive early to avoid protesters and to enter at the rear of the Center but in his shrewdness there was folly, for the Muskegee Falls police security did not usually arrive until 7:30 A.M. (and sometimes later) and by the time police were summoned on this morning, his life would bleed away like the life of a gut-shot hog. Nor had Voorhees seen me less than six feet close behind him and rapidly overtaking him until a look in his companion’s face roused him to turn with an expression of utter surprise and shock.

  “No! Stand back! Don’t—”

  Already in this instant the trigger was being pulled, the barrels aimed at the abortion doctor at above the level of his chest, and the blast of the first barrel knocked Augustus Voorhees backward and tore into his lower jaw and throat in a way terrible to behold as if the Lord had dealt His wrath with a single smote of a great claw; for shrewdly I had aimed high, not knowing if the abortion murderer was wearing a bulletproof vest. (Later it was revealed that Voorhees was not so protected—in defiance of the fate that would befall him.) Yet even so, in the midst of this deafening explosion, the Lord steadied my hands as calmly I turned the barrels onto the accomplice “escort” close by now screaming, “No! No! Don’t shoot!” in clumsy desperation trying to back away and with arms and hands feebly shielding his body but these words came belated, and were no more heeded than the cries of the black-feathered birds flocking in the winter sky overhead as the second shot blasted away the face and much of the throat of the accomplice propelling the now-lifeless body backward as the lifeless body of Voorhees had been propelled, and these bodies crumpled together on the asphalt driveway in front of the van freely gushing blood—within seconds, as the Lord had willed.

  In the ecstasy of the Lord coursing through my arms and hands like electricity I scarcely felt the recoil of the blast as it struck my shoulder like the kick of a mule, only the numbness that came after, and an ache deep in the bone.

  “God have mercy! God forgive you. . . .”

  These words, I had prepared to murmur as I crouched above the fallen sinner (for I believed that Voorhees would die unrepentant) but at the time of utterance it may have been that I spoke too softly to be heard above the scattered cries and screams behind me.

  Few had witnessed the execution. For it was early in the day, and less than a dozen protesters had gathered in front of the Center.

  So slowly, these seconds were passing. For it was as if Luther Dunphy stood a little to the side, observing. What he saw and what he heard came mutedly to him from that distance.

  Calmly too, for all this the Lord had set out before me like a geological map, that has not the confusion of place-names of an ordinary map but only the sculpted contours of the land, I laid the Mossberg twelve-gauge double-barrel shotgun carefully on the driveway on a little rise of asphalt with cracks perpendicular to each other, that suggested to the eye—(to my eye)—the Cro
ss.

  Some twelve feet from the fallen men, and from the weapon (laid against the Cross), and at a perpendicular to the weapon, I knelt.

  Between the fallen men and the weapon, and between the weapon and Luther Dunphy, and between Luther Dunphy and the fallen men, in a line might be drawn establishing a triangle of (uneven) sides and at its peak the Cross of Crucifixion you would want to say was accidental in the asphalt and would never have been detected by any human eye, except for the intervention of the Lord guiding my hand.

  I am a big man and I am (no longer) a limber man. My knee joints often ache, it is said with the onset of arthritis. The bones of my hips and the muscles of my lower back often ache but in defiance of such pain I never complain to my employer nor to my fellow roofers nor do I suggest any sensation of pain on the job or at home (except if my dear wife notices, and it is not possible to dissemble to her who knows me so well through sixteen years of marriage) and in the aftermath now of the assassination of the abortion provider and his accomplice I took care to kneel with my arms uplifted (though now heavy-seeming, tremulous and numb) to await the arrival of the Muskegee police.

  Dear God I commend my soul to You. If it is Your will, I will be joined with you in Heaven this very hour.

  Bowed my head with shut eyes, and eyes rimmed with tears. For I understood that my (mortal) life as Luther Dunphy had ended, in the asphalt driveway of the Women’s Center on this second day of November 1999. My life as a loving Christian husband and father and a private citizen of Muskegee Falls, Ohio. That I was born in Sandusky, Ohio, on March 6, 1960, and would die now, in this place, seemed to me clear for I had “read” this inscription on a grave marker but the night before. The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.

  In deep prayer they would find me with my arms upraised in the posture of surrender and my hands visible, holding no weapon. Deep-immersed in prayer “as if entranced” but “cooperative” (as it would be reported) as Broome County police officers approached with drawn weapons.

  And in my heart I pleaded with the Lord to give me sanctuary with Him in this hour. Pleaded with the Lord, let me make an end of this now. For I will be their captive, and I will be tried in their socialist atheist court of law, that has forsaken You. And I will be jeered at and ridiculed and in the end, in their atheist court I will be sentenced to death. But it will be their way of death which will not be speedy. Truly I understand it will be protracted and shameful and it may be, I will not be strong enough to withstand despair. For a sentence of Death Row will wear away at my soul, in the way that a great abyss is worn out of rock. Pleaded with the Lord in His mercy to allow me to make some threatening gesture to the police upon their arrival, that they would shoot me down where I knelt. That they would execute me in a barrage of bullets that there would be three of us laid lifeless on the asphalt driveway on that morning as a sign to all the world, the abortion butchery must stop.

  But the Lord did not give this permission to me, in His inscrutable wisdom. Though the Lord had been close to me as the heart beating in my rib cage now the Lord had withdrawn from me to His mountain, to observe His servant and His soldier in the aftermath of His mission.

  And so, I did not die that morning. Instead, the Lord caused a numbness to pass into me, of utter submission. I was handcuffed and taken into the custody of the State of Ohio from which, in my lifetime, I will never be released.

  TURNS

  A life is a matter of turns. As I call them.

  A turn is a sudden surprise. As if your shoulders are gripped from behind and you are forcibly turned to see something hidden to you, until that moment.

  A turn, and you are never the same again. “The scales fell from my eyes.” Though all who know you will swear that it is but you whom (they believe) they know.

  Ten days before the execution of Voorhees it was “pure chance” that I’d arrived at the Women’s Center several minutes earlier than my usual time of arrival, which is approximately between 7:45 A.M. and 8:00 A.M. But this day, there was less traffic on the highway than usual, it seemed, and so when I arrived and parked in the street, there was but one other protester in front of the Center, who was a familiar face to me, a man of about ten years older than me (I was soon to become thirty-nine), but I did not know his full name only “Stockard”—which might have been his first name, or his surname. There was a look about this man of dignity and determination that made you think he was a man of God but (maybe) a Catholic priest not wearing his priest clothes. Or, as it happens sometimes, a former priest. As I am, not a former minister but a former lay minister in the St. Paul Missionary Church of Jesus. And we greeted each other like friends, but cautious friends, for I am not one to shake hands and am wary of the “glad-handed” (as they are called), and we fell to talking quietly (as others were arriving, singly and in pairs—we stood a little apart) and he told me that the abortion doctor Voorhees was already inside the Center. Voorhees had arrived before 7:30 A.M. being driven in a van by the “escort” (to his shame, this volunteer at the Broome County Women’s Center was retired U.S. Army Major Timothy Barron, fifty-eight years old) and taken to the rear of the building to park out of sight of the street. The staff (all of them women of whom several are “registered nurses”) employed or volunteering at the Center will arrive before 8:00 A.M. and it is at 8:00 A.M. when the first of the mothers begin to arrive and by then, the police security have arrived, usually between 7:30 A.M. and 7:45 A.M. But this day, the police security (which consists of two Muskegee Falls officers who remain in or near their vehicle unless there is cause for them to approach the Center) did not arrive until 7:51 A.M.

  Carefully I asked of my comrade, “Did he mean that the abortion doctor will arrive here sometimes so many minutes before the police guards?”—and Stockard said yes, he believed that was more so lately than it had been.

  He said, “Voorhees gets here early so that he can be safe inside before the doors open.”

  There was a quiet sort of fury in his uttering of Voorhees.

  Voorhees was the (new) director of the Center who had come here in July 1999 from his work as an abortion provider in Michigan. We knew of him that he had long been associated with Planned Parenthood and that he was a medical doctor whose specialty was obstetrics and gynecology. He had come to Muskegee Falls following the resignation of the previous (female) director who had headed the Center for just seven months.

  For a brief while, it had seemed possible that the Broome County Women’s Center would be closed down. Our campaign was to discourage and discredit all who were associated with the Center. Some had suggested burning down the Center—(but I was not one of these, at the time). But there came “Augustus Voorhees” whose reputation was such, his name was prominent on the WANTED: BABY KILLERS AMONG US list posted in newsletters including the ARMY OF GOD Sentinel.

  At this time in October 1999, Voorhees was number three on the list. Until the assassination of the abortion provider Paul Erich, in Livingston, Kentucky, by Shaun Harris, six weeks before, Voorhees had been number four.

  As murderers are removed from the list, others move up.

  Currently there are nineteen names on the WANTED list of which all are (male) medical doctors who have betrayed their mission to do no harm.

  There has been much agitation in the (socialist, atheist) media to “censor” the ARMY OF GOD website. Demands that the WANTED: BABY KILLERS AMONG US list be taken down. But it is our First Amendment right under the U.S. Constitution—freedom of speech.

  As it is our right as U.S. citizens to bear arms.

  The Army of God understands that each abortion murderer who is assassinated means the saving of infants’ lives. If Voorhees could be struck down, the babies that were to be murdered by his hand and by other abortion doctors in emulation of him would have another chance at life.

  For each day there were between fifteen and twenty infants slain in the Muskegee Center alone by the abortionist’s instruments (by our estimate). These terrible numbers yo
u could multiply by the many abortion providers through the United States—on some days, there are hundreds of deaths!

  It is sickening that a single infant should die in such a way, and indeed, if there were but one single death, any Christian would be compelled to rise up in protest.

  In the way that my comrade uttered the name Voorhees, all this disgust and outrage was communicated.

  That morning, I did not inquire further about the arrival time of the abortion doctor Voorhees. I did not betray to my comrade any special interest or concern. I am not a man for whom speech comes readily and my instinct is to protect another, it is my habit as a husband and father. In the event that I acted upon the information that Stockard provided, I did not want this innocent man to be arrested by police as an accessory to any action of my own, for it is well known, as our leaders have warned us, not to involve others in our actions in any way for the police will cast a wide net to accuse, vilify, and punish the innocent, beginning with our families and extending to other protesters. Instead, I took up my picket sign as if this were any other morning in my life though there was a powerful buzzing in my head, for very joy I could not think clearly.

  God had sent me a personal message, which it was not possible to ignore or misinterpret—The murderer is not protected! He is vulnerable.

  TO MY SHAME, I had not (yet) the strength to confront this turn. By the end of the morning, when I left the vigil at the Women’s Center, to drive to my workplace, the sensation of joy had vanished and I was left agitated, and “jumpy”—I was trying not to think of that.

  For some days, it was that. Like something floating in my eye, that was not “real” and yet distracting. So that, when you stare at something, it is the miniature floating rod that you are trying not to see, yet cannot not-see.

  That. The possibility that the Lord God, Who has spoken to others and has shown the way in which His will might be fulfilled in the world of humankind, might have spoken at last to me—this was terrifying to me, for it could not be shared with anyone, even my dear wife.