A Book of American Martyrs Page 11

  “Though I remain in contact with Luther Dunphy, currently incarcerated at Chillicothe Correctional Facility, Chillicothe, Ohio, I am not in a position to provide any sort of information about him, or to convey remarks made by him, to any third party or to the media. It is true, I am involved in the Luther Dunphy Defense Fund, which welcomes donations to aid in Luther’s appeal to the Ohio State Supreme Court—checks, money orders, cash. As little as a few dollars, as much as several hundred—or thousand . . . All are welcome, and greatly appreciated in the name of Jesus.”

  A SOLDIER OF CHRIST

  Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image.

  Through the long night these words sounded in my ears. Several times I started from sleep, believing that I had heard these words of Genesis in our bedroom, in our bed in a hoarse and grave voice not recognizable to me. And that Edna Mae who slept her fitful sweating sedated sleep beside me would be wakened too, having heard.

  For at last it was the early morning of November 2 which by certain signs of God had been decreed to be the day of execution.

  “Lord, I will do Your bidding. If this is Your wish.”

  Whoever sheds the blood of man . . . The abortionist-murderer has shed the blood not of men but of unborn babies. His just punishment will be that another will shed his blood in a public place, that all the world will gaze upon him fallen and defeated.

  I had no doubt this was God’s wish. But it was a slow matter for me to accept that this was God’s wish for Luther Dunphy to enact.

  In the ministry school in Toledo, in the library I had read, or tried to read, A Book of Martyrs by the Englishman John Foxe. It was a very old book of the 1500s (so long ago a time, I could not imagine what sorts of people lived then) that had been “updated” for the modern reader. The book was not easy reading, even so. These depictions of the torture-deaths and martyrdoms of Protestant Christians in opposition to the “Roman papacy” were difficult for me to read for more than a few minutes at a time. I was left feeling weak and anxious not knowing why at that time.

  Yet now, it was clear that God had been guiding me then. Like one who is blindfolded, led by another’s hand in utter trust and faithfulness.

  I would feel a thrill of pride, I thought, that one day the distinguished Professor Wohlman would project a photograph of Luther Dunphy up on a screen, and speak admiringly of me to a large audience as a martyr in the cause.

  I had not the slightest doubt that I would be arrested, and tried for murder, if I was successful in my mission. As others before me had done, most recently Terence Mitchell who’d been tried and found guilty, sentenced to prison in northern Wisconsin without the possibility of parole.

  Pray for our brave martyrs, and pray for ourselves, that we have the strength to act as we must, when we must.

  I was not a brave or courageous soldier for the cause. At meetings of Operation Rescue, I sat silent and downlooking while others spoke with passion. At all times since Stockard had confided in me I was very frightened and could not cease hoping that the Lord would change His plans for me and release me back into my ordinary life.

  Your own daughter, the murderer would strike in her mother’s womb if he had been able.

  Sometimes it seemed, when my mind was tired and confused, in the worst hours of the night, that our beloved Daphne had been struck down on the highway by the abortionist-murderers and not by an unknown driver of a pickup truck. (And in my mind it had come to seem that the pickup truck had struck my car, or that my car had slammed into the pickup.) And so it seemed, executing the abortionist-murderer Voorhees was intended by God as a way of exacting justice for our daughter.

  Another time it seemed to me, I felt the touch of the Little Hand on my arm; and when I opened my eyes to see—(for I was half-asleep with tiredness)—it was but a memory of Daphne as a little girl, clutching at my arm—Dad-dee!

  Many days had passed as in a trance. Since Stockard had confided in me that the abortion doctor had now the custom of arriving early at the Center, before the police guards. For there seemed no refutation of that—why otherwise would God have sent me such information? Other signs had been sent to me, I could not equally deny. Three nights ago on The Tom McCarthy Hour which Edna Mae and I sometimes watch together there was a fierce discussion of “the shame and outrage” of abortion and pictures of “abortionist-murderers” were displayed on the screen—six faces and names known to me from the WANTED: BABY KILLERS AMONG US list, and among these Augustus Voorhees.

  It was a surprise to see this. On the TV screen Voorhees looked like any other man. It was shocking to me, you would not pick him out in the street to be an emissary of Satan.

  In the set of his features Voorhees reminded me of one of the roofers in our crew who was always cheerful, or tried to give that impression. Always he called to me—Luth! How’s it going, man?—as if he did not expect an answer beyond a smile and a shrug, that was enough for him. Voorhees was somewhat older than Sam, at age forty-six. In the picture Voorhees was frowning, and serious, and had a look (it seemed to me) of sadness, and guilt.

  I felt a stir of excitement, and terrible unease. Recalling my reluctance as a boy to pull the trigger, sighting a deer in the scope of my rifle, while my uncle and others chided me for my slowness.

  On TV Tom McCarthy was furious. His uplifted voice seemed to be aimed at me. Baby killers he was saying. Outrage, slaughter of innocents. Abortion-mill clinics, Planned Parenthood spreading promiscuity . . . It was not surprising, he said, that Christians were beginning to rise up to strike at the enemy, not just to picket and protest outside the abortion clinics but to take more courageous means.

  Carefully, Tom McCarthy did not utter the words assassination, execution. He did not utter the words soldier, Army of God, Operation Rescue.

  With mock mourning Tom McCarthy spoke of an abortion provider who’d been shot down in Kentucky six weeks before, by a man named Shaun Harris—“Think of it this way: the doctor wasn’t killed, only just terminated in the third trimester.”

  Now a picture of Shaun Harris appeared on the screen. He was a solid-bodied man of about forty with a rifle gripped in his right hand, the stock resting on his thigh and the barrel aimed upward.

  Then, in quick succession photographs of Michael Griffin, Lionel Greene, and Terence Mitchell.

  Each of the photographs had been taken outdoors. The men were unsmiling, grim, squinting into the sun. Griffin was bare-headed, the others wore work hats. Tom McCarthy reported that all were serving life sentences in maximum security prisons.

  He went on to speak of Harris, Griffin, Greene, and Mitchell as soldiers in an undeclared war. While he did not openly condone their civil disobedience (he said) yet it was clear that he admired them, very much.

  “It’s a pathetic, cowardly pseudo-socialist country in which the heroic men who take the moral law into their own hands are ‘murderers’ while cold-blooded ‘murderers’ are—your friendly local ‘abortion-providers.’”

  Tom McCarthy spoke with a sneer. I felt a thrill of hope, that McCarthy might one day approve of me.

  But now there came onto the screen a picture of a rose-colored gravestone that had been purchased by the Pro-Life Action League of Simcoe, Illinois, and placed in a cemetery there, to commemorate the deaths of more than seven hundred babies “made to perish” by abortion in a single year—

  HOLY INNOCENTS

  PREBORN CHILDREN OF GOD

  Jan. 1–Dec. 31, 1997

  When the TV shifted to an advertisement I felt great relief. Edna Mae had been staring at the screen, and at the gravestone, with a quivering intensity.

  I knew she was thinking of our daughter’s gravestone in the little cemetery behind our church, that was not much more than an open field, with few graves there at this time, as the St. Paul Missionary Church of Muskegee Falls had only been founded in 1983. And our congregation, as Reverend Dennis likes to boast, is a young and vigorous congregation
brimming with health.

  “What do you think of those men, who have ‘taken the moral law into their own hands’ and shot the abortion doctors?”—for suddenly it seemed crucial to me, I must ask Edna Mae this question.

  The word abortion sounded strange on my lips. I had not ever uttered this ugly word aloud, and certainly would not have uttered such an ugly word to my dear wife, except under these circumstances.

  For I understood that my time was rapidly running out.

  For I recalled now a remark made by my grandfather on his eighty-eighth birthday that was not self-pitying, but kindly, and smiling—Well. Guess the old man’s time is running out, eh?

  Edna Mae turned her eyes to me, blinking slowly. I saw that her eyes were damp and slightly bloodshot and at the corners of her mouth was a chalky substance. She had not changed from her soiled flannel bathrobe that day. The older children and I had prepared our evening meal, which Edna Mae had barely eaten.

  I had to think, after I was gone Edna Mae would shake herself awake, and stop taking those pills that were eating away at her soul. For I could not plead with her any more than I had done, and I could not force her to stop. But if I departed, and was not always here in the house to oversee the children, and to buy groceries, Edna Mae would revert to her former self, I believed. For Jesus would guide her.

  No doubt, it was surprising to my dear wife that I would ask such a question of her since it was not like me to ask such questions of anyone. In a slow voice she said:

  “I think—I think of how terrible it is—for their wives and mothers and their children if they have children . . . I think that there are many lives that are ended when a man is a soldier for Christ—not just the abortion-doctors’ lives.”

  It was surprising to me too, that my wife should speak in this way, seriously, as if she had given the question some thought.

  Adding then, “It is not for us to judge. We are to anoint the feet of the martyr, that is all.”

  LAY YOUR LIFE ON THE LINE for Jesus.

  Through the long night lying with eyes open to the faint light from a window in darkness and heart beating quickly in dread of what I must do. My fingertips caressed the rough scar on my side, between my ribs where Felice Sipper had sunk her little jackknife blade, as often I caressed that scar, and another on my thigh, to give a kind of comfort in the night. Many times swallowing, or trying to swallow—my mouth was very dry.

  So shivering and restless through the night, though I was badly sweating also, I had to creep from the room to use the bathroom several times. For there was something pinching my bladder causing me to urinate in hot, frothing spurts and the smell of my urine sharp and metallic.

  I feared that my bowels would turn to water, scalding. No shame like the shame of losing control of his bowels, when a soldier has embarked upon a sacred mission.

  Finally at 5:20 A.M. rising from bed as quietly as I could.

  “This will be the final time. My final night in this bed.”

  A kind of wonder came upon me, at this realization. And yet I did not touch my lips to my dear wife’s forehead for fear of waking her and disturbing her.

  It was a strange remark that Edna Mae had made the other evening. There was this side to my wife, that surprised me. As when I would learn that she had sometimes visited the grave of our little girl, without telling me and without having asked me to come with her.

  But Edna Mae had no suspicion of my plans. If she’d had, she would certainly have tried to stop me.

  Slow then like a man in a dream closing the door to that room.

  Slow then in the hall. Saying good-bye to the children: in the boys’ room Luke and Noah asleep in their bed, in the girls’ room Dawn and Anita. And there was one other—so it seemed to me, for a moment.

  Thank you God, for these children. I have been blessed.

  Such love I felt for them! Such regret, I would not ever be their Dad-dee again but instead a man who had chosen another life and would become a stranger to them, in the service of the Lord.

  Descending silently two flights of stairs into the basement to prepare.

  NO MORE DREADED HOUR than the hour to come.

  I had laid out my clothes the night before, in the basement. Recalling the previous summer at J.C. Penney where I’d bought the children sneakers and for myself, for some reason I could not then have named, a khaki-colored long-sleeved T-shirt that had seemed to me a soldier’s shirt, and khaki trousers with deep pockets on both legs in which I could carry ammunition if required.

  “Would you like to try those on?”—so the saleswoman asked of me, in a friendly way. But I told her that was not necessary, the trousers were in my size according to the label.

  Edna Mae had used to laugh at me, that my clothes were sometimes of sizes too large for me. Since childhood, this had been so, for my mother had not wanted to be all the time buying me new clothes, and so purchased clothing large enough for me to “grow into”—which seemed very reasonable to me.

  Later, when I lived by myself, I kept the same habits. For it has never seemed to me to feel right, if clothes are a “fit.”

  I smiled to recall that afternoon with the children. It was rare for us to be alone together in such a way. The saleswoman asked their names and proudly I told them—“Luke—and Dawn—and Noah—and Anita . . .” And another time, it seemed to me that there was someone missing, that took my breath away so that the saleswoman waited for me to continue to speak and the children were made uncomfortable.

  But they’d been well behaved at the mall. Not like those children who run wild, screaming and colliding with shoppers.

  They would wear their new sneakers home, and I would take the old sneakers home in boxes. The sneakers were bright-colored.

  Thanks, Daddy! These’re cool.

  Then, I took them for ice cream. It was almost 5:00 P.M. Edna Mae was not to know. It is a precious sly thing, to have a secret from the children’s mother.

  I realized then, I had seen in a dream-vision my own grave marker, the night before. It was confused in my memory with the grave of the Holy Innocents Preborn Children of God in the cemetery in Illinois but I had seen it clearly—Luther Amos Dunphy 1960—but then, I had not seen the date of my death. Instead of a numeral engraved in the stone there was a blur.

  And so I had known, God would not relent. God would direct me to the execution. It would be done, there was no turning back.

  The Mossberg shotgun, that my grandfather had left to me years ago, I had also prepared the night before. This heavy gun I had not fired in twelve years I had cleaned, but I had not yet loaded. For even so recently I had thought, God might relent. Also, you must never keep a loaded weapon in a household with children.

  Hands so shaky, fingers so numb I could hardly fit the shells inside.

  Such moisture in my eyes, I could not see clearly. A moment’s panic at the thought that, at the crucial instant, I would not be able to see my target clearly.

  Recalling how when I had hunted with my father, uncles, and cousins in the woods outside Sandusky, and had been so eager to keep up with the men, and so fearful of their scorn, I had more than once misfired this very shotgun and sent buckshot into an open field missing the target—in that case, a pheasant.

  Other times, I had hoped to bring down a deer with a rifle shot. But I had only (once) wounded the animal, and had been badly shaken by the sight. Mostly, I had not fired at all.

  To aim at, to shoot at, a human being standing only a few yards away—God, help me! God give me strength.

  By this time I was trembling so badly, I could barely maneuver the zipper of my black nylon jacket.

  At last ascending the stairs to the kitchen, and switching on the overhead light. This too for the last time! On the refrigerator were crayon drawings by the younger children, I had not really seen before—giraffe, elephant, tiger. (Whose were these? Anita’s? Why these animals? Suddenly, I wanted so badly to know.) And there the linoleum floor worn thin at the sink and a
t the table, I had promised Edna Mae I would replace, but had not.

  Hurriedly drinking from a quart milk container. I could not risk any food, even cereal, for fear that I would become nauseated.

  My black nylon windbreaker, that fell to the knees, and would hide the shotgun. Or, would hide the shotgun as much as required. For I would not be closely observed by many, until it was too late.

  A work-cap pulled down low onto my forehead. It is a habit I have, the rim leaves a red mark in my skin Edna Mae had once rubbed with her fingers, to smooth away.

  On the kitchen phone, that is an apricot-colored plastic wall phone, quickly I called Ed Fischer at his business number which I knew he would not answer, at this early hour. Telling Ed that I would not be able to come to work that day for a reason I would explain later.

  Not wanting to think how Ed would react, when he heard. How the others on the crew, my friends I had known for many years since moving here, would react when they heard.

  A sensation of hope came to me, that I often felt at such times, stepping outside and breathing in the air of early morning. Today it was a cold sharp air. There is a pleasure too in turning the ignition and hearing the motor come to life, and thinking of how, in a car, you could drive for thousands of miles along highways—to California, and Alaska . . .

  The summer I’d spent with relatives in Mad River, working on their dairy farm, I had first wanted to drive with my high school friend to Alaska and work on the salmon fishing boats there. But our plans hadn’t worked out.

  In that, the hand of God had guided me. I had not known at the time.

  Driving to the Broome County Women’s Center along the familiar route. Two point six miles. And this too, for the last time. My heart clutched to see at an intersection ahead, a pickup truck braking to a stop at a stop sign.

  As I was arriving earlier than usual at the Women’s Center, there were more places to park closer to the Center.