A Book of American Martyrs

by Joyce Carol Oates

  I asked Felice weren’t they afraid, not to go to church, maybe God would be angry with them and punish them, and Felice said shrugging her shoulders that that had already happened.

  ONCE, IT WOULD BE the last time, though I did not know this at the time, we were in one of the old freight cars, where I knelt on dried leaves and debris, and Felice Sipper cursed me kicking at me with her bare legs. The flash of her bare, white belly was exciting to me, and the thin fuzz between her legs. When I was finished I could not move but lay panting on my back amid the leaves and litter stunned as if an electric current had run through me leaving me paralyzed.

  It was not clear to me why, why at that time, and not at another, earlier time, that Felice Sipper became disgusted and angry with me, and after she was dressed again, and her face wiped and her eyes glaring, out of some pocket she took a jackknife, I saw just the flash of the blade in her hands before it sank into my leg at the thigh, and the pain of it was such that I could not comprehend what was happening, and was scrambling to escape when the blade came again, this time in my side, between my ribs, and Felice was crying at me what sounded like Hate hate hate you pig and then she was gone, jumped out of the freight car and ran away.

  From four stab-wounds I was bleeding. The pain was like a loud, deafening noise, I could not comprehend it but tried to sit up whimpering, staunching the blood flow. The wounds had come swift but shallow, and had not severed any vein or artery (so it seemed). I was panting hard. My hands were shaking. It took some time to soak up the blood. By pressing against the wounds, I could stop the worst of the bleeding.

  When I crawled out of the freight car it was dusk. I would be late for supper and would enter the house by the rear, in a way to avoid my family in the kitchen, and upstairs in the bathroom I would wash the wounds, and try to put bandages over them, and hide away the bloodied clothing where I could throw it out at another time. When I came downstairs my mother said, “Luther! Are you ill?—your face is so white.” My father saw that I was ill, and did not chastise me. My brothers Norman and Jonathan would have laughed but saw that something had happened to me. While trying to eat I felt a wave of nausea and dizziness come over me, and became very light-headed and would have fallen onto the floor if one of my brothers had not caught me.

  My mother believed that I had the flu. Often in Sandusky when you did not feel well, when you felt sick-to-death and wanted to die, it would be said You have a touch of the flu.

  I did not hate Felice Sipper but was eager to see her again. Yet I would not ever see her again for the news was, the Sippers had had to move away from Sandusky, their relatives in the tar paper house had evicted them. And only much later, I would realize that the stab of Felice Sipper’s blade into my (sinful) flesh had been a warning of Jesus, that I had gone too far, and if I did not desist, a worse punishment would follow.

  THERE WERE BOYS we chased, and knocked to the ground, and kicked, and rubbed their faces in the dirt. A boy (from the special class at school) we chased along the creek, into a patch of mud, pulled down his pants, rubbed mud and little stones and grit onto his groin, his penis, until he screamed and wept for us to stop.

  Another time, after a boy had reported one of my friends to the school principal for stealing out of lockers we chased him into the railroad yard and “hog-tied” him—wrists tied behind his back and his ankles tied and connected to his wrists and a noose looped around his neck so if he tried to free himself he’d be strangled.

  Didn’t we care that he might die, somebody might ask.

  After we left, and the guys went home, I doubled back to the railroad yard to untie Albert Metzer and remove the filthy rag we’d stuffed in his mouth. I said for him not to tell anybody or he would be killed and Albert could scarcely speak, but whispered Yes.

  So grateful for me saving him, he almost kissed my hands.

  But then the next evening police officers came to my house, and were met by my father, who called me downstairs, and they asked me questions about Albert Metzer and I said no, I didn’t know anything about it, whatever had been done to him, I had no idea. But I was stammering so they could hardly understand me and it was obvious that I was lying.

  Still, the police went away. Out by their patrol car my father stood talking with them and whatever he said to them, or they said to him, they did not arrest me but drove away.

  In the doorway of the room I shared with Jonathan my father stood regarding me with eyes of disgust. He asked me what I knew about the boy who’d been “almost strangled” and “had had to be taken to a hospital” and I repeated that I didn’t know anything, I had had nothing to do with it.

  I was stammering so badly now, tears started from my eyes.

  My father was holding something in his hand, at about the level of his thigh. I did not want to look at it too closely but it appeared to be of the size of a hammer, and wrapped in a towel or cloth. When I tried to slip past my father, to run down the stairs, he struck me with this object, on my back, on my buttocks, and as I fell, on the side of my head. I fell heavily, and a thought comforted me—Now it is over. I can die.

  In the place where I had fallen Jesus awaited me. I saw that Jesus was displeased with me but he would not speak harshly to me, as my father did, to reprimand me.

  My father did not ever explain to my mother (who heard us from downstairs) why he had “disciplined” me in this way and why for a long time afterward he would not look at me, and did not wish that I would enter any room in which he was; why I had to eat my meals alone in the kitchen after the rest of the family had finished. It was not the behavior against Albert Metzer that infuriated him so much as the fact that I would try to lie to him.

  Even when I accompanied my father to work, and worked beside him at a construction site, he did not speak to me except when necessary. Though he was a Christian my father did not easily forgive, and he did not easily forget. Eventually his fury and disgust at me diminished with time like a slow wearing-out in the way that a new-polished linoleum floor loses its shine and becomes dull with grime and you cease to notice it.

  I was sick to think that my father did not love me—now. He had loved me (maybe) as a father would love his son but now, since I had disappointed him, and had no way to stammer an apology nor even an explanation or excuse, for having dared to lie to him, he could not look upon me with love or even patience. And once I had seen in my mother’s face, when by accident I turned clumsily in the kitchen, in a small space, and came near to colliding with her, a look of fright—She thinks that I would hit her. She thinks that I am an animal.

  One by one my older brothers had disappointed my father, in their own ways. But they would mature, and move away from home, and marry, and have children; and he would look upon them as men like himself, and forgive them. Or rather, he would forget his anger at them, when they were ignorant boys and lived in the house with them, taking up so much room; and so in that way he would forgive them, also.

  It was at that time that I came to realize how Jesus does not reprimand us. The way of the world is to accuse and punish but it is Jesus within us that will speak to us when the time is ripe, in our own voices. For of course we know all there is to know of the teachings of Jesus. For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.

  These things we know, that Jesus has died for us. Though in the blindness and fever of rutting sin we are ignorant of it, and pretend not to know.

  STILL, WITH GIRLS I continued to behave badly. If a girl was aloof to me I hated her as stuck-up and if she was friendly to me I hated her as sluttish. I am ashamed to say, when I first met Edna Mae Reiser, it was sex-thoughts that came to me in a rush and not a wish to “love.” Though I understood this girl to be a good, Christian girl, and respected her. It was impressive to me too, that Edna Mae was training as a nurse’s aide and worked part-time at a nursing home in Muskegee Falls.

  After we first met, we did not meet again for some months. For I was
seeing another girl then. I would see adult women, one of them a divorcée with small children.

  By then I had dropped out of high school. My grades were C’s and D’s except in vocational arts (shop) where my grades were B’s and where our teacher Mr. Bidenmann often asked me to help out the other students who were unskilled and clumsy using their hands.

  When I met Edna Mae Reiser another time I was not so shy. Though I knew that Edna Mae was a virgin, and very innocent of men, yet I coerced her into certain acts against her wishes, and made her cry. I felt sorry for her but also impatient with her, for it was a dirty thing I had made her do, touching me with her bare hand, and letting me touch her. And other things that passed between us, that I made Edna Mae comply with, that would have provoked Felice Sipper to stab me in the gut. And then later, it was around Christmastime, when we were alone together in her parents’ house that smelled of fresh-cut evergreens, I saw a look in Edna Mae’s face that was stiff and pleading and I heard myself say, You have shamed yourself. I don’t want to see you again.

  It was for the thrill of saying such words that I said them. I had not ever said such words before in my life but now I went away disgusted, or pretending to be disgusted. I did not call Edna Mae for twelve days but returned to seeing another, older girl from high school who did not expect so much of me. In the parking lot of the nursing home I waited in my car to observe Edna Mae walking into the rear of the building, in her white nurse’s aide uniform, and with thin white stockings and white crepe-soled shoes, sometimes with other girls in white uniforms, and sometimes alone.

  In my thoughts I loved her, if she would love me. Yet the sex-act had come between us. Though I had forced this act upon Edna Mae, yet it seemed to me that she had behaved weakly in not stopping me. I disliked her for this weakness in giving in to me. Like a rutting hog I could not stop myself. The slime of my semen on the girl’s thighs was so vivid to me that if I recalled it later, I was excited at once, and my penis hard as a rod.

  The sex-heat was everywhere in me. My blood beat hard and fast from my groin up into my belly and chest. My tongue felt engorged in my mouth, like a penis. My body had become a great Thing, engorged and upright, barely able to stagger. If I did not seize and stroke myself, I could not endure it. And yet if I gave in, I was overcome with disgust. I had not attended Bible school for years and did not regularly attend church but recalled Jesus’s words If thine eye offend thee pluck it out and cast it from thee; it is better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire.

  In the old barn behind our house in Sandusky at my father’s workbench (which my brothers and I were forbidden to touch) there came to be a screwdriver in my shaking hand. It was one of the larger screwdrivers in my father’s toolbox. For a long shaking moment gripping the tool in both hands bringing its (dull) point slowly to my face thinking Pluck it out! Pluck it out, pig!—but in the end, I had not the courage.

  Yet Jesus did not judge me. This was a great relief to me at the time and would prepare me for later in my life, when Jesus would come into my heart of His choice to save me.

  My friends (who had also quit school to work during the day) and I went drinking until we were sick to our stomachs. We pissed, and we vomited. We were happy only in the company of one another for we did not judge one another (as our families judged us) and yet, when we were not drinking we shrank from the sight of one another. Often we fought. We had no idea why, we hated each other like brothers who have had to share a room and a smelly bed for too long. In a filthy lavatory in a tavern on Overhill Road when I entered I saw one of them at a urinal, his face was flushed and coarse, there was a red pimple or pustule on his cheek that drew my eye, and a drunken rage came over me, and I seized him around the neck and tried to throw him down, I beat him with my fists and kicked him where he had fallen, I shoved him so that he struck his head on the urinal, and I did not help him up but hurriedly left the tavern; and had only the mildest worry that my friend might die of a skull fracture or a broken neck.

  My knuckles were swollen and bleeding from the attack. Even my feet ached, where I had kicked the unresisting body. There were lacerations in my face, there was a shortness to my breath, the old wound between my ribs ached where Felice Sipper had sank the three-inch jackknife blade.

  I did not see my friends for weeks. I had no news of my friend who’d been beaten and his skull cracked against the urinal but I did not think he had died or was hospitalized for there was nothing about this in the newspaper or on local TV. I made calls to Edna Mae Reiser who did not return them. But I persevered, and left messages with her mother and came to know Mrs. Reiser, through these conversations; and felt that Mrs. Reiser, who did not know Luther Dunphy, yet liked me. Then, at another time, I saw my friends again, as one of them had enlisted in the U.S. Army and would be leaving soon for boot camp, at this exciting time (for it was made to seem exciting on TV) when the Soviet army had invaded a remote Asian country called Afghanistan, in defiance of U.S. warnings, and there was a promise of a new war now between the United States and Soviet Russia; and the subject of the beating in the men’s lavatory came up, and my friends were embarrassed looking at me. Luther, you never found out who did that to you? Never saw his face? Fucker should be killed.

  WHEN I WAS BAPTIZED for the second time, at age twenty-two, by the pastor of the St. Paul Missionary Church, Jesus rejoiced in my heart. Jesus did not need to say—I knew that you would come to me, Luther. All those years I was waiting, I knew.

  Very quickly it had happened. Edna Mae had brought me with her to a new church, in Muskegee Falls, about which her friends had told her. At once stepping into this church (that was not fully finished and smelled of new lumber) I felt a turmoil in my soul as if I had come home, and would be recognized here.

  The pastor was much younger than our pastor in the Sandusky church, who had never seemed to like me, and had always confused me with my brothers. This pastor greeted me with a smile and welcomed me as a friend. He was my height, and my approximate weight, but with wavy sand-colored hair, and pale gray eyes of unusual frankness and warmth. He might have been thirty-five years old. Warmly he asked me to call him “Dennis”—not “Reverend Dennis.” As soon as Reverend Dennis mentioned the work needing to be done on the church, insulation and shingle-laying, I told him that I would like to help him; and when he said, he was not sure that the church could afford a professional roofer, I told him I did not expect to be paid, it was for the sake of the church and for the sake of Jesus.

  These words came from me without preparation. At once I felt my heart suffused with joy, and the look in Edna Mae’s face was one of astonishment and adoration.

  When we were alone together Edna Mae wept with me, in sheer happiness. She said how she loved me, and had forgiven me the hurt I had done her, and would not give it another thought. By then, without either of us knowing, she was six weeks pregnant with our first son, Luke.

  Soon then, within a few weeks, both Edna Mae and I were baptized in the St. Paul Missionary Church of Jesus. And soon after that, we were married.

  THE CALLING

  You must follow your heart, Luther. If you are absolutely certain that this is what you want.”

  It was a curious mannerism of our pastor that, when he smiled, his face seemed to contract for just an instant, as if in pain; and when he laughed, his laughter was silent, and seemed to wrack his body with a kind of pain also.

  Stiffly I said, “It is not what I want, Reverend Dennis, but what the Lord has called me to.”

  “Has He! Well.”

  I had hoped that Reverend Dennis would clasp my hand in a brotherly gesture as often he did, with Edna Mae and me, and other members of the congregation, in greeting us at the church door, and saying good-bye to us, at the end of services. But he did not seem so friendly now. The childish eagerness I had brought to him was like a warm patch of sunshine with no place to fall upon. It was not like our beloved pastor, to seem so awkward
with a fellow Christian who had come to him with a joyous expectation.

  I had been excited to reveal to Reverend Dennis the news of my hopes for a career in the church, which I had been discussing with Edna Mae for months, and about which we had prayed together for guidance; but Reverend Dennis did not greet this revelation as I had anticipated. Instead, after I spoke for some minutes, telling him of my plan to become a minister in the Missionary Church, like him, as I was inspired by his sermons and by his example, Reverend Dennis deflected the subject by asking me about my family, and my work, and where we were living in Muskegee Falls, in a voice that did not indicate enthusiasm but with only a common sort of friendly inquiry, as if he had hardly been listening to my words at all.

  For some perplexing minutes Reverend Dennis even inquired after my parents, who lived in Sandusky, whom he had met only once, at my wedding three years before.

  It was hard for me to reply. I could not think of the right words. My parents were not happy with me, for converting to the St. Paul Missionary Church, though my mother was eager to see her grandchildren, and deeply hurt, that Edna Mae and I did not seem to have time to visit Sandusky as my mother wished, and that we did not invite them to visit us often. (This was not Edna Mae’s wish of course. For Edna Mae declared that she “loved” my parents—all of my family. But I did not care to visit with my father, as my father did not care to visit with us. In this way, there was a stalemate as it is called, I think—for neither my father nor I would give in. As I was a husband and a father now, embarked upon my own life, I did not intend to give in to the old man.)