A Book of American Martyrs

by Joyce Carol Oates

  She parked her car, a rented Nissan she’d acquired at the Detroit airport, on a service road just off the bridge. On a pedestrian walkway she walked about one-third of the way back across the bridge, to position her camera atop the railing, and record the small city of Muskegee Falls from this perspective. Later, she would add a voice—commentary.

  This is the Muskegee River in central Ohio. There, Muskegee Falls.

  The Muskegee Bridge was originally built in 1939.

  My father Gus Voorhees moved here to live and to work—temporarily he believed—in the late summer of 1999.

  ON THE PHONE often he’d been guilty-sounding. He’d laughed a good deal. He’d called her sweetheart. He’d extracted from her a vague promise to Come visit Daddy, OK? Some weekend?

  That weekend had never come. But now, she was here.

  But she’d been angry at Daddy! They all were.

  They were not angry at Daddy, that was silly. If they’d been angry at anyone it was at Mommy—(with the cruel acuity of children they knew this)—for her failure to be sufficiently loved, to keep a man like Gus Voorhees at home.

  For a long time she had not liked to speak the name aloud—“Muskegee Falls.” The very sound “Ohio”—the mocking drawl of the vowels—was repugnant to her.

  She’d composed a detailed timeline of that year 1999. The last year. Her files had grown voluminous and had become difficult to peruse at a single sitting.

  That her father had come here, to this place out of all the places of the world—he had died here.

  No answer to the plaintive query—Why?

  She’d done research. She’d become adept at using the Internet in pursuit of (at least) a statistical and computational notion of the environment in which her father had lived for those brief months before he’d died.

  So she’d known, before seeing the shuttered mills and factories along the riverfront, and the shabbiness of the riverfront, that Muskegee Falls had not recovered from an economic crisis dating back to the mid-1990s. A branch of General Motors had shut down, a women’s-wear manufacturer had shut down, homes had been foreclosed in a wave of bankruptcies. The small city had lost approximately one-fifth of its population.

  On a pot-holed roadway along the river recording with her camera stretches of abandoned riverfront buildings, docks, warehouses and trucking companies, vacant lots piled with rubble, open grassy lots that had become fields in which (she saw through the magnified camera eye) dust-colored rats scavenged energetically amid dumped trash.She felt her skin crawl. The rats were visually exciting, in the camera eye.

  Baltimore & Ohio railway yard, railroad tracks, freight cars that looked old, battered, abandoned. A sharp smell of creosote.

  And the Muskegee River beyond, splotched with sunlight like small flaring fires startling and beautiful to the eye.

  Her father had seen these sights, she was sure. Especially the river—beautiful despite the ugliness on shore.

  He had so loved Katechay Island!—the morning mist over Lake Huron. Loons on the lake, a high whistling wind. Hiking along the shore, prints of Daddy’s bare feet deep-impressed in the hard-packed sand, and his young daughter trotting along behind earnestly trying to fit her small feet into those prints . . .

  On Main Street, slow afternoon traffic. Slow traffic lights. Turn onto Center Street, to First Avenue, to Capitol Square—the Broome County Courthouse that was a dour-faced sandstone municipal building with a brighter, beige-brick wing at the rear.

  It was something of a mild shock to encounter this building, so abruptly.

  Jenna had attended the first trial of Luther Amos Dunphy here—the “mistrial.”

  Their poor distraught mother, alone in this place! She had not wanted Naomi or Darren to accompany her.

  Jenna had hidden from her children her terrible despair, her grief that was a kind of bone-marrow cancer draining her soul. She had hoped to spare them.

  They had not realized at the time. Like children they’d thought mostly of themselves. Yet they’d never quite forgiven her. Almost, it was getting to be too late.

  Naomi turned her camera onto the Broome County Courthouse, a building of little distinction. Through the camera lens the sandstone building looked a little more interesting—but only a little. Along with the criminal and civil judiciary for the county it also contained the Office of Public Records and a branch of the Ohio Motor Vehicle Agency and these accounted for most of the business in the courthouse that she could see.

  Had her father ever stepped inside this building? (She had no reason to suppose that he had.) Yet it was here, at the second trial, that his murderer Luther Dunphy had been found guilty and sentenced to death.

  She had to record the courthouse for that reason. She had to see for herself the interior to which her mother had been subjected pitilessly in the tedium and anxiety of the first Dunphy trial.

  In the front foyer, after she’d gone through a desultory security check, Naomi asked permission of a county sheriff’s deputy to film the interior of the courtroom. (There was only a single, large courtroom in the building, which happened not to be in use at the time.) “Why?”—the deputy squinted at her suspiciously.

  “For a school project. I’m in film school.”

  “‘Film school’ where?”

  Naomi considered. If she said New York City, that might be a less judicious answer than Ann Arbor, Michigan.

  In fact, she had taken courses in what was called film studies at both the University of Michigan and at New York University.

  She told the deputy Michigan. This appeared to be a good answer.

  Still, he asked to see ID. She gave him her Michigan driver’s license which he examined closely.

  “‘Voorhees.’”

  (What did this mean? Why had the deputy spoken the name aloud? Did he recall the name, somehow?)

  The deputy was about forty years old. It was quite possible that he’d been on duty at the time of the trials. Possibly, he’d even been on duty guarding the Women’s Center on the morning that Luther Dunphy had shown up with a shotgun and killed two people before anyone could stop him.

  Naomi waited uneasily, smiling. Always in such circumstances you smile.

  Good that she was white-skinned, an attractive girl with a friendly and forthright manner, obviously no threat to Broome County Courthouse security or to the Broome County sheriff’s deputy.

  “OK, miss—‘Naomi.’”

  With a smile the deputy handed the little laminated card back to her. The name Voorhees had meant nothing to him.

  He’d smiled, but not with his eyes. He was a thickset man with narrow suspicious eyes, heavy jaw. His dull-blue uniform fitted him tightly; you could see the holstered firearm prominent at his hip. Yet Naomi was grateful to him for a few minutes inside the courtroom with her video camera.

  Here is the courtroom where Luther Dunphy was tried. Twice.

  First trial declared a “mistrial.”

  Second trial resulting in guilty verdict. Sentenced to death for the murders of Gus Voorhees and Timothy Barron.

  In March 2006, executed.

  The camera eye is neutral, unjudging. Her own eye saw the futility of the effort: (empty) judge’s bench, (empty) jurors’ box, (empty) rows of seats. On the wall at the front of the room the heraldic coppery Seal of the State of Ohio. Near the judge’s bench, a U.S. flag.

  Tall windows ablaze with sunshine, swirling motes of dust-molecules.

  Nothing here. Nothing will come of nothing.

  A remark of Gus Voorhees usually uttered with a smile.

  A sweetly ironic smile. Not a mean or sardonic smile.

  The trials were long over. Nothing of those days could be evoked now.

  “Stay as long as you want to, miss. There’s no trials scheduled for today.”

  The voice was intrusive, jarring. Noami had known that the deputy was watching her but she did not want to encourage a conversation.

  “Thank you. I’m almost finished.”
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  “What kind of film course is it?”

  “Our assignment is to make a visual record of municipal buildings, historic buildings, in Ohio.”

  An answer so dull, even the deputy intrigued by a young woman who has wandered into his vicinity could not think of a reply.

  For her visit to Muskegee Falls Naomi had dressed inconspicuously: loose-fitting khaki pants, shirt, sweater. On her head a baseball cap whose rim she could pull low over her forehead to shield her eyes from the sun while driving, and from the scrutiny of strangers. Her hair that was shoulder-length, wavy, a warm-mahogany brown, was pulled back pragmatically into a ponytail. There were no rings on her fingers except a single small milky opal in a white gold setting which her grandmother Madelena had given her as a “keepsake”—a ring that had belonged to Madelena.

  She was a filmmaker—a documentarian. She had no wish to be seen, but to see. Everything in her appearance and in her manner was a signal to observers—Don’t take note of me please. I am nothing, nobody. I am invisible.

  “Says you’re from Michigan, on your license? Why’d you come so far, here?”

  Naomi saw that the deputy was watching her intently, with a kind of mild masculine belligerence that could be easily placated by a smile, an exchange of banter, a (female) air of coquettish deference. Any law enforcement officer of any age with a shiny badge, a gun on his hip, in uniform has been conditioned to expect such placating: it should not have cost Naomi Voorhees much to perform. Yet, she spoke matter-of-factly, just slightly coolly and not quite looking at the man.

  “Because there was a trial here, in 2000. A man named Luther Dunphy was tried for murder. Two murders. Do you remember that?” Naomi heard herself speak less matter-of-factly than she’d intended.

  “‘Luther Dunphy.’ Yes . . .”

  The deputy spoke uncertainly, frowning. Naomi had to wonder what Dunphy might mean to him, who had no recollection of Voorhees.

  She told him that there had been two trials. The first had been a mistrial.

  “What was the name again?”

  “‘Luther Dunphy.’ He lived in Muskegee Falls . . .”

  “‘Dunphy’—the name is kind of familiar. But I wasn’t here then. I didn’t move to Broome County until 2002.”

  The murders had occurred in November 1999, Naomi said. A man named Luther Dunphy had killed two people, with a shotgun, at the Women’s Center here. “At the second trial Dunphy was sentenced to death and he died—he was executed—in 2006.”

  So strangely, her voice faltered. The deputy stared at her. She wondered if he was thinking that she might be related to Luther Dunphy.

  Returning to the courthouse where he’d been sentenced to death—and with what intention? To do damage? Set off a bomb?

  But she’d been allowed through the metal detector. Her camera bag had been examined. She had to be harmless.

  Feeling sorry for me, that Luther Dunphy was my father!

  “What’s wrong, miss? What’s going on?”

  “Nothing is ‘going on.’ Excuse me.”

  He was distrustful of her. He didn’t like her so much now.

  Clutching her camera, forcing herself to smile, Naomi made an attempt to walk away; but the deputy blocked her passage.

  “Miss? Let me see that camera, please.”

  “But why? It’s just a camera . . .”

  “I said, miss—let me see that camera.”

  Naomi handed it over. Adrenaline flooded her body, she felt almost that she might faint. How she hated this person!—this uniformed bully with a gun on his hip, a shiny badge. His initial interest in her had been casually sexual, not exactly intimidating but not altogether benign, either; yet she could have made no complaint about him. And now she said nothing further, she did not want to antagonize him. Self-importantly he examined the camera, turned it over in his hands, roughly; asked to see the camera bag as well, and examined the interior of the bag. Examined lenses, shaking the cases. What did he expect to find? What did he hope to find? It was a craven thought—how fortunate for her, she was white-skinned. A person of color, a person whose skin tone might suggest foreignness, “terrorism”—how would the Broome County, Ohio, deputy have treated him, or her? A skirmish might be made to occur; as the law enforcement officer laid hands on her, and instinctively she resisted, he might respond with force; even if she did not resist, she might not have been able to comply quickly enough to spare herself rough treatment. And how quickly this might happen! In the corner of her eye Naomi saw passersby in the foyer glancing at her and at the deputy who’d detained her. At least, there were witnesses.

  When the deputy was finished with his examination, grudgingly satisfied that there was nothing suspicious inside the camera or in the bag, and he had no choice but to release her, Naomi did not say a word, not a murmur of displeasure, not a murmur of gratitude, but only took her things from the deputy and walked quickly away.

  Of this encounter, she had no video recording. No memory, and no proof. As if it had never been.

  INVISIBLY AFOOT in the “city center” of the old Ohio river town.

  Camera eye restless in continuous motion.

  Broome County Family Services. Broome County Senior Center. Broome County Board of Education.

  How she’d come to hate the very words—Broome County!

  Years she’d hated these words. Feared these words.

  Fountain Square bounded by sparsely leafed young trees. Open paved area, salmon-colored flagstones. Park benches newly painted bright green. Pedestrian mall—but few pedestrians. Bus stops with new-looking plastic awnings where elderly persons, some of them dark-skinned, sat patiently awaiting buses or shuttles.

  Unless these were homeless persons simply sitting amid shopping bags, boxes, laundry baskets heaped with possessions.

  Solitary figures in the “city center” motionless as statues in a tableau of blight. Though this part of Muskegee Falls had undergone an ambitious urban renewal (evidently) it did not appear renewed but rather enervated, eviscerated. The camera eye dwelled upon open, near-empty “plazas” with fountains sparkling giddily in the sun, and no one to see, as in a painting of de Chirico. Patches of burnt-out grass. Spindling trees seemingly abandoned to die in the dry sunny heat of autumn.

  At the edge of the sandstone square a smart, new-looking building where there was a flurry of activity—Broome County Public Library.

  Her hands were less shaky now, gripping the camera. She was feeling a delayed rush of fear, anger, dismay—how helpless she’d have been, if the deputy had confiscated her camera, or smashed it . . . Was it an exaggeration, to imagine this happening? Had she misread the man’s hostility to her, that had seemed to come on so swiftly? She didn’t want to think that, if he’d known her identity, not Dunphy but Voorhees the daughter of the murdered abortion provider, he might have been even more hostile to her.

  With her camera she drifted like a ghost. Strangers glanced at her, some of them with quizzical smiles. Do I know you, miss? Do you know me?

  She did not know these strangers. She did not know any of them. She could not bring herself to ask if anyone had known, or had even heard of, her father Gus Voorhees.

  And why here, why these scattered and random sights recorded in her camera, she could not have said. Except that he had been here in 1999, or in the vicinity. And she was recording what she could of Muskegee Falls in the (desperate, quixotic) hope that out of these scattered and random sights at some future time she could extract a meaning that eluded her now.

  The Israeli filmmaker Yael Ravel whom she’d so admired had said you must accumulate hours, days, weeks of video material to extract from it just a few precious minutes to preserve—if you are lucky.

  She wanted to believe this. She had no option.

  IN THE LOBBY of the Muskegee Falls Inn, est. 1894. Handsome old “historic” hotel, faded Tudor facade. Lobby very quiet at this hour of mid-afternoon. Dimly lighted, wood-paneled walls, staid leather couches, chairs. Firepl
ace piled with (unlit) birch logs. Ornate chandelier with tall slender white faux candles.

  Through a doorway a large room, banquet room, with myriad round tables, empty.

  Through another doorway, an entrance to the dim-lit Sign of the Ram Pub.

  He’d stayed in this hotel sometimes, she had reason to think. Before he’d rented a place of his own in town.

  Or had he stayed with friends, initially? Newly acquired friends here in Muskegee Falls. Colleagues in public health work. Planned Parenthood, abortion providers.

  The comaraderie of the beleaguered. The threatened, despised.

  Baby killers. Your souls will burn in Hell.

  She knew that Jenna had stayed in the Muskegee Falls Inn for the duration of the first trial.

  Alone, as Jenna had preferred.

  Newly widowed, and in dread of sympathy. The swarm of sympathy-bearers with their plaintive cries—Oh Jenna I feel so sad about Gus, just terrible about Gus . . . Terrible, terrible!

  They’d laughed wildly together. Jenna, Darren, Naomi. A kind of drunken revelry. The stress of so much (well-intentioned) sympathy. For a long time fearful of going outside (Jenna had said) without wearing a veil or a mask or a paper bag over your head, so that no one could recognize you and clamp you in an embrace.

  “Miss? May I be of assistance?”

  The big-haired woman behind the check-in counter cast her voice across the lobby at Naomi, with a thin slice of a smile.

  Skilled in assessing strangers, seeing that the young woman who’d entered the lobby in rumpled khakis, sneakers, baseball cap pulled low over her forehead was carrying just a shoulder bag and a camera and did not have a suitcase with her.

  Politely Naomi asked if there was a room available for the night.

  The thin-sliced smile turned to a frown. “A single room?”

  “Yes. A single room.”

  It was perceived to be just slightly strange, was it—that Naomi was alone? Obviously a traveler, a stranger to Muskegee Falls, wanting a single room.

  “For how many nights, miss?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe two, or three.”

  The big-haired woman smiled at Naomi with an expression of frank curiosity. “D’you have family here?”