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.
But at this time, when the effect of the powerful pill seemed to have worn off, and an agitation of the nerves had not yet set in, Edna Mae spoke to her older daughter with passion. Her eyes were clear and alert and focused upon Dawn’s face in a way so fierce that Dawn felt pride in Mawmaw, that she had not felt in some time. And Mawmaw was smiling in a kind of triumph. Dawn had no actual idea what Mawmaw’s words meant but she recognized them from the Bible, the words of Jesus on the cross crying out to His Father in heaven, or from one of Reverend Dennis’s sermons, and understood that the meaning was good news, rejoicing and not lamentation.
This day you shall be with me in Paradise.
THE CHRISTIAN GIRL
Trust Jesus. If Jesus abides in your heart, you can do no evil. And no evil will be done unto you.”
This was told to her. Visiting Daddy in the detention facility and the chaplain there who was a retired Baptist minister and a former missionary in the dark continent of Africa (he said proudly) said these words which were familiar to her though she could not have recollected them herself—she had not a “way with words” as others did. But she understood the chaplain, and understood by the quiet in her daddy’s face, that was a tired face, yet a calm face, a face that had passed beyond the fretfulness of ordinary people, this was the bond between them, and among all of the Dunphys, that would abide forever.
(BUT—WAS IT TRUE? When she was alone, and sad-feeling, she could not remember the consoling words of the adults. Could she trust Jesus?)
SHE TOLD NO ONE, she’d begun to be afraid. For there was doubt in her heart, that she could trust Jesus.
It was like on TV, she’d used to see at a neighbor girl’s house (for Mawmaw and Daddy did not allow the small-screen TV in their house to be turned to such programs), you heard people speaking in a normal-seeming way but then came music, scary music, that the TV people did not seem to hear, that should have warned them that something was wrong, and something very bad would happen in another few minutes. So scary you could hardly bear it, but wanted to press your hands over your eyes.
For consider: Jesus had urged her daddy to shoot the baby killers with his shotgun but now (it seemed) Jesus had abandoned Daddy in the Broome County Men’s Detention Center where they could visit him for just one hour once a week on Saturdays. And if something went wrong and the facility was “in lockdown” they could not visit Daddy even then but were turned away at the front entrance by smirking guards.
Just one visit to the ugly detention facility on a hill above the Mad River looking like one of the old shut-down textile mills and you understood that Jesus was nowhere near such a crummy place! Only just prisoners, guards who couldn’t get decent jobs elsewhere, and sad-faced visitors thrown together as in a smelly anteroom of Hell.
Crummy was a new word Luke used often in this new place where they’d had to come to live. What Luke said Dawn was likely to pick up like those little thistle thorns that catch on your clothes, then catch everywhere.