Suddenly, she was free of her mother’s grip. She was taller than Edna Mae, and stronger.
As Edna Mae called after her Dawn fled past the glaring lights of the minivan. She saw the shining eyes of strangers on her and she saw Reverend Trucross and his wife Merri gaping at her—“Dawn? Where are you going, Dawn?” She’d come to hate it, the Trucrosses called her Dawn as if she was their daughter too. If there was one truth Jesus had been drumming into her it was—She was not anyone’s daughter.
At the end of the alley was a TV minivan and camera crew whose lights blinded her as she ran toward them and past them shielding her face with her hands paying them no heed hearing Edna Mae calling after her in an angry pleading voice—“Dawn! Dawn! Come back here at once!”
But Dawn swayed, stumbled, ran. And ran.
IT WAS THE GREATEST SHOCK of my life I think! More even than the call telling us that my brother-in-law Luther Dunphy had shot two men in cold blood back in November 1999.
Well, this was a call, too—our neighbor! Noreen, quick turn on your TV, June Gallagher said. Channel forty-nine.
And there was this “prayer vigil” in a cemetery in Cleveland, at night, and people kneeling at a large grave site clasping their hands at their hearts and praying with bowed heads and one of them was Edna Mae—my sister!
I just stared and stared. What was Edna Mae doing there, in a cemetery in Cleveland? And why was she being televised?
It was explained that this was a particular area of a Baptist cemetery reserved for “aborted fetuses”—“preborn children of God”—as they were called. The fetuses had been discarded as medical waste from abortion clinics and had been “rescued” by members of a right-to-life organization for Christian burial in consecrated soil and my sister Edna Mae was one of these evidently. We had known that Edna Mae belonged to a new church in Mad River Junction where the family had had to move after the trial but none of us had heard anything about this—National Day of Remembrance for Preborn Infants Murdered by Abortion.
Almost, I would not have recognized Edna Mae. She’d cut her hair, and she looked different than I remembered—a high-strung kind of person that you’d get a little shock from if you touched her. She wasn’t aware of the TV camera, or didn’t give any sign. With the others she was kneeling and praying and then they were setting some small objects into the grave while a minister said a blessing over them—looked like Ziploc bags, with something in them—the remains of fetuses!—but where the bags were, the screen was blurred like something underwater or in a dream—too raw to show on TV, I guess.
There were close-ups of a few faces. But the camera didn’t linger on Edna Mae.
The TV announcer was a blond woman sympathetic with the ceremony but also horrified, you could see. With her microphone in her hand she didn’t get too close to the grave site and she was keeping her eyes averted from what was inside it. In a breathless voice she spoke of the faithful coming hundreds of miles from churches “all over Ohio” to rescue the aborted fetuses from being “thrown away like trash.” The minister she interviewed was from a Pentecostal church in Mad River Junction—had to be Edna Mae’s church—a putty-faced man of about fifty with a strange sad smile and teary eyes squinting into the TV lights saying, “Ma’am, these are holy innocents of God like you and me except they were not allowed to be born as we were. That is the only difference between us!—we were born, and they were not. And they were not even granted Christian burials. And so some of us are stepping in where the mainstream Christian churches have failed in their ministry to protect the least of us.”
The blond TV woman tried to think what to say to these words, that were uttered in a low, urgent voice like the voice of someone who has gripped your elbow to make you stop and hear. But all she could reply was—“Ohhh! Yes”—“Thank you, Reverend!”
Already there were 103 aborted infants buried in this cemetery, the minister said. After tonight the number would near 150.
The camera moved onto the gaping grave site again, though still you could not see clearly what was inside the Ziploc bags, only just pale-shadowy outlines. And there was my sister Edna Mae kneeling at the edge with her head bowed and her face shining tears.
These were the strangest minutes in my life. Seeing my sister there on TV, as distant to me as if we’d never known each other. And I had to realize, Edna Mae and I had been out of contact for most of our adult lives. Since the death sentence of my brother-in-law, it had been hard to speak to any Dunphy. What do you say? What can you say? I had tried to keep in contact with Edna Mae but Edna Mae never answered the phone and never returned my calls. And when I called and got Dawn on the phone, Dawn would say she’d tell Edna Mae that I called, but Edna Mae never called back. And if I asked how they were Dawn would say, How’d you think we are?—in this sarcastic voice.