Oh well—my dad did not actually witness the shootings. That was a misconception.
Him and the other officer were just en route to the scene. They were scheduled to arrive at 7:30 A.M. and the shootings were just before that and the call came to them in the cruiser to get to the scene at once. They hardly had time to put on the siren, they said.
Dad would think—almost—that he’d heard the gunfire. He heard the screams as soon as they pulled up. He dealt with the panicked people. He was the one who “arrested” Luther Dunphy. He put cuffs on the man.
SHINGLED ROOF. Small country church shaped like a box. And of the hue of cardboard. Box-shaped country church. Small country church, brown-aluminum-shingled, new-looking roof, set in an uncultivated field, dun-colored grasses, gravel driveway, hand-painted sign—ST. PAUL MISSIONARY CHURCH OF JESUS SUNDAY SERVICE 9:00 A.M., WEDNESDAY PRAYER MEETING 7:00 P.M.
This was on the Schylerville Road. Approximately six miles from downtown Muskegee Falls in a rural area of farms, ramshackle country houses, trailer homes.
She had made telephone calls. She had hoped to meet with the minister of the church but she’d been told that that was not possible for Reverend Dennis was “away” and “would not be back” for twelve days.
She asked if she might have a telephone number for Reverend Dennis, or an email address, and was told these were “private.”
(How did they know who she was? she wondered. Had word spread in Muskegee Falls, another “journalist” from out of town had arrived?)
Several times it had been assured her: no one with the name of Dunphy lives here now.
Circling the church, camera in hand. Grasses rustled dryly beneath her feet.
Behind the church was a small graveyard. Grave markers amid tufts of spiky grass, wooden crosses and stone slabs and artificial flowers in clay pots. It came over her in a rush, Luther Dunphy must be buried here! But when she investigated the more recent graves she did not see the name Dunphy.
She had learned that Luther Dunphy’s immediate family, wife and children, had moved to a small town not far away called Mad River Junction. But she had no plans to pursue them there. She had no wish to interfere with their lives. Even Dawn Dunphy, whom she particularly disliked, was of no interest to her any longer.
Once, she and Darren had fantasized “revenge” upon the Dunphys. But that was long ago, when they’d been young adolescents, deranged by grief.
“Hello? Hello? Hel-lo? No one here?”—her voice lifted lightly, sadly.
No one was here. No one saw. No one turned into the gravel drive in a vehicle, incensed at her trespassing and demanding to know who she was.
No sound but autumnal insects and the random cries of birds. Bat-like birds she supposed must be cliff swallows or swifts, swooping and diving near the river. On her way to the St. Paul Missionary Church of Jesus driving beside the river she’d seen the falls where a shimmering vapor arose, evaporating as it lifted.
At the peak of the church roof was an aluminum cross not prominent or showy, about five feet in height.
Daddy help me. I am failing, I am drowning. I don’t know what to do, to reach you.
She turned off the camera. She had recorded all there was to record.
THAT NIGHT IN her room in the Muskegee Falls Inn she dreamt of her father as she had not seen him in a long time. With urgency he’d been speaking to her, half-angrily as one might speak to a stubborn child who is in danger.
“Honey, look: let me go.”
And a voice meant to be her voice, yet not issued from her exactly: “Let you go, Daddy—where?”
And he says, “Where the dead go, honey. Let me go there.”
“But—I can’t do that. How can I do that?”
And he says, “I wasn’t so special, honey. Except that I was your dad, I wasn’t so special.”
Her heart begins to pound violently. She wakes, sick with horror, and she will not sleep for the rest of the night.
KATECHAY ISLAND:
OCTOBER 2011
At the motel on Katechay Island they waited.
“She’d said she was definitely coming.”
“‘Definitely’? I don’t think so. She’d said she hoped to come.”
“Hoped to come. Not to me, she didn’t say that.”
Naomi spoke with more certainty than she felt. Almost, a kind of defiance.
Darren had brought the urn containing their father’s ashes. On a table it stood like a primitive artifact generating its own dark shadow.
In the confusion of her life at the time (in the early months of 2000) Jenna had not buried the urn in an Ann Arbor cemetery but had entrusted it to one of Gus’s oldest friends in Ann Arbor who’d kept it on a shelf in his book-lined study for years.
There’d been some bitterness between them—between the brother and sister, and their mother.
Naomi and Darren had wanted to scatter the ashes on Katechay Island, but Jenna had resisted. Why?—had not ever been clear.