In the way that my comrade uttered the name Voorhees, all this disgust and outrage was communicated.
That morning, I did not inquire further about the arrival time of the abortion doctor Voorhees. I did not betray to my comrade any special interest or concern. I am not a man for whom speech comes readily and my instinct is to protect another, it is my habit as a husband and father. In the event that I acted upon the information that Stockard provided, I did not want this innocent man to be arrested by police as an accessory to any action of my own, for it is well known, as our leaders have warned us, not to involve others in our actions in any way for the police will cast a wide net to accuse, vilify, and punish the innocent, beginning with our families and extending to other protesters. Instead, I took up my picket sign as if this were any other morning in my life though there was a powerful buzzing in my head, for very joy I could not think clearly.
God had sent me a personal message, which it was not possible to ignore or misinterpret—The murderer is not protected! He is vulnerable.
TO MY SHAME, I had not (yet) the strength to confront this turn. By the end of the morning, when I left the vigil at the Women’s Center, to drive to my workplace, the sensation of joy had vanished and I was left agitated, and “jumpy”—I was trying not to think of that.
For some days, it was that. Like something floating in my eye, that was not “real” and yet distracting. So that, when you stare at something, it is the miniature floating rod that you are trying not to see, yet cannot not-see.
That. The possibility that the Lord God, Who has spoken to others and has shown the way in which His will might be fulfilled in the world of humankind, might have spoken at last to me—this was terrifying to me, for it could not be shared with anyone, even my dear wife.
Yet whenever I was alone, or drifted away in my thoughts from others (including even my younger children pulling at my sleeves or nudging their heads against me, in their way of pleading Dad-dee look! that tore at my heart) it was of that I was made aware.
Lately he’s been arriving early. Before the police guard.
How many minutes?—could be ten minutes, twelve . . .
He is a murderer, and also a coward. Hiding himself inside among women whom he victimizes—butchers.
Voorhees. One of those on the List.
Had Stockard uttered these words to me? Or had Stockard communicated these words, without speaking?
His eyes shone with feeling behind rimless glasses, octagonal in shape. He had no need to say—The murderer must be stopped! One of us must stop him.
At work, laying shingles for the roof of a house overlooking a ravine in a residential neighborhood of Muskegee Falls (a new “colonial” of a size that could contain two houses of the size of my own as the lot itself was three acres, six times the size of my property), as I hammered nails each blow of the hammer was a strike to the heart—A baby is being hammered to death, a baby is being sucked out of its mother’s womb, a baby is denied birth, a baby will die. And a woman’s or a girl’s body has been violated by the abortionist’s instrument as her soul has been violated. For those who are meant by the Lord to be mothers are often brainwashed, and have no idea to what they are consenting.
A woman does not know her own mind. Especially a woman who has become pregnant, whose mental state has been thrown into disruption by what are called “hormones.”
All of the women of my acquaintance, my mother, my sister, and my dear wife Edna Mae, have acknowledged this. And troubled women whom it was my task to comfort, when I was a lay minister in our church. Often a woman will say, she did not mean what she’d said when she was angry or upset, a kind of madness had come over her. It is that time of month. Or it is hot flashes. As Satan speaks through the female mouth that becomes ugly and contorted. And there is a feeling of Satan in her thoughts. The weakness of a woman or a girl in “giving in” to a man is not the worst sin, but one to be forgiven as Jesus forgave Mary Magdalene. But it is a fact—A woman must be protected from the most terrible mistake of her life.
The thought that our own precious children might have died by the abortionist’s hand, if circumstances had been different. For there is a blindness to fate, that cannot be comprehended.
A child is yourself. And yet, of course a child is not yourself, and unknowable.
We are here on earth to protect and love one another and it is to the least of these, the children and infants, we are most responsible.
On the roofs of strangers’ houses such thoughts came to me often. All my worklife it has been such, beginning at age fourteen in Sandusky where my father was a carpenter and roofer and first brought me to work-sites with him. My father was not a man easy in his speech and it was rare for him to touch me (or any of my brothers or sisters) except at such a time when he might grab my hand to secure me as I stepped onto a roof—Got you!