In a trance of horror and loathing he discovered such proclamations. Such revelations in luridly printed newsletters, bulletins and newspapers that made their way into the mailbox or were discovered shoved beneath a weathered welcome mat or the very windshield wiper of his mother’s car.
He could not stop himself from turning the pages. He could not stop himself from reading what was, so unbelievably, there to be read. Each time extracting from himself a promise to stop, to not succumb another time. But he could not.
Once, he would discover a cardboard box of these publications, in the trunk of a minivan belonging to a lawyer friend of his father’s. Accumulating evidence—it was explained.
Army of God, Christians Awake!, National Coalition of Life Activists, L.I.F.E. America, Children of Jesus, National Right to Life, US United for Life, Crusade for Life, Gospel of Light, Heritage Life Ministries, Libertarian Activists for Life, Midwest Coalition for Life, National League for Life.
In what would have seemed to the casual eye ordinary, small-town newspapers: ABORTION-DOCTOR-MURDERER VOORHEES SHOT DOWN IN OHIO
ABORTION-DOCTOR-MURDERER PREVENTED FROM PERFORMING ANY MORE ABORTIONS!
NOTORIOUS BABY KILLER VOORHEES DIES, OHIO ABORTION CLINIC
OPERATION RESCUE CLAIMS VICTORY
REJOICE! ANOTHER ABORTION-MURDERER HAS CEASED HIS EVIL
SOLDIER OF JESUS IN POLICE CUSTODY FOLLOWING OHIO SHOOTING
DEFENSE FUND FOR LUTHER DUNPHY SEND CHECKS, MONEY ORDERS, CASH C/O ARMY OF GOD AMERICA Accompanying these lurid words were photographs of his father. The likenesses of Gus Voorhees were unsmiling and grim and not Gus Voorhees as Darren recalled him for some seemed to have been defaced, disfigured.
Yet there was one photograph, had to have been a family snapshot—(but how had his father’s enemies acquired it?)—Gus Voorhees standing cross-armed in front of a white brick wall, in a khaki jacket, smiling tensely, squinting in the sun. Strangely, his father appeared older in this picture than he’d ever been in life, his hair more silver—Darren was sure.
Baby Killer Voorhees Gone to His Reward in Hell Months ago, a year or more ago, his father had extracted from Darren a promise never to read the anti-abortion propaganda. Not ever.
He’d asked Why and his father squeezed his shoulder with a pained smile saying Because I’m asking you, Darren. Please.
The enemy. Anti-abortion activists. Threats. Ugly images. Just ignore.
Darren hadn’t quite realized, his beloved father Gus Voorhees was a particular target in these publications. In his childish naiveté he’d imagined, or perhaps he had wished to imagine, that the hostility was ideological, political.
Their beliefs are contrary to ours, Gus had explained. The debate will have to be hammered out in the voting booths of America.
Debate! The kind of adult idealism you took for granted, without questioning. (Possibly) you rolled your eyes, it was so schoolteacherish. But a good kind of schoolteacherish.
Now Darren was discovering a looking-glass world where the murderers of abortion providers were honored as “heroes”—“martyrs.” These were “soldiers of God” or “soldiers of Jesus” who had traded their lives to “defend the defenseless.” These were men named Griffin, Greene, Mitchell—and now Dunphy. In the looking-glass world of the anti-abortion movement, in the glossier publications their faces were made luminous as the faces of saints.
Just ignore, Darren. There is much garbage printed, as there is much garbage in the world, which you can’t change. But you can live your life without having to know.
But was this true? His father had been mistaken in such a belief.
His parents would never have allowed him to read such material, in the days before Gus had been killed. They’d feared “brain-rot” in all their children and so had not even owned a television set. Religious propaganda, anti-Socialist and anti-Communist publications, popular pornographic magazines like Hustler—all were equally abhorrent to them though (as Darren teased) they believed in free speech, freedom of the press and opposed censorship. It had been an innocent era, Darren would one day realize, before the Internet brought the depths of the human psyche into the household—from the infinitely precious to the unspeakably filthy, soul-withering.
For what remained of the Voorhees family it was the aftermath of life. A posthumous life. There was no one to monitor a boy as shrewd, calculating, and devious as Darren. His devastated mother had become transformed into a personage acclaimed in the world as Gus Voorhees’s widow—the more ravaged Jenna appeared, the more of a martyr. The effort of performing as Gus Voorhees’s widow required all her strength and so she had little time for such petty concerns as censoring her children’s reading materials and she was not often in close proximity to her teenaged son in any case.