Book of American Martyrs, A by Oates Joyce Carol

Author:Oates, Joyce Carol [Oates, Joyce Carol]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Novel, Fiction
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-12-23T00:00:00+00:00

HELP ME, JESUS! My husband needs me with him in his hour of need.

And yet, in the morning, again Edna Mae could not lift her head from her pillow. A terrible weariness had sunk into her bones in the night turning their marrow to lead.

Each morning before she left for school Dawn came to plead with her—“Mawmaw! Wake up.”

Edna Mae wanted to protest, she was awake. Her brain was awake. Yet, she could not open her eyes.

Barely she could move her limbs. If her limbs were not leaden-heavy they were light as air and detached from her, incapable of being moved.

Her mouth so dry from the pills, she could not speak.

And so it was, morning following morning through the remainder of that terrible month September 2001. And each morning a (seeming) surprise to Edna Mae who’d been resolved the night before that the next day would be different.

Yet she would attend the trial. She vowed.

It was the last days, she believed. The Great Tribulation had begun. Cataclysms, firestorms, floods. Earthquakes, plagues. The terrorist attacks were only the first strike of the wrathful God. Yet so strange to her, as to others in Mad River Junction, that, after the devastation at Ground Zero, nothing further had happened—really, nothing at all had happened to the inhabitants of Mad River Junction.

“Edna? Edna!”—a face so close to Edna Mae’s face she could scarcely recognize it as her aunt’s. Mary Kay Mack was all but snapping her fingers to wake Edna Mae who was not asleep at the kitchen table where she’d poured cereal into a bowl but had not gotten around to pouring milk onto the cereal or taking up a spoon to eat.

“Edna Mae. We just had a call. The jury is ‘deliberating.’ Maybe you should be with Luther?”

Confused, Edna Mae saw that it was twenty-five after twelve. The last she recalled, she’d come downstairs to have breakfast at about nine-thirty.

“Luther’s lawyer called. They are ‘hoping for the best.’ We can drive over now, if you’re up to it.”

“Yes.”

But she was so tired suddenly! She hid her face in her hands.

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