By the third day, the guilt had nearly gnawed Darl Moody in two. He snapped awake from a dream, the sheets soaked with sweat, unable to shake the image of Carol Brewer’s blood-soaked clothes.
Sitting on the church pew beside his mother the morning before, he’d listened to the preacher tell the story of Joseph and his brothers, how Joseph had received a message from God and how his brothers, filled with jealousy, had plotted to kill him, then faked his death and sold him into slavery. It was the image of Joseph’s coat—the fabric sopped with animal’s blood, the brothers taking it to their father to prove to him Joseph was dead—that must’ve triggered the dream. Darl saw crimson stains spotting heavy weave like rose petals, a dark puddle spread wide and so black in the middle that it seemed endless, bottomless; as if, had he slipped and fallen into that black, he would fall on forever.
There was something in the back of his mind that just kept saying, Confess, and the more he thought about it, the more he started to believe that going to the sheriff might be the only way to clear his conscience. Right and wrong was easy. The hard part was handing your life away, it was being brave enough to look around at everything you had and say, Yeah, I’ll give it all up just to make things square. As he lay in bed that Monday morning, his mind awash with the consequence of it all, he decided to give it a week. Holding off might’ve been selfish, but if he was going all in, he needed to know what all he was pushing into the pot. He needed to have a proper accounting.
That morning, he drove to his sister, Marla’s. She and her husband lived in a trailer park a quarter mile south of Jimmy’s Mini Mart in Tuckasegee with their three sons and a baby girl. Early morning blushed a stand of poplar yellow with fall. The reflection brought warm, golden light through linen curtains, but in a home with a two-year-old such things weren’t noticed.
Smoke filled the kitchen and the fire alarm wailed and Marla waved a dirty dish towel to clear the air while her husband, Rusty, ran out the front door with a heavy cast-iron pan. Their two-year-old, Ruth, screamed from her high chair at the table, her tiny fingers sticky with applesauce. She was fighting off a hand, foot, and mouth infection that covered her in a rash and turned her into a twenty-five-pound weapon-grade siren. The boys, who were each a head taller than the one before so that side by side they rose like a set of steps, were fighting over crumbs. Darl watched the chaos in that tiny kitchen and he thought about how much he’d miss it.
The haze drifted in the room, but the alarm stopped and Rusty topped off his coffee before sitting back down at the table. The kitchen smelled of burned bacon and eggs. Marla wore a ratty bathrobe and her hair was pulled back in a greasy ponytail. Her bare feet made a sound like a dog smacking its chops as she crossed the sticky linoleum from the stove and slid a plate across the table. A charred pile of scrambled eggs sat beside four strips of bacon black as railroad ties. Rusty looked so tired he didn’t even notice. He merely reached for the salt and pepper, seasoned rashly, and swallowed it down without so much as a word.
Darl watched Rusty eat his breakfast bit by broken bit and he wondered how much longer the man could last, how much longer they all could last. Ten years back Rusty had owned a shiny black Peterbilt covered in chrome with a jake-brake that sounded like a machine gun firing down the mountain. He had been working for himself, gone three weeks, home one, making more than they knew what to do with, raking in money hand over fist. Then one day, he had a seizure. A few days later, he had another. They came on him out of nowhere and stole everything that he had. The state took his CDLs, even took his regular driver’s license. He couldn’t run equipment like he’d done most his life. He couldn’t even drive a car. A fellow who worked at the County garage gave Rusty a ride each morning to the Justice Center, where he scrubbed toilets and washed windows and emptied trash and brought home barely enough to sink slowly.
Rusty scraped at his plate with his fork and swallowed the last of what he had. He checked the time on the microwave, snatched his lunch from the counter, kissed his wife and tousled the hair of his youngest boy, nodded at Darl, and out the door he went, too tired and beaten for words.
Now it was Darl, Marla, and the kids. Ruth was still screaming at the top of her lungs and Marla was working her way through the dishes as the boys licked their plates clean and dropped them into soapy water. A horn blew outside and the boys raced for their book bags, their footsteps shaking that tiny singlewide like thunder, and out the door they tore to beat out the other kids in the park for window seats on the school bus. When they were gone, Marla wiped her hands down her bathrobe, came over to the table, and scooped Ruth into her arms. The child was crying and Marla rocked her against her shoulder, patting her back, and shushing softly in her daughter’s ear, a sound about as calm and peaceful as any sound Darl had ever heard in his life.
Looking at his sister was like looking in the mirror, both carrying the same sharp nose and heavy chin of their mother. Their old man had kicked the bucket early and for Darl that meant the burden was on his shoulders. A man was put on this earth to provide for his own and for Darl that meant watching after his mother and making sure his sister and her family never went hungry. Marla and the kids were part of the reason he stayed in the woods. He could catch limits of trout every month but March, shoot deer come fall, drop dove and rabbit in winter, call turkeys in spring, and keep the freezers full year-round. Thinking about that right then, he wondered how in the world they’d survive without him. Who’d make sure his mama didn’t want for nothing? Who’d put food in the pot when the money ran dry? Confessing what he’d done wasn’t just a matter of giving away his own life, it was bigger than that. It was sacrificing everyone he loved.
“What was it you wanted to talk about?” Marla asked when the baby finally quit crying long enough for her to speak.
“Can I hold her?” Darl asked.
“Of course you can,” Marla said.
Darl held that little girl against his chest, her body hot against him, and he touched the tip of his nose against the top of her head. There was this indescribably sweet smell that was faded like a vase of flowers carrying from a room across the house. It was so soft, so faint, but there was no missing a smell like that, and he inhaled as deeply as he could, as if he couldn’t breathe without it, like that smell was oxygen.
“What was it you wanted to talk about?” Marla asked again.
The smell of that little girl filled his lungs and coursed through his body like a drug. “Nothing,” he whispered, that word only a breath against that little girl’s scalp. “Nothing at all.”