by David Joy
Rogers’s words echoed. “It ain’t the knowing that does that to a man, Jacob. It’s the not knowing,” he’d said. I couldn’t fathom not knowing. I knew who did it before he’d come. I’d let it happen, and in a lot of ways, I was responsible. That shit’ll eat a man too, I thought, and it gnawed into me then. It burrowed down deep and clacked its teeth against the hardest part it could find. There was no place deep enough to bury it, no place buried enough to stop that gnawing.
On the floor beside my father lay a Bible, a small pocket Bible, black leather, gold gilded along the edges of pages. The Bible sat on top of the blood, not a single drop on the cover of the book. Rogers had dropped it there afterward.
I hung down and picked the Bible up from the floor, the backside of the book sticky and wet. I fumbled through a book that had never done me much good and tried to find the words the reverend had shouted at me when I carried my mother’s ashes. I knew the verse, knew it for Psalms, but it had been a long time since I’d navigated those chapters. “Thou wilt light our candle, the Lord our God will enlighten our darkness.” I read it over my father’s body like an incantation and waited again for God to show Himself. I read it over and over, louder and louder, until those words were bouncing all over the room, and I waited for God to show Himself. I screamed and waited, begged for Him to come down and save me, save us, but nothing came. Nothing. It was just as it had always been. Only us. There was no verse that could change that. I knelt beside my father and laid that Bible on his chest, situated it square, then brought his clenched hands to rest over that book and hold it just so.
The tears rode on waves. When I thought it settled, another wave. Choking. Gagging. There was a slow groan when I breathed, an uncontrollable groan that wheezed on every breath, and I knew then that the only way to be rid of it was to run. I stood from the bed but my body hung in the air. My knees bent and my top half drooped limp, but I knew I had to go.
The closet doors were open and the shiny green safe identical to the one at the shop stood in the back corner with its heavy door agape. Long guns were piled inside and pistols sat on the shelves, and I knew if it had been open while Daddy was alive there would have been one more body stiff on the floor. But Rogers wasn’t there. Rogers had made it out.
Daddy had always kept his bills folded in stacks of a hundred, ten thousand dollars cinched tight under each band. Where there should’ve been twenty stacks only one remained, one lonely wad of folded bills with the stretched band holding loosely where some had been taken.
Outside the hounds raged, and I walked out of the bedroom, stepped over Josephine’s body, and stumbled toward the window above the sink to look outside. At the edge of the yard a procession of patrol cars parked behind my pickup, their lights flashing madly in the early-morning glow. Rogers’s Expedition headed the line and he stood by the back bumper of his rig, two bulls with long guns standing one on each side. The three faced the house, while another pair of bulls cleared my truck and rummaged through the cab. It was all a setup and I knew it then. Not only had Rogers taken what was mine, he’d placed me there with blood on my hands. Means, motive, and opportunity, I had them all. The man I respected, the man I had come to trust more than my own father, had given me his word. “That’s all a man has is his word,” Daddy had said. Rogers’s word meant nothing.
I watched Rogers for a long time while the bulls moved around the cars. There were more of them coming up the drive now, all of them jumping out and popping their trunks for long guns. The deputies rushed about, but Rogers didn’t budge. He just held there watching the house, his eyes aimed directly where I stood. I wondered if he saw me, if he could see me peering through the window at him. His face was void, just a blank emotionless gaze. He leaned to the side and pulled a pack of Lucky Strikes from the cargo pocket of his britches, lit a cigarette, and made it jump between his teeth. Arms folded, he propped against the Expedition while all of those bulls moved and readied themselves for the moment he gave word.
I’d never killed a man, but for a long time, I’d known I had it in me. If there was one thing my father had given me, it was that. Killing Rogers would make things square, and if there was no getting out, then the best I could hope for was square. Leave this world just how Daddy fancied. I hurried into Daddy’s bedroom and ran my eyes down the rows of long guns in the safe. I chose the rifle that he would have wanted for such a task, an old Marlin .30-30 lever-action that Papaw had given him when he was old enough to hunt on his own. The blued receiver was pitted and matte, just a dull and dark bluish gray swirling about the metal. Daddy had marked every animal he ever took with the rifle along the black walnut stock. Almost all of the wood was marked with X’s and slashes and refinished over so the stain dried dark in the grooves he’d cut. I held the rifle pointed toward the ceiling and racked the lever until brass disappeared into the chamber. I took one last look at Daddy there on the floor with the Bible cradled under his fists, grabbed the stack of bills from the safe, and left him there. I had one last chance to honor my word. One last chance to make him proud.
I stepped over Josephine in the hallway and hurried into my bedroom. The sheets on the bed were just how I’d left them, pulled and mangled from the mattress centering the wall, and I laid the rifle there. On the far side of the bed was the place in the hardwood where I’d hidden things as a child, a place I was certain Maggie would remember. I opened it one last time, centered the stack of hundreds in the hide, and pulled my cell phone from my pocket to text her. There was no time to call, and her voice would’ve broken me. Even thinking those things brought on a heaviness that I could no longer carry. So I just texted her, turned off the phone, put it in the hide next to the money, sealed the floor, and left it all behind.
When I got back into the kitchen and could see through the window, Rogers hadn’t moved from that spot, and the bulls still rushed around. He took a drag from the cigarette and flicked it into the yard, blew a long line of smoke that thinned as it rose. Rogers seemed to stare at the window where I stood, but that blank expression never altered. He mustn’t have been able to see me there, because if he had he would’ve known what was coming. I wouldn’t break the windowsill. I wouldn’t lift the glass. I’d shoot him right through the windowpane. None of them would expect a thing till it was done.
Braced against the windowsill, the muzzle of the barrel held steady as I drew a bead. My left hand sweated, clenching hard on the foregrip, and I pulled the rifle back into me so that the butt of the stock pressed tightly against my shoulder. The hammer was back and my aim was true and I slid my fingertip over the trigger. There was no countdown. No breathing. Only powder burning. Lead sent to air. Glass flew apart when the trigger broke and from the yard screams came loud over the Walkers’ howls, but it wasn’t Rogers screaming. Rogers just lifted his hands to the bottom of his breastbone where that bullet hit, and the blood seeped from under his fingers, all of that red staining the belly of his khaki shirt. His eyes were wide, and even from that distance, I could see the fear and pain settling into him. He looked down at the place that burned and then back to the window as he fell and slid down the tail of the Expedition. There was a calmness I’d never really felt until then that washed over me while I watched him, a calmness that Daddy had always carried, but that I had never known until right at that moment.
The bulls dropped and scurried behind the cars. Their rifles rested on hoods and roofs and anything they could use to steady themselves. They hollered to one another with words I couldn’t understand through all of the ringing. One of them rushed out to get his arms under Rogers and drag him behind the cars. He must’ve asked for cover because right about then a round came from their side and blew away shards of glass that hung just over my head. Even through the ringing I heard the bullet whiz past like a pissed-off hornet, and I dropped down behind the cabinets and knelt there for a long time listening to them yell, listening to the Walkers bay.
A few more rounds came
through the open window and hammered holes into the wall across from me. I could see Josephine’s body in the hall from my position, and the way that she slept looked so peaceful that I thought for a second or two of joining her there. That type of peacefulness and stillness was all that mattered anymore.
I crawled over by the refrigerator and opened the cabinet where Daddy kept his liquor. There was a half-filled bottle of Evan Williams that seemed to suit me right then, so I popped the cork and put the bottle to my lips. My mouth was dry and that woody-tasting bourbon hit it just right, so I took another long slug until my thirst was gone and a woozy clarity flushed over me. I crept across the room, sliding my knees and hands and that rifle along the hardwood until I was in the living room and right beside the coffee table. That opened pack of Winstons looked good, so I shook one from the pack and lit it. I hadn’t noticed my hands shaking until I held the cigarette between my fingers, but I was trembling. I set the pack of smokes back where Daddy had left them, squared it off between the record album and television remote just so.
The front door was still cracked open and outside the bulls were waiting. I stood from the floor with Daddy’s rifle in my hands and opened the door a bit further till it was only the screen and the porch and the stairs and the yard and those dogs that separated us from one another. I was on the edge of that ravine now and peered around the corner to where the sun shined brightly onto cars, a fierce white light blinding all of the bulls who stood out there in wait. It was a light that no matter how hard they tried, they would never understand, and I felt sorry for them. There was such a sad, sad truth in how clueless they were to what shined down all around them. The gap between here and there didn’t seem so barren any longer, didn’t seem so far and out of reach. The space between here and there was no distance at all, and I readied myself to go where that Indian had never had the courage to go, the place Mama had peered off onto with a beckoning kind of sadness in her eyes. There was no fear or sorrow or repentance any longer, and I ventured out into that middle ground with a fearless pride that held my back arched and chest out. That restful time was near now, and I finally understood that there’d never been any difference between here or there. Only the middle ground of this wicked world mattered, the vast gap that stretched between, and those who were born with enough grit to brave it.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank my agent, Julia Kenny, and editor, Sara Minnich, for their unwavering encouragement and editorial vision, as well as the entire team at G. P. Putnam’s Sons. I would also like to thank two wonderful friends, Greg Hlavaty and Bessie Dietrich Goggins, for their support from the book’s infancy.
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