The Line That Held Us

by David Joy

  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.”

  SEVEN

  The Grand Prix had not moved from where it was parked along the tractor path. Over the past few days, a tulip poplar had begun to shed its leaves, a storm the night before blowing the treetop bare. Yellow leaves stuck to the windshield and driver’s-side glass, the turquoise paint slapped here and there with goldenrod shots of color. Dwayne Brewer had driven here every day to check on his brother’s car. He was certain now that his brother wasn’t coming out of those woods.

  The old man sat at his kitchen table eating a bowl of oatmeal. His gray beard hung from his chin like Spanish moss, the wires of it caked with bits of food that fell from his spoon and caught. His hair had thinned to a deep widow’s peak, and what remained was slicked back with a comb. Dwayne could see him through the screen door, the entrance opening into a small den, the kitchen off to the left. He rapped with his knuckle against the wooden doorframe where crackled white paint now chipped away.

  The old man glanced up from his bowl, flicked his eyes upward as he blew steam off his next bite. He stared for a few seconds, and even from such distance Dwayne could see sunlight through a kitchen window showing his eyes pale blue. “Whatever it is you’re selling, I ain’t buying,” Coon Coward hollered across the room.

  “I need to talk to you.”

  Coon now rested his spoon in the bowl and set his palms on the table. “Well, if you’ve come to try and get me to go to one of your newfangled churches with TVs and guitars, I don’t want no part of that neither. Been a member of Moses Creek all my life and don’t have much of a mind to change now.”

  “Open the fucking door, old man!”

  Coon Coward stood and disappeared to a place in the kitchen that Dwayne could not see from the porch. When he came around the corner, he was shoving a small revolver into the side pocket of his overalls. The old man walked with a long gait, his right leg following behind as if it were tied to him with a leash. He came onto the porch and where he stopped his boots made a right angle on the weathered planks, his right foot never coming straight.

  “What’s this about?” Coon asked.

  “My brother,” Dwayne said. He stared at the old man’s eyes, and in the hollows around them was the reason for his name. Tillmon Coward had almost drowned in Bear Lake as a child and the blood vessels had ruptured around his eyes, the skin darkening around them like he’d been in a fistfight. For one reason or another, the darkness never left, deep purple sockets that made his pale blue eyes look almost white against them.

  “My God, you’re Red Brewer’s boy, ain’t you?”

  Dwayne didn’t answer.

  “Shame what happened,” Coon said. “How long’s that been now?”

  “Five years,” Dwayne said. He thought back on what had happened to his parents and he knew it wasn’t anything at all like folks thought. His daddy was drunk and drove right off the side of a mountain, but it was neither an accident nor a shame.

  The old man grunted and shook his head. “A shame,” he said. “Your daddy worked for me up there at the plastics plant that used to be in Cashiers. I had to fire him for peeping in the women’s locker room. Hated to do it really, but my hands were tied.”

  “Ah,” Dwayne grunted, wishing the old man would stop reminiscing and get on with it.

  “Now what’s this about your brother?” Coon asked. His head tilted to the side. He wore a look of confusion.

  “My brother was back in there on your property this past weekend, and I ain’t heard a peep out of him since.”

  “What was your brother doing on my property?”

  “You know as well as I do what he was doing.”

  “No, I can’t say that I do.”

  “I ain’t here to play grab ass, old man, so cut the shit,” Dwayne yelled. “Ginseng!” His voice was deep as if the words were bellowed from a cave.

  Coon’s eyes squinted and his brow lowered. “Well, if your brother was back in there stealing my ginseng, I don’t rightly know what happened to him.”

  “Either you saw him or you didn’t.”

  “I ain’t seen a soul, son.” Coon strolled past Dwayne like he wasn’t there, then hobbled down the front steps and crossed the yard to his car. He pulled the revolver from his pocket and placed it on the roof of the Oldsmobile, then fished a set of keys from his overalls and hit a button on the key chain. The trunk popped an
d he shoved the keys and the wheelgun back into his pocket. He pulled a navy-colored vinyl suitcase from the trunk, set it on the gravel drive, and slammed the lid. “I been out of town attending to my sister’s funeral the past week and a half,” Coon said. “Ain’t been home an hour.”

  He came back onto the porch, dropped his luggage by the door, and sat nonchalantly in a rocking chair as if he were going to pass the last of the day whittling a stick with his pocketknife.

  “I don’t know where you come from, old man, and I don’t much give a shit, but I’m telling you my brother was back in there and ain’t been out since. His goddamn car is sitting right down there on that road that goes up to your back field where he left it.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you, son, aside from he ain’t have no business being here in the first place.”

  “I’m telling you something’s happened to my brother.” Dwayne’s fists clenched by his sides. He stepped forward and hovered over the old man. “And if I find out it has anything to do with you I’m going to tie you up and drag you behind my car till there ain’t a lick of meat left on your dried-up bones.”

  Coon Coward leaned onto his hip and pulled the revolver from his pocket. He held his finger on the trigger and rested the .38 against his thigh as if he didn’t have a care in this world. Dwayne almost found humor in how the old man didn’t seem to give one single shit what he was telling him. Maybe it was age, maybe it was knowing he was nearing the end anyways that made him that way, or maybe that old man was stone-cold crazy. Coon Coward sucked at his back teeth and watched Dwayne out of the corner of his eye.

  “Well, if there was anybody back in there on my property while I was gone, there ought to be an easy way to find out.”

  “How’s that?” Dwayne asked.

  “I got a game camera in there on the main trail. If anybody was back in there while I was gone I probably got a picture of him. Unless they come in some other way, but I doubt it,” Coon said. “If a man was smart, he’d cut his own way in, but they ain’t ever smart. They’re lazy. People don’t want to have to work for nothing so they walk that same path like a bunch of doe-eyed children.” Coon Coward shook his head, slapped his hands against the worn thighs of his overalls, his right still clenching the revolver, and stood from his chair. He limped to the edge of the porch and spit out into the yard. “Let’s get on with it,” he said, shooting Dwayne a look like he couldn’t quite decide who was killing whom.

  Coon wandered out into the yard and never turned back, and in a moment Dwayne followed the old man’s lead. They walked to where the grass met the woods and then they were in them, neither quite sure what they’d find.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE ROOM COON COWARD used for an office was piled floor to ceiling with cardboard boxes taped shut and labeled with permanent marker. A monitor sat deep on top of a cheap laminate desk, the wood grain peeled back to particleboard. Coon grabbed a pair of reading glasses from behind the keyboard and balanced them on the tip of his crooked nose, and when the computer was running, he stuck the memory card they’d pulled from the game camera into a small drive by the mouse pad.

  “I cleared this card right before I left for my sister’s, so anything on here came while I was gone.” Coon sat in a creaky swivel chair. Dwayne pushed a stack of boxes out of the way with his boot and knelt beside the old man so he could see.

  The computer screen offered the only light in the room and Dwayne watched the old man’s face, the way he kept his head tilted up to see through his glasses, how he stroked his beard down his chest. The only sounds in the room were that of the old man’s coarse hair running through his fist and the hum of the computer’s fan. There was a startling juxtaposition of time in these mountains, in the way a man might still plow his field with horse and harrow as if it were a hundred years before, then turn right around and pull a brand-new iPhone from his pocket to tell his wife he’d be late for supper. Dwayne didn’t think of it with that sort of complexity, but it seemed queer to see that old man fiddling with a computer.

  When the photos were downloaded, a program opened and Coon double-clicked the first file. He tapped his way through the pictures with the arrow keys, the first ten or so only nighttime animals: a skinny black bear with tall shoulders strolled through the trees, picking about for what acorns littered the ground; there were three or four photos of a mother raccoon leading her litter of kits along the trail, her eyes fluorescent as fireflies in the green light of the camera’s hidden flash; four or five does crossed in front of the tree each morning, but the large buck Coon called Solomon only showed in one frame, following fifteen minutes behind the girls one foggy morning with his nose to the ground, his tail straight as a pointer’s. Finally, there was a photo of a man in camouflage with a rifle cradled in his arms and a treestand on his back slipping down the trail.

  “Bingo,” Coon said as he drew a marquee around the man on the screen. Zoomed in, the photo was too blurry to make out. The trespasser’s back was turned to the camera. But in the very next shot, Coon could see him clear as day as the man made his way back out of the woods the same way he’d come in a few hours earlier. “I be damned,” Coon said. “That’s Sharon Moody’s boy, sure as the world. Darl Moody. That sneaky little son of a bitch.”

  Dwayne knelt quietly and glared at the screen, studying the picture as he committed the name to memory. He knew Darl Moody from growing up. Darl was three or four years younger, somewhere around the same age as Sissy, but Dwayne hadn’t ever known him to be much. In the days that followed, there were photos of Darl Moody going past the camera around the same time every evening, making his way to the stand sometime around five-thirty and leaving at dusk.

  “I bet that little son of a bitch knew I was out of town,” Coon said. “Me and his mama in the same Sunday school class. The nerve of that little shit.”

  “I don’t give a fuck about this, old man. I couldn’t care less if he shoots every deer in here. Get on to Friday and see if you got any pictures of my brother.”

  Coon x-ed out of the photo and double-clicked a file further down in the folder. Once again, Darl Moody made his way into the woods around suppertime and a little more than two hours later he was on his way out, though it looked like he was running. “Something’s got him spooked,” Coon said. In the next photo, it was pitch-black, the backs of two men, one in full camo, the other in jeans and a dark hooded sweatshirt, were lit green by the camera’s flash. “That looks like Darl again.”

  “Who’s that with him?”

  “Beats me,” Coon said. He clicked forward and what came next left them both confused. Darl Moody walked with his hands behind his back pulling a tarp, the person with him following behind with the other end so that the tarp swung between them like a hammock.

  Dwayne shouldered the old man out of the way and drew a marquee around the tarp in the picture. It was impossible to tell what was inside, though it looked heavy, a visible strain evident in the way both men’s bodies hunched, their shoulders raised to bear the weight. Darl was easy to make out, the long face and sharp nose, a thick beard that curved in waves from his chin. But the man with him, a short, stocky fellow, was hidden in the shadow of his hood. Dwayne zoomed in hoping to see something, but it was equally dark and fuzzy up close. “What’s that say on his shirt?” Dwayne asked. He tried to get as close as he could to the logo on the breast of the sweatshirt, but like the man’s face, it was out of focus. “What’s after that?”

  Coon took the mouse and clicked through the rest of the photos, about eleven more shots of raccoons and possums wandering the nighttime woods like gypsies. When he’d reached the last of the pictures, Coon took off his reading glasses and set them on the desk. “That’s it,” he said. “And your brother’s not in any of them pictures.”

  “He was here,” Dwayne said. “His goddamn car’s still parked right down there where he left it.”

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p; “You ever think maybe he parked his car right there in my woods and then doubled back to the road?”

  “What the hell would he be doing going back to the road?”

  “I don’t know,” Coon said.

  “He came after your ginseng, old man.”

  “Well, I don’t know what to tell you.”

  Dwayne stood from the floor and sneered at the back of Coon Coward’s grease-slicked head. The old man’s contrariness had gotten under Dwayne’s skin and he looked around the room at the boxes searching for the heaviest thing he could find: a brick, a rock, anything. His fists clenched and he thought for a second about bashing in that old man’s skull with his bare hands, but he knew it wouldn’t change a thing. Coon Coward had said all he had to say and he had pictures right there to prove it.

  Dwayne breathed deep through his nose, then turned and headed out of the room, and the old man watched him go without so much as goodbye. There were a million questions running through Dwayne Brewer’s mind, buzzing around his skull like flies. Somebody’s going to give me a goddamn answer.

  EIGHT

  The simplest way to know for sure was to stop at Walgreens on the way to Asheville. Take a pregnancy test. Plus or minus, yes or no. Be done with it.

  Angie always started on Sundays. Her cycle always lasted three days. You could set your daily planner by it. Three days late might not have meant anything for most women, but the fact it was already Wednesday had Angie thinking a million things while she waited in the restaurant booth for Calvin to meet her for supper. More than anything in particular, something just felt different. Something had felt different for the past week and a half.