The Weight of This World

by David Joy

  Thad knew he was supposed to laugh, but he couldn’t. In all honesty, he could not imagine bottling what was inside a second longer. The drugs still had him and the thoughts still had him, and just a minute more and he knew he would explode.

  The reverend laughed through his nose and shook his head, then eyed Thad curiously. “I’ve got to get off of my feet,” he said, and stepped over to the last pew in the church. He eased himself onto the bench with a grunt, and once he was situated, rested one hand on top of the other, both braced over the handle of the oxygen carriage in front of him. “Go ahead and pull you up a chair,” he said. The reverend wallowed against the wooden bench and looked up at Thad. “These old pews ain’t the most comfortable seats God ever made, but they’ll sit.”

  Thad hadn’t moved since he came inside. His back was against the door. “I think it’d suit me just to stand,” he said.

  “Then you go on and stand, but I think I’m going to sit a spell. Standing gets to be like work when you get this old,” the reverend said.

  Thad stood there for a long time without saying a word. He knew what he wanted to do, but he just couldn’t get up the nerve to do it. He put his hand around his back and felt where the revolver was stuck in his waistline. He nudged the handle just a hair and felt the cold steel of the cylinder and barrel shift against his skin. The reverend watched with that one eye half-closed and his brow lowered like he wasn’t quite sure what to make of Thad, and then he slowly began to nod his head. He’d always seemed to know the things most folks were scared to say.

  “Now, I think you’ve got something you want to tell me,” the reverend said. “Is that right?”

  Still Thad did not speak.

  “Now, First John tells us, ‘If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness,’” the reverend said. Pieces of Scripture were stockpiled for moments his own words escaped him.

  Thad could feel himself moving closer and closer to some invisible edge that he knew was right in front of him, but he didn’t know how to stop himself from going over. He stood there and did not speak. His hands were sweating and he reached around and felt the revolver again, the weight of it now adding to all of the things he carried.

  “Well, let me ask you this.” Reverend Messer inched to the edge of the pew and lifted the oxygen carriage and tank by the handle, jabbed it back to the floor like he was driving a post. “Have you been saved?”

  “You’re the one baptized me,” Thad said.

  “Now, I know I am. But what I’m asking you is if you’ve accepted Jesus Christ as your Savior. Baptism’s just an outward expression of an inward act, something inside. You understand?”

  Thad nodded.

  “When we’ve got Jesus in our hearts, our repentance is our water,” the reverend said. “Those times of renewal come from the Lord once we’ve done that. You take Jesus into your heart and the old has gone and the new has come. ‘As far as the east is from the west, so far hath He removed our transgressions from us.’”

  At that moment, Thad could bear no more. He knelt to the floor and wept, his tears never even touching his face as they fell and spotted dusty slats. The reverend stood from the pew and bridged the small space between them. Thad could see the reverend’s worn leather brogans in front of him, the cylinder and the wheels of the oxygen carriage beside his shoes. His hand came to rest on the crown of Thad’s head, and though Thad shook beneath him, the reverend’s hand never waned.

  “All you have to do is ask,” the reverend said. “‘In Him we have redemption through His blood.’ The Lord said it Himself, ‘though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.’ All we have to do is ask, Thaddeus. ‘To the Lord our God belong mercies and forgivenesses.’”

  “You don’t understand what I’ve done,” Thad said.

  “I don’t need to understand what you’ve done,” the reverend said. “Now, if you want to tell me I’ll listen. I’m more than happy to listen to anything you’ve got to say. But as far as forgiveness, as far as taking Jesus into your heart and asking for mercy, that’s something between you and Him.”

  “I don’t know what to say.” Thad looked up and the tears washed down his face.

  “Well, I can probably help you with that,” the reverend said. He pressed his hand firmly against the top of Thad’s head. “You just repeat what I say now, son.”

  Thad nodded wildly, his eyes squinted as he faltered for breath.

  “I recognize that I am a sinner in need of a Savior.”

  Thad snorted to clear his nose, and spoke the words brokenly, barely more than a whisper.

  “I believe with all of my being that God raised Jesus from the dead.”

  “I confess Jesus Christ as my Lord and my God.”

  “I receive Jesus Christ as my Savior forever.”

  Thad echoed these things and just like that it was done. He’d been washed without water, washed clean by the very thing for which he sought forgiveness. Blood. And the hand upon his head became that of God Almighty. Thad felt all of this. He felt a great burden lifted. But he still needed to say it. Saying what he had done was the only way to set it aside. There had been so many things that he’d wanted to say to someone, anyone who’d listen, for so long. But no one listened anymore. No one. And perhaps it was that not listening that led to things like this. Perhaps it was that not listening that made the world so volatile. He looked up to Reverend Messer and said, “I need to tell you what I did.”

  “I told you, son,” the reverend said, “I’ll listen to anything you want to say.”

  Thad started with what haunted him most, the little Afghani girl that he shot in the chest, her body dropping like so much weight. He told the reverend how his finger had felt on the trigger and how he still wasn’t entirely sure whether he consciously squeezed or whether he was holding right there at the break and it just happened. But that didn’t make a difference because she was dead just the same. He told him about picking up pieces of Billy Thompson out of the moondust and how all of those parts went into a bag on a helicopter, a bag that was shaped for a body but whose shape no longer mattered because there was just pieces of him, pieces that Thad was partly responsible for, pieces that were shipped back to Georgia to a mother who couldn’t put any of it back together. All she could do was bury what was returned. He told him about the engagements and the uncertainty of just how many bullets had found their mark. There was really no telling how many. He spoke of the men they captured and what they did to them. He said he carried those things home like a sickness.

  Thad explained what Doug Dietz had done. He told the reverend about what that sergeant had said about the infantry being the hand of God, and how when he saw his dog stabbed right through the back with that screwdriver, that long metal pick pinning Loretta Lynn there, something inside had snapped and those words meant more than they ever had before. He made no mention of Aiden. Aiden had nothing to do with how things had unraveled, but he told the reverend of the trailer up Booker Branch, how he’d stormed inside, and of the bodies of the two girls that now lay on the floor. The reverend asked why he had killed the girls, and Thad said because he wanted Doug to hurt. He told the reverend how he forced Doug Dietz to look at those bodies, then how he’d stolen the car and driven to Bonas Defeat. He unclasped the sheath on his hip when he reached the grizzliest part. Pulling the knife from his belt, he showed the reverend just what he’d used to do it. He told him about forcing Doug to walk the gorge and how the leaves and dirt had stuck to the bottoms of his feet, how Doug crawled those last few steps and went unconscious when his body could go no farther. He described that giant stone, the moss-covered hillside just upstream from there, the unseen place where Doug’s body was probably wedged between rocks.

  The reverend stood there with his brow low, the oxygen tubes running from under his nose and across his cheeks to beh
ind his ears. His mouth hung slightly open and to the side the way it always did. Thad expected a look of horror, but that’s not how the reverend looked at all. What Thad saw on Reverend Donald Messer’s face was a look of conviction. “And you repent these things?” the reverend asked.

  “I do,” Thad said.

  “Then it’s forgiven,” the reverend said. He placed his hand on Thad’s shoulder and squeezed. “The Bible tells us you are a new creation. ‘And their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more.’”

  The reverend spoke then of what was promised. He told of twelve gates and twelve angels, the names written of the twelve tribes of the children of Israel. He took his tie clip between his fingers, rubbed at the stone, and spoke of walls of jasper. There would be no sun and no moon, a never-ending day with no night. There would be no more pain and no more sorrow, and he shook the oxygen carriage and said there would be no need for him to lug that around anymore either. But all of these were things to come after. There were things that had to be done now. There was a price paid for heaven, and one owed on earth. The reverend said he’d make the call if Thad needed him to, that he’d be right beside him every step of the way.

  Thad’s mind raced with the thought of what the reverend said. He was not going to turn himself in. There were only two outcomes for holding out his arms and letting the law clink handcuffs around his wrists: life in prison or a death sentence, and a death sentence would be the more merciful of the two. Thad would not spend the rest of his life in some concrete box with a bed bolted to the floor. He would not take three squares and an hour outside as the only light he saw between now and the day he died. His mind tore out of control and he suddenly felt the need to run. He shook his head and reached at the base of his back as he rose from the floor. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Reverend,” he stuttered, “but I can’t do that.”

  “This isn’t something you can run from, son. You have to pay what you owe in this old world.”

  Thad stuttered and his thoughts whirled and all of a sudden the door opened behind him and hit him square in the back. He yanked the revolver from the waist of his jeans, spun into the open, and had his left arm cinched around the person’s throat before he even saw it was a man. Thad dug the barrel into the man’s temple so hard that his head cocked to the side before Thad saw who he was. He smelled the man then, the smell of cheap aftershave, and he felt him trembling against his chest. Thad saw the red hair and knew immediately who he was holding, Samuel Mathis, the church deacon, who reeked like a drunk even on Sundays.

  “I’m sorry,” the man said. “I’m so sorry.” He whimpered and Thad didn’t ease up at all, just kept him hemmed against his chest with that snub-nose pressed into the side of his head.

  “There ain’t no need for this,” the reverend said. “Now, put that gun down, Thad. You just put that gun down and we’ll figure this out.”

  Thad could hear sirens coming up the mountain outside and couldn’t put his finger on a single thought, his head electric with the way the world was spinning so fast.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” the man kept saying, and Thad wasn’t sure what he was sorry for. He’d just walked in at the wrong time and now here he was, and Thad could hear the man piss himself, he could hear the sound of it tinkle from his leg onto the floor where they stood. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

  “Let him go, Thad.” The reverend hammered the oxygen carriage against the floor so that each syllable he spoke resounded. “You let him go and me and you are going to figure all this out.”

  The sirens were closer and Thad did not understand how they knew, but they did, and here they came, and there would only be seconds before they were here to take him. The time to run had come and gone, and even if he kept the gun to Samuel Mathis’s head and backed his way out of the church and into the parking lot just as the patrol cars came sliding in, even if he made it all the way to that pickup truck and onto the highway, how far could he go before the showdown, how far could he make it before they threw Stop Sticks across the road, everything coming to a screeching halt with only six shots to hold them off?

  At the very least he’d tried, and maybe trying was enough for forgiveness. The sirens were loud now, the law just seconds away, and Thad suddenly realized that dying wasn’t dying anymore. Dying was a one-way ticket to judgment, and it made no difference whether it came now or years down the road. He would be judged. Thad pulled the gun back from Samuel Mathis’s head and shoved him forward. Samuel tripped on the edge of the pew and fell sprawled in the center aisle at the reverend’s feet. The time to face God had come and that made doing what he had to do so easy and thoughtless, and he angled the revolver into the roof of his mouth without a second thought because he was not going to die. He could no longer die. He was headed for eternity. He saw the reverend’s eyes widen and his mouth begin to open, and the reverend was going to try to say something to stop it but Thad was bearing down on the double action and it broke before he ever heard a word. The sound was deafening in such a silent space, all of that sound held within the sanctuary. The two who remained could not escape that sound, and they did not even look up as the sirens screamed past the church. They were oblivious to that final decrescendo. They just stood there thunderstruck as the patrol cars barreled away.

  (32)

  Grays Ridge Road was crawling with sheriff deputies and the vehicles of volunteer firemen when Aiden got there at four o’clock. The minute he saw the lights flashing and the procession of patrol cars, his heart sank. He knew they were there for one reason. He knew it had something to do with Thad.

  Two deputies leaned against the back of one of the cruisers and faced in Aiden’s direction. They didn’t seem to be paying attention. One of the deputies slapped the back of his hand against the other one’s chest as he spoke. There was a driveway halfway between Aiden and them, and he hated to pull that close, hated to give them a chance to see him there, but he didn’t want to whip around right in the road either. They weren’t blocking anyone from passing and so turning around might seem stranger than just pulling on up.

  When Aiden got closer, the deputy who swatted the other one took a dip of tobacco from his partner’s box of snuff and handed the can back. The deputy craned his head away from his body as he shoved a wad of tobacco into his bottom lip, then brushed tobacco he’d dropped off the chest of his uniform. The one he was bumming from must’ve said something funny right about then because he slapped his knee and went to poking and prodding at the other one’s stomach and chest, and before Aiden knew it, they were wrestling around behind the Crown Vic like two middle-school boys. They never even saw Aiden pull behind a graveyard of busted trucks onto a gravel drive that led to a farmhouse.

  The driveway sank down a small hill where a grayed barn rotted into ruin at the bottom. Aiden had the windows down and could smell the dried hay in the barn when he tucked in on the far side and threw the Ranchero in reverse to turn around. The two deputies noticed him when he pulled back into the road, though, from the looks of it, they just as well might’ve figured he owned the place. One of the deputies threw up a hand and the other spit onto the pavement. Somehow the two bulls standing there were the only two in the whole sheriff’s office who didn’t know Aiden’s face, who didn’t know that car. Aiden waved and the one who’d spit nodded as he wheeled into the road and left them in the rearview.

  The thoughts swarmed him once he got back to the two-lane highway and drove north toward Charleys Creek. There were so many cops. A dozen cars. Maybe twenty. Blue lights going crazy. There was no telling what all of those cops were doing, but the sheer number alone guaranteed they weren’t hanging around for coffee and donuts. There was a red Geo Tracker up ahead of those patrol cars. Aiden had seen that thing outside the Dietzes’ trailer. Aiden saw it at the end of Grays Ridge Road. He’d gotten out of the car and looked inside, for Christ’s sake. Thank God he hadn’t touched it. Had he touched it? Could you leave finge
rprints in the rain? You could guarantee those pigs would dust for prints. That Tracker probably looked like it’d been rolled in flour by now. Probably had Aiden’s prints all over it. He was probably already fried. Hadn’t done a thing and he was fried.

  Aiden was panicked, but he tried to stay calm by convincing himself that he didn’t really know anything at all. He didn’t know what had happened. The last time he saw Thad he was standing on the front porch of the Dietzes’ trailer and Doug and Julie and Meredith were all alive and breathing. Sure, he’d heard a couple gunshots, but for all he knew, Thad had just blown a few holes in the wall or given them a skylight in the ceiling. Maybe Thad just pulled off a couple rounds to scare them a little, and after he was done scaring them, maybe that’s when he took the SUV and headed back into the woods, back to the only place that felt remotely like home to him anymore.

  At the head of Charleys Creek, Aiden could see the church parking lot filled with patrol cars, deputies everywhere. There were black-and-white Crown Vics and black-and-white Expeditions and dark gray unmarked Expeditions that were newer, with tinted windows. There were silver-and-black Chargers like the state troopers drove all parked bumper to bumper in the church parking lot like the whole Jackson County Sheriff’s Office was about to get baptized. Maybe they were having a funeral. Maybe some deputy from Little Canada had died, but surely he would have heard something if that had happened. April would have seen something about that on Facebook. She was always on Facebook. But she hadn’t said anything about someone dying. Then again, he hadn’t asked. They hadn’t talked about much at all over the last few days.