by David Joy
Darl sat in his truck on the dusty pull-off by the mailboxes, his headlights shining on a cattle gate where Calvin was working a chain loose from the fence. When the gate was open, Darl pulled up with his window down and his arm resting on the door. The night was misty below that bright blood moon, so the whole world seemed to reside within a hazy rust-colored glow. Calvin stood there by the window and glanced into the bed of Darl’s truck.
“When you get back to that middle field, cut your lights so you don’t shine up there toward the house.”
“All right,” Darl said.
“Head into that back pasture and you’ll see where I’ve been digging stumps out. I’ll be back there in a couple minutes. This diesel’s too loud to cross that field without it echoing up there to the house.” Calvin nodded back to his truck.
Darl headed into the field and Calvin shut the gate behind him. As Darl drove across the pasture, his headlights lit the eyes of Angus and Hereford cows standing motionless in the oat grass. Calvin’s family once had nearly a hundred head, but was now down to twenty or thirty. A red fox stopped for a moment in its tracks and studied with eyes aglow before lifting its nose to the air and trotting after the scent of something gone before.
The pasture was mostly flat but rose toward the back before dropping into the middle field. Darl killed the lights as he approached the fence line. The air was damp on his arms when he stepped out to open the gate. There was plenty of light to see as he crossed that second pasture, the grass there eaten down to ragged stubble. The field bottomed out beside a small creek where he and Calvin had caught spring lizards together as children and coaxed crawfish from under lichen-covered stones with torn bits of hotdog baited on fishhooks. The last pasture ran long rather than wide, and at its back, mounds of red dirt rose beside a small ’80s-model Cat excavator. Darl pulled in beside the trackhoe and cut the engine.
From his truck, he watched the land in his rearview and waited for Calvin to come over the hill. He thought about how many generations this land had belonged to Hoopers, and he wondered how far into the future it would remain that way. Names are a funny thing, he thought. Names were tied to place and occupation and condition, something that brought folks to ask things like “So are you a Little Canada McCall or a Glenville McCall,” to which you might say, “Yeah, I’m from Little Canada,” or “Yeah, I’m from Glenville,” or “Naw, my family come from Balsam Grove.” Some families were farmers and some families built houses, some ran equipment and some ran stores, some were lawmen and others were outlaws. Somewhere far enough back most names tied together, but names had history that might bring someone to say something like “Yeah, that’s the Franks coming out in her” when Leigh Ann Rice got mean at the Ingles deli, so that names became things that even if you married out of them had a way of sticking with you. Darl thought about who lay in the back of his pickup. Brewer was a name that demanded things be done this way.
A silhouette rose from the hill as if what came had clawed its way out of the ground. As the figure came closer, Darl could hear the brush of steps through waist-high sedge, and in a few moments Calvin was there beside him. Darl stepped out of the truck and they stood by the back tire, neither saying a word, expressionless as they considered what lay before them. Calvin walked over to the trackhoe and cranked the engine. The diesel sputtered loud, but this far back into the field the sound was contained, the woods and the land providing a barrier of secrecy.
It did not take long to dig the grave, and when it was done they rolled the body out of the tarp. Darl refused to look in to see how Carol lay in the bottom. Calvin pushed dirt into the hole as if they were covering a mended waterline, and when the grave was filled, he packed the dirt with the weight of the machine balanced beneath its bucket. The night was all but gone by then, and they rode back through the field with a faint breath of light growing behind the eastern ridge.
They were sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee with a haze of cigarette smoke shifting overhead when Angie Moss came from the bedroom. She was wearing one of Calvin’s T-shirts, a ratty Guy Harvey shirt with a pair of puppy drum on the back. The sleeves ran to her elbows and the bottom cut her mid-thigh where a pair of striped boxer shorts ended, so that it looked as if the shirt might’ve been all she wore. Angie stopped in the doorway and stood there scratching at the back of her head, her eyes peering half asleep.
A very strange awareness came over Darl as he sat there, to have come from where they returned and now be back in a room so commonplace, a room where he’d sat a thousand times over the course of his life. Nothing seemed real just yet. They were not men accustomed to such darkness. They were ordinary men—work-hard, weekend-warrior, get-up-and-go-to-church kind of men—and what they’d just seen, where they’d come from affected them so. Numbness and disbelief hollowed his insides, a fire trapped in his flesh with the truth of what they carried.
“What in the world you doing here?” Angie asked.
No one said anything. Calvin had a look like he and Darl had been caught in the middle of something. Angie looked back and forth between them trying to figure out if there was a joke she wasn’t in on, something she didn’t get.
“Good to see you, too,” Darl finally said. He forced himself to grin, thinking, Act normal. Just smile.
Angie walked over to the coffeepot and Darl watched her, studied the curves of her legs, how her breasts swayed beneath her shirt as she came back to the table. She sat down in a ladder-back chair and blew steam off her cup, tried to take a sip then set it down to cool. Even having rolled out of bed, she was so stunning it was hard not to gawk. Her blond hair held natural waves, eyes green as mill marbles. Freckles crossed her nose and dotted her cheeks like specks of mud. She ran her hair through her fists till it was all pulled over her right shoulder.
Calvin had lit another cigarette and she reached to take it from his fingers. He slid an open pack across the table, a lighter rested on top of the box.
“I don’t want a whole one,” she said. “I’m trying to quit.”
He handed her his smoke and she took a long drag, holding it in for what seemed forever before blowing the smoke out the corner of her mouth. Her legs were crossed and she was rocking her foot, that single motion shaking her whole body. She started to give Calvin his cigarette, but took one more quick puff before she passed it.
“Really, Darl, what in the world you doing here so early?”
“Came to see Calvin about some work.” Darl glanced across the table at Calvin, who cut his eyes down to the ashtray and tapped a fingernail of ash into the glass.
“Why in the world you covered in mud?”
Darl looked down to where his camo jeans and boots were caked with red clay. “Some of us ain’t got somebody to wash our clothes for us.”
“That might be part of your problem, chief. You’re running around looking for a woman to cook and clean and have to look at that face of yours.” Angie grinned and cradled her cup with both hands in front of her mouth. “That’s a hard sale.”
Calvin finished the rest of his coffee, then stood and walked over to the refrigerator. He opened the door and peered inside, not finding anything that suited him, and walked over to pour what was left of the pot.
“What time you have to be at class today?” Calvin asked when he came back to the table.
Angie was in school at the community college, studying to be an RN. She was eight years younger than Calvin and Darl, but had a good head on her shoulders, had grown up here like they had, her family coming off Bradley Branch over in Whittier.
She looked at Calvin, confused. “It’s Saturday,” she said.
“Oh, yeah,” Calvin said. “What you got planned?”
“Thought I’d ride over to Uncle Bill’s Flea Market and see if I couldn’t find some curtains.” Angie nodded toward the den. “There’s a lady there that used to have all kinds of linens and curtains. She has one
of those electrolarynx.”
“An electro what?”
Angie held her fist to her throat and mimicked the electronic sound. “That’ll be ten dollars and fifteen cents,” she grunted.
Neither Darl’s nor Calvin’s expression altered.
“What the hell’s wrong with the two of you?”
They didn’t answer.
“Well, I’m going to go by there and see if I can’t find some curtains and then I’m going to run by and see Mama, see if she needs me to do anything for her. She’s been sick as a dog the past week and a half. I bet Daddy’s starved to death.”
They sat there for a few minutes and didn’t say anything, each sipping their coffee, eyes forward. There was a dreamlike glow about the room as the morning grew outside and filtered in through thin white curtains and old crown-glass windowpanes. Darl sat there in a trance, the room around him, Calvin and Angie sitting there beside him, all of it feeling like make-believe.
“You know, I don’t think bear season opens up for a few more weeks, Darl,” Angie said. Her words came out of nowhere and caught him off guard.
Darl looked at her, confused. “What are you talking about?”
“I said I don’t think bear season opens up for another week or two, does it, Cal?” She glanced over at Calvin then cut her eyes back to Darl. “Deer season don’t open till Thanksgiving. So if you can’t run bear and you can’t hunt deer, what exactly are you all dressed up for? Getting ready for Halloween?”
Darl didn’t answer. He looked down at the camouflage clothes he wore and no words came to mind. It scared him that he didn’t have an answer.
“Geez Louise! Talking to the two of you’s like talking to a couple stiffs this morning,” Angie said. “I’m just giving you a hard time. I don’t care if you poach deer all year as long as you bring me some.”
Angie stood and walked over to the counter. She folded a checkered dish towel back on a wooden bowl filled with fresh eggs. Opening a cabinet, she grabbed a milk-glass bowl, started cracking different-colored eggs and whisking them with a fork.
“You know, one time my daddy killed a doe somewhere back in Whiteside Cove and it was the night before a doe day and he figured he’d leave it in the woods overnight till he could come back and get it.” Angie’s story mixed with the sound of the fork beating against the side of the bowl. “So he field dressed that deer and he sunk it down in a beaver pond to keep it from spoiling, then he came back that next morning and pulled it out. Well, when he took it down to Burt Hogsed that next day, Daddy said Burt opened that deer up and there were crawfish crawling inside it. He said Burt looked up at him and said, ‘Where’d this deer come from? There’s a bunch of crawfish in here.’ Daddy said he told him, ‘Deer’ll eat about anything when they’re hungry.’” Angie shook her head and laughed and turned back to the table.
Darl met her eyes and he shook his head and forced a smile. “I better be getting on,” he said.
“Why don’t you stay for breakfast? I’m going to scramble some eggs and I think there’s some sausage in there that needs to be cooked. I’m making it anyways.”
“No, I better get on,” Darl said. He stood from the table and stretched his arms at his sides.
“Well, at least take some eggs with you.” Angie grabbed the wooden bowl filled with fresh eggs and offered it toward him. There was a mix of brown and cream-colored eggs, a few green and a few pale blue Easter eggers. “There’s some egg crates stacked over there on the washing machine. We’ve got eggs coming out of our ears.”
“I’m okay,” Darl said. “Really.”
Angie came over and stood on her tiptoes to kiss him on his cheek. He felt her lips wet and cool against his skin. His face was on fire.
Outside, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky and the sun had barely broken over the mountainside to burn the fog from the fields. A mixed brood of Araucana and Rhode Island Red chickens scratched around the side of the house, pecking grubs and grain from the grass. Calvin followed Darl out to the driveway and they stood by the front bumper of Darl’s pickup. The white farmhouse looked the same as it always had. The tin roof was newer, but everything else was as it had always been: a small, white-sided one-story with black shutters; a porch centered the front of the house with decorative black cast-iron columns with vines and leaves like used to be on all Southern homes. Darl looked at Calvin and could see the same boy he’d known his whole life right behind the man’s face, same green eyes and boxy jaw. Folks had always thought they looked like brothers, but Calvin was short and stocky while Darl was long and lean.
“She must not have woken up when I left last night,” Calvin finally said. He faced the house with his back leaning against the grill, while Darl hovered over the hood of the truck and faced the road.
“Must not have.”
Calvin turned and leaned his elbows on the rough, worn paint of the hood. “Well, what now?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean what do we do?”
“We don’t do anything. We go on to work and get right back to what we’ve always done.”
“And what if something happens?”
“Ain’t nothing going to happen,” Darl said, though saying it seemed almost like a curse, and he looked around for a piece of wood to knock for luck but found nothing within reach.
“But what if it does?” Calvin said. There was fear in his voice.
“Then it’ll be me.”
Calvin looked at Darl with a look of guilt and worry.
“I’ll take all of it, Calvin. You have my word. You don’t worry about anything.”
Calvin didn’t speak again, though he stood there for another minute or two as the morning grew around them. Neither said goodbye when Calvin walked back to the house. Darl waited there at the front of his pickup until Calvin was inside.
When he was gone, Darl climbed into his truck and sat there with the engine running for a minute more, watching the house vacantly. Nothing had settled in his mind just yet, that night and what they’d done as unreal and dreamlike right then as if he’d imagined it. Not enough time had passed to know whether this was something a man could live with, or if it would gnaw him in two. They were still too close to what had happened to see it with any sort of perspective.
He grabbed a can of Skoal wintergreen from the seat, loaded a thick plug of tobacco against his gums, and put the truck in reverse. By the mailboxes, he sat with his mind blank and dumb, unsure whether to turn right or left. He knew his way home, but things that had always been simple would never be that way again.
SIX
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 t
o 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.