Where All Light Tends to Go

by David Joy

Only now is the child finally divested of all that he has been. His origins are become remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world’s turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man’s will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay. —CORMAC McCARTHY, Blood Meridian

something buried deep in her that never let anything outside of herself decide what she would become.

She was out of here from the moment she set her eyes on the distance.

Maggie hadn’t cut me out entirely, but there seemed to be few words left between us, or words too heavy for either of us to say. She loved me too much to let me go and I loved her too much to drag her down. That type of love doesn’t work.

But with time, I realized that someone can’t give what they don’t have. She was what she was, an addict, and there was nothing that could be said or done to change her. Death was her only savior.

I shouldn’t have found how bad-off she was funny, but with a lifetime of disappointment, it was the only way to handle it. Smiles outweighed tears. Laughter outweighed pain.

Toughness never wore out of men born with it.

“Thing is, son, a woman like that is just waiting around to die,” Lieutenant Rogers finally said. Rogers was trying hard to offer some sort of insight into a reality that he knew led to hurt. But I’d known it since I was a kid. That was my reality: the hurt, the shame, and everything else entailed. So, waiting around to die was something I’d known for a long time, and it wasn’t the dying part that ate at me. It was the waiting.

I’d never cared much for running. I wasn’t about to run unless something gave chase, more specifically something with teeth, something with a gun, or something with blue lights and a badge looking for someone to take down to Sylva mid-shift. Maggie ran from things all her own. She ran from circumstance. She ran from things that would never catch her. And somewhere down in that valley, Maggie was running right toward me without even knowing.

And in that moment that passed between us, there was this energy in the air that seemed to cup the two of us like lightning bugs in closed hands.

In just a few short minutes, dying had become simple. It was the living part I feared.

His words couldn’t sting me now. I was well past numb. But the summer air was crisp on the water where the wind had a chance to ride unrestrained between the mountains. The moon was already starting to descend behind the ridgeline, with stars that much brighter in its absence. Just a few short hours till daylight now. The boat putted toward the dam, but it would be twenty or thirty minutes before we made it there. I leaned against the front bumper of the Cabes’ truck and kept my eyes fixed on the sky.

Sunlight and darkness became the only testament to time. The way those shadows rose and fell along the walls was the only proof hours had passed at all over the next few days. A low yellow shone through the blinds each morning until white light spread across the room, then the blues settled on evening until it all went black again. I studied all of that movement and light in a drug-fueled delirium.

Praying’s easiest when you need something,

Nothing stirred at the trailer, only a murder of crows that swooped down low over the property and cut up into a tulip poplar across the way. The crows cawed and cackled back and forth between limbs.

I could still smell his skin burning, see the way that skin peeled and held to the tarp as we drug him through the woods. Those types of things don’t just fade away. They are the worms of the living and eat at a man for as long as he’s breathing. I reckon I deserved what burrowed in me just as Daddy deserved his.

There was never a moment in my life when I bought into the idea of light at the end of the tunnel. That old adage rests entirely on the direction being traveled. Out of darkness toward the light, folks might find some sort of hope in moving forward, some sort of anticipation for what awaits them. But my entire life I’d been traveling in the opposite direction, and for those who move further into darkness, the light becomes a thing onto which we can only look back. Looking back slows you down. Looking back destroys focus. Looking back can get you killed.

There for a while I got caught up in dreaming, and dreaming’s an awfully good thing when you don’t have to wake up. But staring back at the light only to stumble further into darkness hurts worse than never dreaming at all. That phone call from Rogers brought me out of my dream and showed me what was real.

wasn’t really sure what to say, but I knew she was giving me the closest thing to truth that she had for giving. She had a fate she was trapped to just the same as I did, just the same as Daddy. Wasn’t any use in sugarcoating that type of shit.

Baptist funerals were revivals. There wasn’t time for looking back on lives lost when there were souls that still needed saving.

There was a place where all light tends to go, and I reckon that was heaven.

On the pew where I sat, though, there wasn’t a damn bit of light to be had. Light never shined on a man like me and that was certain. In a lot of ways, that made men like Daddy the lucky ones to have only ever known the darkness. Knowing only darkness, a man doesn’t have to get his heart broken in search of the light. I envied him for that.

The two of us both seemed to think we could fool God into letting the wretched slip through the cracks.

I reckon it was the certainty and fearlessness that kept me watching him most times. I sat on the couch and gazed at the picture for hours and hours trying my damnedest to figure how he’d brave the gap. It wasn’t here or there that had ever been scary. It was the middle ground, that long desolate space between, that scared the hell out of me.

There’d always been something in her that seemed to say she and life had an understanding, some sort of deal between them that guaranteed it’d pan out.