All the Sinners Bleed

Begin Reading Table of Contents About the Author Copyright Page To my brother, Darrell Cosby. What we know only we could ever know. The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness. —JOSEPH CONRAD Behold, I make all things new. —REVELATION 21:5 Charon County Charon County was founded in bloodshed and darkness. Literally and figuratively. Even the name is enveloped in shadows and morbidity. Legend has it the name of the county was supposed to be Charlotte or Charles County, but the town elders waited too late and those names were already taken by the time they decided to incorporate their fledgling encampment. As the story goes, they just moved their finger down the list of names until they settled on Charon. Those men, weathered as whitleather with hands like splitting mauls, bestowed the name on their new town with no regard to its macabre nature. Or perhaps they just liked the name because a river flowed through the county and emptied into the Chesapeake like the River Styx. Who knows? Who could know the thoughts of those long-dead men? What is known is that in 1805 in the dead of night a group of white landowners, chafing at the limits of their own manifest destiny, set fire to the last remaining indigenous village on the teardrop-shaped peninsula that would become Charon County. Those who escaped the flames were brought down by muskets with no regard to age, gender, or infirmity. That was the first of many tragedies in the history of Charon. The cannibalism of the winter of 1853. The malaria outbreak of 1901. The United Daughters of the Confederacy picnic poisoning of 1935. The Danforth family murder-suicide of 1957. The tent revival baptismal drownings of 1968, and on and on. The soil of Charon County, like most towns and counties in the South, was sown with generations of tears. They were places where violence and mayhem were celebrated as the pillars of a pioneering spirit every Founders’ Day in the county square. Blood and tears. Violence and mayhem. Love and hate. These were the rocks upon which the South was built. They were the foundation upon which Charon County stood. If you had an occasion to ask some of the citizens of Charon, most of them would tell you those things were in the past. That they had been washed away by the river of time that flows ever forward. They might even say those ONE Titus woke up five minutes before his alarm went off at 7:00 A.M. and made himself a cup of coffee in the Keurig Darlene had gotten him last Christmas. At the time she’d given it to him he’d thought it was an expensive gift for a relationship that was barely four months old. These days, Titus had to admit it was a damn good gift that he was grateful to have. He’d gotten her a bottle of perfume. He almost winced thinking back on it. If knowing your lover was a competition, Darlene was a gold medalist. Titus didn’t even qualify for the bronze. Over the last ten months he’d forced himself to get exponentially better in the gift-giving department. Titus sipped his coffee. His last girlfriend before Darlene had said he was a great boyfriend but was awful at relationships. He didn’t dispute that assessment. Titus took another sip. He heard the stairs creak as his father made his way down to the kitchen. That mournful cry of ancient wood had gotten him and Marquis in trouble on more than one late Friday night until Titus stopped staying out late and Marquis stopped coming home. “Hey, while you standing there in your boxers, make me one of them there fancy cups out that machine,” Albert Crown said. Titus watched his father limp over to the kitchen table and ease himself down into one of their vinyl-covered metal chairs that would drive a hipster interior designer mad with nouveau retro euphoria. It had been a year since his father’s hip replacement and Albert still walked with a studied caution. He stubbornly refused to use a cane, but Titus saw the way his smooth brown face twisted into tight Gordian knots when a rainstorm blew in off the bay or when the temperature started to drop like a lead sinker. Albert Crown had made his living on that bay for forty years, hauling in crab pots six days a week, fourteen hours a day off the shore of Piney Island on boats owned by folks who barely saw him as a man. No insurance, no 401(k), but all those backbreaking days and the frugality of