“Sheriff, if you don’t need me, I’d like to leave. This place gives me a bad taste in the mouth.”

“No, you can go on, Mr. Tanner—Kennesaw. I have your statement, and if anything else comes up, I’ll give you a call.”

“Good night, Sheriff.”

“Good night. Drive carefully.”

It seemed an especially long drive from Panther Creek back to Dutch Island. I hadn’t slept in more than a day and a half and I was groggy with fatigue. My head ached, and my eyes felt like scorched cinders rattling loosely in their orbs. The smell of burned human flesh hung in my nostrils like a bad cold, and I could not rid my mind’s eye of that charred and blackened stump that had once been a living human being—Joree Causey—a woman I had known.

Was there no end to the misery associated with that family? Tonya dead; Joree murdered; the son, Junior, possibly the killer of his own mother, and in all likelihood, complicit, in one fashion or the other, with the demise of his sister.

What the hell is it with these people? They don’t just invite catastrophe, it’s as though they continually invent it, nourish it, and grow it as a crop. As though tragedy is contained within the very marrow of their bones.

I wanted to assign blame—to blame someone, anyone—for the failings of these people, this family I had come to know and to recognize as fellow beings. I wanted to blame them for their predicament. And blame they certainly bore. But was that all there was to it? Were they the only guilty ones? And perhaps that was the source of my anger and frustration: the realization, as the saying goes, that “There, but for the grace of God, go I.”

And then, from his masterwork The Prophet, the recollected words of Kahlil Gibran came to my mind, as they often do when I am confused and unsure and groping for answers to a particularly human predicament.

Oftentimes have I heard you speak of one
who commits a wrong as though he were
not one of you, but a stranger unto you and
an intruder upon your world.
But I say that even as the holy and the righteous cannot rise
beyond the highest which is in each one of you,
So the wicked and the weak cannot fall lower than the lowest
which is in you also.
And as a single leaf turns not yellow but
with the silent knowledge of the whole tree,
So the wrong-doer cannot do wrong
without the hidden will of you all.

Like a procession you walk together
towards your god-self.
You are the way and the wayfarers.
And when one of you falls down he falls
for those behind him, a caution against the stumbling stone.
Ay, and he falls for those ahead of him,
who though faster and surer of foot,
yet removed not the stumbling stone.