Moss Harlingen and Abel Harlingen

Moss Harlingen and Abel Harlingen’s relationship ends in patricide concealed as a hunting accident. The account first presents Moss’s apparent financial motive, then exposes the childhood trauma and protective impulse that complicate his understanding of why he killed his father.

The Hunting Accident

In 1973, Moss and Abel were hunting deer near Greenville. Moss waited behind a fallen tree until Abel crossed a stream about fifty yards downhill, then shot him. The county coroner ruled Abel’s death a misadventure, allowing the killing to pass publicly as an accident.

Moss had an immediate financial reason to want his father dead. His construction company, Big Ditch Construction, faced two bank notes coming due within six weeks, and neither bank would extend its loan while the other remained involved. Abel could have helped but refused. After the coroner’s ruling, Moss inherited money, paid the notes, and believed he had committed murder for financial gain.

The Buried Motive

The disclosure to ’Becka Paulson revises that explanation. When Moss was ten and his brother Emory was seven, their mother spent a winter in Rhode Island helping her widowed sister-in-law. During her absence, Abel abused both boys; the abuse stopped when their mother returned. Moss had no conscious memory of those events as an adult, including the fear and shame he experienced as a child.

The recollection of Emory’s pleas gives Moss’s action a second, concealed meaning. As the sound of the shot faded in the Maine woods, Moss whispered, “Not you, Em, not tonight.” The words connect the killing to an impulse to protect his younger brother, even though Moss himself did not remember the childhood abuse that had shaped that impulse.

What the Revelation Changes

Jesus tells ’Becka that Moss believed he had killed for money, perhaps without acknowledging the truth even in his deepest dreams. The contrast between the practical debt crisis and the forgotten abuse makes the murder’s motive layered rather than simply financial: the money explains the circumstances and apparent benefit, while the final words point to a buried history and a protective response.

The revelation also shows how completely the family’s past had been suppressed. Moss remembered neither his own childhood terror nor Emory’s distress, and his adult account of the killing therefore left out the history that gave his final words their meaning. The apparent hunting accident concealed not only a deliberate murder, but also the motive Moss could not consciously recover.