Mos Haringen

Moss Harlingen is a construction-business owner and one of Joe Paulson’s poker buddies whose past crime becomes part of the supernatural revelations surrounding ’Becka Paulson. In 1973 he killed his father, Abel, and the shooting was officially treated as a hunting accident. The later disclosure complicates Moss’s apparent motive: he believed he had killed for money, but the novel connects his action to forgotten childhood abuse and a last, protective thought about his younger brother, Emory.

Identity and Background

Moss’s business, Big Ditch Construction, faced immediate financial pressure in 1973. Two bank notes were due within six weeks, and neither bank would grant an extension while the other note remained outstanding. Moss asked Abel, who could afford to help, for money; his father refused. The circumstances made financial desperation a plausible explanation for what followed.

Years later, Moss is identified as one of Joe Paulson’s poker companions. He is not initially introduced through a confrontation or investigation: his concealed history reaches the reader as one of the private facts disclosed to ’Becka, while Joe remains absorbed in his own work, baseball, and affair with Nancy Voss.

The Killing and Its Apparent Motive

While hunting deer near Greenville in 1973, Moss waited behind a fallen tree for Abel to cross a stream roughly fifty yards downhill. He shot his father, and the county coroner ruled the death an accident. That ruling allowed Moss to inherit money and pay the two construction-business notes that were coming due.

The sequence supports the motive Moss himself believed he had acted on: he thought he had committed murder for financial gain. The apparent explanation has a hard, practical logic—his father refused help, the lenders would not extend credit, and the inheritance resolved the crisis. But the account does not let that logic stand as the whole truth.

The Buried Family History

The revelation delivered to ’Becka reaches further back, to a winter when Moss was ten and Emory was seven. Their mother had gone to Rhode Island to help her widowed sister-in-law, leaving the boys at home with Abel. During that absence, Abel abused both children; the incidents stopped when their mother returned and were never repeated.

Moss had no conscious recollection of the abuse as an adult. The narration stresses the gap between an event’s lasting force and the memory a person can retrieve: he did not remember his childhood fear, his attempts to suppress his cries, or Emory’s pleas from the next bed. The account therefore revises the financial explanation without erasing it. Moss had reason to believe the money was his motive, yet the deeper family history gives the killing another, obscured context.

Emory and the Meaning of the Shot

As the echoes of the shot faded in the Maine wilderness, Moss whispered, “Not you, Em, not tonight.” The words connect the killing to Emory, whom Moss had also seen suffer at Abel’s hands. They suggest a protective meaning to the act, although Moss himself had forgotten the childhood events that give the words their force.

The contrast is central to Moss’s characterization: an apparently calculated crime produces an inheritance, but the novel discloses a buried history that makes the act more than a response to debt. The whispered words do not undo the murder or settle every question of motive; they expose the personal past concealed beneath Moss’s own account of what he had done.

Revelation Through ’Becka

Jesus tells ’Becka about Moss’s crime and family history over a period of several days. These disclosures trouble her sleep and appetite and make her afraid that her guilty knowledge will show. Joe, by contrast, notices little of her distress. The revelations arrive not through Moss’s confession, but through information that reaches ’Becka before the violent television episode.

When Joe turns on the television, the images include the earlier baseball play that won him money, his affair with Nancy, and Moss waiting behind the fallen tree with his rifle. The screen shows Moss aiming at Abel and repeats the words “Not you, Em, not tonight.” It then shifts to a separate image of a woman and a man digging in the woods beside a large, dull-silver object protruding from the earth. By placing Moss’s concealed past among images of Joe’s private life and the buried object, the scene makes private knowledge appear suddenly visible, while keeping Moss’s own response to the revelation outside the reader’s view.