A man tormented by the guilt of murder will be a fugitive till death; let no one support him (Proverbs 28:17).

He'd completely gotten away with it.  Now 84 years old, John Murphy had managed a lifetime of guilt following the death of Bill Tyler.  No one else knew that "the accident" which took his co-worker's life back when they had both been 19 years old was not an accident at all.

They'd been working out in the fields and arguing about a girl:  Sarah Wyler.  Murphy had been infatuated with her since grade school -- a fact which Tyler knew full-well, having discussed the situation endlessly as the two boys worked as farm-hands for Clarence Liggety over the previous two years.  Even so, Tyler asked Sarah Wyler to the Saturday night dance.  And when he mentioned the fact that she'd said yes, he said it as an afterthought, an indifferent assault on Murphy's honor and ambitions.  Murphy was furious.  The whole day, he seethed with rage and jealousy, and whenever he thought of Tyler dropping by Sarah Wyler's house on Saturday night, commenting on her lovely polka-dot dress, and walking arm-in-arm to the dance, he went blind with hatred towards the man who had betrayed him and cut in on him.

So when Tyler was caught up in the combine while working with Murphy to clear a jam in the blades, it was easy for Murphy to claim ignorance.  His mind truly had been elsewhere.  And since such farming accidents happen all too regularly, nobody blamed Murphy for what had taken place.  In fact, most folks went out of their way to comfort and console Murphy on the fact that he had witnessed such a gruesome scene.  But Murphy knew better.  It was he who had not killed the power to the combine.  It was he who had knowingly watched Tyler's arm go up into the blades to clear the obvious obstruction.  It was he who had derived a moment's satisfaction in knowing that the arm would become permanently unavailable to Sarah Wyler.  And it was he who kept silent and accepted the role of victim -- not perpetrator -- when the news of the tragedy worked its way through the community.

This was, in fact, how John Murphy and Sarah Wyler managed to come together.  That Saturday, instead of a dance, there was a funeral.  And when Sarah Wyler had approached Murphy at the wake, to offer her sympathy, they fell into the kind of conversation that Murphy had dreamed of for years.  She saw him.  She understood him.  She comforted him.  And he, in turn, comforted her, even as the guilt of his crime had settled about him like a leaded apron.

The two of them were married the following spring, and they established a household, raised children, and served the community together for 53 years before Sarah died and was buried in Oak Crest Cemetary, just on the other side of the hill from where Bill Tyler had been buried so many years earlier.  But in all those years of "wedded bliss," Murphy was never truly happy.  He couldn't slept well, plagued by nightmares of blood and dismemberment to the point that he and Sarah eventually had to sleep in separate rooms.  He could never look his children in the eye, so they grew distant and rebellious.  Although his life was relatively uneventful following the accident back on the farm, and he was generally viewed as a benign presence in the community, Murphy lived in torment of the day that he had allowed Bill Tyler to die, while he watched.

In spite of the constant emotional anguish, though, Murphy never told another soul about what really happened on that day in the fields.  He couldn't let anyone else support him, not after what he had done.  But when the stroke hit, and the room went red, he felt the presence of Bill Tyler there beside him.  As he careened towards the floor, he had the sensation of falling into the strong, young arms of his childhood friend.