Thomas Jane credited as playing...
Wilfred James
- Wilfred James: I discovered something that night that most people never have to learn. Murder is sin. Murder is damnation. But murder is also work.
- Wilfred James: [narrating] I believe that there's another man... inside of every man. A stranger. A conniving man.
- Wilfred James: [writing] In 1922, I murdered my wife. My son... aided me. This is a thing I regret, even more bitterly than the crime, for the reasons that this document will show.
- Wilfred James: [narrating] Waiting for a teenage boy to come to his senses is like waiting for a broomstick to sprout flowers.
- [first lines]
- Wilfred James: [writing] To whom it may concern. My name is Wilfred Leland James, and this is my confession. The issue that led to my crime and damnation was 100 acres of good land in Hemingford Home, Nebraska, willed to my wife, Arlette Christina Winters James, following the death of her father. It was much my intention to add her 100 to our 80-acre freehold farm, as it was to someday pass it all on to my boy, Henry Freeman James, and to his thereafter.
- Wilfred James: [narrating] No father should have to kiss his son for the last time... but if any father deserved such a fate... it was I.
- Wilfred James: A murdered man or a woman dies not on God's time, but on man's. And if she is cut short before atoning for sin, well, all errors must be forgiven.
- Henry James: But what about us, Pa? Wouldn't we go to hell?
- Wilfred James: How can you say so when you see heaven all around us? Yet she means to drive us away from it. And think. If she does go to Omaha, well, she'll be digging her an even deeper pit in Sheol. If she takes you, you'll become a city boy. Yeah. Just forget all this and... and start learning city ways.
- Wilfred James: Money fixes everything, right? As the wife says, no money *spoils* everything, boy. Now I know that. Shannon will, too, now that she's got a baby to watch out for now. You'll see.
- Henry James: Not if they make her give it away.
- Wilfred James: That don't change how a woman feels when she got a chap in the belly. You see a chap makes a woman feel wise in ways a man don't understand, son. Now, I haven't lost any respect for you, just because you gonna have a baby. Or her. You ain't the first. You certainly won't be the last. But you will not, hey, You will *not* ask a five-month pregnant girl to run off with you.
- Wilfred James: [narrating] Whenever I tried to busy myself with work to keep out the thoughts... they'd find me.