After a few years they had a third child, Wesley, but they still weren’t anywhere close to realizing domestic bliss. Their battles were becoming the stuff of local legend. They found it tough restraining themselves even at family get-togethers.Darrell’s brother Larry vividly remembers an altercation that took place during dinner one Thanksgiving at R.J. and Lexie’s. Darrell reached over and took some food off Joyce’s plate. Joyce was incensed and started choking him. Darrell choked her right back. They kept at it, gasping and grimacing, until Larry and a couple of other people at the table jumped in and pulled them apart. Sometimes they’d pull guns on each other. One night Joyce held a .45 Magnum (with a cocked hair trigger) inches from Darrell’s face. If she’d so much as twitched, she’d have blown him away. Darrell talked her down, then took out his .22 Ruger semiautomatic, which he’d emptied of bullets the night before, and pointed it at her temple. Joyce broke down and cried, and they declared one of their periodic, and highly fragile, truces.Money was a constant source of tension.
