Deliver Us From Evil

by Allen Lee Harris

  Maybe that was all it was, he told himself. He stood up and went back again to the railing.

  Suddenly his heart jumped. He heard somebody’s voice down in the yard. “Jamey?” he called out hopefully, then went over to the ladder and looked down.

  But it was just Clemson. He scooted up, followed closely by Alvin Anderson. “We just thought we’d drop by,” Clemson explained. Then he looked around and said with obvious disappointment, “Where’s Jamey? He ain’t with you?”

  Larry shook his head and again used what had become the old standby. “He’s sick.”

  “Shit,” Clemson said.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Alvin and me, we had us a bet.”

  “On what?”

  Clemson gave out one of his raucous laughs. “I done bet that Alvin here’s crazy as a loon.”

  “I done told you, I ain’t crazy. I know I seen it. With my own eyes.”

  “You ain’t seen nothing, boy. You was dreaming, I told you. Having one of them parlor dreams,” Clemson said mock-sinisterly. Many years ago Alvin had made the mistake of taking Clemson into his confidence, relating to him the nightmares he had been having about his daddy’s funeral parlor, located, as it was, in the basement of the Anderson house. Afterward, every time Alvin’s daddy, Tommy Lee, had a corpse laid out downstairs, Clemson would start in, saying, “Old Mrs. So-and-so been climbing up them basement steps to get you yet, oozing that old embalming fluid out her nose?” Or other variations on the same theme: That the corpse in residence had somehow come alive and, in the middle of the night, would crawl up the creaky set of steps that led to the main part of the house from the basement, heading straight to poor Alvin’s room, to perform all manner of vile and unspeakable acts on the hapless boy’s sleeping body.

  “I wasn’t dreaming,” Alvin insisted. “I done seen him, like I told you.”

  “Seen who?”

  “Jamey,” Alvin said.

  And again Clemson roared. “You ain’t seen nothing. You’s just scared on account of how old Doc’s down there a-lying out. You afraid he’s going to start up them old steps you got, oozing that...”

  “I ain’t scared of nothing,” Alvin protested. “I seen him, Larry. Honest. Last night.”

  Larry stared into Alvin’s face. He might have been many things, but Alvin was no liar. At least, not about this. “What happened?”

  “I woke up in the middle of the night. And I thought I heard something. Something from the basement.”

  “Bet you done nearly shit in your pants,” Clemson said with a cackle.

  “Hush up and let him finish, Clemson.”

  “So’s I get out of my bed and I go to check, to see if that door’s been locked good.”

  Larry knew what Alvin meant: It was the door leading to the basement steps. Alvin would sometimes have his mom check on it two or three times right before going to sleep, to make sure it was closed and locked tight.

  “Anyhow, I seen it was open. And then I seen him, Larry. ”

  “Who?”

  “Jamey. He was just standing there, looking down them steps. And I called out to him, saying, ‘What you doing? What you doing here?’ But he don’t say nothing. Like he ain’t even heard me. And then—”

  “Go on, Alvin.”

  “Then he starts down them steps, real slow-like. Down them steps to that old parlor.”

  “You was just dreaming and you know it. What’d Jamey be doing down in that parlor for? Less he wanted to see old Doc.” Clemson put forward this last remark to Larry, as if it were the most amusing thing he had ever heard in his life. “Say, Larry.”

  But Larry wasn’t laughing. He wasn’t even smiling. “Did he...I mean, was he acting like...like he was sleepwalking?”

  Alvin nodded yes.

  That’s just crazy talk, Alvin,” Clemson said angrily. “Ain’t that right, Larry? Why, sounds like something Miss Eula Watkins’d come up with, don’t it? I told you once, Alvin,” Clemson went on, standing up, “he done saved my life and I ain’t going to let nobody go running their mouths about him, hear?”

  “I ain’t running my mouth, Clemson. I done seen it. I swear I did, Larry,” Aivin said, turning back to him.

  Clemson shook his head in disgust. “You ever heard anything crazier in your life? I’m going.” And with that, Clemson climbed back down the ladder.

  Larry and Alvin sat there in silence. After a few moments, Alvin looked over at Larry. “There’s something else, something I didn’t tell Clemson about. Right when he started to go down them steps, Jamey looked over at me. And—”

  “And what?”

  Alvin looked down. “He starts up grinning, Larry. I seen it before, the same grin, I seen it before in them nightmares I get sometimes. In them faces coming up the steps from down in the parlor. I ain’t never seen nobody grin thataway, Larry.”

  Alvin sat there uneasily, then looked up. “I reckon I best be getting on home,” he said. Just as he was about to go down the ladder, he stopped and looked back. “Don’t tell nobody. Okay, Larry?”

  “Okay.”

  When Alvin left, Larry went over to the railing and watched as the boy half waddled, half ran through the gateway from the backyard.

  He knew what Alvin was talking about. He had seen the same grin that night on the dirt road leading to the Randolph house. The same mean, shuddery grin. It sure as hell wasn’t Jamey’s.

  Larry stared at the empty gateway.

  Whose was it, then?

  4

  At old Doc’s, all the lights were still on. Jerry Robins had just made himself another drink and had carried it out to the side porch. The porch where he and Doc used to sleep during the summer.

  The cots were gone now. And Doc was lying over in Tommy Lee Anderson’s parlor.

  Robins looked out into the dark yard.

  It had been a long time since he had been there. Fifteen years. Fifteen years spent without the person he had loved more than anyone in the world. And what had come in between? He closed his eyes and saw a swirl of confused images: A failed marriage, three failed careers, a failed life, a lingering sense of loss and betrayal.

  Robins pushed open the screen door and walked down three steps.

  “Love child,” he whispered to himself, swaying in the darkness.

  Was it really so crazy as he had thought at first? He didn’t know now. Though when he first heard about it, earlier that day over at the lawyer’s office in Willard, he had scoffed at the very idea. But looking up, staring at the vast expanse of darkness overhead, he realized he couldn’t be sure. There was enough darkness out there to work its way into any man’s soul, even Doc’s.

  Did that explain who Jamey was? How he had come to be?

  “Love child . . .”

  Robins went back to the porch and sat down in Doc’s old rocking chair—the same one Doc used to sit in when, late at night, he would read to Robins.

  He smiled, remembering back to the first night he had spent with the old man. It had started back up in Atlanta, when Robins was seven. His father had died two years before and his mother had decided that he was in need of what she called a strong male role model. “And that’s why I’ve thought of this nice surprise for you,” she said, smiling. “You’re going to spend the summer with Grandpa.” He was terrified. He had met his grandfather only once before, at Robins’s father’s funeral, and remembered him as a curt, eccentric man who never did much more than mumble or snarl. He begged his momma not to make him go. But she was dead set on it. She had decided it would build character if he went. And so he did.

  The first day was awful. His granddaddy hardly spoke a word to him. And when he did, Robins had trouble figuring out exactly what he had said. Finally, at about nine-thirty, his grandfather said that it was time to go to bed. Then he added, “If you want, you can sleep out on
the porch. I got two cots setup. Robins had never slept on a porch before, but he agreed.

  Robins still remembered the impact of that first night. Lying there, on the screened-in porch, he was made aware for the first time in his life of the immense power of simple darkness. The night that was all around them seemed a world apart from those he had been familiar with up in Atlanta, with their slow, almost imperceptible transition from daylight to darkness. And even then, it was a limited, domesticated kind of darkness, rendered tolerable by a vast, continuous network of electric lights and neon signs, by four-lane streets brilliantly, perpetually lit. In cities like that, you could ease your way into the isolation of sleep, step by step, like a reluctant child being led for the first time into the sea.

  In Lucerne it was different. The first step and you were in over your head.

  In a little country town like Lucerne, there was nothing to cushion the fall of darkness. When night came, it was with a darkness pure and undiluted, seeming less like the absence of light than like the presence of something more powerful, more elemental than the day, something that returned to claim its own, to take possession of what the light had merely usurped from it. Vast in its sweep and current, the night carried before it all it came up against, leaving in its wake only a flotsam of dim porch lights and gasping fireflies. For darkness did not fall on Lucerne so much as engulf it, pouring over roofs and treetops, swirling down chimneys and smashing through windows, submerging everything into the darkness of the surrounding woods, leaving the streets as dark and empty as those of a city the sea had swallowed. By eleven, all that was left was the town’s solitary streetlight, in front of the post office. But this, instead of dispelling the dark, served only to intensify it, multiplying the play of shadows like a match dropped into a well to gauge its depth.

  Only here, the night was bottomless.

  “It’s so dark,’’ Robins had whispered to his grandfather, lying only three feet away, on the other cot.

  “Better to see the stars with,” the old man replied in his gruff voice, sounding not unlike the wolf imitating little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother in the fairy tale.

  And, looking out, Robins gazed at them: More stars than he had ever imagined there to be, so many more than he had ever seen up in Atlanta.

  Then Doc had propped himself up on his elbow and said, “Tell me what you know about the stars.”

  Robins had blinked. He didn’t know much and said something about the Big Dipper.

  “That’s all you know?”

  “Yes, sir.

  Doc had chortled, “Hell, I was born knowing more about them than that.” He then proceeded to tell Robins about how far the stars were and how long it look for their light to reach us. From where Robins was lying on his cot, he could just barely catch a glimpse of Betelgeuse. He watched it in fascination as his grandfather described the incomprehensible journey each speck of light had undertaken simply to reach his eye at that precise moment. “Why, every star in the sky might have gone out and we wouldn’t know about it for years.

  “Where do they go when it’s daylight?” Robins had asked.

  Doc had laughed. “Oh, there’re still out there. You just can’t tell. It’s the darkness lets you see them.”

  “Where did the dark come from. Grandpa?” Robins had asked, staring up at it through the screen.

  Doc was silent for a moment. Robins remembered actually sitting up, to look over and see if, maybe, his grandfather had suddenly fallen asleep. But he was just thinking. Then he laughed and said, “You got a peculiar mind, son. Most kids, they want to know where the stars come from, not the dark. Reckon they don’t even think about the dark—overlook it, kind of. Course, what’s most important is exactly what most folks overlook,” Doc said. Then he sat up and stared at the boy. “Where do you think it came from, son?”

  Robins thought a moment, then offered tentatively, “Did God make it? The darkness?”

  Doc frowned and looked away. “Funny, I never thought of it before, son. What you hear is that God created everything. From scratch. What they used to call ex nihilo. That’s Latin for ‘out of nothing.’ It’s not like when we make things, where we always start out with something or other, like a piece of wood or a lump of clay. He didn’t have anything like that. Least, according to the Bible. He just had nothing. Except for this funny stuff—this thing called darkness. Because the Bible says, ‘And darkness was upon the face of the deep. . . . ’ And I reckon that means it was already there. Before anything else ever was. Before light. Before anything at all, it was. Doc paused. “Kind of like, it was outside God’s control, like maybe he couldn’t make it, but couldn’t unmake it, either. Like... he just kind of had to work around it. But there was one thing he could do with it, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, he gave it a name. ‘And the darkness he called night,’ it says. Maybe that’s all he could do with it. Just set it off, divide it from the light, give us something to call it by.”

  “Could he make it go away?”

  “Reckon not. Maybe what He did, maybe it was the best He could do. Filling up the universe with as much light as He could fit in. Reckon we can’t blame Him that so much of it’s still left over. I suppose He did His best. ’

  “Tell me some more, Grandpa,” Robins had whispered. And Doc told him some more. Robins had listened for as long as he could, trying to understand his grandfather’s words, and when he got too sleepy to understand them, he went on listening to them as if they were a kind of music. There was something about his voice that gave Robins a sense of actually floating out there, serene among the stars, half in sleep and half out of it—something soothing, reassuring about the voice, as if he could trust it to go on and on, always wise, always comforting. That night he could not remember falling asleep or when his grandfather’s voice passed over into the voice of his dream.

  That summer he was the happiest he had ever been in his life, before or since. His grandfather showed him a thousand things—how to hunt, how to look in a telescope, how to mend a broken bone, how to fly-cast, how to use a compass, how to start a fire, how to make a lean-to, how to catch and throw a ball, how to ride a horse, how to swim, how to use an encyclopedia, how to read a thermometer.

  This went on for eight summers running. And then the letter came. His mother didn’t let him read it, but she paraphrased it for him. It was the middle of June, and he was excited about going down to see his grandfather the very next week. Again, she took him to her room and sat him down. Only this time she wasn’t smiling. In her best graceful-under-stress tone of voice, she announced that Granddad had written, saying he had better things to do that summer than entertain his grandson.

  Robins had been stunned, both by the bald pronouncement and by his mother’s refusal to “go into it,” as she said. The most he had ever gotten from her in the way of an explanation was that it looked like they had both better start learning to get along without Granddad. And, until his death, that was what they did. Robins returned to the town, for the first time, after receiving the telegram from Tom Harlan, to attend Doc’s funeral. Robins had just turned twenty-nine.

  And what had come in between?

  Somehow, in his mind, the entire past fifteen years resolved themselves into a series of lonely late-night bouts of reflective drinking. Nights when he would decide to cast away his past, to remake his life, to get a fresh start. Like the night when he decided to go to graduate school in philosophy. The night he decided to get married. The night he decided to get divorced. The night he decided to settle down, once and for all, doing something really practical— medicine, just like his grandfather. The night when, after having been in practice in Atlanta for almost three years, he decided to chuck it. That’s when he decided to become a writer. How had he overlooked it? All along, that was what he was meant to be. He retired to his room with a typewriter and two reams of paper and, for the
next three months, watched every game show and soap opera on TV. He seldom made it to Family Feud sober and sometimes was drunk before he caught his first glimpse of Jane Pauley. At last, it occurred to him: Maybe he wasn’t meant to be a writer, after all. Then what? For the first time he got drunk in the dark, by himself, and decided to do...nothing. He was a failure. Not in the normal sense. He did everything well and many things brilliantly. In med school, he had graduated second in his class, even though he had started losing interest in the middle of his second year. No, he wasn’t a failure that way, but in some subtler, more cunningly destructive sense. It wasn’t his mind. It was his soul. He always wanted something more—something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Each time he thought he’d find it by reading Plato, by having a devoted wife, by seeing children healed, by putting down on paper every dark nuance of his soul. Yet, when he tried to do this, he found his soul just had too many dark nuances. As soon as he pinned one down, three fluttered off. It was hopeless.

  What did he want? What was that elusive thing that would, somehow, make him happy and content? For a while, after he abandoned his writing career, he told himself that he would simply have to start living without illusion. He liked that phrase, living without illusion. He used it a lot in bars, especially when he was telling people his philosophy of life.

  But standing on the porch of Doc’s, Robins realized he still had at least one illusion left. For fifteen years he had harbored a conviction, irrational and yet deeply seated, that one day his grandfather would explain everything to him, put it all into perspective, make it clear why he had abandoned him. For that was how Robins felt. Abandoned and betrayed by the one person he had ever really loved.

  He saw now that there would never be an explanation. At least, not from Doc.