Deliver Us From Evil

by Allen Lee Harris

  Then from whom? Abigail? He had heard her theory already. And what about Jamey himself? It was unlikely. When he had barged into Abigail’s house earlier that evening, to ask Jamey about Doc, the boy had suddenly started stuttering so badly that he could hardly get a word out. It was as if he had accidentally touched some incredibly painful spot in the boy’s soul.

  Robins frowned, still embarrassed by the recollection. Even when he had been prying at the boy, he kept telling himself that it was none of his business. No matter who the boy was or where he had come from, Robins knew he had no right to be poking into his life like that. And yet Robins couldn’t help it, couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow the boy was at the bottom of the change that had come over old Doc those many years before, though, of course, considering the boy’s age, he could have been nothing more than the unwitting cause of such a change. It would just be too much of a coincidence to assume anything else.

  It was strange, Robins thought, but until that morning he had not even known about the boy’s existence. He had gone to the lawyer’s office over in Willard, expecting to be the only person present. The lawyer, a thin, pink-faced man named Jesse Spalding, had been entrusted with carrying out the terms of old Doc’s will. Lawyer Spalding had just begun talking when there was a loud knock on the frosted glass door to the office. Spalding jumped up, excusing himself, and opening the door, he smiled at the sharp-faced woman who was standing there, an enormous red hat on her head, with an equally enormous feather sticking out from the top of it. The lawyer, motioning her in, looked behind her, then stuck his head out into the hallway. “Where’s the boy?” he asked.

  The woman said, “I done told you about that. He ain’t to know. He ain’t to know so much as a breath—”

  “Yes, I appreciate that,” Spalding said. “Still, I thought he would be here with you.”

  “Ain’t no point in digging up dirt. Not if you don’t have to,” the woman said emphatically. At which point Spalding remembered himself and, indicating Robins, introduced him to Abigail Parker.

  “I recollect who he is,” she said promptly.

  Robins, staring up at her in astonishment, said, “You do?”

  Ignoring this remark, she said to Spalding, “His momma used to pack him up and send him down of a summer.”

  Staring up at her, Robins frowned. Looking at the chisel-sharp tip of her nose, it came back to him. He had seen her from time to time during his summer visits. He and his grandfather might be walking down one side of a narrow street, while Abigail was coming up on the other. When they came beside each other, his granddad always tipped his hat and said, in mock-genteel tones, “Why, afternoon, Abigail.” To which Abigail never gave so much as a grunt, her nose raised defiantly, determined not to show the slightest acknowledgment of their existence. As far as Robins could remember, the grudge had arisen years before, when Abigail’s husband had died, and she believed that old Doc had played some role in depriving her of her rightful inheritance.

  The lawyer cleared his throat and said, “I still would have preferred for the boy to be made aware of—”

  “Aware of what?” Abigail broke in sharply. “Of his taint? No, sir, it’s a secret I’m taking with me to the grave. Why, ain’t it enough he’s bearing the marks of sin upon his body, afflicted as he is? Bearing the taint of lustful defilements? The sins of the father? Ain’t that punishment enough for one lifetime?”

  Here Robins, his mouth open in astonishment at Abigail’s outburst, broke in. “What on earth are you two talking about?”

  Abigail glanced at him. “Don’t he know?”

  “I was fixing to tell him later.”

  “Well, you might as well go on. Seeing how you done already let the cat out of the bag.”

  Spalding turned to Robins and cleared his throat. “There . . . ah . .. there was a child.”

  “A child?”

  “A boy.”

  “Spit it out. Go on,” Abigail prompted. “A love child.”

  “A love child?” Robins repeated with a grimace.

  “Yes,” Spalding confirmed. “Sometime back, it seems. I’m not certain of any of the details, of course. I just know what the late Dr. Kennedy entrusted to me.”

  “A love child? You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “No,” Spalding said, looking down at his desk in embarrassment.

  “With who?”

  “Pardon?”

  “If he had a love child, who did he have it with?”

  “Why,” Spalding began uneasily, “the late Dr. Kennedy did not go into that with me. He only said he wished the mother to remain anonymous.”

  “Some piece of white trash, I reckon. Why, everybody knew how he was, going around to white trash and niggers, too—didn’t make no difference to him—talking to them just like they was white. Ma’aming an old nigger woman just like he was talking to the Queen of Spain. And telling them how to wash up and what to eat and sticking his nose in where nobody wanted it anyways,” Abigail said. “What I figure he done is paid her to keep her mouth shut about it. Then he delivered the baby hisself and sent it on up to some orphanage, saying how it was from some poor white-trash girl. Which was half true, anyways. And then later on, sitting up there all alone in that house of his, not seeing nobody and not having nothing else to do, his conscience starts to bother him and that’s when he comes to me, knowing there wasn’t a soul in this whole world he could trust more than Abigail Parker. Even after the wrong he had done her about her Lester’s money.”

  Lester was Abigail’s husband.

  Spalding gave a grim, embarrassed smile, then said, “Be that as it may, there still are some things we must attend to.”

  That was when Spalding, more from desperation than anything else, turned to the details of old Doc’s will. The bulk of the money—which was considerable—went to providing for Jamey. The money was to be handed over on a regular basis to Abigail, who would spend it at her discretion, presumably for the boy’s needs, and taking—again at her own discretion—what she required for her “expenses” in keeping the boy.

  All that was given to Robins was the house.

  After Spalding had explained various little details, Abigail arose, saying she had heard what she had come to hear and how she had to be getting back, seeing how it was close to lunchtime. “Why, you just wait and see how I fatten him up. He ain’t never had the looking-after that his Abigail give him. No, sir.”

  As soon as Abigail left, Robins asked: “And this boy, how old is he?”

  “Fourteen.”

  Robins thought a moment. “Then he would have been born after my grandfather shut himself off. Or at least, right about the same time.”

  “So it would appear,” Spalding said. Then, getting back up, he handed Robins some legal papers to sign. Robins, turning the matter over in his mind, did as he was asked.

  At first, Robins found the story ridiculous. Old Doc was just not that kind of man. He had idolized his wife, both when she was alive and after her death. And in all the summers Robins had spent in Lucerne, he had never known his grandfather even to glance at a woman.

  Though, when Robins thought about it, he began to wonder. Who really knew for sure? Stranger things had happened. And would it really have been so out of character for Doc to have kept that part of his nature scrupulously hidden from everybody, and especially from his grandson?

  He looked up at the stars and at the vast pool of darkness all around them.

  Was it really so implausible? As strong a man as Doc had been, there must have been moments when the darkness overcame him, when it wormed its way into his soul. Was that the answer to the riddle? Robins wondered. The darkness? Did that explain why Doc had done what he had done?

  Robins probably would never know.

  He stood up. One more drink, he told himself, just to help him fall asleep. He stood there, looking ou
t at the backyard. “‘And the darkness he called night,’” he whispered to himself.

  He turned around and staggered into the house.

  5

  “Doc,” Miss Amelia said with a gasp as she jerked herself bolt upright in her bed, her eyes fixed on the window. “Doc?” She lay motionless for a second, then jumped up and went to the window. She looked out into the dark yard. She scanned it, tilting her head one way, then another. No, it had just been a dream. But such a bad dream.

  Miss Amelia went back and sat down on the edge of her bed, trying to recompose herself. “You’re just being such a silly, ” she told herself out loud, and in the same voice she used when scolding her preschoolers. She glanced over at the clock, then frowned in disappointment: It was only a little after eleven-thirty. Somehow it didn’t seem like that could be right. But pulling the clock closer to her, she saw she hadn’t made a mistake.

  It was still a long way to morning.

  Miss Amelia looked on the floor by the bed and saw where she had knocked off her Sunday school lesson book as well as the memo pad she had been writing on earlier. She leaned over and picked them up. On the memo pad were some lines she had jotted down when she had come back from the McAlisters earlier in the evening, lines she particularly wanted to include in her poem for old Doc’s funeral. She read them over, reciting them aloud:

  You gave us all so much, oh, best of docs,

  You cured our mumps, measles, and chicken pox.

  You healed us of our stomach aches and headaches, too. You made us better when we had the flu.

  But most of all. Lucerne is grateful

  That you were always kind and never hateful.

  You sat by our beds when we were ailing,

  You came to us without ever failing.

  This was as far as she had gotten.

  Miss Amelia set the memo pad on the nightstand next to her, then looked toward the window again.

  Such a crazy dream, she thought. So, so crazy. Somehow or other she was walking down a dirt road at night and she heard a voice call to her. She turned around and saw old Doc.

  Come look, Miss Amelia, he said. “Come see what I’ve done.” That was the beginning of the craziness: Doc was talking to her like a little boy, like one of the boys in her Sunday school class. “Doc? That you?” She had called out in surprise, remembering that he was, after all, dead, and making a note not to mention anything about it to him, out of politeness. But she did wonder. “What is it you want me to see?” But Doc just smiled and said, “Come look.” And Miss Amelia had walked over to where he was standing, and that was when she saw the sign. It was the one she had taken up contributions for after the Kline girl’s death, the sign that read “CHRIST OUR ONLY HOPE.” Only something was wrong about it. There were holes all over it and in the dark she could see the things slithering in and out of them. “Come closer,” Doc said. And then she looked into one of the holes—it was in the middle of the word “CHRIST”—and saw the gleaming eyes of the water moccasin, its tongue flicking out at her. You like em? Doc asked. And she remembered how she was trying so hard to smile, to make him think she was pleased by what he had done to the sign. “That’s real nice,” she managed to whisper. And then he said, “You want to see something else real nice?” And then he grinned at her and she saw that there was something funny about his face now, especially his mouth. He opened it and inside she thought she saw something gleam. Suddenly he took hold of her. “Remember the night I kissed you?” he whispered. And she nodded. As Doc pulled her to him, she saw his tongue flick out toward her. That was when she woke up.

  Miss Amelia shivered. “Snakes,” she whispered to herself, glancing around the floor uneasily. She had never liked them, any of them. Not even the ones her daddy used to tell her did good things for the farmers: black snakes. But water moccasins were the worst. She had seen her first one when she was a little girl and her brother had taken her to the Allatoona, to one of the swimming holes. Her brother had chased after the moccasin and killed it with a stick. He then cut its head off and showed it to her. She could still recollect vividly what it had looked like, the fangs and the dead tongue, but the eyes somehow still alive, still full of purposeless but unfathomable evil. He had held it close to her face and said with a hiss, “It can still kill you. They’re so mean, they don’t even have to be alive to kill you. See.” And he twisted the head back in such a way that a trickle of poison came dripping down the fangs.

  He had taken it home with them and put it in a jar full of alcohol under his bed. Every now and then he’d take it out in the middle of the night and look at it. “Can it still kill you now?” she had asked after a couple of months had passed. He nodded solemnly. “Can’t never get the poison out.” And sometimes looking at it would make her brother wax philosophical and deep. “You think God made all them moccasins out there?” he’d ask her. And she would stare into the eyes, still alive even after having been a year or more in its jar. Then she would shake her head. “No.” God couldn’t have made them. But her brother would smile and say, “But God made everything. Moccasins, too. Ain’t that what the Bible says?” And she’d say, “Yes, He made everything. Except water moccasins.”

  “Then where’d you think they come from?” he’d ask.

  Miss Amelia, remembering her brother’s questions, still did not know the answer, even after all these years. Where had they come from? And why had such things been put here? Black snakes—even if she didn’t like them, at least she knew that they served a good purpose. And even garden snakes. But moccasins were different. They couldn’t have been created, not by God, not for any purpose or good use. Which meant that, somehow, they always had to have been, eternally, before the Creation—as if they had lain coiled and piled up on top of each other in the void, sleeping, resting in the cool of that primordial darkness, as if at the bottom of some infinite well.

  Miss Amelia shivered and whispered to herself, “Silly Miss Amelia, you’ve got to stop thinking like that. Think of nice, sweet things. Think of all the nice things God made. Kittens and puppy dogs and . . .”

  But even as she tried to review her usual litany of sweet things, she kept seeing it hovering in front of her—the eyes still alive, staring directly at her.

  “Stop, just stop it right now,” she scolded herself. She got up from the bed and stepped out into the hallway. She walked to the edge of the stairs leading to the bottom floor, then stopped.

  A glass of warm milk—maybe that would do the trick. A glass of warm milk and all she would have to do would be to close her eyes and drift off.

  But staring down into the dark first floor of the house, Amelia couldn’t bring herself to go down the steps.

  “Stop it now,” she told herself again. “You just have to stop thinking like that. Think sweet, nice thoughts.”

  Still she couldn’t do it. What if, on going from the last step into the downstairs hallway, what if she felt something squishy under her foot, something slimy? What if she looked around and saw every inch of the floor was covered with them, pile upon pile?

  It was crazy, she told herself. Yet, no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t bring herself to take even one step down the dark stairway.

  She shook her head and said to herself, “Well, if you’re going to be a silly about it.” Then she walked back down the hallway and stopped at the bathroom.

  Suddenly it came to her. The perfect solution. A warm bath. She had done it before, the other times she had been bothered by insomnia, and it had always worked. Sitting in a tub filled to the edge with warm water always gave her that nice drifting sensation, relaxing every part of her body.

  Stepping inside the bathroom, she hung her robe up, then went over to the tub. Like most everything else in Miss Amelia’s house, it was old-fashioned, raised up off the floor by four little legs, all designed in the shape of lion’s claws. She went over to it and put the black rubber plug into the drai
n, then turned the water on. She had always liked her water very hot. As a child, her daddy used to tell her he didn’t see how she could stand it.

  She watched the water cascade onto the white porcelain, churning as it it were not just hot but boiling, tilling the tub. Then Miss Amelia removed her gown and set it on the hook behind the door.

  Going back to the tub, she put the tip of her finger in.

  Suddenly she heard something. Or at least she thought she did, though she couldn’t be sure because of all the noise the water was making as it came rushing from the tap. Quickly turning both knobs, Miss Amelia strained to hear if it was still there.

  But there was nothing.

  She waited. Then, just to be sure, she went to the door of the bathroom and opened it a crack, listening to see if there was any sound in the hallway or coming from downstairs.

  But again nothing.

  When the water was high enough, Miss Amelia turned off the tap and eased herself into the huge old tub, watching the steam rise from the surface as she sank beneath the water, up to her chin.

  All around her she felt the water’s warmth, felt, too, as if she were drifting back along a great warm river. She closed her eyes and again heard the voice from her dream: “Remember the night I kissed you?

  It had been thirty years ago, about four months after Doc’s wife had died. He had taken it hard and was terribly lonely. He had come by Amelia’s after supper and the two of them had talked together all evening. Then, right before he was to leave, he took hold of her and kissed her. Kissed her hard. She had flinched back, flustered by the sudden outburst of emotion, letting out a startled, “Oh, my!” Miss Amelia had never been kissed that way, even as a girl. Then Doc had poured his heart out, had told her how lonely and unbearable the nights had become for him, how he would lay awake, alone, and feel it closing in all around him. “There’s too much darkness, he had told her, “too much for anyone to face alone. Don’t you ever feel it?” he asked her. And what did she say?