“Well. Charlie tells me you’ve been having some bad dreams. I thought maybe if you got some air, it’d help ”
“That ain’t got nothing to do with it.”
“Okay, Beulah,” Robins said. He sat down on the edge of the old woman’s bed, “So why don’t you begin by telling me your dreams.
She said nothing. Her hands kneaded the quilt that rested on top of her.
“You don’t have to worry about me telling anybody. I’ll keep anything you say in confidence. If there’s something...well, something sexual or something you’re ashamed of dreaming about, that’s normal.”
“I ain’t no sex fiend,” Beulah said.
“I know you’re not. That’s why I want you to get those dreams off your chest. Understand?”
Beulah’s eyes were fixed at a point behind Robins. He turned around and saw that it was her closet. “You keep looking over there. Does your dream have something to do with the closet? Something that maybe comes out of it in the night?”
From the way the old woman looked up at him, Robins knew he was getting warm. She waited, then nodded.
Suddenly Beulah looked at Robins. Her lips trembling, she whispered, “You believe in The Judgment?”
Robins frowned. “The Judgment?”
“I show you something, you promise you won’t never tell nobody?”
“Of course.”
“Lock that door there,” Beulah said. Robins went over and did as she told him. “You see that closet back yonder? You go look inside.”
Robins walked over to the closet next to Beulah’s dresser. He opened the door to it and looked inside. It was full of Beulah’s nightgowns, huge as tents but frilly enough to be worn by a twelve-year-old girl. “What am I supposed to be looking for, Beulah?”
“Look down at the bottom, you’ll see.”
Robins crouched down and peered at the back of the closet. “What am I supposed—” But he stopped. There, about three feet back, was a small door, no more than four feet high and two feet wide. It was latched.
“Open that door and reach back.”
Robins unlatched the door and looked inside. The door led into part of the attic.
“Reach back now.”
“Okay. Whatever you say, Beulah.” Robins extended his hand into the darkness and felt around for a moment. His fingers brushed against something. He reached farther and took hold of the thing. He pulled it toward him.
“You got it?”
“I think so.” Robins managed to stand it up and pull it out the little door. He picked it up and showed it to Beulah. “This what you talking about?”
Beulah said nothing. Her eyes wide, she stared at what he had in his hands, then nodded. “Carry it here.”
Robins did as he was told, setting it down on the bed.
“Now open it,” she whispered.
Robins stared down at the battered old suitcase, its clasps rusted. “Okay.” He sat on the edge of the bed and opened it.
“You see them?”
Inside the suitcase were only two things. An old Bible, torn and dog-eared; and a cracked pair of reading glasses. “This it?”
Beulah nodded. “Take them out. Give them to me.”
Robins handed her the Bible and the glasses. Beulah took them, her hands trembling slightly. “These here, they used to belong to this old nigger woman, used to live down in this shack by the river. She used to pay me ten dollars a month, rent money.”
Robins frowned. Something clicked in his mind. “The one who carried an old suitcase around with her all the time?” Then, looking back down at the bed, he said, “This suitcase.”
Beulah nodded yes.
“I remember seeing her,” Robins said, “back when I was a boy and would come down here in the summer. My grandfather said she was supposed to have some kind of. . . second sight.”
“Hattie,” Beulah whispered.
“Yeah, Hattie. I remember now.”
“I was with her the night she died,” Beulah said. “She come up here and give me that. She says, ‘Beulah, you keep this here suitcase for me. You put it someplace safe. You keep hold of it till The Judgment.’ That was the night she done burned. She knowed . . . she knowed, Beulah whispered, staring down at the old Bible and the reading glasses. Her voice now had taken on a strange, remote quality. “She told me that night she knowed she was going to die. On account of this here vision she’d seen. She done told me, ‘Beulah, I seen it last night, a-coming down old Jacob’s ladder, I seen The Judgment that’s a-coming.’ And I says, ‘Tell me about The Judgment, Hattie.’ But she looks at me and she says, ‘You don’t want to be knowing that. It ain’t fit for you to know.’ But I says, ‘Tell me anyways.’ And she says, ‘The Judgment, it ain’t going to be like nobody’s a-thinking,’ she says. ‘Ain’t going to be no trumpet...ain’t going to be no riding on no clouds, neither. And the one coming, he ain’t what nobody in this whole world’ll be looking for to come. I seen his face. But it ain’t the face people be expecting to see at The Judgment.” Beulah kneaded the quilt with her hands. “Then I says to her, ‘How’m I going to be judged at The Judgment?’ And she says, ‘I done told you enough. You don’t want to be knowing no more.’ But I says, ‘You tell me anyhow.’ And then she looks off real peculiar-like and says, ‘You remember how Jesus done had his Twelve?’ And I says, ‘Of course.’ And she says, ‘This one, the one that come to the Judgment, he’ll have his Twelve, just like Jesus. And Beulah,’ she says to me, looking me right in the eyes, ‘you’re going to be one of them. Only it ain’t going to be like Jesus. It ain’t going to be at all like Jesus.’ And I says, ‘What you mean?’ And her face gets to looking strange and she says, ‘Don’t be asking me no more.’ And I says, ‘You tell me. What’s it going to be like?’ And she looks at me and says. . .”
Robins said, “Go on.”
“She says to me, Beulah, it’s going to be like your worstest nightmare. Only there ain’t going to be no waking from it. Ain’t never going to be no waking from it,” Beulah whispered.
Robins shook his head. “Is that why you keep all the doors and windows locked, Beulah?”
Beulah nodded absently.
“You really believe something like that’s going to happen to you?” Robins said. “I mean, doesn’t it sound a little. ..farfetched?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know no more. Don’t know what sounds crazy and what don’t.”
“I’ve felt that way myself plenty of times, Beulah,” Robins said. “But you will admit that it does sound a little peculiar, won’t you?”
Beulah shook her head. “I seen her eyes when she was saying them things. I seen the way her eyes looked when she was a-talking.”
And Robins, for his part, thought he could almost see the same thing in Beulah’s eyes. Did it really matter, after all, that the whole story was crazy, as long as it had seized hold of Beulah the way it had? Robins didn’t know. He sat there and said, “I expect you’ve got some idea what this worst nightmare’s going to be like.”
Again Beulah nodded.
“I know, cause it done started,” she whispered. “These last couple nights.”
“Can you tell me about it?”
“When I was little,” Beulah began, “I come down with something. My momma, she called this here doctor to come out and see me. He come out and he says, ‘Your little girl, she’s going to need some bleeding done. Some bleeding done,’” she repeated, licking her lips quickly. “And then he gets him out these little bottles and I seen them big old suckers inside. Them bloodsuckers a-squirming and a-wiggling inside. And he looks at me and he says, ‘these here ain’t going to hurt none. Why, you won’t hardly feel nothing,’ And then he commences. . .” Here Beulah stopped, her lower lip quivering. “Him and my momma and my daddy, they had to strap me down so’s I couldn’t move none. And he commences to putting t
hem things on me.”
Robins looked down. He had heard his grandfather tell such stories, explaining that you could still find some country doctors who used medicinal leeches as late as the thirties. “Is that what you’ve been dreaming about, Beulah?”
“I reach down to feel of my legs. And that’s when I feel them things. All over my legs, end to end, soft and wet and fat.”
“Yeah,” Robins mumbled. “Sounds like a pretty bad dream, all right.” He stood up and took out of Beulah’s hands the Bible and the reading glasses. He set them in the suitcase and carried it to the closet. When he had put the suitcase back where he found it, he went over to Beulah and took the old woman’s hand. It was trembling. She looked up at him and for a moment reminded Robins of a child, a child afraid of the darkness she soon would have to face alone. He squeezed her hand. “Maybe it sounds hard to believe, but no matter how real they might seem to you, they’re still just dreams. You understand?”
“But how them dreams get inside me, if I don’t want them there?”
Robins looked at her. It was a good question. A question he had asked himself more than once. “Maybe there’s something inside all of us that we don’t understand.”
“But who let it in? Who let it in there, anyhow?”
“I can’t answer that, Beulah.”
He looked down at the old woman, at her pathetic lacy nightgown, at her trembling hands with their tiny brown spots. Who could answer that? It was a question that still baffled him. A question that could be asked of more things than just dreams. Madness, despair, each of the thousand self-destructive furies that plague the race. Who let them all in?
“I thought you was a doctor. Ain’t they got some kind of pill for it?”
Robins shook his head. “Not that I know of. The best way we have of figuring it is that there’s something in our unconscious mind. In our psyche. And sometimes—”
“Don’t you give me no gobbledygook doctor talk. You ain’t got no pills for it, all the gobbledygook in the world don’t make no difference.’’
“Yeah. I guess you’re right,” Robins conceded.
“Well, what you going to do about it?”
He shook his head. “The only thing I can do. And that’s to tell you, if you need me, I’ll be here.”
“That ain’t much.”
“Well, it’s the best offer I can come up with.”
Beulah frowned. Robins let go of the old woman’s hand and walked to the door. He turned around and looked back at the bed. Beulah’s eyes were fixed on the closet. She was mumbling to herself. He caught only a few fragments, but enough to let him know what she was talking about. “You ain’t never... waking up....” He turned around and, after unlocking the door, walked downstairs to Charlie.
12
On the way back to Lucerne, Robins gave Charlie a sketch of his conversation with Beulah, dwelling on how her eyes looked when she spoke of the Judgment that was coming. “She kept talking about that old black woman: Hattie,” Robins said. “I guess you remember her, too.”
Charlie nodded. “Old Hattie was pretty hard to forget, I’d say.”
“Yeah,” Robins murmured. He was silent for a little way, looking out over the countryside: It was just beginning to disappear into twilight. “Did you know, my grandfather used to go out to her shack. I went there with him a couple of times. He was supposed to be treating her arthritis. But I kind of got the idea he really went there just to listen to her. Sometimes he’d let me fish down by the river, but a few times I’d sit there with them and listen to Hattie talk. Talk about the things she had seen. Her second sight. Talk about Jacob’s ladder. I remember the way my grandfather used to listen to her with such respect. I mean, genuine respect. And when we left, he’d always talk about her the same way. Once I recall driving back and I asked him if her stories were true. If she really did have the second sight. I guess I was expecting a simple ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’ But Doc, of course, he didn’t set much store by ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’”
Charlie smiled. It was one of Doc’s habits, both endearing and maddening. You could never pin him down, never put him in anybody else’s pigeonhole. And even when he was asked to state his opinion, he’d never say it outright. Sometimes he’d never say it at all. Instead he’d offer you a story, a parable, an illustration—anything to get the other person thinking.
“It was the same way when he’d teach me about math. He’d give me a problem to do and when I couldn’t do it, I’d ask him for the answer. But he’d always give me another problem to do, instead. A few times I’d lose my patience and say, ‘Please, just tell me what the answer is.’ But he’d shake his head and say, ‘Answers don’t mean nothing. It’s the getting of the answers that counts.’And I’d tell him that was the problem. I kept getting the wrong answer. But he said, ‘There’s only one wrong answer in this world, son. And that’s the one somebody else has handed you. Any answer you come up with yourself isn’t ever wrong—it’s maybe just meandering a bit, trying to find its way home.’ I know now he was trying to get me to think for myself. Even when he used to say something really beautiful or profound—and he said a lot of things that were both—he’d always caution me by saying, Course, son, that might all be just a whole lot of CM—cow manure, that is.’ Not that he really believed it was. He just didn’t want me taking it on faith. Like he used to say, ‘Insight is when you make something yourself, from scratch. Opinion is when you buy it at the store.”’
“You got these written down someplace?” Charlie said with a laugh.
Robins grinned, too. “As a matter of fact, I do. I’ve got a whole notebook at home. Seriously.
“I believe you.”
“Anyway, seems like I was leading up to something.”
“About Hattie, I think.”
Robins nodded. “Let me see. How did he put it? We were driving back, along this same road here, and I asked him if the things Hattie claimed to see and know were really true. And he said that it depended on what kind of truth I was looking for, and I asked him how many kinds of truth there were, and he thought a moment and said, ‘As far as I can see, two.’ And, of course, playing the straight man, I said, ‘What are they, Grandpa?’ And he said that the first kind of truth is what you call newspaper truth. Now, the moment he said that I knew right off, it wasn’t going to be the kind of truth Doc liked. After all, he hadn’t read a newspaper in thirty years. But still I played along and said, ‘What’s newspaper truth?’ And he said that it’s what most people mean when they say something’s true. If something was true like that, it meant anybody could just open their eyes and see it was true. They didn’t have to think about it any, which meant that nobody could argue about it. He said that it’s the kind of truth any fool can see. But there was something else that made it newspaper truth—namely, when you’re finished with it, you just throw it away. And then I asked him what the other kind of truth was. And he said, ‘It’s one you can’t just throw away when you’re finished with it. And that’s because you’re never finished with it.’ In fact, that’s what he called it, unfinished truth. And then he looked over at me and said, ‘You confused yet?’ And I nodded yes. And he said, ‘Good. Few things are more important for a man than knowing when he’s confused. And then he proceeded to give me an example of the two kinds of truth. ‘Suppose you read in the newspaper about this fellow who left home a while back, and how he took some of his daddy’s money with him and wasted it on all kinds of ne’er-do-welling. Then, when he’s flat broke, he decides he’d better hightail it on home, only he’s worried about what his daddy’s going to say to him when he gets back. But you read in the paper that it all worked out real nice and his daddy was tickled pink to see him again and gave him a big party. Now suppose we want to check out all these facts and we find, yes, indeed, everything happened just the way the story said it did, and that the reporter who wrote it up—say, as a human-interest story—got all hi
s facts straight. Now, that’s newspaper truth. But let’s suppose we hear somebody else tell this story. Say, Jesus. Only he calls his story a parable, the parable of the prodigal son. Now suppose we’re out there listening to him and we say, ‘Hold on a moment, Jesus. You sure you got your facts straight? Have you checked it all out good?’ Or we might try to pin him down some, saving things like, ‘Who’s this fellow you’re talking about, anyway? What’s his name? Where did he live? What’s his address? What day did he come back on? How many months was he gone?’ You know, the kind of questions a good reporter asks. Now, what do you think Jesus would have said to all this?”
Charlie laughed. “Don’t know.”
“Well, my grandfather said Jesus probably would have laughed, too. Or maybe cried. Because the guy asking questions like that totally missed the point. He thought he was listening to a newspaper story. But Jesus didn’t tell the story for that reason. He didn’t care about something that was true just once and in just one place: He cared about what was true always and everywhere. And even if Jesus happened to get his parable from something that actually happened, he wasn’t interested in the facts of the story. He was interested in what lay half hidden behind the facts. In what it meant for everybody and for all time. But this deeper meaning, let’s call it, wasn’t something you could see by just opening your eyes. It was something you had to think about, meditate on, connect up with the stirrings of your own heart. And that’s because the real truth—the only kind worth going after—was hidden and had to be looked for hard. But he said this kind of truth also had its advantages. You could never be finished with it or throw it away, because the more you thought about the world, the more deeply you looked into your own heart, the richer and deeper the story became. Until finally you saw that its truth could never be exhausted, not in a single lifetime, not in the lifetime of all humanity. And that was why some people turned away from it. Because they were like impatient children: They want it all now, right now. They want all the questions answered for them at one stroke. Just the way I was with the math problems he’d give. And most people are like that: They just want the answers, without the work required to get them. And why? So they won’t be bothered by them anymore and can go back to being children again. But, my grandfather said, that’s why God made truth hard, and why He hides it. So we could never go back to being children again once we grasp even a particle of the truth. Because even the smallest particle of it made us aware of how much more there was than we could ever be done with. I remember, he put it in a nice, folksy way. He said, ‘If God hadn’t hidden the truth, we would never have gotten off our butts to go looking for it. And that’s also why part of it will always stay hidden, too. Because God respects us too much to treat us like children.’”
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