Deliver Us From Evil

by Allen Lee Harris

  Charlie smiled. “That sounds like old Doc.”

  “Anyway, I guess that’s why he kind of took up with Hattie. Why he would even listen to her tell her ideas about the Bible. It was better, he said, than listening to some minister who went on about the Bible’s literal truth, as if it were just a collection of newspaper articles. Hattie wasn’t like that. Hattie, he said, didn’t read the Bible with her lips but with her heart.’’ Robins paused and looked out the window at the landscape as it rolled by. “Alies Vergaengliche ist nur ein Gleichnis,” he said softly.

  Charlie looked over at him and said, “Gesundheit.”

  Robins laughed. “It’s from the final chorus of Goethe’s Faust.”

  “Of course. How could I forget something like that?”

  “It means, everything transitory—passing—is only a parable. A similitude. My grandfather used to love to quote it, saying that anyone who really thought like that had a kind of second sight. The ability to see in every event both the literal truth and the deeper truth. The way Hattie saw things, in other words. Like the way she looked upon dreams. Kind of like Jacob in the Bible did. What for somebody else would have been just a nightmare, too much undigested pottage in the stomach, for her became a key to unlock the awesomeness of existence.” Robins paused a second, then said, “Maybe it was because of Hattie, but that was one of my grandfather’s favorite stories to explain. Jacob’s ladder. And what lie always dwelled upon was Jacob’s terror at his vision. His dread and horror at what he saw coming down. A terror that came out of the realization that the world around him, the everyday world he was so comfortable in, was not the only world. That there was another one, alien and awful, unyielding and incomprehensible. But even that wasn’t the worst part of it. The worst part wasn’t his vision of the other world but his vision of the ladder. Because, from then on, Jacob knew that this other world could erupt at any moment into his own world and that the two worlds were invisibly intertwined. From that night on, the world could never be the same for him again. Remember, when he awoke from his dream, Jacob set a stone to mark the place where he had slept. My grandfather said, ‘Think about that stone. Before the dream, it was just a stone. A worthless, meaningless hulk of rock. Something Jacob might have thoughtfully kicked aside to lay his head down. But after the vision, it was totally transformed. It looked no different; it felt no different to the touch. And yet it had become something unspeakably holy. Why? Because it was a reminder. A reminder that no matter how insignificant or meaningless something might appear to us, there could be another side to it, hidden, a side that attached it to that other world. ‘Think,’ my grandfather said, ‘from that night on, Jacob would never set his foot down anywhere on earth without wondering, Perhaps this, too, is a holy place. Perhaps this, too, is a place that God has touched.”

  When Robins finished, both of the men were silent for a few minutes. It was dark outside now. Robins stared at the kudzu-engulfed woods they were passing along, then whispered. “It’s funny, isn’t it? How much it all comes back to you sometimes? The past. I guess I’d forgotten how much I remembered. We do that, don’t we?”

  “I reckon,” Charlie said. “I’ll tell you one thing, though. You sure got a lot of your grandfather in you.”

  “More than I realized, I guess. Coming back down here made me see that, in an odd way. You don’t know how much I wanted to be like him as a boy. I wanted to be as wise and as good, as strong and as just. I just wish I’d had a little more time with him,” Robins said sadly. “I guess everybody feels that kind of loss sometimes, a loss you can’t ever go back and make good again. A loss that always keeps you wondering later on, What if...What if...But I suppose that’s pretty stupid.”

  “If it is,” Charlie said, “I reckon we’re all pretty stupid from time to time.”

  “Yeah.”

  By now they were back in Lucerne. Charlie pulled in front of old Doc’s place, but Robins didn’t get out. It was clear that he still had something on his mind. “I guess what I’ve always wondered about is why my grandfather cut himself off from the world the way he did. Cut himself off from me the way he did. For a while I was haunted by the fear that it was something I’d done. Or something I should have done but didn’t. But then, when I got older and maybe a little wiser, I started explaining it to myself in a different way.”

  “How’s that?”

  Robins collected his thoughts. “I had to ask myself what would make a man like my grandfather suddenly turn against the world. How a man that good, that strong could simply pull the drapes and lock the doors. It’s the kind of thing where it’s easy to say, ‘Well, the poor guy just went crazy.’ But I couldn’t buy that. I knew him too well.

  “My grandfather did good because he was obsessed by it, by his vision of what the world could be like, what people could be like. He loved that vision the way an ordinary man loves a woman. And that’s what he dedicated his life to. Not just to doing good. That’s not so hard. In fact, there was nothing Doc hated more than do-gooders. He used to say you can’t do good for somebody else, you can only try to help them do good for themselves. Otherwise, it’s like handing money to a drunk. You have to find the spark of soul that is still smoldering in every human being, no matter how debased or mutilated or crippled. Sometimes, he said, you had to look pretty hard, but it’s always there, even if only God can see it. And then you have to try to get that spark going again. You have to try to awaken it.”

  “That’s a pretty fine idea,” Charlie said quietly.

  Robins nodded, staring out at the night landscape.

  “My granddad had problems with certain parts of the Bible, like the story of the Flood. What worried him wasn’t so much whether or not it was true, but the way it made God look. After all, if God was supposed to be so good, why would he want to destroy the world? But he told me later that he came to understand what the story of the Flood really meant. He called it the last, final temptation, a temptation so great that even God had felt it, and for a moment, succumbed to it. A temptation born out of the despair, the despair that comes from seeing the chasm between the world as it is and the world as it could be. And anger at seeing how the gift of Creation had been squandered and abused, anger at seeing the divinely kindled sparks being put out one by one. And so, in a moment of anger and despair, God had wished to undo the act of Creation, to douse out with his own hand the sparks he had scattered, to extinguish them all in a single stroke, to return everything to what it had once been, vast and impenetrable night. Only a flicker of hope stayed His hand. And somehow He went on with it.’’

  Robins stopped for a moment, then said, “I remember, when my grandfather told me his version of the story of the Flood, I felt something I never thought I could feel. I felt compassion for God. I always figured He was the one who was supposed to feel compassion for us. Not us for Him. But the thought went through my mind that we were all in it together, both God and us, and that we both had to face the sufferings and pain and disappointments of Creation... together. Only, unlike us, God couldn’t grow callous and uncaring, or harden His heart. He couldn’t close His eyes or turn away. He couldn’t even blink. . . not for a moment.”

  Here Robins paused and, strangely, laughed. “I guess that’s why later on I came to the conclusion that God didn’t exist...that He couldn’t exist. That pity would have killed Him long, long ago. It also made me understand why my grandfather did what he did.”

  “How’d you mean?”

  “He didn’t cut himself off from the world. He cut the world off from himself. He had to. He couldn’t go on in it. He couldn’t even go on looking at it. So that in the end the shadow overcame the light. “In fact,” Robins said as a sudden afterthought, “I remember an incident. One night he and I went out to see Hattie. I was fourteen, and it was the last summer I spent down here. I stayed down by the river and when I went back to Hattie’s cabin, I saw my grandfather standing outside. I’d neve
r seen him look so downcast and gloomy. Like he was carrying the problems of the world on his shoulders. And I asked him what was wrong, but he said nothing. The whole way back home he was silent, and I knew that wasn’t like him. That night he sat out on the porch by himself. I went out there a couple of times, to see if he was okay, if he had cheered up any. The last time I remember he asked me to sit with him. He didn’t say a word for a while and then finally I asked him, ‘Why are you so sad?’ He shook his head. ‘Sometimes I get afraid, son.’ ‘Of what?’ I asked him. He hesitated a moment and said, ‘Of all the darkness there is. Sometimes I wonder if maybe the light in the world just isn’t strong enough to bear it, all the darkness there is. Sometimes I wonder if I’m strong enough.’ I didn’t know what to say to him, so I said, ‘Grandpa, you’re strong enough for anything.’ But he just shook his head sadly and whispered, ‘I wish that were true. I wish that were true.’ We sat there a little longer and then he got up and went over to the Kline house. That was back when their girl was ... I never was sure what it was . . . but apparently she was having some kind of mental problems. I knew my grandfather was fond of her, and her parents, too. I guess that was weighing on him pretty heavy, too.”

  Charlie looked at Robins. He frowned and, just from his expression, Robins knew something was wrong. “What is it?”

  “Nothing.”

  “No, tell me.”

  Charlie sighed. “I guess it never occurred to me. I figured you would have known, somehow. But, thinking back, I reckon it happened right before you were supposed to come down here that last summer.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You want to drive around a bit? I’ll tell you about it.” Robins nodded. “Sure.”

  An hour later the two men were a little way outside Lucerne. Charlie had just finished telling Robins what had happened back fourteen years ago, beginning with the night that Catherine Kline had disappeared. They were parked on the side of the road, right by the sign that Miss Amelia had put up in memory of the Klines’ daughter. Robins stared at it. “I guess that puts a lot of things in a different light,” he said. “I mean, about my grandfather. Makes it a little more understandable what he did. Why he did it. I just wish I had known before.”

  “Yeah.”

  And again the two men were silent for a while. Through the open windows of the car, they could hear the crickets all around them. Finally Charlie started the car up and said, “You ready to go on back?”

  Robins nodded. “I guess I was right after all. I just didn’t know how right.”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “The darkness broke him. Seeing a child like that—a child he loved the way he loved that girl—seeing what happened to her, it must have killed something inside him. The spark just went out, all at once.”

  “Reckon so.”

  “It’s odd,” Robins whispered, “but sometimes it seems like in the very best things in this world there lurks a danger—in love, in goodness itself, in the passion for bringing light and justice to the world. Like all these things have another side to them, a dark and fearful side.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Because what happens when love fails. . . when even goodness fails? What happens is. . . despair. As if the higher the soul aspires, the deeper it falls—when it falls. I guess that’s why, before coming back down here this time, I had just about convinced myself that real wisdom consists in—”

  “In what?”

  “In letting the spark just...just die. A painless, easy death,” Robins whispered. “But, you know, I see now even that’s not as easy as it seems.”

  “What changed your mind?”

  “I guess being here. Thinking about old Doc. And also something else...”

  “What?”

  “Something your son told me. About Jamey. That friend of his. Seems like the boy’s had a pretty rough time of it in life. Had some pretty hard knocks. And yet, somehow, he’s managed to keep his spark going. Going strong enough that he was willing to risk his life for your son. Without even giving it a moment’s thought. As if it were the most obvious thing in the world. So I figured, if somebody like that can keep the spark going, maybe...maybe we all can. Somehow.”

  “Well,” Charlie said softly, “it sure doesn’t sound to me like you’ve let yours die.”

  “I guess it’s another in the long line of my failures,” Robins said with a hollow laugh. “Maybe you see now why I called myself a lapsed nihilist. Even when I tried to believe in nothing, I failed.”

  “Have you ever thought that maybe at Judgment Day, what’ll be weighed to our credit won’t be what we succeeded at but what we failed at, provided it was worth failing at?”

  Again Robins laughed, though this time not so hollowly. “Maybe.”

  They were now back in Lucerne. As Charlie was about to turn onto the street where old Doc’s place was, Robins said, “Take me by the funeral home, okay?”

  “You sure?”

  Robins nodded. “I’d like to just be with Doc by myself for a while.”

  “Well, maybe you’d better let me talk with Tommy Lee first, okay?” Charlie said. “He can be a might fussy sometimes.”

  When they got to Anderson’s Funeral Home—in the basement of Tommy Lee Anderson s house—Charlie got out and went up to the front door, leaving Robins alone in the car. At first, Tommy Lee was resistant, but Charlie made it clear that Robins wouldn’t take ‘No’ for an answer.

  Charlie walked Robins around the back of the old house. They stood there, waiting on the porch steps in the dark for Tommy Lee to let them in. Robins looked up at Charlie. “I can walk back,” he said.

  Charlie put his arm over Robins’s shoulder. “Just don’t let that spark go out, not quite yet. Okay?”

  Then Tommy Lee opened the door.

  13

  As soon as Priscilla Anderson heard her husband down in the basement, she turned to her son. “Hon, you reckon we got time to eat us some ice cream?” Alvin nodded and together the two of them scurried into the kitchen. Soon they were sitting at the kitchen table eating chocolate chip ice cream out of two large bowls. Priscilla was just starting on her second helping when she heard a sound and cocked her head. “You hear something, Alvin?”

  Alvin looked up, his spoon raised halfway to his pink, open mouth. They waited a moment, motionless. Then Priscilla jumped out of her chair. “Lord, hon, I think it’s your daddy coming up from the parlor already.” She hurried over to the sink, turned the tap on full blast, and put her bowl underneath it until all traces of the ice cream had been washed away. “You bring yours over here, hon. Hurry,” she whispered to Alvin, who was sucking on a large chunk of chocolate he had found.

  But it was too late. Tommy Lee had already come into the kitchen. Priscilla glanced at him and tried to smile. “I was just letting Alvin finish up the little bit of chocolate chip before I threw it out.” But Tommy Lee wasn’t listening. He didn’t even look in Alvin’s direction, though Alvin, for his part, was watching his daddy closely, the spoonful of ice cream still raised before his open mouth. Priscilla went over and put her hands protectively on her son’s fat, slumping shoulders. “You go put your dish in the sink. Hurry up now.” Alvin obediently pulled back his chair, his eyes still warily on his dad.

  Unlike his wife and son, Tommy Lee was tall and thin, even emaciated. With monotonous regularity—the only type he knew—Tommy Lee would point out to Priscilla that Alvin sure didn’t take after his side of the family leaving no doubt as to whose side he did. “And if he’s this fat now,” he would add, “just think what he’ll be like later on. After all, you and your momma didn’t start to balloon up till after you was married off.”

  Hoping to keep her husband’s mind on his work, Priscilla smiled and began babbling questions. “He still down in the parlor, old Doc’s grandson? What’s he like? He nice?”

 
“Supposed to be some kind of doctor fellow,” Tommy Lee said with a snort of contempt. Tommy Lee had never had much of an opinion of doctors. Priscilla figured he saw them as a kind of competition.

  Tommy Lee walked to the refrigerator and opened it. He looked inside with a scowl. “You two guzzle down that half gallon of milk I got yesterday?”

  Priscilla craned her neck to look inside the refrigerator. “I was going to buy some more today. Why don’t I fix you some nice iced tea?”

  Tommy Lee reached in and pulled out a Nehi. Priscilla tried to take the bottle so she could open it for him, but Tommy Lee brushed past her. He opened the bottle himself. Then, as he sipped from it, he stared at Alvin. “Look at that there, his undershirt don’t even cover his belly good.” Tommy Lee spoke as if his son were an exhibit or a display, a habit he had picked up from being an undertaker all his life, like his daddy and granddaddy before him. Down in the parlor you didn’t have to worry about the feelings of the people you worked with. You could say anything about them you pleased, and Tommy Lee did. He was always criticizing the corpses, coming back upstairs and saying how fat old Mrs. So-and-so was without her corset and how Mr. So-and-so wore false teeth, and even mentioning other things that were even less decent.