Deliver Us From Evil

by Allen Lee Harris

  “But why would they want to send him here?”

  Edna May drew herself up, folding her arms across her chest with majestical superiority. She looked around the room. It was just the question she had been waiting for. “Ain’t it clear by now? That boy come from right here. Why, his momma, she could be somebody we know. Somebody we ain’t never suspected. Somebody sitting right here in this room. But all these years she’s been carrying around this here deep dark secret in her heart.

  Up to this point Lou Anne had been able to sit listening to Edna May without saving a word. Only Mabel Jackson noticed the way Lou Anne’s left foot kept rapidly beating out a furious rhythm, like a metronome set on presto. When Edna May got to the incest part, however, something else began to happen: Lou Anne’s delicate skin give way to two purplish spots. The veins on her temples, too, began to protrude, growing more prominent until Mabel was convinced Lou Anne was about to have some kind of apoplectic fit. Finally unable to control herself anymore, Lou Anne stood up, her black eyes flashing fire. “You call yourself Christians!” she said, trembling from head to foot. “Can’t you see he’s just a scared and lonely boy? Can’t you treat him that wav, instead of sitting here picking his life apart ?” Just as Edna May was gathering all her righteous indignation to respond, Lou Anne turned and got her things. She walked to the door and stopped. “Every one of you should be ashamed. Ashamed!”

  When Charlie came home for lunch that day—it was a Friday, exactly a week after the orphan boy’s arrival—he found his wife sitting at her piano. She was playing Mozart but hitting the keys with a fury Charlie would have reserved for hammering nails into a hardwood floor.

  She got up without a word and went into the kitchen. She jerked open the refrigerator door, slapped a single slice of bologna between two pieces of bread, put the sandwich on a plate, then carried it to the kitchen table, slamming it down with so much force that the plate shattered into three pieces. She looked at it and suddenly Charlie heard a word that had never, to his knowledge, issued from his wife’s mouth before. “Shit,” she cried, then ran from the room.

  Dumbfounded, Charlie followed her back into their bedroom. She was lying face-down, her head buried in a pillow. He went over to her and put his hand on her back. “Something the matter?”

  “How can people be so cruel? They sit there with their Bibles. They pray, they go to church. And then they act like a bunch of vultures!”

  “Something happen at the Circle this morning?”

  Still without looking around, Lou Anne nodded. “I made a fool of myself.”

  And then, rubbing his wife’s back, Charlie listened as she told him of the incident. “I just couldn’t sit there another second listening to that talk. Why can’t they be decent, Charlie?” Lou Anne asked, finally turning around and looking at Charlie, her eyes puffy. He stroked her hair. She still wore it long, even though she had turned forty-one a month before, and people were beginning to talk about how it was time for Lou Anne to start wearing it short, as befitting middle-aged decency. “Over my dead body,” Charlie had told her when she had last brought up the issue. And as Charlie looked at her now, he sincerely couldn’t see anything about her that had changed since he had first laid eyes on her twenty-five vears before.

  “You don’t know what it’s like. You’ve always gotten along with everybody. But I remember. I know what it means to be an outcast and a misfit. To have people whisper about you behind your back.” Charlie suddenly understood why his wife had taken the matter of the orphan boy so personally. Lou Anne’s father had died when she was six, her mother four year later. At the age of ten she began being carted from relative to relative, finally ending up with her invalid and demanding Aunt Beulah. When Charlie first met Lou Anne she was withdrawn and painfully shy, hardly able to look him—or anyone else—in the eye. When he started seeing her, his friends had all reacted with disbelief. “She just ain’t your type,” they said. “She’s weird, Charlie. Always got her nose in a book. Even likes that funny Liberace music.” In contrast, Charlie was the captain of the football team as well as the class president. All the cheerleaders had crushes on him.

  Charlie reached over to the nightstand and pulled a Kleenex out of the drawer. “Here, blow your nose.” He even held the Kleenex for her. “Good girl. You feel all better now?’’

  “You’re making fun of me.”

  Charlie smiled. “That’s what you said when I started courting you, remember? Was I making fun of you then too?”

  This time Lou Anne smiled.

  “I’m still not sure,” Lou Anne said. “It was bad enough having the captain of the football team even come out there to see me. I figured somebody had to put you up to it on a dare.”

  “Actually, Bubba Carter and me did have this bet,” Charlie said with a straight face.

  “Bet you five bucks you can’t sit in the same room with that crazy Lou Anne girl. Is that how it was?” Lou Anne asked, indignant.

  Charlie nodded. “And I said, ‘Listen here, Bubba. For fifteen bucks not only can I sit in the same room with her for five minutes but I can listen to her play her Liberace music.’”

  “And you won, huh?”

  “Yep. I won.” Charlie leaned over and kissed Lou Anne on the neck. She giggled and pushed him away. “You’re lying,” she said.

  “No, I am not.” Charlie was on the bed now. He had gotten Lou Anne into what he always called one of his rastlin’ holds, with his arms tight around her waist. She pretended to struggle a little longer, then sighed. “I still remember that, Charlie. It was the nicest, sweetest moment in my life.”

  “What you talking about, woman?” Charlie said in the redneck drawl he used to tease her.

  “You know.”

  Charlie smiled. “Oh, that.” It had happened the fourth evening Charlie came to call on Lou Anne at her Aunt Beulah’s. The other times he dropped by he had asked Lou Anne to play her favorite piece of music for him, but she had always led the conversation in another direction. Finally she had been persuaded that Charlie meant what he said. Though nervous and justifiably apprehensive—after all, one of her uncles, on hearing her play Beethoven, had told her he’d rather hear his pet bulldog pass gas—she sat down at the keyboard and began to play, She played as if she were alone. And when she finished, she didn’t turn around. She was afraid to. Afraid she would see Charlie grinning or snickering. Afraid he might not even be there. But a second later, she felt his strong hand on her shoulder. He leaned over and kissed her on her neck, then whispered: “Lord God, I love you.”

  Later that same evening, she had asked Charlie if there was a special song he liked. Now it was his turn to be shy.

  “Not really. Well. . . maybe . . . .” Lou Anne had laughed.

  “Tell me.”

  “You promise you won’t laugh at me?”

  “I promise.”

  And Charlie told her, “The Streets of Laredo.”

  “Course, what d’you expect from a dumb old redneck?” he said. Without saying a word, she walked back to her piano and began playing, so beautifully that Charlie got tears in his eyes. “You mind playing it again?” All told, she played it five times that one night. And she had played it many more times since.

  “Sometimes,” Lou Anne said, now taking hold of Charlie’s hand, “I think that’s the only reason you married me. Because I could play that damn song for you.”

  He tightened his hold on her. “Tell you the truth, honey,” Charlie said in a whisper, “there’s something you do I like a whole lot more than ‘The Streets of Laredo.’ ”

  She tried to jump up. “Charlie! It’s one o’clock in the afternoon.”

  “I won’t tell the Circle ladies if you don’t.”

  “Good grief. I can’t believe you. That’s what this whole thing is all about. And here I thought you were trying to cheer me up.”

  “Can’t think of a b
etter way. Can you?”

  “Charlie! You got your—”

  “Mom? Dad?”

  Charlie jumped from the bed. Lou Anne sat up. Larry, their fourteen-year-old son, was standing in the doorway, his face crimson.

  “Your mom and I, we were just having a discussion.”

  “Is everything okay?” Larry asked. “I saw the broken plate in the kitchen. I was wondering if—”

  “Everything’s fine.” Charlie turned back to Lou Anne. “Well, you about ready to fix lunch? You got two hungry men on your hands, looks like.”

  “I’ll be in the kitchen,” Larry said tactfully.

  “He must think we’re horrible.”

  Charlie shrugged, and again lapsing into his redneck drawl, he said, “Well, he must’ve done figured we was horrible at least once.”

  Out in the kitchen, Lou Anne made sandwiches and carried them to the table. Charlie took a few bites then looked up, as if an idea had just that second occurred to him. “Son, you know what I was just thinking?”

  Larry shook his head, his suspicions already aroused by the deliberate casualness of his dad’s comment. Often it was this kind of offhand comment that ended up with Larry spending all afternoon cutting the lawn or painting the house. “No, sir.”

  “Well, if was thinking it’d be mighty neighborly if you were to go over to Abigail Parker’s house this afternoon. Kind of introduce yourself to the new boy. Make him feel at home. I mean, let’s look at it this way, son. Suppose you’d just come into a new town where you didn’t know anybody from Adam, I expect you’d kind of like it if somebody was friendly with you. Wouldn’t you?”

  “I guess,’ Larry murmured, staring into his glass of milk.

  “He’s just your age, too. You’d probably find you two boys have a lot in common. Most boys do.”

  This time Larry made a scowl. “But don’t you know what everybody’s saying about him?” Larry said. “They’re calling him a retard.”

  “By everybody, I reckon you mean Clemson McGee?”

  Larry shook his head. “No, sir. Everybody.”

  “Well, have you ever thought maybe everybody could be wrong?”

  At that moment there was a thunderous rattle at the screen door that led from the backyard into the kitchen. “Larry! Me and Randy, we was going to play ball. You want to come?” It was Clemson McGee himself. Larry looked over at his parents. “I already told him I would.”

  Charlie glanced at Lou Anne, and she nodded. A few seconds later, Larry, his half-eaten sandwich in his hand, had dashed out the door. Charlie and Lou Anne could hear Clemson s scandalized voice as the two boys ran around the side of the house. “They was saying you should what?”

  Well? Charlie looked over at his wife and sighed. “I guess we could make him go over there.”

  But Lou Anne shook her head. “If he does it, I want him to do it for the right reason. Otherwise he’ll just resent it. And probably even hold it against the boy.”

  Charlie nodded. “Course, you can’t really blame Clemson. He comes by that kind of talk naturally. He’s just repeating what Slim and Edna May say around the house. You can’t even blame them. They just don’t know any better. It’s a wonder they do as well as they do,” Charlie added, repeating one of his mother’s favorite maxims.

  “Who can you blame?” Lou Anne said as she picked up the dirty plates from the table and carried them over to the sink. She looked out the window. She could see Larry walking alongside Clemson. They stopped at the corner for Randy Whitlow. “I don’t want Larry to become just another good old boy.”

  “I don’t, either. But you can’t make somebody think for himself. You know that.”

  She nodded. Charlie went up behind his wife and put his arms around her. “I could always do what Frank wants me to. At least it’d mean getting away from here.”

  Before, when Charlie had brought up this topic, Lou Anne had always talked him out of it, But this time she said nothing. Charlie waited, half hoping she’d say, “Don’t be silly. You know we’re happier right where we are.” But she didn’t.

  “Anyways, you think about it,” he said, unwrapping his arms.

  When Charlie closed the screen door behind him, his wife was still staring out the window, her hands resting on the edge of the sink.

  3

  The town of Lucerne, with its four hundred inhabitants, makes only the merest pinprick on the Georgia map, but like many country towns, the Lucerne you see when passing through is only the tip of the demographic iceberg. Out beyond its fringe, submerged by woods and rolling farmyards, there is a second Lucerne, spread out across the landscape like a shadow cast by the first. This Lucerne lies scattered in isolated patches of shacks and shanties, along twisting dirt roads that sprout off in every direction from the town, sometimes connecting back up with a paved highway miles and miles away, but more often either petering out into a slope of red clay or else circling back to the town itself. Along these roads the poorer families live, both white and black, their homes resembling abandoned hovels with a blackened barn set a little ways behind, and a few harsh acres of okra and field peas lying beyond.

  It was after five-thirty and Tom Harlan was finishing up his usual afternoon round of deliveries to this outlying region. He had started making such deliveries years before, after watching an old woman trudge nearly eight miles into town just to buy a box of laundry powder at his general store. “It just ain’t right,” he had told his friend Doc. “Her having to come all that way. He had given the woman a ride back to her home and soon began making rounds every afternoon.

  Tom was about a half mile from town when he slowed down his truck, then pulled off onto the clay shoulder of the highway. There, only thirty feet in front of him, was the old Methodist billboard, large enough to have advertised a Holiday Inn if there had been one around. In big black letters it read:

  CHRIST

  OUR ONLY HOPE

  except that where the comma should go there was a cross lying on its side, as if being carried up Calvary on invisible shoulders.

  Tom got out of his pickup. He shook his head, then walked over to the sign. He reached up and started to pull away a few of the early shoots of kudzu that were already crisscrossing the sign’s face. But seeing that it was impossible to loosen them without damaging the sign itself, he stopped.

  When it had first been put up, fourteen years before, the sign had been meant to comfort, though now, after years of exposure, it seemed only to remind people of what they would rather forget. The idea had been Miss Amelia’s, head of the Methodist Sunday school. She had paid for it from collections taken each Sunday from her various departments. To her it was a way of setting up a memorial to the preacher’s girl, while at the same time giving consolation to the townspeople. But Tom didn’t see it that way. To him it just didn’t set right. Better, he thought, to let the poor dead girl be. And, at the very least, to leave Jesus out of it. “I told Miss Amelia,” Tom muttered to himself. “I told her what would happen. Didn’t I, Doc?”

  Tom sighed. In a month the sign would he totally invisible, completely sunken under the kudzu, as much a part of the surrounding countryside as the pine trees or the scrub brush.

  Though when you thought about it, it was one of those blessings in disguise. After all, back then, right after it had happened, no one in town could talk or think of anything else. If somebody heard a tree limb rustling against a windowpane, it was him scratching to get in, or whispering his crazy words. Women would awaken in the middle of the night and hurry to their child’s bedroom, terrified they would find the bed empty and the window screen torn loose, terrified that he had returned once more. And yet, in time, people gradually stopped talking. In time they even managed to push most of it from their minds. If Sarah Bradley stayed awake nights it wasn’t on account of some peculiar noise in her attic, but more likely because she was wondering if what Edna M
ay had said about Miss Amelia having liquor on her breath at the last Circle meeting was true.

  Eventually, what had happened to the preacher’s daughter came to take on a different light. Familiarity reduced the events to a different perspective. After all, as Edna May McGee was always pointing out to Tom, we are all given a cross to bear. Just look at the Whitlows, losing their fine-looking older boy in a hunting accident. Or take the way the Wilsons handled it when their little girl died of leukemia. None of them threw themselves under a thresher or went clean raving out of their minds or locked themselves in a dark old house. Why, Cynthia Wilson was right there in church the very next Sunday, along with her husband and her two other children, each of them dressed as nice as could be, all singing at the top of their lungs. Besides, Edna May went on, what kind of example did it set, having a man of the cloth go on like that, and his wife, too? If either one of them had half the faith they talked about having, they’d see it was all part of God’s infinite wisdom. “We just got to trust the Lord,” Edna May would say. “No matter what cross he puts on our shoulders.”

  But as Tom stared absently at the sign, recalling Edna May’s words, he couldn’t keep from asking himself, How? How could God countenance such evil, let alone have designed it? Tom shook his head and recalled something old Doc had once said to him: There are things in this world it’s wiser to pretend that God knows nothing about.

  “You were right, Doc. You were right.” Tom stood there a moment longer. He was about to turn around and head back to the pickup when something caught his eye. He put his hand up to shield the afternoon sun and squinted. It was an old woman, dressed only in a white nightgown, walking right at the edge of the woods, about sixty or seventy feet from Tom. She stopped and looked around but didn’t seem to notice him. And even at that distance, Tom could hear her singing a hymn, and then he knew who it was.

  “Sadie!” he called out, then took off after her. By the time he had gotten to the edge of the woods, the old woman had already pushed her way twenty feet into them. She stopped and turned back around to him. The strap of her nightgown was hanging down her arm, exposing a pale, sagging breast. Even at that distance, Tom could see the stains on the gown. Food stains, Coke stains, urine stains, he didn’t know. Her thin white hair was wild. And yet, as she turned back to him, she gave him the sweetest, happiest smile Tom had ever seen. Like the smile of someone who had just heard the best news of her life. “Why, Tom,” she said. “You’re coming, too?”