I have a friend who is 73 years old. He told me that his grandmother ran away from home when she was 16. She walked down a country lane in Tennessee. There was a black car, she later said. A man got out and raped her in the bushes by the side of the road. She stumbled home and told no one for fear that she would get in trouble. But months later her belly began to swell. She told the truth when she had to. Some people believed her. Others didn’t. Nine months later his father was born.

“That was in the year 19 and 8,” he said.

I thought about this for a few moments and felt pretty overwhelmed by the revelation. His life, it seemed, was held together by a ragged thread of evil wound through a series of long shots. Like rolling snake eyes 6 times in a row. Why did she choose that day to leave? Why that hour? Why that lane and not another?

“If she hadn’t run away from home and had that happen, you wouldn’t have been born.”

He snapped his chin down to his chest and bounced it quickly up again. It’s a gesture I’ve seen old men make when something is said that is surely true.

“That’s right,” he said. “That’s exactly right. Not me, not my children, not my 12 grandchildren, nor the 5 great-grand-babies.”

“So...” I left a long pause to soften the question that was coming. “Would you say that you’re glad it happened? I mean, surely you’re glad to be alive.”

“I don’t rightly think it’s a fair question,” he said. “The past is dead and gone and all that pain with it. A pile of manure might be lucky enough to have a flower grow out of it, but that doesn’t change its basic nature.”

I ran the tops of two fingers underneath my chin against the grain of my whiskers. I felt the stubble grab at my skin and heard the rasping sound. It’s something I do when I’m thinking.

“I don’t know how things were for her. My father didn’t tell me much about that. I know it was hard for him. He was either the bastard son of a rapist or the bastard son of a ruined girl. Whatever people thought, none of it was good. And folks wasn’t nearly as kind about them things back then. Sometimes you hear people say how the world has gotten meaner and people are less kind today.”

He shook his head.

“Theys lots of ways that people are much kinder now. About children such as my father, for example. Nobody blames the children anymore, but they used to. Kindly looked at them funny all their life. Most of them would end up leaving those parts and their people and start somewhere fresh. That’s what my daddy did. Brought his mother with him and came to Texas. He got married over in Bastrop. We still got family there. He lived a respectable life. Was a good man. Course, by the time us kids were born, it wasn’t nothin but an old story no one remembered. I only know it cause my daddy told me when I was older. He thought I ought to know it for some reason.”

He pulled a handkerchief out of his back pocket, blew his nose loudly, glanced at what he had deposited into the cloth, then folded it up and put it back in his pocket.

“There ain’t much of it left now. She’s dead. He’s dead. The man with the black car is surely dead. The only thing left is a story in an old man’s mind. And I think I’ll let it die with me. The story is dried up. All the pain is gone. I see no call to tell the children about it. So I think I’ll just take it with me.”

“Only you told me,” I observed. “So now I know it.”

He smiled. “Yeah, but you aren’t family. With you it’s like pushing a caboose down a side track with a dead end in the woods. It’s just a story to you.”

He laughed.

“Just another one of all those stories you got in your head, all that writin you do.”

I smiled and nodded and got to working my fingers under my chin again.

“No sir." he said. "The blood of Jesus and good living covered those sins long ago.”

I nodded very deliberately, the way men do when they agree and there’s nothing left to be said.

It seems to me that every act of evil is a cosmic event, a kind of big bang unto itself. There is the moment of evil, a moment so filled with dark energy and pain that no one can stand to look at it. It explodes and sends its ugliness out in every direction. Sometimes evil begets evil, and sometimes good people snuff it out.

There was a moment in time back in 19 and 8. It was a thing no one wants to look at or remember. A man in a black car grabbed a girl and dragged her into the bushes. There was the reality of his lust and anger. There was the reality of her panicked fear and pathetic cries for help and mercy. No one heard her. Her clothing was torn and her flesh abraded on the rough earth. And God help us all, there was the raw biology of the act itself.

That is a moment that no one wants to see. Everyone turns their face away in horror. It is like an explosion of pain and suffering.

Then the camera of time pulls away from the scene, mercifully we think, and we can look back again. There she is, running down the lane, bloodied and weeping. There she is confessing the truth and falling into her mother’s arms. There are the gossiping neighbors. There is the sorrow and the beauty of his birth. There are the stares and the shunning he was too young to understand. There is his anger and determination when he figured it all out. There they are, packing their things and leaving for Texas.

The camera draws back faster now. We see his joy at meeting a girl who did not know his history. Their courtship, their wedding. His mother weeping with joy and saying to herself, “I endured it for him.” Her death, we hope a gentle one. His children and grandchildren. His aging face and hands. His last telling of the story to his oldest son, bequeathing it because he was not the one to decide when to bury it.

For years the story lived like a wraith in the mind of a happy and good man. His father loved him and taught him, and he made good. And now the story is severed from the family and lives in me. It lives only in these words between you and me with no power to hurt but only to bear witness as a testimony to how things sometimes happen.

For this is the power of evil and the power of goodness and the power of stories and the power of redemption and the power of time.

rlp