The Little Friend Read online

  “Life goes on.” It was one of Edie’s favorite sayings. It was a lie. These were the days when Charlotte still woke in a drugged delirium to get her dead son up for school, when she started from bed five and six times a night calling his name. And sometimes, for a moment or two, she believed that Robin was upstairs and it was all a bad dream. But when her eyes adjusted to the dark, and the hideous despairing litter (tissues, pill bottles, dead flower petals) strewn across the bed table, she began to sob again—though she had sobbed until her ribcage ached—because Robin wasn’t upstairs or any place he’d ever come back from again.

  He’d stuck cards in the spokes of his bicycle. Though she hadn’t realized it when he was alive, it was by their rattle that she’d kept track of his comings and goings. Some child in the neighborhood had a bicycle that sounded exactly like it and every time she heard it in the distance her heart vaulted up for a soaring, incredulous, gorgeously cruel moment.

  Had he called for her? To think about his last moments was soul-destroying and yet she could think of nothing else. How long? Had he suffered? All day long she stared at the bedroom ceiling until the shadows slid across it, and then she lay awake and stared at the glow of the luminescent clock-dial in the darkness.

  “You’re not doing anybody in the world any good lying in the bed crying all day,” said Edie briskly. “You’d feel a lot better if you put on some clothes and went and had your hair fixed.”

  In dreams he was evasive and distant, withholding something. She longed for some word from him but he never met her eyes, never spoke. Libby, in the worst days, had murmured something to her over and over again, something that she hadn’t understood. We were never meant to have him, darling. He wasn’t ours to keep. We were lucky he was with us for as long as he was.

  And this was the thought that came to Charlotte, through a narcotic fog, that hot morning in the shuttered room. That what Libby had told her was the truth. And that, in some strange way or other, ever since he was just a baby, Robin had been trying to say goodbye to her all his life.

  ————

  Edie was the last person to see him. No one was too clear after that. As her family talked in the living room—longer silences now, everyone glancing around pleasantly, waiting for the call to go to table—Charlotte was on her hands and knees rummaging through the dining-room buffet for her good linen napkins (she’d come in to find the table set with everyday cotton; Ida—typically—claimed never to have heard of the others, said the checked picnic napkins were the only ones she could find). Charlotte had just found the good napkins, and was about to call out to Ida (see? right where I said they were) when she was struck by the conviction that something was wrong.

  The baby. It was her first instinct. She jumped up, letting the napkins fall on the rug, and ran out onto the porch.

  But Harriet was fine. Still strapped in her swing, she stared at her mother with big grave eyes. Allison sat on the sidewalk, thumb in mouth. She was rocking back and forth, making a wasplike, humming sound—unharmed, apparently, but Charlotte saw that she’d been crying.

  What’s the matter? said Charlotte. Did you hurt yourself?

  But Allison, thumb still in mouth, shook her head no.

  From the corner of her eye, Charlotte saw a flash of movement at the yard’s edge—Robin? But when she looked up, nobody was there.

  Are you sure? she said to Allison. Did the kitty scratch you?

  Allison shook her head no. Charlotte knelt and checked her over quickly; no bumps, no bruises. The cat had disappeared.

  Still uneasy, Charlotte kissed Allison on the forehead and led her into the house (“Why don’t you go see what Ida’s doing in the kitchen, honey?”) and then went back out for the baby. She had felt these dreamlike flashes of panic before, usually in the middle of the night and always when a child was less than six months old, bolting upright from a sound sleep to rush to the crib. But Allison wasn’t hurt, and the baby was fine.… She went into the living room and deposited Harriet with her aunt Adelaide, picked up the napkins on the dining-room rug, and—still half-sleepwalking, she didn’t know why—trailed into the kitchen to get the baby’s jar of apricots.

  Her husband, Dix, had said not to wait supper. He was out duck-hunting. That was fine. When Dix wasn’t at the bank, he was usually out hunting or over at his mother’s house. She pushed open the kitchen doors and dragged a stool over to get the baby’s apricots from the cabinet. Ida Rhew was bending low, pulling a pan of rolls from the oven. God, sang a cracking Negro voice from the transistor radio. God don’t never change.

  That gospel program. It was something that haunted Charlotte, though she’d never mentioned it to anyone. If Ida hadn’t had that racket turned up so loud they might have heard what was going on in the yard, might have known that something was wrong. But then (tossing in her bed at night, trying restlessly to trace events to a possible First Cause) it was she who had made pious Ida work on Sunday in the first place. Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy. Jehovah in the Old Testament was always smiting people down for far less.

  These rolls is nearly done, Ida Rhew said, stooping to the oven again.

  Ida, I’ll get those. I think it’s about to rain. Why don’t you bring the clothes in and call Robin to supper.

  When Ida—grouchy and stiff—creaked back in with an armload of white shirts, she said: He won’t come.

  You tell him to get in here this minute.

  I don’t know where he is. I done called half a dozen times.

  Maybe he’s across the street.

  Ida dropped the shirts in the ironing basket. The screen door banged shut. Robin, Charlotte heard her yell. You come on, or I’ll switch your legs.

  And then, again: Robin!

  But Robin didn’t come.

  Oh, for Heaven’s sake, said Charlotte, drying her hands on a kitchen towel, and went out into the yard.

  Once she was there she realized, with a slight unease that was more irritation than anything else, that she had no idea where to look. His bicycle was leaning against the porch. He knew not to wander off so close to dinnertime, especially when they had company.

  Robin! she called. Was he hiding? No children his age lived in the neighborhood, and though every now and then unkempt children—black and white—wandered up from the river to the wide, oak-shaded sidewalks of George Street, she didn’t see any of them now. Ida forbade him to play with them, though sometimes he did anyway. The smallest ones were pitiful, with their scabbed knees and dirty feet; though Ida Rhew shooed them roughly from the yard, Charlotte, in tender-hearted moods, sometimes gave them quarters or glasses of lemonade. But when they grew older—thirteen or fourteen—she was glad to retreat into the house and allow Ida to be as fierce as she liked in chasing them away. They shot BB guns at dogs, stole things from people’s porches, used bad language, and ran the streets till all hours of the night.

  Ida said: Some of them trashy little boys was running down the street a while ago.

  When Ida said trashy, she meant white. Ida hated the poor white children and blamed them with unilateral ferocity for all yard mishaps, even those with which Charlotte was certain they could have had nothing possibly to do.

  Was Robin with them? said Charlotte.

  Nome.

  Where are they now?

  I run them off.

  Which way?

  Yunder towards the depot.

  Old Mrs. Fountain from next door, in her white cardigan and harlequin glasses, had come out into her yard to see what was happening. Close behind was her decrepit poodle, Mickey, with whom she shared a comical resemblance: sharp nose, stiff gray curls, suspicious thrust of chin.

  Well, she called gaily. Yall having a big party over there?

  Just the family, Charlotte called back, scanning the darkening horizon behind Natchez Street where the train tracks stretched flat in the distance. She should have invited Mrs. Fountain to dinner. Mrs. Fountain was a widow, and her only child had died in the Korean War, but she
was a complainer and a vicious busybody. Mr. Fountain, who ran a dry-cleaning business, had died fairly young, and people joked that she had talked him into the ground.

  What’s wrong? Mrs. Fountain said.

  You haven’t seen Robin, have you?

  No. I’ve been upstairs cleaning out this attic all afternoon. I know I look like a great big mess. See all this trash I hauled out? I know the garbage man doesn’t come until Tuesday and I hate to just leave it out on the street like this but I don’t know what else to do. Where’d Robin run off to? Can’t you find him?

  I’m sure he didn’t go far, said Charlotte, stepping out on the sidewalk to peer down the street. But it’s suppertime.

  It’s fixin to thunder, said Ida Rhew, gazing up at the sky.

  You don’t reckon he fell in the fishpond, do you? Mrs. Fountain said anxiously. I always was afraid that one of those babies was going to fall in there.

  That fishpond isn’t a foot deep, Charlotte said, but all the same she turned and headed toward the back yard.

  Edie had come out onto the porch. Anything the matter? she said.

  He’s not in the back, yelled Ida Rhew. I looked already.

  As Charlotte went past the open kitchen window on the side of the house, she could still hear Ida’s gospel program:

  Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling

  Calling for you and for me

  See, by the portals he’s waiting and watching …

  The back yard was deserted. The door of the tool shed stood ajar: empty. A mucid sheet of green scum floated undisturbed over the goldfish pool. As Charlotte glanced up, a ravelled wire of lightning flashed in the black clouds.

  It was Mrs. Fountain who saw him first. The scream froze Charlotte in her tracks. She turned and ran back, quick, quick, not quick enough—dry thunder rumbling in the distance, everything strangely lit beneath the stormy sky and the ground pitching up at her as the heels of her shoes sank in the muddy earth, as the choir still sang somewhere and a strong sudden wind, cool with the coming rain, swept through the oaks overhead with a sound like giant wings and the lawn rearing up all green and bilious and heaving about her like the sea, as she stumbled blind and terrified toward what she knew—for it was all there, everything, in Mrs. Fountain’s cry—would be the very worst.

  Where had Ida been when she got there? Where was Edie? All she remembered was Mrs. Fountain, a hand with a crumpled Kleenex pressed tight to her mouth and her eyes rolling and wild behind the pearly glasses; Mrs. Fountain, and the poodle barking, and—ringing from nowhere, and somewhere, and everywhere at once—the rich, unearthly vibrato of Edie’s screams.

  He was hanging by the neck from a piece of rope, slung over a low branch of the black-tupelo that stood near the overgrown privet hedge between Charlotte’s house and Mrs. Fountain’s; and he was dead. The toes of his limp tennis shoes dangled six inches above the grass. The cat, Weenie, was sprawled barrel-legged on his stomach atop a branch, batting, with a deft, feinting paw, at Robin’s copper-red hair, which ruffled and glinted in the breeze and which was the only thing about him that was the right color any more.

  Come home, sang the radio choir, melodiously:

  Come home …

  Ye who are weary come home

  Black smoke pouring out the kitchen window. The chicken croquettes had gone up on the stove. They had been a family favorite but after that day no one was ever able to touch them again.

  CHAPTER

  1

  ——

  The Dead Cat

  Twelve years after Robin’s death, no one knew any more about how he had ended up hanged from a tree in his own yard than they had on the day it happened.

  People in the town still discussed the death. Usually they referred to it as “the accident,” though the facts (as discussed at bridge luncheons, at the barber’s, in bait shacks and doctors’ waiting rooms and in the main dining room of the Country Club) tended to suggest otherwise. Certainly it was difficult to imagine a nine-year-old managing to hang himself through mischance or bad luck. Everyone knew the details, which were the source of much speculation and debate. Robin had been hanged by a type of fiber cable—not common—which electricians sometimes used, and nobody had any idea where it came from or how Robin got hold of it. It was thick, obstinate stuff, and the investigator from Memphis had told the town sheriff (now retired) that in his opinion a little boy like Robin couldn’t have tied the knots by himself. The cable was fastened to the tree in a slipshod, amateurish fashion, but whether this implied inexperience or haste on the killer’s part, no one knew. And the marks on the body (so said Robin’s pediatrician, who had spoken to the medical examiner from the state, who in turn had examined the county coroner’s report) suggested that Robin had died not of a broken neck, but strangulation. Some people believed he’d strangled where he hung; others argued that he’d been strangled on the ground, and strung up in the tree as an afterthought.

  In the mind of the town, and of Robin’s family, there was little question that Robin had met foul play of some sort. Exactly what sort, or by whom, left everyone at a loss. Twice, since the 1920s, women of prominent family had been murdered by jealous husbands, but these were old scandals, the parties concerned long-deceased. And every now and then a black man turned up dead in Alexandria but (as most whites were quick to point out) these killings were generally done by other Negroes, over primarily Negro concerns. A dead child was a different matter—frightening to everyone, rich and poor, black and white—and no one could think who might have done such a thing, or why.

  Around the neighborhood there was talk of a Mysterious Prowler, and years after Robin’s death people still claimed to see him. He was, by all accounts, a giant of a man, but after this the descriptions diverged. Sometimes he was black, sometimes white; sometimes he bore dramatic distinguishing marks such as a missing finger, a clubfoot, a livid scar across one cheek. He was said to be a rogue hired man who had strangled a Texas senator’s child and fed it to the pigs; an ex–rodeo clown, luring little children to their deaths with fancy lariat tricks; a psychopathic half-wit, wanted in eleven states, escaped from the state mental hospital at Whitfield. But though parents in Alexandria warned their children about him, and though his massive form was regularly sighted limping around the vicinity of George Street each Halloween, the Prowler remained an elusive figure. Every tramp and itinerant and window-peeper for a hundred miles had been rounded up and questioned after the little Cleve boy’s death, but the investigation had turned up nothing. And while nobody liked to think of a killer walking around free, the fear persisted. The particular fear was that he still prowled the neighborhood: watching children at play from a discreetly parked sedan.

  It was the people in the town who talked about this sort of thing. Robin’s family never discussed it, ever.

  What Robin’s family talked about was Robin. They told anecdotes from baby days and kindergarten and Little League, all the sweet and funny and inconsequential things anyone remembered he’d ever said or done. His old aunts recalled mountains of trivia: toys he’d had, clothes he’d worn, teachers he’d liked or hated, games he’d played, dreams he’d recounted, things he’d disliked, and wished for, and most loved. Some of this was accurate; some of it was not; a good bit of it no one had any way of knowing, but when the Cleves chose to agree on some subjective matter it became—automatically and quite irrevocably—the truth, without any of them being aware of the collective alchemy which had made it so.

  The mysterious, conflicted circumstances of Robin’s death were not subject to this alchemy. Strong as the Cleves’ revisionist instincts were, there was no plot to be imposed on these fragments, no logic to be inferred, no lesson in hindsight, no moral to this story. Robin himself, or what they remembered of him, was all they had; and their exquisite delineation of his character—painstakingly ornamented over a number of years—was their greatest masterpiece. Because he had been such an engaging little stray of a boy, and because his whims and peculiar
ities were precisely why they had all loved him so, in their reconstructions the impulsive quickness of the living Robin came through in places almost painfully clear and then he would practically be dashing down the street on his bicycle past you, leaning forward, hair blown back, stepping hard on the pedals so the bike wobbled slightly—a fitful, capricious, breathing child. But this clarity was deceptive, lending treacherous verisimilitude to what was largely a fabular whole, for in other places the story was worn nearly transparent, radiant but oddly featureless, as the lives of saints sometimes are.

  ————

  “How Robin would have loved this!” the aunts used to say fondly. “How Robin would have laughed!” In truth, Robin had been a giddy, fickle child—somber at odd moments, practically hysterical at others—and, in life, this unpredictability had been a great part of his charm. But his younger sisters, who had never in any proper sense known him at all, nonetheless grew up certain of their dead brother’s favorite color (red); his favorite book (The Wind in the Willows) and his favorite character in it (Mr. Toad); his favorite flavor of ice cream (chocolate) and his favorite baseball team (the Cardinals) and a thousand other things which they—being living children, and preferring chocolate ice cream one week and peach the next—were not even sure they knew about themselves. Consequently their relationship with their dead brother was of the most intimate sort, his strong, bright, immutable character shining changelessly against the vagueness and vacillation of their own characters, and the characters of people that they knew; and they grew up believing that this was due to some rare, angelic incandescence of nature on Robin’s part, and not at all to the fact that he was dead.

  Robin’s younger sisters had grown up to be very different from Robin, and very different from each other.