The Little Friend Read online

  “I like the things you make, Adelaide,” Harriet would always say. She did, too. Though she had no use for aprons, pillowcases, tea towels, she hoarded Adelaide’s garish linens and had drawers full of them in her room. It was not the linens but the designs she liked: Dutch girls, dancing coffee pots, snoozing Mexicans in sombrero hats. She coveted them to the point of stealing them out of other people’s cupboards, and she had been extremely irritated that Edie was sending the pillowcases off to charity (“Don’t be ridiculous, Harriet. What on earth can you want with that?”) when she wanted them herself.

  “I know you like them, darling,” murmured Adelaide, her voice tremulous with self-pity, drooping to give Harriet a theatrical kiss as Tat and Edie exchanged looks behind her back. “Someday, when I’m gone, you may be glad you have those things.”

  “That baby,” said Chester to Ida, “love to start a scrap.”

  Edie, who did not much mind a scrap herself, found in her youngest granddaughter a solid competitor. Despite, or perhaps because of this, they enjoyed each other’s company and Harriet spent a good bit of time over at her grandmother’s house. Edie often complained of Harriet’s stubbornness and lack of manners, and grumbled about how she was always under foot, but though Harriet was exasperating Edie found her a more satisfying companion than Allison, who had very little to say. She liked having Harriet around, though she wouldn’t have admitted it, and missed her on the afternoons when she didn’t come.

  Though the aunts loved Harriet, she was not as affectionate a child as her sister, and her pridefulness troubled them. She was too forthright. She did not at all understand reticence or diplomacy, and in this she resembled Edie more than Edie realized.

  In vain, the aunts tried to teach her to be polite. “But don’t you understand, darling,” said Tat, “that if you don’t like fruitcake, it’s better to eat it anyway instead of hurting your hostess’s feelings?”

  “But I don’t like fruitcake.”

  “I know you don’t, Harriet. That’s why I used that example.”

  “But fruitcake is horrible. I don’t know anybody that likes it. And if I tell her I like it she’s just going to keep on giving it to me.”

  “Yes, dear, but that’s not the point. The point is, if somebody has gone to the trouble to cook you something, it’s good manners to eat it even if you don’t want it.”

  “The Bible says not to lie.”

  “That’s different. This is a white lie. The Bible’s talking about another kind of lie.”

  “The Bible doesn’t say black or white lies. It just says lies.”

  “Believe me, Harriet. It’s true, Jesus tells us not to lie, but that doesn’t mean we have to be rude to our hostess.”

  “Jesus doesn’t say anything about our hostess. He says that lying is a sin. He says that the Devil is a liar and the prince of lies.”

  “But Jesus says Love Thy Neighbor, doesn’t He?” said Libby, inspired, taking over for the now speechless Tat. “Doesn’t that mean your hostess? Your hostess is your neighbor, too.”

  “That’s right,” said Tat gladly. “Not,” she hastened, “that anybody is trying to say your hostess necessarily lives next door to you. All Love Thy Neighbor means is that you should eat what you’re offered and be gracious about it.”

  “I don’t see why loving my neighbor means telling him I love fruitcake. When I don’t.”

  No one, not even Edie, had any idea how to respond to this grim pedantry. It could go on for hours. It didn’t matter if you talked until you were blue in the face. Even more infuriating was that Harriet’s arguments, preposterous as they were, usually had at bottom some more or less sound scriptural basis. Edie was unimpressed by this. Though she did charity and missionary work, and sang in the church choir, she did not actually believe that every word of the Bible was true any more than, in her heart, she actually believed some of her own favorite sayings: that, for example, everything that happened was always for the best or that, deep down, Negroes were exactly the same as white people. But the aunts—Libby, in particular—were troubled if they thought too much about some of the things Harriet said. Her sophisms were grounded undeniably in the Bible, yet flew in the face of common sense and everything that was right. “Maybe,” Libby said uneasily after Harriet had stumped off home to supper, “maybe the Lord doesn’t see a difference between a white lie and a wicked lie. Maybe they’re all wicked in His eyes.”

  “Now, Libby.”

  “Maybe it takes a little child to remind us of that.”

  “I’d just as soon go to Hell,” snapped Edie—who had been absent during the earlier exchange—“as have to go around all the time letting everybody in town know exactly what I thought of them.”

  “Edith!” cried all her sisters at once.

  “Edith, you don’t mean that!”

  “I do. And I don’t care to know what everybody in town thinks of me, either.”

  “I can’t imagine what it is you’ve done, Edith,” said self-righteous Adelaide, “that makes you believe everyone thinks so badly of you.”

  Odean, Libby’s maid—who pretended to be hard of hearing—listened to this stolidly as she was in the kitchen warming some creamed chicken and biscuits for the old lady’s supper. Not much exciting happened at Libby’s house, and the conversation was usually a little more heated on the days when Harriet visited.

  Unlike Allison—whom other children accepted vaguely, without quite knowing why—Harriet was a bossy little girl, not particularly liked. The friends she did have were not lukewarm or casual, like Allison’s. They were mostly boys, mostly younger than herself, and fanatically devoted, riding their bicycles halfway across town after school to see her. She made them play Crusades, and Joan of Arc; she made them dress up in sheets and act out pageantry from the New Testament, in which she herself took the role of Jesus. The Last Supper was her favorite. Sitting all on one side of the picnic table, à la Leonardo, under the muscadine-draped pergola in Harriet’s back yard, they all waited eagerly for the moment when—after dispensing a Last Supper of Ritz crackers and grape Fanta—she would look around the table at them, fixing and holding each boy, for a matter of seconds, with her cold gaze. “And yet one of you,” she would say, with a calm that thrilled them, “one of you here tonight will betray me.”

  “No! No!” they would shriek with delight—including Hely, the boy who played Judas, but then Hely was Harriet’s favorite and got to play not only Judas but all the other plum disciples: Saint John, Saint Luke, Saint Simon Peter. “Never, Lord!”

  Afterwards, there was the procession to Gethsemane, which was located in the deep shade beneath the black tupelo tree in Harriet’s yard. Here Harriet, as Jesus, was forced to undergo capture by the Romans—violent capture, more boisterous than the version of it rendered in the Gospels—and this was exciting enough; but the boys mainly loved Gethsemane because it was played under the tree her brother was murdered in. The murder had happened before most of them were born but they all knew the story, had patched it together from fragments of their parents’ conversation or grotesque half-truths whispered by their older siblings in darkened bedrooms, and the tree had thrown its rich-dyed shadow across their imaginations ever since the first time their nursemaids had stooped on the corner of George Street to clasp their hands and point it out to them, with hissed cautions, when they were very small.

  People wondered why the tree still stood. Everyone thought it should be cut—not just because of Robin, but because it had started to die from the top, melancholy gray bones broken and protruding above the brackish foliage, as if blasted by lightning. In the fall it turned a brilliant outraged red, and was pretty for a day or two before it abruptly dropped all its leaves and stood naked. The leaves, when they appeared again, were glossy and leathery and so dark that they were nearly black. They cast such deep shade that the grass hardly grew; besides, the tree was too big, too close to the house, if there came a strong enough wind, the tree surgeon had told Charlotte, she’d wa
ke up one morning to find it crashed through her bedroom window (“not to mention that little boy,” he’d told his partner as he heaved himself back into his truck and slammed the door, “how can that poor woman wake up every morning of her life and look in her yard and see that thing?”). Mrs. Fountain had even offered to pay to have the tree removed, tactfully citing the danger posed to her own house. This was extraordinary, as Mrs. Fountain was so cheap she washed out her old tinfoil to roll in a ball and use again, but Charlotte only shook her head. “No, thank you, Mrs. Fountain,” she said, in a voice so vague that Mrs. Fountain wondered if she’d misunderstood.

  “I tell you,” shrilled Mrs. Fountain. “I’m offering to pay for it! I’m glad to do it! It’s a danger to my house, too, and if a tornado comes and—”

  “No, thank you.”

  She was not looking at Mrs. Fountain—not even looking at the tree, where her dead son’s treehouse rotted forlornly in a decayed fork. She was looking across the street, past the empty lot where the ragged robin and witch grass grew tall, to where the train tracks threaded bleakly past the rusted roofs of Niggertown, far away.

  “I tell you,” said Mrs. Fountain, her voice different. “I tell you, Charlotte. You think I don’t know, but I know what it’s like to lose a son. But it’s God’s will and you just have to accept it.” Encouraged by Charlotte’s silence, she continued: “Besides, he wasn’t your only child. At least you’ve got the others. Now, poor Lynsie—he was all I had. Not a day goes by when I don’t think of that morning I heard his plane was shot down. We were getting ready for Christmas, I was on a ladder in my nightgown and housecoat trying to fasten a sprig of mistletoe on to the chandelier when I heard that knock at the front. Porter, bless his heart—this was after his first heart attact, but before his second—”

  Her voice broke, and she glanced at Charlotte. But Charlotte wasn’t there any more. She had turned from Mrs. Fountain and was drifting back towards the house.

  That had been years ago and the tree still stood, with Robin’s old treehouse still rotting at the top of it. Mrs. Fountain, when she met Charlotte, was not so friendly now. “She don’t pay a bit of attention to either one of those girls,” she said to the ladies down at Mrs. Neely’s while she was having her hair done. “And that house is just crammed full of trash. If you look in the windows, there’s newspaper stacked almost to the ceiling.”

  “I wonder,” said fox-faced Mrs. Neely, catching and holding Mrs. Fountain’s eye in the mirror as she reached for the hair spray, “if she don’t take a little drink every now and then?”

  “I wouldn’t be at all surprised,” Mrs. Fountain said.

  Because Mrs. Fountain often yelled at children from her porch, the children ran away and made up stories about her: that she kidnapped (and ate) little boys; that her prizewinning rose-bed was fertilized by their ground-up bones. Proximity to Mrs. Fountain’s house of horrors made the re-enactment of the arrest at Gethsemane in Harriet’s yard that much more thrilling. But though the boys succeeded sometimes in frightening each other about Mrs. Fountain, they did not have to try to frighten themselves about the tree. Something in its lineaments made them uneasy; the stifled drab of its shadow—only footsteps from the bright lawn, but immensities apart—was disquieting even if one knew nothing of its history. There was no need for them to remind themselves about what had happened because the tree reminded them itself. It had its own authority, its own darkness.

  Because of Robin’s death, Allison had been teased cruelly in her early years of school (“Mommy, mommy, can I go outside and play with my brother?” “Absolutely not, you’ve dug him up three times this week!”). She’d endured the taunting in meek silence—no one knew quite how much, or for how long—until a kind teacher had finally discovered what was going on and put a stop to it.

  But Harriet—perhaps because of her more ferocious nature, or possibly only because her classmates were too young to remember the murder—had escaped such persecution. The tragedy in her family reflected a spooky glamour on her which the boys found irresistible. Frequently she spoke of her dead brother, with a strange, willful obstinacy which implied not only that she had known Robin but that he was still alive. Time and again, the boys found themselves staring at the back of Harriet’s head or the side of her face. Sometimes it seemed to them as if she was Robin: a child like themselves, returned from the grave and knowing things they didn’t. In her eyes they felt the sting of her dead brother’s gaze, through the mystery of their shared blood. Actually, though none of them realized it, there was very little resemblance between Harriet and her brother, even in photographs; fast, bright, slippery as a minnow, he could not have been further from Harriet’s brooding and her lofty humorlessness, and it was fully the force of her own character that held and transfixed them, not his.

  Not much irony suggested itself to the boys, no hard parallels, between the tragedy they re-enacted in the darkness beneath the black-gum tupelo and the tragedy which had taken place there twelve years before. Hely had his hands full, since as Judas Iscariot he gave Harriet up to the Romans but also (as Simon Peter) cut off a centurion’s ear in her defense. Pleased and nervous, he counted out the thirty boiled peanuts for which he would betray his Savior, and, as the other boys jostled and nudged him, moistened his lips with an extra swig of grape Fanta. In order to betray Harriet he got to kiss her on the cheek. Once—egged on by the other disciples—he had kissed her smack on the mouth. The sternness with which she’d wiped it away—a contemptuous swipe across the mouth with the back of her hand—had thrilled him more than the kiss itself.

  The shrouded figures of Harriet and her disciples were an eerie presence in the neighborhood. Sometimes Ida Rhew, looking out the window over the sink, was hit by the strangeness of the little procession treading its grim way across the lawn. She did not see Hely fingering his boiled peanuts as he walked, or see his green sneakers beneath the robe, or hear the other disciples whispering resentfully about not being allowed to bring their cap pistols along to defend Jesus. The file of small, white-draped figures, sheets trailing the grass, struck her with the same curiosity and foreboding she might have felt had she been a washerwoman in Palestine, elbow-deep in a tub of dirty well water, pausing in the warm Passover twilight to wipe her brow with the back of her wrist and to stare for a moment, puzzled, at the thirteen hooded figures gliding past, up the dusty road to the walled olive grove at the top of the hill—the importance of their errand evident in their slow, grave bearing but the nature of it unimaginable: a funeral, perhaps? A sickbed, a trial, a religious celebration? Something unsettling, whatever it was; enough to turn her attention for a moment or two, though she would go back to her work with no way of knowing that the little procession was on its way to something unsettling enough to turn history.

  “Why yall always want to play under that nasty old tree?” she asked Harriet when Harriet came indoors.

  “Because,” said Harriet, “it’s the darkest place in the yard.”

  ————

  She’d had, from the time she was small, a preoccupation with archaeology: with Indian mounds, ruined cities, buried things. This had begun with an interest in dinosaurs which had turned into something else. What interested Harriet, it became apparent as soon as she was old enough to articulate it, were not the dinosaurs themselves—the long-lashed brontosauruses of Saturday cartoons, who allowed themselves to be ridden, or meekly bent their necks as a playground slide for children—nor even the screaming tyrannosaurs and pterodactyls of nightmare. What interested her was that they no longer existed.

  “But how do we know,” she had asked Edie—who was sick of the word dinosaur—“what they really looked like?”

  “Because people found their bones.”

  “But if I found your bones, Edie, I wouldn’t know what you looked like.”

  Edie—busy peeling peaches—offered no reply.

  “Look here, Edie. Look. It says here they only found a leg bone.” She clambered up on a stool and
, with one hand, hopefully proffered the book. “And here’s a picture of the whole dinosaur.”

  “Don’t you know that song, Harriet?” interrupted Libby, leaning over from the kitchen counter where she was pitting peaches. In her quavery voice, she sang: “The knee bone’s connected to the leg bone … The leg bone’s connected to the—”

  “But how do they know what it looked like? How do they know it was green? They’ve made it green in the picture. Look. Look, Edie.”

  “I’m looking,” said Edie sourly, though she wasn’t.

  “No, you’re not!”

  “I’ve seen all of it I care to.”

  When Harriet got a bit older, nine or ten, the fixation switched to archaeology. In this she found a willing if addled discussion partner in her aunt Tat. Tat had taught Latin for thirty years at the local high school; in retirement, she had developed an interest in various Riddles of the Ancients, many of which, she believed, hinged on Atlantis. The Atlanteans, she explained, had built the pyramids and the monoliths of Easter Island; Atlantean wisdom accounted for trepanned skulls found in the Andes and modern electrical batteries discovered in the tombs of the Pharaohs. Her bookshelves were filled with pseudo-scholarly popular works from the 1890s which she had inherited from her educated but credulous father, a distinguished judge who had spent his final years attempting to escape from a locked bedroom in his pyjamas. His library, which he had left to his next-to-youngest daughter, Theodora—nicknamed, by him, Tattycorum, Tat for short—included such works as The Antediluvian Controversy, Other Worlds Than Ours, and Mu: Fact or Fiction?