The Little Friend Read online

  Harriet herself had been born before Christmas, in the middle of a snowstorm that was the biggest on record in Mississippi. There was a picture of this snowfall in the heart-shaped box: Tribulation’s alley of oaks bright with ice and Bounce, Adelaide’s long-dead terrier, dashing down the snow-covered walk mad with excitement, towards his mistress the photographer, caught forever in mid-bark—his tiny legs a blur, kicking a froth of snow behind him—in the moment of glorious anticipation before he reached his beloved. In the distance, the front door of Tribulation was thrown open and Robin, his timid sister Allison clinging to his waist, was waving joyously at the viewer. He was waving at Adelaide—who had snapped the picture—and at Edie, who was helping his mother out of the car; and at his baby sister Harriet, whom he had never seen before, and who was being brought home from the hospital for the first time on this snowy bright Christmas Eve.

  Harriet had seen snow only twice, but all her life she knew that she had been born in it. Every Christmas Eve (smaller, sadder Christmases now, gathered around a gas heater in Libby’s stuffy little low-ceilinged house, drinking eggnog) Libby and Tat and Adelaide told the same story, the story of how they’d packed into Edie’s car and driven over to the hospital in Vicksburg to bring Harriet home in the snow.

  “You were the best Christmas present we ever had,” they said. “Robin was so excited. The night before we went to get you he could hardly sleep, he kept your grandmother awake until four in the morning. And the first time he saw you, when we brought you inside, he was quiet for a minute and then he said, ‘Mother, you must have picked out the prettiest baby they had.’ ”

  “Harriet was such a good baby,” said Harriet’s mother wistfully—seated by the heater, clasping her knees. Like Robin’s birthday and the anniversary of his death, Christmas was especially hard for her and everyone knew it.

  “Was I good?”

  “Yes, you were, darling.” It was true. Harriet had never cried or given anyone a moment of trouble before she had learned how to talk.

  Harriet’s favorite picture in the heart-shaped box, which she studied by flashlight again and again, was of her and Robin and Allison in the parlor of Tribulation, beside the Christmas tree. It was the only picture, so far as she knew, of the three of them together; it was the only picture of herself which had been taken in her family’s old house. It communicated no sense whatever of the many dooms which were about to fall. The old Judge would be gone in a month, Tribulation would be lost forever and Robin would die in the spring but of course nobody had known that then; it was Christmas, there was a new baby in the house, everybody was happy and thought they would be happy forever.

  In the photograph, Allison (grave in her white nightgown) stood barefoot beside Robin, who was holding baby Harriet—his expression a mixture of excitement and bewilderment, as if Harriet was a fancy toy he wasn’t quite sure how to handle. The Christmas tree sparkled beside them; peeking sweetly from the corner of the photograph were Robin’s cat Weenie and inquisitive Bounce, like the beasts come to witness the miracle in the stables. Above the scene the marble seraphim smiled. The light in the photograph was fractured, sentimental, incandescent with disaster. Even Bounce the terrier would be dead by the next Christmas.

  ————

  After Robin’s death, the First Baptist Church started a collection for a gift in his memory—a Japanese quince, or perhaps new cushions for the church pews—but more money poured in than anyone had expected. One of the church’s six stained-glass windows—each depicting a scene from the life of Christ—had been shattered by a tree branch during a winter storm, and boarded up with plywood ever since. The pastor, who had despaired over the cost of replacing it, suggested using the money to buy a new one.

  A considerable portion of the fund had come from the town’s schoolchildren. They had gone door to door, organized raffles and bake sales. Robin’s friend Pemberton Hull (who had played the Gingerbread Man to Robin’s blackbird in the kindergarten play) had given close to two hundred dollars to the memorial for his dead friend, a largesse which nine-year-old Pem claimed to have obtained by smashing his piggy bank but which he had actually stolen from his grandmother’s purse. (He had also attempted to contribute his mother’s engagement ring, ten silver teaspoons, and a Masonic tie tack whose origins no one was able to determine; it was set with diamonds and evidently worth some money.) But even without these handsome bequests, the total sum brought in by Robin’s classmates amounted to quite a lot; and it was suggested, instead of replacing the broken portrayal of the Wedding at Cana with the same scene, that something be done to honor not only Robin but the children who had worked so hard for him.

  The new window—unveiled, to the gasps of the First Baptist congregation, a year and a half later—depicted a pleasant blue-eyed Jesus seated on a boulder beneath an olive tree and involved in conversation with a red-haired boy in a baseball cap who bore an unmistakable resemblance to Robin.

  SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN TO COME UNTO ME

  ran the inscription beneath the scene, and, engraved on a plaque beneath:

  In Loving Memory of Robin Cleve Dufresnes

  From the Schoolchildren of Alexandria, Mississippi

  “For Theirs Shall Be the Kingdom of Heaven”

  For all her life, Harriet had seen her brother ablaze in the same constellation as the archangel Gabriel, Saint John the Baptist, Joseph and Mary and of course Christ himself. The noonday sun streamed through his exalted form; and the purified outlines of his face (bobbed nose, elfin smile) shone with the same beatific clarity. It was a clarity all the more radiant for being childish, more vulnerable than John the Baptist and the others; yet in his small face too was the serene indifference of eternity, like a secret they all shared.

  What exactly happened at Calvary, or in the grave? How did flesh ascend from lowliness and sorrow into this kaleidoscope of resurrection? Harriet didn’t know. But Robin knew, and the secret glowed in his transfigured face.

  Christ’s own passage—aptly—was described as a Mystery, yet people were queerly uninterested in getting to the bottom of it. What exactly did the Bible mean when it said that Jesus rose from the dead? Had He returned only in spirit, an unsatisfactory spook of some sort? Apparently not, according to the Bible: Doubting Thomas had put a finger in one of the nail holes in His palm; He had been spotted, solid enough, on the road to Emmaus; He had even eaten a little snack over at one of the disciples’ houses. But if He had in fact risen from the dead in His earthly body, where was He now? And if He loved everybody as much as He claimed to, why then did anybody ever die at all?

  When Harriet was about seven or eight, she had gone to the library in town and asked for some books on magic. But when she got them home, she was enraged to discover that they contained only tricks: balls disappearing from under cups, quarters dropping from people’s ears. Opposite the window which depicted Jesus and her brother was a scene of Lazarus raised from the dead. Over and over again, Harriet read the story about Lazarus in the Bible, but it refused to address even the most basic questions. What had Lazarus to say to Jesus and his sisters about his week in the grave? Did he still smell? Was he able to go back home and carry on living with his sisters, or was he frightening to the people around him and perhaps had to go off somewhere and live by himself like Frankenstein’s monster? She could not help thinking that if she, Harriet, had been there, she would have had more to say on the subject than Saint Luke did.

  Perhaps it was all a story. Perhaps Jesus himself hadn’t risen from the dead, though everyone said He had; but if indeed He had rolled the stone away and stepped living from the grave why then not her brother, whom she saw every Sunday blazing by His side?

  This was Harriet’s greatest obsession, and the one from which all the others sprang. For what she wanted—more than Tribulation, more than anything—was to have her brother back. Next to that, she wanted to find out who killed him.

  ————

  On a Friday morning in May, twelve yea
rs after Robin’s murder, Harriet was sitting at Edie’s kitchen table reading the journals of Captain Scott’s last expedition to the Antarctic. The book was propped open between her elbow and a plate from which she was eating a scrambled egg and some toast. She and Allison often ate their breakfast at Edie’s house on school mornings. Ida Rhew, who did all the cooking, did not arrive at work until eight o’clock and their mother, who seldom ate much of anything anyway, had only a cigarette and occasionally a bottle of Pepsi for breakfast.

  This was not a school morning, however, but a weekday morning early in the summer vacation. Edie stood at the stove with a polka-dot apron over her dress scrambling her own egg. She did not care for this business of Harriet reading at the table but it was easier to just go ahead and let her do it instead of having to correct her every five minutes.

  The egg was done. She turned off the flame and went to the cupboard to fetch a plate. In doing so she was forced to step over the prone form of her other granddaughter, who lay stretched out full length on her stomach across the kitchen linoleum sobbing monotonously.

  Edie, ignoring the sobs, stepped carefully back over Allison’s body and spooned the egg upon a plate. Then she circled to the kitchen table—carefully avoiding Allison as she did so—and sat down across from the oblivious Harriet and began to eat in silence. She was far too old for this sort of thing. She had been up since five o’clock, and she had had it up to here with the children.

  The problem was the children’s cat, which lay on a towel in a cardboard box near Allison’s head. A week ago, it had begun to refuse its food. Then it had started to cry whenever it was picked up. They had then brought it over to Edie’s house for Edie to examine.

  Edie was good with animals, and she often thought that she would have made an excellent veterinarian or even a doctor if girls had done such things in her day. She had nursed all sorts of kittens and puppies to health, raised baby birds fallen from the nest, and cleaned the wounds and set the broken bones of all manner of hurt creatures. The children knew this—not only her grandchildren, but all the children in the neighborhood—and brought to her not only their own sick pets but any pitiful little strays or wild things they happened to find.

  But, fond as she was of animals, Edie was not sentimental about them. Nor, as she reminded the children, was she a miracle worker. After brisk examination of the cat—who indeed appeared listless, but had nothing obviously wrong with it—she had stood up and dusted her hands on her skirt while her granddaughters looked hopefully on.

  “How old is this cat, anyway?” she asked them.

  “Sixteen and a half,” said Harriet.

  Edie bent down to stroke the poor thing, which was leaning against the table leg with a wild, miserable look in its eye. She was fond of the cat herself. It had been Robin’s kitty. He had found it lying on the hot sidewalk in the summertime—half dead, its eyes hardly open—and had brought it to her, gingerly, in his cupped palms. Edie had had a devil of a time saving it. A knot of maggots had eaten a hole in its side and she still remembered how meekly and uncomplainingly the little thing had lain while she washed the wound out, in a shallow basin of lukewarm water, and how pink the water was when she finished.

  “He’ll be all right, won’t he, Edie?” said Allison, who was even then close to tears. The cat was her best friend. After Robin died, it had taken up with her; it followed her around, brought her little presents it had stolen or killed (dead birds; tasty bits of garbage; once—mysteriously—an unopened package of oatmeal cookies); and ever since Allison started school, it had scratched on the back door every afternoon at two-forty-five asking to be let out so that it could walk down to the corner to meet her.

  Allison, in turn, lavished more affection on the cat than on any other living creature, including the members of her own family. She talked to it constantly, fed it pinches of chicken and ham from her own plate, and allowed it to sleep with its stomach draped over her throat at night.

  “Probably he ate something that didn’t agree with him,” said Harriet.

  “We’ll see,” Edie said.

  But the following days confirmed her suspicion. There was nothing wrong with the cat. It was just old. She offered it tuna fish, and milk from an eyedropper, but the cat only closed its eyes and spat out the milk in an ugly froth between its teeth. The morning before, while the children were at school, she had come into the kitchen to find it twitching in a kind of fit, and she had wrapped it in a towel and taken it to the vet.

  When the girls stopped by her house that afternoon she told them: “I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do. I took the cat to Dr. Clark this morning. He says we’ll have to put him to sleep.”

  Harriet—surprisingly, for she was quite capable of flying off the handle when she felt like it—had taken the news with relative equanimity. “Poor old Weenie,” she had said, kneeling by the cat’s box. “Poor kitty.” And she laid her hand on the cat’s heaving flank. She loved the cat nearly as much as Allison did, though it paid little attention to her.

  But Allison had turned pale. “What do you mean, put him to sleep?”

  “I mean what I say.”

  “You can’t do that. I won’t let you.”

  “There’s nothing more we can do for him,” said Edie sharply. “The vet knows best.”

  “I won’t let you kill him.”

  “What do you want to do? Prolong the poor thing’s suffering?”

  Allison, lip trembling, dropped to her knees by the cat’s box and burst into hysterical tears.

  That had been yesterday afternoon at three o’clock. Since then, Allison had not moved from the cat’s side. She had eaten no supper; she had refused pillow and blanket; she had simply lain all night on the cold floor wailing and crying. Edie, for about half an hour, had sat in the kitchen with her and attempted to deliver a brisk little talk about how everything in the world died and how Allison must learn to accept this. But Allison had only cried harder; and finally Edie had given it up and gone in her bedroom and shut the door and started an Agatha Christie novel.

  At last—about midnight, by Edie’s bedside clock—the crying had stopped. Now she was at it again. Edie took a sip of her tea. Harriet was deeply absorbed in Captain Scott. Across the table, Allison’s breakfast stood untouched.

  “Allison,” Edie said.

  Allison, shoulders shaking, did not respond.

  “Allison. Get over here and eat your breakfast.” It was the third time she had said it.

  “I’m not hungry,” came the muffled reply.

  “Look here,” Edie snapped. “I’ve had just about enough. You’re too old to be acting this way. I want you to stop wallowing on the floor this instant and get up and eat your breakfast. Come on, now. It’s getting cold.”

  This rebuke was greeted only by a howl of anguish.

  “Oh, for Heaven’s sake,” said Edie, turning back to her breakfast. “Do as you please. I wonder what your teachers at school would say if they could see you rolling on the floor like a big baby.”

  “Listen to this,” Harriet said suddenly. She began to read from her book in a pedantic voice:

  “ ‘Titus Oates is very near the end, one feels. What he or we will do, God only knows. We discussed the matter after breakfast; he is a brave fine fellow and understands the situation, but—’ ”

  “Harriet, we are none of us very interested right now in Captain Scott,” said Edie. She felt very nearly at the end of her own rope.

  “All I’m saying is that Scott and his men were brave. They kept their spirits up. Even when they were caught in the storm and they knew they were all going to die.” She continued, her voice rising: “ ‘We are very near the end, but have not and will not lose our good cheer—’ ”

  “Well, death is certainly a part of life,” said Edie resignedly.

  “Scott’s men loved their dogs and their ponies, but it got so bad they had to shoot every single one of them. Listen to this, Allison. They had to eat them.” She flipped ba
ck a few pages and bent her head to the book again. “ ‘Poor beasts! They have done wonderfully well considering the terrible circumstances under which they worked, but yet it is hard to have to kill them so—’ ”

  “Make her stop!” Allison wailed from the floor, hands clamped over her ears.

  “Shut up, Harriet,” said Edie.

  “But—”

  “No buts. Allison,” she said sharply, “get off the floor. Crying isn’t going to help the cat.”

  “I’m the only one here who loves Weenie. Nobody else ca-ha-hares.”

  “Allison. Allison. One day,” said Edie, reaching for the butter knife, “your brother brought me a toad he found that had its leg cut off by the lawn mower.”

  The screams from the kitchen floor which greeted this were such that Edie thought her head would split in two, but she kept on buttering her toast—which was by now stone cold—and plowed ahead: “Robin wanted me to make it better. But I couldn’t. There was nothing I could do for the poor thing but kill it. Robin didn’t understand that when creatures are suffering like that, sometimes the kindest thing to do is to put them out of their misery. He cried and cried. There was no way I could make him understand that the toad was better off dead than in such terrible pain. Of course he was much younger than you are now.”