The Little Friend (9 page)

“Tell your mother you’ll kill yourself,” said Hely breathlessly. A large group of his school friends had been packed off the day before, trudging with resigned slumps toward the bright green school bus as if it were headed not to summer camp but straight down into Hell. “I told them I’d kill myself if they made me go back. I said I’d lie down in the road and let a car run over me.”

“That’s not the problem.” Tersely, Harriet explained about the cat.

“So you’re not going to camp?”

“Not if I can help it,” said Harriet. For weeks, she had watched the mail for the registration forms; when they arrived, she tore them up and hid them in the garbage. But the danger was not yet over. Edie, who was the real menace (her absent-minded mother hadn’t even noticed that the forms were missing), had already bought Harriet a knapsack and a new pair of sneakers, and was asking to see the Supplies list.

Hely picked up the picture of the baboon and examined it. “What’s this for?”

“Oh. That.” She explained.

“Maybe another animal would be better,” suggested Hely. He disliked Edie. She was always teasing him about his hair and pretending that she thought he was a girl. “Maybe a hippopotamus. Or a pig.”

“I think this is pretty good.”

He leaned over her shoulder, eating boiled peanuts from his pocket, and watched as Harriet glued the snarling baboon face over Edie’s, so that it was artfully framed by her own hairdo. Fangs bared, it glared aggressively at the viewer as Harriet’s grandfather—in profile—beamed raptly at his
simian bride. Beneath the photograph was written, in Edie’s own hand:

Edith and Hayward
Ocean Springs, Mississippi
June 11th, 1935

Together, they studied it.

“You’re right,” said Hely. “That is pretty good.”

“Yes. I thought about a hyena but this is better.”

They had just put the encyclopedia back on the shelf and replaced the album (embossed, in gilt, with Victorian curlicues) when they heard the crunch of Edie’s car turning into the gravel drive.

The screen door slammed. “Girls,” they heard her call, business as usual.

No answer.

“Girls, I decided to be a good sport and bring the cat home so you could give him a funeral, but if one of you doesn’t answer me this minute I’m turning right around and taking him back out to Dr. Clark’s.”

There was a stampede to the front room. All three children stood in the doorway, staring at her.

Edie raised an eyebrow. “Why, who’s this little miss?” she said to Hely in mock surprise. She was very fond of him—he reminded her of Robin, except for the horrible long hair—and had no idea that by what she regarded as good-natured teasing she had incurred his bitter hatred. “Can that be
you
, Hely? I’m afraid I didn’t recognize you beneath your golden tresses.”

Hely smirked. “We were looking at some pictures of you.”

Harriet kicked him.

“Well, that can’t have been very exciting,” Edie said. “Girls,” she said to her granddaughters, “I thought you’d want to bury the cat in your own yard so I stopped on the way back and asked Chester to dig a grave.”

“Where’s Weenie?” said Allison. Her voice was hoarse, and she had a crazy look in her eye. “Where is he? Where did you leave him?”

“With Chester. He’s wrapped up in his towel. I suggest you don’t open it, girls.”

————

“Come on,” said Hely, bumping Harriet with his shoulder. “Let’s have a look.”

He and Harriet were standing in the dark tool shed in Harriet’s yard, where Weenie’s body lay swaddled in a blue bath towel on Chester’s workbench. Allison—still crying her eyes out—was inside digging through drawers for an old sweater the cat had liked to sleep on and that she wanted to bury with him.

Harriet glanced out the toolshed’s window, which was furred with dust. At the corner of the bright summer lawn was the silhouette of Chester, stepping down hard on the edge of the spade.

“All right,” she said. “But quick. Before she gets back.”

Only later did Harriet realize that it was the first time she had ever seen or touched a dead creature. She was not expecting it to be such a shock. The cat’s flank was cold and unyielding, hard to the touch, and an ugly thrill ran through her fingertips.

Hely leaned in for a closer look. “Gross,” he said cheerfully.

Harriet stroked the orange fur. It was still orange, and as soft as ever, despite the frightening woodenness of the body beneath. His paws were stretched out rigid, as if he was bracing himself against being thrown into a tub of water, and his eyes—which even in old age and suffering had been a clear, ringing green—were clotted with a gelatinous film.

Hely bent to touch him. “Hey,” he yelped, and snatched his hand back.
“Gross.”

Harriet didn’t flinch. Gingerly, she slid her hand to touch the pink spot on the cat’s side where the hair had never quite grown right, the place the maggots had eaten when he was tiny. Weenie, in life, would never let anybody touch him there; he would hiss and take a swipe at anybody who tried it, even Allison. But the cat was still, his lips drawn back from the clenched needles of his teeth. The skin was puckered, rough like brushed gloveskin, and cold cold cold.

So this was the secret, what Captain Scott and Lazarus and Robin all knew, what even the cat had come to know in its last hour: this was it, the passage to the stained-glass window. When Scott’s tent was found, eight months later, Bowers and Wilson lay with their sleeping bags closed over their heads and Scott was in an open bag with his arm thrown over Wilson. That was the Antarctic, and this a breezy green morning in May, but the form beneath her palm was as hard as ice. She ran a knuckle over Weenie’s white-stockinged forefoot.
It seems a pity
, Scott had written with his stiffening hand, as the white closed in softly from the white immensities, and the faint pencil letters grew fainter on the white paper,
but I do not think I can write any more
.

“Bet you won’t touch his eyeball,” said Hely, inching closer. “I dare you.”

Harriet scarcely heard him. This was what her mother and Edie had seen: outer dark, the terror you never came back from. Words that slid off paper into emptiness.

In the cool dim of the shed, Hely drew closer. “Are you scared?” he whispered. His hand stole to her shoulder.

“Cut it out,” said Harriet, shrugging away.

She heard the screen door slam shut, her mother calling after Allison; quickly, she tossed the towel back over the cat.

It would never wholly leave her, the vertigo of this moment; it would be with her for the rest of her life, and it would always be mingled inextricably with the dim tool-shed—shiny metal sawteeth, the smells of dust and gasoline—and three dead Englishmen beneath a cairn of snow with icicles glittering in their hair. Amnesia: ice floes, violent distances, the body turned to stone. The horror of all bodies.

“Come on,” said Hely, with a toss of his head. “Let’s get out of here.”

“I’m coming,” said Harriet. Her heart was pounding, and she felt breathless—not with the breathlessness of fear, but with something very close to rage.

————

Though Mrs. Fountain had not poisoned the cat, she was nonetheless pleased that it was dead. From the window over
her sink—the observation point at which she stood for hours each day, watching the comings and goings of her neighbors—she had spied Chester digging the hole, and now, squinting through the kitchen curtain, she saw the three children gathered around it. One of them—the little girl, Harriet—held a bundle in her arms. The big girl was crying.

Mrs. Fountain pulled her pearly-framed reading glasses low on her nose, and shouldered a cardigan with jeweled buttons over her housedress—it was a warm day but she got chilled easily, she needed a wrap when she went out—and pegged along out her back door and over to the fence.

It was a fast, fresh, airy day. Low clouds raced across the sky. The grass—which needed cutting, it was a tragedy how Charlotte had let the place go—was sprinkled with violets, wild oxalis, dandelions gone to seed, and the wind rippled through it in erratic currents and eddies like wind on the sea. Wisteria tendrils undulated from the screen porch, delicate as seaweed. It hung so thick over the back of the house that you could hardly see the porch anymore; it was pretty enough when the flowers were in bloom but the rest of the time it was a shaggy mess and besides, the weight of it was liable to pull the porch down—wisteria was a parasite, it weakened the structure of a house if you let it crawl all over the place—but some people had to learn everything the hard way.

She had expected the children to greet her, and stood expectantly by the fence for some moments, but they did not acknowledge her and kept on about whatever they were doing.

“What are yall children doing over there?” she called sweetly.

They looked up, startled as deer.

“Are yall burying something?”

“No,” shouted Harriet, the little one, in a tone which Mrs. Fountain did not much like. She was a smart aleck, that one.

“Sure looks like it.”

“Well, we’re not.”

“I believe yall are burying that old orange cat.”

No reply.

Mrs. Fountain squinted over the tops of her reading
glasses. Yes, the big girl was crying. She was too old for such nonsense. The little one was lowering the swaddled form into the hole.

“That’s exactly what yall are doing,” she crowed. “You can’t fool me. That cat was a nuisance. He used to walk over here every day and get his nasty footprints all over the windshield of my car.”

“Don’t pay any attention to her,” Harriet said to her sister, between her teeth. “Old bitch.”

Hely had never heard Harriet swear before. A wicked shiver of pleasure fluttered down the back of his neck. “Bitch,” he repeated, more audibly, the bad word delicious on his tongue.

“What’s that?” shrilled Mrs. Fountain. “Who said that over there?”

“Shut up,” Harriet said to Hely.

“Which one of you said that? Who’s over there with you girls?”

Harriet had dropped to her knees and, with her bare hands, was shoving the pile of dirt back into the hole, over the blue towel. “Come on, Hely,” she hissed. “Quick. Help me.”

“Who’s that over there?” squawked Mrs. Fountain. “You’d better answer me. I’m going right inside the house and call your mother.”

“Shit,” said Hely, emboldened and flushed with daring. He dropped to his knees beside Harriet and, rapidly, began to help her push the dirt in. Allison, a fist over her mouth, stood over them with tears streaming down her face.

“You children better answer me.”

“Wait,” cried Allison suddenly. “Wait.” She turned from the grave and dashed back through the grass towards the house.

Harriet and Hely paused, wrist-deep in dirt.

“What’s she doing?” whispered Hely, wiping his brow with the wrist of his muddied hand.

“I don’t know,” said Harriet, baffled.

“Is that the little Hull boy?” cried Mrs. Fountain. “You come over here. I’m going to call your mother. You come over here right now.”

“Go on and call, bitch,” muttered Hely. “She’s not at home.”

The screen door slammed, and Allison ran out, stumbling, an arm over her face, blinded by tears. “Here,” she said, and she fell to her knees beside them and tossed something into the open grave.

Hely and Harriet craned to look. It was a picture of Allison, a studio portrait taken at school the autumn before, smiling up at them from the raw dirt. She had on a pink sweater with a lace collar, and pink barrettes in her hair.

Sobbing, Allison scooped a double handful of earth and threw it in the grave, over her own smiling face. The dirt rattled as it hit the photograph. For a moment the pink of Allison’s sweater was still visible, her timid eyes still peering hopefully through a blear of soil; another black handful rattled over them and they were gone.

“Come on,” she cried impatiently, as the two younger children stared down into the hole and then at her, bewildered. “Come
on
, Harriet. Help me.”

“That’s it,” shrieked Mrs. Fountain. “I’m going back in the house. I’m going to go get right on the telephone with your mothers. Look. I’m going back inside now. You children are all going to be
mighty sorry.
”

A few nights later, around ten o’clock, while her mother and sister were upstairs sleeping, Harriet gently turned the key in the lock of the gun cabinet. The guns were old and in bad repair, inherited by Harriet’s father from an uncle who’d collected them. Of this mysterious Uncle Clyde, Harriet knew nothing but his profession (engineering), his temperament (“sour,” said Adelaide, making a face; she had been at high school with him) and his end (plane crash, off the Florida coast). Because he had been “lost at sea” (that was the phrase that everyone used), Harriet never thought of Uncle Clyde as dead, exactly. Whenever his name was mentioned, she had a vague impression of a bearded tatterdemalion like Ben Gunn in
Treasure Island
, leading a lonely existence on some bleak, salty islet, his pants in rags and his wristwatch corroded from the seawater.

Carefully, with a palm on the glass so it wouldn’t rattle, Harriet worked the sticky old door of the gun cabinet. With a shiver, it popped open. On the top shelf was a case of antique pistols—tiny dueling sets, trimmed in silver and mother of pearl, freakish little Derringers scarcely four inches long.
Below, ranked in chronological order and leaning to the left, stood the larger arms: Kentucky flintlocks; a grim, ten-pound Plains rifle; a rust-locked muzzle loader said to have been in the Civil War. Of the newer guns, the most impressive was a Winchester shotgun from World War I.

Harriet’s father, the owner of this collection, was a remote and unpleasant figure. People whispered about the fact that he lived in Nashville, since he and Harriet’s mother were still married to each other. Though Harriet had no idea how this arrangement had come to be (except, vaguely, that it had to do with her father’s work), it was quite unremarkable to her, since he had lived away from home as long as Harriet could remember. A check arrived every month for the household expenses; he came home for Christmas and Thanksgiving, and stopped by for several days in the fall on the way down to his hunting camp in the Delta. To Harriet, this arrangement seemed perfectly reasonable, suiting as it did the personalities of those involved: her mother, who had very little energy (staying in bed most of the day), and her father, who had too much energy, and the wrong kind. He ate fast, talked fast, and—unless he had a drink in his hand—was incapable of sitting still. In public, he was always kidding around, and people thought he was a hoot, but his unpredictable humors were not always so amusing in private, and his impulsive habit of saying the first thing that came into his head often hurt his family’s feelings.