The Little Friend (35 page)

“You want to go over there?” Hely asked Harriet when they were back on the sidewalk. “I don’t mind.” The bicycle ride to the Confederate Cemetery was a hot, hard, demanding one, which crossed the highway and wound through questionable neighborhoods with hot-tamale shacks, little Greek and Italian and black kids playing kick-ball together on the street, a seedy, vivacious grocery where an old man with a gold tooth in front sold hard Italian cookies and colored Italian sherbets and loose cigarettes at the counter for a nickel apiece.

“Yes, but Edie’s at the cemetery too. She’s the president of the Garden Club.”

Hely accepted this excuse without question. He stayed out of Edie’s way whenever he could and Harriet’s desire to avoid her did not strike him as odd in the slightest. “We can go to my house then,” he said, tossing the hair out of his eyes. “Come on.”

“Maybe my aunt Tatty’s at home.”

“Why don’t we just play on your porch or mine?” said Hely,
tossing a peanut shell from his pocket rather bitterly at the windshield of a parked car. Libby was all right, but the other two aunts were nearly as bad as Edie.

————

Harriet’s aunt Tat had been at the cemetery with the rest of the Garden Club, but had asked to be driven home because of hay fever; she was fretful, her eyes itched, whopping red wheals had risen on the backs of her hand from the bindweed, and she could understand no better than Hely this dogged insistence upon
her
house for the afternoon’s play. She’d answered the door still in her dirty gardening clothes: Bermuda shorts and a smock-length African dashiki. Edie had a garment very similar; they were presents from a Baptist missionary friend stationed in Nigeria. The Kente cloth was colorful and cool and both old ladies wore the exotic gifts frequently, for light gardening and errands—quite oblivious to the Black Power symbolism which their “caftans” broadcast to curious onlookers. Young black men leaned out the windows of passing cars and saluted Edie and Tatty with raised fists. “Gray Panthers!” they shouted; and “Eldridge and Bobby, right on!”

Tattycorum did not enjoy working outdoors; Edie had bullied her into the Garden Club project and she wanted to get her khakis and “caftan” off and into the washing machine. She wanted a Benadryl; she wanted a bath; she wanted to finish her library book before it was due the next day. She was not pleased when she opened the door to see the children but she greeted them graciously and with only a touch of irony. “As you can see, Hely, I’m very informal here,” she said for the second time as she led them in a threading pathway through a dim hall narrowed with heavy old barrister’s bookcases, into a trim living-dining area overpowered with a massive mahogany sideboard and buffet from Tribulation and a spotty old gilt-edged mirror so tall it touched the ceiling. Audubon birds of prey glared down at them from on high. An enormous Malayer carpet—also from Tribulation, much too large for any room of the house—lay rolled up a foot thick across the doorway at the far end, like a velvety log rotting obstinately across
the path. “Watch your step, now,” she said, extending a hand to help the children over it one at a time, like a scout leader guiding them over a fallen tree in the forest. “Harriet will tell you that her aunt Adelaide is the housekeeper in the family, Libby is good with the little ones, and Edith keeps the trains running on time, but I’m no good at any of that. No, my Daddy always called me the archivist. Do you know what that is?”

She glanced back, sharp and merry, with her red-rimmed eyes. There was a smudge of dirt under her cheekbone. Hely, unobtrusively, cut his own eyes away, for he was a little afraid of all Harriet’s old ladies, with their long noses and their shrewd, birdlike manners, like a pack of witches.

“No?” Tat turned her head and sneezed, violently. “An archivist,” she said, with a gasp, “is just a fancy word for
pack rat.…
Harriet, darling, please forgive your old auntie for rambling on to your poor company. She doesn’t mean to be tiresome, she only hopes that Hely won’t go home and tell that nice little mother of his what a mess I am over here. Next time,” and her voice dropped as she fell behind with Harriet, “next time, before you come all the way over here, darling, you should call Aunt Tatty on the telephone. What if I hadn’t been here to let you in?”

With a smack, she kissed impassive Harriet on her round cheek (the child was filthy, though the little boy was cleanly, if queerly, dressed in a long white T-shirt which came past his knees like Grandpa’s nightgown). She left them on the back porch and hurried to the kitchen where—teaspoon clattering—she mixed lemonade from tap water and a pouch of citrus-flavored powder from the grocery. Tattycorum had real lemons and sugar—but nowadays they all turned up their noses at the real thing, said Tatty’s friends in the Circle who had grandchildren.

She called to the children to fetch their drinks (“I’m afraid we’re very informal here, Hely, I hope you don’t mind serving yourself”) and hurried to the back of the house to freshen up.

————

On Tat’s clothes-line, which ran across the back porch, hung a checkered quilt with large tan and black squares. The
card table where they sat was placed in front of it like a stage set, and the quilt’s squares mirrored the small squares of the game board between them.

“Hey, what does this quilt remind you of?” said Hely cheerfully, kicking the rungs of his chair. “The chess tournament in
From Russia with Love?
Remember? That first scene, with the giant chessboard?”

“If you touch that bishop,” said Harriet, “you’ll have to go on and move it.”

“I already moved. That pawn there.” He wasn’t interested in chess, or checkers, either; both games made his head hurt. He raised his lemonade glass, and pretended to discover a secret message from the Russians pasted on the bottom, but his arched eyebrow was lost on Harriet.

Harriet, without wasting any time, jumped the black knight out into the middle of the board.

“Congratulations, sir,” crowed Hely, banging down the glass, though he wasn’t in check and there was nothing unusual about the play. “A brilliant coup.” It was a line from the chess tournament in the movie and he was proud of himself for remembering it.

They played on. Hely captured one of Harriet’s pawns with his bishop, and smacked himself on the forehead when Harriet immediately leapt a knight forward to take the bishop. “You can’t do that,” he said, although he really didn’t know if she could or not; he had a hard time keeping track of how knights were able to jump, which was too bad because knights were the pieces that Harriet liked most and used best.

Harriet was staring at the board, her chin cupped moodily in her hand. “I think he knows who I am,” she said suddenly.

“You didn’t say anything, did you?” said Hely uneasily. Though he admired her daring, he had not really thought it a good idea for Harriet to go down to the pool hall on her own.

“He came outside and stared at me. Just standing there, without moving.”

Hely moved a pawn without thinking, just for something to do. Suddenly he felt very tired and grumpy. He didn’t like lemonade—he preferred Coke—and chess wasn’t his idea of a good time. He had a chess set of his own—a nice one, that his
father had given him—but he never played except when Harriet came over, and mostly he used the pieces for G.I. Joe tombstones.

————

The heat pressed down heavy, even with the fan whirring and the shades halfway drawn, and Tat’s allergies weighed cumbrous and lopsided in her head. The BC headache powder had left a bitter taste in her mouth. She put
Mary Queen of Scots
face-down on the chenille bedspread and closed her eyes for a moment.

Not a peep from the porch: the children were playing quietly enough, but it was hard to rest, knowing they were in the house. There was so much to worry about in the little collection of waifs over on George Street, and so little to be done for any of them, she thought, as she reached for the water glass on her bedside table. And Allison—who, in her heart, Tat loved the best of her two great-nieces—was the child she worried about most. Allison was like her mother, Charlotte, too tender for her own good. In Tat’s experience, it was the mild, gentle girls like Allison and her mother who got beaten down and brutalized by life. Harriet was like her grandmother—too much like her, which was why Tat had never been particularly comfortable around her; she was a bright-eyed tiger cub, cute enough now that she was small, but less so with every inch she grew. And though Harriet was not yet old enough to take care of herself, that day would arrive soon enough and then she—like Edith—would thrive no matter what befell her, be it famine or bank crash or Russian invasion.

The bedroom door squealed. Tat started, palm to her ribcage. “Harriet?”

Old Scratch—Tatty’s black tomcat—leapt lightly up on the bed and sat looking at her, switching his tail.

“What you doing in here, Bombo?” he said—or, rather, Tatty said for him, in the shrill, insolent singsong that she and her sisters had employed since childhood to carry on conversations with their pets.

“You scared me to death, Scratch,” she replied, dropping an octave to her natural voice.

“I know how to open the door, Bombo.”

“Hush.” She got up and closed the door. When she lay down again, the cat curled up comfortably beside her knee, and before long they were both asleep.

————

Danny’s grandmother, Gum, winced as with both hands she strained uselessly to lift a cast-iron skillet of cornbread from the stove.

“Here Gum, let me hep you,” said Farish, jumping up so fast that he knocked over the aluminum kitchen chair.

Gum ducked and scraped away from the stove, smiling up at her favorite grandson. “Oh Farish.
I’ll
get it,” she said, feebly.

Danny sat staring at the checkered vinyl tablecloth, wishing hard that he was somewhere else. The trailer’s kitchen was so cramped that there was hardly room to move, and it got so overheated and smelly from the stove that it was an unpleasant place to sit even in winter. A few minutes ago, he’d drifted off into a waking daydream, a dream about a girl—not a real girl, but a girl like a spirit. Dark hair swirling, like weeds at a shallow pond’s edge: maybe black, maybe green. She’d drawn deliciously close, as if to kiss him—but instead, she’d breathed into his open mouth, cool fresh wonderful air, air like a breath from Paradise. The sweetness of the memory made him shudder. He wanted to be alone, to savor the daydream, for it was fading fast and he wanted desperately to slip back into it.

But instead he was here. “Farish,” his grandmother was saying, “I sure do hate for you to get up.” Anxiously, pressing her hands together, she followed the salt and syrup with her eyes as Farish reached over and banged them down on the table. “Please don’t worry with that.”

“Set down, Gum,” Farish said sternly. This was a regular little routine between the two of them; it happened every meal.

With regretful glances, and a great show of reluctance, Gum limped murmuring to her chair as Farish—rattling with product,
ding-dong
to the eyeballs—thundered back and forth
between stove and table and the refrigerator on the front porch, setting the table with great thumps and clanks. When he thrust an overloaded plate at her, she waved it weakly aside.

“You boys go on and eat first,” she said. “Eugene, won’t you take this?”

Farish glowered at Eugene—who was sitting quietly, hands folded in his lap—and plunked the plate down in front of Gum.

“Here … Eugene …” With trembling hands, she offered the plate to Eugene, who shied back, reluctant to take it.

“Gum, you aint as big as a minute,” roared Farish. “You’re going to end up back in the hospital.”

Silently, Danny pushed the hair out of his face and helped himself to a square of cornbread. He was too hot and too wired to eat and the ungodly stench from the crank lab—combined with that of stale grease and onions—was enough to make him feel he would never be hungry again.

“Yes,” said Gum, smiling wistfully at the tablecloth. “I sure do love cooking for you all.”

Danny was fairly sure that his grandmother did not love cooking for her boys quite so much as she said she did. She was a tiny, emaciated, leather-brown creature, stooped from continual cringing, so decrepit that she looked closer to a hundred than her real age—somewhere around sixty. Born to a Cajun-French father and a mother who was a full-blood Chickasaw, in a sharecropper’s shack with a dirt floor and no plumbing (privations on which she daily refreshed her grandsons), Gum had been married, at thirteen, to a fur trapper twenty-five years her senior. It was hard to imagine what she’d looked like in those days—in her hardscrabble youth there had been no money for foolishness like cameras and pictures—but Danny’s father (who had adored Gum, passionately, more as a suitor than a son) remembered her as a girl with red cheeks and shiny black hair. She’d been only fourteen when he was born; she was (he’d said) “the prettiest little coon-ass gal you ever saw.” By coon-ass he meant Cajun, but when Danny was small he’d had a vague idea that Gum was part raccoon—an animal which, with her sunken dark eyes,
her sharp face and snaggled teeth and small, dark, wrinkled hands, she indeed resembled.

For Gum was tiny. She seemed to shrink every year. Now she was shriveled to little more than a hollow-cheeked cinder, her mouth as thin and ruinous as a razor. As she punctually reminded her grandsons, she’d worked hard all her life, and it was hard work (which she wasn’t ashamed of—not Gum) that had worn her down before her time.

Curtis—happily—smacked away at his supper while Farish continued to clickety-click about Gum with abrupt offers of food and service, all of which, with an air of affliction, she sadly waved aside. Farish was fiercely attached to his grandmother; her crippled and generally pitiable air never failed to move him, and she in turn flattered Farish in the same soft, meek, obsequious manner that she had flattered their dead father. And as her flattery had encouraged all that was worst in Danny’s father (nursing his self-pity, feeding his rages, pampering his pride and above all his violent streak), something in the way she fawned on Farish also encouraged his brutal side.