The Little Friend (8 page)

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 back 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.”

This little soliloquy had no effect on its intended subject, but when Edie glanced up, she became aware, with some annoyance, that Harriet was staring at her with parted lips.

“How did you kill it, Edie?”

“As mercifully as I could,” said Edie crisply. She had chopped its head off with a hoe—and, moreover, had been careless enough to do it in front of Robin, for which she was sorry—but she had no intention of going into this.

“Did you step on it?”

“Nobody listens to me,” Allison burst out suddenly. “Mrs. Fountain poisoned Weenie. I know she did. She said she wanted to kill him. He used to walk over in her yard and get footprints on the windshield of her car.”

Edie sighed. They had been through this before. “I don’t like Grace Fountain any more than you do,” she said, “she’s a spiteful old bird, and she’s got her nose into everything, but you can’t convince me she poisoned that cat.”

“I know she did. I hate her.”

“It does you no good to think like this.”

“She’s right, Allison,” said Harriet abruptly. “I don’t think Mrs. Fountain poisoned Weenie.”

“What do you mean?” said Edie, turning to Harriet, suspicious of this unexpected concord of opinion.

“I mean that if she did, I think I would know about it.”

“And how would you know something like that?”

“Don’t worry, Allison. I don’t think she poisoned him. But if she did,” said Harriet, going back to her book, “she’ll be sorry.”

Edie, who had no intention of letting this statement drop, was about to pursue it when Allison burst out again, louder than ever.

“I don’t
care
who did it,” she sobbed, the heels of her hands dug hard in her eyes. “Why does Weenie have to die? Why did all those poor people freeze to death?
Why is everything always so horrible all the time?
”

Edie said: “Because that’s how the world is.”

“The world makes me sick, then.”

“Allison, stop.”

“I won’t. I’ll never stop thinking it.”

“Well, that’s a very sophomoric attitude,” said Edie. “Hating the world. The world doesn’t care.”

“I’ll hate it for the rest of my life. I’ll never stop hating it.”

“Scott and his men were very brave, Allison,” said Harriet. “Even when they were dying. Listen. ‘We are in a desperate state, feet frozen, etcetera. No fuel and a long way from food, but it would do your heart good to be in our tent, to hear our songs and cheery conversation—’ ”

Edie stood up. “That’s it,” she said. “I’m taking the cat to Dr. Clark’s. You girls stay here.” Stolidly, she began to gather up the plates, ignoring the renewed shrieks from the floor near her feet.

“No, Edie,” said Harriet, scraping back her chair. She hopped up and ran over to the cardboard box. “Poor Weenie,” she said, stroking the shivering cat. “Poor kitty. Please don’t take him now, Edie.”

The old cat’s eyes were half-shut with pain. Feebly, it thumped its tail on the side of the box.

Allison, half-choked with sobs, put her arms around it and drew its face close to her cheek. “No, Weenie,” she hiccupped. “No, no, no.”

Edie came over and, with surprising gentleness, took the cat from her. As she lifted it, gingerly, it gave a delicate and almost human cry. Its grizzled muzzle, drawn in a yellow-toothed rictus, looked like an old man’s, patient and worn with suffering.

Edie scratched it, tenderly, behind the ears. “Hand me that towel, Harriet,” she said.

Allison was trying to say something, but she was crying so hard that she couldn’t.

“Don’t, Edie,” pleaded Harriet. She, too, had begun to cry. “Please. I haven’t had a chance to say goodbye.”

Edie stooped down and got the towel herself, then straightened up again. “Say goodbye, then,” she said impatiently. “The cat’s going outside now, and he may be some time.”

————

An hour later, her eyes still red, Harriet was on Edie’s back porch scissoring a picture of a baboon from the B volume of the
Compton’s Encyclopedia
. After Edie’s old blue Oldsmobile had pulled out of the driveway, she too had lain on the
kitchen floor by the empty box and cried as stormily as her sister. After her tears subsided, she had got up and gone in her grandmother’s bedroom and, picking a straight pin from the tomato-shaped pincushion on the bureau, had amused herself for a few minutes by scratching I HATE EDIE in tiny letters on the footboard of Edie’s bed. But this proved strangely unsatisfying and while she was huddled sniffling on the carpet by the footboard, she was struck by a more cheering idea. After she cut the baboon’s face from the encyclopedia she intended to paste it over Edie’s face in a portrait in the family album. She had attempted to interest Allison in the project but Allison, face down by the cat’s empty box, refused even to look.

The gate to Edie’s back yard screeched open and Hely Hull darted in without closing it behind him. He was eleven, a year younger than Harriet, and wore his sandy hair down to his shoulders in imitation of his older brother, Pemberton. “Harriet,” he called, thumping up the porch steps, “hey, Harriet,” but he stopped short when he heard the monotonous sobs from the kitchen. When Harriet glanced up, he saw she’d been crying, too.

“Oh, no,” he said, stricken. “They’re making you go to camp, aren’t they?”

Camp Lake de Selby was Hely’s—and Harriet’s—greatest terror. It was a Christian children’s camp they had both been forced to attend the summer before. Boys and girls (segregated on opposite sides of the lake) were compelled to spend four hours a day in Bible study and the rest of the time braiding lanyards and acting in sappy humiliating skits the counselors had written. Over on the boys’ side, they’d insisted on pronouncing Hely’s name the wrong way—not “Healy,” as was correct, but—humiliatingly—“Helly” to rhyme with “Nelly.” Worse: they’d forcibly cut his hair short at assembly, as entertainment for the other campers. And though Harriet on her end had rather enjoyed the Bible classes—mainly because they gave her a captive and easily shocked forum in which to air her unorthodox views of Scripture—she had been wholly as miserable there as Hely: up at
five and lights out at eight, no time to herself and no books but the Bible, and lots of “good old-fashioned discipline” (paddling, public ridicule) to enforce these rules. At the end of the six weeks, she and Hely and the other First Baptist campers had sat staring listlessly out the windows of the church bus, silent in their green Camp Lake de Selby T-shirts, absolutely shattered.