Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

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 y'all 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 archeology: 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 archeology. 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 pajamas. 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 ?

Tat’s sisters did not encourage this line of inquiry, Adelaide and Libby thinking it un-Christian; Edie, merely foolish. “But if there was such a thing as Atlanta,” said Libby, her innocent brow furrowed, “why isn’t it mentioned in the Bible?”

“Because it wasn’t built yet,” said Edie rather cruelly. “Atlanta is the capital of Georgia. Sherman burnt it in the Civil War.”

“Oh, Edith, don’t be hateful—”

“The Atlanteans,” said Tat, “were the ancestors of the Ancient Egyptians.”

“Well, there you go. The Ancient Egyptians weren’t Christian,” said Adelaide. “They worshipped cats and dogs and that kind of thing.”

“They couldn’t have been Christian, Adelaide. Christ wasn’t born yet.”

“Maybe not, but Moses and all them at least followed the Ten Commandments. They weren’t out there worshipping cats and dogs.”

“Atlanteans,” Tat said haughtily, over the laughter of her sisters, “ Atlanteans knew many things that modern scientists would be glad to get their hands on today. Daddy knew about Atlantis and he was a good Christian man and had more education than all of us here in this room put together.”

“Daddy,” Edie muttered, “ Daddy used to get me out of bed in the night saying Kaiser Wilhelm was coming and to hide the silver down the well.”

“Edith!”

“Edith, that’s not right. He was sick then. After how good he was to all of us!”

“I’m not saying Daddy wasn’t a good man, Tatty. I’m just saying I was the one who had to take care of him.”

“Daddy always knew me ,” said Adelaide eagerly—who, being the youngest, and, she believed, her father’s favorite, never missed an opportunity to remind her sisters of this. “He remembered me right up until the end. The day he died, he took my hand and he said, ‘Addie, honey, what have they done to me?’ I don’t know why in the world I was the only one he recognized. It was the funniest thing.”

Harriet enjoyed very much looking at Tat’s books, which included not only the Atlantis volumes but more established works such as Gibbon and Ridpath’s History as well as a number of paperbacked romances set in ancient times with colored pictures of gladiators on the covers.

“Of course, these are not historical works,” explained Tat. “They are just little light novels with historical backdrops. But they are very entertaining books, and educational, too. I used to give them to the children down at the high school to try to get them interested in Roman times. You probably couldn’t do that any more with the kind of books they all write nowadays but these are clean little novels, not the kind of trash they have now.” She ran a bony forefinger—big-knuckled with arthritis—down the row of identical spines. “ H. Montgomery Storm . I think he used to write novels about the Regency period as well, under a woman’s name, but I can’t remember what it was.”

Harriet was not at all interested in the gladiator novels. They were only love stories in Roman dress, and she disliked anything which had to do with love or romance. Her favorite of Tat’s books was a large volume called Pompeii and Herculaneum: The Forgotten Cities , illustrated with color plates.

Tat was happy enough to look at this with Harriet, too. They sat on Tat’s velveteen sofa and turned the pages together, past delicate murals from ruined villas, past baker’s stalls preserved perfectly, bread and all, beneath fifteen feet of ash, past the faceless gray plaster casts of dead Romans still twisted in the same eloquent postures of anguish in which they had fallen, two thousand years ago, beneath the rain of cinders on the cobblestones.