Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

“Out at Tribulation, Mother’s cousins would show up out of the clear blue to stay weeks at a time, and nobody thought a thing in the world about it,” Edie was saying. The speed limit was fifty-five but she was proceeding at her usual, leisurely motoring pace: forty miles an hour.

In the mirror, Harriet could see the driver of the log truck slapping his forehead and making impatient gestures with his open palm.

“Now, I’m not talking about the Memphis cousins,” said Edie. “I’m talking about the cousins from Baton Rouge. Miss Ollie, and Jules, and Mary Willard. And little Aunt Fluff!”

Harriet stared bleakly out the window: sawmills and pine barrens, preposterously rosy in the early morning light. Warm, dusty wind blew her hair in her face, whipped monotonously in a loose flap of upholstery on the ceiling, rattled in the cellophane panel of the doughnut box. She was thirsty—hungry, too—but there was nothing to drink but the coffee, and the doughnuts were crumbly and stale. Edie always bought day-old doughnuts, even though they were only a few cents cheaper than fresh.

“Mother’s uncle had a small plantation down there around Covington—Angevine it was called,” said Edie, plucking up a napkin with her free hand; in what could only be called a kingly manner, like a king accustomed to eating with his hands, she took a big bite of her doughnut. “Libby used to take the three of us down there on the old Number 4 train. Weeks at a time! Miss Ollie had a little dog-trot house out back, with a wood stove, and table and chairs, and we loved to play out in that little dog–trot house better than anything!”

The backs of Harriet’s legs were stuck to the car seat. Irritably, she shifted around and tried to get comfortable. They’d been in the car three hours, and the sun was high and hot. Every so often Edie considered trading in the Oldsmobile—for something with air conditioning, or a radio that worked—but she always changed her mind at the last minute, mainly for the secret pleasure of watching Roy Dial wring his hands and dance around in anguish. It drove Mr. Dial crazy that a well-placed old Baptist lady like Edie rode around town in a car twenty years old; sometimes, when the new cars came out, he spun by Edie’s house late in the afternoon and dropped off an unrequested “tester”—usually a top-of-the-line Cadillac. “Just drive it for a few days,” he’d say, palms in the air. “See what you think.” Edie strung him along cruelly, pretending to fall in love with the proffered vehicle, then—just as Mr. Dial was drawing up the papers—return it, suddenly opposed to the color, or the power windows, or complaining of some microscopic flaw, some rattle in the dashboard or sticky lock button.

“It still says Hospitality State on the Mississippi license plate but in my opinion true hospitality died out here in the first half of the present century. My great-grandfather was dead against the building of the old Alexandria Hotel, back before the war,” said Edie, raising her voice over the long, insistent horn blast of the truck behind them. “He said that he himself was more than happy to put up any respectable travelers who came to town.”

“Edie, that man back there’s honking at you.”

“Let him,” said Edie, who had settled in at her own comfortable speed.

“I think he wants to pass.”

“It won’t hurt him to slow down a little bit. Where does he think he’s taking those logs in such a great big hurry?”

The landscape—sandy clay hills; endless pines—was so raw and strange-looking that it made Harriet’s stomach hurt. Everything she saw reminded her that she was far from home. Even the people in neighboring cars looked different: sun-reddened, with broad, flat faces and farm clothes, not like the people from her own town.

They passed a dismal little cluster of businesses: Freelon Spraying Co., Tune’s AAA Transmission, New Dixie Stone and Gravel. A rickety old black man in coveralls and orange hunting cap was hobbling along the shoulder of the road carrying a brown grocery bag. What would Ida think when she came to work and found her gone? She would be arriving just about now; Harriet’s breath quickened a little at the thought.

Sagging telephone wires; patches of collards and corn; ramshackle houses with dooryards of packed dirt. Harriet pressed her forehead to the warm glass. Maybe Ida would realize how badly Harriet’s feelings were hurt; maybe she’d realize that she couldn’t threaten to pack up and quit every single time she got mad about something or other…. A middle-aged black man in glasses was tossing feed from a Crisco can to some red chickens; solemnly, he raised a hand at the car and Harriet waved back, so energetically that she felt a little embarrassed.

She was worried about Hely, too. Though he’d seemed pretty certain that his name wasn’t on the wagon, still she didn’t like the thought that it was sitting up there, waiting for someone to find it. To think what would happen if they traced it back to Hely made her feel ill. Don’t think about it, don’t think about it , she told herself.

On they drove. Shacks gave way to more woods, with occasional flat fields that smelled of pesticide. In a grim little clearing, a fat white woman wearing a maroon shirt and shorts, one foot encased in a surgical boot, was slinging wet clothes on a line off to the side of her trailer home; she glanced at the car, but didn’t wave.

Suddenly Harriet was jolted from her thoughts by a squeal of brakes, and a turn that slung her into the door and upset the box of doughnuts. Edie had turned—across traffic—into the bumpy little country road that led to the camp.

“Sorry, dear,” said Edie breezily, leaning over to right her purse. “I don’t know why they make these signs so little that you can’t even read them until you get right up on them….”

In silence, they jostled down the gravel road. A silver tube of lipstick rolled across the seat. Harriet caught it before it fell —Cherries in the Snow , said the label on the bottom—and dropped it back in Edie’s straw handbag.

“We’re certainly in Jones County now!” said Edie gaily. Her backlit profile—dark against the sun—was sharp and girlish. Only the line of her throat, and her hands on the steering wheel—knotty, freckled—betrayed her age; in her crisp white shirt, plaid skirt, and two-toned correspondent oxfords she looked like some enthusiastic 1940s newspaper reporter out to chase down The Big Story. “Do you remember old Newt Knight the deserter from your Mississippi History, Harriet? The Robin Hood of the Piney Woods, so he called himself! He and his men were poor and sorry, and they didn’t want to fight a rich man’s war so they holed up down here in the backwoods and wouldn’t have a thing to do with the Confederacy. The Republic of Jones, that’s what they called themselves! The cavalry sent bloodhounds after them, and the old cracker women choked those dogs to death with red pepper! That’s the kind of gentlemen you’ve got down here in Jones County.”

“Edie,” said Harriet—watching her grandmother’s face as she spoke—”maybe you should get your eyes checked.”

“I can read just fine. Yes, ma'am. At one time,” said Edie, regally, “these backwoods were full of Confederate renegades. They were too poor to have any slaves themselves, and they resented those rich enough to have them. So they seceded from the Secession! Hoeing their sorry little corn patches out here in the pine woods! Of course, they didn’t understand that the war was really about States’ Rights.”

To the left, the woods opened onto a field. At the very sight of it—the small sad bleachers, the soccer nets, the ragged grass—Harriet’s heart plunged. Some tough-looking older girls were punching a tetherball, their slaps and oofs ringing out hard and audible in the morning stillness. Over the scoreboard, a hand-lettered sign read: