Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

Allison shrugged—but she looked troubled, and hurried from the room with her head down. Harriet stood in the kitchen for a minute, brow knotted, and then went to the telephone and eased up the receiver.

In the background, Harriet could hear a television. “—shouldn’t blame you,” her mother was saying querulously.

“Don’t be silly.” Her father’s boredom and impatience was perfectly audible in the way he was breathing. “Why don’t you come up here if you don’t believe me?”

“I don’t want you to say anything you don’t mean.”

Quietly, Harriet pressed the button and then put the phone down. She’d feared that the two of them were talking about her, but this was worse. Things were bad enough when her father visited, and the house was noisy and violent and charged with his presence, but he cared what people thought of him, and he behaved better around Edie and the aunts. To know that they were only a few blocks away made Harriet feel safer. And the house was large enough so she could tiptoe around and avoid him much of the time. But his apartment in Nashville was small—only five rooms. There would be no getting away from him.

As if in response to these thoughts, bang , a crash behind her, and she jumped with her hand to her throat. The window-sash had fallen, a confusion of objects (magazines, a red geranium in a clay pot) tumbled to the kitchen floor. For an eerie, vacuum-sealed moment (curtains flat, breeze vanished) she stared at the broken pot, the black crumbs of dirt spilled across the linoleum and then up, apprehensively, into the four shadowy corners of the room. The sunset glow on the ceiling was lurid, ghastly.

“Hello?” she finally whispered, to whatever spirit (friendly or not) had blown through the room. For she had a sense of being observed. But all was silence; and after some moments, Harriet turned and hurried from the room as if the very Devil were skimming after her.

Eugene, in some reading glasses from the drugstore, sat quietly at Gum’s kitchen table in the summer twilight. He was reading a smeary old booklet from the County Extension Office called Home Gardens: Fruits and Ornamentals . His snake-bit hand, though long out of the bandage, still had a useless look about it, the fingers stiff, propping the book open like a paperweight.

Eugene had returned from the hospital a changed man. He’d had an epiphany, lying awake listening to the idiot laughter of the television floating down the hall—waxed checkerboard tile, straight lines converging on white double doors that swung inward to Infinity. Through the nights, he prayed until dawn, staring up at the chilly harp of light on the ceiling, trembling in the antiseptic air of death: the hum of X rays, the robot beep of the heart monitors, the rubbery, secretive footsteps of the nurses and the agonized breaths of the man in the bed next to him.

Eugene’s epiphany had been threefold. One: because he was not spiritually prepared to handle serpents, and had no anointment from the Lord, God in His mercy and justice had lashed out and smote him. Two: Not everybody in the world—every Christian, every believer—was meant to be a minister of the Word; it had been Eugene’s mistake to think that the ministry (for which he was unqualified, in nearly all respects) was the only ladder by which the righteous could attain Heaven. The Lord, it seemed, had different plans for Eugene, had had them all along—for Eugene was no speaker; he had no education, or gift for tongues, or easy rapport with his fellow man; even the mark on his face rendered him an unlikely messenger, as people quailed and shrunk from such visible signs of the Living God’s vengeance.

But if Gene was unfit to prophesy or preach the gospel: what then? A sign , he’d prayed, lying wakeful in his hospital bed, in the cool gray shadows … and, as he prayed, his eyes returned repeatedly to a ribboned vase of red carnations by the bed of his neighbor—a very large, very brown old man, very wrinkled in the face, whose mouth opened and closed like a hooked fish; whose dry, gingerbread-brown hands—tufted with black hairs—grasped and pulled at the bland coverlet with a desperation that was terrible to see.

The flowers were the only pinprick of color in the room. When Gum was in the hospital, Eugene had returned to look in the door at his poor neighbor, with whom he had never exchanged a word. The bed was empty but the flowers were still there, blazing up red from the bed table as if in sympathy with the deep, red, basso pain that throbbed in his bitten arm, and suddenly the veil fell away, and it was revealed to Eugene that the flowers themselves were the sign he’d prayed for. They were little live things, the flowers, created by God and living like his heart was: tender, slender lovelies that had veins, and vessels, that sipped water from their hobnail vase, that breathed their weak, pretty scent of cloves even in the Valley of the Shadow of Death. And as he was thinking on these things, the Lord himself had spoken to Eugene, there as he stood in the quiet of the afternoon, saying: Plant my gardens .

This was the third epiphany. That very afternoon, Eugene had hunted through the seed packs on the back porch and planted a row of collards and another of winter turnip greens in a moist, dark patch of earth where—until recently—a stack of old tractor tires had sat atop a sheet of black plastic. He’d also purchased two rosebushes on sale at the feed store and planted them in the scrubby grass in front of his grandmother’s trailer. Gum, typically, was suspicious, as if the roses were a sly trick at her expense; Eugene, several times, had caught her standing in the front yard staring at the poor little shrubs as if they were dangerous intruders, freeloaders and parasites, there to rob them all blind. “What I want to know,” she said, limping after Eugene as he ministered to the roses with pesticide and watering can, “is, who’s gone attend to them thangs? Who’s gone pay for all that fancy spray, and fertilizer? Who’s gone get stuck with watering them, and dusting them, and nursing them, and fooling with them all the time?” And she cast a cloudy old martyred eye at Eugene, as if to say that she knew that the burden of their care would only crush down joylessly on her own shoulders.

The door of the trailer squeaked open—so loudly that Eugene jumped—and in trudged Danny: dirty, unshaven, hollow-eyed and dehydrated-looking, as if he’d been wandering the desert for days. He was so thin that his jeans were falling off his hip-bones.

Eugene said: “You look awful.”

Danny gave him a sharp look, then collapsed at the table with his head in his hands.

“It’s your own fault. You ought to just stop taking that stuff.”

Danny raised his head. His vacant stare was frightening. Suddenly he said: “Do you remember that little black-haired girl come up to the back door of the Mission the night you got bit?”

“Well, yes,” said Eugene, closing the booklet on his finger. “Yes, I do. Farsh can go around saying any crazy thing he wants to, and can’t nobody question it—”

“You remember her, then.”

“Yes. And it’s funny you mention it.” Eugene considered where to begin. “That girl run off from me,” he said, “before the snakes was even out of the window. She was nervous, down there on the sidewalk with me, and the second that yell come from up there she was off .” Eugene set the booklet aside. “And I can tell you another thing, I did not leave that door unlocked. I don’t care what Farsh says. It was standing open when we come back, and—”

He drew his neck back and blinked at the tiny photograph which Danny had suddenly shoved in his face.