Donna Tartt: The Little Friend

When Ida—grouchy and stiff—creaked back in with an armload of white shirts, she said: He won’t come.

You tell him to get in here this minute.

I don’t know where he is. I done called half a dozen times.

Maybe he’s across the street.

Ida dropped the shirts in the ironing basket. The screen door banged shut. Robin , Charlotte heard her yell. You come on, or I’ll switch your legs .

And then, again: Robin!

But Robin didn’t come.

Oh, for Heaven’s sake, said Charlotte, drying her hands on a kitchen towel, and went out into the yard.

Once she was there she realized, with a slight unease that was more irritation than anything else, that she had no idea where to look. His bicycle was leaning against the porch. He knew not to wander off so close to dinnertime, especially when they had company.

Robin! she called. Was he hiding? No children his age lived in the neighborhood, and though every now and then unkempt children—black and white—wandered up from the river to the wide, oak-shaded sidewalks of George Street, she didn’t see any of them now. Ida forbade him to play with them, though sometimes he did anyway. The smallest ones were pitiful, with their scabbed knees and dirty feet; though Ida Rhew shooed them roughly from the yard, Charlotte, in tender-hearted moods, sometimes gave them quarters or glasses of lemonade. But when they grew older—thirteen or fourteen—she was glad to retreat into the house and allow Ida to be as fierce as she liked in chasing them away. They shot BB guns at dogs, stole things from people’s porches, used bad language, and ran the streets till all hours of the night.

Ida said: Some of them trashy little boys was running down the street a while ago.

When Ida said trashy, she meant white. Ida hated the poor white children and blamed them with unilateral ferocity for all yard mishaps, even those with which Charlotte was certain they could have had nothing possibly to do.

Was Robin with them? said Charlotte.

Nome.

Where are they now?

I run them off.

Which way?

Yunder towards the depot.

Old Mrs. Fountain from next door, in her white cardigan and harlequin glasses, had come out into her yard to see what was happening. Close behind was her decrepit poodle, Mickey, with whom she shared a comical resemblance: sharp nose, stiff gray curls, suspicious thrust of chin.

Well, she called gaily. Y'all having a big party over there?

Just the family, Charlotte called back, scanning the darkening horizon behind Natchez Street where the train tracks stretched flat in the distance. She should have invited Mrs. Fountain to dinner. Mrs. Fountain was a widow, and her only child had died in the Korean War, but she was a complainer and a vicious busybody. Mr. Fountain, who ran a dry-cleaning business, had died fairly young, and people joked that she had talked him into the ground.

What’s wrong? Mrs. Fountain said.

You haven’t seen Robin, have you?

No. I’ve been upstairs cleaning out this attic all afternoon. I know I look like a great big mess. See all this trash I hauled out? I know the garbage man doesn’t come until Tuesday and I hate to just leave it out on the street like this but I dont know what else to do. Where’d Robin run off to? Can’t you find him?

I’m sure he didn’t go far, said Charlotte, stepping out on the sidewalk to peer down the street. But it’s suppertime.

It’s fixin to thunder, said Ida Rhew, gazing up at the sky.

You don’t reckon he fell in the fishpond, do you? Mrs. Fountain said anxiously. I always was afraid that one of those babies was going to fall in there.

That fishpond isn’t a foot deep, Charlotte said, but all the same she turned and headed toward the back yard.

Edie had come out onto the porch. Anything the matter? she said.

He’s not in the back, yelled Ida Rhew. I looked already.

As Charlotte went past the open kitchen window on the side of the house, she could still hear Ida’s gospel program:

Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling

Calling for you and for me

See, by the portals he’s waiting and watching …

The back yard was deserted. The door of the tool shed stood ajar: empty. A mucid sheet of green scum floated undisturbed over the goldfish pool. As Charlotte glanced up, a ravelled wire of lightning flashed in the black clouds.

It was Mrs. Fountain who saw him first. The scream froze Charlotte in her tracks. She turned and ran back, quick, quick, not quick enough—dry thunder rumbling in the distance, everything strangely lit beneath the stormy sky and the ground pitching up at her as the heels of her shoes sank in the muddy earth, as the choir still sang somewhere and a strong sudden wind, cool with the coming rain, swept through the oaks overhead with a sound like giant wings and the lawn rearing up all green and bilious and heaving about her like the sea, as she stumbled blind and terrified toward what she knew—for it was all there, everything, in Mrs. Fountain’s cry—would be the very worst.

Where had Ida been when she got there? Where was Edie? All she remembered was Mrs. Fountain, a hand with a crumpled Kleenex pressed tight to her mouth and her eyes rolling and wild behind the pearly glasses; Mrs. Fountain, and the poodle barking, and—ringing from nowhere, and somewhere, and everywhere at once—the rich, unearthly vibrato of Edie’s screams.

He was hanging by the neck from a piece of rope, slung over a low branch of the black-tupelo that stood near the overgrown privet hedge between Charlotte’s house and Mrs. Fountain’s; and he was dead. The toes of his limp tennis shoes dangled six inches above the grass. The cat, Weenie, was sprawled barrel-legged on his stomach atop a branch, batting, with a deft, feinting paw, at Robin’s copper-red hair, which ruffled and glinted in the breeze and which was the only thing about him that was the right color any more.

Come home , sang the radio choir, melodiously:

Come home …

Ye who are weary come home

Black smoke pouring out the kitchen window. The chicken croquettes had gone up on the stove. They had been a family favorite but after that day no one was ever able to touch them again.

CHAPTER 1.

The Dead Cat.

Twelve years after Robin’s death, no one knew any more about how he had ended up hanged from a tree in his own yard than they had on the day it happened.

People in the town still discussed the death. Usually they referred to it as “the accident,” though the facts (as discussed at bridge luncheons, at the barber’s, in bait shacks and doctors’ waiting rooms and in the main dining room of the Country Club) tended to suggest otherwise. Certainly it was difficult to imagine a nine-year-old managing to hang himself through mischance or bad luck. Everyone knew the details, which were the source of much speculation and debate. Robin had been hanged by a type of fiber cable—not common—which electricians sometimes used, and nobody had any idea where it came from or how Robin got hold of it. It was thick, obstinate stuff, and the investigator from Memphis had told the town sheriff (now retired) that in his opinion a little boy like Robin couldn’t have tied the knots by himself. The cable was fastened to the tree in a slipshod, amateurish fashion, but whether this implied inexperience or haste on the killer’s part, no one knew. And the marks on the body (so said Robin’s pediatrician, who had spoken to the medical examiner from the state, who in turn had examined the county coroner’s report) suggested that Robin had died not of a broken neck, but strangulation. Some people believed he’d strangled where he hung; others argued that he’d been strangled on the ground, and strung up in the tree as an afterthought.