Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

Diplomatically, Loyal interrupted: “What kindly trial are you on, ma'am?”

Gum sopped her bread in the syrup. “Nigger stole a tractor.”

Farish said: “They’re going to make you go all the way down there? Just for that?”

“Well, in my time,” Gum said peacefully, “we didn’t have all this nonsense about a big trial.”

When there was no answer to her knock, Harriet nudged Tat’s bedroom door open. In the dimness, she saw her old aunt dozing on the white summer bedspread with her glasses off and her mouth open.

“Tat?” she said, uncertainly. The room smelled of medicine, Grandee water, vetivert and Mentholatum and dust. A fan purred in sleepy half-circles, stirring the filmy curtains to the left and then the right.

Tat slept on. The room was cool and still. Silver-framed photographs on the bureau: Judge Cleve and Harriet’s great-grandmother—cameo at her throat—before the turn of the century; Harriet’s mother as a 1950s debutante, with elbow gloves and a fussy hairdo; a hand-tinted eight-by-ten of Tat’s husband, Mr. Pink, as a young man and a glossy newspaper shot—much later—of Mr. Pink accepting an award from the Chamber of Commerce. On the heavy dressing table stood Tat’s things: Pond’s cold cream, a jelly jar of hairpins, pincushion and Bakelite comb and brush set and a single lipstick—a plain, modest little family, neatly arranged as if for a group picture.

Harriet felt as if she might cry. She flung herself on the bed. Tat woke with a jolt. “ Gracious . Harriet?” Blindly, she struggled up and fumbled for her glasses. “What’s wrong? Where’s your little company?”

“He went home. Tatty, do you love me?”

“What’s the matter? What time is it, honey?” she said, squinting uselessly at the bedside clock. “You’re not crying, are you?” She leaned over to feel Harriet’s forehead with her palm, but it was damp and cool. “What on earth’s the matter?”

“Can I spend the night?”

Tat’s heart sank. “Oh, darling. Poor Tatty’s half dead with allergies…. Please tell me what’s wrong, honey? Are you feeling bad?”

“I won’t be any trouble.”

“Darling. Oh, darling. You are never any trouble for me and Allison isn’t either, but—”

“Why don’t you or Libby or Adelaide ever want me to stay over?”

Tat was flummoxed. “Now Harriet,” she said. She reached over and switched on her reading lamp. “You know that’s not true.”

“You never ask me!”

“Well, look, Harriet. I’ll get the calendar. Let’s pick a date next week, and by then I’ll be feeling better and …”

She trailed away. The child was crying.

“Look here,” she said, in a sprightly voice. Though Tat tried to act interested when her friends rhapsodized about their grandchildren, she wasn’t sorry that she didn’t have any of her own. Children bored and irritated her—a fact she struggled valiantly to conceal from her little nieces. “Let me run get a washcloth. You’ll feel better if…. No, you come with me. Harriet, stand up.”

She took Harriet’s grubby hand and led her down the dark hall to the bathroom. She turned on both faucets in the sink and handed her a bar of pink toilet soap. “Here, sweetheart. Wash your face and hands … hands first. Now then, splash a little of that cool water on your face, that’ll make you feel better….”

She moistened a washcloth and, busily, dabbed Harriet’s cheeks with it, then handed it to her. “There, darling. Now, will you take this nice cool rag and wash around your neck and under your arms for me?”

Harriet did—mechanically, a single pass over her throat and then reaching the cloth up under her shirt for a couple of feeble swipes.

“Now. I know you can do better than that. Doesn’t Ida make you wash?”

“Yes, ma'am,” said Harriet, rather hopelessly.

“How come you’re so dirty, then? Does she make you get in the bathtub every day?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Does she make you stick your head under the faucet and check to see if the soap is wet after you get out? It doesn’t do a bit of good, Harriet, if you climb into a tub of hot water and just sit there. Ida Rhew knows good and well that she needs to—”

“It’s not Ida’s fault! Why does everybody blame everything on Ida?”

“Nobody’s blaming her. I know you love Ida, sweetheart, but I think your grandmother may need to have a little talk with her. Ida hasn’t done anything wrong, it’s just that colored people have different ideas—oh, Harriet. Please,” said Tatty, wringing her hands. “No. Please don’t start with that again.”

Eugene, rather anxiously, followed Loyal outside after dinner. Loyal looked at peace with the world, ready for a leisurely after-dinner stroll, but Eugene (who had changed into his uncomfortable black preaching suit after dinner) was clammy all over with anxiety. He glanced at himself in the side mirror of Loyal’s truck and ran a quick comb through his greasy gray ducktail. The previous night’s revival (off on a farm somewhere, on the opposite side of the county) had not been a success. The curiosity seekers who’d shown up at the brushwood arbor had snickered, and thrown bottle tops and bits of gravel, and ignored the collection plate, and got up and jostled away before the service was over—and who could blame them? Young Reese—with his eyes like blue gas flames, and his hair blown backwards as if he’d just seen an angel—might have more faith in his little finger than the lot of these sniggerers combined, but not one snake had come out of the box, not one; and though Eugene was embarrassed by this, neither was he eager to bring them out with his own hands. Loyal had assured him of a warmer reception tonight, at Boiling Spring—but what did Eugene care about Boiling Spring? Sure, there was a regular congregation of the faithful over there, and it belonged to somebody else. Day after tomorrow, they were going to try drumming up a crowd on the square—yet how in the world could they when their biggest crowd draw—the snakes—was prohibited by law?

Loyal seemed not at all bothered by any of this. “I’m here to do God’s work,” he’d said. “And God’s work is to battle Death.” The previous night, he’d been untroubled by the jeers of the crowd; but though Eugene feared the snakes, and knew himself incapable of taking them up in his own hands, neither was he looking forward to another such night of public humiliation.

They were standing out on the lighted concrete slab they all called “the carport,” with a gas grill at one end and a basketball goal at the other. Eugene glanced nervously at Loyal’s truck—at the tarp which draped the caged snakes piled in back, at the bumper sticker which read, in slanted, fanatical letters: THIS WORLD IS NOT MY HOME ! Curtis was safely inside, watching television (if he saw them leaving, he would cry to come along), and Eugene was about to suggest that they just get in the truck and go when the screen door creaked open and out shuffled Gum, in their direction.

“Hello there, ma'am!” called Loyal cordially.

Eugene turned partially away. These days he was having to fight a constant hatred of his grandmother, and he had to keep reminding himself that Gum was only an old lady—sick, too, sick for years. He remembered the day long ago when he and Farish were little, his father stumbling home drunk in the middle of the afternoon and yanking them out of the trailer into the yard, as if for a whipping. His face was bright red, and he spoke through clenched teeth. But he wasn’t angry: he was crying. O Lord, I been sick this morning every since I heard. Lord God have mercy. Poor Gum won’t be with us more than a month or two. The doctors say she’s eat to the bone with cancer .