Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

That was two decades ago. Four brothers had been born since then—and grown up, and left home, or been disabled, or sent to prison; father and uncle and mother—as well as a stillborn baby sister—were all in the ground. Yet Gum thrived. Her death sentences from various doctors and health department officials had arrived, quite regularly, all throughout Eugene’s childhood and adolescence, and Gum continued to receive them every six months or so. She delivered the bad news herself now, apologetically, now that their father was dead. Her spleen was enlarged and about to rupture; her liver, or her pancreas, or her thyroid had given out; she was eaten up with this kind of cancer or that kind of cancer—so many different kinds that her bones were blackened to charcoal from it, like chicken bones charred in the woodstove. And indeed: Gum did look eaten up. Unable to kill her, the cancer had taken up residence within her, and made her its comfortable home—nesting in her ribcage, rooted firmly and pushing its tentacle tips up through the surface of her skin in a spatter of black moles—so (it seemed to Eugene) if someone was to cut Gum open at this point, there was apt to be no blood in her at all, only a mass of poisonous sponge.

“Ma'am, if you don’t mind my asting,” Eugene’s visitor said, politely, “hi come your boys come to call you Gum?”

“Ain't none of us know why, the name just stuck ,” chortled Farish, bursting from his taxidermy shed accompanied by a beam of electric light on the sawgrass. He charged up behind her and put his arms around her and tickled her like they were sweethearts. “Ont me to chunk you in the back of that truck with them snakes, Gum?”

“Quit,” said Gum listlessly. She felt it undignified to show how much she liked this sort of rough attention, but she did like it all the same; and though her expression was blank, her tiny black eyes were bright with pleasure.

Eugene’s visitor peered, suspiciously, inside the open door of the taxidermy/methamphetamine shack, which was windowless, bathed in the bald light of a ceiling bulb: beakers, copper pipe, an incredibly complex and jerry-rigged network of vacuum pumps and tubing and burners and old bathroom faucets. Gruesome reminders of the taxidermy work—like an embryo cougar preserved in formaldehyde, and a clear plastic fishing tackle box full of different kinds of glass eyes—gave the set-up a feel of Frankenstein’s laboratory.

“Come on, come on in,” said Farish, wheeling around. He let go of Gum and grabbed up Loyal by the back of his shirt and half-rushed, half threw him through the laboratory door.

Eugene followed, anxiously. His visitor—perhaps accustomed to similar rough behavior from brother Dolphus—did not seem nervous but Eugene had seen enough of Farish to know that Farish’s good humor was plenty to be nervous about.

“Farsh,” he said, stridently. “Farsh.”

Inside, the dark shelves were lined with glass jars of chemicals and rows of whiskey bottles with the labels scraped off, filled with some dark liquid that Farish used in his laboratory work. Danny, wearing a pair of rubber dishwashing gloves, was seated upon an up-ended plastic bucket picking at something or other with a small utensil. A glass filtering flask bubbled behind him; a stuffed chicken hawk, wings outspread, glowered from the shadowy rafters as if to sweep down and strike. On the shelves were also large-mouth bass, mounted on crude wooden displays; turkey feet, fox heads, house cats—from grown toms down to tiny kittens; woodpeckers, snake-birds, and an egret, half-stitched, and stinking.

“Tell you what, Loyal. I had somebody bring me in a bull moccasin this big around, wish I still had him to show to you because I do believe he was bigger than any you’ve got out in the truck there….”

Chewing his thumbnail, Eugene edged inside and looked over Loyal’s shoulder, perceiving as if for the first time through Loyal’s eyes the stuffed kittens, the droop-necked egret with eye sockets wrinkled like cowrie shells. “For his taxidermy,” he said, aloud, when he felt Loyal’s gaze lingering upon the rows of whiskey bottles.

“The Lord means for us to love His kingdom, and guard it, and shepherd it beneath us,” said Loyal, gazing up at the grim walls which, between stink and carcass and shadow, were like a cross-section of Hell itself. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t know whether that means it’s right for us to mount ‘em and stuff ‘em.”

In the corner, Eugene spotted a pile of Hustler magazines. The picture on the top one was sickening. He laid an arm on Loyal’s arm. “Come on, let’s go,” he said; for he didn’t know what Loyal might say or do if he saw the picture, and unpredictable behavior of any sort was unwise around Farish.

“Well,” said Farish, “I don’t know but what you’re right, Loyal.” To Eugene’s horror, Farish leaned over his aluminum work-table and—tossing his hair over his shoulder—sniffed up a white streak of something Eugene presumed to be dope through a rolled-up dollar bill. “Excuse me here. But am I wrong in supposing, Loyal, that you’d eat a nice fat T-bone steak as fast as my brother here?”

“What is that?” inquired Loyal.

“Headache powder.”

“Farish here is disabled,” Danny chimed in helpfully.

“My goodness,” Loyal said mildly to Gum—who, at her snail’s creep, had only now just managed to shuffle from truck bed to doorway. “Affliction is certainly a fierce teacher amongst your children.”

Farish tossed his hair back and straightened from the table with a loud sniff. No matter that he was the only person in the household who collected disability checks; he did not care for his own misfortune to be mentioned in the same breath with Eugene’s facial disfigurement and certainly not with Curtis’s more extensive problems.

“Ain't that the truth, Loyle,” said Gum, wagging her head mournfully. “The Good Lord has give me a terrible time with the cancer, and the arthuritis, and the sugar diabetes, and this here ….” She indicated a decayed-looking black-and-purple scab on her neck the size of a quarter. “That’s where poor old Gum had to have her veins scraped,” she said solicitously, craning her neck to one side so Loyal could have a better view. “That’s where they come right in with that cathetur, right in through there, you see….”

“What time tonight y'all fixing to revive these folks?” said Danny brightly, finger to nostril, after straightening up from his own dose of headache powder.

“We ought to leave,” said Eugene to Loyal. “Come on.”

“And then,” Gum was saying to Loyal, “then they insertioned this what-you-call balloon into my neck veins here, and they—”

“Gum, he’s got to go.”

Gum cackled, and caught the sleeve of Loyal’s long-sleeved white dress shirt with a black-speckled claw. She was delighted to have discovered such a considerate listener, and was reluctant to let him get away quite so easily.

Harriet walked home from Tatty’s. The wide sidewalks were shaded by pecan and magnolia trees, littered with crushed petals from the crape myrtles; faintly, across the warm air, floated the sad evening chimes from the First Baptist Church. The houses on Main Street were grander than the Georgians and carpenter-Gothic cottages of George Street—Greek Revival, Italianate, Second Empire Victorian, relics of a cotton economy gone bust. A few, but not many, were still owned by descendants of the families who had built them; a couple had even been bought by rich people from out of town. But there were also a growing number of eyesores, with tricycles in the yard and clotheslines strung between the Doric columns.