Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

Harriet pinched him.

“Hmm? Snakes? If he handles snakes,” said Pemberton, “he’s a bigger nut than I thought.”

“Maybe they’re tame,” Hely said.

“Idiot. You can’t tame a snake .”

It had been a mistake telling Farish about the car. Eugene was sorry he’d ever said anything about it. Farish had called back half an hour later, just as Eugene had managed to doze off—and then again, ten minutes after that. “Have you seen any suspicious characters in uniform in the street outside your house? Like jogging suits, or janitor outfits?”

“No.”

“Anybody been tailing you?”

“Look here, Farsh, I’m trying to get some rest.”

“This is how you tell if you’ve got a tail on you. Run a red light or drive the wrong way down a one way street and see if the person follows. Or—Tell you what. Maybe I should just come on down there myself and take a look around.”

It was only with the greatest difficulty that Eugene was able to dissuade Farish from coming down to the Mission for what he called “an inspection.” He settled down for a nap in the beanbag chair. Finally—just as he’d managed to slip into a dazed and fitful sleep—he became aware that Loyal was standing over him.

“Loyle?” he said, floundering.

“I’ve got some bad news,” said Loyal.

“Well, what is it?”

“There was a key broke off in the lock. I couldn’t get in.”

Eugene sat quietly, trying to make some sense of this. He was still half asleep; in his dream, there’d been lost keys, car keys. He’d been stranded at an ugly bar with a loud jukebox somewhere out on a dirt road at night, with no way to get home.

Loyal said: “I’d been told I could leave them snakes over at a hunting cabin in Webster County. But there was a key broke off in the lock and I couldn’t get in.”

“Ah.” Eugene shook his head, to clear it, and looked around the room. “So that means …”

“The snakes are downstairs in my truck.”

There was a long silence.

“Loyle, I’ll tell you the truth, I’ve had a migraine headache.”

“I’ll bring em in. You don’t have to help. I can get em up here by myself.”

Eugene rubbed his temples.

“Listen, I’m in a tight spot. It’s cruel to leave em out there roasting in this heat.”

“Right,” said Eugene listlessly. But he wasn’t worried about the snakes’ welfare; he was worried about leaving them out in the open to be discovered—by Mr. Dial, by the mysterious snooper in the convertible, who knew. And suddenly it came to him that there had been a snake too in his dream, a dangerous snake crawling loose among people somewhere.

“Okay,” he said to Loyal with a sigh, “bring em in.”

“I promise they’ll be out of here by tomorrow morning. This hasn’t worked out very well for you, I know,” said Loyal. His intense blue gaze was frankly sympathetic. “Having me here.”

“It ain’t your fault.”

Loyal ran a hand through his hair. “I want you to know I’ve enjoyt your fellowship. If the Lord don’t call you to handle—well, He has His reasons. Sometimes He don’t call me to handle either.”

“I understand.” Eugene felt he should say something more, but he couldn’t marshal the right thoughts. And he was too ashamed to say what he felt: that his spirit was dry and empty, that he wasn’t naturally good, good in his mind and heart. That he was of a tainted blood, and a tainted lineage; that God looked down on him, and despised his gifts, as He had despised the gifts of Cain.

“Someday I’ll get called,” he said, with a brightness he did not feel. “The Lord’s just not ready for me yet.”

“There are other gifts of the Spirit,” said Loyal. “Prayer, preaching, prophecy, visions. Laying hands on the sick. Charity and works. Even amongst your own family—” he hesitated, discreetly. “There’s good to be done there.”

Wearily, Eugene looked up into the kind, candid eyes of his visitor.

“It ain’t about what you want,” said Loyal. “It’s about the perfect will of God.”

Harriet came in through the back door to find the kitchen floor wet, and the counter-tops wiped—but no Ida. The house was silent: no radio, no fan, no footsteps, only the monotone hum of the Frigidaire. Behind her, something scratched: Harriet jumped, and turned just in time to see a small gray lizard scrabbling up the screen of the open window behind her.

The smell of the pine cleaner that Ida used made her head ache in the heat. In the dining room, the massive china cabinet from Tribulation squatted amongst the hectic stacks of newspaper. Two oblong carving platters, leaning upright against the top shelf, gave it a wild-eyed expression; low and tense on its bowed legs, it slanted out from the wall on one side ever so slightly, like a musty old sabreur poised to leap out over the stacks of newspaper. Harriet ran an affectionate hand over it as she edged past; and the old cabinet seemed to pull its shoulders back and flatten itself, obligingly, against the wall to let her by.

She found Ida Rhew in the living room, sitting in her favorite chair, where she ate her lunch, or sewed buttons, or shelled peas while she watched the soap operas. The chair itself—plump, comforting, with worn tweed upholstery and lumpy stuffing—had come to resemble Ida in the way that a dog sometimes resembles its owner; and Harriet, when she couldn’t sleep at night, sometimes came downstairs and curled up in the chair with her cheek against the tweedy brown fabric, humming strange old sad songs to herself that nobody sang but Ida, songs from Harriet’s babyhood, songs as old and mysterious as time itself, about ghosts, and broken hearts, and loved ones dead and gone forever:

Don’t you miss your mother sometimes, sometimes?

Don’t you miss your mother sometimes, sometimes?

The flowers are blooming for evermore,

There the sun will never go down .

At the foot of the chair, Allison lay on her stomach with her ankles crossed. She and Ida were looking out the window opposite. The sun was low and orange, and the television aerials bristled on Mrs. Fountain’s roof through a sizzle of afternoon glare.

How she loved Ida! The force of it made her dizzy. With no thought whatever of her sister, Harriet skittered over and threw her arms passionately around Ida’s neck.

Ida started. “Gracious,” she said, “where’d you come from?”

Harriet closed her eyes and rested with her face in the moist warmth of Ida’s neck, which smelled like cloves, and tea, and woodsmoke, and something else bitter-sweet and feathery but quite definite that was to Harriet the very aroma of love.

Ida reached around and disengaged Harriet’s arm. “You trying to strangle me?” she said. “Look there. We’s just watching that bird over on the roof.”

Without turning around, Allison said: “He comes every day.”

Harriet shaded her eyes with her hand. On the top of Mrs. Fountain’s chimney, pocketed neatly between a pair of bricks, stood a red-winged blackbird: spruce, soldierly in its bearing, with steady sharp eyes and a fierce slash of scarlet cutting like a military epaulet across each wing.

“He’s a funny one,” said Ida. “Here’s how he sound.” She pursed her lips and, expertly, imitated the red-winged blackbird’s call: not the liquid piping of the wood thrush, which dipped down into the dry tcch tchh tchh of the cricket’s birr and up again in delirious, sobbing trills; not the clear, three-note whistle of the chickadee or even the blue jay’s rough cry, which was like a rusty gate creaking. This was an abrupt, whirring, unfamiliar cry, a scream of warning —congeree! —which choked itself off on a subdued, fluting note.