The Little Friend (21 page)

Harriet, who was very uncomfortable, yawned to mask her confusion and distress. She and Hely attended Alexandria Academy, as did almost every white child in the county. Even Odums and Ratliffs and Scurlees practically starved themselves to death in order to keep their children out of the public schools. Certainly, families like Harriet’s (and Hely’s) would not tolerate for one moment brick-throwing at children white or black (“or purple,” as Edie was fond of piping up in any discussion about skin color). And yet there Harriet was, at the all-white school.

“Them mens call themselves preachers. Out there spitting and calling that poor baby every kind of Jigaboo and Jungle Bunny. But aint never any reason for a big one to harm a little one,” said Ida Rhew grimly. “The Bible teach it.
Whoso shall offend one of these little—
”

“Were they arrested?”

Ida Rhew snorted.

“
Were
they?”

“Sometime the police favor criminals more than the one against who they commit the crime.”

Harriet thought about this. Nothing, as far as she knew, had happened to the Ratliffs for shooting guns down at the creek. It seemed like these people could do pretty much what they wanted and get away with it.

“It’s against the law for anybody to throw bricks in public,” she said aloud.

“Don’t make a bit of difference. Police aint done a thing to the Ratliffs when they lit the Missionary Baptist Church on fire, did they, when you’s just a baby? After Dr. King come to town? Just drove right by, and chunked that whiskey bottle with a lit rag in it through the window there.”

Harriet, all her life, had heard about this church fire—and about others, in other Mississippi towns, all confused with each other in her mind—but she had never been told that the Ratliffs were responsible. You would think (said Edie) that Negroes and poor whites would not hate each other the way they did since they had a lot in common—mainly, being poor. But sorry white people like the Ratliffs had only Negroes to look down upon. They could not bear the idea that the Negroes were now just as good as they were, and, in many cases, far more prosperous and respectable. “A poor Negro has at least the excuse of his birth,” Edie said. “The poor white has nothing to blame for his station but his own character. Well, of course,
that
won’t do. That would mean having to assume some responsibility for his own laziness and sorry behavior. No, he’d much rather stomp around burning crosses and blaming the Negro for everything than go out and try to get an education or improve himself in any way.”

Ida Rhew, lost in thought, continued to polish the stove top though it no longer needed polishing. “Yesm, it sho is the truth,” she said. “Them trash killed Miss Etta Coffey sure as they’d stabbed her in the heart.” She compressed her lips for several moments as she polished, in small, tight circles, the chrome dials of the stove. “Old Miss Etta, she righteous, sometime she praying all the night. My mother, she see that light burning late there at Miss Etta’s, she make my daddy
get out of bed and walk himself right over there and tap at the window and ax Miss Etta has she fell, or do she need help to get up off the floor. She holler at him
no thank you
, her and Jesus still got business to talk!”

“One time, Edie told me—”

“Yes, sir. Miss Etta, she dwelling at His right hand side. And my mother and my daddy, and my poor brother Cuff that die with cancer. And little old Robin, too, right up amongst them. God keep a place for all His children. He surely do.”

“But Edie said that old lady didn’t die in the
fire
. Edie said she had a heart attack.”

“Edie say?”

You didn’t want to challenge Ida when she used that tone. Harriet looked at her fingernails.

“Didn’t die
in the fire
. Hah!” Ida wadded the wet cloth and slapped it down on the counter. “She die of the smoke, didn’t she? And of all the shoving and hollering and people fighting to get out? She
old
, Miss Coffey. She so tender-hearted, she not able to eat deer meat or take a fish off the hook. And here ride up these horrible old trash, chunking fire through the window—”

“Did the church burn
all the way
down?”

“It was burnt good enough.”

“Edie said—”

“Was Edie there?”

Her voice was terrible. Harriet dared not say a word. Ida glared at her for several long moments and then hiked the hem of her skirt and rolled down her stocking, which was thick and fleshy-tan, rolled above her knees, many shades paler than Ida’s rich, dark skin. Now, above the opaque roll of nylon, appeared a six-inch patch of seared flesh: pink like an uncooked wiener, shiny and repulsively smooth in some spots, puckered and pitted in others, shocking in both color and texture against the pleasing Brazil-nut brown of Ida’s knee.

“Reckon Edie aint think that’s a burn good enough?”

Harriet was speechless.

“Alls I know is, it felt good and hot to me.”

“Does it hurt?”

“It sho
did
hurt.”

“What about now?”

“No. Sometime it itch me, though. Come on, now,” she said to the stocking as she began to roll it back up. “Don’t give me no trouble. Sometimes these hoseries like to kill me.”

“Is that a third-degree burn?”

“Third, fourth,
and
fifth.” Ida laughed again, this time rather unpleasantly. “Alls I know, it hurt so bad I can’t sleep for six weeks. But maybe Edie think that fire aint hot enough unless both legs burnt right off. And I reckon the law think the same thing, because they never going to punish the ones that did it.”

“They have to.”

“Who say?”

“The law does. That’s why it’s the law.”

“It’s one law for the weak, and another for the strong.”

With more confidence than she felt, Harriet said: “No, there’s not. It’s the same law for everybody.”

“Then why them mens still walking free?”

“I think you ought to tell Edie about this,” said Harriet, after a confused pause. “If you don’t, I will.”

“Edie?”
Ida Rhew’s mouth twitched, strangely, with something close to amusement; she was about to speak but then changed her mind.

What?
Harriet thought, chilled to the heart.
Does Edie know?

Her shock and sickness at the notion was perfectly visible, like a window shade had snapped up from over her face. Ida’s expression softened—it’s true, thought Harriet, in disbelief,
she’s told Edie already, Edie knows
.

But Ida Rhew, quite suddenly, had busied herself with the stove again. “And how come you think I need to be bother Miss
Edie
with this mess, Harriet?” she said, with her back turned, and in a bantering and rather too hearty voice. “She an old lady. What you think
she
going to do? Stamp on they feet?” She chuckled; and though the chuckle was warm and unquestionably heartfelt, it did not reassure Harriet. “Beat them crost the head with that black pocketbook?”

“She should call the police.” Was it conceivable that Edie
had been told of this, and
not
called the police? “Whoever did that to you should be in jail.”

“Jail?” To Harriet’s surprise, Ida roared with laughter. “Bless your heart. They
likes
to be in jail. Air conditioning in the summertime and free peas and cornbread. And plenty time to idle round and visit with they sorry friends.”

“The Ratliffs did this? You’re sure?”

Ida rolled her eyes. “Bragging about it around the town.”

Harriet felt about to cry. How could they be walking free? “And threw the bricks too?”

“Yes, ma’am. Grown men. Young’uns too. And that one call himself a preacher—he not actually doing the
chunking
, he just hollering and shaking his Bible and stirring the others up.”

“There’s a Ratliff boy about Robin’s age,” said Harriet, watching Ida carefully. “Pemberton told me about him.”

Ida said nothing. She wrung out the dishrag, and then went to the drainer to put away the clean dishes.

“He would be about twenty now.” Old enough, thought Harriet, to be one of the men shooting off the creek bridge.

Ida, with a sigh, heaved the heavy cast-iron frying pan out of the drainer, and stooped to put it in the cabinet. The kitchen was by far the cleanest room in the house; Ida had carved out a little fortress of order here, free from the dusty newspapers piled throughout the rest of the house. Harriet’s mother did not allow the newspapers to be thrown away—this a rule so ancient and inviolable that even Harriet did not question it—but by some unspoken treaty between them, she kept them out of the kitchen, which was Ida’s realm.

“His name is Danny,” said Harriet. “Danny Ratliff. This person Robin’s age.”

Ida glanced over her shoulder. “What for you studying Ratliff so big all of a sudden?”

“Do you remember him? Danny Ratliff?”

“Lord, yes.” Ida grimaced as she stretched up on tiptoe to put away a cereal bowl. “I remember him just like yesterday.”

Harriet took care to keep her face composed. “He came to the house? When Robin was alive?”

“Yes sir.
Nasty
little loud-mouth. Couldn’t run him off for nothing. Hitting at the porch with baseball bats and creeping around here in the yard after dark, and one time he taken Robin’s bicycle. I tell your poor mama, I tell her and I tell her, but she aint done a thing.
Underprivilege
, she say. Underprivilege, my foot.”

She opened the drawer and—noisily, with lots of clatter—began to replace the clean spoons. “Nobody pay a bit of attention to what I say. I
tell
your mother, I
tell
her and
tell
her that little Ratliff is nasty. Trying to fight Robin. Always cussing and setting off firecrackers and chunking something or other. Someday somebody going to get hurt. I sees it plain enough even if nobody else do. Who watch Robin every day? Who always looking right here out the window at him—” she pointed, at the window above the sink, at the late-afternoon sky and all the full-leafed greenness of the summer yard—“while he playing right out there with his soldiers or his kitty cat?” Sadly, she shook her head, and shut the silverware drawer. “Your brother, he a good little fellow. Buzz around underfoot like a little old june bug, and he sure do sass me every now and then, but he always sorry for it. He never pout and go on like you do. Sometimes he run up and thow his arms around me, like so. ‘I’s lonesome, Ida!’ I told him not to play with that trash, I told him and
told
him, but he’s lonesome, and your mother say she don’t see nothing the matter with it, and sometime he do it anyway.”

“Danny Ratliff fought Robin? In the yard here?”

“Yes, sir. Cussed and stole, too.” Ida took off her apron, and hung it on a peg. “And I chase him out of the yard not ten minutes before your mama find poor little Robin hung off that tree limb out there.”

————

“I’m telling you, the police don’t
do
anything to people like him,” said Harriet; and she started in again about the church, and Ida’s leg, and the old lady who had burned to death, but Hely was tired of hearing about all this. What excited him was a dangerous criminal on the loose, and the notion of being a hero. Though he was grateful to have evaded church camp,
the summer so far had been just a little too quiet. Apprehending a killer promised to be more fun than acting in pageants, or running away from home, or any of the other activities he’d hoped to do with Harriet over the summer.

They were in the toolshed in Harriet’s back yard, where the two of them had retreated to have private conversations ever since kindergarten. The air was stifling, and smelled of gasoline and dust. Big black coils of rubber tubing hung from hooks on the wall; a spiky forest of tomato frames loomed behind the lawn mower, their skeletons exaggerated and made fantastical by cobweb and shadow, and the swordlike shafts of light which pierced the holes in the rusted tin ceiling crisscrossed in the dim, so furred with dust motes that they looked solid, as if yellow powder would rub off on your fingertips if you brushed your hands across them. The dimness, and heat, only increased the toolshed’s atmosphere of secrecy and excitement. Chester kept packs of Kool cigarettes hidden in the tool shed, and bottles of Kentucky Tavern whiskey, in hiding places which he varied from time to time. When Hely and Harriet were younger, they’d taken great pleasure in pouring water on the cigarettes (once Hely, in a fit of meanness, had peed on them) and in emptying the whiskey bottles and re-filling them with tea. Chester never told on them because he wasn’t supposed to have the whiskey or the cigarettes in the first place.

Harriet had already told Hely everything that she had to tell, but she was so agitated after her conversation with Ida that she kept fidgeting and pacing and repeating herself. “She knew it was Danny Ratliff. She
knew
. She said herself it was him and I hadn’t even told her what your brother said. Pem said he bragged about other stuff, too, bad things—”

“Why don’t we pour sugar in his gas tank? That’ll totally destroy the engine of a car.”

She gave him a disgusted look, which offended him slightly; he had thought this an excellent idea.

“Or let’s write a letter to the police and don’t sign our names.”

“What good will that do?”

“If we tell my daddy, I bet he’ll call them.”

Harriet snorted. She didn’t share Hely’s high opinion of his father, who was a principal at the high school.

“Let’s hear
your
big idea then,” Hely said sarcastically.

Harriet bit her lower lip. “I want to kill him,” she said.

The sternness and remove of her expression struck a thrill at Hely’s heart. “Can I help?” he said immediately.

“No.”

“You can’t kill him by yourself!”

“Why not?”

He was taken aback by her look. For a moment he couldn’t think of a good reason. “Because he’s big,” he said at last. “He’ll kick your ass.”

“Yes, but I bet I’m smarter than him.”

“Let me help. How are you going to do it, anyway?” he said, nudging her with the toe of his sneaker. “Have you got a gun?”