The Little Friend (64 page)

“Can I help you?”

“Harriet—I was—”

“I’m not Harriet. Harriet’s my grand-daughter,” said Edie, and crossed her arms and watched him with the sportive relish at his discomfort which had made Hely despise her.

Hely tried again. “I—I—”

“Go on, spit it out.”

“Is she here?”

“Yes she’s here. Now run along home.” She grabbed his shoulders and turned him, manually, towards the door.

The boy shrugged free. “Is she going back to camp?”

“This isn’t play-time,” snapped Edie. The boy’s mother—a flirtatious little sass since childhood—had not bothered to show up for Libby’s funeral, had not sent flowers or even called. “Run tell your mother not to let you bother folks when there’s been a death in the house. Now
scat!
” she cried, as he still stood gaping at her.

She stood watching at the door as he went down the steps and—taking his time about it—mooched around the corner and out of sight. Then she went to the kitchen, retrieved the whiskey bottle from the cabinet under the sink and freshened her toddy, and walked back to the living room to check on her guests. The crowd was thinning. Charlotte (who was very rumpled, and damp-looking, and pink in the face, as if from strenuous exertion) stood at her post by the punch bowl smiling, with a dazed expression, at pug-faced Mrs. Chaffin from the florist’s, who chattered to her companionably between sips of punch. “Here’s my advice,” she was saying—or shouting, for Mrs. Chaffin like many deaf people tended to raise her own voice instead of asking other people to raise theirs. “Fill the nest. It’s terrible to lose a child, but I see a lot of death in my business, and the best thing for it is to get busy and have a few more little ones.”

Edie noted a large run in the back of her daughter’s stocking. Being in charge of the punch bowl was not a very
demanding task—Harriet or Allison could have done it, and Edie would have assigned either of them the job had she not felt it inappropriate for Charlotte to stand around the reception staring tragically into space. “But I don’t know what to do,” she’d said, in a frightened little squeak, when Edie had marched her to the punch bowl and slapped the ladle in her hand.

“Fill their cups and give them more if they want it.”

In dismay—as if the ladle were a monkey wrench and the punch bowl a complicated piece of machinery—Charlotte glanced at her mother. Several ladies from the choir—smiling hesitantly—lingered politely by the cups and saucers.

Edie snatched the ladle from Charlotte, dipped it, filled a cup and set it on the tablecloth, then handed the ladle back to Charlotte. Down at the end of the table, little Mrs. Teagarten (all in green, like a small, spry tree frog with her wide mouth and large, liquid eyes) turned theatrically with her freckled hand to her breast. “Gracious!” she cried. “Is that for
me?
”

“Certainly!” called Edie in her brightest stage voice as the ladies—now beaming—began to migrate in their direction.

Charlotte touched her mother’s sleeve, urgently. “But what should I say to them?”

“
Isn’t
this refreshing?” said Mrs. Teagarten, loudly. “Do I taste ginger ale?”

“I don’t reckon you have to say anything,” Edie said quietly to Charlotte, and then, in full voice, to the assembled company: “Yes, it’s just a plain little non-alcoholic punch, nothing special, just what we have at Christmas. Mary Grace! Katherine! Won’t you have something to drink?”

“Oh, Edith …” In pressed the choir ladies. “Doesn’t this look lovely.… I don’t know how you find the time.…”

“Edith’s such a capable hostess, she just throws it all together at a moment’s notice.” This, from Cousin Lucinda, who had just strode up, hands in the pockets of her skirt.

“Oh, it’s easy for Edith,” Adelaide was heard to say in a thin voice, “she’s got a
freezer.
”

Edie, ignoring the slight, had made the necessary introductions and slipped away, leaving Charlotte to the punch bowl. All Charlotte needed was to be told what to do, and she
was fine, so long as there wasn’t independent thought or decision of any sort. Robin’s death had really been a double loss, for she’d lost Charlotte, too—her busy bright daughter, altered so tragically; ruined, really. Certainly one never got over such a blow, but it had been more than ten years. People pulled themselves together somehow, moved along. Ruefully, Edie thought back to Charlotte’s girlhood, when Charlotte had announced she wanted to be a fashion buyer for a large department store.

Mrs. Chaffin placed her punch cup in the saucer, which was balanced in the palm of her left hand. “You know,” she was saying to Charlotte, “poinsettias can be lovely at a Christmas funeral. The church can be so dark that time of year.”

Edie stood with her arms across her chest and watched them. As soon as she found the right moment, she meant to have a little word with Mrs. Chaffin herself. Though Dix was unable—on such short notice, so Charlotte had said—to drive down from Nashville for the funeral, the arrangement of mock-orange and Iceberg roses he’d sent (too decorative, too tasteful,
feminine
somehow) had caught Edie’s attention. Certainly it was more sophisticated than Mrs. Chaffin’s usual arrangements. Then, at the funeral home, she’d walked into a room where Mrs. Hatfield Keene was giving Mrs. Chaffin a hand with the flowers, only to hear Mrs. Keene say—stiffly, as if in reply to an inappropriate confidence: “Well, she might have been Dixon’s secretary.”

Adjusting a spray of gladiolus, Mrs. Chaffin sniffed, and cocked her head shrewdly to one side. “
Well
. I answered the telephone, and took the order myself,” she said—stepping back to observe her handiwork—“and she sure didn’t sound like a secretary to
me.
”

————

Hely did not go home, but merely turned the corner and circled around to the side gate of Edie’s yard, where he found Harriet sitting in Edie’s back yard glider swing. Without preamble he marched up and said: “Hey, when’d you get home?”

He had expected his presence to cheer her immediately,
and when it didn’t he was annoyed. “Did you get my letter?” he said.

“I got it,” said Harriet. She had eaten herself half-sick on candied almonds from the buffet, and their taste lingered disagreeably in her mouth. “You shouldn’t have sent it.”

Hely sat down in the swing beside her. “I was freaked out. I—”

With a curt nod, Harriet indicated Edie’s porch, twenty feet away, where four or five adults with punch cups stood behind the dim screen, chatting.

Hely took a deep breath. In a quieter voice, he said: “It’s been scary here. He drives
all over town
. Real slow. Like he’s looking for us. I’ve been in the car with my mother, and there he is, parked by the underpass like he’s staking it out.”

The two of them, though they were sitting side by side, were looking straight ahead, at the grown-ups on the porch, and not at each other. Harriet said: “You didn’t go back up there to get the wagon, did you?”

“No!” said Hely, shocked. “Do you think I’m nuts? For a while, he was there every day. Lately he’s been going down to the freight yards, by the railroad tracks.”

“Why?”

“How should I know? A couple of days ago I got bored and went down to the warehouse, to hit some tennis balls. Then I heard a car, and it’s lucky I hid, because it was
him
. I’ve never been so scared. He parked his car and he sat for a while. Then he got up and walked around. Maybe he followed me, I don’t know.”

Harriet rubbed her eyes and said: “I saw him driving that way a little while ago. Today.”

“Towards the train tracks?”

“Maybe. I wondered where he was going.”

“I’m just glad he didn’t see me,” said Hely. “When he got out of his car I nearly had a heart attack. I was hiding in the bushes for about an hour.”

“We should go over on a Special Op and see what he’s doing down there.”

She had thought the phrase
special op
would be irresistible
to Hely, and she was surprised by how firmly and swiftly he said: “
Not me
. I’m not going down there again. You don’t understand—”

His voice had risen sharply. A grown-up on the porch turned a bland face in their direction. Harriet nudged him in the ribs.

He looked at her, aggrieved. “But you
don’t
understand,” he said, in a quieter voice. “You had to see it. He would have killed me if he saw me, you could tell by the way he was looking around.” Hely imitated the expression: face distorted, eyes roving wildly over the ground.

“Looking for what?”

“I don’t know. I mean it, I’m not messing with him any more, Harriet, and you’d better not, either. If him or any of his brothers figure out it’s us that threw that snake, we’re dead. Didn’t you read that thing from the newspaper I sent you?”

“I didn’t get the chance.”

“Well, it was his grandma,” said Hely austerely. “She nearly died.”

Edie’s garden gate creaked open. Suddenly Harriet leaped up. “Odean!” she cried. But the little black lady—in straw hat, and belted cotton dress—cut her eyes at Harriet without turning her head and did not reply. Her lips were compressed, her face rigid. Slowly, she shuffled to the back porch and up the stairs, and rapped on the door.

“Miz Edith here?” she said, hand to brow, peering through the screen.

After a moment’s hesitation Harriet—stunned, cheeks burning from the snub—sat back down in the swing. Though Odean was old and grumpy, and Harriet’s relationship with her had never been very good, no one had been closer to Libby; the two of them were like an old married couple—not only in their disagreements (mostly about Libby’s cat, which Odean despised) but also in their stoic, companionable affection for one another—and Harriet’s heart had risen violently at the very sight of her.

She had not thought of Odean since the accident. Odean had been with Libby since they were both young women, out
at Tribulation. Where would she go now, what would she do? Odean was a rickety old lady, in poor health; and (as Edie often complained) not much use around the house any more.

Confusion on the screen porch. “There,” said somebody inside, moving to make room, and Tat stepped sideways to the front. “Odean!” she said. “You know me, don’t you? Edith’s sister?”

“Why aint nobody told me about Miss Libby?”

“Oh, dear … Oh my. Odean.” Glance backwards, at the porch: perplexed, ashamed. “I’m
so
sorry. Why don’t you come inside?”

“Mae Helen, who works for Ms. McLemore, done come and told me. Nobody come and got me. And yall already put her into the ground.”

“Oh, Odean! We didn’t think you had a telephone.…”

In the silence that followed, a chickadee whistled: four clear, bouncy, sociable notes.

“Yalls could have come and got me.” Odean’s voice cracked. Her coppery face was immobile. “At my house. I lives out at Pine Hill, you know it. Yalls could have gone to that trouble.…”

“Odean.… Oh, my,” said Tat, helplessly. She took a deep breath; she looked about. “Please, won’t you come in and sit down a minute?”

“Nome,” said Odean, stiffly. “I thank you.”

“Odean, I’m
so
sorry. We didn’t think …”

Odean dashed away a tear. “I work for Miss Lib fifty-five years and nobody aint even told me she’s in the hospital.”

Tat closed her eyes for an instant. “Odean.” There was a dreadful silence. “Oh, this is horrible. How can you forgive us?”

“This whole week I’m thinking yalls up in Sorth Carolina and I’s suppose to come back to work on Monday. And here she is, laying in the ground.”

“Please.”
Tat laid a hand on Odean’s arm. “Wait here while I run get Edith. Will you wait here, just a moment?”

She flustered inside. Conversation—not very clear—resumed on the porch. Odean, expressionless, turned and
stared into the middle distance. Someone—a man—said, in a stage whisper: “I believe she wants a little money.”

Blood rose hot to Harriet’s face. Odean—dull-faced, unblinking—stood where she was, without moving. Amongst all the large white people in their Sunday finery, she looked very small and drab: a lone wren in a flock of starlings. Hely had got up and was standing behind the swing observing the scene with frank interest.

Harriet didn’t know what to do. She felt as if she should go over and stand with Odean—it was what Libby would want her to do—but Odean didn’t seem very friendly or welcoming; in fact, there was something forbidding in her manner that frightened Harriet. Suddenly, quite without warning, there was movement on the porch and Allison burst through the door into Odean’s arms, so that the old lady—wild-eyed at the abrupt onslaught—had to catch the porch rail to keep from falling over backwards.

Allison sobbed, with an intensity frightening even to Harriet. Odean stared over Allison’s shoulder without returning or appearing to welcome the hug.

Edie came through, and out onto the steps. “Allison, get back in the house,” she said; and—grabbing Allison’s shoulder, turning her around: “Now!”

Allison—with a sharp cry—wrenched away and ran across the yard: past the glider swing, past Hely and Harriet, into Edie’s toolshed. There was a tinny crash, as of a rake toppling off the wall at the slammed door.

Hely said, flatly, as he swivelled his head to stare: “Man, your sister’s nuts.”

From the porch Edie’s voice—clear, carrying—resonated with an air of public address: formal though it was, emotion trembled behind it and also something of emergency. “Odean! Thank you for coming! Won’t you step inside for a minute?”

“Nome, I don’t want to bother nobody.”

“Don’t be ridiculous! We’re mighty glad to see you!”

Hely kicked Harriet in the foot. “Say,” he said, and nodded at the toolshed. “What’s the matter with her?”

“Bless your heart!” Edie scolded Odean—who still stood
motionless. “Enough of this! You come inside right this minute!”

Harriet could not speak. From the decrepit toolshed: a single weird, dry sob, as if of a choked creature. Harriet’s face constricted: not with disgust, or even embarrassment, but with some foreign, frightening emotion which made Hely step away from her as if she had an infectious disease.