The Little Friend

What was all this business about the grave—what was she talking about? He told her everything. He had been more than geared up for a session of dire whispers in the toolshed, threats and plots and suspense—and even having Harriet attack him would have been better than nothing.

At last, with an exaggerated sigh and stretch, he stood up. “All right,” he said importantly. “Here’s the plan. We practice with the slingshot until supper. Out back in the training area.” The “training area” was what Hely liked to call the secluded area of his backyard which lay between the vegetable garden and the shed where his father kept the lawn mower. “Then, in a day or two, we switch to bows and arrows—”

“I don’t feel like playing.”

“Well, I don’t either,” said Hely, stung. It was

only a baby bow-and-arrow set, with blue suction cups at the tip, and though he was humiliated by them they were better than nothing.

But none of his plans interested Harriet. After thinking hard for a moment or two, he suggested—with a calculated “Hey!” to suggest dawning excitement—that they run to his house at once and make what he called “an inventory of weapons” (even though he knew the only weapons he had were the BB gun, a rusted pocketknife, and a boomerang that neither of them knew how to throw). When this too met with a shrug, he suggested (wildly, in desperation, for her indifference was unbearable) that they go find one of his mother’s Good Housekeeping magazines and sign up Danny Ratliff for the Book-of-the-Month Club.

Harriet turned her head at this, but the look she gave him was far from heartening.

“I’m telling you.” He was slightly embarrassed, but enough convinced of the efficacy of the book-club tactic to continue. “It’s the worst thing in the world you can do to somebody. A kid from school did it to Dad. If we sign enough of those rednecks up, enough times … Hey, look,” he said, unnerved by Harriet’s unwavering gaze. “I

don’t care.” The horrific boredom of sitting around at home by himself all day was still fresh in his mind, and he would gladly have taken off his clothes and lain down naked in the street if she had asked him.

“Look, I’m tired,” she said irritably. “I’m going to go over to Libby’s for a while.”

“Okay then,” said Hely after a stoic, bewildered pause. “I’ll ride you over there.”

Silently, they walked their bikes along the dirt road towards the street. Hely accepted the primacy of Libby in Harriet’s life without quite understanding it. She was different from Edie and the other aunts—kinder, more motherly. Back in kindergarten, Harriet had told Hely and the other kids that Libby was her mother; and oddly, no one—even Hely—had questioned this. Libby was old, and lived in a different house from Harriet, yet Libby was the one who had led Harriet in by the hand on the first day; who brought cupcakes for Harriet’s birthday and who helped with the costumes for Cinderella

(in which Hely had portrayed a helpful mouse; Harriet was the smallest—and the meanest—of the wicked stepsisters). Though Edie also made appearances at school when Harriet got in trouble for fighting, or talking back, it never occurred to anybody that she was Harriet’s parent: she was far too stern, like one of the mean algebra teachers up at the high school.

Unfortunately, Libby wasn’t around. “Miss Cleve at the cemetery,” said a sleepy-eyed Odean (who had taken quite a while to answer the back door). “She pulling weeds from off the graves.”

“You want to go over there?” Hely asked Harriet when they were back on the sidewalk. “I don’t mind.” The bicycle ride to the Confederate Cemetery was a hot, hard, demanding one, which crossed the highway and wound through questionable neighborhoods with hot-tamale shacks, little Greek and Italian and black kids playing kick-ball together on the street, a seedy, vivacious grocery where an old man with a gold tooth in front sold hard Italian cookies and colored Italian sherbets and loose cigarettes at the counter for a nickel apiece.

“Yes, but Edie’s at the cemetery too. She’s the president of the Garden Club.”

Hely accepted this excuse without question. He stayed out of Edie’s way whenever he could and Harriet’s desire to avoid her did not strike him as odd in the slightest. “We can go to my house then,” he said, tossing the hair out of his eyes. “Come on.”

“Maybe my aunt Tatty’s at home.”

“Why don’t we just play on your porch or mine?” said Hely, tossing a peanut shell from his pocket rather bitterly at the windshield of a parked car. Libby was all right, but the other two aunts were nearly as bad as Edie.

————