The Little Friend

Eugene, rather anxiously, followed Loyal outside after dinner. Loyal looked at peace with the world, ready for a leisurely after-dinner stroll, but Eugene (who had changed into his uncomfortable black preaching suit after dinner) was clammy all over with anxiety. He glanced at himself in the side mirror of Loyal’s truck and ran a quick comb through his greasy gray ducktail. The previous night’s revival (off on a farm somewhere, on the opposite side of the county) had not been a success. The curiosity seekers who’d shown up at the brushwood arbor had snickered, and thrown bottle tops and bits of gravel, and ignored the collection plate, and got up and jostled away before the service was over—and who could blame them? Young Reese—with his eyes like blue gas flames, and his hair blown backwards as if he’d just seen an angel—might have more faith in his little finger than the lot of these sniggerers combined, but not one snake had come out of the box, not one; and though Eugene was embarrassed by this, neither was he eager to bring them out with his own hands. Loyal had assured him of a warmer reception tonight, at Boiling Spring—but what did Eugene care about Boiling Spring? Sure, there was a regular congregation of the faithful over there, and it belonged to somebody else. Day after tomorrow, they were going to try drumming up a crowd on the square—yet how in the world could they when their biggest crowd draw—the snakes—was prohibited by law?

Loyal seemed not at all bothered by any of this. “I’m here to do God’s work,” he’d said. “And God’s work is to battle Death.” The previous night, he’d been untroubled by the jeers of the crowd; but though Eugene feared the snakes, and knew himself incapable of taking them up in his own hands, neither was he looking forward to another such night of public humiliation.

They were standing out on the lighted concrete slab they all called “the carport,” with a gas grill at one end and a basketball goal at the other. Eugene glanced nervously at Loyal’s truck—at the tarp which draped the caged snakes piled in back, at the bumper sticker which read, in slanted, fanatical letters: THIS WORLD IS NOT MY HOME! Curtis was safely inside, watching television (if he saw them leaving, he would cry to come along), and Eugene was about to suggest that they just get in the truck and go when the screen door creaked open and out shuffled Gum, in their direction.

“Hello there, maam!” called Loyal cordially.

Eugene turned partially away. These days he was having to fight a constant hatred of his grandmother, and he had to keep reminding himself that Gum was only an old lady—sick, too, sick for years. He remembered the day long ago when he and Farish were little, his father stumbling home drunk in the middle of the afternoon and yanking them out of the trailer into the yard, as if for a whipping. His face was bright red, and he spoke through clenched teeth. But he wasn’t angry: he was crying. O Lord, I been sick this morning every since I heard. Lord God have mercy. Poor Gum won’t be with us more than a month or two. The doctors say she’s eat to the bone with cancer.

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.

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