The Little Friend

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.

Allison laughed aloud. “Look!” she said, rising up on her knees—for the bird had suddenly perked up, cocking its glossy fine head intelligently to the side. “He hears you!”

“Do it again!” said Harriet. Ida wouldn’t do bird-calls for them just any old time; you had to catch her in the right mood.

“Yes, Ida, please!”

But Ida only laughed and shook her head. “Yall remember, don’t you,” she said, “the old story how he got his red wing?”

“No,” said Harriet and Allison, at once, though they did. Now that they were older, Ida told stories less and less, and that was too bad because Ida’s stories were wild and strange and often very frightening: stories about drowned children, and ghosts in the woods, and the buzzard’s hunting party; about gold-toothed raccoons that bit babies in their cradles, and bewitched saucers of milk that turned to blood in the night.…

“Well, once upon a time, in the long-ago,” said Ida, “there was a ugly little hunchback man so mad at everything he decide to burn up the whole world. So he taken a torch in his hand, just as mad as he could be, and walked down to the big river where all the animals lived. Because back in the old days, there wasn’t a whole lot of little second-class rivers and creeks like you have now. There was only the one.”

Over on Mrs. Fountain’s chimney, the bird battered his wings—quick, businesslike—and flew away.

“Oh, look. There he goes. Aint want to hear my story.” With a heavy sigh, Ida glanced at the clock, and—to Harriet’s dismay—stretched and stood up. “And it’s time for me to be getting home.”

“Tell us anyway!”