The Little Friend

Hely! He lived in a busy, companionable, colorful world, where everything was modern and bright: corn chips and Ping-Pong, stereos and sodas, his mother in T-shirt and cut off jeans running around barefoot on the wall-to-wall carpet. Even the smell over there was new and lemon-fresh—not like her own dim home, heavy and malodorous with memory, its aroma a sorrowful backwash of old clothes and dust. What did Hely—eating his tacos for supper, sailing off blithely to Miss Erlichson’s home room in the fall—what did Hely care about chill and loneliness? What did he know of her world?

Later, when Harriet remembered that day, it would seem the exact, crystalline, scientific point where her life had swerved into misery. Never had she been happy or content, exactly, but she was quite unprepared for the strange darks that lay ahead of her. For the rest of her life, Harriet would remember with a wince that she hadn’t been brave enough to stay for one last afternoon—the very last one!—to sit at the foot of Ida’s chair with her head on Ida’s knees. What might they have talked of? She would never know. It would pain her that she’d run off, cravenly, before Ida’s last work-week was over; it would pain her that somehow, strangely, the whole misunderstanding had been her fault; it would pain her, terribly, that she hadn’t told Ida goodbye. But, most of all, it would pain her that she’d been too proud to tell Ida that she loved her. In her anger, and her pride, she had failed to realize that she would never see Ida again. A whole new ugly kind of life was settling about Harriet, there in the dark hallway at the telephone-table; and though it felt new to her then, it would come to seem horribly familiar in the weeks ahead.

CHAPTER

6

 ——

The Funeral

“Hospitality was the key-note of life in those days,” said Edie. Her voice—clear, declamatory—rose effortlessly over the hot wind roaring through the car windows; grandly, without bothering to signal, she swept into the left lane and cut in front of a log truck.

The Oldsmobile was a lush, curvaceous manatee of a car. Edie had purchased it from Colonel Chipper Dee’s car lot in Vicksburg, back in the 1950s. A vast tract of empty seat stretched between Edie, on the driver’s side, and Harriet slouched against the opposite door. Between them—next to Edie’s straw purse with the wooden handles—was a plaid thermos of coffee and a box of doughnuts.

“Out at Tribulation, Mother’s cousins would show up out of the clear blue to stay weeks at a time, and nobody thought a thing in the world about it,” Edie was saying. The speed limit was fifty-five but she was proceeding at her usual, leisurely motoring pace: forty miles an hour.

In the mirror, Harriet could see the driver of the log truck slapping his forehead and making impatient gestures with his open palm.

“Now, I’m not talking about the Memphis cousins,” said Edie. “I’m talking about the cousins from Baton Rouge. Miss Ollie, and Jules, and Mary Willard. And little Aunt Fluff!”

Harriet stared bleakly out the window: sawmills and pine barrens, preposterously rosy in the early morning light. Warm, dusty wind blew her hair in her face, whipped monotonously in a loose flap of upholstery on the ceiling, rattled in the cellophane panel of the doughnut box. She was thirsty—hungry, too—but there was nothing to drink but the coffee, and the doughnuts were crumbly and stale. Edie always bought day-old doughnuts, even though they were only a few cents cheaper than fresh.

“Mother’s uncle had a small plantation down there around Covington—Angevine it was called,” said Edie, plucking up a napkin with her free hand; in what could only be called a kingly manner, like a king accustomed to eating with his hands, she took a big bite of her doughnut. “Libby used to take the three of us down there on the old Number 4 train. Weeks at a time! Miss Ollie had a little dog-trot house out back, with a wood stove, and table and chairs, and we loved to play out in that little dog-trot house better than anything!”