The Little Friend

“We’re certainly in Jones County now!” said Edie gaily. Her backlit profile—dark against the sun—was sharp and girlish. Only the line of her throat, and her hands on the steering wheel—knotty, freckled—betrayed her age; in her crisp white shirt, plaid skirt, and two-toned correspondent oxfords she looked like some enthusiastic 1940s newspaper reporter out to chase down The Big Story. “Do you remember old Newt Knight the deserter from your Mississippi History, Harriet? The Robin Hood of the Piney Woods, so he called himself! He and his men were poor and sorry, and they didn’t want to fight a rich man’s war so they holed up down here in the backwoods and wouldn’t have a thing to do with the Confederacy. The Republic of Jones, that’s what they called themselves! The cavalry sent bloodhounds after them, and the old cracker women choked those dogs to death with red pepper! That’s the kind of gentlemen you’ve got down here in Jones County.”

“Edie,” said Harriet—watching her grandmother’s face as she spoke—“maybe you should get your eyes checked.”

“I can read just fine. Yes, maam. At one time,” said Edie, regally, “these backwoods were full of Confederate renegades. They were too poor to have any slaves themselves, and they resented those rich enough to have them. So they seceded from the Secession! Hoeing their sorry little corn patches out here in the pine woods! Of course, they didn’t understand that the war was really about States’ Rights.”

To the left, the woods opened onto a field. At the very sight of it—the small sad bleachers, the soccer nets, the ragged grass—Harriet’s heart plunged. Some tough-looking older girls were punching a tetherball, their slaps and oofs ringing out hard and audible in the morning stillness. Over the scoreboard, a hand-lettered sign read:

de Selby Frosh!

there are no Limits!

Harriet’s throat constricted. Suddenly she realized she’d made a terrible mistake.

“Now, Nathan Bedford Forrest was not from the wealthiest or most cultivated family in the world, but he was the greatest general of the war!” Edie was saying. “Yes, maam! ‘Fustest with the Mostest’! That was Forrest!”

“Edie,” said Harriet in a small fast voice, “I don’t want to stay here. Let’s go home.”

“Home?” Edie sounded amused—not even surprised. “Nonsense! You’re going to have the time of your life.”

“No, please. I hate it here.”

“Then why’d you want to come?”

Harriet had no answer for this. Rounding the old familiar corner, at the bottom of the hill, a gallery of forgotten horrors opened before her. The patchy grass, the dust-dulled pines, the particular yellowy-red color of the gravel which was like uncooked chicken livers—how could she have forgotten how much she loathed this place, how miserable she’d been every single minute? Up ahead, on the left, the pass gate; beyond, the head counselor’s cabin, sunk in threatening shade. Above the door was a homemade cloth banner with a dove on it that read, in fat, hippie letters: REJOICE!

“Edie please,” said Harriet, quickly, “I changed my mind. Let’s go.”

Edie, gripping the steering wheel, swung around and glared at her—light-colored eyes, predatory and cold, eyes that Chester called “sure-shot” because they seemed made to look down the barrel of a gun. Harriet’s eyes (“Little sure-shot,” Chester sometimes called her) were just as light, and chilling; but, for Edie, it was not pleasant to meet her own stare so fixedly and in miniature. She was unaware of any sorrow or anxiety in her grandchild’s rigid expression; which struck her only as insolence, and aggressive insolence at that.

“Don’t be silly,” she said, callously, and glanced back at the road—just in time to keep from running off into a ditch. “You’ll love it here. In a week you’ll be screaming and carrying on because you don’t want to come home.”

Harriet stared at her in amazement.

“Edie,” she said, “you wouldn’t like it here yourself. You wouldn’t stay with these people for a million dollars.”

“ ‘Oh, Edie!’ ” Meanly, in falsetto, Edie mimicked Harriet’s voice. “ ‘Take me back! Take me back to camp!’ That’s what you’ll be saying when it’s time to go.”

Harriet was so stung that she couldn’t speak. “I won’t,” she managed to say at last. “I won’t.”

“Yes you will!” sang Edie, chin high, in the smug, merry voice that Harriet detested; and “Yes you will!”—even louder, without looking at her.

Suddenly a clarinet honked, a shuddering note which was partly barnyard bray and partly country howdy: Dr. Vance, with clarinet, heralding their arrival. Dr. Vance was not a real doctor—a medical doctor—only a sort of a glorified Christian band director; he was a Yankee, with thick bushy eyebrows, and big teeth like a mule. He was a big wheel on the Baptist youth circuit, and it was Adelaide who had pointed out—correctly—that he was a dead ringer for the famous Tenniel drawing of the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland.