The Little Friend

“Look here,” Edie snapped. “I’ve had just about enough. You’re too old to be acting this way. I want you to stop wallowing on the floor this instant and get up and eat your breakfast. Come on, now. It’s getting cold.”

This rebuke was greeted only by a howl of anguish.

“Oh, for Heaven’s sake,” said Edie, turning back to her breakfast. “Do as you please. I wonder what your teachers at school would say if they could see you rolling on the floor like a big baby.”

“Listen to this,” Harriet said suddenly. She began to read from her book in a pedantic voice:

“ ‘Titus Oates is very near the end, one feels. What he or we will do, God only knows. We discussed the matter after breakfast; he is a brave fine fellow and understands the situation, but—’ ”

“Harriet, we are none of us very interested right now in Captain Scott,” said Edie. She felt very nearly at the end of her own rope.

“All I’m saying is that Scott and his men were brave. They kept their spirits up. Even when they were caught in the storm and they knew they were all going to die.” She continued, her voice rising: “ ‘We are very near the end, but have not and will not lose our good cheer—’ ”

“Well, death is certainly a part of life,” said Edie resignedly.

“Scott’s men loved their dogs and their ponies, but it got so bad they had to shoot every single one of them. Listen to this, Allison. They had to eat them.” She flipped back a few pages and bent her head to the book again. “ ‘Poor beasts! They have done wonderfully well considering the terrible circumstances under which they worked, but yet it is hard to have to kill them so—’ ”

“Make her stop!” Allison wailed from the floor, hands clamped over her ears.

“Shut up, Harriet,” said Edie.

“But—”

“No buts. Allison,” she said sharply, “get off the floor. Crying isn’t going to help the cat.”

“I’m the only one here who loves Weenie. Nobody else ca-ha-hares.”

“Allison. Allison

. One day,” said Edie, reaching for the butter knife, “your brother brought me a toad he found that had its leg cut off by the lawn mower.”

The screams from the kitchen floor which greeted this were such that Edie thought her head would split in two, but she kept on buttering her toast—which was by now stone cold—and plowed ahead: “Robin wanted me to make it better. But I couldn’t. There was nothing I could do for the poor thing but kill it. Robin didn’t understand that when creatures are suffering like that, sometimes the kindest thing to do is to put them out of their misery. He cried and cried. There was no way I could make him understand that the toad was better off dead than in such terrible pain. Of course he was much younger than you are now.”

This little soliloquy had no effect on its intended subject, but when Edie glanced up, she became aware, with some annoyance, that Harriet was staring at her with parted lips.

“How did you kill it, Edie?”

“As mercifully as I could,” said Edie crisply. She had chopped its head off with a hoe—and, moreover, had been careless enough to do it in front of Robin, for which she was sorry—but she had no intention of going into this.

“Did you step on it?”

“Nobody listens to me,” Allison burst out suddenly. “Mrs. Fountain poisoned Weenie. I know she did. She said she wanted to kill him. He used to walk over in her yard and get footprints on the windshield of her car.”

Edie sighed. They had been through this before. “I don’t like Grace Fountain any more than you do,” she said, “she’s a spiteful old bird, and she’s got her nose into everything, but you can’t convince me she poisoned that cat.”

“I know she did. I hate her.”

“It does you no good to think like this.”

“She’s right, Allison,” said Harriet abruptly. “I don’t think Mrs. Fountain poisoned Weenie.”

“What do you mean?” said Edie, turning to Harriet, suspicious of this unexpected concord of opinion.

“I mean that if she did, I think I would know about it.”

“And how would you know something like that?”

“Don’t worry, Allison. I don’t think she poisoned him. But if she did,” said Harriet, going back to her book, “she’ll be sorry.”

Edie, who had no intention of letting this statement drop, was about to pursue it when Allison burst out again, louder than ever.

“I don’t care who did it,” she sobbed, the heels of her hands dug hard in her eyes. “Why does Weenie have to die? Why did all those poor people freeze to death? Why is everything always so horrible all the time?”

Edie said: “Because that’s how the world is.”

“The world makes me sick, then.”

“Allison, stop.”

“I won’t. I’ll never stop thinking it.”

“Well, that’s a very sophomoric attitude,” said Edie. “Hating the world. The world doesn’t care.”

“I’ll hate it for the rest of my life. I’ll never stop hating it.”