The Little Friend

“Scott and his men were very brave, Allison,” said Harriet. “Even when they were dying. Listen. ‘We are in a desperate state, feet frozen, etcetera. No fuel and a long way from food, but it would do your heart good to be in our tent, to hear our songs and cheery conversation—’ ”

Edie stood up. “That’s it,” she said. “I’m taking the cat to Dr. Clark’s. You girls stay here.” Stolidly, she began to gather up the plates, ignoring the renewed shrieks from the floor near her feet.

“No, Edie,” said Harriet, scraping back her chair. She hopped up and ran over to the cardboard box. “Poor Weenie,” she said, stroking the shivering cat. “Poor kitty. Please don’t take him now, Edie.”

The old cat’s eyes were half-shut with pain. Feebly, it thumped its tail on the side of the box.

Allison, half-choked with sobs, put her arms around it and drew its face close to her cheek. “No, Weenie,” she hiccupped. “No, no, no.”

Edie came over and, with surprising gentleness, took the cat from her. As she lifted it, gingerly, it gave a delicate and almost human cry. Its grizzled muzzle, drawn in a yellow-toothed rictus, looked like an old man’s, patient and worn with suffering.

Edie scratched it, tenderly, behind the ears. “Hand me that towel, Harriet,” she said.

Allison was trying to say something, but she was crying so hard that she couldn’t.

“Don’t, Edie,” pleaded Harriet. She, too, had begun to cry. “Please. I haven’t had a chance to say goodbye.”

Edie stooped down and got the towel herself, then straightened up again. “Say goodbye, then,” she said impatiently. “The cat’s going outside now, and he may be some time.”

————

An hour later, her eyes still red, Harriet was on Edie’s back porch scissoring a picture of a baboon from the B volume of the Compton’s Encyclopedia. After Edie’s old blue Oldsmobile had pulled out of the driveway, she too had lain on the kitchen floor by the empty box and cried as stormily as her sister. After her tears subsided, she had got up and gone in her grandmother’s bedroom and, picking a straight pin from the tomato-shaped pincushion on the bureau, had amused herself for a few minutes by scratching I HATE EDIE in tiny letters on the footboard of Edie’s bed. But this proved strangely unsatisfying and while she was huddled sniffling on the carpet by the footboard, she was struck by a more cheering idea. After she cut the baboon’s face from the encyclopedia she intended to paste it over Edie’s face in a portrait in the family album. She had attempted to interest Allison in the project but Allison, face down by the cat’s empty box, refused even to look.

The gate to Edie’s back yard screeched open and Hely Hull darted in without closing it behind him. He was eleven, a year younger than Harriet, and wore his sandy hair down to his shoulders in imitation of his older brother, Pemberton. “Harriet,” he called, thumping up the porch steps, “hey, Harriet,” but he stopped short when he heard the monotonous sobs from the kitchen. When Harriet glanced up, he saw she’d been crying, too.

“Oh, no,” he said, stricken. “They’re making you go to camp, aren’t they?”

Camp Lake de Selby was Hely’s—and Harriet’s—greatest terror. It was a Christian children’s camp they had both been forced to attend the summer before. Boys and girls (segregated on opposite sides of the lake) were compelled to spend four hours a day in Bible study and the rest of the time braiding lanyards and acting in sappy humiliating skits the counselors had written. Over on the boys’ side, they’d insisted on pronouncing Hely’s name the wrong way—not “Healy,” as was correct, but—humiliatingly—“Helly” to rhyme with “Nelly.” Worse: they’d forcibly cut his hair short at assembly, as entertainment for the other campers. And though Harriet on her end had rather enjoyed the Bible classes—mainly because they gave her a captive and easily shocked forum in which to air her unorthodox views of Scripture—she had been wholly as miserable there as Hely: up at five and lights out at eight, no time to herself and no books but the Bible, and lots of “good old-fashioned discipline” (paddling, public ridicule) to enforce these rules. At the end of the six weeks, she and Hely and the other First Baptist campers had sat staring listlessly out the windows of the church bus, silent in their green Camp Lake de Selby T-shirts, absolutely shattered.

“Tell your mother you’ll kill yourself,” said Hely breathlessly. A large group of his school friends had been packed off the day before, trudging with resigned slumps toward the bright green school bus as if it were headed not to summer camp but straight down into Hell. “I told them I’d kill myself if they made me go back. I said I’d lie down in the road and let a car run over me.”

“That’s not the problem.” Tersely, Harriet explained about the cat.

“So you’re not going to camp?”