The Little Friend

So this was the secret, what Captain Scott and Lazarus and Robin all knew, what even the cat had come to know in its last hour: this was it, the passage to the stained-glass window. When Scott’s tent was found, eight months later, Bowers and Wilson lay with their sleeping bags closed over their heads and Scott was in an open bag with his arm thrown over Wilson. That was the Antarctic, and this a breezy green morning in May, but the form beneath her palm was as hard as ice. She ran a knuckle over Weenie’s white-stockinged forefoot. It seems a pity, Scott had written with his stiffening hand, as the white closed in softly from the white immensities, and the faint pencil letters grew fainter on the white paper, but I do not think I can write any more.

“Bet you won’t touch his eyeball,” said Hely, inching closer. “I dare you.”

Harriet scarcely heard him. This was what her mother and Edie had seen: outer dark, the terror you never came back from. Words that slid off paper into emptiness.

In the cool dim of the shed, Hely drew closer. “Are you scared?” he whispered. His hand stole to her shoulder.

“Cut it out,” said Harriet, shrugging away.

She heard the screen door slam shut, her mother calling after Allison; quickly, she tossed the towel back over the cat.

It would never wholly leave her, the vertigo of this moment; it would be with her for the rest of her life, and it would always be mingled inextricably with the dim tool-shed—shiny metal sawteeth, the smells of dust and gasoline—and three dead Englishmen beneath a cairn of snow with icicles glittering in their hair. Amnesia: ice floes, violent distances, the body turned to stone. The horror of all bodies.

“Come on,” said Hely, with a toss of his head. “Let’s get out of here.”

“I’m coming,” said Harriet. Her heart was pounding, and she felt breathless—not with the breathlessness of fear, but with something very close to rage.

————

Though Mrs. Fountain had not poisoned the cat, she was nonetheless pleased that it was dead. From the window over her sink—the observation point at which she stood for hours each day, watching the comings and goings of her neighbors—she had spied Chester digging the hole, and now, squinting through the kitchen curtain, she saw the three children gathered around it. One of them—the little girl, Harriet—held a bundle in her arms. The big girl was crying.

Mrs. Fountain pulled her pearly-framed reading glasses low on her nose, and shouldered a cardigan with jeweled buttons over her housedress—it was a warm day but she got chilled easily, she needed a wrap when she went out—and pegged along out her back door and over to the fence.

It was a fast, fresh, airy day. Low clouds raced across the sky. The grass—which needed cutting, it was a tragedy how Charlotte had let the place go—was sprinkled with violets, wild oxalis, dandelions gone to seed, and the wind rippled through it in erratic currents and eddies like wind on the sea. Wisteria tendrils undulated from the screen porch, delicate as seaweed. It hung so thick over the back of the house that you could hardly see the porch anymore; it was pretty enough when the flowers were in bloom but the rest of the time it was a shaggy mess and besides, the weight of it was liable to pull the porch down—wisteria was a parasite, it weakened the structure of a house if you let it crawl all over the place—but some people had to learn everything the hard way.

She had expected the children to greet her, and stood expectantly by the fence for some moments, but they did not acknowledge her and kept on about whatever they were doing.

“What are yall children doing over there?” she called sweetly.

They looked up, startled as deer.

“Are yall burying something?”

“No,” shouted Harriet, the little one, in a tone which Mrs. Fountain did not much like. She was a smart aleck, that one.

“Sure looks like it.”

“Well, we’re not.”

“I believe yall are burying that old orange cat.”

No reply.

Mrs. Fountain squinted over the tops of her reading glasses. Yes, the big girl was crying. She was too old for such nonsense. The little one was lowering the swaddled form into the hole.

“That’s exactly what yall are doing,” she crowed. “You can’t fool me. That cat was a nuisance. He used to walk over here every day and get his nasty footprints all over the windshield of my car.”

“Don’t pay any attention to her,” Harriet said to her sister, between her teeth. “Old bitch.”

Hely had never heard Harriet swear before. A wicked shiver of pleasure fluttered down the back of his neck. “Bitch,” he repeated, more audibly, the bad word delicious on his tongue.

“What’s that?” shrilled Mrs. Fountain. “Who said that over there?”

“Shut up,” Harriet said to Hely.

“Which one of you said that? Who’s over there with you girls?”

Harriet had dropped to her knees and, with her bare hands, was shoving the pile of dirt back into the hole, over the blue towel. “Come on, Hely,” she hissed. “Quick. Help me.”