The Little Friend

He giggled, sidestepping his sister’s swipe, and seemed about to elaborate when unexpectedly Ida Rhew charged from the house, screen door slamming behind her, and ran toward the children clapping her hands as if they were birds taking seed from a field.

“Yall go on and get out of here,” she cried. “Scat!”

In a blink they were gone, baby and all. Ida Rhew stood on the sidewalk, shaking her fist. “Don’t yall be messing around here no more,” she shouted after them. “I call the police on you.”

“Ida!” wailed Allison.

“Don’t you Ida me.”

“But they were just little! They weren’t bothering anything.”

“No, and they aint going to bother anything either,” said Ida Rhew, gazing after them steadily for a minute, then dusting her hands off and heading towards the house. Ferdinand the Bull lay askew on the sidewalk where the children had dropped it. She stooped, laboriously, to pick it up, grasping it by the corner between thumb and forefinger as if it were contaminated. Holding it out at arm’s length, she straightened up with a sharp exhalation and started around the house to the garbage can.

“But Ida!” said Allison. “That’s a library book!”

“I don’t care where it come from,” said Ida Rhew, without turning around. “It’s filthy. I don’t want yall touching it.”

Charlotte, her face anxious and blurry with sleep, poked her head out the front door. “What’s the matter?” she said.

“It was just some little kids, Mother. They weren’t hurting anybody.”

“Oh, dear,” said Charlotte, wrapping the ribbons of her bed jacket tighter at her waist. “That’s too bad. I’ve been meaning to go in your bedroom and get up a bag of your old toys for the next time they came by.”

“Mother!” shrieked Harriet.

“Now, you know you don’t play with those old baby things any more,” said her mother serenely.

“But they’re mine! I want them!” Harriet’s toy farm … the Dancerina and Chrissy dolls which she had not wanted, but asked for anyway, because the other girls in her class had them … the mouse family dressed in periwigs and fancy French costume, which Harriet had seen in the window of a very very expensive shop in New Orleans and which she had pleaded for, cried for, grew silent and refused her supper for, until finally Libby and Adelaide and Tat slipped out of the Pontchartrain Hotel and chipped in together to buy them for her. The Christmas of the Mice: the happiest of Harriet’s life. Never had she been so flabbergasted with joy as when she’d opened that beautiful red box, storms of tissue paper flying. How could Harriet’s mother hoard every scrap of newsprint which came into the house—get cross if Ida threw a shred of it away—and yet try to give Harriet’s mice away to filthy little strangers?

For this was exactly what happened. Last October, the mouse family had vanished from the top of Harriet’s bureau. After a hysterical search, Harriet unearthed them in the attic, jumbled in a box with some of her other toys. Her mother, when confronted, admitted taking a few things that she thought Harriet no longer played with, to give to underprivileged children, but she seemed not to realize how much Harriet loved the mice, or that she should have asked before taking them. (“I know your aunts gave them to you, but didn’t Adelaide or one of them give you that Dancerina doll? You don’t want that.”) Harriet doubted that her mother even remembered the incident, a suspicion now confirmed by her uncomprehending stare.

“Don’t you understand?” cried Harriet in despair. “I want my toys!”

“Don’t be selfish, darling.”

“But they’re mine!”

“I can’t believe you begrudge those poor little children a few things that you’re too old to play with,” Charlotte said, blinking in confusion. “If you’d seen how happy they were to get Robin’s toys—”

“Robin’s dead.”

“If you give them kids anything,” said Ida Rhew darkly, reappearing around the side of the house, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, “it be nasty or broken fo they get it home.”

————

After Ida Rhew left for the day, Allison picked Ferdinand the Bull out of the garbage can and carried it back to the porch. In the twilight, she examined it. It had fallen in a pile of coffee grounds and a brown stain warped the edge of the pages. She cleaned it as best she could with a paper towel, then took a ten-dollar bill from her jewelry box and tucked it inside the front cover. Ten dollars, she thought, should more than cover the damage. When Mrs. Fawcett saw the condition the book was in, she would make them pay for it or else give up their library privileges and there was no way little kids like that would be able to scrape up the fine on their own.