The Little Friend

“By the river. I was fishing.” Hely was always trudging down to the river with his cane pole and his sorrowful bucket of worms. Nobody ever came with him. Nobody ever wanted the little bream and crappies he caught, either, so he almost always let them go. Sitting alone in the dark—he loved night-fishing the best, with the frogs chirruping and a wide white ribbon of moonlight bobbing on the water—his favorite daydream was that he and Harriet lived by themselves like grown-ups in a little shack down by the river. The idea entertained him for hours. Dirty faces and leaves in their hair. Building campfires. Catching frogs and mud turtles. Harriet’s eyes ferocious when they glowed at him suddenly in the dark, like a little feral cat’s.

He shivered. “I wish you’d come last night,” he said. “I saw an owl.”

“What was Allison doing?” said Harriet in disbelief. “Not fishing.”

“Nope. See,” he said, confidentially, scooting closer on his rear end, “I heard Pem’s car on the bank. You know that noise it makes—” expertly, with pursed lips, he imitated it, whap whap whap whap!

—“you can hear him coming a mile off, so I know it’s him, and I thought Mama had sent him to get me so I got my stuff and climbed up. But he wasn’t looking for me.” Hely laughed, a short, knowing huff of a laugh that came out sounding so very sophisticated that he repeated it—even more satisfyingly—a beat or two later.

“What’s so funny?”

“Well—” he could not resist the opening she’d given him for yet a third chance to try out the sophisticated new laugh—“there was Allison, way on her side of the car but Pem had his arm on the seat and he was leaning towards her—” (he extended an arm behind Harriet’s shoulders, to demonstrate) “like this.” He made a big wet smacking noise and Harriet, irritably, shifted away.

“Did she kiss him back?”

“She didn’t look like she cared one way or another. I’d sneaked way up on them,” he said brightly. “I started to throw a night crawler in the car but Pem would’ve beat the shit out of me.”

He offered Harriet a boiled peanut from his pocket, which she refused.

“What’s the matter? It’s not poison.”

“I don’t like peanuts.”

“Good, more for me,” he said, popping the peanut into his own mouth. “Come on, go fishing with me today.”

“No thanks.”

“I found a sandbar hidden in the reeds. There’s a path that goes right down to it. You’ll love this place. It’s white sand, like Florida.”

“No.”

Harriet’s father often took the same irritating tone, assuring her with confidence that she would “love” this or that thing (football, square dance music, church cookouts) she knew full well she detested.

“What’s your problem, Harriet?” It grieved Hely that she never did what he wanted to do. He wanted to walk through the narrow path in the tall grass with her, holding hands and smoking cigarettes like grown people, their bare legs all scratched and muddy. Fine rain and a fine white froth blown up around the edge of the reeds.

————

Harriet’s great-aunt Adelaide was an indefatigable housekeeper. Unlike her sisters—whose small houses were crammed to the rafters with books, curio cabinets and bric-a-brac, dress patterns and trays of nasturtiums started from seed and maidenhair ferns clawed to tatters by cats—Adelaide kept no garden, no animals, hated to cook, and had a mortal dread of what she called “clutter.” She complained that she was unable to afford a housekeeper, which infuriated Tat and Edie as Adelaide’s three monthly Social Security checks (courtesy of three dead husbands) kept Adelaide far better fixed for money than they were, but the truth was that she enjoyed cleaning (her childhood in decayed Tribulation had given her a horror of disorder) and she rarely felt happier than when she was washing curtains, ironing linens, or bustling around her bare, disinfectant-smelling little house with a dust rag and a spray can of lemon furniture polish.

Usually, when Harriet dropped by, she found Adelaide vacuuming the carpets or cleaning out her kitchen cabinets, but Adelaide was on the sofa in the living room: pearl ear-clips, her hair—rinsed tasteful ash-blond—freshly permed, her nyloned legs crossed at the ankle. She had always been the prettiest of the sisters and at sixty-five, she was the youngest, too. Unlike timid Libby, Valkyrie Edith, or nervous, scatterbrained Tat, there was an undertow of flirtatiousness about Adelaide, a roguish sparkle of the Merry Widow, and a fourth husband was not out of the question should the right man (some natty balding gent in a sports jacket, with oil wells, perhaps, or horse farms) unexpectedly present himself in Alexandria and take a shine to her.