The Little Friend

“There’s a Ratliff boy about Robin’s age,” said Harriet, watching Ida carefully. “Pemberton told me about him.”

Ida said nothing. She wrung out the dishrag, and then went to the drainer to put away the clean dishes.

“He would be about twenty now.” Old enough, thought Harriet, to be one of the men shooting off the creek bridge.

Ida, with a sigh, heaved the heavy cast-iron frying pan out of the drainer, and stooped to put it in the cabinet. The kitchen was by far the cleanest room in the house; Ida had carved out a little fortress of order here, free from the dusty newspapers piled throughout the rest of the house. Harriet’s mother did not allow the newspapers to be thrown away—this a rule so ancient and inviolable that even Harriet did not question it—but by some unspoken treaty between them, she kept them out of the kitchen, which was Ida’s realm.

“His name is Danny,” said Harriet. “Danny Ratliff. This person Robin’s age.”

Ida glanced over her shoulder. “What for you studying Ratliff so big all of a sudden?”

“Do you remember him? Danny Ratliff?”

“Lord, yes.” Ida grimaced as she stretched up on tiptoe to put away a cereal bowl. “I remember him just like yesterday.”

Harriet took care to keep her face composed. “He came to the house? When Robin was alive?”

“Yes sir. Nasty little loud-mouth. Couldn’t run him off for nothing. Hitting at the porch with baseball bats and creeping around here in the yard after dark, and one time he taken Robin’s bicycle. I tell your poor mama, I tell her and I tell her, but she aint done a thing. Underprivilege, she say. Underprivilege, my foot.”

She opened the drawer and—noisily, with lots of clatter—began to replace the clean spoons. “Nobody pay a bit of attention to what I say. I tell

your mother, I tell her and tell her that little Ratliff is nasty. Trying to fight Robin. Always cussing and setting off firecrackers and chunking something or other. Someday somebody going to get hurt. I sees it plain enough even if nobody else do. Who watch Robin every day? Who always looking right here out the window at him—” she pointed, at the window above the sink, at the late-afternoon sky and all the full-leafed greenness of the summer yard—“while he playing right out there with his soldiers or his kitty cat?” Sadly, she shook her head, and shut the silverware drawer. “Your brother, he a good little fellow. Buzz around underfoot like a little old june bug, and he sure do sass me every now and then, but he always sorry for it. He never pout and go on like you do. Sometimes he run up and thow his arms around me, like so. ‘I’s lonesome, Ida!’ I told him not to play with that trash, I told him and told him, but he’s lonesome, and your mother say she don’t see nothing the matter with it, and sometime he do it anyway.”

“Danny Ratliff fought Robin? In the yard here?”

“Yes, sir. Cussed and stole, too.” Ida took off her apron, and hung it on a peg. “And I chase him out of the yard not ten minutes before your mama find poor little Robin hung off that tree limb out there.”

————

“I’m telling you, the police don’t do anything to people like him,” said Harriet; and she started in again about the church, and Ida’s leg, and the old lady who had burned to death, but Hely was tired of hearing about all this. What excited him was a dangerous criminal on the loose, and the notion of being a hero. Though he was grateful to have evaded church camp, the summer so far had been just a little too quiet. Apprehending a killer promised to be more fun than acting in pageants, or running away from home, or any of the other activities he’d hoped to do with Harriet over the summer.

They were in the toolshed in Harriet’s back yard, where the two of them had retreated to have private conversations ever since kindergarten. The air was stifling, and smelled of gasoline and dust. Big black coils of rubber tubing hung from hooks on the wall; a spiky forest of tomato frames loomed behind the lawn mower, their skeletons exaggerated and made fantastical by cobweb and shadow, and the swordlike shafts of light which pierced the holes in the rusted tin ceiling crisscrossed in the dim, so furred with dust motes that they looked solid, as if yellow powder would rub off on your fingertips if you brushed your hands across them. The dimness, and heat, only increased the toolshed’s atmosphere of secrecy and excitement. Chester kept packs of Kool cigarettes hidden in the tool shed, and bottles of Kentucky Tavern whiskey, in hiding places which he varied from time to time. When Hely and Harriet were younger, they’d taken great pleasure in pouring water on the cigarettes (once Hely, in a fit of meanness, had peed on them) and in emptying the whiskey bottles and re-filling them with tea. Chester never told on them because he wasn’t supposed to have the whiskey or the cigarettes in the first place.