The Little Friend by Donna Tartt
Eugene’s visitor—a wiry, staring-eyed young man of twenty-two or -three, with a loose-limbed country manner and ears that stood out from his head—joined Eugene at the window. He’d done his best to slick back his short, cowlicked hair but it still stood up in unruly tufts all over his head.
“It’s the innocents such as him for who Christ shedded His blood,” he remarked. His smile was the frozen smile of the fanatical blessed, radiating either hope or idiocy, depending on how you looked at it.
“Praise God,” said Eugene, rather mechanically. Eugene found snakes unpleasant whether they were poisonous or not, but for some reason he had assumed these on the floor behind him had been milked of venom or otherwise rendered harmless—else how did hill preachers like his visitor kiss these rattlers on the lips and stuff them down their shirt fronts and pitch them back and forth across the length of their tin-roofed churches as they were said to do? Eugene himself had never seen snakes handled during a religious service (and, indeed, snake-handling was rare enough even high in the coal mining country of Kentucky, where the visitor hailed from). He had, however, seen plenty of churchgoers babbling in tongues, knocked flat on the floor and twitching in fits. He had seen devils cast out, with a smack of the palm to the sufferer’s forehead, unclean spirits coughed up in gobs of bloody spit. He had witnessed the laying on of hands, which made the lame to walk and the blind to see; and, one evening at a riverside Pentecostal service near Pickens, Mississippi, he had seen a black preacher named Cecil Dale McAllister raise a fat woman in a green pants suit from the dead.
Eugene accepted the legitimacy of such phenomena, much as he and his brothers accepted the pageantry and feuds of World Federation professional wrestling, not caring much if some of the matches were fixed. Certainly many of those who performed wonders in His name were fakes; legions of the shady and deceitful stood constantly on the look-out for new ways to rook their fellow man, and Jesus Himself had spoken against them—but even if only five percent of the purported miracles of Christ Eugene had witnessed were genuine, was not that five percent miracle enough? The devotion with which Eugene regarded his Maker was vocal, unwavering, and driven by terror. There was no question of Christ’s power to lift the burden of the imprisoned, the oppressed and oppressive, the drunk, the bitter, the sorry. But the loyalty He demanded was absolute, for His engines of retribution were swifter than His engines of mercy.
Eugene was a minister of the Word, though affiliated with no church in particular. He preached to all who had ears to hear him, just as the prophets and John the Baptist had done. Though Eugene was rich in faith the Lord had not seen fit to bless him with charisma or oratorical skill; and sometimes the obstacles he struggled against (even in the bosom of his family) seemed insurmountable. Being forced to preach the Word in abandoned warehouses and by the side of the highway was to labor without rest among the wicked of the earth.
The hill-preacher was not Eugene’s idea. His brothers Farish and Danny had arranged the visit (“to hep your ministry”) with enough whispering and winking and low talking in the kitchen to make Eugene suspicious. Never before had Eugene laid eyes upon the visitor. His name was Loyal Reese, and he was the baby brother of Dolphus Reese, a mean Kentucky operator who had worked as a trustee alongside Eugene in the laundry room at Parchman Penitentiary while Eugene and Farish were serving time for two counts of Grand Theft Auto in the late 1960s. Dolphus was never getting out. He was in for life plus ninety-nine on racketeering and two counts of first-degree murder, which he claimed he wasn’t guilty of and had been set up for.
Dolphus and Eugene’s brother Farish were buddies, two of a kind—still kept in touch, and Eugene got the feeling that Farish, on the outside now, aided Dolphus in some of his inside schemes. Dolphus was six foot six, could drive a car like Junior Johnson and kill a man with his bare hands (he said) in half a dozen ways. But unlike the closemouthed and sullen Farish, Dolphus was a great talker. He was the lost black sheep in a family of Holiness preachers, preachers for three generations back; and Eugene had loved to hear Dolphus tell—over the roar of the great industrial washing machines in the prison laundry—tales of his boyhood in Kentucky: singing on the street corners of mountain coal towns in Christmas snowstorms; traveling around in the rattletrap school bus from which his father operated his ministry, and which the whole family lived in, for months at a time—eating potted meat from the can, sleeping on corn shucks piled in the back, the caged rattlesnakes whispering at their feet; driving town to town, one step ahead of the law, brush arbor revivals and midnight prayer meetings lit by gasoline torches, all six children clapping and dancing to tambourines and the strumming of their mother’s Sears-Roebuck guitar as their father gulped strychnine out of a mason jar, wove rattlesnakes around his arms, his neck, around his waist in a living belt—their scaly bodies weaving upwards in time with the music, as if to climb on the air—as he preached in tongues, stamping, shaking from head to foot, chanting all the while about the might of the Living God, His signs and wonders, and the terror and joy of His awful, awful love.
The visitor—Loyal Reese—was the baby of the family, the baby Eugene had heard tell of in the prison laundry, laid to rest as a newborn amongst the rattlers. He had been handling serpents since he was twelve years old; he looked as innocent as a calf, with his big country ears and his slicked-back hair, beatitude shining glassily from his brown eyes. As far as Eugene knew, none of Dolphus’s family (apart from Dolphus) had ever been in trouble with the law for any reason other than their peculiar religious practices. But Eugene was convinced that his own sniggering and malicious brothers (involved in narcotics, both of them) had some ulterior motive in arranging this visit of Dolphus’s youngest sibling—some motive, that is, apart from Eugene’s inconvenience and distress. His brothers were lazy, and as much as they loved to annoy Eugene, calling young Reese down here with all his reptiles was too much effort for a practical joke. As for young Reese himself, with his big ears and his bad skin, he seemed wholly unsuspicious: lighted violently by hope, and his calling, and only slightly puzzled by the cautious welcome Eugene had offered him.
From the window, Eugene watched his baby brother Curtis galumphing off down the street. He had not asked for the visitor, and felt confused about how to deal with the reptiles caged and hissing around the Mission. He’d envisioned them locked in a car trunk or a barn somewhere, not residing as guests in his own quarters. Eugene had stood dumbfounded as box after tarp-draped box was dragged laboriously up the stairs.
“How come you didn’t tell me these things didn’t have the poison took out of them?” he said abruptly.
Dolphus’s little brother seemed astonished. “That’s not in accordiance with the Scripture,” he said. His hill-country twang was as sharp as Dolphus’s, but without the wryness, the gamesome cordiality. “Working with the Signs, we work with the serpent as God made him.”
Eugene said, curtly: “I could have got bit.”
“Not if you had the anointment of God, my brother!”
He turned from the window, full-face, and Eugene flinched slightly at the bright impact of his gaze.
“Read the Acts of the Prophets, my Brother! The Gospel according to Mark! It’s coming a victory against the Devil here in the last days, just like it was told in the Bible times. … And these signs shall follow them that believe: they shall take up serpents, and if they drink any deadly thang—”
“These animals are dangerous.”
“His hand hath made the serpent, Brother, just as it made the little lamb.”
Eugene did not reply. He had invited trustful Curtis to wait with him at the apartment for young Reese’s arrival. Because Curtis was such a valorous puppy—stricken, bumbling uselessly to the defense when he believed his loved ones hurt or in danger—Eugene had thought to scare him by pretending to be bitten.
But the joke had been on Eugene. Now he felt ashamed of the trick he had tried to pull, especially since Curtis had reacted with great sympathy to Eugene’
“The mark upon your face, my brother?”
“What about it?” Eugene was well aware of the gruesome red burn scar running down his face, and felt no need for strangers to call it to his attention.
“Is it not from being took in the Signs?”
“Accident,” Eugene said curtly. The injury had resulted from a concoction of lye and Crisco shortening known, in prison parlance, as Angola cold cream. A vicious little trick-bag named Weems—from Cascilla, Mississippi, in for aggravated assault—had thrown it in Eugene’s face in a dispute over a pack of cigarettes. It was while Eugene was recovering from this burn that the Lord had appeared to Eugene in the dark of the night and informed him of his mission in the world; and Eugene had come out of the infirmary with his sight restored and all set to forgive his persecutor; but Weems was dead. Another disgruntled prisoner had cut Weems’s throat with a razor blade melted into the end of a toothbrush—an act which only strengthened Eugene’s new faith in the mighty turbines of Providence.
“We all of us who love Him,” said Loyal, “bear His mark.” And he held out his hands, pocked and hatched with scar tissue. One finger—spotted with black—was horribly bulbed at the tip and another cut short to a nub.
“Here’s the thing,” Loyal said. “We got to be willing to die for Him like He was willing to die for us. And when we take up the deadly serpent and handle it in His name, we show our love for Him just as He shown it for you and me.”
Eugene was touched. Obviously the boy was sincere—no sideshow performer, but a man who lived his beliefs, who offered up his life to Christ like the martyrs of old. But just then they were disturbed very suddenly by a knock at the door, a series of quick, jaunty little raps: tap tap tap tap.
Eugene tossed his chin at the visitor; their gazes parted. For several moments, all was stillness except their breath and the dry, whispery rattle from the dynamite crates—a hideous noise, so delicate that Eugene had not been aware of it before.
Tap tap tap tap tap. Again came the knock, prissy and self-important—Roy Dial, had to be. Eugene was paid up on the rent but Dial—a born landlord, drawn irresistibly to meddle—often came snooping around on one pretext or another.
Young Reese laid a hand on Eugene’s arm. “They’s a sheriff in Franklin County got a warrant on me,” he said in Eugene’s ear. His breath smelled like hay. “My daddy and five others was arrested down there night before last for Breach of the Peace.”
Eugene held up a palm to reassure him but then Mr. Dial gave the doorknob a ferocious rattle. “Hello? Anybody home?” Tap tap tap tap tap. A moment of silence and then, to his horror, Eugene heard a stealthy key turning in the lock.
He bolted to the back room, just in time to see the chain-lock catch the door in the act of easing open.
“Eugene?” The doorknob rattled. “Is somebody in there?”
“Um, I’m sorry Mr. Dial but now aint a very good time,” Eugene called, in the chatty, polite voice he used with bill collectors and law-enforcement officials.
“Eugene! Hello there, bud! Listen, I understand what you’re saying but I’d appreciate it if we could have a word.” The nose of a black wing-tip shoe slid into the door crack. “Okey-doke? Half a second.”
Eugene crept up, stood with one ear inclined to the door. “Uh, what can I do for you?”
“Eugene.” The doorknob rattled again. “Half a second and I’ll be out of your hair!”
He ort to been a preacher himself, thought Eugene sourly. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hands and said aloud, in the most glib and sociable voice he could muster: “Um, I sure do hate to do you this away but you done caught me at a bad time, Mr. Dial! I’m directly in the middle of my Bible Study!”
A brief silence before Mr. Dial’s voice came back: “All right. But Eugene—you ought not to be setting all this garbage out in front of the curb before five o’clock p.m. If I receive a summons you’re going to be responsible.”
“Mr. Dial,” said Eugene, staring fixedly at the Little Igloo cooler on his kitchen floor, “I sure do hate to tell you this but I kindly think that trash out there belongs to the Mormon boys.”
“It’s not my problem whose it is. The Sanitation Department doesn’t want it out here before five.”
Eugene glanced at his wristwatch. Five minutes to five, you Baptist devil. “All right. Er, I surely will keep my eye on it.”
“Thanks! I’d really appreciate it if we could help each other out on this thing, Eugene. By the way—is Jimmy Dale Ratliff your cousin?”
After a wary pause, Eugene replied: “Second cousin.”
“I’m having trouble running down a phone number on him. Could you give it to me?”
“Jimmy Dale and them out there don’t have a phone.”
“If you see him, Eugene, will you please tell him to stop by the office? We need to have a little talk about the financing on his vehicle.”
In the silence that followed, Eugene reflected upon how Jesus had overthrown the tables of the moneychangers, and cast out them that sold and bought in the temple. Cattle and oxen had been their wares—the cars and trucks of Bible times.
“All right now?”
“I sure will do it, Mr. Dial!”
Eugene listened for Mr. Dial’s footsteps going down the stairs—slowly at first, pausing halfway before they resumed at a brisker pace. Then he crept to the window. Mr. Dial did not proceed directly to his own vehicle (a Chevy Impala with dealer’s plates) but lingered in the front yard for several minutes, out of Eugene’s line of vision—probably inspecting Loyal’s pick-up, also a Chevrolet; possibly only checking up on the poor Mormons, whom he was fond of but devilled mercilessly, baiting them with provocative passages from Scripture and interrogating them on their views of the Afterlife and so forth.
Only when the Chevy started up (with a rather lazy, reluctant sound, for so new a car) did Eugene return to his visitor, whom he found knelt down on one knee and praying intently, all atremble, thumb and forefinger pressed into his eye sockets in the manner of a Christian athlete before a football game.
Eugene was uncomfortable, reluctant either to disturb his guest or join him. Quietly, he went back to the front room and retrieved from his Little Igloo cooler a warm, sweaty wedge of hoop cheese—purchased only that morning, never far from his thoughts since he’d bought it—and cut himself a greedy chunk with his pocket knife. Without crackers, he gobbled it down, his shoulders hunched and his back to the open door of the room where his guest still knelt amongst the dynamite boxes, and wondered why it had never occurred to him to put curtains up in the Mission. Never before had it seemed necessary, since he was on the second story, and though his own yard was bare, trees in other yards occluded the view from neighboring windows. Still, a little extra privacy would be wise while the snakes were in his custody.
————
Ida Rhew poked her head through the door of Harriet’s room, her arms full of fresh towels. “You aint cutting pictures from that book, are you?” she said, eyeing a pair of scissors on the rug.
“No, maam,” said Harriet. Faintly, through the open window, drifted the whir of chainsaws: trees toppling, one by one. Expansion was all the Deacons thought about at the Baptist church: new rec rooms, new parking lot, a new youth center. Soon there would not be a tree left on the block.
“I better not catch you doing any such.”
“Yes, maam.”
“What them scissors out for, then?” Belligerently, she nodded at them. “You put them up,” she said. “This minute.”
Harriet, obediently, went to her bureau and put the scissors in the drawer and closed it. Ida sniffed, and trundled off. Harriet sat down on the foot of her bed, and waited; and as soon as Ida was out of earshot, she opened the drawer and got the scissors out again.
Harriet had seven yearb
And then the senior portraits. Tuxedoes, pimples, pearls. Big-jawed country girls looking awkward in the photographer’s drape. Twinkly Angie Stanhope, who’d won everything that year, who’d married right out of high school, who now looked so pasty and faded and thick about the waist when Harriet saw her in the grocery store. But there was no sign of Danny Ratliff. Had he failed? Dropped out? She turned the page, to baby pictures of the graduating seniors (Diane Leavitt talking on a play plastic telephone; scowling Pem in a soggy diaper, swaggering about a toy pool), and with a shock found herself looking down at a photo of her dead brother.
Yes, Robin: there he was opposite, on a page to himself, frail and freckled and glad, wearing a huge straw hat that looked as if it might belong to Chester. He was laughing—not as if he was laughing at something funny but in a sweet way, as if he loved the person who was holding the camera. ROBIN WE MISS YOU!!! read the caption. And, underneath, his graduating classmates had all signed their names.
For a long time, she studied the picture. She would never know what Robin’s voice had sounded like, but she had loved his face all her life, and had followed its modulations tenderly throughout a fading trail of snapshots: random moments, miracles of ordinary light. What would he have looked like, grown up? There was no way of knowing. To judge from his photograph, Pemberton had been a very ugly baby—broad-shouldered and bow-legged, with no neck, and no indication at all that he would grow up to be handsome.