The Little Friend by Donna Tartt
“Hey, what does this quilt remind you of?” said Hely cheerfully, kicking the rungs of his chair. “The chess tournament in From Russia with Love? Remember? That first scene, with the giant chessboard?”
“If you touch that bishop,” said Harriet, “you’ll have to go on and move it.”
“I already moved. That pawn there.” He wasn’t interested in chess, or checkers, either; both games made his head hurt. He raised his lemonade glass, and pretended to discover a secret message from the Russians pasted on the bottom, but his arched eyebrow was lost on Harriet.
Harriet, without wasting any time, jumped the black knight out into the middle of the board.
“Congratulations, sir,” crowed Hely, banging down the glass, though he wasn’t in check and there was nothing unusual about the play. “A brilliant coup.” It was a line from the chess tournament in the movie and he was proud of himself for remembering it.
They played on. Hely captured one of Harriet’s pawns with his bishop, and smacked himself on the forehead when Harriet immediately leapt a knight forward to take the bishop. “You can’t do that,” he said, although he really didn’t know if she could or not; he had a hard time keeping track of how knights were able to jump, which was too bad because knights were the pieces that Harriet liked most and used best.
Harriet was staring at the board, her chin cupped moodily in her hand. “I think he knows who I am,” she said suddenly.
“You didn’t say anything, did you?” said Hely uneasily. Though he admired her daring, he had not really thought it a good idea for Harriet to go down to the pool hall on her own.
“He came outside and stared at me. Just standing there, without moving.”
Hely moved a pawn without thinking, just for something to do. Suddenly he felt very tired and grumpy. He didn’t like lemonade—he preferred Coke—and chess wasn’t his idea of a good time. He had a chess set of his own—a nice one, that his father had given him—but he never played except when Harriet came over, and mostly he used the pieces for G.I. Joe tombstones.
————
The heat pressed down heavy, even with the fan whirring and the shades halfway drawn, and Tat’s allergies weighed cumbrous and lopsided in her head. The BC headache powder had left a bitter taste in her mouth. She put Mary Queen of Scots face-down on the chenille bedspread and closed her eyes for a moment.
Not a peep from the porch: the children were playing quietly enough, but it was hard to rest, knowing they were in the house. There was so much to worry about in the little collection of waifs over on George Street, and so little to be done for any of them, she thought, as she reached for the water glass on her bedside table. And Allison—who, in her heart, Tat loved the best of her two great-nieces—was the child she worried about most. Allison was like her mother, Charlotte, too tender for her own good. In Tat’s experience, it was the mild, gentle girls like Allison and her mother who got beaten down and brutalized by life. Harriet was like her grandmother—too much like her, which was why Tat had never been particularly comfortable around her; she was a bright-eyed tiger cub, cute enough now that she was small, but less so with every inch she grew. And though Harriet was not yet old enough to take care of herself, that day would arrive soon enough and then she—like Edith—would thrive no matter what befell her, be it famine or bank crash or Russian invasion.
The bedroom door squealed. Tat started, palm to her ribcage. “Harriet?”
Old Scratch—Tatty’s black tomcat—leapt lightly up on the bed and sat looking at her, switching his tail.
“What you doing in here, Bombo?” he said—or, rather, Tatty said for him, in the shrill, insolent singsong that she and her sisters had employed since childhood to carry on conversations with their pets.
“You scared me to death, Scratch,” she replied, dropping an octave to her natural voice.
“I know how to open the door, Bombo.”
“Hush.” She got up and closed the door. When she lay down again, the cat curled up comfortably beside her knee, and before long they were both asleep.
————
Danny’s grandmother, Gum, winced as with both hands she strained uselessly to lift a cast-iron skillet of cornbread from the stove.
“Here Gum, let me hep you,” said Farish, jumping up so fast that he knocked over the aluminum kitchen chair.
Gum ducked and scraped away from the stove, smiling up at her favorite grandson. “Oh Farish. I’ll get it,” she said, feebly.
Danny sat staring at the checkered vinyl tablecloth, wishing hard that he was somewhere else. The trailer’s kitchen was so cramped that there was hardly room to move, and it got so overheated and smelly from the stove that it was an unpleasant place to sit even in winter. A few minutes ago, he’d drifted off into a waking daydream, a dream about a girl—not a real girl, but a girl like a spirit. Dark hair swirling, like weeds at a shallow pond’s edge: maybe black, maybe green. She’d drawn deliciously close, as if to kiss him—but instead, she’d breathed into his open mouth, cool fresh wonderful air, air like a breath from Paradise. The sweetness of the memory made him shudder. He wanted to be alone, to savor the daydream, for it was fading fast and he wanted desperately to slip back into it.
But instead he was here. “Farish,” his grandmother was saying, “I sure do hate for you to get up.” Anxiously, pressing her hands together, she followed the salt and syrup with her eyes as Farish reached over and banged them down on the table. “Please don’t worry with that.”
“Set down, Gum,” Farish said sternly. This was a regular little routine between the two of them; it happened every meal.
With regretful glances, and a great show of reluctance, Gum limped murmuring to her chair as Farish—rattling with product, ding-dong to the eyeballs—thundered back and forth between stove and table and the refrigerator on the front porch, setting the table with great thumps and clanks. When he thrust an overloaded plate at her, she waved it weakly aside.
“You boys go on and eat first,” she said. “Eugene, won’t you take this?”
Farish glowered at Eugene—who was sitting quietly, hands folded in his lap—and plunked the plate down in front of Gum.
“Here … Eugene …” With trembling hands, she offered the plate to Eugene, who shied back, reluctant to take it.
“Gum, you aint as big as a minute,” roared Farish. “You’re going to end up back in the hospital.”
Silently, Danny pushed the hair out of his face and helped himself to a square of cornbread. He was too hot and too wired to eat and the ungodly stench from the crank lab—combined with that of stale grease and onions—was enough to make him feel he would never be hungry again.
“Yes,” said Gum, smiling wistfully at the tablecloth. “I sure do love cooking for you all.”
Danny was fairly sure that his grandmother did not love cooking for her boys quite so much as she said she did. She was a tiny, emaciated, leather-brown creature, stooped from continual cringing, so decrepit that she looked closer to a hundred than her real age—somewhere around sixty. Born to a Cajun-French father and a mother who was a full-blood Chickasaw, in a sharecropper’s shack with a dirt floor and no plumbing (privations on which she daily refreshed her grandsons), Gum had been married, at thirteen, to a fur trapper twenty-five years her senior. It was hard to imagine what she’d looked like in those days—in her hardscrabble youth there had been no money for foolishness like cameras and pictures—but Danny’s father (who had adored Gum, passionately, more as a suitor than a son) remembered her as a girl with red cheeks and shiny black hair. She’d been only fourteen when he was born; she was (he’d said) “the prettiest little coon-ass gal you ever saw.” By coon-ass he meant Cajun, but when Danny was small he’d had a vague idea that Gum was part raccoon—an animal which, with her sunken dark eyes, her sharp face and snaggled teeth and small, dark, wrinkled hands, she indeed resembled.
For Gum was tiny. She seemed to shrink every year. Now she was shriveled to little more than a ho
Curtis—happily—smacked away at his supper while Farish continued to clickety-click about Gum with abrupt offers of food and service, all of which, with an air of affliction, she sadly waved aside. Farish was fiercely attached to his grandmother; her crippled and generally pitiable air never failed to move him, and she in turn flattered Farish in the same soft, meek, obsequious manner that she had flattered their dead father. And as her flattery had encouraged all that was worst in Danny’s father (nursing his self-pity, feeding his rages, pampering his pride and above all his violent streak), something in the way she fawned on Farish also encouraged his brutal side.
“Farish, I can’t eat that much,” she was murmuring (despite the fact that the moment had passed, and her grandsons all had plates of their own now). “Give this plate to Brother Eugene.”
Danny rolled his eyes and pushed back slightly from the table. His patience was badly frayed from the crank, and everything in his grandmother’s manner (her weak gesture of refusal, her tone of suffering) was calculated—sure as the multiplication table—to make Farish whip around and blow up at Eugene.
And sure enough it did. “Him?” Farish glowered down at the end of the table at Eugene, who sat gobbling his food with hunched shoulders. Eugene’s appetite was a sore point, a source of relentless strife, since he ate more than anyone in the household and contributed little to the expenses.
Curtis—mouth full—reached out a greasy paw to take the piece of chicken that his grandmother proffered with trembling hand across the table. Quick as a flash, Farish slapped it down: an ugly whack that made Curtis’s mouth drop open.
A few globules of half-chewed food fell out on the tablecloth.
“Aww … let im have it if he wants it,” Gum said, tenderly. “Here, Curtis. You want you some more to eat?”
“Curtis,” said Danny, bristling with impatience; he didn’t think he could stand to watch this unpleasant little suppertime drama unroll for the thousandth time. “Here. Take mine.” But Curtis—who didn’t understand the exact nature of this game and never would—was smiling and reaching out for the chicken leg trembling in front of his face.
“If he takes that,” growled Farish, looking up at the ceiling, “I swear I’ll knock him from here to—”
“Here, Curtis,” Danny repeated. “Take mine.”
“Or mine,” said the visiting preacher, quite suddenly, from his place by Eugene at the end of the table. “There’s plenty. If the child wants it.”
They had all forgotten that he was there. Everyone turned to stare at him, an opportunity Danny seized, inconspicuously, to lean over and scrape his entire disgusting dinner onto Curtis’s plate.
Curtis burbled ecstatically at his windfall. “Love!” he exclaimed, and clasped his hands.
“It all sure tastes mighty good,” said Loyal, politely. His blue eyes were feverish, and too intense. “I thank you all.”
Farish paused with the cornbread. “You don’t favor Dolphus in the face one bit.”
“Well, you know, my mother thinks I do. Dolphus and me are fair, like her side of the family.”
Farish chuckled, and began to shovel peas into his mouth with a wedge of cornbread: though he was visibly, clatteringly, high, he always managed to pack his dinner down around Gum so as not to hurt her feelings.
“Tell you one thing about Cain, Brother Dolphus sho did know how to raise it,” he said through a mouthful of food. “Back there in Parchman, he told you to hop, you jumped. And you didn’t jump, well then, he’d jump you. Curtis, goddamn,” he exclaimed, scraping his chair back, rolling his eyes. “You like to make me sick. Gum, can’t you make him get his hands out of the food plate?”
“He don’t know any better,” said Gum, standing creakily to push the serving platter out of Curtis’s range and then easing herself back down into her chair, very slowly, as if into an ice-cold bath. To Loyal she made a nod of obeisance. “I’m afret the Good Lord didn’t spend quite enough time on this one here,” she said, with an apologetic wince. “But we love our little monstrer, don’t we, Curtis?”
“Love,” cooed Curtis. He offered her a square of cornbread.
“Naw, Curtis. Gum don’t need that.”
“God don’t make mistakes,” said Loyal. “His loving eye is on us all. Blessed is He who varies the aspect of all His creatures.”
“Well, yall better hope God’s not looking the other way when yall start handling them rattlesnakes,” said Farish, casting a sly eye at Eugene as he poured himself another glass of iced tea. “Loyal? That your name?”
“Yes sir. Loyal Bright. The Bright is after my mama’s side.”
“Well, tell me this, Loyal, what’s the point in hauling all them reptiles down here if they have to stay in the damn box? How many days you been running this revival?”
“One,” said Eugene, through a mouthful of food, not looking up.
“I can’t predetermine to handle,” said Loyal. “God sends the anointment on us, and sometimes he don’t. The Victory is His to bestow. Sometimes it pleases Him to try our faith.”
“I reckon that makes you feel pretty foolish, standing up in front of all those people and not a snake in sight.”
“No sir. The serpent is His creation and serves His will. If we take up and handle, and we’re not in accordiance with His will, we’ll be hurt.”
“All right, Loyal,” said Farish, leaning back in his chair, “would you say that Eugene here isn’t quite right with the Lord? Maybe that’s what’s holding you up.”
“Well, tell you one thing,” said Eugene very suddenly, “it don’t help for people to poke at the snakes with sticks and blow cigarette smoke in on em and mess with em and tease em—”
“Now wait just a—”
“Farsh, I seen you fooling with them out back in the truck there.”
“Farsh,” said Farish, in a high derisive voice. Eugene had a funny way of pronouncing certain words.
“Don’t make mock of me.”
“Yall,” said Gum weakly. “Yall, now.”
“Gum,” said Danny and then, more softly: “Gum”; for his voice was so loud and sudden that it had made everybody at the table jump.
“Yes, Danny?”
“Gum, I meant to ast …” He was so wired that he could not now remember the connection between what everyone was talking about and what was now coming out of his mouth. “Did you get picked for Jury Duty?”
His grandmother folded a piece of white bread in half and dipped it in a puddle of corn syrup. “I did.”
“What?” said Eugene. “When’s the trial start?”
“Wednesday.”
“Hi you going to get there with the truck broke?”
“Jury Duty?” said Farish, sitting bolt upright. “How come I aint heard of this?”
“Poor old Gum don’t like to bother you, Farish.…”
“The truck’s not bad broke,” said Eugene, “just broke so she can’t drive it. I can hardly turn the wheel on it.”
“Jury duty?” Roughly, Farish pushed his chair back from the table. “And why are they calling up an invalid? Looks like they could find some able-bodied man—”
“I’m happy to serve,” said Gum, in a martyred voice.
“Hun, I know it, all I’m saying is that looks like they could find somebody else. You’ll have to sit down there all day, in those hard chairs, and what with your arthritis—”
Gum said, in a whisper: “Well, I’ll tell you the truth, what worries me is this nausea I’ve got from the other medicine I’m taking.”
“I hope you told them that this is like to put you in the hospital again. Dragging a poor old crippled lady out of her house—”
Diplomatically, Loyal interrupted: “What kindly trial are you on, maam?”
Gum
Farish said: “They’re going to make you go all the way down there? Just for that?”
“Well, in my time,” Gum said peacefully, “we didn’t have all this nonsense about a big trial.”
————
When there was no answer to her knock, Harriet nudged Tat’s bedroom door open. In the dimness, she saw her old aunt dozing on the white summer bedspread with her glasses off and her mouth open.
“Tat?” she said, uncertainly. The room smelled of medicine, Grandee water, vetivert and Mentholatum and dust. A fan purred in sleepy half-circles, stirring the filmy curtains to the left and then the right.
Tat slept on. The room was cool and still. Silver-framed photographs on the bureau: Judge Cleve and Harriet’s great-grandmother—cameo at her throat—before the turn of the century; Harriet’s mother as a 1950s debutante, with elbow gloves and a fussy hairdo; a hand-tinted eight-by-ten of Tat’s husband, Mr. Pink, as a young man and a glossy newspaper shot—much later—of Mr. Pink accepting an award from the Chamber of Commerce. On the heavy dressing table stood Tat’s things: Pond’s cold cream, a jelly jar of hairpins, pincushion and Bakelite comb and brush set and a single lipstick—a plain, modest little family, neatly arranged as if for a group picture.
Harriet felt as if she might cry. She flung herself on the bed.
Tat woke with a jolt. “Gracious. Harriet?” Blindly, she struggled up and fumbled for her glasses. “What’s wrong? Where’s your little company?”
“He went home. Tatty, do you love me?”
“What’s the matter? What time is it, honey?” she said, squinting uselessly at the bedside clock. “You’re not crying, are you?” She leaned over to feel Harriet’s forehead with her palm, but it was damp and cool. “What on earth’s the matter?”
“Can I spend the night?”
Tat’s heart sank. “Oh, darling. Poor Tatty’s half dead with allergies.… Please tell me what’s wrong, honey? Are you feeling bad?”
“I won’t be any trouble.”