The Little Friend by Donna Tartt
CHAPTER
6
——
The Funeral
“Hospitality was the key-note of life in those days,” said Edie. Her voice—clear, declamatory—rose effortlessly over the hot wind roaring through the car windows; grandly, without bothering to signal, she swept into the left lane and cut in front of a log truck.
The Oldsmobile was a lush, curvaceous manatee of a car. Edie had purchased it from Colonel Chipper Dee’s car lot in Vicksburg, back in the 1950s. A vast tract of empty seat stretched between Edie, on the driver’s side, and Harriet slouched against the opposite door. Between them—next to Edie’s straw purse with the wooden handles—was a plaid thermos of coffee and a box of doughnuts.
“Out at Tribulation, Mother’s cousins would show up out of the clear blue to stay weeks at a time, and nobody thought a thing in the world about it,” Edie was saying. The speed limit was fifty-five but she was proceeding at her usual, leisurely motoring pace: forty miles an hour.
In the mirror, Harriet could see the driver of the log truck slapping his forehead and making impatient gestures with his open palm.
“Now, I’m not talking about the Memphis cousins,” said Edie. “I’m talking about the cousins from Baton Rouge. Miss Ollie, and Jules, and Mary Willard. And little Aunt Fluff!”
Harriet stared bleakly out the window: sawmills and pine barrens, preposterously rosy in the early morning light. Warm, dusty wind blew her hair in her face, whipped monotonously in a loose flap of upholstery on the ceiling, rattled in the cellophane panel of the doughnut box. She was thirsty—hungry, too—but there was nothing to drink but the coffee, and the doughnuts were crumbly and stale. Edie always bought day-old doughnuts, even though they were only a few cents cheaper than fresh.
“Mother’s uncle had a small plantation down there around Covington—Angevine it was called,” said Edie, plucking up a napkin with her free hand; in what could only be called a kingly manner, like a king accustomed to eating with his hands, she took a big bite of her doughnut. “Libby used to take the three of us down there on the old Number 4 train. Weeks at a time! Miss Ollie had a little dog-trot house out back, with a wood stove, and table and chairs, and we loved to play out in that little dog-trot house better than anything!”
The backs of Harriet’s legs were stuck to the car seat. Irritably, she shifted around and tried to get comfortable. They’d been in the car three hours, and the sun was high and hot. Every so often Edie considered trading in the Oldsmobile—for something with air conditioning, or a radio that worked—but she always changed her mind at the last minute, mainly for the secret pleasure of watching Roy Dial wring his hands and dance around in anguish. It drove Mr. Dial crazy that a well-placed old Baptist lady like Edie rode around town in a car twenty years old; sometimes, when the new cars came out, he spun by Edie’s house late in the afternoon and dropped off an unrequested “tester”—usually a top-of-the-line Cadillac. “Just drive it for a few days,” he’d say, palms in the air. “See what you think.” Edie strung him along cruelly, pretending to fall in love with the proffered vehicle, then—just as Mr. Dial was drawing up the papers—return it, suddenly opposed to the color, or the power windows, or complaining of some microscopic flaw, some rattle in the dashboard or sticky lock button.
“It still says Hospitality State on the Mississippi license plate but in my opinion true hospitality died out here in the first half of the present century. My great-grandfather was dead against the building of the old Alexandria Hotel, back before the war,” said Edie, raising her voice over the long, insistent horn blast of the truck behind them. “He said that he himself was more than happy to put up any respectable travelers who came to town.”
“Edie, that man back there’s honking at you.”
“Let him,” said Edie, who had settled in at her own comfortable speed.
“I think he wants to pass.”
“It won’t hurt him to slow down a little bit. Where does he think he’s taking those logs in such a great big hurry?”
The landscape—sandy clay hills, endless pines—was so raw and strange-looking that it made Harriet’s stomach hurt. Everything she saw reminded her that she was far from home. Even the people in neighboring cars looked different: sun-reddened, with broad, flat faces and farm clothes, not like the people from her own town.
They passed a dismal little cluster of businesses: Freelon Spraying Co., Tune’s AAA Transmission, New Dixie Stone and Gravel. A rickety old black man in coveralls and orange hunting cap was hobbling along the shoulder of the road carrying a brown grocery bag. What would Ida think when she came to work and found her gone? She would be arriving just about now; Harriet’s breath quickened a little at the thought.
Sagging telephone wires; patches of collards and corn; ramshackle houses with dooryards of packed dirt. Harriet pressed her forehead to the warm glass. Maybe Ida would realize how badly Harriet’s feelings were hurt; maybe she’d realize that she couldn’t threaten to pack up and quit every single time she got mad about something or other.… A middle-aged black man in glasses was tossing feed from a Crisco can to some red chickens; solemnly, he raised a hand at the car and Harriet waved back, so energetically that she felt a little embarrassed.
She was worried about Hely, too. Though he’d seemed pretty certain that his name wasn’t on the wagon, still she didn’t like the thought that it was sitting up there, waiting for someone to find it. To think what would happen if they traced it back to Hely made her feel ill. Don’t think about it, don’t think about it, she told herself.
On they drove. Shacks gave way to more woods, with occasional flat fields that smelled of pesticide. In a grim little clearing, a fat white woman wearing a maroon shirt and shorts, one foot encased in a surgical boot, was slinging wet clothes on a line off to the side of her trailer home; she glanced at the car, but didn’t wave.
Suddenly Harriet was jolted from her thoughts by a squeal of brakes, and a turn that slung her into the door and upset the box of doughnuts. Edie had turned—across traffic—into the bumpy little country road that led to the camp.
“Sorry, dear,” said Edie breezily, leaning over to right her purse. “I don’t know why they make these signs so little that you can’t even read them until you get right up on them.…”
In silence, they jostled down the gravel road. A silver tube of lipstick rolled across the seat. Harriet caught it before it fell—Cherries in the Snow, said the label on the bottom—and dropped it back in Edie’s straw handbag.
“We’re certainly in Jones County now!” said Edie gaily. Her backlit profile—dark against the sun—was sharp and girlish. Only the line of her throat, and her hands on the steering wheel—knotty, freckled—betrayed her age; in her crisp white shirt, plaid skirt, and two-toned correspondent oxfords she looked like some enthusiastic 1940s newspaper reporter out to chase down The Big Story. “Do you remember old Newt Knight the deserter from your Mississippi History, Harriet? The Robin Hood of the Piney Woods, so he called himself! He and his men were poor and sorry, and they didn’t want to fight a rich man’s war so they holed up down here in the backwoods and wouldn’t have a thing to do with the Confederacy. The Republic of Jones, that’s what they called themselves! The cavalry sent bloodhounds after them, and the old cracker women choked those dogs to death with red pepper! That’s the kind of gentlemen you’ve got down here in Jones County.”
“Edie,” said Harriet—watching her grandmother’s face as she spoke—“maybe you should get your eyes checked.”
“I can read just fine. Yes, maam. At one time,” said Edie, regally, “these backwoods were full of Confederate renegades. They were too poor to have any slaves themselves, and they resented those rich enough to have them. So they seceded from the Secession! Hoeing their sorry little corn patches out here in the pine woods! Of course, they didn’t understand that the war was really about States’ Rights.”
To the left, the woods opened onto a field. At the very sight of it—the sm
de Selby Frosh!
there are no Limits!
Harriet’s throat constricted. Suddenly she realized she’d made a terrible mistake.
“Now, Nathan Bedford Forrest was not from the wealthiest or most cultivated family in the world, but he was the greatest general of the war!” Edie was saying. “Yes, maam! ‘Fustest with the Mostest’! That was Forrest!”
“Edie,” said Harriet in a small fast voice, “I don’t want to stay here. Let’s go home.”
“Home?” Edie sounded amused—not even surprised. “Nonsense! You’re going to have the time of your life.”
“No, please. I hate it here.”
“Then why’d you want to come?”
Harriet had no answer for this. Rounding the old familiar corner, at the bottom of the hill, a gallery of forgotten horrors opened before her. The patchy grass, the dust-dulled pines, the particular yellowy-red color of the gravel which was like uncooked chicken livers—how could she have forgotten how much she loathed this place, how miserable she’d been every single minute? Up ahead, on the left, the pass gate; beyond, the head counselor’s cabin, sunk in threatening shade. Above the door was a homemade cloth banner with a dove on it that read, in fat, hippie letters: REJOICE!
“Edie please,” said Harriet, quickly, “I changed my mind. Let’s go.”
Edie, gripping the steering wheel, swung around and glared at her—light-colored eyes, predatory and cold, eyes that Chester called “sure-shot” because they seemed made to look down the barrel of a gun. Harriet’s eyes (“Little sure-shot,” Chester sometimes called her) were just as light, and chilling; but, for Edie, it was not pleasant to meet her own stare so fixedly and in miniature. She was unaware of any sorrow or anxiety in her grandchild’s rigid expression; which struck her only as insolence, and aggressive insolence at that.
“Don’t be silly,” she said, callously, and glanced back at the road—just in time to keep from running off into a ditch. “You’ll love it here. In a week you’ll be screaming and carrying on because you don’t want to come home.”
Harriet stared at her in amazement.
“Edie,” she said, “you wouldn’t like it here yourself. You wouldn’t stay with these people for a million dollars.”
“ ‘Oh, Edie!’ ” Meanly, in falsetto, Edie mimicked Harriet’s voice. “ ‘Take me back! Take me back to camp!’ That’s what you’ll be saying when it’s time to go.”
Harriet was so stung that she couldn’t speak. “I won’t,” she managed to say at last. “I won’t.”
“Yes you will!” sang Edie, chin high, in the smug, merry voice that Harriet detested; and “Yes you will!”—even louder, without looking at her.
Suddenly a clarinet honked, a shuddering note which was partly barnyard bray and partly country howdy: Dr. Vance, with clarinet, heralding their arrival. Dr. Vance was not a real doctor—a medical doctor—only a sort of a glorified Christian band director; he was a Yankee, with thick bushy eyebrows, and big teeth like a mule. He was a big wheel on the Baptist youth circuit, and it was Adelaide who had pointed out—correctly—that he was a dead ringer for the famous Tenniel drawing of the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland.
“Welcome, ladies,” he crowed, leaning into Edie’s rolled-down window. “Praise the Lard!”
“Hear hear,” replied Edie, who did not care for the more evangelical tone which sometimes crept into Dr. Vance’s conversation. “Here’s our little camper. I guess we’ll get her checked in and then I’ll be going.”
Dr. Vance—tucking his chin down—leaned in the window to grin at Harriet. His face was a rough, stony red. Coldly, Harriet noted the hair in his nostrils, the stains between his large, square teeth.
Dr. Vance drew back theatrically, as if singed by Harriet’s expression. “Whew!” He raised an arm; he sniffed his armpit, then looked at Edie. “Thought maybe I forgot to put my deodorant on this morning.”
Harriet stared at her knees. Even if I have to be here, she told herself, I don’t have to pretend I like it. Dr. Vance wanted his campers to be loud, outgoing, boisterous, and those who didn’t rise naturally enough into the camp spirit he heckled and teased and tried to pry open by force. What’s wrong, cantcha take a joke? Dontcha know how to laugh at yourself?! If a kid was too quiet—for any reason—Dr. Vance would make sure they got doused with the water balloon, that they had to dance in front of everybody like a chicken or chase a greased pig in a mud pit or wear a funny hat.
“Harriet!” said Edie, after an awkward pause. No matter what Edie said otherwise, Dr. Vance made her uncomfortable too, and Harriet knew it.
Dr. Vance blew a sour note on the clarinet, and—when this too failed to get Harriet’s attention—put his head in at the window and stuck his tongue out at her.
I am among the enemy, Harriet told herself. She would have to hold fast, and remember why she was here. For as much as she hated Camp de Selby it was the safest place to be at the moment.
Dr. Vance whistled: a derisive note, insulting. Harriet, grudgingly, glanced at him (there was no use resisting; he would just keep hammering at her) and he dropped his eyebrows like a sad clown and stuck out his bottom lip. “A pity party isn’t much of a party,” he said. “Know why? Hmn? Because there’s only room for one.”
Harriet—face aflame—sneaked a glance past him, out the window. Gangly pines. A line of girls in swimsuits tiptoed past, gingerly, their legs and feet splashed with red mud. The power of the highland chiefs is broken, she told herself. I have fled my country and gone to the heather.
“… problems at home?” she heard Dr. Vance inquire, rather sanctimoniously.
“Certainly not. She’s just—Harriet is a bit big for her britches,” said Edie, in a clear and carrying voice.
A sharp ugly memory rose in Harriet’s mind: Dr. Vance pushing her onstage in the Hula Hoop contest, the camp roaring with laughter at her dismay.
“Well—” Dr. Vance chuckled—“big britches is one condition we certainly know how to cure around here!”
“Do you hear that, Harriet? Harriet. I don’t,” said Edie, with a little sigh, “I don’t know what’s got into her.”
“Oh, one or two skit nights, and a hot potato race or two, and we’ll get her warmed up.”
The skit nights! Confused memories rose in a clamor: stolen underpants, water poured in her bunk (look, Harriet wets the bed!), a girl’s voice crying: You can’t sit here!
Look, here comes Miss Book Scholar!
“Well hay!” This was Dr. Vance’s wife, her voice high-pitched and countrified, swaying amiably toward them in her polyester shorts set. Mrs. Vance (or “Miss Patsy” as she liked the campers to call her) was in charge of the girls’ side of the camp, and she was as bad as Dr. Vance, but in a different way: touchy-feely, intrusive, asking too many personal questions (about boyfriends, bodily functions and the like). Though Miss Patsy was her official nickname, the girls called her “The Nurse.”
“Hay, Hun!” In through the car window she reached and pinched Harriet on the upper arm. “How you doing, girl!” Twist, twist. “Lookit you!”
“Well hello, Mrs. Vance,” said Edie, “how do you do?” Edie—perversely—liked people like Mrs. Vance because they gave her the space to be especially lofty and grand.
“Well come on, yall! Let’s head up to the office!” Everything Mrs. Vance said, she said with unnatural pep, like the women in the Miss Mississippi pageant or on The Lawrence Welk Show. “Gosh, you’re all grown up, girl!” she said to Harriet. “I know you’re not going to get in any more fist-fights this time, are you?”
Dr. Vance, in turn, gave Harriet a hard look that she did not like.
————
At the hospital, Farish played and replayed the scenario of t
“If you move, he’s going to bite you,” Farish said, addressing the air, almost as if he was talking to the absent Gum. “You shouldn’t of moved. I don’t care if he’s laying in your lap.”
He had stood—running his hands through his hair—and begun to pace, disturbing their view of the television. “Farsh,” said Eugene loudly, re-crossing his legs, “Gum had to drive the car, didn’t she?”
“She didn’t have to drive it off in a ditch,” said Danny.
Farish drew his eyebrows down. “You couldn’t have knocked me out of that driver’s seat,” he said belligerently. “I would’ve sat still as a mouse. If you move—” he made a smooth, skating motion with the flat of his palm—“you’ve threatened him. He’s going to defend himself.”
“What the hell is she going to do, Farish? A snake is coming through the roof of the damn car?”
Suddenly Curtis clapped his hands and pointed at the television. “Gum!” he exclaimed.
Farish wheeled around. After a moment, Eugene and Danny burst into horrified laughter. In the cartoon, the dog and a group of young people were trooping through a spooky old castle. A grinning skeleton hung on the wall, along with a bunch of trumpets and axes—and, strange to say, the skeleton bore a strong resemblance to Gum. Suddenly it flew off the wall and sailed after the dog, who ran yowling.