by Donna Tartt
————
“Now, boys and girls,” said Mr. Dial. With one chilly, whale-gray eye, he surveyed Harriet and Hely’s Sunday School class, which—due to Mr. Dial’s enthusiasm for Camp Lake de Selby, and unwelcome advocacy of it among the parents of his pupils—was more than half empty. “I want yall to think for a minute about Moses. Why was Moses so focused on leading the children of Israel into the Promised Land?”
Silence. Mr. Dial’s appraising, salesman’s gaze roved over the small group of uninterested faces. The church—not knowing what to do with the new school bus—had begun an outreach program, picking up underprivileged white children from out in the country and hauling them in to the prosperous cool halls of First Baptist for Sunday school. Dirty-faced, furtive, in clothing inappropriate for church, their downcast gazes strayed across the floor. Only gigantic Curtis Ratliff, who was retarded, and several years older than the rest of the children, goggled at Mr. Dial with open-mouthed appreciation.
“Or, let’s take another example,” said Mr. Dial. “What about John the Baptist? Why was he so determined to go forth in the wilderness and prepare the way for Christ’s arrival?”
There was no point attempting to reach these little Ratliffs and Scurlees and Odums, these youngsters with their rheumy eyes and pinched faces, their glue-sniffing mothers, their tattooed fornicating fathers. They were pitiful. Only the day before, Mr. Dial had been forced to send his son-in-law Ralph—whom he employed at Dial Chevrolet—down to some of the Scurlees to repossess a new Oldsmobile Cutlass. It was an old, old story: these sad dogs drove around in top-end automobiles chewing tobacco and swilling beer from the quart bottle, little caring that they were six months late on the payments. Another Scurlee and two Odums were due for a little visit from Ralph on Monday morning, though they didn’t know it.
Mr. Dial’s gaze lighted on Harriet—Miss Libby Cleve’s little niece—and her friend the Hull boy. They were Old Alexandria, from a nice neighborhood: their families belonged to the Country Club and made their car payments more or less on time.
“Hely,” said Mr. Dial.
Hely, wild-eyed, started convulsively from the Sunday school booklet he had been folding and refolding into tiny squares.
Mr. Dial grinned. His small teeth, his wide-set eyes and his bulging forehead—plus his habit of looking at the class in profile, rather than straight on—gave him the slight aspect of an unfriendly dolphin. “Will you tell us why John the Baptist went forth crying in the wilderness?”
Hely writhed. “Because Jesus made him do it.”
“Not quite!” said Mr. Dial, rubbing his hands. “Let’s all think about John’s situation for a minute. Wonder why he’s quoting the words of Isaiah the prophet in—” he ran his finger down the page—“verse 23 here?”
“He was following God’s plan?” said a little voice in the first row.
This came from Annabel Arnold, her gloved hands folded decorously over the zippered white Bible in her lap.
“Very good!” said Mr. Dial. Annabel came from a fine family—a fine Christian family, unlike such cocktail-drinking country-club families as the Hulls. Annabel, a champion baton twirler, had been instrumental in leading a little Jewish schoolmate to Christ. On Tuesday night, she was participating in a regional twirling competition on over at the high school, an event of which Dial Chevrolet was one of the main sponsors.
Mr. Dial, noticing that Harriet was about to speak, started in again hastily: “Did you hear what Annabel said, boys and girls?” he said brightly. “John the Baptist was working in accordiance with God’s Plan. And why was he doing that? Because,” said Mr. Dial, turning his head and fixing the class with his other eye, “because John the Baptist had a goal.”
Silence.
“Why is it so important to have goals in life, boys and girls?” As he waited for an answer, he squared and re-squared a small stack of paper on the podium, so that the jewel in his massive gold class ring caught and flashed red in the light. “Let’s think about this, shall we? Without goals, we aren’t motivated, are we? Without goals, we’re not financially prosperous! Without goals, we can’t achieve what Christ wants for us as Christians and members of the community!”
Harriet, he noticed with a bit of a start, was glaring at him rather aggressively.
“No sir!” Mr. Dial clapped his hands. “Because goals keep us focused on the things that matter! It’s important for all of us, no matter what age we are, to set goals for ourselves on a yearly and weekly and even hourly basis, or else we don’t have the get-up-and-go to haul our bee-hinds from out in front the television and earn a living when we grow up.”
As he spoke, he began to pass out paper and colored pens. It did no harm to try to force a little work ethic down some of these little Ratliffs and Odums. They were certainly exposed to nothing of the sort at home, sitting around living off the government the way most of them did. The exercise he was about to propose to them was one Mr. Dial himself had participated in, and found extremely motivational, from a Christian Salesmanship conference he had attended in Lynchburg, Virginia, the summer before.
“Now I want us all to write down a goal we want to achieve this summer,” said Mr. Dial. He folded his hands into a church steeple and rested his forefingers upon his pursed lips. “It may be a project, a financial or a personal achievement … or it may be some way to help your family, your community, or your Lord. You don’t have to sign your name if you don’t want to—just draw a little symbol at the bottom that represents who you are.”
Several drowsy heads jerked up in panic.
“Nothing too complicated! For instance,” said Mr. Dial, screwing his hands together, “you might draw a football if you enjoy sports! Or a happy face if you enjoy making people smile!”
He sat down again; and, since the children were looking at their papers and not at him, his wide, small-toothed grin soured slightly at the edges. No, it didn’t matter how you tried with these little Ratliffs and Odums and so forth: it was useless to think you could teach them a thing. He looked out over the dull little faces, sucking listlessly on the ends of their pencils. In a few years, these little unfortunates would be keeping Mr. Dial and Ralph busy in the repossession business, just like their cousins and brothers were doing right now.
————
Hely leaned over and tried to see what Harriet had written on her paper. “Hey,” he whispered. For his personal symbol he had dutifully drawn a football, then sat staring for the better part of five minutes in dazed silence.
“No talking back there,” said Mr. Dial.
With an extravagant exhalation, he got up and collected the children’s work. “Now then,” he said, depositing the papers in a heap on the table. “Everybody file up and choose a paper—no,” he snapped as several children sprang up from their chairs, “not run, like monkeys. One at a time.”
Without enthusiasm, the children shuffled up to the table. Back at her seat, Harriet struggled to open the paper she’d chosen, which was folded to the excruciating tininess of a postage stamp.
From Hely, unexpectedly, a snort of laughter. He shoved the paper he’d chosen at Harriet. Beneath a cryptic drawing (a headless blotch on stick legs, part furniture, part insect, depicting what animal or object or even piece of machinery Harriet could not guess) the gnarled script tumbled rockily down the paper at a forty-five-degree angle. My gol, read Harriet, with difficulty, is Didy tak me to Opry Land.
“Come on now,” Mr. Dial was saying up front. “Anybody start. It doesn’t matter who.”
Harriet managed to pick her paper open. The writing was Annabel Arnold’s: rotund and labored, with elaborate curlicues on the g’s and y’s.
my goal!
my goal is to say a little prayer every day that God
will send me a new person to help!!!!
Harriet stared at it balefully. At the bottom of the page, two capital B’s, back to back, formed an inane butterfly.
“Harriet?” said Mr. Dial suddenly.
“Let’s start with you.”
With a flatness that she hoped would convey her contempt, Harriet read the curlicued vow aloud.
“Now, that’s an outstanding goal,” said Mr. Dial warmly. “It’s a call to prayer, but it’s a call to service, too. Here’s a young Christian who thinks about others in church and communi—Is something funny back there?”
The pallid snickerers fell silent.
Mr. Dial said, in amplified voice: “Harriet, what does this goal reveal about the person that wrote it?”
Hely tapped Harriet’s knee. To the side of his leg, he made an inconspicuous little thumbs-down gesture: loser.
“Is there a symbol?”
“Sir?” said Harriet.
“What symbol has this writer chosen to represent him- or herself?”
“An insect.”
“An insect??”
“It’s a butterfly,” said Annabel faintly, but Mr. Dial didn’t hear.
“What kind of an insect?” he demanded of Harriet.
“I’m not sure, but it looks like it’s got a stinger.”
Hely craned over to see. “Gross,” he cried, in apparently unfeigned horror, “what is that?”
“Pass it up here,” said Mr. Dial sharply.
“Who would draw something like that?” Hely said, looking around the room in alarm.
“It’s a butterfly,” said Annabel, more audibly this time.
Mr. Dial got up to reach for the paper and then very suddenly—so suddenly that everyone jumped—Curtis Ratliff made an exhilarated gobbling noise. Pointing at something on the table, he began to bounce excitedly in his seat.
“Rat my,” he gobbled. “Rat my.”
Mr. Dial stopped short. This had always been his terror, that the generally docile Curtis would someday erupt into some kind of violence or fit.
Quickly, he abandoned the podium and hurried to the front row. “Is something wrong, Curtis?” he said, bending low, his confidential tone audible over the whole classroom. “Do you need to use the toilet?”
Curtis gobbled, face scarlet. Up and down he bounced in the squealing chair—which was too small for him—so energetically that Mr. Dial winced and stepped backwards.
Curtis stabbed at the air with his finger. “Rat my,” he crowed. Unexpectedly, he lunged from his chair—Mr. Dial stumbled backward, with a small, humiliating cry—and snatched a crumpled paper off the table.
Then, very gently, he smoothed it flat and handed it to Mr. Dial. He pointed at the paper; he pointed to himself. “My,” he said, beaming.
“Oh,” said Mr. Dial. From the back of the room, he heard whispers, an impudent little snort of merriment. “That’s right, Curtis. That’s your paper.” Mr. Dial had set it aside, intentionally, from those of the other children. Though Curtis always demanded pencil and paper—and cried when he was denied them—he could neither read nor write.
“My,” Curtis said. He indicated his chest with his thumb.
“Yes,” said Mr. Dial, carefully. “That’s your goal, Curtis. That’s exactly right.”
He laid the paper back on the table. Curtis snatched the paper up again and thrust it back at him, smiling expectantly.
“Yes, thank you, Curtis,” said Mr. Dial, and pointed to his empty chair. “Oh, Curtis? You can sit down now. I’m just going to—”
“Wee.”
“Curtis. If you don’t sit down, I can’t—”
“Wee my!” Curtis shrieked. To Mr. Dial’s horror, he began to jump up and down. “Wee my! Wee my! Wee my!”
Mr. Dial—flabbergasted—glanced down at the crumpled paper which lay in his hand. There was no writing on it at all, only scribbles a baby might make.
Curtis blinked at him sweetly, and took a lumbering step closer. For a mongoloid he had very long eyelashes. “Wee,” he said.
————
“I wonder what Curtis’s goal was?” said Harriet ruminatively as she and Hely walked home together. Her patent-leather shoes clacked on the sidewalk. It had rained in the night and pungent clumps of cut grass, crushed petals blown from shrubbery, littered the damp cement.
“I mean,” said Harriet, “do you think Curtis even has a goal?”
“My goal was for Curtis to kick Mr. Dial’s ass.”
They turned down George Street, where the pecans and sweetgums were in full, dark leaf, and the bees buzzed heavily in crape myrtle, Confederate jasmine, pink floribunda roses. The fusty, drunken perfume of magnolias was as drenching as the heat itself, and rich enough to make your head ache. Harriet said nothing. Along she clicked, head down, her hands behind her back, lost in thought.
Sociably, in an effort to revive the conversation, Hely threw back his head and let out his best dolphin whinny.
O, they call him Flipper, Flipper, he sang, in a smarmy voice. Faster than light-ning.…
Harriet let out a gratifying little snort. Because of his whickering laugh, and the porpoise-like bulge of his forehead, Flipper was their nickname for Mr. Dial.
“What’d you write?” Hely asked her. He’d taken off his Sunday suit jacket, which he hated, and was snapping it around in the air. “Was it you put down that black mark?”
“Yep.”
Hely glowed. It was for cryptic and unpredictable gestures like this that he adored Harriet. You couldn’t understand why she did things like this, or even why they were cool, but they were cool. Certainly the black mark had upset Mr. Dial, especially after the Curtis debacle. He’d blinked and looked disturbed when a kid in the back held up an empty paper, blank except for the creepy little mark in the center. “Someone’s being funny,” he snapped, after an eerie skipped beat, and went on immediately to the next kid, because the black mark was creepy—why? It was just a pencil mark, but still the room had gone quiet for a strange instant as the kid held it up for everyone to see. And this was the hallmark of Harriet’s touch: she could scare the daylights out of you, and you weren’t even sure why.
He bumped her with his shoulder. “You know something funny? You should have wrote ass. Ha!” Hely was always thinking of tricks for other people to pull; he didn’t have the nerve to pull them himself. “In really tiny letters, you know, so he could barely read it.”
“The black spot is in Treasure Island,” said Harriet. “That’s what the pirates gave you when they were coming to kill you, just a blank piece of paper with a black spot on it.”
————
Once home, Harriet went into her bedroom and dug out a notebook she kept hidden beneath the underwear in her bureau drawer. Then she lay down on the other side of Allison’s twin bed where no one could see her from the doorway, though she was unlikely to be disturbed. Allison and her mother were at church. Harriet was supposed to have met them there—along with Edie and her aunts—but her mother would not notice or much care that she hadn’t shown up.
Harriet did not like Mr. Dial, but nonetheless the exercise in the Sunday school room had got her thinking. Put on the spot, she had been unable to think what her goals were—for the day, for the summer, for the rest of her life—and this disturbed her, because for some reason the question was merged and entangled in her mind with the recent unpleasantness of the dead cat in the toolshed.
Harriet liked to set herself difficult physical tests (once, she’d tried to see how long she could subsist on eighteen peanuts a day, the Confederate ration at the end of the war), but mostly these involved suffering to no practical point. The only real goal she was able to think of—and it was a poor one—was to win first prize in the library’s Summer Reading Contest. Harriet had entered it every year since she was six—and won it twice—but now that she was older and reading real novels, she didn’t stand a chance. Last year, the prize had gone to a tall skinny black girl who came two and three times a day to check out immense stacks of baby books like Dr. Seuss and Curious George and Make Way for Ducklings. Harriet had stood behind her in line, with her Ivanhoe and her Algernon Blackwood and her Myths and Legends of Japan, fuming. Even Mrs. Fawcett
, the librarian, had raised an eyebrow in a way that made it perfectly plain how she felt about it.
Harriet opened the notebook. Hely had given it to her. It was just a plain, spiral-bound notebook with a cartoon of a dune buggy on the cover which Harriet did not much care for, but she liked it because the lined paper was bright orange. Hely had tried to use it for his geography notebook in Mrs. Criswell’s class two years before, but had been told that neither the groovy dune buggy nor the orange paper was suitable for school. On the first page of the notebook (in felt-tip pen, also pronounced unsuitable, and confiscated by Mrs. Criswell) was half a page of sporadic notations by Hely.
World Geography Alexandria Academy
Duncan Hely Hull September 4
The two continests that form a continuos land mass Eurge and Asic
The one half of the earth above the equtor is called the Northern.
Why is it standerd units of mesurament needed?
If a theory is the best available explanation of some part of nature?
There are four parts to a Map.
These Harriet examined with affectionate contempt. Several times she had considered tearing the page out, but over time it had come to seem part of the notebook’s personality, best left undisturbed.
She turned the page, to where her own notations, in pencil, began. These were mostly lists. Lists of books she’d read, and books she wanted to read, and of poems she knew by heart; lists of presents she’d got for birthday and Christmas, and who they were from; lists of places she’d visited (nowhere very exotic) and lists of places she wanted to go (Easter Island, Antarctica, Machu Picchu, Nepal). There were lists of people she admired: Napoleon and Nathan Bedford Forrest, Genghis Khan and Lawrence of Arabia, Alexander the Great and Harry Houdini and Joan of Arc. There was a whole page of complaints about sharing a room with Allison. There were lists of vocabulary words—Latin and English—and an inept Cyrillic alphabet which she’d done her laborious best to copy from the encyclopedia one afternoon when she had nothing else to do. There were also several letters Harriet had written, and never sent, to various people she did not like. There was one to Mrs. Fountain, and another to her detested fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Beebe. There was also one to Mr. Dial. In an attempt to kill two birds with one stone, she’d written it in a labored, curlicued hand that looked like Annabel Arnold’s.
