by Donna Tartt
There was no proper address, only Rt 260. Harriet, after gnawing her lip in indecision, dialed the number and inhaled with sharp surprise when it was caught up on the first ring (ugly television clatter in the background). A man barked: “Yellope!”
With a crash—as if slamming the lid on a devil—Harriet banged down the receiver with both hands.
————
“I saw my brother trying to kiss your sister last night,” said Hely to Harriet as they sat on Edie’s back steps. Hely had come over to fetch her after breakfast.
“Where?”
“By the river. I was fishing.” Hely was always trudging down to the river with his cane pole and his sorrowful bucket of worms. Nobody ever came with him. Nobody ever wanted the little bream and crappies he caught, either, so he almost always let them go. Sitting alone in the dark—he loved night-fishing the best, with the frogs chirruping and a wide white ribbon of moonlight bobbing on the water—his favorite daydream was that he and Harriet lived by themselves like grown-ups in a little shack down by the river. The idea entertained him for hours. Dirty faces and leaves in their hair. Building campfires. Catching frogs and mud turtles. Harriet’s eyes ferocious when they glowed at him suddenly in the dark, like a little feral cat’s.
He shivered. “I wish you’d come last night,” he said. “I saw an owl.”
“What was Allison doing?” said Harriet in disbelief. “Not fishing.”
“Nope. See,” he said, confidentially, scooting closer on his rear end, “I heard Pem’s car on the bank. You know that noise it makes—” expertly, with pursed lips, he imitated it, whap whap whap whap!—“you can hear him coming a mile off, so I know it’s him, and I thought Mama had sent him to get me so I got my stuff and climbed up. But he wasn’t looking for me.” Hely laughed, a short, knowing huff of a laugh that came out sounding so very sophisticated that he repeated it—even more satisfyingly—a beat or two later.
“What’s so funny?”
“Well—” he could not resist the opening she’d given him for yet a third chance to try out the sophisticated new laugh—“there was Allison, way on her side of the car but Pem had his arm on the seat and he was leaning towards her—” (he extended an arm behind Harriet’s shoulders, to demonstrate) “like this.” He made a big wet smacking noise and Harriet, irritably, shifted away.
“Did she kiss him back?”
“She didn’t look like she cared one way or another. I’d sneaked way up on them,” he said brightly. “I started to throw a night crawler in the car but Pem would’ve beat the shit out of me.”
He offered Harriet a boiled peanut from his pocket, which she refused.
“What’s the matter? It’s not poison.”
“I don’t like peanuts.”
“Good, more for me,” he said, popping the peanut into his own mouth. “Come on, go fishing with me today.”
“No thanks.”
“I found a sandbar hidden in the reeds. There’s a path that goes right down to it. You’ll love this place. It’s white sand, like Florida.”
“No.” Harriet’s father often took the same irritating tone, assuring her with confidence that she would “love” this or that thing (football, square dance music, church cookouts) she knew full well she detested.
“What’s your problem, Harriet?” It grieved Hely that she never did what he wanted to do. He wanted to walk through the narrow path in the tall grass with her, holding hands and smoking cigarettes like grown people, their bare legs all scratched and muddy. Fine rain and a fine white froth blown up around the edge of the reeds.
————
Harriet’s great-aunt Adelaide was an indefatigable housekeeper. Unlike her sisters—whose small houses were crammed to the rafters with books, curio cabinets and bric-a-brac, dress patterns and trays of nasturtiums started from seed and maidenhair ferns clawed to tatters by cats—Adelaide kept no garden, no animals, hated to cook, and had a mortal dread of what she called “clutter.” She complained that she was unable to afford a housekeeper, which infuriated Tat and Edie as Adelaide’s three monthly Social Security checks (courtesy of three dead husbands) kept Adelaide far better fixed for money than they were, but the truth was that she enjoyed cleaning (her childhood in decayed Tribulation had given her a horror of disorder) and she rarely felt happier than when she was washing curtains, ironing linens, or bustling around her bare, disinfectant-smelling little house with a dust rag and a spray can of lemon furniture polish.
Usually, when Harriet dropped by, she found Adelaide vacuuming the carpets or cleaning out her kitchen cabinets, but Adelaide was on the sofa in the living room: pearl ear-clips, her hair—rinsed tasteful ash-blond—freshly permed, her nyloned legs crossed at the ankle. She had always been the prettiest of the sisters and at sixty-five, she was the youngest, too. Unlike timid Libby, Valkyrie Edith, or nervous, scatterbrained Tat, there was an undertow of flirtatiousness about Adelaide, a roguish sparkle of the Merry Widow, and a fourth husband was not out of the question should the right man (some natty balding gent in a sports jacket, with oil wells, perhaps, or horse farms) unexpectedly present himself in Alexandria and take a shine to her.
Adelaide was poring over the June issue of Town and Country magazine, which had just arrived. She was looking now at the Weddings. “Which of these two do you reckon has the money?” she asked Harriet, showing her a photograph of a dark-haired young man with frosty, haunted eyes standing alongside a shiny-faced blonde in a bustled hoopskirt that made her look like a baby dinosaur.
“The man looks like he’s about to throw up.”
“I don’t understand what is all this business about blondes. Blondes have more fun and all that. I think that’s something people dreamed up on the television. Most natural blondes have weak features and they look washed-out and rabbity unless they take a lot of pains to fix themselves up. Look at this poor girl. Look at that one. She has a face like a sheep.”
“I wanted to talk to you about Robin,” said Harriet, who saw no use in edging gracefully up to the subject.
“What’s that you’re saying, sweet?” said Adelaide, eyeing a photograph of a charity ball. A slender young man in black tie—clear, confident, unspoilt face—was rocking back on his heels with laughter, one hand at the back of a sleek little brunette in sugar-pink ballgown and elbow gloves to match.
“Robin, Addie.”
“Oh, darling,” said Adelaide wistfully, glancing up from the handsome boy in the photograph. “If Robin was with us now he’d be knocking the girls over like skittles. Even when he was just a tiny thing … so full of fun, he’d tip over backwards sometimes with laughing so hard. He liked to sneak up behind me and throw his arms around my neck and nibble on my ear. Adorable. Like a parakeet named Billy Boy that Edith used to have when we were children.…”
Adelaide trailed away as the smile of the triumphant young Yankee caught her eye again. College sophomore, the caption said. Robin, if he was alive, would be about the same age now. She felt a flutter of indignation. What right did this F. Dudley Willard, whoever he was, have to be alive and laughing in the Plaza Hotel with an orchestra playing in the Palm Court and his glossy girl in the satin gown laughing back at him? Adelaide’s own husbands had fallen respectively to World War II, an accidentally fired bullet during hunting season, and massive coronary; she had borne two stillborn boys by the first and her daughter, with the second, had died at eighteen months, of smoke inhalation, when the chimney of the old West Third Street apartment caught fire in the middle of the night—savage blows, knee-buckling, cruel. Yet (moment by painful moment, breath by painful breath) one got through things. Now, when she thought of the stillborn twins, she remembered only their delicate and perfectly formed features, their eyes closed peacefully, as if sleeping. Of all the tragedies in her life (and she had suffered more than her share) nothing lingered and festered with quite the rankness of little Robin’s murder, a wound that never quite healed but gnawed and sickened and grew ever more corroding wit
h time.
Harriet observed her aunt’s faraway expression; she cleared her throat. “I guess this is what I came over to ask you, Adelaide,” she said.
“I always wonder if his hair would have darkened when he got older,” said Adelaide, holding up the magazine at arm’s length to examine it over the tops of her reading glasses. “Edith’s hair was mighty red when we were little, but not as red as his. A true red. No orange about it.” Tragic, she thought. Here were these spoilt Yankee children prancing around the Plaza Hotel, while her lovely little nephew, superior in all respects, was in the ground. Robin had never even had the chance to touch a girl. With warmth, Adelaide thought of her three ardent marriages and the cloakroom kisses of her own full-handed youth.
“What I wanted to ask is if you had any idea who might have—”
“He would have grown up to break some hearts, darling. Every little Chi O and Tri Delt at Ole Miss would be fighting over who got to take him to the Debutante Assembly in Greenwood. Not that I put much stock in that debutante foolishness, all that blackballing and cliques and petty—”
Rap rap rap: a shadow at the screen door. “Addie?”
“Who’s there?” called Adelaide, starting up. “Edith?”
“Darling,” said Tattycorum, bursting in wild-eyed without even looking at Harriet, tossing her patent-leather handbag into an armchair, “darling, can you believe that rascal Roy Dial from the Chevrolet place wants to charge everybody in the Ladies’ Circle sixty dollars apiece to ride to Charleston on the church trip? On that broken-down school bus?”
“Sixty dollars?” shrieked Adelaide. “He said he was lending the bus. He said it was free.”
“He’s still saying it’s free. He says the sixty dollars is for gasoline.”
“That’s enough gasoline to drive to Red China!”
“Well, Eugenie Monmouth’s calling the minister to complain.”
Adelaide rolled her eyes. “I think Edith should call.”
“I expect she will, when she hears about it. I’ll tell you what Emma Caradine said. ‘He’s just trying to make himself a big profit.’ ”
“Certainly he is. You’d think he’d be ashamed of himself. Especially with Eugenie and Liza and Susie Lee and the rest of them living on Social Security—”
“Now if it was ten dollars. Ten dollars I could understand.”
“And Roy Dial supposedly such a big deacon and all. Sixty dollars?” said Adelaide. She got up and went over to the telephone table for pencil and notebook and began to figure. “Goodness, I’m going to have to get the atlas out for this,” she said. “How many ladies on the bus?”
“Twenty-five, I think, now that Mrs. Taylor’s dropped out and poor old Mrs. Newman McLemore fell and broke her hip—Hello, sweet Harriet!” said Tat, swooping to kiss her. “Did your grandmother tell you? Our church circle is going on a trip. ‘Historic Gardens of the Carolinas.’ I’m awfully excited.”
“I don’t know that I care to go now that we’ve got to be paying all this exorbitant fee to Roy Dial.”
“He ought to be ashamed. That’s all there is to it. With that big new house out in Oak Lawn and all those brand-new cars and Winnebagos and boats and things—”
“I want to ask a question,” said Harriet in despair. “It’s important. About when Robin died.”
Addie and Tat stopped talking at once. Adelaide turned from the road atlas. Their unexpected composure was so jarring that Harriet felt a surge of fright.
“You were in the house when it happened,” she said, in the uncomfortable silence, the words tumbling out a little too fast. “Didn’t you hear anything?”
The two old ladies glanced at each other, a small beat of thoughtfulness during which some unspoken communication seemed to pass between them. Then Tatty took a deep breath and said: “No. Nobody heard a thing. And do you know what I think?” she said, as Harriet tried to interrupt with another question. “I don’t think this is a very good subject for you to go around casually bringing up with people.”
“But I—”
“You haven’t bothered your mother or your grandmother with any of this, have you?”
Adelaide said, stiffly: “I don’t think this is a very good topic of conversation either. In fact,” she said, over Harriet’s rising objections, “I think it might be a good time for you to run along home, Harriet.”
————
Hely, half-blinded by sun, sat sweating on a brush-tangled creek bank, watching the red and white bobber of his cane pole flicker on the murky water. He had let his night crawlers go because he thought it might cheer him up to dump them onto the ground in a big creepy knot, to watch them squirming off or digging holes in the ground or whatever. But they did not realize that they were free of the pail, and, after disentangling themselves, wove around placidly at his feet. It was depressing. He plucked one off his sneaker, looked at its mummy-segmented underside and then flung it into the water.
There were plenty of girls at school prettier than Harriet, and nicer. But none of them were as smart, or as brave. Sadly, he thought of her many gifts. She could forge handwriting—teacher handwriting—and compose adult-sounding excuse notes like a pro; she could make bombs from vinegar and baking soda, mimic voices over the telephone. She loved to shoot fireworks—unlike a lot of girls, who wouldn’t go near a string of firecrackers. She had got sent home in second grade for tricking a boy into eating a spoonful of cayenne pepper; and two years ago she had started a panic by saying that the spooky old lunchroom in the school basement was a portal to Hell. If you turned off the light, Satan’s face appeared on the wall. A gang of girls trooped downstairs, giggling, switched the lights out—and burst forth completely off their heads and screaming with terror. Kids started playing sick, asking to go home for lunch, anything to keep from going down in the basement. After several days of mounting unease, Mrs. Miley called the children together and—along with tough old Mrs. Kennedy, the sixth-grade teacher—marched them all down to the empty lunchroom (girls and boys, crowding in behind them) and switched off the light. “See?” she said scornfully. “Now don’t you all feel silly?”
At the back, in a thin, rather hopeless-sounding voice which was somehow more authoritative than the teacher’s bluster, Harriet said: “He’s there. I see him.”
“See!” cried a little boy’s voice. “See?”
Gasps: then a howling stampede. For sure enough, once your eyes got used to the dark, an eerie greenish glow (even Mrs. Kennedy blinked in confusion) shimmered in the upper-left corner of the room, and if you looked long enough, it was like an evil face with slanted eyes and a handkerchief tied over the mouth.
All that uproar about the Lunchroom Devil (parents phoning the school, demanding meetings with the principal, preachers jumping on the bandwagon, too, Church of Christ and Baptist, a flutter of bewildered and combative sermons entitled “Devil Out” and “Satan in Our Schools?”)—all this was Harriet’s doing, the fruit of her dry, ruthless, calculating little mind. Harriet! Though small, she was ferocious on the playground, and in a fight, she fought dirty. Once, when Fay Gardner tattled on her, Harriet had calmly reached under the desk and unfastened the oversized safety pin that held her kilt skirt together. All day she had waited for her opportunity; and that afternoon, when Fay was passing some papers out, she struck out like lightning and stabbed Fay in the back of the hand. It was the only time Hely had ever seen the principal beat a girl. Three licks with the paddle. And she hadn’t cried. So what, she’d said coolly when he complimented her on the way home from school.
How could he make her love him? He wished he knew something new and interesting to tell her, some interesting fact or cool secret, something that would really impress her. Or that she would be trapped in a burning house, or have robbers after her, so he could rush in like a hero and rescue her.
He had ridden his bicycle out to this very remote creek, so small it didn’t even have a name. Down the creek bank was a group of black boys not much older than he wa
s, and, further up, several solitary old black men in khaki trousers rolled up at the ankle. One of these—with a Styrofoam bucket and a big straw sombrero embroidered in green with Souvenir of Mexico—was now approaching him cautiously. “Good day,” he said.
“Hey,” said Hely warily.
“Why you dump all these good night crawlers on the ground?”
Hely couldn’t think of anything to say. “I spilled gasoline on them,” he said at last.
“That not going to hurt them. The fish going to eat them, anyway. Just wash them off.”
“That’s all right.”
“I help you. We can just muddle them around in the shallow water right here.”
“Go on and take them if you want them.”
Dryly, the old man chuckled, then stooped to the ground and began to fill his bucket. Hely was humiliated. He sat staring out at his unbaited hook in the water, munching morosely on boiled peanuts from a plastic bag in his pocket and pretending not to see.
How could he make her love him, make her notice when he wasn’t there? He could buy her something, maybe, except he didn’t know anything she wanted and he didn’t have any money. He wished he knew how to build a rocket or a robot, or throw knives and hit stuff like at the circus, or that he had a motorcycle and could do tricks like Evel Knievel.
Dreamily, he blinked out across the creek, at an old black woman fishing on the opposite bank. Out in the country one afternoon, Pemberton had shown him how to work the gearshift on the Cadillac. He pictured himself and Harriet, speeding up Highway 51 with the top down. Yes: he was only eleven, but in Mississippi you could get a driver’s license when you were fifteen, and in Louisiana the age was thirteen. Certainly he could pass for thirteen if he had to.
They could pack a lunch. Pickles and jelly sandwiches. Maybe he could steal some whiskey from his mother’s liquor cabinet, or, failing that, a bottle of Dr. Tichenor’s—it was antiseptic, and tasted like shit, but it was a hundred and forty proof. They could drive to Memphis, up to the museum so she could see the dinosaur bones and shrunken heads. She liked that kind of thing, educational. Then they could drive downtown to the Peabody Hotel and watch the ducks march across the lobby. They could jump on the bed in a big room, and order shrimps and steaks from room service, and watch television all night long. No one to stop them from getting in the bathtub too, if they felt like it. Without their clothes on. His face burned. How old did you have to be to get married? If he could convince the highway patrol that he was fifteen, surely he could convince some preacher. He saw himself standing with her on some rickety porch in De Soto County: Harriet in that red checked shorts set she had and he in Pem’s old Harley-Davidson T-shirt, so faded that you could hardly read the part that said Ride Hard Die Free. Harriet’s hot little hand burning in his. “And now you may kiss the bride.” The preacher’s wife would have lemonade afterwards. Then they would be married forever and drive around in the car all the time and have fun and eat fish he caught for them. His mother and father and everybody at home would be worried sick. It would be fantastic.
