by Donna Tartt
He was jolted from his reverie by a loud bang—followed by a splash, and high, crazy laughter. On the opposite bank, confusion—the old black woman dropped her pole and covered her face with her hands as a plume of spray burst from the brown water.
Then another. And another. The laughter—frightening to hear—rang from the little wooden bridge above the creek. Hely, bewildered, held his hand up against the sun and saw two white men, indistinct. The larger of the two (and he was much larger) was simply a massive shadow, slumped in hilarity, and Hely had only a confused impression of his hands dangling over the rail: big dirty hands, with big silver rings. The smaller silhouette (cowboy hat, long hair) was using both hands to aim a glinting silver pistol down at the water. He fired again and an old man upstream jumped back as the bullet kicked up a white spray of water near the end of his fishing line.
On the bridge, the big guy threw back his lion’s mane of hair, and crowed hoarsely; Hely saw the bushy outline of a beard.
The black kids had dropped their poles and were scrambling up the bank, and the old black woman on the opposite bank limped light and fast after them, holding her skirts up with one hand, an arm outstretched, crying.
“Get a move on, grammaw.”
The gun sang out again, echoes ricocheting off the bluffs, chunks of rock and dirt falling into the water. Now the guy was just shooting every which way. Hely stood petrified. A bullet whistled past and struck up a puff of dust next to a log where one of the black men lay hidden. Hely dropped his pole and turned to bolt—sliding, nearly falling—and ran as fast as he could for the underbrush.
He dived into a patch of blackberry bushes, and cried out as the brambles scratched his bare legs. As another shot rang out, he wondered if the rednecks could see from that distance that he was white, and if they could, whether they’d care.
————
Harriet, poring over her notebook, heard a loud wail through the open window and then Allison screaming, from the front yard: “Harriet! Harriet! Come quick!”
Harriet jumped up—kicking the notebook under her bed—and ran downstairs and out the front door. Allison stood on the sidewalk crying with her hair in her face. Harriet was halfway down the front walk before she realized the concrete was too hot for her bare feet, and—leaning to one side, off-balance—she hopped on one foot back to the porch.
“Come on! Hurry!”
“I have to get some shoes.”
“What’s going on?” Ida Rhew yelled from the kitchen window. “Why yall carrying on out there?”
Harriet thumped up the stairs and slapped down them again in her sandals. Before she could ask what was wrong, Allison, sobbing, dashed forward and seized Harriet’s arm and dragged her down the street. “Come on. Hurry, hurry.”
Harriet, stumbling along (the sandals were hard to run in) scuffed behind Allison as fast as she could and then Allison stopped, still weeping, and flung her free arm out at something squawking and fluttering in the middle of the street.
It was a moment or two before Harriet realized what she was looking at: a blackbird, one wing stuck in a puddle of tar. The free wing flapped frantically: Harriet, horrified, saw right down the creature’s throat as it screamed, down to the blue roots of its pointed tongue.
“Do something!” cried Allison.
Harriet didn’t know what to do. She started toward the bird, then pulled back in alarm as the bird shrieked piercingly and battered its lopsided wing at her approach.
Mrs. Fountain had shuffled out on her side porch. “Yall leave that thing alone,” she called, in a thin, peevish voice, a dim form behind the screen. “It’s nasty.”
Harriet—her heart striking fast against her ribs—grabbed at the bird, flinching, as if making feints at a hot coal; she was scared to touch it, and when its wingtip brushed her wrist, she snatched her hand back in spite of herself.
Allison screamed: “Can you get it loose?”
“I don’t know,” said Harriet, trying to sound calm. She circled around to the back of the bird, thinking it might quiet down if it couldn’t see her, but it only screamed and struggled with renewed ferocity. Broken quills bristled through the mess and—Harriet saw, with a sick feeling—glossy red coils that looked like red toothpaste.
Trembling with agitation, she knelt on the hot asphalt. “Stop it,” she whispered as she eased both hands towards it, “hush, don’t be afraid …,” but it was scared to death, flapping and floundering, its fierce black eye glinting bright with fear. She slipped her hands underneath it, supporting its stuck wing as best as she could and—wincing against the wing beating violent in her face—lifted up. There was a hellish screech and Harriet, opening her eyes, saw that she’d ripped the stuck wing off the bird’s shoulder. There it lay in the tar, grotesquely elongated, a bone glistening blue out the torn end.
“You’d better put it down,” she heard Mrs. Fountain call. “That thing’s going to bite you.”
The wing was completely gone, Harriet realized, stunned, as the bird fought and struggled in her tarry hands. There was only a pumping, oozing red spot where the wing had been.
“Put that thing down,” called Mrs. Fountain. “You’re going to get rabies. They have to give you the shots in your stomach.”
“Hurry, Harriet,” cried Allison, plucking at her sleeve, “come on, hurry, let’s take it to Edie,” but the bird gave a spasmodic shudder and went limp in her blood-slick hands, the glossy head drooping. The sheen of its feathers—green on black—was as brilliant as ever, but the bright black glaze of pain and fright in its eyes had already dulled to a dumb incredulity, the horror of death without understanding.
“Hurry, Harriet,” cried Allison. “It’s dying. It’s dying.”
“It’s dead,” Harriet heard herself say.
————
“What’s wrong with you?” shouted Ida Rhew to Hely, who had just run in through the back door—past the stove, where Ida, sweating, stood stirring the custard for a banana pudding—through the kitchen, pounded up the stairs to Harriet’s room, leaving the screen door to slam shut behind him.
He burst into Harriet’s bedroom without knocking. She was lying on the bed and his pulse—already racing—quickened at the arm flung over her head and the hollow white armpit, the dirty brown soles of her feet. Though it was only three-thirty in the afternoon she had her pyjamas on; and her shorts and shirt, with something sticky and black smeared all over them, lay wadded on the rug beside the bed.
Hely kicked them out of the way and plumped himself, panting, at her feet. “Harriet!” He was so excited he could hardly talk. “I got shot at! Somebody shot me!”
“Shot you?” With a sleepy creak of the bedsprings, Harriet rolled over and looked at him. “With what?”
“A gun. Well, they almost shot me. I was on the bank, see, and pow, there’s this big splash, water—” Frantically he fanned the air with his free hand.
“How can somebody almost shoot you?”
“I’m not kidding, Harriet. A bullet went right by my head. I jumped in some sticker bushes to get away. Look at my legs! I—”
He broke off in consternation. She was leaning back on her elbows, looking at him; and her gaze, though attentive, was not at all commiserating or even very startled. Too late, he realized his mistake: her admiration was hard enough to win, but going for sympathy would get him nowhere.
He sprang from his seat at the foot of her bed and paced over to the door. “I threw some rocks at them,” he said bravely. “I yelled at them, too. Then they ran off.”
“What were they shooting with?” said Harriet. “A BB gun or something?”
“No,” said Hely after a slight, shocked pause; how could he make her grasp the urgency of this, the danger? “It was a real gun, Harriet. Real bullets. Niggers running everywhere—” He flung out an arm, overwhelmed with the difficulty of making her see it all, the hot sun, the echoes off the bluff, the laughter and the panic.…
“Why didn’t you come with me?�
� he wailed. “I begged you to come—”
“If it was a real gun they were shooting, I think you were stupid to stand around throwing rocks.”
“No! That’s not what—”
“That’s exactly what you said.”
Hely took a deep breath and then, all of a sudden, he felt limp with exhaustion and hopelessness. The bedsprings whined as he sat down again. “Don’t you even want to know who it was?” he said. “It was so weird, Harriet. Just this … weird …”
“Sure, I want to know,” said Harriet, but she didn’t seem too worried or anything. “Who was it? Some kids?”
“No,” said Hely, aggrieved. “Grown-ups. Big guys. Trying to shoot the corks off the fishing poles.”
“Why were they shooting at you?”
“They were shooting at everybody. It wasn’t just me. They were—”
He broke off as Harriet stood up. For the first time Hely took in fully her pyjamas, her grimy black hands, the smeared clothes on the sun-soaked rug.
“Hey, man. What’s all this black mess?” he inquired sympathetically. “Are you in trouble?”
“I tore a bird’s wing off by mistake.”
“Yuck. How come?” said Hely, forgetting his own troubles for the moment.
“He was stuck in some tar. He would have died anyway, or a cat got him.”
“A live bird?”
“I was trying to save him.”
“What about your clothes?”
She gave him a vague, puzzled glance.
“That won’t come off. Not tar. Ida’s going to whip your ass.”
“I don’t care.”
“Look here. And here. It’s all over the rug.”
For several moments, there was no noise in the room except the whir of the window fan.
“My mother has a book at home that tells how to take out different stains,” said Hely in a quieter voice. “I looked up chocolate one time when I left a candy bar on a chair and it melted.”
“Did you get it off?”
“Not all the way, but she would have killed me if she’d seen it before. Give me the clothes. I can take them to my house.”
“I bet tar’s not in the book.”
“Then I’ll throw them away,” said Hely, gratified at finally having got her attention. “You’re nuts if you put them in your own garbage can. Here,” and he circled to the other side of the bed, “help me move this so she won’t see it on the rug.”
————
Odean, Libby’s maid, who was capricious about her comings and goings, had abandoned Libby’s kitchen in the middle of rolling out some pie crust. Harriet wandered in to find the kitchen table dusted with flour and strewn with apple peels and scraps of dough. At the far end—looking tiny and frail—sat Libby, drinking a cup of weak tea, the cup outsized in her little speckled hands. She was bent over the crossword puzzle from the newspaper.
“Oh, how glad I am you’ve come, darling,” she said, without remarking Harriet’s unannounced entry and without scolding her—as Edie would have been swift to do—for going out in public with a pyjama top over her blue jeans and with black all over her hands. Absent-mindedly, she patted the seat of the chair beside her. “The Commercial Appeal has a new man on the crossword puzzles and he makes them so hard. All kinds of old French words and science and things.” She indicated some smudged squares with the blunt lead of her pencil. “ ‘Metallic element.’ I know it starts with T because the Torah is certainly the first five books of Hebrew scripture but there isn’t a metal that starts with T. Is there?”
Harriet studied it for a moment. “You need another letter. Titanium has eight letters and so does Tungsten.”
“Darling, you’re so clever. I never heard of any such.”
“Here we go,” said Harriet. “Six down, ‘Referee or judge.’ That’s Umpire, so the metal must be Tungsten.”
“My goodness! They teach you children so much in school nowadays! When we were girls we didn’t learn a bit about these horrible old metals and things. It was all arithmetic and European History.”
Together, they worked on the puzzle—they were stumped on a five-letter word for Objectionable Woman beginning with S—until Odean finally came in and began to clatter pans so energetically around the kitchen that they were forced to retreat to Libby’s bedroom.
Libby, the eldest of the Cleve sisters, was the only one who had never married, though all of them (except thrice-married Adelaide) were spinsters at heart. Edie was divorced. Nobody would talk about this mysterious alliance which had produced Harriet’s mother, though Harriet was desperate to know about it, and badgered her aunts for information. But apart from a few old photographs she’d seen (weak chin, fair hair, thin smile) and certain tantalizing phrases she’d overheard (“… liked to take a drink …” “… his own worst enemy …”) all Harriet really knew about her maternal grandfather was that he’d spent time in an Alabama hospital, where he’d died a few years ago. When younger, Harriet had derived (from Heidi) the idea that she herself could be a force for family reconciliation, if only she were taken to the hospital to see him. Had not Heidi enchanted the dour Swiss grandpapa up in the Alps, brought him “back to life”?
“Ha! I shouldn’t count on that,” said Edie, jerking quite forcefully the knotted thread on the back side of her sewing.
Tat had fared better, with a content, if uneventful, nineteen-year marriage to the owner of a lumber company—Pinkerton Lamb, known locally as Mr. Pink—who had dropped dead of an embolism at the planing mill before Harriet and Allison were born. The wide and courtly Mr. Pink (much older than Tat, a colorful figure in his puttees and Norfolk jackets) had been unable to father children; there was talk of adoption which never came to anything but Tat was unperturbed by childlessness and widowhood alike; indeed, she had nearly forgotten that she’d ever been married at all, and reacted with mild surprise when reminded of it.
Libby—the spinster—was nine years older than Edie, eleven years older than Tat, and a full seventeen years older than Adelaide. Pale, flat-chested, nearsighted even in her youth, she had never been as pretty as her younger sisters but the real reason that she had never married was that selfish old Judge Cleve—whose harried wife died in childbirth with Adelaide—had pressed her to stay home and take care of him and the three younger girls. By appealing to poor Libby’s selfless nature, and by managing to run off the few suitors that came along, he retained her at Tribulation as unpaid nursemaid, cook, and cribbage companion until he died when Libby was in her late sixties: leaving a pile of debts, and Libby virtually penniless.
Her sisters were tormented with guilt about this—as though Libby’s servitude had been their fault, not their father’s. “Disgraceful,” said Edie. “Seventeen years old, and Daddy forcing her to raise two children and a baby.” But Libby had accepted the sacrifice cheerfully, without regrets. She had adored her sulky, ungrateful old father, and she considered it a privilege to stay at home and care for her motherless siblings, whom she loved extravagantly and quite without thought for herself. For her generosity, her patience, her uncomplaining good humor, her younger sisters (who did not share her gentle nature) considered Libby as close to a saint as it was possible for a person to be. As a young woman, she’d been quite colorless and plain (though radiantly pretty when she smiled); now, at eighty-two, with her satin slippers, her pink satin bed-jackets and her angora cardigans trimmed with pink ribbon, there was something babyish and adorable about her, with her gigantic blue eyes and her silky white hair.
To step into Libby’s sheltered bedroom, with its wooden window-blinds and its walls of duck-egg blue, was like sliding into a friendly underwater kingdom. Outside, in the fierce sun, the lawns and houses and trees were blanched and hostile-looking; the glare-dazzled sidewalks made her think of the blackbird, of the bright meaningless horror that shone in its eyes. Libby’s room was a refuge from all this: from heat, dust, cruelty. The colors and textures were unchanged since Harriet’s babyhood: dull, dark floo
rboards, tufted chenille bedspread and dusty organza curtains, the crystal candy dish where Libby kept her hairpins. On the mantelpiece slumbered a chunky, egg-shaped paperweight of aquamarine glass—bubbled in its heart, filtering the sun like seawater—which changed throughout the day like a living creature. In the mornings, it glowed bright, hitting its most brilliant sparkle about ten o’clock, fading to a cool jade by noon. Throughout her childhood, Harriet had spent many long, contented hours ruminating on the floor, as the light in the paperweight swung high and flittered, tottered and sank, as the tiger-striped light glowed here, glowed there, on the blue-green walls. The flowery vine-patterned carpet was a game board, her own private battlefield. She had spent countless afternoons on her hands and knees, moving toy armies across those winding green paths. Over the mantel and dominating it all was the haunting old smoky photograph of Tribulation, white columns rising ghostly from black evergreens.
Together, they worked the crossword puzzle, with Harriet perched on the arm of Libby’s chintz-upholstered chair. The china clock ticked blandly on the mantel, the same cordial, comforting old tick Harriet had heard all her life; and the blue bedroom was like Heaven with its friendly smells of cats and cedarwood and dusty cloth, of vetivert root and Limes de Buras powder and some kind of purple bath salts that Libby had used for as long as Harriet could remember. All the old ladies used vetivert root, sewn into sachets, to keep the moths out of their clothes; and though the quaint mustiness of it was familiar to Harriet from infancy, there was a tickle of mystery about it still, something sad and foreign, like rotted forests or woodsmoke in autumn; it was the old, dark smell of plantation armoires, of Tribulation, of the very past.
