by Donna Tartt
There would be roaches, and worse. Something had to be done before Grace Fountain or some other nosy neighbor called the Health Department. Confronting Charlotte would only mean excuses and tears. An appeal to the adulterous Dix was risky, because if it came to divorce (and it might) the squalor would only give Dix an edge in court. Why on earth had Charlotte let the colored woman go?
Edie pinned her hair back, swallowed a couple of aspirin with a glass of water (her ribs hurt mightily, after the night on the cot) and stepped out into the room again. All roads lead to the hospital, she thought. Since Libby’s death, she had been returning to the hospital nightly in her dreams—wandering the corridors, riding the elevator up and down, searching for floors and room numbers that didn’t exist—and now it was daytime and here she was again, in a room very like the one where Libby had died.
Harriet was still asleep—which was fine. The doctor had said she’d sleep most of the day. After the accountant, and yet another morning wasted in poring through Judge Cleve’s books (which were written practically in cypher), she had to meet with the lawyer. He was urging her to settle with this awful Mr. Rixey person—which was all well and good, except that the “reasonable compromise” he was suggesting would leave her practically destitute. Lost in thought, (Mr. Rixey had not even accepted the “reasonable compromise”; she would find out today if he had) Edie gave herself one last glance in the mirror, got her purse, and walked out of the room without noticing the preacher loitering at the end of the hall.
————
The bedsheets felt cool and delicious. Harriet lay in the morning light with her eyes tight shut. She had been dreaming of stone steps in a bright grassy field, steps that led nowhere, steps so crumbled with age that they might have been boulders tumbled and sunken in the buzzing pasture. The needle was a hateful ping in the crook of her elbow, silver and chill, cumbrous apparatus winding away from it up through the ceiling and into the white skies of dream.
For some minutes she hung between sleep and waking. Footsteps knocked across the floor (cold corridors, echoing like palaces) and she lay very still, hoping that some kindly official person would walk over and take notice of her: Harriet small, Harriet pale and ill.
The footsteps neared the bed, and stopped. Harriet sensed a presence leaning over her. Quietly she lay there, eyelids fluttering, allowing herself to be examined. Then she opened her eyes and started back in horror at the preacher, whose face was inches from her own. His scar stood out a bright, turkey-wattle red; beneath the melted tissue of the brow bone, his eye shone wet and fierce.
“Be quiet, now,” he said, with a parrot-like cock of his head. His voice was high and singsong, with an eerieness to it. “Aint no need in making noise, innit?”
Harriet would have liked to make noise—a lot of it. Frozen with fear and confusion, she stared up at him.
“I know who you are.” His mouth moved very little as he spoke. “You was at the Mission that night.”
Harriet cut her eyes over at the empty doorway. Pain flicked through her temples like electricity.
The preacher furrowed his brow at her as he leaned closer. “You was messing with them snakes. I think it was you that let em aloose, wannit?” he said, in his curious high-pitched voice. His hair pomade smelled like lilac. “And you was following my brother Danny, wasn’t you?”
Harriet stared at him. Did he know about the tower?
“How come you run from me in the hall back there?”
He didn’t know. Harriet was careful to sit very still. At school, nobody could beat her in the game where the kids tried to outstare each other. Dim bells clanged in her head. She wasn’t well; she longed to rub her eyes, start the morning over. Something about the position of her own face, as opposed to the preacher’s, didn’t make sense; it was as if he were a reflection she ought to be seeing from a different angle.
The preacher squinted at her. “You’re a bold little piece,” he said. “Bold as brass.”
Harriet felt weak and giddy. He doesn’t know, she told herself fiercely, he doesn’t know.… There was a call button for the nurse on the side of her bed, and though she wanted very badly to turn her head and look at it, she forced herself to keep still.
He was watching her closely. Beyond, the whiteness of the room swept away into airy distances, an emptiness just as sickening in its way as the close darkness of the water tank.
“Lookahere,” he said, leaning even closer. “What you so scared of? Aint nobody laid a finger on you.”
Rigidly, Harriet looked up in his face and did not flinch.
“Maybe you done something to be scared of, then? I want to know what you was up to, sneaking around my house. And if you don’t tell me, I’m on find out.”
Suddenly a cheerful voice said from the doorway: “Knock knock!”
Hastily, the preacher straightened and turned around. There, waving from the doorway, stood Roy Dial with some Sunday-school booklets and a box of candy.
“Hope I’m not interrupting anything,” said Mr. Dial, striding in unafraid. He was in casual dress instead of the suit and tie that he wore to Sunday school: all sporty in his deck shoes and khakis, a whiff about him of Florida and Sea World. “Why Eugene. What are you doing here?”
“Mr. Dial!” The preacher sprang to offer his hand.
His tone had changed—charged with a new kind of energy—and even in her illness and fright, Harriet noted this. He’s afraid, she thought.
“Ah—yes.” Mr. Dial looked at Eugene. “Wasn’t a Ratliff admitted yesterday? In the newspaper …”
“Yes sir! My brother Farsh. He …” Eugene made a visible effort to slow down. “Well, he’s been shot, sir.”
Shot? thought Harriet, dazed.
“Shot in the neck, sir. They found him last night. He—”
“Well, my goodness!” cried Mr. Dial gaily, rearing back with a drollery which told how little he cared to hear about Eugene’s family. “Goodness gracious! I sure do hate that! I’ll be sure and stop in and see him as soon as he feels a little better! I—”
Without giving Eugene the chance to explain that Farish wasn’t going to get better, Mr. Dial threw up his hands as if to say: what do you do? and set down the box of candy on the night-stand. “I’m afraid this isn’t for you, Harriet,” he said, in dolphinly profile, leaning in cozily to peer at her with his left eye. “I was just running out before work to visit with dear Agnes Upchurch” (Miss Upchurch was a rickety old Baptist invalid, a banker’s widow, high on Mr. Dial’s list of prospects for the Building Fund) “and who should I bump into downstairs but your grandmother! Why my goodness! I said. Miss Edith! I—”
The preacher, Harriet noticed, was edging towards the door. Mr. Dial saw her looking at him, and turned.
“And how do you know this fine young lady?”
The preacher—arrested in his retreat—made the best of it. “Yes, sir,” he said, rubbing at the back of his neck with one hand and stepping back to Mr. Dial’s side as if that was what he had meant to do all along, “well, sir, I was here when they brung her in last night. Too weak to walk. She was a mighty sick little girl and that’s the truth.” This he said with a conclusive air, as if further explanation could not possibly be necessary.
“And so you were just—” Mr. Dial looked as if he could hardly bring himself to say it—“visiting? With Harriet here?”
Eugene cleared his throat and looked away. “There’s my brother, sir,” he said, “and while I’m out here, I might as well try to visit and bring some comfort to others. It’s a joy to get out amongst the little ones and pour out that precious seed.”
Mr. Dial looked at Harriet, as if to say: has this man been bothering you?
“It don’t take nothing but a set of knees and a Bible. You know,” said Eugene, nodding at the television set, “that there’s the greatest detriment to a child’s salvation you can have in the house. The Sin Box, is what I call it.”
“Mr. Dial,” said Harriet suddenly—and he
r voice sounded thin and faraway—“where’s my grandmother?”
“Downstairs, I think,” said Mr. Dial, fixing her with his chilly porpoise eye. “On the telephone. What’s the matter?”
“I don’t feel good,” said Harriet, truthfully.
The preacher, she noticed, was easing out of the room. When he saw Harriet watching him, he gave her a look before he slid away.
“What’s the matter?” said Mr. Dial, bending down over her, overwhelming her with his sharp, fruity aftershave. “Do you want some water? Do you want some breakfast? Are you sick to your stomach?”
“I—I—” Harriet struggled to sit up. What she wanted she couldn’t ask for, not in so many words. She was afraid of being left alone, but she could not think exactly how to tell Mr. Dial this without telling him what she was afraid of, and why.
Just at that instant, the telephone at her bedside rang.
“Here, let me get that,” said Mr. Dial, snatching up the receiver and passing it to her.
“Mama?” said Harriet, faintly.
“Congratulations! A brilliant coup!”
It was Hely. His voice—though exuberant—was tinny and remote. From the hiss on the line, Harriet knew he was calling from the Saints phone in his bedroom.
“Harriet? Hah! Man, you destroyed him! You nailed him!”
“I—” Harriet’s brain wasn’t working at top speed and she couldn’t think quick enough what to say. Despite the connection, his hoots and yelps were so loud on the other end that Harriet feared Mr. Dial could hear him.
“Way to go!” In his excitement he dropped the phone, with an enormous clatter; his voice rushed back at her, breathy, deafening. “It was in the paper—”
“What?”
“I knew it was you. What are you doing in the hospital? What happened? Are you hurt? Are you shot?”
Harriet cleared her throat in a special way they had, which meant she wasn’t free to talk.
“Oh, right,” said Hely, after a somber pause. “Sorry.”
Mr. Dial, taking his candy, mouthed at her: I have to run.
“No, don’t,” said Harriet, in sudden panic, but Mr. Dial kept right on backing out the door.
See you later! he mouthed, with bright gesticulations. I got to go sell me some cars!
“Just answer yes or no, then,” Hely was saying. “Are you in trouble?”
Fearfully, Harriet gazed at the empty doorway. Mr. Dial was far from the kindest or most understanding of adults, but at least he was competent: all rectitude and pickiness, sweet moral outrage itself. Nobody would dare to hurt her if he was around.
“Are they going to arrest you? Is a policeman on guard?”
“Hely, can you do something for me?” she said.
“Sure,” he said, serious suddenly, alert as a terrier.
Harriet—an eye on the door—said: “Promise.” Though she was half-whispering, her voice carried farther than she wanted it to in the frosty silence, all Formica and slickness.
“What? I can’t hear you.”
“Promise me first.”
“Harriet, come on, just tell me!”
“At the water tower.” Harriet took a deep breath; there was no way to say it without coming right out and saying it. “There’s a gun lying on the ground. I need you to go—”
“A gun?”
“—to get it and throw it away,” she said hopelessly. Why even bother keeping her voice down? Who knew who was listening, on his end or even hers? She’d just watched a nurse walk past the door; now here came another, glancing in curiously as she passed.
“Jeez, Harriet!”
“Hely, I can’t go.” She felt like crying.
“But I’ve got band practice. And we have to stay late today.”
Band practice. Harriet’s heart sank. How was this ever going to work?
“Or,” Hely was saying, “or I could go now. If I hurry. Mom’s dropping me off in half an hour.”
Wanly, Harriet smiled at the nurse who put her head in at the door. What difference was it going to make, either way? Leave her father’s gun on the ground, for the police to find, or let Hely go get it? It would be all over the band hall by noon.
“What am I supposed to do with it?” Hely was saying. “Hide it in your yard?”
“No,” said Harriet, so sharply that the nurse raised her eyebrows. “Throw it—” jeez, she thought, closing her eyes, just go ahead and say it—“Throw it in the …”
“The river?” Hely inquired, helpfully.
“Right,” said Harriet, shifting as the nurse (a big square woman, with stiff gray hair and large hands) reached over to plump her pillow.
“What if it won’t sink?”
It took a moment for this to register. Hely repeated the question as the nurse unhooked Harriet’s chart off the foot of the bed and departed, with a heavy side-swaying gait.
“It’s … metal,” said Harriet.
Hely, she realized with a shock, was talking to somebody on the other end.
Rapidly, he came back on. “All right! Gotta go!”
Click. Harriet sat with the dead phone to her ear, sat stunned until the dial tone came on and, fearfully (for she had never taken her eyes from the doorway, not for a moment), hung up the receiver and settled back on the pillows, looking about the room in apprehension.
————
The hours dragged, interminable, white on white. Harriet had nothing to read, and though her head ached terribly she was too afraid to go to sleep. Mr. Dial had left a Sunday-school booklet, called “Apron String Devotionals,” with a picture of a rosy baby in an old-fashioned sun bonnet pushing a flower cart, and at last, in desperation, she turned to this. It was designed for the mothers of young children, and it disgusted Harriet in a matter of moments.
As disgusted as she was, she read the whole thing from cover to flimsy cover and then sat. And sat. There was no clock in the room, no pictures to look at and nothing to keep her thoughts and fears from roiling miserably about, nothing except the pain which—intermittently—pitched through her stomach in waves. When it rolled away, she lay beached and gasping, washed clean for the moment, but soon her worries set in gnawing again with renewed energy. Hely hadn’t actually promised anything. Who knew if he’d get the gun or not? And even if he did go get it: would he have the sense to throw it away? Hely in the band hall, showing off her father’s gun. “Hey Dave, look at this!” She winced and pressed her head deep in the pillow. Her father’s gun. Her fingerprints all over it. And Hely, the biggest blabbermouth in the world. Yet who could she have asked to help her but Hely? No one. No one.
After a long while the nurse lumbered in again (her thick-soled shoes all worn down on the outer edge) to give Harriet a shot. Harriet, who was rolling her head around, and talking to herself a bit, struggled to pull away from her worries. With effort, she turned her attention to the nurse. She had a jolly weatherbeaten face with wrinkled cheeks, thick ankles and a rolling, off-centered walk. Except for her nurse’s uniform, she might have been the captain of a sailing ship, striding across decks. Her nametag said Gladys Coots.
“Now, I’m going to get this over with as quick as I can,” she was saying.
Harriet—too weak and too worried to put up her customary resistance—rolled on her stomach and grimaced as the needle slid into her hip. She hated shots, and—when younger—had screamed and cried and fought to escape, to such a degree that Edie (who knew how to give injections) had on several occasions impatiently rolled up her sleeves right in the doctor’s office and taken over with the needle.
“Where’s my grandmother?” she asked as she rolled over, rubbing the stung place on her bottom.
“Mercy! Aint nobody told you?”
“What?” cried Harriet, scrabbling back in the bed like a crab. “What happened? Where is she?”
“Sssh. Calm down!” Energetically, the nurse began to plump up the pillows. “She had to go downtown for a while, is all. Is all,” she repeated, when Harriet looked at
her doubtfully. “Now lie on back and make yourself comfortable.”
Never, never again in her life would Harriet know such a long day. Pain pulsed and spangled merciless in her temples; a parallelogram of sun shimmered motionless on the wall. Nurse Coots, swaying in and out with the bedpan, was a rarity: a white elephant, much heralded, returning every century or so. In the course of the interminable morning she drew blood, administered eye-drops, brought Harriet iced water, ginger ale, a dish of green gelatin which Harriet tasted and pushed aside, cutlery clattering fretful on her bright plastic tray.
Fearfully, she sat upright in bed and listened. The corridor was a sedate net of echoes: talk at the desk, occasional laughter, the tap of canes and the scrape of walkers as gray convalescents from Physical Therapy drifted up and down the hall. Every so often, a woman’s voice came on the intercom, calling out strings of numbers, obscure commands, Carla, step into the hallway, orderly on two, orderly on two.…
As if counting out sums, Harriet worked out what she knew on her fingers, muttering under her breath, not caring if she looked like a crazy person. The preacher didn’t know about the tower. He’d said nothing to indicate he knew Danny was up there (or dead). But all that might change if the doctor figured out that bad water was what had made Harriet sick. The Trans Am was parked far enough from the tower that probably no one had thought to look up there—and if they hadn’t already, who knows, maybe they wouldn’t.
But maybe they would. And then there was her father’s gun. Why hadn’t she picked it up, how could she have forgotten? Of course, she hadn’t actually shot anybody; but the gun had been shot, they’d know that, and the fact that it was at the base of the tower would surely be enough to make somebody go up and look in the tower.
And Hely. All his cheerful questions: had she been arrested, was a policeman on guard. It would be immensely entertaining for Hely if she was arrested: not a consoling thought.
