The Little Friend

CHAPTER

2

——

The Blackbird

A few nights later, around ten o’clock, while her mother and sister were upstairs sleeping, Harriet gently turned the key in the lock of the gun cabinet. The guns were old and in bad repair, inherited by Harriet’s father from an uncle who’d collected them. Of this mysterious Uncle Clyde, Harriet knew nothing but his profession (engineering), his temperament (“sour,” said Adelaide, making a face; she had been at high school with him) and his end (plane crash, off the Florida coast). Because he had been “lost at sea” (that was the phrase that everyone used), Harriet never thought of Uncle Clyde as dead, exactly. Whenever his name was mentioned, she had a vague impression of a bearded tatterdemalion like Ben Gunn in Treasure Island, leading a lonely existence on some bleak, salty islet, his pants in rags and his wristwatch corroded from the seawater.

Carefully, with a palm on the glass so it wouldn’t rattle, Harriet worked the sticky old door of the gun cabinet. With a shiver, it popped open. On the top shelf was a case of antique pistols—tiny dueling sets, trimmed in silver and mother of pearl, freakish little Derringers scarcely four inches long. Below, ranked in chronological order and leaning to the left, stood the larger arms: Kentucky flintlocks; a grim, ten-pound Plains rifle; a rust-locked muzzle loader said to have been in the Civil War. Of the newer guns, the most impressive was a Winchester shotgun from World War I.

Harriet’s father, the owner of this collection, was a remote and unpleasant figure. People whispered about the fact that he lived in Nashville, since he and Harriet’s mother were still married to each other. Though Harriet had no idea how this arrangement had come to be (except, vaguely, that it had to do with her father’s work), it was quite unremarkable to her, since he had lived away from home as long as Harriet could remember. A check arrived every month for the household expenses; he came home for Christmas and Thanksgiving, and stopped by for several days in the fall on the way down to his hunting camp in the Delta. To Harriet, this arrangement seemed perfectly reasonable, suiting as it did the personalities of those involved: her mother, who had very little energy (staying in bed most of the day), and her father, who had too much energy, and the wrong kind. He ate fast, talked fast, and—unless he had a drink in his hand—was incapable of sitting still. In public, he was always kidding around, and people thought he was a hoot, but his unpredictable humors were not always so amusing in private, and his impulsive habit of saying the first thing that came into his head often hurt his family’s feelings.

Worse: Harriet’s father was always right, even when he was wrong. Everything was a test of wills. Though he was quite inflexible in his opinions, he loved to argue; and even in good moods (settled back in his chair with a cocktail, half-watching the television) he liked to needle Harriet, and tease her, just to show her who was boss. “Smart girls aren’t popular,” he’d say. Or: “No point of educating you when you’re just going to grow up and get married.” And because Harriet was incensed by this sort of talk—which he considered the plain, good-natured truth—and refused to take it, there was trouble. Sometimes he whipped Harriet with a belt—for talking back—while Allison looked on glassy-eyed and their mother cowered in the bedroom. Other times, as punishment, he assigned Harriet tremendous, un-doable chores (mowing the yard with the push mower, cleaning the whole attic by herself) which Harriet simply planted her feet and refused to do. “Go on!” Ida Rhew would say, poking her head through the attic door with a worried look, after her father had stormed downstairs. “You better get going or he going to tear you up some more when he gets back!”

But Harriet—glowering amidst stacks of papers and old magazines—would not budge. He could whip her all he wanted; never mind. It was the principle of the thing. And often Ida was so worried for Harriet that she would abandon her own work, and go upstairs and do the thing herself.

Because her father was so quarrelsome and disruptive, and so dissatisfied with everything, it seemed right to Harriet that he did not live at home. Never had she been struck by the strangeness of the arrangement, or realized that people thought it odd, until one afternoon in fourth grade when her school bus broke down on a country road. Harriet was seated next to a talkative younger girl named Christy Dooley, who had big front teeth and wore a white crochet poncho to school every day. She was the daughter of a policeman, though nothing in her white-mouse appearance or twitchy manner suggested this. Between sips of leftover vegetable soup from her Thermos bottle, she chattered without encouragement, repeating various secrets (about teachers, about other people’s parents) that she had heard at home. Harriet stared bleakly out the window, waiting for somebody to come and fix the bus, until she became aware, with a jolt, that Christy was talking about her own mother and father.

Harriet turned to stare. Oh, everybody knew, Christy whispered, huddling close under her poncho (she always wanted to sit closer than was comfortable). Didn’t Harriet wonder why her dad lived out of town?

“He works there,” said Harriet. Never before had this explanation struck her as inadequate, but Christy gave a satisfied and very adult little sigh, and then told Harriet the real story. The gist of it was this: Harriet’s father wanted to move after Robin died—to a new town, someplace he could “start over.” Christy’s eyes widened with a confidential spookiness. “But she wouldn’t go.” It was as if Christy was talking not about Harriet’s own mother but some woman in a ghost story. “She said she was going to stay forever.”

Harriet—who was annoyed to be sitting by Christy in the first place—slid away from her on the seat and looked out the window.

“Are you mad?” said Christy slyly.

“No.”

“What’s wrong then?”

“Your breath smells like soup.”

In the years since, Harriet had heard other remarks, from both children and adults, to the effect that there was something “creepy” about her household but these struck Harriet as ridiculous. Her family’s living arrangements were practical—even ingenious. Her father’s job in Nashville paid the bills, but no one enjoyed his holiday visits; he did not love Edie and the aunts; and everybody was disturbed by the hard, infuriating way he badgered Harriet’s mother. Last year he had nagged her to go with him to some Christmas party until at last (rubbing her shoulders through the thin sleeves of her night-gown) she blinked and said Fine. But when it was time to get ready, she sat at her dressing table in her bathrobe and stared at her reflection without putting on lipstick or taking the pins out of her hair. When Allison tiptoed upstairs to check on her, she said she had a migraine. Then she locked herself in the bathroom and ran the taps until Harriet’s father (red in the face, trembling) pounded on the door with his fists. It had been a miserable Christmas Eve, Harriet and Allison sitting rigidly in the living room by the tree, as the Christmas carols (alternately sonorous and jubilant) swelled powerfully from the stereo, not quite powerful enough to cover the shouting upstairs. It was a relief when Harriet’s father clumped out to his car with his suitcase and his shopping bag of presents early on Christmas afternoon and drove away again, up to Tennessee, and the household settled back with a sigh into its own forgetful doze.

Harriet’s house was a sleepy house—for everybody but Harriet, who was wakeful and alert by nature. When she was the only person awake in the dark, silent house, as she often was, the boredoms that settled over her were so dense, so glassy and confused, that sometimes she was unable to do anything but gape at a window or a wall, as if doped. Her mother stayed in her bedroom pretty much all the time; and after Allison went to bed—early, most nights, around nine—Harriet was on her own: drinking milk straight out of the carton, wandering through the house in her stocking feet, through the stacks of newspaper which were piled high in nearly every room. Harriet’s mother, since Robin’s death, had developed an odd inability to throw anything away and the junk which packed the attic and cellar had now begun to creep into the rest of the house.

Sometimes Harriet enjoyed being up by herself. She switched on lights, turned on the television or the record player, called Dial-a-Prayer or made prank calls to the neighbors. She ate what she wanted out of the refrigerator; she clambered up on high shelves, and poked through cabinets she wasn’t supposed to open; she jumped on the sofa till the springs squealed, and pulled the cushions on the ground and built forts and life rafts on the floor. Sometimes she pulled her mother’s old college clothes out of the closet (pastel sweaters with moth holes, elbow gloves in every color, an aqua prom dress that—on Harriet—dragged a foot upon the ground). This was dangerous; Harriet’s mother was quite particular about the clothes, though she never wore them; but Harriet was careful about putting everything back the way she’d found it and if her mother ever noticed anything amiss, she never mentioned it.

None of the guns were loaded. The only ammunition in the case was a box of twelve-gauge shells. Harriet, who had only the haziest idea of the difference between a rifle and a shotgun, shook the shells out of the box and arranged them in starburst patterns on the carpet. One of the big guns had a bayonet attachment, which was interesting, but her favorite was the Winchester with the telescopic scope. She switched off the overhead light and propped the barrel on the sill of the living-room window and looked down the scope with narrowed eyes—at parked cars, pavement sparkling under the high lamps and sprinklers hissing on lush empty lawns. The fort was under attack; she was guarding her post and all their lives depended on it.

Wind chimes tinkled on Mrs. Fountain’s front porch. Across the overgrown lawn, along the oily barrel of the gun, she could see the tree her brother had died in. A breeze whispered in the glossy leaves, jingling the liquid shadows on the grass.

Sometimes, when Harriet was prowling the gloomy house late at night, she felt her dead brother draw close to her side, his silence friendly, confidential. She heard his footfall in the creakings of the floorboards, sensed him in the playing of a blown curtain or the arc of a door that swung open by itself. Occasionally, he was mischievous—hiding her book or her candy bar, replacing it on the seat of her chair when she wasn’t looking. Harriet enjoyed his company. Somehow she imagined that wherever he lived it was always night, and that when she wasn’t there, he was all by himself: fidgeting, lonely, swinging his legs, in a waiting room with ticking clocks.

Here I am, she said to herself, on guard. For she felt the glow of his presence quite warmly when she sat at the window with the gun. Twelve years had passed since her brother’s death and much had altered or fallen away but the view from the living-room window had not changed. Even the tree was still there.

Harriet’s arms ached. Carefully, she laid the rifle down at the foot of her armchair and went into the kitchen for a Popsicle. Back in the living room, she ate it by the window, in the dark, without hurrying. Then she put the stick on top of a stack of newspaper and resumed her position with the rifle. The Popsicles were grape, her favorite. There were more in the freezer, and nobody to stop her from eating the whole box, but it was hard to eat Popsicles and keep the rifle propped up at the same time.

She moved the gun across the dark sky, following some night bird across the moonlit clouds. A car door slammed. Quickly, she swivelled toward the sound and zeroed in on Mrs. Fountain—returning late from choir practice, tottering up her front walk in the haze of the street lamps—oblivious, entirely unaware that one sparkly earring shone dead in the center of Harriet’s crosshairs. Porch lights off, kitchen lights on. Mrs. Fountain’s slope-shouldered, goat-faced silhouette gliding past the window shade, like a puppet in a shadow play.

“Bang,” Harriet whispered. One twitch, one squeeze of the knuckle, that’s all it took and Mrs. Fountain would be where she belonged—down with the Devil. She would fit right in—horns curling out of her permanent and an arrow-tipped tail poking from the back of her dress. Ramming that grocery cart around through Hell.

A car was approaching. She swung from Mrs. Fountain and followed it, magnified and bouncing, in her scope—teenagers, windows down, going too fast—until the red tail-lights swept around the corner and vanished.

On her way back to Mrs. Fountain, she saw a lighted window blur over the lens and then, to her delight, she was smack in the Godfreys’ dining room, across the road. The Godfreys were rosy and cheerful and well into their forties—childless, sociable, active in the Baptist church—and to see the two of them up and moving around was comforting. Mrs. Godfrey stood scooping yellow ice cream from a carton into a dish. Mr. Godfrey sat at the table with his back to Harriet. The two of them were alone, lace tablecloth, pink-shaded lamp burning low in the corner; everything sharp and intimate, down to the grape-leaf patterns on the Godfreys’ ice-cream dishes and the bobby pins in Mrs. Godfrey’s hair.

The Winchester was a pair of binoculars, a camera, a way of seeing things. She laid her cheek against the stock, which was smooth and very cool.

Robin, she was certain, watched over her on these nights much the way she watched over him. She could feel him breathing at her back: quiet, sociable, glad for her company. But the creaks and shadows of the dark house still frightened her sometimes.

Restless, her arms aching from the gun’s weight, Harriet shifted in the armchair. Occasionally, on nights like this, she smoked her mother’s cigarettes. On the worst nights she was unable even to read, and the letters of her books—even Treasure Island, Kidnapped, books she loved and never tired of—changed into some kind of savage Chinese: illegible, vicious, an itch she couldn’t scratch. Once, out of sheer frustration, she had smashed a china figurine of a kitten belonging to her mother: then, panic-stricken (for her mother was fond of the figurine, and had had it since she was a little girl), she wrapped the fragments in a paper towel and shoved them inside an empty cereal box and put the cereal box at the very bottom of the garbage can. That had been two years ago. As far as Harriet knew, her mother still was not aware that the kitten was missing from the china cabinet. But whenever Harriet thought of this, especially when she was tempted to do something of the sort again (break a teacup, rip up a tablecloth with scissors), it gave her a heady, sick feeling. She could set the house on fire if she wanted to, and no one would be there to stop her.

A rusty cloud had drifted halfway over the moon. She swept the rifle back to the Godfreys’ window. Now Mrs. Godfrey had some ice cream too. She was talking to her husband, between lazy spoonfuls, with a rather cool, annoyed expression on her face. Mr. Godfrey had both elbows propped on the lace tablecloth. All she could see was the back of his bald head—which was dead in the center of the crosshairs—and she couldn’t tell if he was answering Mrs. Godfrey or even if he was listening.

Suddenly, he got up, made a stretching movement, and walked out. Mrs. Godfrey, alone now at the table, said something. As she ate the last spoonful of her ice cream, she turned her head slightly, as if listening to Mr. Godfrey’s response in the other room, and then stood and walked to the door, smoothing her skirt with the back of her hand. Then the picture went black. Theirs had been the only light on the street. Mrs. Fountain’s had gone out long ago.

Harriet glanced at the clock on the mantel. It was past eleven, and she had to be up at nine in the morning for Sunday school.

There was nothing to be scared of—the lamps shone bright on the calm street—but the house was very still and Harriet was a little edgy. Even though he had come to her house in broad daylight, she was most afraid of the killer at night. When he returned in her nightmares it was always dark: a cold breeze blowing through the house, curtains fluttering, and all the windows and doors ajar as she ran to and fro slamming the sashes, fumbling with the locks, her mother sitting unconcerned on the sofa with cold-cream on her face, never moving a finger to help, and never enough time before the glass shattered and the gloved hand reached through to turn the knob. Sometimes Harriet saw the door opening but she always woke up before she saw a face.

On hands and knees, she gathered the shells. Neatly, she re-stacked them in their box; wiped the gun clean of fingerprints and replaced it, then locked the cabinet and dropped the key back in the red leather box in her father’s desk where it belonged: along with the nail clippers, some mis-matched cufflinks and a pair of dice in a green suede pouch, and a stack of faded matchbooks from nightclubs in Memphis and Miami and New Orleans.

Upstairs, she undressed quietly without turning on the lamp. In the next bed, Allison lay face down in a dead man’s float. The moonlight shifted over the bedspread in dappled patterns which changed and played when the wind stirred through the trees. A jumble of stuffed animals were packed in the bed around her as if on a life raft—a patchwork elephant, a piebald dog with a button eye missing, a woolly black lambkin and a kangaroo of purple velveteen and a whole family of teddy bears—and their innocent shapes crowded around her head in sweet, shadowed grotesquerie, as if they were creatures in Allison’s dreams.

————

“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.

Dear Mr. Dial (it began.)

I am a young lady of your acquaintance who has admired you in secret for some time. I am so crazy about you I can hardly get to sleep. I know that I am very young, and there is Mrs. Dial, too, but perhaps we can arrange a meeting some evening out behind Dial Chevrolet. I have prayed over this letter, and the Lord has told me that Love is the answer. I will write again soon. Please do not show this letter to any body. p.s. I think you might know who this is. Love, your secret Valentine!

At the bottom Harriet had pasted a tiny picture of Annabel Arnold that she’d cut out of the newspaper next to an enormous, jaundiced head of Mr. Dial she’d found in the Yellow Pages—his pop-eyes goggling with enthusiasm and his head aburst in a corona of cartoon stars above which a jangle of frantic black letters screamed:

WHERE QUALITY COMES FIRST!

LOW DOWN PAYMENT!

Looking at these letters now gave Harriet the idea of actually sending Mr. Dial a threatening note, in misspelled baby printing, purporting to be from Curtis Ratliff. But this, she decided, tapping her pencil against her teeth, would be unfair to Curtis. She wished Curtis no harm, especially after his attack on Mr. Dial.

She turned the page, and on a fresh sheet of orange paper, wrote:

Goals for Summer

Harriet Cleve Dufresnes

Restlessly, she stared at this. Like the woodcutter’s child at the beginning of a fairy tale, a mysterious longing had possessed her, a desire to travel far and do great things; and though she could not say exactly what it was she wanted to do, she knew that it was something grand and gloomy and extremely difficult.

She turned back several pages, to the list of people she admired: a preponderance of generals, soldiers, explorers, men of action all. Joan of Arc had led armies when she was hardly older than Harriet. Yet, for Christmas last year, Harriet’s father had given Harriet an insulting board game for girls called What Shall I Be? It was a particularly flimsy game, meant to offer career guidance but no matter how well you played, it offered only four possible futures: teacher, ballerina, mother, or nurse.

The possible, as it was presented in her Health textbook (a mathematical progression of dating, “career,” marriage, and motherhood), did not interest Harriet. Of all the heroes on her list, the greatest of them all was Sherlock Holmes, and he wasn’t even a real person. Then there was Harry Houdini. He was a master of the impossible; more importantly, for Harriet, he was a master of escape. No prison in the world could hold him: he escaped from straitjackets, from locked trunks dropped in fast rivers and from coffins buried six feet underground.

And how had he done it? He wasn’t afraid. Saint Joan had galloped out with the angels on her side but Houdini had mastered fear on his own. No divine aid for him; he’d taught himself the hard way how to beat back panic, the horror of suffocation and drowning and dark. Handcuffed in a locked trunk in the bottom of a river, he squandered not a heartbeat on being afraid, never buckled to the terror of the chains and the dark and the icy water; if he became lightheaded, for even a moment, if he fumbled at the breathless labor before him—somersaulting along the river-bed, head over heels—he would never come up from the water alive.

A training program. This was Houdini’s secret. He’d immersed himself in daily tubs of ice, swum immense distances underwater, practiced holding his breath until he could hold it for three minutes. And while the tubs of ice were impossible, the swimming and the breath-holding—this she could do.

She heard her mother and sister coming in the front door, her sister’s plaintive voice, unintelligible. Quickly she hid the notebook and ran downstairs.

————

“Don’t say Hate, honey,” said Charlotte absent-mindedly to Allison. The three of them were sitting around the dining-room table in their Sunday dresses, eating the chicken that Ida had left for their lunch.

Allison, with her hair falling in her face, sat staring at her plate, chewing a slice of lemon from her iced tea. Though she’d sawed apart her food energetically enough, and shoved it back and forth across her plate, and piled it up in unappetizing heaps (a habit of hers that drove Edie crazy), she’d eaten very little of it.

“I don’t see why Allison can’t say Hate, Mother,” said Harriet. “Hate is a perfectly good word.”

“It’s not polite.”

“It says Hate in the Bible. The Lord hateth this and the Lord hateth that. It says it practically on every page.”

“Well, don’t you say it.”

“All right, then,” Allison burst out. “I detest Mrs. Biggs.” Mrs. Biggs was Allison’s Sunday school teacher.

Charlotte, through her tranquilized fog, was mildly surprised. Allison was usually such a timid, gentle girl. Such crazy talk about hating people was more the kind of thing you expected from Harriet.

“Now, Allison,” she said. “Mrs. Biggs is a sweet old thing. And she’s a friend of your aunt Adelaide’s.”

Allison—raking her fork listlessly through her disordered plate—said: “I still hate her.”

“That’s no good reason to hate somebody, honey, just because they wouldn’t pray in Sunday school for a dead cat.”

“Why not? She made us pray that Sissy and Annabel Arnold would win the twirling contest.”

Harriet said: “Mr. Dial made us pray for that, too. It’s because their father is a deacon.”

Carefully, Allison balanced the slice of lemon on the edge of her plate. “I hope they drop one of those fire batons,” she said. “I hope the place burns down.”

“Listen, girls,” said Charlotte vaguely, in the silence that followed. Her mind—never fully engaged with the business of the cat and the church and the twirling competition—had already drifted on to something else. “Have yall been down to the Health Center yet to get your typhoid shots?”

When neither child answered, she said: “Now, I want you to be sure and remember to go down and do that first thing Monday morning. And a tetanus shot, too. Swimming in cow ponds and running around barefoot all summer long …”

She trailed off, pleasantly, then resumed eating. Harriet and Allison were silent. Neither of them had ever swum in a cow pond in her life. Their mother was thinking of her own childhood and muddling it up with the present—something she did more and more frequently these days—and neither of the girls knew quite how to respond when this happened.

————

Still in her daisy-patterned Sunday dress, which she’d had on since the morning, Harriet padded downstairs in the dark, her white ankle socks gray-soled with dirt. It was nine-thirty at night, and both her mother and Allison had been in bed for half an hour.

Allison’s somnolence—unlike her mother’s—was natural and not narcotic. She was happiest when she was asleep, with her head beneath her pillow; she longed for her bed all day, and flung herself into it as soon as it was decently dark. But Edie, who seldom slept more than six hours a night, was annoyed by all the lounging around in bed that went on at Harriet’s house. Charlotte had been on some kind of tranquilizers since Robin died, and there was no talking to her about it, but Allison was a different matter. Hypothesizing mononucleosis or encephalitis she had several times forced Allison to go to the doctor for blood tests, which came back negative. “She’s a growing teenager,” the doctor told Edie. “Teenagers need a lot of rest.”

“But sixteen hours!” said Edie, exasperated. She was well aware that the doctor didn’t believe her. She also suspected—correctly—that he was the one prescribing whatever dope that kept Charlotte so groggy all the time.

“Don’t matter if it’s seventeen,” said Dr. Breedlove, sitting with one white-coated haunch on his littered desk and regarding Edie with a fishy, clinical stare. “That gal wants to sleep, you let her do it.”

“But how can you stand to stay asleep so much?” Harriet had once asked her sister curiously.

Allison shrugged.

“Isn’t it boring?”

“I only get bored when I’m awake.”

Harriet knew how that went. Her own boredoms were so numbing that sometimes she was sick and woozy with them, like she’d been chloroformed. Now, however, she was excited by the prospect of the solitary hours ahead, and in the living room made not for the gun cabinet but for her father’s desk.

There were lots of interesting things in her father’s desk drawer (gold coins, birth certificates, things she wasn’t supposed to fool with). After rummaging through some photographs and boxes of canceled checks she finally found what she was looking for: a black-plastic stopwatch—giveaway from a finance company—with a red digital display.

She sat down on the sofa, and gulped down a deep breath as she clicked the watch. Houdini had trained himself to hold his breath for minutes at a time: a trick that made many of his greatest tricks possible. Now she would see how long she could hold her own breath without passing out.

Ten. Twenty seconds. Thirty. She became conscious of the blood thumping hard and harder in her temples.

Thirty-five. Forty. Harriet’s eyes watered, her heartbeat throbbed in her eyeballs. At forty-five, a spasm fluttered in her lungs and she was forced to pinch her nose shut and clamp a hand over her mouth.

Fifty-eight. Fifty-nine. Her eyes were streaming, she couldn’t sit still, she got up and paced in a tiny frantic circle by the sofa, fanning with her free hand at the air and her eyes skittering desperately from object to object—desk, door, Sunday shoes pigeontoed on the dove-gray carpet—as the room jumped with her thunderous heartbeat and the wall of newspapers chattered as if in the pre-trembling of an earthquake.

Sixty seconds. Sixty-five. The rose-pink stripes in the draperies had darkened to a bloody color and the light from the lamp unravelled in long, iridescent tentacles which ebbed and flowed with the wash of some invisible tide, before they, too, began to darken, blackening around the pulsating edges though the centers still burned white and somewhere she heard a wasp buzzing, somewhere near her ear though maybe it wasn’t, maybe it was coming from somewhere inside her; the room was whirling and suddenly she couldn’t pinch her nose shut any longer, her hand was trembling and wouldn’t do what she told it to and with a long, agonized rasp, she fell backward on the sofa in a shower of sparks, clicking the stopwatch with her thumb.

For a long time she lay there, panting, as the phosphorescent fairy lights drifted gently from the ceiling.

A glass hammer pounded, with crystalline pings, at the base of her skull. Her thoughts spooled up and unwound in complex ormolu tracery which floated in delicate patterns around her head.

When the sparks slowed, and she was finally able to sit up—dizzy, grasping the back of the sofa—she looked at the stopwatch. One minute and sixteen seconds.

This was a long time, longer than she’d expected on the first try, but Harriet felt very queer. Her eyes ached and it was as if the whole ingredients of her head were jostled and crunched together, so that hearing was mixed up with sight and sight with taste and her thoughts were jumbled up with all this like a jigsaw puzzle so she couldn’t tell which piece went where.

She tried to stand up. It was like trying to stand up in a canoe. She sat down again. Echoes, black bells.

Well: nobody had said it was going to be easy. If it was easy, learning to hold your breath for three minutes, then everybody in the world would be doing it and not just Houdini.

She sat still for some minutes, breathing deeply as they had taught her in swimming class, and when she felt slightly more herself she took another deep breath and clicked the watch.

This time, she was determined not to look at the numbers as they ticked by, but to concentrate on something else. Looking at the numbers made it worse.

As her discomfort increased, and her heart pounded louder, sparkling needle-pricks pattered quickly over her scalp in icy waves, like raindrops. Her eyes burned. She closed them. Against the throbbing red darkness rained a spectacular drizzle of cinders. A black trunk bound with chains clattered across the loose stones of a riverbed, swept by the current, thump thump, thump thump—something heavy and soft, a body inside—and her hand flew up to pinch her nose as if against a bad smell but still the suitcase rolled along, over the mossy stones, and an orchestra was playing somewhere, in a gilded theatre ablaze with chandeliers, and Harriet heard Edie’s clear soprano, soaring high above the violins: “Many brave hearts lie asleep in the deep. Sailor, beware: sailor, take care.”

No, it wasn’t Edie, it was a tenor: a tenor with black brilliantined hair and a gloved hand pressed to his tuxedo front, his powdered face chalk-white in the footlights, his eyes and lips darkened like an actor in a silent movie. He stood in front of the fringed velvet curtains as slowly they parted—amid a ripple of applause—to reveal, center stage, an enormous block of ice with a hunched figure frozen in the middle.

A gasp. The flustered orchestra, which was composed mostly of penguins, struck up the tempo. The gallery was filled with jostling polar bears, several of whom wore Santa Claus hats. They had come in late and were having a disagreement over the seating. In their midst sat Mrs. Godfrey, glassy-eyed, who sat eating ice cream from a harlequin-patterned dish.

Suddenly, the lights dimmed. The tenor bowed and stepped into the wings. One of the polar bears craned over the balcony and—throwing his Santa hat high in the air—roared: “Three cheers for Captain Scott!”

There was a deafening commotion as blue-eyed Scott, his furs stiff with blubber grease and coated with ice, stepped onto the stage shaking the snow from his clothes and lifted a mittened hand to the audience. Behind him little Bowers—on skis—emitted a low, mystified whistle, squinting into the footlights and raising an arm to shield his sunburnt face. Dr. Wilson—hatless and gloveless, with ice crampons on his boots—hurried past him and onto the stage, leaving behind him a trail of snowy footprints which dissolved instantly into puddles under the stage lights. Ignoring the burst of applause, he ran a hand across the block of ice, made a notation or two in a leather-bound notebook. Then he snapped the notebook shut and the audience fell silent.

“Conditions critical, Captain,” he said, his breath coming out white. “Winds are blowing from the north-northwest and there seems to be a distinct difference of origin between the upper and lower portions of the berg, suggesting that it has accumulated layer by layer from seasonal snows.”

“Then, we shall have to commence the rescue immediately,” said Captain Scott. “Osman! Esh to,” he said impatiently to the sled dog which barked and jumped around him. “The ice axes, Lieutenant Bowers.”

Bowers seemed not at all surprised to discover that his ski poles had turned into a pair of axes in his mittened fists. He tossed one deftly across the stage to his captain, to a wild din of honks and roars and clapped flippers, and, shouldering off their snow-crumbled woolens, the two of them began to hack at the frozen block as the penguin orchestra struck up again and Dr. Wilson continued to provide interesting scientific commentary about the nature of the ice. A flurry of snow had begun to whirl gently from the proscenium. At the edge of the stage, the brilliantined tenor was assisting Ponting, the expedition’s photographer, in setting up his tripod.

“The poor chap,” said Captain Scott, between blows of the axe—he and Bowers were not making a great deal of headway—“is very near the end, one feels.”

“Hurry it up there, Captain.”

“Good cheer, lads,” roared a polar bear from the gallery.

“We are in the hands of God, and unless He intervenes we are lost,” said Dr. Wilson somberly. Sweat stood out in beads on his temples and the stage lights glinted in white discs across the lenses of his little old-fashioned glasses. “All hands join in saying the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed.”

Not everyone seemed to know the Lord’s Prayer. Some penguins sang Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do; others, flippers over hearts, recited the Pledge of Allegiance when over the stage—head first, lowered by the ankles from a corkscrewing chain—appeared the strait-jacketed, manacled form of a man in evening dress. A hush fell over the audience as—twisting, thrashing, red in the face—he wriggled free of the strait-jacket and shouldered it over his head. With his teeth, he set to work on the manacles; in a moment or two they clattered to the planks and then—nimbly doubling up and freeing his feet—he swung from the chain suspended ten feet above the ground and landed, arm high, with a gymnast’s flourish, doffing a top hat which appeared from nowhere. A battery of pink doves flapped out and began to dip around the theatre, to the audience’s delight.

“I am afraid that conventional methods will not work here, gentlemen,” said this newcomer to the startled explorers, rolling up the sleeves of his evening coat and pausing, for an instant, to smile brilliantly for the explosive flash of the camera. “I nearly perished twice while attempting this very feat—once in the Cirkus Beketow in Copenhagen and once in the Apollo Theatre in Nuremberg.” From thin air, he produced a jeweled blowtorch, which shot a blue flame three feet long, and then produced a pistol which he fired into the air with a loud crack and a puff of smoke. “Assistants, please!”

Five Chinamen in scarlet robes and skullcaps, long black queues down their backs, ran out with fireaxes and hacksaws.

Houdini tossed the pistol into the audience—which, to the delight of the penguins, transformed into a thrashing salmon in mid-air before it landed amongst them—and grabbed from Captain Scott the pickaxe. With his left hand, he brandished it high in the air, while the blowtorch burned in his right. “May I remind the audience,” he shouted, “that the subject in question has been deprived of life-sustaining oxygen for four thousand six hundred sixty-five days, twelve hours, twenty-seven minutes, and thirty-nine seconds, and that a recovery attempt of this magnitude has never before been attempted on the North American stage.” He threw the pickaxe back to Captain Scott and, reaching up to stroke the orange cat perched on his shoulder, tossed his head at the penguin conductor. “Maestro, if you please.”

The Chinamen—under the cheerful direction of Bowers, who was stripped to the singlet and working shoulder-to-shoulder among them—hacked rhythmically at the block in time with the music. Houdini was making spectacular headway with the blowtorch. A great puddle spread across the stage: the penguin musicians, with great pleasure, shimmied happily beneath the icy water dripping into the orchestra pit. Captain Scott, to stage left, was doing his best to restrain the sled dog, Osman—who had gone berserk upon spotting Houdini’s cat—and was shouting angrily into the wings for Meares to come assist him.

The mysterious figure in the bubbled block of ice was now only about six inches from the blowtorch and the Chinamen’s hacksaws.

“Courage,” roared a polar bear from the gallery.

Another bear leaped to his feet. He held, in his enormous baseball mitt of a paw, a struggling dove, and he chomped its head off and spat it out in a bloody chunk.

Harriet wasn’t sure what was happening on stage, though it seemed very important. Sick with impatience, she craned up on tiptoe but the penguins—jibbing and chattering, standing on one another’s shoulders—were taller than she. Several of them wobbled from their seats, and began to totter toward the stage at a forward list, ducking and wobbling, bills tipped to the ceiling, their wall-eyes loony with concern. As she shoved through their ranks, she was pushed hard from behind, and got an oily mouthful of penguin feathers as she stumbled forward.

Suddenly there was a triumphant shout from Houdini. “Ladies and Gentlemen!” he cried. “We’ve got him!”

The crowd swarmed the stage. Harriet, in the confusion, glimpsed the white explosions of Ponting’s old-fashioned camera, a gang of bobbies rushing in, with handcuffs and billy clubs and service revolvers.

“This way, officers!” said Houdini, stepping forward with an elegant sweep of his arm.

Smoothly, unexpectedly, all heads swung round to Harriet. An awful silence had fallen, unbroken but for the tick tick tick of the melted ice dripping into the orchestra pit. Everyone was watching her: Captain Scott, startled little Bowers, Houdini with black brows lowered over his basilisk gaze. The penguins, in unblinking left profile, leaned forward all at once, each fixing her with a yellow, fishy eye.

Somebody was trying to hand her something. It’s up to you, my dear.…

Harriet sat bolt upright on the sofa downstairs.

————

“Well, Harriet,” said Edie briskly, when Harriet turned up, late, at her back door for breakfast. “Where have you been? We missed you at church yesterday.”

She untied her apron, without taking notice of Harriet’s silence or even of the rumpled daisy dress. She was in an unusually chipper mood, for Edie, and she was all dressed up, in a navy-blue summer suit and spectator pumps to match.

“I was about to start without you,” she said, as she sat down to her toast and coffee. “Is Allison coming? I’m going to a meeting.”

“Meeting of what?”

“At the church. Your aunts and I are going on a trip.”

This was news, even in Harriet’s dazed state. Edie and the aunts never went anywhere. Libby had scarcely even been outside Mississippi; and she and the other aunts were gloomy and terrified for days if they had to venture more than a few miles from home. The water tasted funny, they murmured; they couldn’t sleep in a strange bed; they were worried that they’d left the coffee on, worried about their houseplants and their cats, worried that there would be a fire or someone would break into their houses or that the End of the World would happen while they were away. They would have to use commodes in filling stations—commodes which were filthy, with no telling what diseases on them. People in strange restaurants didn’t care about Libby’s saltfree diet. And what if the car broke down? What if somebody got sick?

“We’re going in August,” said Edie. “To Charleston. On a tour of historic homes.”

“You’re driving?” Though Edie refused to admit it, her eyesight was not what it had been and she sailed through red lights, turning left against traffic and jerking to dead stops as she leaned over the back seat to chat with her sisters—who, hunting through their pocketbooks for tissues and peppermints, were as sweetly oblivious as Edie herself to the exhausted, hollow-eyed guardian angel who hovered with lowered wings above the Oldsmobile, averting fireball collisions at every turn.

“All the ladies from our church circle are going,” Edie said, crunching busily on her toast. “Roy Dial, from the Chevrolet dealership, is lending us a bus. And a driver. I wouldn’t mind taking my car if people out on the highway didn’t act so nutty these days.”

“And Libby said she would go?”

“Certainly. Why shouldn’t she? Mrs. Hatfield Keene and Mrs. Nelson McLemore and all her friends are going.”

“Addie, too? And Tat?”

“Certainly.”

“And they want to go? Nobody’s making them?”

“Your aunts and I aren’t getting any younger.”

“Listen, Edie,” said Harriet abruptly, swallowing a mouthful of biscuit. “Will you give me ninety dollars?”

“Ninety dollars?” said Edie, suddenly ferocious. “Certainly not. What in the world do you want ninety dollars for?”

“Mother let our membership at the Country Club lapse.”

“What can you possibly want over at the Country Club?”

“I want to go swimming this summer.”

“Make that little Hull boy take you as his guest.”

“He can’t. He’s only allowed to bring a guest five times. I’m going to want to go more than that.”

“I don’t see the point in giving the Country Club ninety dollars just to use the pool,” said Edie. “You can swim in Lake de Selby all you like.”

Harriet said nothing.

“It’s funny. Camp’s late starting up this year. I would have thought the first session had already started.”

“I guess not.”

“Remind me,” said Edie, “to make a note to call down there this afternoon. I don’t know what’s wrong with those people. I wonder when the little Hull boy is going?”

“May I be excused?”

“You never did tell me what you’re doing today.”

“I’m going down to the library to sign up for the reading program. I want to win it again.” Now, she thought, was not the time to explain her true goal for the summer, not with Camp de Selby hovering over the conversation.

“Well, I’m sure you’ll do fine,” Edie said, standing to take her coffee cup to the sink.

“Do you mind if I ask you something, Edie?”

“Depends what it is.”

“My brother was murdered, wasn’t he?”

Edie’s eyes slid out of focus. She set the cup down.

“Who do you think did it?”

Edie’s gaze wavered for a moment and then—all at once—sharpened angrily on Harriet. After an uncomfortable instant (during which Harriet practically felt the smoke rising off her, as if she was a pile of dry wood chips smoldering in a beam of light) she turned and put the cup in the sink. Her waist looked very narrow and her shoulders very angular and military in the navy blue suit.

“Get your things,” she said, crisply, her back still turned.

Harriet didn’t know what to say. She didn’t have any things.

————

After the excruciating silence of the car ride (staring at the stitching on the upholstery, fiddling with a piece of loose foam on the armrest) Harriet didn’t especially feel like going to the library. But Edie waited stonily at the curb, and Harriet had no choice but to walk up the stairs (stiffly, conscious of being watched) and push open the glass doors.

The library looked empty. Mrs. Fawcett was alone at the front desk going through the night’s returns and drinking a cup of coffee. She was a tiny, bird-boned woman, with short pepper-and-salt hair, veiny white arms (she wore copper bracelets, for her arthritis) and eyes that were a little too sharp and closely set, especially since her nose was on the beaky side. Most kids were afraid of her: not Harriet, who loved the library and everything about it.

“Hi, Harriet!” said Mrs. Fawcett. “Have you come in to sign up for the reading program?” She reached under her desk for a poster. “You know how this works, right?”

She handed Harriet a map of the United States, which Harriet studied more intently than she needed to. I must not be all that upset really, she told herself, if Mrs. Fawcett can’t tell. Harriet’s feelings were not easily hurt—not by Edie, anyway, who was always flying off the handle about something—but the silent treatment in the car had unnerved her.

“They’re doing it with an American map this year,” Mrs. Fawcett said. “For every four books you check out, you get a sticker shaped like a state to paste on your map. Would you like me to tack this up for you?”

“Thank you, I can do it myself,” said Harriet.

She went to the bulletin board on the back wall. The reading program had started Saturday, only day before yesterday. Seven or eight maps were up already; most were blank but one of the maps had three stamps. How could someone have read twelve books since Saturday?

“Who,” she asked Mrs. Fawcett, returning to the desk with the four books she’d selected, “is Lasharon Odum?”

Mrs. Fawcett leaned out from the desk and—pointing silently to the children’s room—nodded at a tiny figure with matted hair, dressed in a grubby T-shirt and pants that were too small for her. She was scrunched up in a chair, reading, her eyes wide and her breath rasping through her parched lips.

“There she sits,” whispered Mrs. Fawcett. “Poor little thing. Every morning for the past week, she’s been waiting on the front steps when I come to open up, and she stays there quiet as a mouse until I close at six. If she’s really reading those books, and not just sitting there pretending, she reads right well for her age group.”

“Mrs. Fawcett,” said Harriet, “will you let me back in the newspaper stacks today?”

Mrs. Fawcett looked startled. “You can’t take those out of the library.”

“I know. I’m doing some research.”

Mrs. Fawcett looked at Harriet over the tops of her glasses, pleased by this adult-sounding request. “Do you know which ones you want?” she said.

“Oh, just the local papers. Maybe the Memphis and Jackson ones, too. For—” She hesitated; she was afraid of tipping off Mrs. Fawcett by mentioning the date of Robin’s death.

“Well,” said Mrs. Fawcett, “I’m really not supposed to let you back there, but if you’re careful I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

————

Harriet—going the long way, so she wouldn’t have to walk by Hely’s house; he’d asked her to go fishing with him—stopped at home to drop off the books she’d checked out. It was twelve-thirty. Allison—sleepy and flushed looking, still in pyjamas—sat alone at the dining-room table moodily eating a tomato sandwich.

“You want tomato, Harriet?” called Ida Rhew from the kitchen. “Or you wants chicken instead?”

“Tomato, please,” said Harriet. She sat down by her sister.

“I’m going to the Country Club to sign up for swimming this afternoon,” she said. “Do you want to come?”

Allison shook her head.

“Do you want me to sign you up, too?”

“I don’t care.”

“Weenie wouldn’t want you to act like this,” said Harriet. “He would want you to be happy, and get on with life.”

“I’ll never be happy again,” said Allison, putting down her sandwich. Tears began to brim at the rims of her melancholy, chocolate-brown eyes. “I wish I was dead.”

“Allison?” said Harriet.

She didn’t answer.

“Do you know who killed Robin?”

Allison began to pick at the crust of her sandwich. She peeled off a strip; she rolled it into a ball between thumb and forefinger.

“You were in the yard when it happened,” said Harriet, watching her sister closely. “I read it in the newspaper down at the library. They said you were out there the whole time.”

“You were there, too.”

“Yes, but I was a baby. You were four.”

Allison peeled off another layer of crust and ate it carefully, without looking at Harriet.

“Four is pretty old. I remember practically everything that happened to me when I was four.”

At this point, Ida Rhew appeared with Harriet’s plate. Both girls were silent. After she went back into the kitchen, Allison said: “Please leave me alone, Harriet.”

“You must remember something,” said Harriet, her eyes still fixed on Allison. “It’s important. Think.”

Allison speared a tomato slice with her fork and ate it, nibbling delicately around the edges.

“Listen. I had a dream last night.”

Allison looked up at her, startled.

Harriet—who had not failed to notice this leap of attention on Allison’s part—carefully recounted her dream of the night before.

“I think it was trying to tell me something,” she said. “I think I’m supposed to try to find out who killed Robin.”

She finished her sandwich. Allison was still looking at her. Edie—Harriet knew—was wrong in believing that Allison was stupid; it was just very difficult to tell what she was thinking and you had to be careful around her in order not to frighten her.

“I want you to help me,” said Harriet. “Weenie would want you to help me, too. He loved Robin. He was Robin’s kitty.”

“I can’t,” said Allison. She pushed back her chair. “I have to go. It’s time for Dark Shadows.”

“No, wait,” said Harriet. “I want you to do something. Will you do something for me?”

“What?”

“Will you try to remember the dreams you have at night, and will you write them down and show me in the morning?”

Blankly, Allison looked at her.

“You sleep all the time. You must have dreams. Sometimes people can remember things in dreams that they can’t remember when they’re awake.”

“Allison,” Ida called from the kitchen. “It’s time for our program.” She and Allison were obsessed with Dark Shadows. In the summertime they watched it together every day.

“Come watch it with us,” said Allison to Harriet. “It’s been really good the last week. They’re back in the past now. It’s explaining how Barnabas got to be a vampire.”

“You can tell me about it when I get home. I’m going to go over to the country club and sign us both up for the pool. Okay? If I sign you up, will you go swimming with me sometime?”

“When does your camp start, anyway? Aren’t you going this summer?”

“Come on,” said Ida Rhew, bursting through the door with her own lunch, a chicken sandwich, on a plate. The summer before, Allison had got her addicted to Dark Shadows—Ida had watched it with her, suspiciously at first—and now during the school year Ida watched it every day and sat down with Allison when she got home and told her everything that had happened.

————

Lying on the cold tile floor of the bathroom with the door locked, and a fountain pen poised above her father’s checkbook, Harriet composed herself for a moment before beginning to write. She was good at forging her mother’s handwriting and even better at her father’s; but with his loping scrawl she couldn’t hesitate for an instant, once the pen touched the paper she had to rush through it, without thinking, or else it looked awkward and wrong. Edie’s hand was more elaborate: erect, old-fashioned, balletic in its extravagance, and her high masterly capitals were difficult to copy with any fluency, so that Harriet had to work slowly, pausing constantly to refer to a sample of Edie’s writing. The result was passable, but though it had fooled other people it did not fool them all the time and it had never fooled Edie.

Harriet’s pen hovered over the blank line. The creepy theme music of Dark Shadows had just begun to waft through the closed bathroom door.

Pay to the Order of: Alexandria Country Club, she dashed out impetuously in her father’s wide, careless hand. One hundred eighty dollars. Then the big banker’s signature, the easiest part. She breathed out, a long sigh, and looked it over: fair enough. These were local checks, drawn on the town bank, so the statements went to Harriet’s house and not to Nashville; when the cancelled check came back, she would slip it out of the envelope and burn it, and no one would be the wiser. So far, since she had first been daring enough to try this trick, Harriet had appropriated over five hundred dollars (in dribs and drabs) from her father’s account. He owed it to her, she felt; were it not for the fear of blowing her system, she would happily have cleaned him out.

“The Dufresnes,” said Aunt Tat, “are cold people. They have always been cold. I’ve never felt they were particularly cultivated, either.”

Harriet concurred with this. Her Dufresnes uncles were all more or less like her father: deer hunters and sportsmen, loud rough talkers with black dye combed through their graying hair, aging variations on the Elvis theme with their potbellies and their elastic-sided boots. They didn’t read books; their jokes were coarse; in their manners and preoccupations, they were about one generation removed from country sorry. Only once had she met her grandmother Dufresnes: an irritable woman in pink plastic beads and stretch pantsuits, who lived in a condominium in Florida that had sliding glass doors and foil giraffes on the wallpaper. Harriet had once gone down to stay with her for a week—and nearly went insane from boredom, since Grandmother Dufresnes had no library card, and owned no books except a biography of a man who had started the Hilton chain of hotels and a paperback entitled A Texan Looks at LBJ. She had been lifted from rural poverty in Tallahatchie County by her sons, who’d bought her the condominium in a Tampa retirement community. She sent a box of grapefruit to Harriet’s house every Christmas. Otherwise they rarely heard from her.

Though Harriet had certainly sensed the resentment that Edie and the aunts had for her father, she had no idea quite how bitter it was. He had never been an attentive husband or father, they murmured, even when Robin was alive. It was a crime how he ignored the girls. It was a crime how he ignored his wife—especially after their son had died. He had just carried on with work, as usual, hadn’t even taken any time off from the bank, and he had gone on a hunting trip to Canada hardly a month after his son was in the ground. It was hardly surprising that Charlotte’s mind wasn’t quite what it used to be, with a sorry husband like that.

“It would be better,” said Edie angrily, “if he just went on and divorced her. Charlotte is still young. And there’s that nice young Willory man who just bought that property out by Glenwild—he’s from the Delta, he’s got some money—”

“Well,” murmured Adelaide, “Dixon is a good provider.”

“What I’m saying is, she could get somebody so much better.”

“What I’m saying, Edith, is that there’s many a slip twixt the cup and the lip. I don’t know what would happen to little Charlotte and those girls if Dix wasn’t earning a good salary.”

“Well, yes,” said Edie, “there is that.”

“Sometimes I wonder,” said Libby tremulously, “if we did the right thing by not urging Charlotte to move to Dallas.”

There had been talk of this not long after Robin died. The bank had offered Dix a promotion if he would relocate to Texas. Several years later, he had tried to get them all to move to some town in Nebraska. So far from not urging Charlotte and the girls to go, the aunts had been panic-stricken on both occasions and Adelaide and Libby and even Ida Rhew had wept for weeks at the very thought.

Harriet blew on her father’s signature, though the ink was dry. Her mother wrote checks on this account all the time—it was how she paid the bills—but, as Harriet had learned, she didn’t keep track of the balance. She would have paid the Country Club bill happily enough if Harriet had asked; but the threat of Camp Lake de Selby grumbled black at the horizon, and Harriet did not wish to risk reminding her, by mention of Country Club and swimming pool, that the registration forms had not arrived.

————

She got on her bicycle and rode over to the Country Club. The office was locked. Everybody was at lunch in the dining room. She walked down the hall to the Pro Shop, where she found Hely’s big brother, Pemberton, smoking a cigarette behind the counter and reading a stereo magazine.

“Can I give this money to you?” she asked him. She liked Pemberton. He was Robin’s age, and had been Robin’s friend. Now he was twenty-one and some people said it was a shame that his mother had talked his father out of sending him to military school back when it might have made a difference. Though Pem had been popular in high school, and his picture was on practically every page of his senior class yearbook, he was a loafer and a little bit of a beatnik, and he hadn’t lasted long at Vanderbilt, or at Ole Miss or even Delta State. Now he lived at home. His hair was a lot longer even than Hely’s; in the summer he was a lifeguard at the Country Club, and in the winter all he did was work on his car and listen to loud music.

“Hey, Harriet,” said Pemberton. He was probably lonesome, Harriet thought, there all by himself in the Pro Shop. He wore a torn T-shirt, madras plaid shorts, and golf shoes with no socks; the remains of a hamburger and french fries, on one of the Country Club’s monogrammed dishes, were near his elbow on the counter. “Come over here and help me pick out a car stereo.”

“I don’t know anything about car stereos. I want to leave this check with you.”

Pem hooked his hair behind his ears with a big-knuckled hand, then took the check and examined it. He was long-boned, easy in his demeanor, and much taller than Hely; his hair was the same tangled, stripey blonde, light on top and darker underneath. His features were like Hely’s, too, but more finely cut, and his teeth were slightly crooked but in a way that was somehow more pleasing than if they were straight.

“Well, you can leave it with me,” he said at last, “but I’m not sure what to do with it. Say, I didn’t know your dad was in town.”

“He’s not.”

Pemberton, cocking a sly eyebrow at her, indicated the date.

“He sent it in the mail,” said Harriet.

“Where is old Dix, anyway? I haven’t seen him around in ages.”

Harriet shrugged. Though she didn’t like her father, she knew she wasn’t supposed to gossip or complain about him, either.

“Well, when you see him, why don’t you ask him if he’ll send me a check, too. I really want these speakers.” He pushed the magazine across the counter and showed them to her.

Harriet studied them. “They all look the same.”

“No way, sweetie. These Blaupunkts are the sexiest thing around. See? All black, with black buttons on the receiver? See how little it is compared to the Pioneers?”

“Well, get that one, then.”

“I will when you get your dad to send me three hundred bucks.” He took a last drag of his cigarette and stubbed it out on his plate with a hiss. “Say, where’s that dingbat brother of mine?”

“I don’t know.”

Pemberton leaned forward, with a confidential shift of the shoulders. “How come you let him hang around with you?”

Harriet stared at the ruins of Pem’s lunch: cold french fries, cigarette crooked and hissing in a puddle of ketchup.

“Doesn’t he get on your nerves?” Pemberton said. “How come you make him dress up like a woman?”

Harriet looked up, startled.

“You know, in Martha’s housecoats.” Martha was Pem and Hely’s mother. “He loves it. Every time I see him he’s running out of the house with some kind of weird pillowcase or towel over his head or something. He says you make him do it.”

“No I don’t.”

“Come on, Harriet.” He pronounced her name as if he found something faintly ridiculous about it. “I drive by your house and you’ve always got about seven or eight little boys in bedsheets hanging around out in your yard. Ricky Ashmore calls yall the baby Ku Klux Klan but I think you just enjoy making them dress up like girls.”

“It’s a game,” said Harriet, stolidly. She was annoyed at his persistence; the Bible pageants were a thing of the past. “Listen. I wanted to talk to you. About my brother.”

Now it was Pemberton’s turn to be uncomfortable. He picked up the stereo magazine and began to leaf through it with studied care.

“Do you know who killed him?”

“Well,” said Pemberton slyly. He put down the stereo magazine. “I’ll tell you something if you promise not to tell a soul. You know old Mrs. Fountain that lives next door to you?”

Harriet was looking at him with such undisguised contempt that he collapsed in laughter.

“What?” he said. “You don’t believe it about Mrs. Fountain and all them people buried up under her house?” Several years ago, Pem had scared Hely stiff by telling him somebody had found human bones poking out of Mrs. Fountain’s flowerbed, also that Mrs. Fountain had stuffed her dead husband and propped him up in a recliner to keep her company at night.

“So you don’t know who did it, then.”

“Nope,” said Pemberton, a bit curtly. He still remembered his mother coming up to his bedroom (he had been putting together a model airplane; weird, the things that stuck in your mind sometimes) and calling him out into the hall to tell him Robin was dead. It was the only time he’d ever seen her cry. Pem hadn’t cried: he was nine years old, didn’t have a clue, he’d just gone back to his room and shut the door and—under a cloud of growing unease—continued work on the Sop-with Camel; and he could still remember how the glue beaded up in the seams, it looked like shit, eventually he’d thrown it away without finishing it.

“You shouldn’t joke around about this kind of stuff,” he said to Harriet.

“I am not joking. I am in deadly earnest,” said Harriet loftily. Not for the first time, Pemberton thought how different she was from Robin, so different you could hardly believe they were related. Maybe it was partly the dark hair that made her seem so serious, but unlike Robin she had a ponderous quality about her: poker-faced and pompous, never laughing. There was a whimsical flutter of Robin’s ghost about Allison (who, now she was in high school, was starting to get a nice little walk on her; she had turned Pem’s head on the street the other day without his realizing who she was) but Harriet was not sweet or whimsical by any stretch of the imagination. Harriet was a trip.

“I think you’ve been reading too much Nancy Drew, sweetie,” he said to her. “All that stuff happened before Hely was even born.” He practiced a golf swing with an invisible club. “There used to be three or four trains that stopped here every day, and you had a lot more tramps over around the railroad tracks.”

“Maybe whoever did it is still around.”

“If that’s true, why haven’t they caught him?”

“Did anything seem odd before it happened?”

Pem snorted derisively. “What, you mean like spooky?”

“No, just strange.”

“Look, this wasn’t like in the movies. Nobody saw some big pervert or creep hanging around and just forgot to mention it.” He sighed. At school, for years afterward, the favorite game at recess was to re-enact Robin’s murder: a game which—passed down, and mutated over the years—was still popular at the elementary school. But in the playground version, the killer was caught and punished. Children gathered in a circle by the swing-set, raining death blows upon the invisible villain who lay prostrate in their midst.

“For a while there,” he said aloud, “some kind of cop or preacher came to talk to us every day. Kids at school used to brag about knowing who did it, or even that they did it themselves. Just to get attention.”

Harriet was gazing at him intently.

“Kids do that. Danny Ratliff—geez. He used to brag all the time about stuff he never did, like shooting people in the kneecaps and throwing rattlesnakes in old ladies’ cars. You wouldn’t believe some of the crazy stuff I’ve heard him say at the pool hall.…” Pemberton paused. He had known Danny Ratliff since childhood: weak and swaggering, throwing his arms around, full of empty boasts and threats. But though the picture was clear enough in his own mind, he wasn’t sure how to convey it to Harriet.

“He—Danny’s just nuts,” he said.

“Where can I find this Danny?”

“Whoa. You don’t want to mess around with Danny Ratliff. He just got out of prison.”

“What for?”

“Knife fight or something. Can’t remember. Every single one of the Ratliffs has been in the penitentiary for armed robbery or killing somebody except the baby, the little retarded guy. And Hely told me he beat the shit out of Mr. Dial the other day.”

Harriet was appalled. “That’s not true. Curtis didn’t lay a finger on him.”

Pemberton chortled. “I’m sorry to hear that. I never saw anybody needed to get the shit beat out of them as bad as Mr. Dial.”

“You never did tell me where I can find this Danny.”

Pemberton sighed. “Look, Harriet,” he said. “Danny Ratliff is, like, my age. All that with Robin happened back when we were in the fourth grade.”

“Maybe it was a kid who did it. Maybe that’s how come they never caught him.”

“Look, I don’t see why you think you’re such a genius, figuring this out when nobody else could.”

“You say he goes to the Pool Hall?”

“Yes, and the Black Door Tavern. But I’m telling you, Harriet, he didn’t have anything to do with it and even if he did you better leave him alone. There’s a bunch of those brothers and they’re all kind of crazy.”

“Crazy?”

“Not like that. I mean … one of them is a preacher—you’ve probably seen him, he stands around on the highway yelling about the Atonement and shit. And the big brother, Farish, was in the mental hospital down at Whitfield for a while.”

“What for?”

“Because he got hit in the head with a shovel or something. I can’t remember. Every single one of them is getting arrested all the time. For stealing cars,” he added, when he saw how Harriet was looking at him. “Breaking into houses. Nothing like what you’re talking about. If they’d had anything to do with Robin the cops would have beat it out of them years ago.”

He picked up Harriet’s check, which was still lying on the counter. “All right, kiddo? This is for you and Allison, too?”

“Yes.”

“Where is she?”

“At home.”

“What’s she doing?” Pem said, leaning forward on his elbows.

“Watching Dark Shadows.”

“Reckon she’ll be coming to the pool any this summer?”

“If she wants to.”

“Does she have a boyfriend?”

“Boys call her on the phone.”

“Oh, yeah?” said Pemberton. “Like who?”

“She doesn’t like to talk to them.”

“Why is that?”

“Don’t know.”

“Reckon if I called her sometime, she’d talk to me?”

Abruptly, Harriet said: “Guess what I’m going to do this summer?”

“Huh?”

“I’m going to swim the length of the pool underwater.”

Pemberton—who was growing a little tired of her—rolled his eyes. “What’s next?” he said. “Cover of Rolling Stone?”

“I know I can do it. I held my breath for almost two minutes last night.”

“Forget it, sweetie,” said Pemberton, who did not believe a word of this. “You’ll drown. I’ll have to fish you out of the pool.”

————

Harriet spent the afternoon reading on the front porch. Ida was washing clothes, as she always did on Monday afternoons; her mother and sister were asleep. She was nearing the end of King Solomon’s Mines when Allison, barefoot and yawning, tottered outside, in a flowery dress that looked like it belonged to their mother. With a sigh, she lay down on the pillowed porch swing and pushed herself with the tip of her big toe to set herself rocking.

Immediately, Harriet put down the book and went to sit by her sister.

“Did you have any dreams during your nap?” she asked.

“I don’t remember.”

“If you don’t remember, then maybe you did.”

Allison didn’t answer. Harriet counted to fifteen and then—more slowly this time—politely repeated what she had just said.

“I didn’t have any dreams.”

“I thought you said you didn’t remember.”

“I don’t.”

“Hey,” said a nasal little voice bravely from the sidewalk.

Allison raised herself up on her elbows. Harriet—extremely annoyed at the interruption—turned and saw Lasharon Odum, the grimy little girl whom Mrs. Fawcett had pointed out earlier at the library. She was gripping the wrist of a little white-haired creature of indeterminate sex, in a stained shirt that did not quite cover its stomach, and a baby in plastic diapers was straddled on her opposite hip. Like little wild animals, afraid to come too close, they stood back and watched with flat eyes that glowed eerie and silvery in their sunburnt faces.

“Well, hello there,” said Allison, standing up and moving cautiously down the steps to greet them. Shy as Allison was, she liked children—white or black, and the smaller the better. Often she struck up conversations with the dirty ragamuffins who wandered up from the shacks by the river, though Ida Rhew had forbidden her to do this. “You not going to think they so cute when you come down with the lice or the ringworm,” she said.

The children watched Allison warily, but stood their ground as she approached. Allison stroked the baby’s head. “What’s his name?” she said.

Lasharon Odum did not answer. She was looking past Allison, at Harriet. Young as she was, there was something pinched and old about her face; her eyes were a ringing, primitive ice gray, like a wolf cub’s. “I seen you at the libery,” she said.

Harriet, stony-faced, met her gaze but did not reply. She was uninterested in babies and small children, and agreed with Ida that they had no business venturing up uninvited into the yard.

“My name is Allison,” Allison said to her. “What’s yours?”

Lasharon fidgeted.

“Are these your brothers? What are their names? Hmm?” she said, squatting on her heels to look into the face of the smaller child, who was holding a library book by its back cover, so that the open pages dragged on the sidewalk. “Will you tell me what your name is?”

“Go on, Randy,” said the girl, prodding the toddler.

“Randy? Is that your name?”

“Say yesm, Randy.” She jostled the baby on her hip. “Say, That there’s Randy and I’m Rusty,” she said, speaking for the baby in a high-pitched, acidic little voice.

“Randy and Rusty?”

Nasty and Dirty, more like it, thought Harriet.

With scarcely concealed impatience, she sat on the swing tapping her foot as Allison patiently coaxed all their ages out of Lasharon and complimented her for being such a good babysitter.

“And will you let me see your library book?” Allison was saying to the little boy called Randy. “Hmn?” She reached for it but, coyly, he turned himself away from her with his whole body, grinning infuriatingly.

“It aint hisn,” said Lasharon. Her voice—though sharp, and richly nasal—was also dainty and clear. “It’s mine.”

“What’s it about?”

“Ferdinand the Bull.”

“I remember Ferdinand. He was the little fellow who liked to smell flowers instead of fight, wasn’t he?”

“You’re pretty, lady,” burst out Randy, who until this moment had said nothing. Excitedly, he swung his arm back and forth so the pages of the open book scrubbed against the sidewalk.

“Is that the right way to treat library books?” said Allison.

Randy, flustered, let the book drop altogether.

“You pick that up,” said his big sister, making as if to slap him.

Randy flinched easily from the slap and, aware that Allison’s eyes were on him, stepped backwards and began instead to swivel his lower body in an oddly lascivious and adult-looking little dance.

“Why don’t her say nothing?” said Lasharon, squinting past Allison at Harriet—who glowered at them from the porch.

Startled, Allison glanced back at Harriet.

“Is you her mama?”

Trash, thought Harriet, face burning.

She was rather enjoying Allison’s stuttering denial when all of a sudden Randy exaggerated his lewd little hula dance in an effort to wrench the attention back to himself.

“Man stoled Diddy’s car off,” he said. “Man from the Babdist church.”

He giggled, sidestepping his sister’s swipe, and seemed about to elaborate when unexpectedly Ida Rhew charged from the house, screen door slamming behind her, and ran toward the children clapping her hands as if they were birds taking seed from a field.

“Yall go on and get out of here,” she cried. “Scat!”

In a blink they were gone, baby and all. Ida Rhew stood on the sidewalk, shaking her fist. “Don’t yall be messing around here no more,” she shouted after them. “I call the police on you.”

“Ida!” wailed Allison.

“Don’t you Ida me.”

“But they were just little! They weren’t bothering anything.”

“No, and they aint going to bother anything either,” said Ida Rhew, gazing after them steadily for a minute, then dusting her hands off and heading towards the house. Ferdinand the Bull lay askew on the sidewalk where the children had dropped it. She stooped, laboriously, to pick it up, grasping it by the corner between thumb and forefinger as if it were contaminated. Holding it out at arm’s length, she straightened up with a sharp exhalation and started around the house to the garbage can.

“But Ida!” said Allison. “That’s a library book!”

“I don’t care where it come from,” said Ida Rhew, without turning around. “It’s filthy. I don’t want yall touching it.”

Charlotte, her face anxious and blurry with sleep, poked her head out the front door. “What’s the matter?” she said.

“It was just some little kids, Mother. They weren’t hurting anybody.”

“Oh, dear,” said Charlotte, wrapping the ribbons of her bed jacket tighter at her waist. “That’s too bad. I’ve been meaning to go in your bedroom and get up a bag of your old toys for the next time they came by.”

“Mother!” shrieked Harriet.

“Now, you know you don’t play with those old baby things any more,” said her mother serenely.

“But they’re mine! I want them!” Harriet’s toy farm … the Dancerina and Chrissy dolls which she had not wanted, but asked for anyway, because the other girls in her class had them … the mouse family dressed in periwigs and fancy French costume, which Harriet had seen in the window of a very very expensive shop in New Orleans and which she had pleaded for, cried for, grew silent and refused her supper for, until finally Libby and Adelaide and Tat slipped out of the Pontchartrain Hotel and chipped in together to buy them for her. The Christmas of the Mice: the happiest of Harriet’s life. Never had she been so flabbergasted with joy as when she’d opened that beautiful red box, storms of tissue paper flying. How could Harriet’s mother hoard every scrap of newsprint which came into the house—get cross if Ida threw a shred of it away—and yet try to give Harriet’s mice away to filthy little strangers?

For this was exactly what happened. Last October, the mouse family had vanished from the top of Harriet’s bureau. After a hysterical search, Harriet unearthed them in the attic, jumbled in a box with some of her other toys. Her mother, when confronted, admitted taking a few things that she thought Harriet no longer played with, to give to underprivileged children, but she seemed not to realize how much Harriet loved the mice, or that she should have asked before taking them. (“I know your aunts gave them to you, but didn’t Adelaide or one of them give you that Dancerina doll? You don’t want that.”) Harriet doubted that her mother even remembered the incident, a suspicion now confirmed by her uncomprehending stare.

“Don’t you understand?” cried Harriet in despair. “I want my toys!”

“Don’t be selfish, darling.”

“But they’re mine!”

“I can’t believe you begrudge those poor little children a few things that you’re too old to play with,” Charlotte said, blinking in confusion. “If you’d seen how happy they were to get Robin’s toys—”

“Robin’s dead.”

“If you give them kids anything,” said Ida Rhew darkly, reappearing around the side of the house, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, “it be nasty or broken fo they get it home.”

————

After Ida Rhew left for the day, Allison picked Ferdinand the Bull out of the garbage can and carried it back to the porch. In the twilight, she examined it. It had fallen in a pile of coffee grounds and a brown stain warped the edge of the pages. She cleaned it as best she could with a paper towel, then took a ten-dollar bill from her jewelry box and tucked it inside the front cover. Ten dollars, she thought, should more than cover the damage. When Mrs. Fawcett saw the condition the book was in, she would make them pay for it or else give up their library privileges and there was no way little kids like that would be able to scrape up the fine on their own.

She sat on the steps, chin in hands. If Weenie hadn’t died he’d be purring beside her, his ears flattened against his skull and his tail curled like a hook around her bare ankle, his eyes slitted across the dark lawn at the restless, echo-ranging world of night creatures that was invisible to her: snail-trails and cobwebs, glassy-winged flies, beetles and field mice and all the little wordless things struggling in squeaks or chirps or silence. Their small world, she felt, was her true home, the secret dark of speechlessness and frantic heartbeats.

Fast ragged clouds blew across a full moon. The black-gum tree tingled in the breeze, the undersides of its leaves ruffling pale in the darkness.

Allison remembered almost nothing from the days after Robin died, but one strange thing she did remember was climbing up the tree as high as she could, and jumping from it again and again. The fall usually knocked the air out of her. As soon as the shock jangled away, she dusted herself off and climbed up and jumped again. Thud. Over and over. She’d had a dream where she did the same thing, except in the dream she didn’t hit the ground. Instead, a warm wind caught her up from the grass and swept her up into the air and she was flying, bare toes brushing the treetops. Falling fast from the sky, like a swallow, skimming the lawn for twenty feet or so and then up again, twirling and soaring into air and giddy space. But she was little then, she hadn’t understood the difference between dreams and life, and this was why she’d kept jumping from the tree. If she jumped enough times, she hoped, maybe the warm wind from her dream would gust beneath her and lift her up into the sky. But of course that never happened. Poised on the high branch, she’d hear Ida Rhew’s wail from the porch, see Ida running towards her, panic-stricken. And Allison would smile and step off anyway, with Ida’s despairing scream shivering delicious in the pit of her stomach as she fell. She’d jumped so many times she’d broken down the arches in her feet; it was a wonder she hadn’t broken her neck.

The night air was warm, and the moth-pale gardenia blossoms by the porch had a rich, warm, boozy smell. Allison yawned. How could you ever be perfectly sure when you were dreaming and when you were awake? In dreams you thought you were awake, though you weren’t. And though it seemed to Allison that she was currently awake, sitting barefoot on her front porch with a coffee-stained library book on the steps beside her, that didn’t mean she wasn’t upstairs in bed, dreaming it all: porch, gardenias, everything.

Repeatedly, during the day, as she drifted around her own house or through the chilly, antiseptic-smelling halls of her high school with her books in her arms, she asked herself: Am I awake or asleep? How did I get here?

Often, when startled all of a sudden to find herself (say) in biology class (insects on pins, red-haired Mr. Peel going on about the interphase of cell division), she could tell if she was dreaming or not by following back the spool of memory. How did I get here? she would think, dazed. What had she eaten for breakfast? Had Edie driven her to school, was there a progression of events which had brought her somehow to these dark-panelled walls, this morning classroom? Or had she been somewhere else a moment before—on a lonely dirt road, in her own yard, with a yellow sky and a white thing like a sheet billowing out against it?

She would think about it, hard, and then decide that she wasn’t dreaming. Because the wall clock said nine-fifteen, which was when her biology class met; and because she was still seated in alphabetical order, with Maggie Dalton in front and Richard Echols behind; and because the styrofoam board with the pinned insects was still hung on the rear wall—powdery luna moth in the center—between a poster of the feline skeleton and another of the central nervous system.

Yet sometimes—at home, mostly—Allison was disturbed to notice tiny flaws and snags in the thread of reality, for which there was no logical explanation. The roses were the wrong color: red not white. The clothesline wasn’t where it was supposed to be, but where it was before the storm blew it down five years ago. The switch of a lamp ever so slightly different, or in the wrong place. In family photographs or familiar paintings, mysterious background figures that she’d never noticed before. Frightening reflections in a parlor mirror behind the sweet family scene. A hand waving from an open window.

Why no, her mother or Ida would say when Allison pointed out these things. Don’t be ridiculous. It’s always been that way.

What way? She didn’t know. Sleeping or waking, the world was a slippery game: fluid stage sets, drift and echo, reflected light. And all of it sifting like salt between her numbed fingers.

————

Pemberton Hull was driving home from the Country Club in his baby-blue ’62 open-top Cadillac (the chassis needed realigning, the radiator leaked and it was hell to find parts, he had to send off to some warehouse in Texas and wait two weeks before they arrived but still the car was his darling, his baby, his one true love and every cent he made at the Country Club went either to putting gas in it or to fixing it when it broke down) and when he swept around the corner of George Street his headlights swung over little Allison Dufresnes sitting out on her front steps all by herself.

He pulled over in front of her house. How old was she? Fifteen? Seventeen? Jail bait, probably, but he had an ardent weakness for limp, spaced-out girls with thin arms and their hair falling in their eyes.

“Hey,” he said to her.

She didn’t look startled, only raised her head so dreamily and vaporously that the back of his neck tingled.

“Waiting for somebody?”

“No. Just waiting.”

Caramba, thought Pem.

“I’m going to the drive-in,” he said. “You want to come?”

He was expecting her to say No or I Can’t or Let Me Ask My Mother but instead she brushed the bronze hair out of her eyes with a jingle of her charm bracelet and said (a beat too late; he liked this about her, her lagging, drowsy, dissonance): “Why?”

“Why what?”

She only shrugged. Pem was intrigued. There was an … off-ness to Allison, he didn’t know how else to describe it, she dragged her feet when she walked and her hair was different from the other girls’ and her clothes were slightly wrong (like the flowery dress she had on, something an old lady would wear) yet there was a hazy, floaty air about her clumsiness that drove him crazy. Fragmentary romantic scenarios (car, radio, riverbank) began to present themselves.

“Come on,” he said. “I’ll have you back by ten.”

————

Harriet was lying on her bed eating a slice of pound cake and writing in her notebook when a car revved swankily outside her open window. She looked out just in time to catch a glimpse of her sister, hair in the wind, speeding away with Pemberton in his open-top car.

Kneeling on the window seat, her head stuck out between the yellow organdy curtains, and the yellow taste of pound cake dry in her mouth, Harriet blinked down the street. She was dumbfounded. Allison never went anywhere, except down the block to one of the aunts’ houses or maybe to the grocery store.

Ten minutes passed, then fifteen. Harriet felt a small pinch of jealousy. What on earth could they have to say to each other? Pemberton could not possibly be interested in someone like Allison.

As she stared down at the illumined porch (empty swing, Ferdinand the Bull lying on the top step) she heard a rustle in the azaleas that edged the yard. Then, to her surprise, a shape emerged, and she saw Lasharon Odum creeping quietly onto the lawn.

It did not occur to Harriet that she was sneaking back for the book. Something about the cringing set of Lasharon’s shoulders maddened her. Without thinking, she hurled what was left of the pound cake out the window.

Lasharon cried out. There was an abrupt disturbance in the bushes behind her. Then, a few moments later, a shadow darted clear of Harriet’s lawn and skittered down the middle of the well-lit street, followed at a good distance by a smaller one which stumbled, unable to run so fast.

Harriet, kneeling on the window seat with head out between the curtains, stared for some moments at the sparkling stretch of empty pavement where the little Odums had vanished. But the night was as still as glass. Not a leaf stirred, not a cat cried; the moon shone in a puddle on the sidewalk. Even the tinkly wind chimes on Mrs. Fountain’s porch were silent.

Presently, bored and irritated, she abandoned her post. She became absorbed in her notebook again and had almost forgotten that she was supposed to be waiting up for Allison, and annoyed, when a car door slammed in front.

She slipped back to the window and, stealthily, drew the curtain. Allison, standing in the street by the driver’s side of the blue Cadillac, toyed vaguely with her charm bracelet and said something indistinct.

Pemberton barked with laughter. His hair glowed Cinderella-yellow in the street lamps, so long that when it fell in his face, with just the sharp little tip of his nose poking out, he looked like a girl. “Don’t you believe it, darling,” he said.

Darling? What was that supposed to mean? Harriet let the curtains fall and shoved the notebook under the bed as Allison started around the back of the car towards the house, her bare knees red in the Cadillac’s lurid tail-lights.

The front door shut. Pem’s car roared away. Allison padded up the stairs—still barefoot, she’d gone riding without her shoes on—and drifted into the bedroom. Without acknowledging Harriet, she walked straight to the bureau mirror and stared gravely at her face, her nose only inches from the glass. Then she sat down on the side of her bed and carefully dusted off the bits of gravel stuck to the yellowy soles of her feet.

“Where were you?” said Harriet.

Allison, elbowing her dress over her head, made an ambiguous noise.

“I saw you drive off. Where did you go?” she asked, when her sister did not respond to this.

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know where you went?” said Harriet, staring hard at Allison, who kept glancing distractedly at her reflection in the glass as she stepped into her white pyjama trousers. “Did you have a good time?”

Allison—carefully avoiding Harriet’s eye—buttoned up her pyjama top and got in bed and began to pack her stuffed animals around her. They had to be arranged in a certain way about her body before she could go to sleep. Then she pulled the covers over her head.

“Allison?”

“Yes?” came the muffled answer, after a moment or two.

“Do you remember what we talked about?”

“No.”

“Yes you do. About writing down your dreams?”

When there was no answer, Harriet said, in a louder voice: “I’ve put a sheet of paper by your bed. And a pencil. Did you see them?”

“No.”

“I want you to look. Look, Allison.”

Allison poked her head out from under the covers just enough to see a sheet of paper torn from a spiral notebook beneath her bedside lamp. At the top of it was written in Harriet’s hand: Dreams. Allison Dufresnes. June 12.

“Thank you, Harriet,” she said, blurrily; and—before Harriet could get out another word—she pulled the covers up and flounced over with her face to the wall.

Harriet—after gazing steadily for some moments at her sister’s back—reached under the bed and retrieved the notebook. Earlier in the day, she’d taken notes on the account in the local paper, much of which was news to her: the discovery of the body; the efforts at resuscitation (Edie, apparently, had cut him down from the tree with the hedge clippers and worked on his lifeless body until the ambulance came); her mother’s collapse and hospitalization; the sheriff’s comments (“no leads”; “frustrating”) in the weeks that followed. She’d also written down everything that she could remember that Pem had said—important or not. And the more she’d written, the more came back to her, all sorts of random little scraps she’d picked up here and there over the years. That Robin died only a few weeks before school let out for summer vacation. That it had rained that day. That there had been small burglaries in the neighborhood around that time, tools stolen from people’s sheds: related? That when Robin’s body was found in the yard, evening services were just letting out at the Baptist church, and that one of the first people to stop and assist was old Dr. Adair—a retired pediatrician, in his eighties, who’d happened to be driving past with his family on the way home. That her father had been at his hunting camp; and that the preacher had to get in his car and drive down there to find him and break the news.

Even if I don’t find out who killed him, she thought, at least I’ll find out how it happened.

She also had the name of her first suspect. The very act of writing it down made her realize how easy it would be to forget, how important it would be from now on to put everything, everything, down on paper.

Suddenly a thought struck her. Where did he live? She hopped out of bed and went down to the telephone table in the front hall. When she came to his name in the book—Danny Ratliff—a spidery little chill ran down her back.

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 with 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 was, 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.

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 floorboards, 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.

“Last one!” said Libby. “ ‘The art of peacemaking.’ Third letter c, and i-o-n at the end.” Tap tap tap, she counted out the spaces with her pencil.

“Conciliation”?

“Yes. Oh dear … wait. This C is in the wrong place.”

Silently, they puzzled.

“Aha!” cried Libby. “Pacification!” Carefully, she printed in the letters with her blunt pencil. “All done,” she said happily, removing her glasses. “Thank you, Harriet.”

“You’re welcome,” said Harriet curtly; she could not help feeling a little grumpy that Libby was the one who had got the last word.

“I don’t know why I worry so much about these foolish puzzles, but I do think they help to keep my mind alert. Most days I only manage to get three-quarters of the way through.”

“Libby—”

“Let me guess what you’re thinking, dear. Why don’t we go see if Odean’s pie is out of the oven?”

“Libby, why won’t anybody tell me anything about when Robin died?”

Libby laid down the newspaper.

“Did anything strange happen right before?”

“Strange, darling? What in the world do you mean?”

“Anything …” Harriet struggled for words. “A clue.”

“I don’t know about any clue,” said Libby, after an oddly calm pause. “But if you want to hear about strange, one of the strangest things that ever happened to me in my life happened to me about three days before Robin died. Did you ever hear the story about that man’s hat I found in my bedroom?”

“Oh,” said Harriet, disappointed. She had heard the story about the hat on Libby’s bed all her life.

“Everybody thought I was crazy. A man’s black dress hat! Size eight! A Stetson! A nice hat, too, with no sweat on the hatband. And it just appeared there on the foot of my bed in broad daylight.”

“You mean you didn’t see it appear,” said Harriet, bored. Harriet had heard the story about the hat hundreds of times. Nobody thought it was very mysterious except Libby.

“Darling, it was two o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon—”

“Somebody came in the house and left it.”

“No, they didn’t, they couldn’t have. We would have seen or heard them. Odean and I were in the house the whole time—I’d just moved here from Tribulation, after Daddy died—and Odean had been in the bedroom to put away some clean linens not two minutes before. There wasn’t any hat there then.”

“Maybe Odean put it there.”

“Odean did not put that hat there. You go on in and ask her.”

“Well, somebody sneaked in,” Harriet said impatiently. “You and Odean just didn’t hear them.” Odean—normally uncommunicative—was as fond of telling and retelling the Mystery of the Black Hat as Libby was, and their stories were the same (though very different in style, Odean’s being far more cryptic, punctuated by lots of head-shaking and long silences).

“I’ll tell you, sweetheart,” said Libby, sitting forward alertly in her chair, “Odean was walking back and forth throughout this house, putting away clean laundry, and I was in the hall on the telephone to your grandmother, and the door to the bedroom was wide open and within my line of view—no, not a window,” she said over Harriet, “the windows were locked and the storm windows were fastened down tight. Nobody could have got in that bedroom without both Odean and me seeing them.”

“Somebody was playing a joke on you,” said Harriet. This was the consensus of Edie and the aunts; Edie had more than once provoked Libby to tears (and Odean to furious sulks) by mischievously insinuating that Libby and Odean had been nipping at the cooking sherry.

“And what sort of joke was that?” She was getting upset. “To leave a man’s black dress hat on the foot of my bed? It was an expensive hat. And I took it down to the dry goods store and they said nobody sold hats like that in Alexandria or anywhere they knew of closer than Memphis. And lo and behold—three days after I found that hat in my house, little Robin was dead.”

Harriet was silent, pondering this. “But what does that have to do with Robin?”

“Darling, the world is full of things we don’t understand.”

“But why a hat?” said Harriet, after a baffled pause. “And why should they leave it at your house? I don’t see the connection.”

“Here’s another story for you. When I was living out at Tribulation,” said Libby, folding her hands, “there was a very nice woman named Viola Gibbs who taught kindergarten in town. I suppose she was in her late twenties. Well. One day, Mrs. Gibbs was walking in the back door of her own house, and her husband and children all said she jumped back and started slapping the air like something was after her, and the next thing they knew, she fell over on the kitchen floor. Dead.”

“A spider probably bit her.”

“People don’t die like that from a spider bite.”

“Or she had a heart attack.”

“No, no, she was too young. She’d never been sick a day in her life, and she wasn’t allergic to bee stings, and it wasn’t an aneurism, nothing like that. She just dropped dead for no reason in the world, right there in front of her husband and children.”

“It sounds like poison. I bet her husband did it.”

“He did no such thing. But that’s not the odd part of the story, darling.” Politely Libby blinked, and waited, to make sure she had Harriet’s attention. “You see, Viola Gibbs had a twin sister. The odd part of the story is that a year earlier, a year to the day—” Libby tapped the table with her forefinger—“the twin had been climbing out of a swimming pool in Miami, Florida, when she got a horrified look on her face, that’s what people said, a horrified look. Dozens of people saw it. Then she started screaming and slapping at the air with her hands. And next thing anybody knew she fell over dead on the concrete.”

“Why?” said Harriet, after a confused pause.

“Nobody knows.”

“But I don’t understand.”

“Neither does anybody else.”

“People just don’t get attacked by something invisible.”

“Those two sisters did. Twin sisters. Exactly a year apart.”

“There was a case a lot like that in Sherlock Holmes. The Adventure of the Speckled Band.”

“Yes, I know that story, Harriet, but this is different.”

“Why? You think the Devil was after them?”

“All I’m saying is that there are an awful lot of things in the world we don’t understand, honey, and hidden connections between things that don’t seem related at all.”

“You think it was the Devil killed Robin? Or a ghost?”

“Gracious,” said Libby, reaching, flustered, for her glasses, “what’s all this going on in the back?”

There was indeed a disturbance: agitated voices, Odean’s cry of dismay. Harriet followed Libby into the kitchen to find a portly old black woman with speckled cheeks and gray corn-rows, sitting at the table and sobbing into her hands. Behind her, and clearly distraught, Odean poured buttermilk into a glass of ice cubes. “This my auntee,” she said, without looking Libby in the eye. “She upset right now. She be fine in a minute.”

“Why, what on earth’s the matter? Do we need to get the doctor?”

“Nome. She not hurt. She’s just shook up. Some white men been shooting guns at her down by the creek.”

“Shooting guns? What on earth—”

“Have you some this buttermilk,” said Odean to her aunt, whose chest was heaving mightily.

“A little glass of Madeira might do her more good,” said Libby, pattering to the back door. “I don’t keep it in the house. I’ll just run down the street to Adelaide’s.”

“Nome,” wailed the old woman. “I doesn’t drink spirits.”

“But—”

“Please, ma’am. Nome. No whiskey.”

“But Madeira isn’t whiskey. It’s just—oh, dear.” Libby turned to Odean helplessly.

“She be fine in a minute.”

“What happened?” said Libby, her hand to her throat, looking anxiously between the two women.

“I wasn’t bothering nobody.”

“But why—”

“She say,” said Odean to Libby, “that two white men climb up on the bridge and go to shooting pistols at everybody.”

“Was anybody hurt? Shall I call the police?” said Libby breathlessly.

This was met by such a shriek of dismay from Odean’s aunt that even Harriet was unnerved.

“What’s on earth’s the matter?” cried Libby, who was by now pink in the face and half-hysterical.

“Oh, please, ma’am. Nome. Please don’t call no po-lice.”

“But why in the world not?”

“Oh, Lord. I scared of the po-lice.”

“She say it was some of them Ratliff boys,” Odean said. “What just got out of prison.”

“Ratliff?” said Harriet; and despite the confusion in the kitchen, all three women turned to look at her, her voice was so loud and strange.

————

“Ida, what do you know about some people named Ratliff?” asked Harriet the next day.

“That they sorry,” said Ida, grimly wringing out a dish towel.

She slapped the discolored cloth upon the stove top. Harriet, seated in the wide sill of the open window, watched her languidly wipe away the grease freckles from the morning’s skillet of bacon and eggs, humming, nodding her head with trance-like calm. These reveries, which settled over Ida when she did repetitive work—shelling peas, beating the carpets, stirring icing for a cake—were familiar to Harriet from babyhood, and as soothing to watch as a tree sifting back and forth in the breeze; but they were also a plain signal that Ida wanted to be left alone. She could be ferocious if disturbed in such moods. Harriet had seen her snap at Charlotte and even at Edie if one of them chose the wrong moment to question her aggressively about some triviality. But other times—especially if Harriet wanted to ask her something difficult, or secret, or deep—she replied with a serene, oracular frankness, like a subject under hypnosis.

Harriet shifted a bit and pulled one knee beneath her chin. “What else do you know?” she said, toying studiously with the buckle of her sandal. “About the Ratliffs?”

“Nothing to know. You seen them your own self. That bunch of ones come sidling over in the yard the other day.”

“Here?” said Harriet, after a moment of confused silence.

“Yesm. Right over yonder.… Yesm, you sho did,” said Ida Rhew, in a low, singsong tone, almost as though she was talking to herself. “And if it was a bunch of little old goats to come over here fooling around in your mama’s yard I bet yall feel sorry for them, too.… ‘Look a here. Look how cute.’ Before long, yall get to petting and playing with them. ‘Come on over here, Mr. Goat, and eat some sugar out of my hand.’ ‘Mr. Goat, you filthy. Come on and let me give you a bath.’ ‘Poor Mr.

Goat.’ And by the time you realize,” she said, serenely, over Harriet’s startled interruption, “time you realize how mean and nasty they is, you can’t run em off with a stick. They be tearing the clothes off the line, and tramping up the flower beds, and whooping and bleating and hollering out all the night.… And what they don’t eat, they stomps it to pieces and leaves it in the mud. ‘Come on! Give us some more!’ Think they ever satisfied? No, they aint. But I tell you,” Ida said, cutting her red-rimmed eyes at Harriet, “I’d rather me a bunch of goats than a mess of little Ratliffs running around asking and wanting all the time.”

“But Ida—”

“Mean! Filthy!” With a droll little grimace, Ida Rhew wrung out the dish towel. “And before too long, all yall fixing to hear is want, want, want. ‘Give me this thing.’ ‘Buy me that one.’ ”

“Those kids weren’t Ratliffs, Ida. That were here the other day.”

“Yall better watch out,” Ida Rhew said resignedly, going back to her work. “Your mother des keeps on going out there, giving out yalls clothes and toys to this one, and that one, and any one that wanders up. After while, they not even going to bother with the asking. They just going to go on and take.”

“Ida, those were Odums. Those kids in the yard.”

“Same difference. It’s not a one of em knows right from wrong. What if you was one of them little Odums—” she paused to re-fold her dish towel—“and your mother and your daddy never do a lick of work, and teach you it aint a thing in the world wrong to rob, and hate, and steal, and take anything you wanted from another? Hmmn? You wouldn’t know anything but robbing and stealing. No, sir. Wouldn’t think they was a thing wrong with it in the world.”

“But—”

“I’m not saying there’s not bad colored ones, too. It’s bad ones that’s colored, and it’s bad ones that’s white.… All I know is I aint have time to fool with any Odums, and I aint have time to fool with anybody always thinking about what they don’t got, and how they going to get it from another. No, sir. If I don’t earn it,” said Ida somberly, holding up a damp hand, “and I don’t have it, then I don’t want it. No, maam. I sho don’t. I just goes on by.”

“Ida, I don’t care about the Odums.”

“You ought not care about any of them.”

“Well I don’t one bit.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

“What I want to know about is the Ratliffs. What can you—”

“Well, I can tell you they chunked bricks at my sister’s grand-baby while she’s walking to school in the first grade,” said Ida curtly. “How about that? Big old grown men. Chunking bricks and hollering out nigger and get back to the jungle at that poor child.”

Harriet, appalled, said nothing. Without looking up, she continued to fiddle with the strap of her sandal. The word nigger—especially from Ida—made her red in the face.

“Bricks!” Ida shook her head. “From that wing they’s building to the school back then. And I reckon they’s proud of themselves for doing it, but aint nohow it’s correct for nobody to chunk bricks at a little one. Show me in the Bible where it say chunk bricks at your neighbor. Hmn? Look all day and you aint going to find it because it aint there.”

Harriet, who was very uncomfortable, yawned to mask her confusion and distress. She and Hely attended Alexandria Academy, as did almost every white child in the county. Even Odums and Ratliffs and Scurlees practically starved themselves to death in order to keep their children out of the public schools. Certainly, families like Harriet’s (and Hely’s) would not tolerate for one moment brick-throwing at children white or black (“or purple,” as Edie was fond of piping up in any discussion about skin color). And yet there Harriet was, at the all-white school.

“Them mens call themselves preachers. Out there spitting and calling that poor baby every kind of Jigaboo and Jungle Bunny. But aint never any reason for a big one to harm a little one,” said Ida Rhew grimly. “The Bible teach it. Whoso shall offend one of these little—”

“Were they arrested?”

Ida Rhew snorted.

“Were they?”

“Sometime the police favor criminals more than the one against who they commit the crime.”

Harriet thought about this. Nothing, as far as she knew, had happened to the Ratliffs for shooting guns down at the creek. It seemed like these people could do pretty much what they wanted and get away with it.

“It’s against the law for anybody to throw bricks in public,” she said aloud.

“Don’t make a bit of difference. Police aint done a thing to the Ratliffs when they lit the Missionary Baptist Church on fire, did they, when you’s just a baby? After Dr. King come to town? Just drove right by, and chunked that whiskey bottle with a lit rag in it through the window there.”

Harriet, all her life, had heard about this church fire—and about others, in other Mississippi towns, all confused with each other in her mind—but she had never been told that the Ratliffs were responsible. You would think (said Edie) that Negroes and poor whites would not hate each other the way they did since they had a lot in common—mainly, being poor. But sorry white people like the Ratliffs had only Negroes to look down upon. They could not bear the idea that the Negroes were now just as good as they were, and, in many cases, far more prosperous and respectable. “A poor Negro has at least the excuse of his birth,” Edie said. “The poor white has nothing to blame for his station but his own character. Well, of course, that won’t do. That would mean having to assume some responsibility for his own laziness and sorry behavior. No, he’d much rather stomp around burning crosses and blaming the Negro for everything than go out and try to get an education or improve himself in any way.”

Ida Rhew, lost in thought, continued to polish the stove top though it no longer needed polishing. “Yesm, it sho is the truth,” she said. “Them trash killed Miss Etta Coffey sure as they’d stabbed her in the heart.” She compressed her lips for several moments as she polished, in small, tight circles, the chrome dials of the stove. “Old Miss Etta, she righteous, sometime she praying all the night. My mother, she see that light burning late there at Miss Etta’s, she make my daddy get out of bed and walk himself right over there and tap at the window and ax Miss Etta has she fell, or do she need help to get up off the floor. She holler at him no thank you, her and Jesus still got business to talk!”

“One time, Edie told me—”

“Yes, sir. Miss Etta, she dwelling at His right hand side. And my mother and my daddy, and my poor brother Cuff that die with cancer. And little old Robin, too, right up amongst them. God keep a place for all His children. He surely do.”

“But Edie said that old lady didn’t die in the fire. Edie said she had a heart attack.”

“Edie say?”

You didn’t want to challenge Ida when she used that tone. Harriet looked at her fingernails.

“Didn’t die in the fire. Hah!” Ida wadded the wet cloth and slapped it down on the counter. “She die of the smoke, didn’t she? And of all the shoving and hollering and people fighting to get out? She old, Miss Coffey. She so tender-hearted, she not able to eat deer meat or take a fish off the hook. And here ride up these horrible old trash, chunking fire through the window—”

“Did the church burn all the way down?”

“It was burnt good enough.”

“Edie said—”

“Was Edie there?”

Her voice was terrible. Harriet dared not say a word. Ida glared at her for several long moments and then hiked the hem of her skirt and rolled down her stocking, which was thick and fleshy-tan, rolled above her knees, many shades paler than Ida’s rich, dark skin. Now, above the opaque roll of nylon, appeared a six-inch patch of seared flesh: pink like an uncooked wiener, shiny and repulsively smooth in some spots, puckered and pitted in others, shocking in both color and texture against the pleasing Brazil-nut brown of Ida’s knee.

“Reckon Edie aint think that’s a burn good enough?”

Harriet was speechless.

“Alls I know is, it felt good and hot to me.”

“Does it hurt?”

“It sho did hurt.”

“What about now?”

“No. Sometime it itch me, though. Come on, now,” she said to the stocking as she began to roll it back up. “Don’t give me no trouble. Sometimes these hoseries like to kill me.”

“Is that a third-degree burn?”

“Third, fourth, and fifth.” Ida laughed again, this time rather unpleasantly. “Alls I know, it hurt so bad I can’t sleep for six weeks. But maybe Edie think that fire aint hot enough unless both legs burnt right off. And I reckon the law think the same thing, because they never going to punish the ones that did it.”

“They have to.”

“Who say?”

“The law does. That’s why it’s the law.”

“It’s one law for the weak, and another for the strong.”

With more confidence than she felt, Harriet said: “No, there’s not. It’s the same law for everybody.”

“Then why them mens still walking free?”

“I think you ought to tell Edie about this,” said Harriet, after a confused pause. “If you don’t, I will.”

“Edie?” Ida Rhew’s mouth twitched, strangely, with something close to amusement; she was about to speak but then changed her mind.

What? Harriet thought, chilled to the heart. Does Edie know?

Her shock and sickness at the notion was perfectly visible, like a window shade had snapped up from over her face. Ida’s expression softened—it’s true, thought Harriet, in disbelief, she’s told Edie already, Edie knows.

But Ida Rhew, quite suddenly, had busied herself with the stove again. “And how come you think I need to be bother Miss Edie with this mess, Harriet?” she said, with her back turned, and in a bantering and rather too hearty voice. “She an old lady. What you think she going to do? Stamp on they feet?” She chuckled; and though the chuckle was warm and unquestionably heartfelt, it did not reassure Harriet. “Beat them crost the head with that black pocketbook?”

“She should call the police.” Was it conceivable that Edie had been told of this, and not called the police? “Whoever did that to you should be in jail.”

“Jail?” To Harriet’s surprise, Ida roared with laughter. “Bless your heart. They likes to be in jail. Air conditioning in the summertime and free peas and cornbread. And plenty time to idle round and visit with they sorry friends.”

“The Ratliffs did this? You’re sure?”

Ida rolled her eyes. “Bragging about it around the town.”

Harriet felt about to cry. How could they be walking free? “And threw the bricks too?”

“Yes, ma’am. Grown men. Young’uns too. And that one call himself a preacher—he not actually doing the chunking, he just hollering and shaking his Bible and stirring the others up.”

“There’s a Ratliff boy about Robin’s age,” said Harriet, watching Ida carefully. “Pemberton told me about him.”

Ida said nothing. She wrung out the dishrag, and then went to the drainer to put away the clean dishes.

“He would be about twenty now.” Old enough, thought Harriet, to be one of the men shooting off the creek bridge.

Ida, with a sigh, heaved the heavy cast-iron frying pan out of the drainer, and stooped to put it in the cabinet. The kitchen was by far the cleanest room in the house; Ida had carved out a little fortress of order here, free from the dusty newspapers piled throughout the rest of the house. Harriet’s mother did not allow the newspapers to be thrown away—this a rule so ancient and inviolable that even Harriet did not question it—but by some unspoken treaty between them, she kept them out of the kitchen, which was Ida’s realm.

“His name is Danny,” said Harriet. “Danny Ratliff. This person Robin’s age.”

Ida glanced over her shoulder. “What for you studying Ratliff so big all of a sudden?”

“Do you remember him? Danny Ratliff?”

“Lord, yes.” Ida grimaced as she stretched up on tiptoe to put away a cereal bowl. “I remember him just like yesterday.”

Harriet took care to keep her face composed. “He came to the house? When Robin was alive?”

“Yes sir. Nasty little loud-mouth. Couldn’t run him off for nothing. Hitting at the porch with baseball bats and creeping around here in the yard after dark, and one time he taken Robin’s bicycle. I tell your poor mama, I tell her and I tell her, but she aint done a thing. Underprivilege, she say. Underprivilege, my foot.”

She opened the drawer and—noisily, with lots of clatter—began to replace the clean spoons. “Nobody pay a bit of attention to what I say. I tell your mother, I tell her and tell her that little Ratliff is nasty. Trying to fight Robin. Always cussing and setting off firecrackers and chunking something or other. Someday somebody going to get hurt. I sees it plain enough even if nobody else do. Who watch Robin every day? Who always looking right here out the window at him—” she pointed, at the window above the sink, at the late-afternoon sky and all the full-leafed greenness of the summer yard—“while he playing right out there with his soldiers or his kitty cat?” Sadly, she shook her head, and shut the silverware drawer. “Your brother, he a good little fellow. Buzz around underfoot like a little old june bug, and he sure do sass me every now and then, but he always sorry for it. He never pout and go on like you do. Sometimes he run up and thow his arms around me, like so. ‘I’s lonesome, Ida!’ I told him not to play with that trash, I told him and told him, but he’s lonesome, and your mother say she don’t see nothing the matter with it, and sometime he do it anyway.”

“Danny Ratliff fought Robin? In the yard here?”

“Yes, sir. Cussed and stole, too.” Ida took off her apron, and hung it on a peg. “And I chase him out of the yard not ten minutes before your mama find poor little Robin hung off that tree limb out there.”

————

“I’m telling you, the police don’t do anything to people like him,” said Harriet; and she started in again about the church, and Ida’s leg, and the old lady who had burned to death, but Hely was tired of hearing about all this. What excited him was a dangerous criminal on the loose, and the notion of being a hero. Though he was grateful to have evaded church camp, the summer so far had been just a little too quiet. Apprehending a killer promised to be more fun than acting in pageants, or running away from home, or any of the other activities he’d hoped to do with Harriet over the summer.

They were in the toolshed in Harriet’s back yard, where the two of them had retreated to have private conversations ever since kindergarten. The air was stifling, and smelled of gasoline and dust. Big black coils of rubber tubing hung from hooks on the wall; a spiky forest of tomato frames loomed behind the lawn mower, their skeletons exaggerated and made fantastical by cobweb and shadow, and the swordlike shafts of light which pierced the holes in the rusted tin ceiling crisscrossed in the dim, so furred with dust motes that they looked solid, as if yellow powder would rub off on your fingertips if you brushed your hands across them. The dimness, and heat, only increased the toolshed’s atmosphere of secrecy and excitement. Chester kept packs of Kool cigarettes hidden in the tool shed, and bottles of Kentucky Tavern whiskey, in hiding places which he varied from time to time. When Hely and Harriet were younger, they’d taken great pleasure in pouring water on the cigarettes (once Hely, in a fit of meanness, had peed on them) and in emptying the whiskey bottles and re-filling them with tea. Chester never told on them because he wasn’t supposed to have the whiskey or the cigarettes in the first place.

Harriet had already told Hely everything that she had to tell, but she was so agitated after her conversation with Ida that she kept fidgeting and pacing and repeating herself. “She knew it was Danny Ratliff. She knew. She said herself it was him and I hadn’t even told her what your brother said. Pem said he bragged about other stuff, too, bad things—”

“Why don’t we pour sugar in his gas tank? That’ll totally destroy the engine of a car.”

She gave him a disgusted look, which offended him slightly; he had thought this an excellent idea.

“Or let’s write a letter to the police and don’t sign our names.”

“What good will that do?”

“If we tell my daddy, I bet he’ll call them.”

Harriet snorted. She didn’t share Hely’s high opinion of his father, who was a principal at the high school.

“Let’s hear your big idea then,” Hely said sarcastically.

Harriet bit her lower lip. “I want to kill him,” she said.

The sternness and remove of her expression struck a thrill at Hely’s heart. “Can I help?” he said immediately.

“No.”

“You can’t kill him by yourself!”

“Why not?”

He was taken aback by her look. For a moment he couldn’t think of a good reason. “Because he’s big,” he said at last. “He’ll kick your ass.”

“Yes, but I bet I’m smarter than him.”

“Let me help. How are you going to do it, anyway?” he said, nudging her with the toe of his sneaker. “Have you got a gun?”

“My dad does.”

“Those big old shotguns? You couldn’t even pick one of them things up.”

“I can too.”

“Maybe so, but—Look, don’t get mad,” he said, as her brow darkened. “I can’t even shoot a gun that big and I weigh ninety pounds. That shotgun would knock me down, maybe even put my eye out. If you put your eye right up to the sight, the kick will knock your eyeball right out of the socket.”

“Where did you learn all this?” said Harriet, after an attentive pause.

“In Boy Scouts.” He hadn’t really learned it in the Boy Scouts; he didn’t know exactly how he knew it, though he was pretty sure it was true.

“I wouldn’t have quit going to Brownies if they’d taught us stuff like that.”

“Well, they teach you a lot of crap in the Boy Scouts too. Traffic safety and stuff.”

“What if we used a pistol?”

“A pistol would be better,” said Hely, glancing coolly away to conceal his pleasure.

“Do you know how to shoot one?”

“Oh yeah.” Hely had never had his hands on a gun in his life—his father didn’t hunt, and didn’t allow his boys to hunt—but he did have a BB gun. He was about to volunteer that his mother kept a little black pistol in her bedside table when Harriet said: “Is it hard?”

“To shoot? Not for me, it isn’t,” said Hely. “Don’t worry, I’ll shoot him for you.”

“No, I want to do it myself.”

“Okay, so, I’ll teach you,” said Hely. “I’ll coach you. We start today.”

“Where?”

“What do you mean?”

“We can’t be shooting off guns in the back yard.”

“That’s right, sweet pea, you certainly can’t,” said a merry-voiced shadow which loomed suddenly in the door of the toolshed.

Hely and Harriet—badly startled—glanced up into the white pop of a Polaroid flashbulb.

“Mother!” screamed Hely, throwing his arms over his face and stumbling backwards over a can of gasoline.

The camera spat out the picture with a click and a whir.

“Don’t be mad, yall, I couldn’t help it,” said Hely’s mother, in a bemused voice which made it plain she didn’t give a hoot if they were mad or not. “Ida Rhew told me she thought you two were out here. Peanut—” (“Peanut” was what Hely’s mother always called him; it was a nickname he despised) “did you forget that today is Daddy’s birthday? I want both you boys to be at home when he gets back from playing golf so we can surprise him.”

“Don’t sneak up on me like that!”

“Oh, come on. I just went out and bought a bunch of film, and yall just looked so cute. I hope it comes out.…” She examined the photograph, and blew on it through pursed, pink-frosted lips. Though Hely’s mother was the same age as Harriet’s, she dressed and acted much younger. She wore blue eye shadow and had a dark, freckly tan, from parading around Hely’s back yard in a bikini (“like a teenybopper!” said Edie), and her hair was cut the same way that a lot of high-school girls wore it.

“Stop it,” whined Hely. He was embarrassed by his mother. Kids at school teased him about her skirts being too short.

Hely’s mother laughed. “I know you don’t like white cake, Hely, but it is your father’s birthday. Guess what, though?” Hely’s mother always spoke to Hely in this bright, insulting, babyish tone, like he was in kindergarten. “They had some chocolate cupcakes at the bakery, how about that? Come on, now. You need to take a bath and put on some clean clothes.… Harriet, I’m sorry to have to tell you this, sweet pea, but Ida Rhew asked me to tell you to come in for supper.”

“Can’t Harriet eat with us?”

“Not today, Peanut,” she said breezily, with a wink at Harriet. “Harriet understands, don’t you, sweetie?”

Harriet—offended by her forward manner—gazed back at her stolidly. She didn’t see any reason to be more polite to Hely’s mother than Hely was himself.

“I’m sure she understands, don’t you, Harriet? We’ll have her over next time we cook hamburgers in the yard. Besides, if Harriet came, I’m afraid we wouldn’t have a cupcake for her.”

“One cupcake?” shrieked Hely. “You only bought me one cupcake?”

“Peanut, don’t be greedy like that.”

“One isn’t enough!”

“One cupcake is plenty for a bad boy like you.… Oh, look here. This is hilarious.”

She leaned down to show them the Polaroid—still pale, but clear enough now to make out. “Wonder if it’s going to come out any better?” she said. “You two look like a couple of little Martians.”

And it was true: they did. Both Hely and Harriet’s eyes glowed round and red, like the eyes of little nocturnal creatures caught unexpectedly in car headlights; and their faces, dazed with shock, were tinted a sickly green from the flash.