The Little Friend

With difficulty, Hely forced himself to look down at his comic. He had never seen Farish Ratliff up close—only at a distance, pointed out from a moving car, or pictured blurrily in the local paper—but he had heard stories about him all his life. At one time Farish Ratliff had been the most notorious crook in Alexandria, masterminding a family gang which incorporated every kind of burglary and petty theft imaginable. He had also written and distributed a number of educational pamphlets over the years featuring such titles as “Your Money or Your Life” (a protest against the Federal income tax), “Rebel Pride: Answering the Critics,” and “Not MY Daughter!” All this had stopped, however, with an incident with a bulldozer a few years back.

Hely didn’t know why Farish had decided to steal the bulldozer. The newspaper had said that the foreman discovered it missing from a construction site out behind the Party Ice Company and then the next thing anyone knew Farish was spotted tearing down the highway on it. He wouldn’t pull over when signaled, but turned and took defensive action with the bulldozer shovel. Then, when the cops opened fire, he bolted across a cow pasture, tearing down a barbed-wire fence, scattering panicked cattle in all directions, until he managed to tip the bulldozer into a ditch. As they ran across the pasture, shouting for Farish to exit the vehicle with his hands above his head, they stopped dead in their tracks to see the distant figure of Farish, in the bulldozer’s cab, stick a .22 to his temple and fire. There’d been a picture in the paper of a cop named Jackie Sparks, looking genuinely shaken, standing over the body out there in the cow pasture as he shouted instructions to the ambulance attendants.

Though it was a mystery why Farish had stolen the bulldozer in the first place, the real mystery was why Farish had shot himself. Some people claimed that it was because he was afraid of going back to prison but others said no, prison was nothing to a man like Farish, the offense wasn’t that serious and he would have gotten out again in a year or two. The bullet wound was grave, and Farish had very nearly died of it. He’d made news again when he awakened asking for mashed potatoes from what the doctors believed was a vegetative state. When he was released from the hospital—legally blind in his right eye—he was sent down to the state mental farm at Whitfield on an insanity plea, a measure perhaps not unjustified.

Since his release from the mental hospital, Farish was in several aspects an altered man. It wasn’t just the eye. People said he had stopped drinking; as far as anyone knew, he no longer broke into gas stations or stole cars and chainsaws from people’s garages (though his younger brothers took up the slack as far as such activities were concerned). His racial concerns had also slipped from the forefront. No more did he stand on the sidewalk in front of the public school handing out his home-made pamphlets decrying school integration. He ran a taxidermy business, and along with his disability checks and his proceeds from stuffing deer heads and bass for local hunters he had become a fairly law-abiding citizen—or so it was said.

And now here he was, Farish Ratliff in the flesh—twice in the same week, if you counted the bridge. The only Ratliffs Hely had occasion to see in his own part of town were Curtis (who roamed freely over Greater Alexandria, shooting his squirt gun at passing cars) and Brother Eugene, a preacher of some sort. This Eugene was occasionally to be seen preaching on the town square or, more frequently, reeling in the vaporous heat off the highway as he shouted about the Pentecost and shook his fist at the traffic. Though Farish was said to be not quite right in the head since he’d shot himself, Eugene (Hely had heard his father say) was frankly demented. He ate red clay from people’s yards and fell out on the sidewalk in fits where he heard the voice of God in thunder.

Catfish was having a quiet word with a group of middle-aged men at the table beside Odum’s. One of them—a fat man in a yellow sports shirt, with piggy, suspicious eyes like raisins sunk in dough—glanced over at Farish and Odum and then, regally, strode to the other side of the table and sank a low ball. Without glancing at Catfish, he reached carefully for his back pocket and, after half a beat, one of the three spectators standing behind him did the same.

“Hey,” Danny Ratliff said across the room to Odum. “Hold your horses. If it’s for money now, Farish has the next game.”

Farish hawked, with a loud, retching noise, and shifted his weight to the other foot.

“Old Farish only got him the one eye now,” said Catfish, sidling over and slapping Farish on the back.

“Watch it,” Farish said, rather menacingly, with an angry jerk of his head that did not seem entirely show.

Catfish, suavely, leaned across the table and offered his hand to Odum. “Name of Catfish de Bienville,” he said.

Odum, irritably, waved him away. “I know who you are.”

Farish slid a couple of quarters into the metal slide and jerked it, hard. The balls chunked loose from the undercarriage.

“I’ve beat this blind man a time or two. I’ll shoot pool with any man in here that can see,” said Odum, staggering back, righting himself by jabbing his cue to the floor. “Why don’t you step on back and quit crowding me,” he snapped at Catfish, who had slipped behind him again; “yes, you—”

Catfish leaned to whisper something in his ear. Slowly, Odum’s white-blond eyebrows pulled together in a befuddled knot.

“Don’t like to play for money, Odum?” Farish said derisively, after a slight pause, as he reached beneath the table and began to rack the balls. “You a deacon over at the Baptist church?”

“Naw,” said Odum. The greedy thought planted in his ear by Catfish was beginning to work its way across his sunburnt face, as visible as a cloud moving across empty sky.

“Diddy,” said a small, acid voice from the doorway.

It was Lasharon Odum. Her scrawny hip was thrown to the side in what was, to Hely, a disgustingly adult-looking posture. Across it was straddled a baby just as dirty as she was, their mouths encircled with orange rings from Popsicles, or Fanta.

“Well look a here,” said Catfish stagily.

“Diddy, you said come get you when the big hand was on the three.”

“A hundred bucks,” said Farish, in the silence that followed. “Take it or leave it.”

Odum twisted the chalk on his cue and hitched up a pair of imaginary shirtsleeves. Then he said, abruptly, without looking at his daughter: “Diddy’s not ready to go yet, sugar. Here’s yall a dime apiece. Run look at the funny books.”

“Diddy, you said remind you—”

“I said run along. Your break,” he said to Farish.

“I racked.”

“I know it,” said Odum, flicking his hand. “Go on, I’m giving it to you.”

Farish slumped forward, his weight on the table. He looked down the cue with his good eye—straight at Hely—and his gaze was as cold as if he was looking down the barrel of a gun.

Crack. The balls spun apart. Odum walked to the opposite side and studied the table for several moments. Then he popped his neck quickly, by swinging it to the side, and leaned down to make his shot.

Catfish slipped in amongst the men who’d drifted from the pinball machines and the adjoining tables to watch. Inconspicuously, he whispered something to the man in the yellow shirt just as Odum made a showy leap-shot which sank not one, but two striped balls.

Whoops and cheers. Catfish drifted back to Danny’s side, in the confused conversation from the spectators. “Odum can hold the table all day,” he whispered, “as long as they stick to eight ball.”

“Farish can run it just as good when he gets going.”

Odum rolled in another combination—a delicate shot, where the cue ball hit a solid ball that tipped another one into a pocket. More cheers.

“Who’s in?” Danny said. “Them two by the pinball?”

“Not interested,” said Catfish, glancing casually over his shoulder and above Hely’s head as he reached in the watch pocket of his leather vest and palmed a small metal object about the size and shape of a golf tee. In the instant before his beringed fingers closed over it, Hely saw that it was a bronze figurine of a naked lady with high-heeled shoes and a big Afro hairdo.

“Why not? Who are they?”

“Just a couple good Christian boys,” said Catfish, as Odum sank an easy ball into a side pocket. Stealthily, with his hand half in, half out of his jacket pocket, he unscrewed the lady’s head from her body and flicked it into the jacket pocket with his thumb. “Them other group”—he rolled his eyes at the man in the yellow sport shirt and his fat friends—“is passing through from Texas.” Catfish glanced around casually and then, turning as if to sneeze, he raised the vial and took a quick, covert sniff. “Work a shrimping boat,” he said, wiping his nose on the sleeve of his smoking jacket, his gaze passing blankly across the comic-book rack and over the top of Hely’s head as he palmed the vial to Danny.

Danny sniffed, loudly, and pinched his nostrils shut. Water welled in his eyes. “God almighty,” he said.

Odum smacked in another ball. Amidst the hoots of the men from the shrimping boat Farish glared down at the table, the pool cue balanced horizontally along the back of his neck and his elbows slung over either side, paws dangling.

Catfish stepped backward with a loose, comical little dance movement. He seemed exhilarated all of a sudden. “Mistah Farish,” he said gaily, across the room—his tone mimicking that of a popular black comedian on television—“has apprised himself of the situation.”

Hely was excited and so confused that his head felt as though it might pop. The significance of the vial had escaped him, but Catfish’s bad language and suspicious manner had not; and though Hely was not sure exactly what was going on he knew it was gambling, and that it was against the law. Just as it was against the law to shoot guns off a bridge, even if nobody got killed. His ears burned; they always got red when he was excited—he hoped nobody noticed. Casually, he replaced the comic he was looking at and took a new one from the rack—Secrets of Sinister House. A skeleton seated in a witness chair flung out a fleshless arm at the spectators as a ghostly attorney boomed: “And now, my witness—who was the VICTIM—will point out …

“THE MAN WHO KILLED HIM!!!”

“Come on, kick it!” shouted Odum unexpectedly, as the eight ball zinged across the baize, ricocheted, and clunked into the corner pocket opposite.

In the pandemonium that followed, Odum removed a small bottle of whiskey from his back pocket and had a long thirsty pull from it. “Let’s see that hundred dollars, Ratliff.”

“I’m good for it. And I’m good for anotherun, too,” snapped Farish, as the balls fell from the undercarriage and he began to rack them up again. “Winner’s break.”

Odum shrugged, and squinted down the cue—nose wrinkled, upper lip baring his rabbity front teeth—then smashed in a break that not only left the cue ball still spinning where it had hit the rack of balls, but shot the eight ball in a corner pocket.

The men who worked on the shrimping boat hooted and clapped. They looked like guys who felt they were on to a good thing. Catfish lolloped over to them jauntily—knees loose, chin high—to confer over the finances.

“That’s the fastest money you ever lost!” Danny called across the room.

Hely became aware that Lasharon Odum was standing right behind him—not because she said anything but because the baby had a bad cold and breathed with wet, repellent wheezes. “Get away from me,” he muttered, edging a little to the side.

Shyly, she moved after him, obtruding into the corner of his vision. “Let me borry a quarter.”

The wheedling hopelessness of her voice revolted him even more than the baby’s snotty breathing. Pointedly, he turned his back. Farish—to the rolled eyes of the men from the shrimping boat—was reaching again in the undercarriage.

Odum grabbed his jaw between both hands, and cracked his neck to the left and then right: snick. “Still aint had enough?”

“Oh, all right now,” Catfish crooned, along to the jukebox, popping his fingers: “Baby what I say.”

“What’s all this trash on the music box?” snarled Farish, dropping the balls in an angry clatter.

Catfish, teasingly, undulated his meager hips. “Loosen up, Farish.”

“Go on,” said Hely to Lasharon, who had sidled up again, nearly touching him. “I don’t want your booger breath.”

He was so sickened by her nearness that he said this louder than he meant to; and he froze when Odum’s unfocused gaze swung vaguely in their direction. Farish looked up, too; and his good eye pinned Hely like a thrown knife.

Odum took a deep, drunken breath, and put down the pool cue. “Yall see that little old gal standing yonder?” he said melodramatically to Farish and company. “It’s against me to tell you this, but that little gal does the work of a grown woman.”

Catfish and Danny Ratliff exchanged a quick glance of alarm.

“I ask you. Where would you find a sweet little old girl like this that looks after the house, and looks after the little ones, and puts food on the table and totes and fetches and goes without so’s her poor old Diddy can have?”

I wouldn’t want any food she put on the table, thought Hely.

“Younguns today all think they have to have,” Farish said flatly. “They would do just as well to be like yourn and go without.”

“When me and my brothers and sisters were coming up, we didn’t even have us an icebox,” said Odum in a quaver. He was getting good and wound-up. “All the summer long I had to chop cotton out in the fields—”

“I’ve chopped my share of cotton, too.”

“—and my mama, I’m telling you, she worked those fields like a nigger man. Me—I couldn’t go to school! Mama and Daddy, they needed me at home! Naw, we never had a thing but if I had the money it’s nothin in the world I wouldn’t buy those little ones over there. They know old Diddy’d rather give it to them than have it himself. Hmm? Don’t yall know that?”

His unfocused eyes wavered from Lasharon and the baby to Hely himself. “I said, Don’t Yall Know That,” he repeated, in an amplified and less pleasant tone.

He was staring straight at Hely. Hely was shocked: Geez, he thought, is the old coot so drunk he don’t know I’m not his kid? He stared back with his mouth open.

“Yes, Diddy,” Lasharon whispered, just audible.

Odum’s red-rimmed eyes softened, and moved unsteadily to his daughter; and the moist, self-pitying tremor of his lip made Hely more uneasy than anything else he had seen that afternoon.

“Hear that? Hear that little old gal? Come here and hug old Diddy around the neck,” he said, dashing away a tear with his knuckle.

Lasharon hoisted the baby on her bony hip and went slowly to him. Something about the possessiveness of Odum’s embrace, and the vacant way she accepted it—like a miserable old dog, accepting the touch of its owner—disgusted Hely but scared him a bit, too.

“This little gal loves her old Diddy, don’t she?” He pressed her to his shirt front with tears in his eyes.

Hely was gratified to see, by the way they rolled their eyes at each other, that Catfish and Danny Ratliff were just as disgusted by Odum’s slop as he was.

“She knows her Diddy’s a pore man! She don’t have to have a bunch of old toys and candy and fancy clothes!”

“And why should she?” said Farish abruptly.

Odum—intoxicated by the sound of his own voice—turned foggily and puckered his brow.

“Yeah. You heard right. Why should she have all that mess? Why should any of em have it? We didn’t have anything when we was coming up, did we?”

A slow wave of astonishment illumined Odum’s face.

“Naw, brother!” he cried gaily.

“Was we ashamed of being poor? Was we too good to work? What’s good enough for us is good enough for her, aint it?”

“Dern right!”

“Who says that kids should grow up to think they’re better than their own parents? The Federal Government, that’s who! Why do you reckon Government sticks its nose into a man’s home, and doles out all these food stamps, and vaccinations, and liberal educations on a silver platter? I’ll sure tell you why. It’s so they can brainwash kids to think they got to have more than their folks did, and look down on what they come from, and raise themselves above their own flesh and blood. I don’t know about you, sir, but my daddy never give me a thing for free.”

Low murmurs of approval, from all over the poolroom.

“Nope,” said Odum, wagging his head mournfully. “Mama and Diddy never give me nothing. I worked for it all. Everything I have.”

Farish nodded curtly at Lasharon and the baby. “So tell me this. Why should she have what we didn’t?”

“It’s the God’s own truth! Leave Diddy alone, sugar,” Odum said to his daughter, who was tugging listlessly at his pants leg.

“Diddy, please, let’s go.”

“Diddy aint ready to leave yet, sugar.”

“But Diddy, you said remind you that the Chevrolet place closes at six.”

Catfish, with an expression of rather strained goodwill, slid over to speak quietly with the men from the shrimp boat, one of whom had just glanced at his wristwatch. But then, Odum reached into the front pocket of his filthy jeans, and dug around for a moment or two, and pulled out the biggest wad of cash that Hely had ever seen.

This got everyone’s attention right away. Odum tossed the roll of bills on the pool table.

“What’s left of my insurance settlement,” he said, nodding at the money with drunken piety. “From this hand here. Going to go to the Chevrolet place and pay that minty-breath bastard Roy Dial. He come and taken my damn car from out in front my—”

“That’s how they operate,” said Farish, soberly. “These bastards from the Tax Commission and the Finance Company and the Sheriff’s Department. They come right up on a man’s property, and take what they feel like whenever they feel like it—”

“And,” said Odum, raising his voice, “I’m going to go down there directly and get it back. With this.”

“Um, none of my business, but you ort not drop all that cash money on a car.”

“What?” said Odum belligerently, staggering back. The money, on the green baize, lay in a yellow circle of light.

Farish raised a grubby paw. “I’m saying that if you purchase your vehicle above the table, so called, from a slick weasel like Dial, not only is Dial robbing you outright with the financing but the State and Federal government are right in line for their cut, too. I done spoke out many and many a time against the Sales Tax. The Sales Tax is unconstitutional. I can point my finger right where in the Constitution of this nation it says so.”

“Come on, Diddy,” said Lasharon faintly, plucking away gamely at Odum’s pants leg. “Diddy, please let’s go.”

Odum was gathering up his money. He did not seem to have absorbed really the gist of Farish’s little talk. “No, sir.” He was breathing hard. “That man can’t take what belongs to me! I’m going to go right down to Dial Chevrolet, and sling this right in his face—” he slapped the bills against the pool table—” and I’m going to say to him, I’m gonna say: ‘Give me back my vehicle, you minty-breath bastard.’ ” Laboriously, he stuffed the bills into the right pocket of his jeans as he fished for a quarter in the left. “But first I got this four hundred and two more of yours say I can kick your ass one more time at eight ball.”

Danny Ratliff, who had been pacing in a tight circle by the Coke machine, exhaled audibly.

“Them’s high stakes,” said Farish impassively. “My break?”

“Yours,” said Odum, with a drunken, magnanimous wave.

Farish, with absolutely no expression on his face, reached into his hip pocket and retrieved a large black wallet attached by a chain to a belt loop of his coveralls. With a bank teller’s swift professionalism, he counted off six hundred dollars in twenties and laid them down upon the table.

“That’s a lot of cash, my friend,” said Odum.

“Friend?” Farish laughed harshly. “I only got two friends. My two best friends.” He held up the wallet—still thick with bills—for inspection. “See this? This here’s my first friend, and he’s always right here in my hip pocket. I got me a second best friend that stays with me too. And that friend is a .22 pistol.”

“Diddy,” said Lasharon hopelessly, giving her father’s pants leg one more tug. “Please.”

“What are you staring at, you little shit?”

Hely jumped. Danny Ratliff, only a foot away, was towering over him, eyes horribly alight.

“Hmmn? Answer me when I talk to you, you little shit.”

Everyone was looking at him—Catfish, Odum, Farish, the men from the shrimp boat and the fat guy at the cash register.

As if from a great distance, he heard Lasharon Odum say, in her clear acidic voice: “He’s just looking at the funny books wi’ me Diddy.”

“Is that true? Is it?”

Hely—too petrified to speak—nodded.

“What’s your name?” This, gruffly from across the room. Hely glanced over and saw Farish Ratliff’s good eye trained on him like a power drill.

“Hely Hull,” said Hely without thinking, and then, aghast, clapped a hand over his mouth.

Farish chuckled dryly. “That’s the spirit, boy,” he said, screwing a square of blue chalk on the end of his cue, his good eye still fixed on Hely. “Never tell nothing that you aint made to tell.”

“Aw, I know who this little shit-weasel is,” Danny Ratliff said to his big brother, and then tossed his chin at Hely. “Say you called Hull?”

“Yes, sir,” said Hely miserably.

Danny let out a high, harsh laugh. “Yes sir. Listen at that. Don’t you sir me, you little—”

“Nothing wrong with the boy having manners,” said Farish rather sharply. “Hull, your name is?”

“Yes, sir.”

“He’s kin to that Hull boy, drives an old Cadillac convertible,” said Danny to Farish.

“Diddy,” said Lasharon Odum loudly, in the tense silence. “Diddy, kin me and Rusty go look at the funny books?”

Odum gave her a pat on the bottom. “Run along, sugar. Lookahere,” he said drunkenly to Farish, stabbing the butt of his cue on the floor for emphasis, “we’re going to play this game let’s go on and play it. I got to get going.”

But Farish—much to Hely’s relief—had already begun to rack the balls, after one last, long, stare in his direction.

Hely concentrated every ounce of his attention on the comic book. The letters jumped slightly with his heartbeat. Don’t look up, he told himself, even for a second. His hands were trembling, and his face burned so red that he felt it was drawing the attention of everyone in the room, as a fire would.

Farish made the break, and it was a resounding one, so loud that Hely flinched. A ball clunked into a pocket, followed four or five long, rolling seconds later by another.

The men from the shrimping boat went silent. Somebody was smoking a cigar, and the stink made Hely’s head ache, as did the garish ink jittering across the newsprint in front of him.

A long silence. Clunk. Another long silence. Very very quietly, Hely began to slink towards the door.

Clunk, clunk. The stillness practically vibrated with tension.

“Jesus!” someone cried. “You said the bastard couldn’t see!”

Confusion. Hely was past the cash register and nearly out the door when a hand shot out and grabbed him by the back of his shirt, and he found himself blinking into the face of the bald, bull-faced cashier. With horror, he realized that he was still clutching Secrets of Sinister House, which he had not yet paid for. Frantically, he dug in the front pocket of his shorts. But the cashier was not interested in him—was not even looking at him, though he had him by the shirt firmly enough. He was interested in what was going on at the pool table.

Hely dropped a quarter and a dime on the counter and—as soon as the guy let go his shirt—shot out the door. The afternoon sun hurt his eyes after the darkness of the pool hall; he broke into a run down the sidewalk, his vision so light-dazzled that he was hardly able to see where he was going.

There were no pedestrians on the square—too late in the afternoon—and only a few parked cars. Bicycle—where was it? He ran past the post office, past the Masonic Temple, and was halfway down Main Street before he remembered that he’d left it all the way back in the alley, behind the City Hall.

He turned and ran back, panting. The alley was slippery with moss and very dim. Once, when Hely was younger, he had ducked into it without paying attention where he was going and stumbled headlong over the shadowy, supine form of a tramp (an odorous heap of rags) stretched out nearly half the alley’s length. When Hely fell, smack over him, he sprang up, cursing, and grabbed Hely by the ankle. Hely had screamed as if boiling gasoline was being poured over him; in his agony to escape, he’d lost a shoe.

But now Hely was so frightened that he didn’t care who he stepped on. He darted in the alley—skidding on the moss-slick concrete—and retrieved his bicycle. There wasn’t enough room to ride it out, and hardly enough room to turn it around. He grabbed it by the handlebars, sawed and twisted it until he’d maneuvered the front wheel forward, and then he ran it out—where, to his horror, Lasharon Odum and the baby were standing on the sidewalk, waiting for him.

Hely froze. Languidly, she hiked the baby higher on her hip and looked at him. What she wanted from him he had absolutely no idea, but yet he was afraid to say anything and so he just stood there and looked back at her, heart galloping.

After what seemed like forever she re-shifted the baby, and said: “Lemme have that funny book.”

Without a word, Hely reached in his back pocket and handed the comic over. Placidly, without a flicker of gratitude, she shifted the baby’s weight to one arm and reached to take it but before she could, the baby stretched out its arms and caught the comic book between his filthy little palms. With solemn eyes, he drew it close to his face, and then, tentatively, closed his sticky, orange-stained mouth on it.

Hely was revolted; it was one thing if she wanted to read the comic book; it was quite another if she wanted it for the baby to chew. Lasharon made no move to take the comic book away. Instead, she made goo-goo eyes at the baby, and jogged it affectionately up and down—quite as if it was clean and attractive, and not the rheumy little wheezer it was.

“Why Diddy crying?” she said to it brightly, in baby talk, peering directly into its tiny face. “Why Diddy crying back there? Hmn?”

————

“Put some clothes on,” said Ida Rhew to Harriet. “You dripping water all over the floor.”

“No, I’m not. I dried off on the way home.”

“You put some clothes on anyway.”

In her bedroom, Harriet peeled off her bathing suit and put on some khaki shorts and the only clean T-shirt she had: white, with a yellow smiley face on the front. She detested the smiley-face shirt, a birthday present from her father. Undignified as it was, somehow or other her father must have believed it suited her and this thought was more galling to Harriet than the shirt itself.

Though Harriet didn’t know it, the smiley-face shirt (and the peace-sign barrettes, and the other brightly colored and inappropriate presents her father sent for her birthday) had not been chosen by her father at all but by her father’s mistress, in Nashville; and if not for the mistress (whose name was Kay) Harriet and Allison would have received no birthday presents at all. Kay was a minor soft-drink heiress, slightly overweight, with a sugary voice and a soft, slack smile and a few mental problems. She also drank a bit too much; and she and Harriet’s father often got weepy together in bars over his poor little daughters trapped down in Mississippi with their crazy mother.

Everybody in town knew about Dix’s Nashville mistress except his own family and his wife’s. No one had the nerve to tell Edie, or the heart to tell any of the others. Dix’s colleagues at the bank knew, and disapproved—for occasionally he brought the woman to bank functions; Roy Dial’s sister-in-law, who lived in Nashville, had furthermore told Mr. and Mrs. Dial that the lovebirds actually shared an apartment, and while Mr. Dial (to his credit) had kept this to himself, Mrs. Dial had spread it all over Alexandria. Even Hely knew. He’d overheard his mother talking about it when he was nine or ten years old. When he confronted her, she’d made him swear never to mention it to Harriet; and he never had.

It never occurred to Hely to disobey his mother. But though he kept the secret—the only real secret that he did keep from her—it did not seem to him that Harriet would be particularly upset if ever she happened to learn the truth. And about this he was right. No one would have cared except Edie—from outraged pride; for if Edie grumbled about her granddaughters growing up without a father, neither had she or anyone else suggested that Dix’s return would in any way remedy this lack.

Harriet was in a very grim mood, so grim that she relished, perversely, the irony of the smiley-face shirt. Its self-satisfied air called Harriet’s dad to mind—though there was little reason for Harriet’s dad to be so cheerful or to expect cheer from Harriet. No wonder Edie despised him. You could hear it just in the way Edie said his name: Dixon, never Dix.

Nose dripping, eyes burning from the pool chemicals, she sat in the window seat and looked out across the front yard, at the rich greens of the trees in full summer leaf. Her limbs felt heavy and strange from all the swimming, and a dark lacquer of sadness had settled about the room, as it usually did whenever Harriet sat still long enough. When she was little, sometimes she had chanted to herself her address as it would appear to a visitor from outer space. Harriet Cleve Dufresnes, 363 George Street, Alexandria, Mississippi, America, Planet Earth, the Milky Way … and the sense of ringing vastness, of being swallowed by the black maw of the universe—only the tiniest white grain in a sprinkling of white sugar that went on forever—sometimes made her feel as if she were suffocating.

Violently, she sneezed. Spray flew everywhere. She pinched her nose and, eyes streaming, hopped up and ran downstairs for a Kleenex. The telephone was ringing; she could hardly see where she was going; Ida was standing at the telephone table at the foot of the stairs and before Harriet knew what was happening Ida said “Here she is,” and put the receiver in her hand.

“Harriet, listen. Danny Ratliff is at the pool hall now, him and his brother. They’re the ones that shot at me from the bridge.”

“Wait,” said Harriet, who was very disoriented. With effort, she managed to suppress another sneeze.

“But I saw him, Harriet. He’s scary as hell. Him and his brother, too.”

On he babbled, about robbery and shotguns and theft and gambling; and gradually the significance of what he was saying crept in on Harriet. In wonder, she listened, her itch to sneeze now vanished; her nose was still running and, awkwardly, she twisted around and tried to scour her nose upon the skimpy cap-sleeve of her T-shirt, with a rolling motion of the head like Weenie the cat had used to do against the carpet when he had something in his eye.

“Harriet?” said Hely, breaking off in the middle of his narrative. He’d been so eager to tell her what happened that he’d forgot they weren’t supposed to be speaking.

“Here I am.”

A brief silence followed, during which Harriet became aware of the television gabbling cordially in the background on Hely’s end.

“When did you leave the pool hall?” she said.

“About fifteen minutes ago.”

“Reckon they’re still there?”

“Maybe. It looked like there was going to be a fight. The guys from the boat were mad.”

Harriet sneezed. “I want to see him. I’m going to ride my bike down there right now.”

“Whoa. No way,” said Hely in alarm, but she’d already hung up.

————

There had been no fight—nothing that Danny would call a fight, anyway. When, for a moment, it had looked like Odum was reluctant to pay up, Farish had picked up a chair and knocked him to the floor and begun to kick him methodically (while his kids cowered in the doorway) so that soon enough Odum was howling and begging Farish to take the money. The real worry was the men from the shrimp boat, who could have caused a lot of trouble if they’d wanted to. But though the fat man in the yellow sports shirt had some colorful things to say, the rest only muttered among themselves and even chuckled, though a bit angrily. They were on leave, and had money to burn.

To Odum’s pitiful appeals, Farish reacted most impassively. Eat or be eaten was his philosophy, and anything he was able to take from somebody else he regarded as his own rightful property. As Odum limped frantically back and forth, begging Farish to think of the kids, Farish’s attentive, cheerful expression reminded Danny of the way that Farish’s twin German shepherds looked after they had just killed, or were about to kill, a cat: alert, businesslike, playful. No hard feelings, kitty. Better luck next time.

Danny admired Farish’s no-nonsense attitude, though he had little stomach for such things. He lit a cigarette even though he had a bad taste in his mouth from smoking too much.

“Relax,” said Catfish, sliding up behind Odum and laying a hand upon his shoulder. Catfish’s high spirits were inexhaustible; he was cheerful no matter what happened, and he was unable to understand that not everyone was so resilient.

With a feeble, half-crazed bluster—more pitiable than threatening—Odum swaggered back weakly and cried: “Get your hand off me, nigger.”

Catfish was unperturbed. “Anybody can play like you, brother, not going to have trouble winning that money back. Later on, if you feel like it, come find me over at the Esquire Lounge and maybe we can work out a little something.”

Odum stumbled back against the cinder-block wall. “My car,” he said. His eye was swollen and his mouth was bloody.

Unbidden, an ugly memory from early childhood flashed into Danny’s mind: pictures of naked women tucked inside a fish-and-game magazine his father had left by the commode in the bathroom. Excitement, but sick excitement, the black and pink between the women’s legs mixed up with a bleeding buck with an arrow through its eye on one page, and with a hooked fish on the next. And all this—the dying buck, sunk to its forelegs, the gasping fish—was mixed up with the memory of the struggling breathless thing in his nightmare.

“Stop it,” he said, aloud.

“Stop what?” said Catfish absent-mindedly, patting the pockets of his smoking jacket for the little vial.

“This noise in my ears. It just goes on and on.”

Catfish took a quick snort, and passed the vial to Danny. “Don’t let it drag you down. Hey Odum,” he called, across the room. “The Lord loveth a cheerful loser.”

“Ho,” said Danny, pinching his nose. Tears rose to his eyes. The icy, disinfectant taste at the back of his throat made him feel clean: everything surface again, everything sparkle on the glossy face of these waters which swept like thunder over a cesspool he was sick to death of: poverty, grease and rot, blue intestines full of shit.

He handed the vial back to Catfish. An icy fresh wind blew through his head. The poolroom’s seedy, contaminated mood—all heeltaps and grime—waxed bright and clean and comical all of a sudden. With a high, melodious ping, he was struck by the hilarious insight that weepy Odum, with his hayseed clothes and his large pink pumpkin-head, looked exactly like Elmer Fudd. Long skinny Catfish, like Bugs himself popped up from the rabbit hole, lounged against the jukebox. Big feet, big front teeth, even the way he held his cigarette: Bugs Bunny held his carrot out like that, like a cigar, just that cocky.

Feeling sweet and giddy and grateful, Danny reached in his pocket and peeled a twenty off his roll; he had a hundred more, right in his hand. “Give him that for his kids, man,” he said, palming Catfish the money. “I’m on take off.”

“Where you off to?”

“Just off,” Danny heard himself say.

He strolled out to his car. It was Saturday evening, the streets were deserted and a clear summer night lay ahead, with stars and warm wind and night skies full of neon. The car was a beauty: a Trans Am, this nice bronze, with sun roof, side vents, and air option. Danny had just given her a wash and wax, and the light poured off her so glittery and hot that she looked like a spaceship about to take off.

One of Odum’s kids—rather clean, for one of Odum’s, and black-headed, too; possibly she had a different mother—was sitting directly across the street in front of the hardware store. She was looking at a book and waiting for her sorry father to come out. Suddenly he became aware that she was looking at him; she hadn’t moved a muscle, but her eyes weren’t on the book any more, they were fastened on him and they had been fastened on him, the way it sometimes happened with meth when you saw a street sign and you kept on seeing it for two hours; it freaked him out, like the cowboy hat on the bed earlier. Speed fucked with your sense of time, all right (that’s why they call it speed! he thought, with a hot burst of exhilaration at his own cleverness: tweaker speeds up! time slows down!), yes, it stretched time like a rubber band, snapped it back and forth, and sometimes it seemed to Danny like everything in the world was staring at him, even cats and cows and pictures in magazines; yet an eternity seemed to have passed, clouds flying overhead like in a sped-up nature film and still the girl held his gaze without blinking—her eyes a chill green, like a bobcat from Hell, like the very Devil.

But no: she wasn’t staring at him after all. She was looking down at her book like she’d been reading it forever. Stores closed, no cars on the street, long shadows and pavement shimmering like in a bad dream. Danny flashed back to a morning the previous week when he’d gone to the White Kitchen after watching the sun come up over the reservoir: waitress, cop, milkman and postman all turning their heads to stare at him when he pushed the door open—moving casually, pretending that they were only curious at the twinkle of the bell—but they meant business, it was him yes him they were looking at, eyes everywhere, all shining green like Day-Glo Satan. He’d been up for seventy-two hours at that point, faint and clammy, had wondered if his heart was just going to pop in his chest like a fat water balloon, right there in the White Kitchen with the strange little teenage waitresses staring green daggers at him.…

Steady, steady, he said to his frantic heart. What if the kid had stared at him? So what? So fucking what? Danny had spent plenty of hot, dreary hours on that same bench, waiting for his own father. It wasn’t the waiting that was so bad, but dread of what he and Curtis might get later if the game hadn’t gone right. There was no reason to believe that Odum shouldn’t seek consolation for his losses in exactly the same manner: that was the way of the world. “As long as you’re under my roof—” the light bulb over the kitchen table swinging by its cord, their grandmother stirring something on the stove as if the curses and slaps and cries were noise from the television.

Rather spasmodically Danny twisted, and dug into his pocket for some change to toss at the girl. His father had occasionally done the same with other men’s kids, when he’d won and was in a good mood. All at once an unwelcome memory of Odum himself floated up out of the past—a scrawny teenager in a two-tone sports shirt, his white-blond ducktail yellowed from the grease he slicked it back with—squatting next to little Curtis with a pack of gum and telling him not to cry.…

With a pop of astonishment—an audible pop, one he could feel, like a small detonation inside his head—Danny realized that he’d been speaking aloud, the whole time he thought he’d been thinking quietly to himself. Or had he? The quarters were still in his hand, but as he raised his arm to toss them over, yet another shock bolted through his head because the girl was gone. The bench was empty; there was no sign of her—or, indeed, of any living being, not so much as a stray cat—either up or down the street.

“Yodel-ay-hee-hoo,” he said to himself, very softly, beneath his breath.

————

“But what happened?” said Hely in an agony of impatience. The two of them were sitting on the rusted metal steps of an abandoned cotton warehouse near the railroad tracks. It was a marshy spot, secluded by scrubby pine trees, and the stinking black mud attracted flies. The doors of the warehouse were peppered with dark spots from two summers before when Hely and Harriet and Dick Pillow, who was now at Camp de Selby, had amused themselves for several days by throwing muddy tennis balls against them.

Harriet didn’t answer. She was so quiet that it was making him uncomfortable. In his agitation he stood and began to pace.

Moments passed. She didn’t seem impressed by his expert pacing. A small breeze wrinkled the surface of a puddle cut by a tire track in the mud.

Uneasily—anxious not to irritate her but anxious too to make her talk—he bumped her with his elbow. “Come on,” he said encouragingly. “Did he do something to you?”

“No.”

“He better not have. I’ll kick his ass.”

The pine woods—loblollys, mostly, trash trees no good for lumber—were close and stifling. The red bark was shaggy and sloughed off in great red and silvery patches, like snakeskin. Beyond the warehouse, grasshoppers whirred in the high sawgrass.

“Come on.” Hely leapt up and struck a karate chop at the air, followed by a masterful kick. “You can tell me.”

Nearby, a locust trilled. Hely, in mid-punch, squinted up: locusts meant a storm gathering, rain on the way, but through the black snarl of branches the sky still burned a clear, suffocating blue.

He did another pair of karate punches, with twin grunts beneath his breath: huh, huh; but Harriet wasn’t even watching him.

“What’s eating you?” he said, aggressively, tossing the long hair off his forehead. Her preoccupied manner was beginning to make him feel strangely panicked, and he was starting to suspect that she had devised some sort of secret plan that didn’t include him.

She glanced up at him, so quickly that for a second he thought she was going to jump up and kick his ass. But all she said was: “I was thinking about the fall when I was in the second grade. I dug a grave in the back yard.”

“A grave?” Hely was skeptical. He’d tried to dig plenty of holes in his own yard (underground bunkers, passsages to China) but had never got past two feet or so. “How’d you climb in and out?”

“It wasn’t deep. Just—” she held her hands a foot apart—“so deep. And long enough for me to lie down in.”

“Why’d you want to do something like that? Hey, Harriet!” he exclaimed—for on the ground he’d just noticed a gigantic beetle with pincers and horns, two inches long. “Look at that, would you? Man! That’s the biggest bug I’ve ever seen!”

Harriet leaned forward and looked at it, without curiosity. “Yeah, that’s something,” she said. “Anyway. Remember when I was in the hospital with bronchitis? When I missed the Halloween party at school?”

“Oh, yeah,” said Hely, averting his eyes from the beetle and suppressing, with difficulty, the urge to pick it up and mess with it.

“That’s why I got sick. The ground was really cold. I’d cover up with dead leaves and lie there until it got dark and Ida called me to come in.”

“You know what?” said Hely, who—unable to resist—had stretched out a foot to prod the beetle with his toe. “There’s this woman in Ripley’s Believe It or Not! that’s got a telephone in her grave. You call the number, and the phone rings under the ground. Isn’t that crazy?” He sat down beside her. “Hey, what about this? Listen, this is great. Like, what if Mrs. Bohannon had a phone in her coffin, and she called you up in the middle of the night, and says, I want my golden wig. Give me back my goooolden wig.…”

“You’d better not,” said Harriet sharply, eyeing his hand creeping stealthily towards her. Mrs. Bohannon was the church organist; she had died in January after a long illness. “Anyway, they buried Mrs. Bohannon with her wig on.”

“How do you know?”

“Ida told me. Her real hair fell out from the cancer.”

They sat without talking for some time. Hely glanced around for the gigantic beetle, but—sadly—it had disappeared; he swayed from side to side, kicked the heel of his sneaker, rhythmically, against the metal riser of the stairs, bong bong bong bong.…

What was all this business about the grave—what was she talking about? He told her everything. He had been more than geared up for a session of dire whispers in the toolshed, threats and plots and suspense—and even having Harriet attack him would have been better than nothing.

At last, with an exaggerated sigh and stretch, he stood up. “All right,” he said importantly. “Here’s the plan. We practice with the slingshot until supper. Out back in the training area.” The “training area” was what Hely liked to call the secluded area of his backyard which lay between the vegetable garden and the shed where his father kept the lawn mower. “Then, in a day or two, we switch to bows and arrows—”

“I don’t feel like playing.”

“Well, I don’t either,” said Hely, stung. It was only a baby bow-and-arrow set, with blue suction cups at the tip, and though he was humiliated by them they were better than nothing.

But none of his plans interested Harriet. After thinking hard for a moment or two, he suggested—with a calculated “Hey!” to suggest dawning excitement—that they run to his house at once and make what he called “an inventory of weapons” (even though he knew the only weapons he had were the BB gun, a rusted pocketknife, and a boomerang that neither of them knew how to throw). When this too met with a shrug, he suggested (wildly, in desperation, for her indifference was unbearable) that they go find one of his mother’s Good Housekeeping magazines and sign up Danny Ratliff for the Book-of-the-Month Club.

Harriet turned her head at this, but the look she gave him was far from heartening.

“I’m telling you.” He was slightly embarrassed, but enough convinced of the efficacy of the book-club tactic to continue. “It’s the worst thing in the world you can do to somebody. A kid from school did it to Dad. If we sign enough of those rednecks up, enough times … Hey, look,” he said, unnerved by Harriet’s unwavering gaze. “I don’t care.” The horrific boredom of sitting around at home by himself all day was still fresh in his mind, and he would gladly have taken off his clothes and lain down naked in the street if she had asked him.

“Look, I’m tired,” she said irritably. “I’m going to go over to Libby’s for a while.”

“Okay then,” said Hely after a stoic, bewildered pause. “I’ll ride you over there.”

Silently, they walked their bikes along the dirt road towards the street. Hely accepted the primacy of Libby in Harriet’s life without quite understanding it. She was different from Edie and the other aunts—kinder, more motherly. Back in kindergarten, Harriet had told Hely and the other kids that Libby was her mother; and oddly, no one—even Hely—had questioned this. Libby was old, and lived in a different house from Harriet, yet Libby was the one who had led Harriet in by the hand on the first day; who brought cupcakes for Harriet’s birthday and who helped with the costumes for Cinderella (in which Hely had portrayed a helpful mouse; Harriet was the smallest—and the meanest—of the wicked stepsisters). Though Edie also made appearances at school when Harriet got in trouble for fighting, or talking back, it never occurred to anybody that she was Harriet’s parent: she was far too stern, like one of the mean algebra teachers up at the high school.

Unfortunately, Libby wasn’t around. “Miss Cleve at the cemetery,” said a sleepy-eyed Odean (who had taken quite a while to answer the back door). “She pulling weeds from off the graves.”

“You want to go over there?” Hely asked Harriet when they were back on the sidewalk. “I don’t mind.” The bicycle ride to the Confederate Cemetery was a hot, hard, demanding one, which crossed the highway and wound through questionable neighborhoods with hot-tamale shacks, little Greek and Italian and black kids playing kick-ball together on the street, a seedy, vivacious grocery where an old man with a gold tooth in front sold hard Italian cookies and colored Italian sherbets and loose cigarettes at the counter for a nickel apiece.

“Yes, but Edie’s at the cemetery too. She’s the president of the Garden Club.”

Hely accepted this excuse without question. He stayed out of Edie’s way whenever he could and Harriet’s desire to avoid her did not strike him as odd in the slightest. “We can go to my house then,” he said, tossing the hair out of his eyes. “Come on.”

“Maybe my aunt Tatty’s at home.”

“Why don’t we just play on your porch or mine?” said Hely, tossing a peanut shell from his pocket rather bitterly at the windshield of a parked car. Libby was all right, but the other two aunts were nearly as bad as Edie.

————

Harriet’s aunt Tat had been at the cemetery with the rest of the Garden Club, but had asked to be driven home because of hay fever; she was fretful, her eyes itched, whopping red wheals had risen on the backs of her hand from the bindweed, and she could understand no better than Hely this dogged insistence upon her house for the afternoon’s play. She’d answered the door still in her dirty gardening clothes: Bermuda shorts and a smock-length African dashiki. Edie had a garment very similar; they were presents from a Baptist missionary friend stationed in Nigeria. The Kente cloth was colorful and cool and both old ladies wore the exotic gifts frequently, for light gardening and errands—quite oblivious to the Black Power symbolism which their “caftans” broadcast to curious onlookers. Young black men leaned out the windows of passing cars and saluted Edie and Tatty with raised fists. “Gray Panthers!” they shouted; and “Eldridge and Bobby, right on!”

Tattycorum did not enjoy working outdoors; Edie had bullied her into the Garden Club project and she wanted to get her khakis and “caftan” off and into the washing machine. She wanted a Benadryl; she wanted a bath; she wanted to finish her library book before it was due the next day. She was not pleased when she opened the door to see the children but she greeted them graciously and with only a touch of irony. “As you can see, Hely, I’m very informal here,” she said for the second time as she led them in a threading pathway through a dim hall narrowed with heavy old barrister’s bookcases, into a trim living-dining area overpowered with a massive mahogany sideboard and buffet from Tribulation and a spotty old gilt-edged mirror so tall it touched the ceiling. Audubon birds of prey glared down at them from on high. An enormous Malayer carpet—also from Tribulation, much too large for any room of the house—lay rolled up a foot thick across the doorway at the far end, like a velvety log rotting obstinately across the path. “Watch your step, now,” she said, extending a hand to help the children over it one at a time, like a scout leader guiding them over a fallen tree in the forest. “Harriet will tell you that her aunt Adelaide is the housekeeper in the family, Libby is good with the little ones, and Edith keeps the trains running on time, but I’m no good at any of that. No, my Daddy always called me the archivist. Do you know what that is?”

She glanced back, sharp and merry, with her red-rimmed eyes. There was a smudge of dirt under her cheekbone. Hely, unobtrusively, cut his own eyes away, for he was a little afraid of all Harriet’s old ladies, with their long noses and their shrewd, birdlike manners, like a pack of witches.

“No?” Tat turned her head and sneezed, violently. “An archivist,” she said, with a gasp, “is just a fancy word for pack rat.… Harriet, darling, please forgive your old auntie for rambling on to your poor company. She doesn’t mean to be tiresome, she only hopes that Hely won’t go home and tell that nice little mother of his what a mess I am over here. Next time,” and her voice dropped as she fell behind with Harriet, “next time, before you come all the way over here, darling, you should call Aunt Tatty on the telephone. What if I hadn’t been here to let you in?”

With a smack, she kissed impassive Harriet on her round cheek (the child was filthy, though the little boy was cleanly, if queerly, dressed in a long white T-shirt which came past his knees like Grandpa’s nightgown). She left them on the back porch and hurried to the kitchen where—teaspoon clattering—she mixed lemonade from tap water and a pouch of citrus-flavored powder from the grocery. Tattycorum had real lemons and sugar—but nowadays they all turned up their noses at the real thing, said Tatty’s friends in the Circle who had grandchildren.

She called to the children to fetch their drinks (“I’m afraid we’re very informal here, Hely, I hope you don’t mind serving yourself”) and hurried to the back of the house to freshen up.

————

On Tat’s clothes-line, which ran across the back porch, hung a checkered quilt with large tan and black squares. The card table where they sat was placed in front of it like a stage set, and the quilt’s squares mirrored the small squares of the game board between them.

“Hey, what does this quilt remind you of?” said Hely cheerfully, kicking the rungs of his chair. “The chess tournament in From Russia with Love? Remember? That first scene, with the giant chessboard?”

“If you touch that bishop,” said Harriet, “you’ll have to go on and move it.”

“I already moved. That pawn there.” He wasn’t interested in chess, or checkers, either; both games made his head hurt. He raised his lemonade glass, and pretended to discover a secret message from the Russians pasted on the bottom, but his arched eyebrow was lost on Harriet.

Harriet, without wasting any time, jumped the black knight out into the middle of the board.

“Congratulations, sir,” crowed Hely, banging down the glass, though he wasn’t in check and there was nothing unusual about the play. “A brilliant coup.” It was a line from the chess tournament in the movie and he was proud of himself for remembering it.

They played on. Hely captured one of Harriet’s pawns with his bishop, and smacked himself on the forehead when Harriet immediately leapt a knight forward to take the bishop. “You can’t do that,” he said, although he really didn’t know if she could or not; he had a hard time keeping track of how knights were able to jump, which was too bad because knights were the pieces that Harriet liked most and used best.

Harriet was staring at the board, her chin cupped moodily in her hand. “I think he knows who I am,” she said suddenly.

“You didn’t say anything, did you?” said Hely uneasily. Though he admired her daring, he had not really thought it a good idea for Harriet to go down to the pool hall on her own.

“He came outside and stared at me. Just standing there, without moving.”

Hely moved a pawn without thinking, just for something to do. Suddenly he felt very tired and grumpy. He didn’t like lemonade—he preferred Coke—and chess wasn’t his idea of a good time. He had a chess set of his own—a nice one, that his father had given him—but he never played except when Harriet came over, and mostly he used the pieces for G.I. Joe tombstones.

————

The heat pressed down heavy, even with the fan whirring and the shades halfway drawn, and Tat’s allergies weighed cumbrous and lopsided in her head. The BC headache powder had left a bitter taste in her mouth. She put Mary Queen of Scots face-down on the chenille bedspread and closed her eyes for a moment.

Not a peep from the porch: the children were playing quietly enough, but it was hard to rest, knowing they were in the house. There was so much to worry about in the little collection of waifs over on George Street, and so little to be done for any of them, she thought, as she reached for the water glass on her bedside table. And Allison—who, in her heart, Tat loved the best of her two great-nieces—was the child she worried about most. Allison was like her mother, Charlotte, too tender for her own good. In Tat’s experience, it was the mild, gentle girls like Allison and her mother who got beaten down and brutalized by life. Harriet was like her grandmother—too much like her, which was why Tat had never been particularly comfortable around her; she was a bright-eyed tiger cub, cute enough now that she was small, but less so with every inch she grew. And though Harriet was not yet old enough to take care of herself, that day would arrive soon enough and then she—like Edith—would thrive no matter what befell her, be it famine or bank crash or Russian invasion.

The bedroom door squealed. Tat started, palm to her ribcage. “Harriet?”

Old Scratch—Tatty’s black tomcat—leapt lightly up on the bed and sat looking at her, switching his tail.

“What you doing in here, Bombo?” he said—or, rather, Tatty said for him, in the shrill, insolent singsong that she and her sisters had employed since childhood to carry on conversations with their pets.

“You scared me to death, Scratch,” she replied, dropping an octave to her natural voice.

“I know how to open the door, Bombo.”

“Hush.” She got up and closed the door. When she lay down again, the cat curled up comfortably beside her knee, and before long they were both asleep.

————

Danny’s grandmother, Gum, winced as with both hands she strained uselessly to lift a cast-iron skillet of cornbread from the stove.

“Here Gum, let me hep you,” said Farish, jumping up so fast that he knocked over the aluminum kitchen chair.

Gum ducked and scraped away from the stove, smiling up at her favorite grandson. “Oh Farish. I’ll get it,” she said, feebly.

Danny sat staring at the checkered vinyl tablecloth, wishing hard that he was somewhere else. The trailer’s kitchen was so cramped that there was hardly room to move, and it got so overheated and smelly from the stove that it was an unpleasant place to sit even in winter. A few minutes ago, he’d drifted off into a waking daydream, a dream about a girl—not a real girl, but a girl like a spirit. Dark hair swirling, like weeds at a shallow pond’s edge: maybe black, maybe green. She’d drawn deliciously close, as if to kiss him—but instead, she’d breathed into his open mouth, cool fresh wonderful air, air like a breath from Paradise. The sweetness of the memory made him shudder. He wanted to be alone, to savor the daydream, for it was fading fast and he wanted desperately to slip back into it.

But instead he was here. “Farish,” his grandmother was saying, “I sure do hate for you to get up.” Anxiously, pressing her hands together, she followed the salt and syrup with her eyes as Farish reached over and banged them down on the table. “Please don’t worry with that.”

“Set down, Gum,” Farish said sternly. This was a regular little routine between the two of them; it happened every meal.

With regretful glances, and a great show of reluctance, Gum limped murmuring to her chair as Farish—rattling with product, ding-dong to the eyeballs—thundered back and forth between stove and table and the refrigerator on the front porch, setting the table with great thumps and clanks. When he thrust an overloaded plate at her, she waved it weakly aside.

“You boys go on and eat first,” she said. “Eugene, won’t you take this?”

Farish glowered at Eugene—who was sitting quietly, hands folded in his lap—and plunked the plate down in front of Gum.

“Here … Eugene …” With trembling hands, she offered the plate to Eugene, who shied back, reluctant to take it.

“Gum, you aint as big as a minute,” roared Farish. “You’re going to end up back in the hospital.”

Silently, Danny pushed the hair out of his face and helped himself to a square of cornbread. He was too hot and too wired to eat and the ungodly stench from the crank lab—combined with that of stale grease and onions—was enough to make him feel he would never be hungry again.

“Yes,” said Gum, smiling wistfully at the tablecloth. “I sure do love cooking for you all.”

Danny was fairly sure that his grandmother did not love cooking for her boys quite so much as she said she did. She was a tiny, emaciated, leather-brown creature, stooped from continual cringing, so decrepit that she looked closer to a hundred than her real age—somewhere around sixty. Born to a Cajun-French father and a mother who was a full-blood Chickasaw, in a sharecropper’s shack with a dirt floor and no plumbing (privations on which she daily refreshed her grandsons), Gum had been married, at thirteen, to a fur trapper twenty-five years her senior. It was hard to imagine what she’d looked like in those days—in her hardscrabble youth there had been no money for foolishness like cameras and pictures—but Danny’s father (who had adored Gum, passionately, more as a suitor than a son) remembered her as a girl with red cheeks and shiny black hair. She’d been only fourteen when he was born; she was (he’d said) “the prettiest little coon-ass gal you ever saw.” By coon-ass he meant Cajun, but when Danny was small he’d had a vague idea that Gum was part raccoon—an animal which, with her sunken dark eyes, her sharp face and snaggled teeth and small, dark, wrinkled hands, she indeed resembled.

For Gum was tiny. She seemed to shrink every year. Now she was shriveled to little more than a hollow-cheeked cinder, her mouth as thin and ruinous as a razor. As she punctually reminded her grandsons, she’d worked hard all her life, and it was hard work (which she wasn’t ashamed of—not Gum) that had worn her down before her time.

Curtis—happily—smacked away at his supper while Farish continued to clickety-click about Gum with abrupt offers of food and service, all of which, with an air of affliction, she sadly waved aside. Farish was fiercely attached to his grandmother; her crippled and generally pitiable air never failed to move him, and she in turn flattered Farish in the same soft, meek, obsequious manner that she had flattered their dead father. And as her flattery had encouraged all that was worst in Danny’s father (nursing his self-pity, feeding his rages, pampering his pride and above all his violent streak), something in the way she fawned on Farish also encouraged his brutal side.

“Farish, I can’t eat that much,” she was murmuring (despite the fact that the moment had passed, and her grandsons all had plates of their own now). “Give this plate to Brother Eugene.”

Danny rolled his eyes and pushed back slightly from the table. His patience was badly frayed from the crank, and everything in his grandmother’s manner (her weak gesture of refusal, her tone of suffering) was calculated—sure as the multiplication table—to make Farish whip around and blow up at Eugene.

And sure enough it did. “Him?” Farish glowered down at the end of the table at Eugene, who sat gobbling his food with hunched shoulders. Eugene’s appetite was a sore point, a source of relentless strife, since he ate more than anyone in the household and contributed little to the expenses.

Curtis—mouth full—reached out a greasy paw to take the piece of chicken that his grandmother proffered with trembling hand across the table. Quick as a flash, Farish slapped it down: an ugly whack that made Curtis’s mouth drop open.

A few globules of half-chewed food fell out on the tablecloth.

“Aww … let im have it if he wants it,” Gum said, tenderly. “Here, Curtis. You want you some more to eat?”

“Curtis,” said Danny, bristling with impatience; he didn’t think he could stand to watch this unpleasant little suppertime drama unroll for the thousandth time. “Here. Take mine.” But Curtis—who didn’t understand the exact nature of this game and never would—was smiling and reaching out for the chicken leg trembling in front of his face.

“If he takes that,” growled Farish, looking up at the ceiling, “I swear I’ll knock him from here to—”

“Here, Curtis,” Danny repeated. “Take mine.”

“Or mine,” said the visiting preacher, quite suddenly, from his place by Eugene at the end of the table. “There’s plenty. If the child wants it.”

They had all forgotten that he was there. Everyone turned to stare at him, an opportunity Danny seized, inconspicuously, to lean over and scrape his entire disgusting dinner onto Curtis’s plate.

Curtis burbled ecstatically at his windfall. “Love!” he exclaimed, and clasped his hands.

“It all sure tastes mighty good,” said Loyal, politely. His blue eyes were feverish, and too intense. “I thank you all.”

Farish paused with the cornbread. “You don’t favor Dolphus in the face one bit.”

“Well, you know, my mother thinks I do. Dolphus and me are fair, like her side of the family.”

Farish chuckled, and began to shovel peas into his mouth with a wedge of cornbread: though he was visibly, clatteringly, high, he always managed to pack his dinner down around Gum so as not to hurt her feelings.

“Tell you one thing about Cain, Brother Dolphus sho did know how to raise it,” he said through a mouthful of food. “Back there in Parchman, he told you to hop, you jumped. And you didn’t jump, well then, he’d jump you. Curtis, goddamn,” he exclaimed, scraping his chair back, rolling his eyes. “You like to make me sick. Gum, can’t you make him get his hands out of the food plate?”

“He don’t know any better,” said Gum, standing creakily to push the serving platter out of Curtis’s range and then easing herself back down into her chair, very slowly, as if into an ice-cold bath. To Loyal she made a nod of obeisance. “I’m afret the Good Lord didn’t spend quite enough time on this one here,” she said, with an apologetic wince. “But we love our little monstrer, don’t we, Curtis?”

“Love,” cooed Curtis. He offered her a square of cornbread.

“Naw, Curtis. Gum don’t need that.”

“God don’t make mistakes,” said Loyal. “His loving eye is on us all. Blessed is He who varies the aspect of all His creatures.”

“Well, yall better hope God’s not looking the other way when yall start handling them rattlesnakes,” said Farish, casting a sly eye at Eugene as he poured himself another glass of iced tea. “Loyal? That your name?”

“Yes sir. Loyal Bright. The Bright is after my mama’s side.”

“Well, tell me this, Loyal, what’s the point in hauling all them reptiles down here if they have to stay in the damn box? How many days you been running this revival?”

“One,” said Eugene, through a mouthful of food, not looking up.

“I can’t predetermine to handle,” said Loyal. “God sends the anointment on us, and sometimes he don’t. The Victory is His to bestow. Sometimes it pleases Him to try our faith.”

“I reckon that makes you feel pretty foolish, standing up in front of all those people and not a snake in sight.”

“No sir. The serpent is His creation and serves His will. If we take up and handle, and we’re not in accordiance with His will, we’ll be hurt.”

“All right, Loyal,” said Farish, leaning back in his chair, “would you say that Eugene here isn’t quite right with the Lord? Maybe that’s what’s holding you up.”

“Well, tell you one thing,” said Eugene very suddenly, “it don’t help for people to poke at the snakes with sticks and blow cigarette smoke in on em and mess with em and tease em—”

“Now wait just a—”

“Farsh, I seen you fooling with them out back in the truck there.”

“Farsh,” said Farish, in a high derisive voice. Eugene had a funny way of pronouncing certain words.

“Don’t make mock of me.”

“Yall,” said Gum weakly. “Yall, now.”

“Gum,” said Danny and then, more softly: “Gum”; for his voice was so loud and sudden that it had made everybody at the table jump.

“Yes, Danny?”

“Gum, I meant to ast …” He was so wired that he could not now remember the connection between what everyone was talking about and what was now coming out of his mouth. “Did you get picked for Jury Duty?”

His grandmother folded a piece of white bread in half and dipped it in a puddle of corn syrup. “I did.”

“What?” said Eugene. “When’s the trial start?”

“Wednesday.”

“Hi you going to get there with the truck broke?”

“Jury Duty?” said Farish, sitting bolt upright. “How come I aint heard of this?”

“Poor old Gum don’t like to bother you, Farish.…”

“The truck’s not bad broke,” said Eugene, “just broke so she can’t drive it. I can hardly turn the wheel on it.”

“Jury duty?” Roughly, Farish pushed his chair back from the table. “And why are they calling up an invalid? Looks like they could find some able-bodied man—”

“I’m happy to serve,” said Gum, in a martyred voice.

“Hun, I know it, all I’m saying is that looks like they could find somebody else. You’ll have to sit down there all day, in those hard chairs, and what with your arthritis—”

Gum said, in a whisper: “Well, I’ll tell you the truth, what worries me is this nausea I’ve got from the other medicine I’m taking.”

“I hope you told them that this is like to put you in the hospital again. Dragging a poor old crippled lady out of her house—”

Diplomatically, Loyal interrupted: “What kindly trial are you on, maam?”

Gum sopped her bread in the syrup. “Nigger stoled a tractor.”

Farish said: “They’re going to make you go all the way down there? Just for that?”

“Well, in my time,” Gum said peacefully, “we didn’t have all this nonsense about a big trial.”

————

When there was no answer to her knock, Harriet nudged Tat’s bedroom door open. In the dimness, she saw her old aunt dozing on the white summer bedspread with her glasses off and her mouth open.

“Tat?” she said, uncertainly. The room smelled of medicine, Grandee water, vetivert and Mentholatum and dust. A fan purred in sleepy half-circles, stirring the filmy curtains to the left and then the right.

Tat slept on. The room was cool and still. Silver-framed photographs on the bureau: Judge Cleve and Harriet’s great-grandmother—cameo at her throat—before the turn of the century; Harriet’s mother as a 1950s debutante, with elbow gloves and a fussy hairdo; a hand-tinted eight-by-ten of Tat’s husband, Mr. Pink, as a young man and a glossy newspaper shot—much later—of Mr. Pink accepting an award from the Chamber of Commerce. On the heavy dressing table stood Tat’s things: Pond’s cold cream, a jelly jar of hairpins, pincushion and Bakelite comb and brush set and a single lipstick—a plain, modest little family, neatly arranged as if for a group picture.

Harriet felt as if she might cry. She flung herself on the bed.

Tat woke with a jolt. “Gracious. Harriet?” Blindly, she struggled up and fumbled for her glasses. “What’s wrong? Where’s your little company?”

“He went home. Tatty, do you love me?”

“What’s the matter? What time is it, honey?” she said, squinting uselessly at the bedside clock. “You’re not crying, are you?” She leaned over to feel Harriet’s forehead with her palm, but it was damp and cool. “What on earth’s the matter?”

“Can I spend the night?”

Tat’s heart sank. “Oh, darling. Poor Tatty’s half dead with allergies.… Please tell me what’s wrong, honey? Are you feeling bad?”

“I won’t be any trouble.”

“Darling. Oh, darling. You are never any trouble for me and Allison isn’t either, but—”

“Why don’t you or Libby or Adelaide ever want me to stay over?”

Tat was flummoxed. “Now Harriet,” she said. She reached over and switched on her reading lamp. “You know that’s not true.”

“You never ask me!”

“Well, look, Harriet. I’ll get the calendar. Let’s pick a date next week, and by then I’ll be feeling better and …”

She trailed away. The child was crying.

“Look here,” she said, in a sprightly voice. Though Tat tried to act interested when her friends rhapsodized about their grandchildren, she wasn’t sorry that she didn’t have any of her own. Children bored and irritated her—a fact she struggled valiantly to conceal from her little nieces. “Let me run get a washcloth. You’ll feel better if.… No, you come with me. Harriet, stand up.”

She took Harriet’s grubby hand and led her down the dark hall to the bathroom. She turned on both faucets in the sink and handed her a bar of pink toilet soap. “Here, sweetheart. Wash your face and hands … hands first. Now then, splash a little of that cool water on your face, that’ll make you feel better.…”

She moistened a washcloth and, busily, dabbed Harriet’s cheeks with it, then handed it to her. “There, darling. Now, will you take this nice cool rag and wash around your neck and under your arms for me?”

Harriet did—mechanically, a single pass over her throat and then reaching the cloth up under her shirt for a couple of feeble swipes.

“Now. I know you can do better than that. Doesn’t Ida make you wash?”

“Yes, maam,” said Harriet, rather hopelessly.

“How come you’re so dirty, then? Does she make you get in the bathtub every day?”

“Yes, maam.”

“Does she make you stick your head under the faucet and check to see if the soap is wet after you get out? It doesn’t do a bit of good, Harriet, if you climb into a tub of hot water and just sit there. Ida Rhew knows good and well that she needs to—”

“It’s not Ida’s fault! Why does everybody blame everything on Ida?”

“Nobody’s blaming her. I know you love Ida, sweetheart, but I think your grandmother may need to have a little talk with her. Ida hasn’t done anything wrong, it’s just that colored people have different ideas—oh, Harriet. Please,” said Tatty, wringing her hands. “No. Please don’t start with that again.”

————

Eugene, rather anxiously, followed Loyal outside after dinner. Loyal looked at peace with the world, ready for a leisurely after-dinner stroll, but Eugene (who had changed into his uncomfortable black preaching suit after dinner) was clammy all over with anxiety. He glanced at himself in the side mirror of Loyal’s truck and ran a quick comb through his greasy gray ducktail. The previous night’s revival (off on a farm somewhere, on the opposite side of the county) had not been a success. The curiosity seekers who’d shown up at the brushwood arbor had snickered, and thrown bottle tops and bits of gravel, and ignored the collection plate, and got up and jostled away before the service was over—and who could blame them? Young Reese—with his eyes like blue gas flames, and his hair blown backwards as if he’d just seen an angel—might have more faith in his little finger than the lot of these sniggerers combined, but not one snake had come out of the box, not one; and though Eugene was embarrassed by this, neither was he eager to bring them out with his own hands. Loyal had assured him of a warmer reception tonight, at Boiling Spring—but what did Eugene care about Boiling Spring? Sure, there was a regular congregation of the faithful over there, and it belonged to somebody else. Day after tomorrow, they were going to try drumming up a crowd on the square—yet how in the world could they when their biggest crowd draw—the snakes—was prohibited by law?

Loyal seemed not at all bothered by any of this. “I’m here to do God’s work,” he’d said. “And God’s work is to battle Death.” The previous night, he’d been untroubled by the jeers of the crowd; but though Eugene feared the snakes, and knew himself incapable of taking them up in his own hands, neither was he looking forward to another such night of public humiliation.

They were standing out on the lighted concrete slab they all called “the carport,” with a gas grill at one end and a basketball goal at the other. Eugene glanced nervously at Loyal’s truck—at the tarp which draped the caged snakes piled in back, at the bumper sticker which read, in slanted, fanatical letters: THIS WORLD IS NOT MY HOME! Curtis was safely inside, watching television (if he saw them leaving, he would cry to come along), and Eugene was about to suggest that they just get in the truck and go when the screen door creaked open and out shuffled Gum, in their direction.

“Hello there, maam!” called Loyal cordially.

Eugene turned partially away. These days he was having to fight a constant hatred of his grandmother, and he had to keep reminding himself that Gum was only an old lady—sick, too, sick for years. He remembered the day long ago when he and Farish were little, his father stumbling home drunk in the middle of the afternoon and yanking them out of the trailer into the yard, as if for a whipping. His face was bright red, and he spoke through clenched teeth. But he wasn’t angry: he was crying. O Lord, I been sick this morning every since I heard. Lord God have mercy. Poor Gum won’t be with us more than a month or two. The doctors say she’s eat to the bone with cancer.

That was two decades ago. Four brothers had been born since then—and grown up, and left home, or been disabled, or sent to prison; father and uncle and mother—as well as a stillborn baby sister—were all in the ground. Yet Gum thrived. Her death sentences from various doctors and health department officials had arrived, quite regularly, all throughout Eugene’s childhood and adolescence, and Gum continued to receive them every six months or so. She delivered the bad news herself now, apologetically, now that their father was dead. Her spleen was enlarged and about to rupture; her liver, or her pancreas, or her thyroid had given out; she was eaten up with this kind of cancer or that kind of cancer—so many different kinds that her bones were blackened to charcoal from it, like chicken bones charred in the woodstove. And indeed: Gum did look eaten up. Unable to kill her, the cancer had taken up residence within her, and made her its comfortable home—nesting in her ribcage, rooted firmly and pushing its tentacle tips up through the surface of her skin in a spatter of black moles—so (it seemed to Eugene) if someone was to cut Gum open at this point, there was apt to be no blood in her at all, only a mass of poisonous sponge.

“Maam, if you don’t mind my asting,” Eugene’s visitor said, politely, “hi come your boys come to call you Gum?”

“Aint none of us know why, the name just stuck,” chortled Farish, bursting from his taxidermy shed accompanied by a beam of electric light on the sawgrass. He charged up behind her and put his arms around her and tickled her like they were sweethearts. “Ont me to chunk you in the back of that truck with them snakes, Gum?”

“Quit,” said Gum listlessly. She felt it undignified to show how much she liked this sort of rough attention, but she did like it all the same; and though her expression was blank, her tiny black eyes were bright with pleasure.

Eugene’s visitor peered, suspiciously, inside the open door of the taxidermy/methamphetamine shack, which was windowless, bathed in the bald light of a ceiling bulb: beakers, copper pipe, an incredibly complex and jerry-rigged network of vacuum pumps and tubing and burners and old bathroom faucets. Gruesome reminders of the taxidermy work—like an embryo cougar preserved in formaldehyde, and a clear plastic fishing tackle box full of different kinds of glass eyes—gave the set-up a feel of Frankenstein’s laboratory.

“Come on, come on in,” said Farish, wheeling around. He let go of Gum and grabbed up Loyal by the back of his shirt and half-rushed, half-threw him through the laboratory door.

Eugene followed, anxiously. His visitor—perhaps accustomed to similar rough behavior from brother Dolphus—did not seem nervous but Eugene had seen enough of Farish to know that Farish’s good humor was plenty to be nervous about.

“Farsh,” he said, stridently. “Farsh.”

Inside, the dark shelves were lined with glass jars of chemicals and rows of whiskey bottles with the labels scraped off, filled with some dark liquid that Farish used in his laboratory work. Danny, wearing a pair of rubber dishwashing gloves, was seated upon an up-ended plastic bucket picking at something or other with a small utensil. A glass filtering flask bubbled behind him; a stuffed chicken hawk, wings outspread, glowered from the shadowy rafters as if to sweep down and strike. On the shelves were also large-mouth bass, mounted on crude wooden displays; turkey feet, fox heads, house cats—from grown toms down to tiny kittens; woodpeckers, snake-birds, and an egret, half-stitched, and stinking.

“Tell you what, Loyal. I had somebody bring me in a bull moccasin this big around, wish I still had him to show to you because I do believe he was bigger than any you’ve got out in the truck there.…”

Chewing his thumbnail, Eugene edged inside and looked over Loyal’s shoulder, perceiving as if for the first time through Loyal’s eyes the stuffed kittens, the droop-necked egret with eye sockets wrinkled like cowrie shells. “For his taxidermy,” he said, aloud, when he felt Loyal’s gaze lingering upon the rows of whiskey bottles.

“The Lord means for us to love His kingdom, and guard it, and shepherd it beneath us,” said Loyal, gazing up at the grim walls which, between stink and carcass and shadow, were like a cross-section of Hell itself. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t know whether that means it’s right for us to mount ’em and stuff ’em.”

In the corner, Eugene spotted a pile of Hustler magazines. The picture on the top one was sickening. He laid an arm on Loyal’s arm. “Come on, let’s go,” he said; for he didn’t know what Loyal might say or do if he saw the picture, and unpredictable behavior of any sort was unwise around Farish.

“Well,” said Farish, “I don’t know but what you’re right, Loyal.” To Eugene’s horror, Farish leaned over his aluminum work-table and—tossing his hair over his shoulder—sniffed up a white streak of something Eugene presumed to be dope through a rolled-up dollar bill. “Excuse me here. But am I wrong in supposing, Loyal, that you’d eat a nice fat T-bone steak as fast as my brother here?”

“What is that?” inquired Loyal.

“Headache powder.”

“Farish here is disabled,” Danny chimed in helpfully.

“My goodness,” Loyal said mildly to Gum—who, at her snail’s creep, had only now just managed to shuffle from truck bed to doorway. “Affliction is certainly a fierce teacher amongst your children.”

Farish tossed his hair back and straightened from the table with a loud sniff. No matter that he was the only person in the household who collected disability checks; he did not care for his own misfortune to be mentioned in the same breath with Eugene’s facial disfigurement and certainly not with Curtis’s more extensive problems.

“Aint that the truth, Loyle,” said Gum, wagging her head mournfully. “The Good Lord has give me a terrible time with the cancer, and the arthuritis, and the sugar diabetes, and thisyere.…” She indicated a decayed-looking black-and-purple scab on her neck the size of a quarter. “That’s where poor old Gum had to have her veins scraped,” she said solicitously, craning her neck to one side so Loyal could have a better view. “That’s where they come right in with that cathetur, right in through there, you see.…”

“What time tonight yall fixing to revive these folks?” said Danny brightly, finger to nostril, after straightening up from his own dose of headache powder.

“We ort to leave,” said Eugene to Loyal. “Come on.”

“And then,” Gum was saying to Loyal, “then they insertioned this what-you-call balloon into my neck veins here, and they—”

“Gum, he’s got to go.”

Gum cackled, and caught the sleeve of Loyal’s long-sleeved white dress shirt with a black-speckled claw. She was delighted to have discovered such a considerate listener, and was reluctant to let him get away quite so easily.

————

Harriet walked home from Tatty’s. The wide sidewalks were shaded by pecan and magnolia trees, littered with crushed petals from the crape myrtles; faintly, across the warm air, floated the sad evening chimes from the First Baptist Church. The houses on Main Street were grander than the Georgians and carpenter-Gothic cottages of George Street—Greek Revival, Italianate, Second Empire Victorian, relics of a cotton economy gone bust. A few, but not many, were still owned by descendants of the families who had built them; a couple had even been bought by rich people from out of town. But there were also a growing number of eyesores, with tricycles in the yard and clotheslines strung between the Doric columns.

The light was failing. A firefly blinked, down at the end of the street, and practically by her nose two more flashed in quick sequence, pop pop. She wasn’t quite ready to go home—not yet—and though Main Street got desolate and a bit frightening this far down, she told herself that she would walk a little further, down to the Alexandria Hotel. Everyone still called it the Alexandria Hotel though no hotel had existed there in Harriet’s lifetime—or indeed, even Edie’s. During the yellow fever epidemic of ’79, when the stricken town was deluged by ill and panicked strangers fleeing north from Natchez and New Orleans, the dying had been packed like sardines on the porch and the balcony of the overflowing hotel—screaming, raving, crying out for water—while the dead lay heaped on the sidewalk out front.

About every five years, someone tried to open up the Alexandria Hotel again and use it for a dry goods shop, or a meeting hall, or something or other; but such efforts never lasted long. Simply walking past the place made people uncomfortable. A few years ago, some people from out of town had tried to open a tearoom in the lobby, but now it was closed.

Harriet stopped on the sidewalk. Down at the end of the empty street loomed the hotel—a white, staring-eyed wreck, indistinct in the twilight. Then, all of a sudden, she thought she saw something move in an upstairs window—something fluttery, like a piece of cloth—and she turned and fled, heart pounding, down the long darkening street, as if a flotilla of ghosts were skimming after her.

She ran all the way home without stopping, and clattered in at the front door—breathless, exhausted, spots jumping in front of her eyes. Allison was downstairs, sitting in front of the television.

“Mother is worried,” she said. “Go tell her you’re home. Oh, and Hely called.”

Harriet was halfway up the stairs when her mother flew down at her, with a great flap flap flap of bedroom slippers. “Where have you been? Answer me this minute!” Her face was flushed and shiny; she had thrown on a wrinkled old white dress shirt that belonged to Harriet’s father over her nightgown. She grabbed Harriet’s shoulder and shook her and then—incredibly—shoved her against the wall so that Harriet’s head knocked against a framed engraving of the singer Jenny Lind.

Harriet was mystified. “What’s the matter?” she said, blinking.

“Do you know how worried I’ve been?” Her mother’s voice was high and peculiar. “I’ve been sick wondering where you are. Out … of … my … mind …”

“Mother?” In confusion, Harriet smeared an arm over her face. Was she drunk? Sometimes her father behaved like this when he was home for Thanksgiving and had too much to drink.

“I thought you were dead. How dare you—”

“What’s wrong?” The overhead lights were harsh, and all Harriet could think of was getting upstairs to her bedroom. “I was only at Tat’s.”

“Nonsense. Tell me the truth.”

“I was,” said Harriet impatiently, attempting again to sidestep her mother. “Call her if you don’t believe me.”

“I certainly will, first thing in the morning. Right now, you tell me where you’ve been.”

“Go on,” said Harriet, exasperated at having her path blocked. “Call her.”

Harriet’s mother took a quick, angry step towards her, and Harriet, just as quickly, moved two steps down. Her frustrated gaze landed on the pastel portrait of her mother (spark-eyed, humorous, with a camel hair coat and a glossy teen-queen ponytail) which had been drawn on the street in Paris, during junior year abroad. The portrait’s eyes, starry with their exaggerated highlights of white chalk, seemed to widen with lively sympathy at Harriet’s dilemma.

“Why do you want to torture me like this?”

Harriet turned from the chalk portrait to stare back into the same face, much older, in a vaguely unnatural-looking way which suggested that it had been reconstructed after some terrible accident.

“Why?” screamed her mother. “Do you want to drive me crazy?”

A tingle of alarm prickled at Harriet’s scalp. Every so often Harriet’s mother behaved oddly, or got confused and upset, but not like this. It was only seven o’clock; in the summer, Harriet often stayed out playing past ten and her mother didn’t even notice.

Allison was standing at the foot of the stairs, with one hand on the tulip-shaped knob of the newel post.

“Allison?” Harriet asked, rather gruffly. “What’s the matter with Mama?”

Harriet’s mother slapped her. Though it didn’t hurt much, it made a lot of noise. Harriet put a hand to her cheek and stared at her mother, who was breathing fast, in odd little huffs.

“Mama? What did I do?” She was too shocked to cry. “If you were worried, why didn’t you call Hely?”

“I can’t be calling over at the Hulls and rousing the whole house at this hour of the morning!”

Allison, at the foot of the stairs, looked as stunned as Harriet felt. For some reason, Harriet suspected that she was at the bottom of the misunderstanding, whatever it was.

“You did something,” she roared. “What did you tell her?”

But Allison’s eyes—round, incredulous—were fastened on their mother. “Mama?” she said. “What do you mean, ‘morning’?”

Charlotte, a hand on the banister, looked stricken.

“It’s night. Tuesday night,” said Allison.

Charlotte was dead-still for a moment, eyes wide and her mouth slightly parted. Then she ran down the stairs—her heel-less slippers slapping loudly—and looked out the window by the front door.

“Oh, my word,” she said, leaning forward, both hands on the sill. She unsnapped the deadbolt; she stepped onto the front porch in the twilight. Very slowly—like she was dreaming—she walked to a rocking chair and sat down.

“Heavens,” she said. “You’re right. I woke up and the clock said six-thirty and, so help me, I thought it was six in the morning.”

For a while, there was no sound at all except the crickets, and the voices from up the street. The Godfreys had company: an unfamiliar white car stood in the driveway, and a station wagon was pulled along the curb in front. Wisps of smoke from the barbecue grill rose in the yellowy light on their back porch.

Charlotte looked up at Harriet. Her face was sweaty, too white, and the pupils of her eyes so huge and black and swallowing that the irises were shrunk to nothing, blue coronas glowing at the edges of eclipsed moons.

“Harriet, I thought you’d been gone all night.…” She was clammy and gasping, as if half-drowned. “Oh, baby. I thought you were kidnapped or dead. Mama had a bad dream and—oh, dear God. I hit you.” She put her hands over her face and started to cry.

“Come inside, Mama,” said Allison, quietly. “Please.” It wouldn’t do for the Godfreys or Mrs. Fountain to see their mother crying on the front porch in her nightgown.

“Harriet, come here. How can you ever forgive me? Mama’s crazy,” she sobbed, wetly, into Harriet’s hair. “I’m so sorry.…”

Harriet, squashed against her mother’s chest at an uncomfortable angle, tried not to squirm. She felt suffocated. Up above, as if from a distance, her mother wept and coughed with muffled hacking sounds, like a shipwreck victim washed up on a beach. The pink fabric of the nightgown, pressed against Harriet’s cheek, was so magnified that it didn’t even look like cloth, but a technical cross-hatch of coarse, ropy skeins. It was interesting. Harriet shut the eye against her mother’s breast. The pink vanished. Both eyes open: back it popped. She experimented with alternate winks, watching the optical illusion leap back and forth until a fat tear—inordinately huge—dripped onto the cloth and spread in a crimson stain.

Suddenly her mother caught her by the shoulders. Her face was shiny, and smelled of cold-cream; her eyes were inky black, and alien, like the eyes of a nurse shark that Harriet had seen in an aquarium on the Gulf Coast.

“You don’t know what it’s like,” she said.

Once more, Harriet found herself crushed to the front of her mother’s nightgown. Concentrate, she told herself. If she thought hard enough, she could be somewhere else.

A parallelogram of light slanted onto the front porch. The front door stood ajar. “Mama?” she heard Allison say, very faintly. “Please.…”

When, at last, Harriet’s mother allowed herself to be taken by the hand and coaxed inside, Allison led her carefully to the couch, settled her down with a cushion behind her head, and turned on the television—its chatter a frank relief, the bouncy music, the unconcerned voices. She then trailed in and out bringing Kleenex, headache powders, cigarettes and an ashtray, a glass of iced tea and an ice pack their mother kept in the freezer—clear plastic, swimming-pool blue, shaped like a harlequin half-mask from Mardi Gras—which she wore over her eyes when her sinuses were bothering her or when she suffered what she called sick headaches.

Their mother accepted the Kleenex and the tea from the little heap of comforts, and, murmuring distractedly all the while, pressed the aquamarine ice pack to her forehead. “What must you think of me? … I’m so ashamed of myself.…” The ice mask did not escape Harriet, who sat studying her mother from the armchair opposite. She had several times seen her father, the morning after he’d been drinking, sitting stiffly at his desk with the blue ice mask tied onto his head as he made phone calls or flipped angrily through his papers. But there was no liquor on her mother’s breath. Pressed to her mother’s chest, out on the porch, she hadn’t smelled a thing. In fact, her mother didn’t drink—not the way that Harriet’s father did. Every now and then she mixed herself a bourbon and Coke, but usually she carried it around all evening until the ice melted and the paper napkin got soggy, and fell asleep before she managed to drink the whole thing.

Allison reappeared in the doorway. She glanced over at their mother, quickly, to make sure she wasn’t looking, and then, silently, mouthed the words to Harriet: It’s his birthday.

Harriet blinked. Of course: how could she have forgotten? Usually it was the anniversary of his death, in May, that set their mother off: crying fits, inexplicable panics. A few years ago, it had been so bad that she had been unable to leave the house to attend Allison’s eighth-grade graduation. But this May, the date had come and gone without incident.

Allison cleared her throat. “Mama, I’m running you a bath,” she said. Her voice was strangely crisp and adult. “You don’t have to get in if you don’t want to.”

Harriet stood to go upstairs but her mother flung out an arm in a panicky, lightning-quick gesture, as if she were about to walk in front of a car.

“Girls! My two sweet girls!” She patted the sofa on either side, and though her face was swollen from crying, in her voice was a will o’ the wisp—faint, but bright—of the sorority girl in the hall portrait.

“Harriet, why in the world didn’t you speak up?” she said. “Did you have a good time with Tatty? What did you talk about?”

Once again, Harriet found herself struck dumb in the unwelcome glare of her mother’s attention. For some reason, all she could think of was a carnival ride she had been on when she was small, with a ghost sailing placidly back and forth along a length of fishing line in the dark, and how—unexpectedly—the ghost had jumped its track and shot right in her face. Every now and then, she still woke bolt-upright from a sound sleep when the white shape flew at her out of the dark.

“What did you do at Tatty’s house?”

“Played chess.” In the silence that followed, Harriet tried to think of some funny or entertaining observation to tack on to this reply.

Her mother put an arm around Allison, to make her feel included, too. “And why didn’t you go, honey? Have you had your supper yet?”

“And now we present the ABC Movie of the Week,” said the television. “Me, Natalie, starring Patty Duke, James Farentino, and Martin Balsam.”

During the opening credits of the movie, Harriet stood and started up to her room, only to have her mother follow her up the stairs.

“Do you hate Mother for acting so crazy?” she asked, standing forlornly in the open door of Harriet’s room. “Why don’t you come watch the movie with us? Just the three of us?”

“No, thank you,” said Harriet politely. Her mother was staring down at the rug—alarmingly close, Harriet realized, to the tar-stained spot. Part of the stain was visible near the edge of the bed.

“I …” A string in her mother’s throat seemed to pop; helplessly, her glance darted over Allison’s stuffed animals, the pile of books on the window seat by Harriet’s bed. “You must hate me,” she said, in a rusty voice.

Harriet looked at the floor. She couldn’t stand it when her mother was melodramatic like this. “No, Mama,” she said. “I just don’t want to watch that movie.”

“Oh, Harriet. I had the worst dream. And it was so terrible when I woke up and you weren’t here. You know that Mother loves you, don’t you, Harriet?”

Harriet had a hard time answering. She felt slightly numbed, as if she were underwater: the long shadows, the eerie, greenish lamplight, the breeze washing in the curtains.

“Don’t you know I love you?”

“Yes,” said Harriet; but her voice sounded thin like it came from a long way off, or belonged to somebody else.