The Little Friend

CHAPTER

6

——

The Funeral

“Hospitality was the key-note of life in those days,” said Edie. Her voice—clear, declamatory—rose effortlessly over the hot wind roaring through the car windows; grandly, without bothering to signal, she swept into the left lane and cut in front of a log truck.

The Oldsmobile was a lush, curvaceous manatee of a car. Edie had purchased it from Colonel Chipper Dee’s car lot in Vicksburg, back in the 1950s. A vast tract of empty seat stretched between Edie, on the driver’s side, and Harriet slouched against the opposite door. Between them—next to Edie’s straw purse with the wooden handles—was a plaid thermos of coffee and a box of doughnuts.

“Out at Tribulation, Mother’s cousins would show up out of the clear blue to stay weeks at a time, and nobody thought a thing in the world about it,” Edie was saying. The speed limit was fifty-five but she was proceeding at her usual, leisurely motoring pace: forty miles an hour.

In the mirror, Harriet could see the driver of the log truck slapping his forehead and making impatient gestures with his open palm.

“Now, I’m not talking about the Memphis cousins,” said Edie. “I’m talking about the cousins from Baton Rouge. Miss Ollie, and Jules, and Mary Willard. And little Aunt Fluff!”

Harriet stared bleakly out the window: sawmills and pine barrens, preposterously rosy in the early morning light. Warm, dusty wind blew her hair in her face, whipped monotonously in a loose flap of upholstery on the ceiling, rattled in the cellophane panel of the doughnut box. She was thirsty—hungry, too—but there was nothing to drink but the coffee, and the doughnuts were crumbly and stale. Edie always bought day-old doughnuts, even though they were only a few cents cheaper than fresh.

“Mother’s uncle had a small plantation down there around Covington—Angevine it was called,” said Edie, plucking up a napkin with her free hand; in what could only be called a kingly manner, like a king accustomed to eating with his hands, she took a big bite of her doughnut. “Libby used to take the three of us down there on the old Number 4 train. Weeks at a time! Miss Ollie had a little dog-trot house out back, with a wood stove, and table and chairs, and we loved to play out in that little dog-trot house better than anything!”

The backs of Harriet’s legs were stuck to the car seat. Irritably, she shifted around and tried to get comfortable. They’d been in the car three hours, and the sun was high and hot. Every so often Edie considered trading in the Oldsmobile—for something with air conditioning, or a radio that worked—but she always changed her mind at the last minute, mainly for the secret pleasure of watching Roy Dial wring his hands and dance around in anguish. It drove Mr. Dial crazy that a well-placed old Baptist lady like Edie rode around town in a car twenty years old; sometimes, when the new cars came out, he spun by Edie’s house late in the afternoon and dropped off an unrequested “tester”—usually a top-of-the-line Cadillac. “Just drive it for a few days,” he’d say, palms in the air. “See what you think.” Edie strung him along cruelly, pretending to fall in love with the proffered vehicle, then—just as Mr. Dial was drawing up the papers—return it, suddenly opposed to the color, or the power windows, or complaining of some microscopic flaw, some rattle in the dashboard or sticky lock button.

“It still says Hospitality State on the Mississippi license plate but in my opinion true hospitality died out here in the first half of the present century. My great-grandfather was dead against the building of the old Alexandria Hotel, back before the war,” said Edie, raising her voice over the long, insistent horn blast of the truck behind them. “He said that he himself was more than happy to put up any respectable travelers who came to town.”

“Edie, that man back there’s honking at you.”

“Let him,” said Edie, who had settled in at her own comfortable speed.

“I think he wants to pass.”

“It won’t hurt him to slow down a little bit. Where does he think he’s taking those logs in such a great big hurry?”

The landscape—sandy clay hills, endless pines—was so raw and strange-looking that it made Harriet’s stomach hurt. Everything she saw reminded her that she was far from home. Even the people in neighboring cars looked different: sun-reddened, with broad, flat faces and farm clothes, not like the people from her own town.

They passed a dismal little cluster of businesses: Freelon Spraying Co., Tune’s AAA Transmission, New Dixie Stone and Gravel. A rickety old black man in coveralls and orange hunting cap was hobbling along the shoulder of the road carrying a brown grocery bag. What would Ida think when she came to work and found her gone? She would be arriving just about now; Harriet’s breath quickened a little at the thought.

Sagging telephone wires; patches of collards and corn; ramshackle houses with dooryards of packed dirt. Harriet pressed her forehead to the warm glass. Maybe Ida would realize how badly Harriet’s feelings were hurt; maybe she’d realize that she couldn’t threaten to pack up and quit every single time she got mad about something or other.… A middle-aged black man in glasses was tossing feed from a Crisco can to some red chickens; solemnly, he raised a hand at the car and Harriet waved back, so energetically that she felt a little embarrassed.

She was worried about Hely, too. Though he’d seemed pretty certain that his name wasn’t on the wagon, still she didn’t like the thought that it was sitting up there, waiting for someone to find it. To think what would happen if they traced it back to Hely made her feel ill. Don’t think about it, don’t think about it, she told herself.

On they drove. Shacks gave way to more woods, with occasional flat fields that smelled of pesticide. In a grim little clearing, a fat white woman wearing a maroon shirt and shorts, one foot encased in a surgical boot, was slinging wet clothes on a line off to the side of her trailer home; she glanced at the car, but didn’t wave.

Suddenly Harriet was jolted from her thoughts by a squeal of brakes, and a turn that slung her into the door and upset the box of doughnuts. Edie had turned—across traffic—into the bumpy little country road that led to the camp.

“Sorry, dear,” said Edie breezily, leaning over to right her purse. “I don’t know why they make these signs so little that you can’t even read them until you get right up on them.…”

In silence, they jostled down the gravel road. A silver tube of lipstick rolled across the seat. Harriet caught it before it fell—Cherries in the Snow, said the label on the bottom—and dropped it back in Edie’s straw handbag.

“We’re certainly in Jones County now!” said Edie gaily. Her backlit profile—dark against the sun—was sharp and girlish. Only the line of her throat, and her hands on the steering wheel—knotty, freckled—betrayed her age; in her crisp white shirt, plaid skirt, and two-toned correspondent oxfords she looked like some enthusiastic 1940s newspaper reporter out to chase down The Big Story. “Do you remember old Newt Knight the deserter from your Mississippi History, Harriet? The Robin Hood of the Piney Woods, so he called himself! He and his men were poor and sorry, and they didn’t want to fight a rich man’s war so they holed up down here in the backwoods and wouldn’t have a thing to do with the Confederacy. The Republic of Jones, that’s what they called themselves! The cavalry sent bloodhounds after them, and the old cracker women choked those dogs to death with red pepper! That’s the kind of gentlemen you’ve got down here in Jones County.”

“Edie,” said Harriet—watching her grandmother’s face as she spoke—“maybe you should get your eyes checked.”

“I can read just fine. Yes, maam. At one time,” said Edie, regally, “these backwoods were full of Confederate renegades. They were too poor to have any slaves themselves, and they resented those rich enough to have them. So they seceded from the Secession! Hoeing their sorry little corn patches out here in the pine woods! Of course, they didn’t understand that the war was really about States’ Rights.”

To the left, the woods opened onto a field. At the very sight of it—the small sad bleachers, the soccer nets, the ragged grass—Harriet’s heart plunged. Some tough-looking older girls were punching a tetherball, their slaps and oofs ringing out hard and audible in the morning stillness. Over the scoreboard, a hand-lettered sign read:

de Selby Frosh!

there are no Limits!

Harriet’s throat constricted. Suddenly she realized she’d made a terrible mistake.

“Now, Nathan Bedford Forrest was not from the wealthiest or most cultivated family in the world, but he was the greatest general of the war!” Edie was saying. “Yes, maam! ‘Fustest with the Mostest’! That was Forrest!”

“Edie,” said Harriet in a small fast voice, “I don’t want to stay here. Let’s go home.”

“Home?” Edie sounded amused—not even surprised. “Nonsense! You’re going to have the time of your life.”

“No, please. I hate it here.”

“Then why’d you want to come?”

Harriet had no answer for this. Rounding the old familiar corner, at the bottom of the hill, a gallery of forgotten horrors opened before her. The patchy grass, the dust-dulled pines, the particular yellowy-red color of the gravel which was like uncooked chicken livers—how could she have forgotten how much she loathed this place, how miserable she’d been every single minute? Up ahead, on the left, the pass gate; beyond, the head counselor’s cabin, sunk in threatening shade. Above the door was a homemade cloth banner with a dove on it that read, in fat, hippie letters: REJOICE!

“Edie please,” said Harriet, quickly, “I changed my mind. Let’s go.”

Edie, gripping the steering wheel, swung around and glared at her—light-colored eyes, predatory and cold, eyes that Chester called “sure-shot” because they seemed made to look down the barrel of a gun. Harriet’s eyes (“Little sure-shot,” Chester sometimes called her) were just as light, and chilling; but, for Edie, it was not pleasant to meet her own stare so fixedly and in miniature. She was unaware of any sorrow or anxiety in her grandchild’s rigid expression; which struck her only as insolence, and aggressive insolence at that.

“Don’t be silly,” she said, callously, and glanced back at the road—just in time to keep from running off into a ditch. “You’ll love it here. In a week you’ll be screaming and carrying on because you don’t want to come home.”

Harriet stared at her in amazement.

“Edie,” she said, “you wouldn’t like it here yourself. You wouldn’t stay with these people for a million dollars.”

“ ‘Oh, Edie!’ ” Meanly, in falsetto, Edie mimicked Harriet’s voice. “ ‘Take me back! Take me back to camp!’ That’s what you’ll be saying when it’s time to go.”

Harriet was so stung that she couldn’t speak. “I won’t,” she managed to say at last. “I won’t.”

“Yes you will!” sang Edie, chin high, in the smug, merry voice that Harriet detested; and “Yes you will!”—even louder, without looking at her.

Suddenly a clarinet honked, a shuddering note which was partly barnyard bray and partly country howdy: Dr. Vance, with clarinet, heralding their arrival. Dr. Vance was not a real doctor—a medical doctor—only a sort of a glorified Christian band director; he was a Yankee, with thick bushy eyebrows, and big teeth like a mule. He was a big wheel on the Baptist youth circuit, and it was Adelaide who had pointed out—correctly—that he was a dead ringer for the famous Tenniel drawing of the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland.

“Welcome, ladies,” he crowed, leaning into Edie’s rolled-down window. “Praise the Lard!”

“Hear hear,” replied Edie, who did not care for the more evangelical tone which sometimes crept into Dr. Vance’s conversation. “Here’s our little camper. I guess we’ll get her checked in and then I’ll be going.”

Dr. Vance—tucking his chin down—leaned in the window to grin at Harriet. His face was a rough, stony red. Coldly, Harriet noted the hair in his nostrils, the stains between his large, square teeth.

Dr. Vance drew back theatrically, as if singed by Harriet’s expression. “Whew!” He raised an arm; he sniffed his armpit, then looked at Edie. “Thought maybe I forgot to put my deodorant on this morning.”

Harriet stared at her knees. Even if I have to be here, she told herself, I don’t have to pretend I like it. Dr. Vance wanted his campers to be loud, outgoing, boisterous, and those who didn’t rise naturally enough into the camp spirit he heckled and teased and tried to pry open by force. What’s wrong, cantcha take a joke? Dontcha know how to laugh at yourself?! If a kid was too quiet—for any reason—Dr. Vance would make sure they got doused with the water balloon, that they had to dance in front of everybody like a chicken or chase a greased pig in a mud pit or wear a funny hat.

“Harriet!” said Edie, after an awkward pause. No matter what Edie said otherwise, Dr. Vance made her uncomfortable too, and Harriet knew it.

Dr. Vance blew a sour note on the clarinet, and—when this too failed to get Harriet’s attention—put his head in at the window and stuck his tongue out at her.

I am among the enemy, Harriet told herself. She would have to hold fast, and remember why she was here. For as much as she hated Camp de Selby it was the safest place to be at the moment.

Dr. Vance whistled: a derisive note, insulting. Harriet, grudgingly, glanced at him (there was no use resisting; he would just keep hammering at her) and he dropped his eyebrows like a sad clown and stuck out his bottom lip. “A pity party isn’t much of a party,” he said. “Know why? Hmn? Because there’s only room for one.”

Harriet—face aflame—sneaked a glance past him, out the window. Gangly pines. A line of girls in swimsuits tiptoed past, gingerly, their legs and feet splashed with red mud. The power of the highland chiefs is broken, she told herself. I have fled my country and gone to the heather.

“… problems at home?” she heard Dr. Vance inquire, rather sanctimoniously.

“Certainly not. She’s just—Harriet is a bit big for her britches,” said Edie, in a clear and carrying voice.

A sharp ugly memory rose in Harriet’s mind: Dr. Vance pushing her onstage in the Hula Hoop contest, the camp roaring with laughter at her dismay.

“Well—” Dr. Vance chuckled—“big britches is one condition we certainly know how to cure around here!”

“Do you hear that, Harriet? Harriet. I don’t,” said Edie, with a little sigh, “I don’t know what’s got into her.”

“Oh, one or two skit nights, and a hot potato race or two, and we’ll get her warmed up.”

The skit nights! Confused memories rose in a clamor: stolen underpants, water poured in her bunk (look, Harriet wets the bed!), a girl’s voice crying: You can’t sit here!

Look, here comes Miss Book Scholar!

“Well hay!” This was Dr. Vance’s wife, her voice high-pitched and countrified, swaying amiably toward them in her polyester shorts set. Mrs. Vance (or “Miss Patsy” as she liked the campers to call her) was in charge of the girls’ side of the camp, and she was as bad as Dr. Vance, but in a different way: touchy-feely, intrusive, asking too many personal questions (about boyfriends, bodily functions and the like). Though Miss Patsy was her official nickname, the girls called her “The Nurse.”

“Hay, Hun!” In through the car window she reached and pinched Harriet on the upper arm. “How you doing, girl!” Twist, twist. “Lookit you!”

“Well hello, Mrs. Vance,” said Edie, “how do you do?” Edie—perversely—liked people like Mrs. Vance because they gave her the space to be especially lofty and grand.

“Well come on, yall! Let’s head up to the office!” Everything Mrs. Vance said, she said with unnatural pep, like the women in the Miss Mississippi pageant or on The Lawrence Welk Show. “Gosh, you’re all grown up, girl!” she said to Harriet. “I know you’re not going to get in any more fist-fights this time, are you?”

Dr. Vance, in turn, gave Harriet a hard look that she did not like.

————

At the hospital, Farish played and replayed the scenario of their grandmother’s accident, speculating, theorizing, all night long and into the next day, so that his brothers had grown very, very tired of listening to him. Dull, red-eyed with fatigue, they slouched around in the waiting room of Intensive Care, partly listening to him but also partly watching a cartoon program about a dog solving a mystery.

“If you move, he’s going to bite you,” Farish said, addressing the air, almost as if he was talking to the absent Gum. “You shouldn’t of moved. I don’t care if he’s laying in your lap.”

He had stood—running his hands through his hair—and begun to pace, disturbing their view of the television. “Farsh,” said Eugene loudly, re-crossing his legs, “Gum had to drive the car, didn’t she?”

“She didn’t have to drive it off in a ditch,” said Danny.

Farish drew his eyebrows down. “You couldn’t have knocked me out of that driver’s seat,” he said belligerently. “I would’ve sat still as a mouse. If you move—” he made a smooth, skating motion with the flat of his palm—“you’ve threatened him. He’s going to defend himself.”

“What the hell is she going to do, Farish? A snake is coming through the roof of the damn car?”

Suddenly Curtis clapped his hands and pointed at the television. “Gum!” he exclaimed.

Farish wheeled around. After a moment, Eugene and Danny burst into horrified laughter. In the cartoon, the dog and a group of young people were trooping through a spooky old castle. A grinning skeleton hung on the wall, along with a bunch of trumpets and axes—and, strange to say, the skeleton bore a strong resemblance to Gum. Suddenly it flew off the wall and sailed after the dog, who ran yowling.

“That,” said Eugene—he was having a hard time getting it out—“that’s what she looked like when the snake was after her.”

Farish, without a word, turned to look at them in weariness and despair. Curtis—aware that he’d done something wrong—stopped laughing instantly, staring at Farish with a disturbed look on his face. But just at this instant Dr. Breedlove appeared in the doorway, striking them all into silence.

“Your grandmother’s conscious,” he said. “It looks like she’s going to pull through. We’ve got her off the tubes.”

Farish put his face in his hands.

“Off the breathing tubes, anyway. She’s still got the IVs, since her heartbeat hasn’t stabilized yet. Would you like to see her?”

Solemnly, they all threaded single file behind him (all except Curtis, happy enough to stay watching Scooby-Doo) through a wilderness of machines and mysterious equipment, to a curtained area concealing Gum. Though she lay very still, and the stillness itself was frightening, she actually did not look much more ragged than usual except for her eyelids, which drooped half-shut from muscle paralysis.

“Well, I’ll leave you alone for a minute now,” the doctor said, energetically rubbing his hands. “But just a minute. Don’t tire her out.”

Farish made his way to the bed first. “It’s me,” he said, leaning close.

Her eyelids fluttered; slowly, she lifted a hand from the coverlet, which Farish clasped in both his own.

“Who done this to you?” he said, in a stern-sounding voice, and bent his head close to her lips to listen.

After a moment or two she said: “I don’t know.” Her voice was dry and wispy and very faint. “All I seen was some kids off in the distance.”

Farish—shaking his head—stood and smacked his closed fist into his palm. He walked to the window and stood looking out into the parking lot.

“Forget about kids,” Eugene said. “You know who I figured, when I heard this? Porton Stiles.” His arm was still in a sling from his own snake bite. “Or Buddy Reebals. They always said Buddy had a hit list. That there was people he was coming after someday.”

“It wasn’t any of them people,” said Farish, glancing up with a sudden, cutting intelligence. “All this started at the Mission the other night.”

Eugene said: “Don’t look at me like that. It’s not my fault.”

“You think Loyal did it?” said Danny to Farish.

“How could he?” said Eugene. “He left a week ago.”

“Well, we know one thing for damn sure. It’s his snake. No question about that,” Farish said.

“Well, it was you that asked him and his snakes to come here,” said Eugene angrily, “not me. I mean, I’m scared to go in my own place now—”

“I said it was his snake,” said Farish, tapping his foot with agitation. “I didn’t say he was the one that thrown it.”

“See, Farish, this is what bothers me, though,” Danny said. “Who broke that windshield? If they were looking for product—”

Danny noticed Eugene looking at him funny; he stopped talking and shoved his hands in his pockets. There was no need to go on about the drugs in front of Gum and Eugene.

“You think it was Dolphus?” he said to Farish. “Or somebody working for Dolphus maybe?”

Farish thought about it. “No,” he said. “All these snakes and shit aint Dolphus’s style. He’d just send somebody down to cut your ass up.”

“You know what I keep wondering about?” Danny said. “That girl who come upstairs to the door that night.”

“I was thinking about her, too,” said Farish. “I didn’t get a good look at her. Where’d she come from? What was she doing hanging around outside the house?”

Danny shrugged.

“You didn’t ask her?”

“Look, man,” Danny said, trying to keep his voice even, “there was an awful lot going on that night.”

“And you let her get away? You said you saw a kid,” said Farish to Gum. “Black or white? Boy or girl?”

“Yeah, Gum,” said Danny. “What’d you see?”

“Well, I tell you the truth,” said their grandmother, faintly, “I didn’t get a good look. You know how my eyes are.”

“Was it one? Or more than one?”

“I didn’t see a whole lot. When I run off the road, I heard a kid screaming and laughing from up on that overpass.”

“That girl,” Eugene said to Farish, “was down on the square watching Loyal and me preach earlier in the night. I remember her. She was riding a bicycle.”

“She wasn’t on any bicycle when she come to the Mission,” said Danny. “She ran away on foot.”

“I’m just telling you what I saw.”

“I believe I seen a bicycle, come to think of it,” said Gum. “I can’t be sure.”

“I want to talk to this girl,” Farish said. “Yall say you don’t know who she is?”

“She told us her name but she couldn’t make up her mind. First it was Mary Jones. Then it was Mary Johnson.”

“Would you know her if you saw her again?”

“I’d know her,” said Eugene. “I was standing there with her for ten minutes. I got a good look at her face, up close.”

“So did I,” Danny said.

Farish compressed his lips. “Are the cops involved in this?” he said abruptly to his grandmother. “Have they asked you any questions?”

“I didn’t tell em a thing.”

“Good.” Awkwardly, Farish patted his grandmother on the shoulder. “I’m on find out who done this to you,” he said. “And when I find em, you bet they’ll be sorry.”

————

Ida’s last few days at work were like the last few days before Weenie died: those endless hours of lying on the kitchen floor beside his box, and part of him still there but most of him—the best part—gone already. Le Sueur’s Peas, his box had said. The black lettering was stamped in Allison’s memory with all the sickness of despair. She had lain with her nose only inches away from those letters, trying to breathe in time with his fast, agonized little gasps as if with her own lungs she could buoy him up. How vast the kitchen was, so low down, so late at night: all those shadows. Even now, Weenie’s death had the waxy sheen of the linoleum in Edie’s kitchen; it had the crowded feel of her glass-front cabinets (an audience of plates ranked in galleries, goggling helplessly); the useless cheer of red dishcloths and cherry-patterned curtains. Those dumb, well-meaning objects—cardboard box; cherry curtains and jumbled Fiestaware—had pressed close in Allison’s grief, sat up and watched with her all the long awful night. Now, with Ida leaving, nothing in the house shared Allison’s sorrow or reflected it but objects: the gloomy carpets, the cloudy mirrors; the armchairs hunched and grieving and even the tragic old tall-case clock holding itself very rigid and proper, as if it were about to collapse into sobs. Within the china cabinet, the Vienna bagpipers and crinolined Doulton ladies gestured imploringly, this way and that: cheeks hectic, their dark little gazes hollow and stunned.

Ida had Things to Do. She cleaned out the refrigerator; she took everything out of the cabinets, and wiped them down; she made banana bread, and a casserole or two, and wrapped them in tinfoil and put them in the freezer. She talked, and even hummed; and she seemed cheerful enough except that in all her rushing around, she refused to meet Allison’s eye. Once Allison thought she caught her crying. Gingerly, she stood in the doorway. “Are you crying?” she asked.

Ida Rhew jumped—then pressed a hand to her chest, and laughed. “Bless your heart!” she cried.

“Ida, are you sad?”

But Ida just shook her head, and went back to work; and Allison went to her room and cried. Later on, she would regret that she’d wasted one of her few remaining hours with Ida by going up to her bedroom to cry alone. But at the moment, standing there in the kitchen watching Ida clean out the cabinets with her back turned had been too sad to bear, so sad that it gave Allison a panicky, breathless, choking feeling to remember it. Somehow Ida was already gone; as warm and solid as she was, she had already turned into a memory, a ghost, even as she stood in her white nurse’s shoes in the sunny kitchen.

Allison walked to the grocery and got a cardboard box for Ida to carry her cuttings in, so they wouldn’t get broken during the trip. With what money she had—thirty-two dollars, old Christmas money—she bought Ida everything she could think of that Ida might want or need: cans of salmon, which Ida loved to eat for lunch, with crackers; maple syrup; knee-high stockings and a fancy bar of English lavender soap; Fig Newtons; a box of Russell Stover chocolates; a booklet of stamps; a pretty red toothbrush and a tube of striped toothpaste and even a large jar of One-A-Day vitamins.

Allison carried it all home, and then spent a long time that evening out on the back porch, wrapping up Ida’s collection of rooted cuttings, each snuff tin and plastic cup in its own carefully fashioned sleeve of wet newspaper. In the attic was a pretty red box, full of Christmas lights. Allison had dumped them all out on the floor and carried the box down to her bedroom to re-pack the presents, when her mother pattered down the hallway (her pace light, unconcerned) and put her head in at the door.

“It’s lonesome here without Harriet, isn’t it?” she asked brightly. Her face was shiny with cold cream. “Do you want to come in my room and watch television?”

Allison shook her head. She was disturbed: this was very unlike her mother, to go around after ten at night taking an interest, issuing invitations.

“What are you doing? I think you ought to come in with me and watch TV,” said her mother, when Allison did not answer.

“Okay,” said Allison. She stood up.

Her mother was looking at her strangely. Allison, in an agony of embarrassment, glanced away. Sometimes, especially when the two of them were alone together, she sensed keenly her mother’s disappointment that she was herself and not Robin. Her mother couldn’t help this—in fact, she tried touchingly hard to conceal it—but Allison knew that her very existence was a reminder of what was missing, and in deference to her mother’s feelings she did her best to stay out of the way and make herself small and inconspicious around the house. The next few weeks would be difficult, with Ida gone and Harriet away.

“You don’t have to come watch TV,” her mother finally said. “I just thought you might want to.”

Allison felt her face growing red. She avoided her mother’s eye. All the colors in the bedroom—including the box—seemed far too acid and bright.

After her mother left again, Allison finished packing the box and then put the money left over into an envelope, in with the book of stamps, a school picture of herself and her address, carefully printed on a sheet of good stationery. Then she tied the box up with a string of green tinsel.

Much later, in the middle of the night, Allison woke with a start from a bad dream—a dream she’d had before, of standing before a white wall only inches from her face. In the dream she was unable to move, and it was as if she would have to go on looking at the blank wall for the rest of her life.

She lay quietly in the dark, staring at the box on the floor by her bed, until the street lamps went off and the room was blue with the dawn. At last, she got out of bed in her bare feet; with a straight pin from the bureau, she sat down cross-legged by the box, and spent a laborious hour or so pricking out tiny secret messages in the cardboard, until the sun was up and the room was light again: Ida’s last day. IDAJ WE LOVE YOU, the messages on the box said. IDA R. BROWNLEE. COME BACK IDA. DON’T FORGET ME, IDA. LOVE.

————

Though he felt guilty for it, Danny was enjoying his grandmother’s stay in the hospital. Things were easier without her at home, stirring up Farish all the time. And though Farish was doing a lot of drugs (with Gum away, there was nothing to stop him from sitting in front of the television with the razor and the mirror all night long) he wasn’t so likely to blow up at his brothers without the additional strain of gathering three times a day for Gum’s large fried meals in the kitchen.

Danny was doing a lot of drugs himself, but that was all right; he was going to stop soon but he just hadn’t got to that point. And the drugs gave him enough energy to clean the whole trailer. Barefoot, sweating, stripped to his jeans, he washed windows and walls and floors; he threw out all the rancid grease and bacon fat that Gum secreted around the kitchen in smelly old coffee cans; he scrubbed down the bathroom, and polished the linoleum until it shone, and bleached all their old underwear and T-shirts until they were white again. (Their grandmother had never got used to the washing machine Farish had bought her; she was bad about washing the white clothes with colors, so they got gray-looking.)

Cleaning made Danny feel good: in control. The trailer was trim and ship-shape, like the galley of a boat. Even Farish commented on how neat things were looking. Though Danny knew better than to touch any of Farish’s “projects” (the partially assembled machinery, the broken lawn mowers and carburetors and table lamps) it was possible to clean up around them, and getting rid of all the needless mess helped a lot. Twice a day he drove the trash to the garbage dump. After heating alphabet soup or frying bacon and eggs for Curtis, he washed the dishes and dried them immediately, instead of letting them sit. He’d even figured out how to stack everything in the cabinet so it didn’t take up as much room.

At night, he sat up with Farish. This was another good thing about speed: it doubled your day. There was time to work, time to talk, time to think.

And there was a lot to think about. The recent attacks—on the Mission, on Gum—had marshaled Farish’s attention to a single point. In the old days—before his head injury—Farish had a knack for reasoning out certain kinds of practical and logistical problems, and some of this quiet old calculating shrewdness was in the cock of his head as he and Danny stood together on the abandoned overpass, checking out the crime scene: the cobra’s decorated dynamite box, empty; a child’s red wagon; and a bunch of little footprints running back and forth in the cement dust.

“If it was her that done this,” said Farish, “I’m on kill the little bitch.” He was silent, hands on hips, staring down at the cement dust.

“What are you thinking?” Danny said.

“I’m thinking how did a kid move this heavy box.”

“With the wagon.”

“Not down the stairs at the Mission, she didn’t.” Farish chewed on his lower lip. “Also, if she stole the snake, why knock on the door and show her face?”

Danny shrugged. “Kids,” he said. He lit a cigarette, taking the smoke up through his nose, and snapped the big Zippo lighter shut. “They’re dumb.”

“Whoever done this wasn’t dumb. To pull this off took some kind of balls and timing.”

“Or luck.”

“Whatever,” said Farish. His arms were crossed across his chest—military-looking in the brown coverall—and all of a sudden he was staring at the side of Danny’s face in a way that Danny didn’t like.

“You wouldn’t do anything to hurt Gum, would you?” he said.

Danny blinked. “No!” He was almost too shocked to speak. “Jesus!”

“She’s old.”

“I know it!” said Danny, tossing his long hair rather aggressively out of his face.

“I’m just trying to think who else knew that it was her, not you, driving the Trans Am that day.”

“Why?” said Danny after a short, stunned pause. The glare off the highway was shining up in his eyes and it increased his confusion. “What difference does it make? All she said was she didn’t like to climb up in the truck. I told you that. Ask her yourself.”

“Or me.”

“What?”

“Or me,” said Farish. He was breathing audibly, in moist little huffs. “You wouldn’t do anything to hurt me, would you?”

“No,” said Danny, after a long, tense pause, his voice as flat as he could make it. What he felt like saying but was afraid to was fuck you. He spent fully as much time on the drug business as Farish, running errands, working in the lab—hell, he had to drive him everywhere he went—and Farish paid him nothing like an equal share, in fact didn’t pay him shit, just tossed him a ten or a twenty from time to time. True: for a while, it had beat the hell out of having a regular job. Days squandered shooting pool or driving Farish around in the car, listening to music, staying up all night: fun and games, and all the drugs he could do. But watching the sun come up every morning was getting a little eerie and repetitive, and lately it had got downright scary. He was tired of the life, tired of getting high, and was Farish about to pay Danny what he actually owed him so that he could leave town and go someplace where people didn’t know him (you didn’t stand much of a chance in this town if your last name was Ratliff) and get a decent job for a change? No. Why should Farish pay Danny? He had a good deal going, with his unpaid slave.

Abruptly, Farish said: “Find that girl. That’s your number-one priority. I want you to find that girl and I want you to find out what all she knows about this. I don’t care if you have to wring her fucking neck.”

————

“She’s already seen Colonial Williamsburg, she doesn’t care if I see it or not,” said Adelaide, and turned pettishly to look out the back window.

Edie took a deep breath, through her nostrils. Because of taking Harriet to camp, she was already good and tired of driving; because of Libby (who’d had to go back twice to make sure she’d turned off everything) and Adelaide (who’d made them wait in the car while she finished ironing a dress she’d decided to bring at the last minute) and Tat (who’d allowed them to get halfway out of town before she realized she’d left her wristwatch on the sink): because of disorganization sufficient to drive the devil out of a saint they were already two hours late in getting on the road and now—before they were even out of town—Adelaide was demanding detours to another state.

“Oh, we won’t miss Virginia, we’ll be seeing so much,” said Tat—rouged, fresh, redolent of lavender soap and Aqua Net and Souvenez-vous? toilet water. She was hunting through her yellow pocketbook for her asthma inhaler. “Though it does seem a shame … since we will be all the way up there …”

Adelaide began to fan herself with a copy of Mississippi By-ways magazine that she’d brought to look at in the car.

“If you’re not getting enough air back there,” said Edie, “why don’t you let your windows down a little?”

“I don’t want to muss my hair up. I just had it fixed.”

“Well,” said Tat, leaning across, “if you crack it just a little …”

“No! Stop! That’s the door!”

“No, Adelaide, that’s the door. This is the window.”

“Please don’t bother. I’m fine like this.”

Edie said: “If I was you I wouldn’t worry too much about my hair, Addie. You’re going to get mighty hot back there.”

“Well, with all these other windows down,” Adelaide said stiffly, “I’m getting blown to pieces as it is.”

Tat laughed. “Well, I’m not closing my window!”

“Well,” said Adelaide primly, “I’m not opening mine.”

Libby—in the front seat, next to Edie—made a drowsy, fretful noise as if she couldn’t quite get comfortable. Her powdery little cologne was inoffensive, but in combination with the heat, and the powerful Asian clouds of Shalimar and Souvenez-vous? simmering in the rear, Edie’s sinuses had already begun to close up.

Suddenly, Tat shrieked: “Where’s my pocketbook?”

“What? What?” said everybody at once.

“I can’t find my pocketbook!”

“Edith, turn around!” said Libby. “She’s left her pocketbook!”

“I didn’t leave it. I just had it!”

Edie said: “Well, I can’t turn around in the middle of the street.”

“Where can it be? I just had it! I—”

“Oh, Tatty!” Merry laughter from Adelaide. “There it is! You’re sitting on it.”

“What did she say? Did she find it?” Libby asked, looking around in a panic. “Did you find your pocketbook, Tat?”

“Yes, I’ve got it now.”

“Oh, thank goodness. You don’t want to lose your pocketbook. What would you do if you lost your pocketbook?”

As if announcing something over the radio, Adelaide proclaimed: “This reminds me of that crazy Fourth of July weekend when we drove down to Natchez. I’ll never forget it.”

“No, I won’t forget it, either,” said Edie. That had been back in the fifties, before Adelaide quit smoking; Adelaide—busy talking—had caught the ashtray on fire while Edie was driving down the highway.

“Goodness what a long hot drive.”

Edie said tartly: “Yes, my hand certainly felt hot.” A redhot drip of molten plastic—cellophane from Addie’s cigarette pack—had stuck to the back of Edie’s hand while she was slapping the flames out and trying to drive the car at the same time (Addie had done nothing but squeal and flap about in the passenger seat); it was a nasty burn that left a scar, and the pain and shock of it had nearly run Edie off the road. She had driven two hundred miles in August heat with her right hand jammed in a paper cup full of ice water and tears streaming down her face, listening to Adelaide fuss and complain every mile of the way.

“And what about that August we all drove to New Orleans?” Adelaide said, fluttering a hand comically over her chest. “I thought I was going to die of the heat stroke, Edith. I thought that you were going to look over here in the passenger seat and see that I had died.”

You! thought Edie. With your window shut! Whose fault was that?

“Yes!” said Tat. “What a trip! And that was—”

“You weren’t with us.”

“Yes I was!”

“Indeed she was, I’ll never forget it,” Adelaide said imperiously.

“Don’t you remember, Edith, that was the trip you went to the drive-through McDonald’s, in Jackson, and tried to tell our order to a garbage can in the parking lot?”

Peals of merry laughter. Edie gritted her teeth and concentrated on the road.

“Oh, what a bunch of crazy old ladies we are,” said Tat. “What those people must have thought.”

“I just hope I remembered everything,” Libby murmured. “Last night, I started thinking that I’d left my stockings at home and that I’d lost all my money.…”

“I’ll bet you didn’t get a wink of sleep, did you darling?” said Tat, leaning forward to put a hand on Libby’s thin little shoulder.

“Nonsense! I’m doing beautifully! I’m—”

“You know she didn’t! Worrying all the night long! What you need,” said Adelaide, “is some breakfast.”

“You know,” said Tatty—and clapped her hands—“that’s a marvelous idea!”

“Let’s stop, Edith.”

“Listen! I wanted to leave at six this morning! If we stop now, it’ll be noon before we get on the road! Didn’t you all eat before you left?”

“Well, I didn’t know how my stomach would feel until we’d been on the road a while,” said Adelaide.

“We’re hardly out of town!”

“Don’t worry about me, darling,” said Libby. “I’m too excited to eat a bite.”

“Here, Tat,” said Edie, fumbling with the thermos. “Why don’t you pour her a little cup of coffee.”

“If she hasn’t slept,” said Tat, primly, “coffee may give her palpitations.”

Edie snorted. “What’s the matter with you all? You used to drink coffee at my house without complaining about palpitations or anything else. Now you act like it’s poison. Makes you all wild.”

Very suddenly, Adelaide said: “Oh, dear. Turn around, Edith.”

Tat put her hand over her mouth and laughed. “We’re all to pieces this morning, aren’t we?”

Edie said: “What is it now?”

“I’m sorry,” Adelaide said, tightly. “I have to go back.”

“What have you forgotten?”

Adelaide stared straight ahead. “The Sanka.”

“Well, you’ll just have to buy some more.”

“Well,” Tat murmured, “if she has a jar, at home, it’s a shame for her to buy another one—”

“Besides,” said Libby—hands to her face, eyes rolling with wholly unfeigned alarm—“what if she can’t find it? What if they don’t sell it up there?”

“You can buy Sanka anywhere.”

“Edith, please,” Adelaide snapped. “I don’t want to hear it. If you don’t want to take me back, stop the car and let me get out.”

Very sharply, without signaling, Edie swung into the driveway of the highway branch bank and turned around in the parking lot.

“Aren’t we something? I thought it was just me forgetting things this morning,” Tat said gaily as she slid into Adelaide—bracing herself with a hand on Addie’s arm for Edie’s rough turn; and she was about to announce to everyone that she didn’t feel quite so bad now about leaving her wrist-watch at home when from the front seat there was a breathless cry from Libby and BAM: the Oldsmobile—struck hard, in the passenger side—spun nose-around so that the next thing anyone knew the horn was blaring and blood was gushing from Edie’s nose and they were on the wrong side of the highway, staring through a web of cracked glass at oncoming traffic.

————

“Oh Harrr—riet!”

Laughter. To Harriet’s dismay, the ventriloquist’s denimclad dummy had singled her out of the audience. She—and fifty other girls of varying ages—were seated on log benches in a clearing in the woods the counselors called “chapel.”

Up front, two girls from Harriet’s cabin (Dawn and Jada) turned to glare at her. They’d been fighting with Harriet only that morning, a fight which had been interrupted by the chapel bell.

“Hey! Take it easy, Ziggie old boy!” chuckled the ventriloquist. He was a counselor from the boys’ camp named Zach. Dr. and Mrs. Vance had mentioned more than once that Zig (the dummy) and Zach had shared a bedroom for twelve years; that the dummy had accompanied Zach to Bob Jones University as Zach’s “roommate”; Harriet had already heard much, much more about it than she cared to. The dummy was dressed like a Dead End Kid, in knee pants and pork-pie hat, and it had a scary red mouth and freckles that looked like measles. Now—in imitation of Harriet, presumably—it popped its eyes and swivelled its head full circle.

“Hey, boss! And they call me a dummy!” it shrieked aggressively.

More laughter—particularly loud from Jada and Dawn, up front, clapping their hands in appreciation. Harriet, face burning, stared haughtily at the sweaty back of the girl in front of her: an older girl with rolls of fat bulging around her bra straps. I hope I never look like that, she thought. I’ll starve myself first.

She had been at camp for ten days. It seemed like forever. Edie, she suspected, had had a little word with Dr. Vance and his wife because the counselors had established an irritating pattern of singling her out, but part of the problem—Harriet knew it lucidly without being able to do anything about it—was her inability to fit in with the group without attracting attention to herself. As a matter of principle, she had neglected to sign and return the “covenant card” in her information pack. This was a series of solemn pledges all campers were pressured to make: pledges not to attend R-rated movies or listen to “hard or acid rock” music; not to drink alcohol, have sex before marriage, smoke marijuana or tobacco, or take the Lord’s name in vain. It wasn’t as if Harriet actually wanted to do any of these things (except—sometimes, not very often—go to the movies); but still she was determined not to sign it.

“Hay Hun! Didn’t you forget something?” said Nursie Vance brightly, putting an arm around Harriet (who stiffened immediately) and giving her a chummy little squeeze.

“No.”

“I didn’t get a Covenant Card from you.”

Harriet said nothing.

Nursie gave her another intrusive little hug. “You know, hun, God don’t give us but two choices! Either something’s right or it’s wrong! Either you’re a champion for Christ or you’re not!” From her pocket, she produced a blank Covenant Card.

“Now, I want you to pray over this, Harriet. And do what the Lord guides you to do.”

Harriet stared at Nursie’s puffy white tennis shoes.

Nursie clasped Harriet’s hand. “Would you like me to pray with you, hun?” she asked, confidentially, as if offering some great treat.

“No.”

“Oh, I know the Lord will lead you to the right decision on this,” said Nursie, with a twinkly enthusiasm. “Oh, I just know it!”

The girls in Harriet’s wigwam had already paired up before Harriet arrived; mostly they ignored her, and though she woke one night to find her hand in a basin of warm water, and the other girls standing around in the dark whispering and giggling at the bottom of her bunk (it was a trick, the sleeper’s hand in warm water, thought to make the sleeper wet the bed) they didn’t seem to have it in for Harriet particularly; though, of course, there had been Saran Wrap, too, stretched under the seat of the latrine. From outside, muffled laughter. “Hey, what’s taking you so long in there!” A dozen girls, doubled over laughing when she came out stony faced, with wet shorts—but surely that trick hadn’t been directed specifically at her, surely it had been just her bad luck? Still, everybody else seemed to be in on the joke: Beth and Stephanie, Beverley and Michelle, Marcy and Darci and Sara Lynn, Kristle and Jada and Lee Ann and Devon and Dawn. They were mostly from Tupelo and Columbus (the girls from Alexandria, not that she liked them any better, were in Oriole and Goldfinch wigwams); they were all taller than Harriet, and older-looking; girls who wore flavored lip gloss and cut-off jeans and rubbed themselves with coconut oil on the water-ski dock. Their conversation (the Bay City Rollers; the Osmonds; some boy named Jay Jackson who went to their school) bored and irritated her.

And Harriet had expected this. She had expected the “covenant” cards. She had expected the bleakness of life without library books; she had expected the team sports (which she loathed) and the skit nights, and the hectoring Bible classes; she had expected the discomfort and tedium of sitting in a canoe in the broiling windless afternoons and listening to stupid conversations about whether Dave was a good Christian, whether Wayne had been to second base with Lee Ann or whether Jay Jackson drank.

And all this was bad enough. But Harriet was going to be in the eighth grade next year; and what she had not expected was the horrifying new indignity of being classed—for the first time ever—a “Teen Girl”: a creature without mind, wholly protuberance and excretion, to judge from the literature she was given. She had not expected the chipper, humiliating filmstrips filled with demeaning medical information; she had not expected mandatory “rap sessions” where the girls were not only urged to ask personal questions—some of them, to Harriet’s mind, frankly pornographic—but to answer them as well.

During these discussions, Harriet burned radiant with hatred and shame. She felt degraded by Nursie’s blithe assumption that she—Harriet—was no different from these stupid Tupelo girls: preoccupied with under-arm odor, the reproductive system, and dating. The haze of deodorant and “hygiene” sprays in the changing rooms; the stubbly leg hair, the greasy lip gloss: everything was tainted with a slick oil of “puberty,” of obscenity, right down to the sweat on the hot dogs. Worse: Harriet felt as though one of the gruesome transparencies of “Your Developing Body”—all womb, and tubes, and mammaries—had been projected over her poor dumb body; as if all anybody saw when they looked at her—even with her clothes on—were organs and genitalia and hair in unseemly places. Knowing that it was inevitable (“just a natural part of growing up!”) was no better than knowing that someday she would die. Death, at least, was dignified: an end to dishonor and sorrow.

True: some of the girls in her cabin, Kristle and Marcy in particular, had good senses of humor. But the more womanly of her cabin-mates (Lee Ann, Darci, Jada, Dawn) were coarse, and frightening; and Harriet was revolted by their eagerness to be identified in crude biological terms, like who had “tits” and who didn’t. They talked about “necking” and being “on the rag”; they used poor English. And they had absolutely filthy minds. Here, Harriet had said, when Lee Ann was trying to fix her life jacket, you sort of screw it in, like this—

All the girls—including the ingrate Lee Ann—burst into laughter. Do what, Harriet?

Screw, said Harriet, chillingly. Screw is a perfectly good word.…

Oh yeah? Idiotic snickers—they were filthy, all of them, the whole sweaty, menstruating, boy-crazed lot, with their pubic hair and their perspiration problems, winking and kicking each other in the ankles. Say it again, Harriet? What’s it mean? What’s she got to do?

Zach and Zig had now turned to the subject of beer drinking. “Now tell me this, Zig. Would you drink something if it tasted bad? And was bad for you, too?”

“Phew! No way!”

“Well, believe it or not, that’s what a lot of grown people and even kids do!”

Zig, astonished, surveyed the audience. “Kids here, Boss?”

“Maybe. Because there are always a few really dumb kids who think drinking beer is cool, man!” Zach gave the Peace sign. Nervous laughter.

Harriet—who had a headache from sitting in the sun—squinted at a cluster of mosquito bites on her arm. After this assembly (over in ten minutes, thank Heavens) there was forty-five minutes of swimming, then a Bible quiz, then lunch.

Swimming was the only activity Harriet liked or looked forward to. Alone with her heartbeat, she winnowed through the dark, dreamless lake, through the sickly, flickering shafts of sunlight that penetrated the gloom. Near the surface, the water was as warm as bathwater; when she swam deeper, spikes of cold spring water hit her in the face and plumes of powdery murk rolled like green smoke from the plushy mire on the bottom, spiraling with every stroke, every kick.

The girls only got to swim twice a week: Tuesday and Thursday. And she was especially glad that today was Thursday because she was still reeling from the unpleasant surprise she’d had at Mail Call that morning. A letter from Hely had arrived. When she opened it, she was shocked to see a newspaper clipping from the Alexandria Eagle which read EXOTIC REPTILE ATTACKS WOMAN.

There was a letter, too, on blue-lined school paper. “Oooh, is that from your boyfriend?” Dawn snatched the letter away. “ ‘Hey, Harriet,’ ” she read, aloud, to everybody. “ ‘What’s happening?’ ”

The clipping fluttered to the ground. With trembling hands, Harriet grabbed it up and crunched it in a ball and stuffed it in her pocket.

“ ‘Thought you’d like to see this. Check it out …’ Check what out? What’s that?” Dawn was saying.

Harriet, her hand in her pocket, was clawing the newspaper to shreds.

“It’s in her pocket,” Jada was saying. “She put something in her pocket.”

“Get it! Get it!”

Gleefully, Jada lunged at Harriet and Harriet hit her in the face.

Jada screamed. “Oh my God! She scratched me! You scratched me on the eyelid, you little shit!”

“Hey you guys,” someone hissed, “Mel’s gonna hear.” This was Melanie, their wigwam counselor.

“I’m bleeding!” Jada was shrieking. “She tried to put my eye out! Fuck!”

Dawn stood stunned, her frosty lip-glossed mouth hanging open. Harriet took advantage of the confusion to snatch Hely’s letter back from her and jam it in her pocket.

“Look!” said Jada, holding out her hand. On her fingertips, and on her eyelid, was blood—not a lot, but some. “Look what she did to me!”

“You guys shut up,” said someone shrilly, “or we’re gonna get a demerit.”

“If we get another one,” said someone else, in an aggrieved voice, “we can’t roast marshmallows with the boys.”

“Yeah, that’s right. Shut up.”

Jada—fist drawn theatrically—stepped towards Harriet. “You’d better watch your back, girl,” she said, “you better—”

“Shut up! Mel’s coming!”

Then the bell had rung for chapel. So Zach and his dummy had saved Harriet, for the moment at least. If Jada decided to tell, she’d get in trouble, but that was nothing new; getting in trouble for fighting was something that Harriet was used to.

What worried her was the clipping. It had been incredibly stupid of Hely to send it. At least no one had seen it; that was the main thing. Apart from the headline, she’d hardly seen it herself; she’d shredded it thoroughly, along with Hely’s letter, and mashed the pieces together in her pocket.

Something, she realized, had changed in the clearing. Zach had stopped talking and all the girls had got very still and quiet all of a sudden. In the silence, a thrill of panic ran through Harriet. She expected the heads to turn all at once, to look at her, but then Zach cleared his throat, and Harriet understood, as if waking from a dream, that the silence wasn’t about her at all, that it was only the prayer. Quickly, she shut her eyes and bowed her head.

————

As soon as the prayer was finished, and the girls stretched and giggled and began to gather in conversational groups (Jada and Dawn and Darci, too, obviously talking about Harriet, arms folded across their chests, hostile stares across the clearing in her direction) Mel (in tennis visor, swipe of zinc oxide down her nose) collared Harriet. “Forget swimming. The Vances want to see you.”

Harriet tried to conceal her dismay.

“Up at the office,” said Mel, and ran her tongue over her braces. She was looking over Harriet’s head—for the glorious Zach, no doubt, worried that he might slip back to the boys’ camp without talking to her.

Harriet nodded and tried to look indifferent. What could they do to her? Make her sit by herself in the wigwam all day?

“Hey,” Mel called after her—she’d already spotted Zach, had a hand up and was threading through the girls towards him—“if the Vances get finished with you before Bible study, just come on out to the tennis court and do drills with the ten o’clock group, okay?”

The pines were dark—a welcome respite from the sun-bleached brightness of “chapel”—and the path through the woods was soft and sticky. Harriet walked with her head down. That was quick, she thought. Though Jada was a thug and a bully, Harriet hadn’t figured her for a tattletale.

But who knew? Maybe it was nothing. Maybe Dr. Vance just wanted to drag her off for what he called a “session” (where he repeated a lot of Bible verses about Obedience and then asked if Harriet accepted Jesus as her personal savior). Or maybe he wanted to question her about the Star Wars figure. (Two nights before, he had called the whole camp together, boys and girls, and screamed at them for an hour because one of them—he said—had stolen a Star Wars figure belonging to Brantley, his grunting little kindergarten-aged son.)

Or possibly she had a phone call. The phone was in Dr. Vance’s office. But who would call her? Hely?

Maybe it’s the police, she thought uneasily, maybe they found the wagon. And she tried to push the thought from her mind.

She emerged from the woods, warily. Outside the office, beside the mini-bus, and Dr. Vance’s station wagon, was a car with dealer’s plates—from Dial Chevrolet. Before Harriet had time to wonder what it had to do with her, the door to the office opened with a melodious cascade of wind chimes and out stepped Dr. Vance, followed by Edie.

Harriet was too shocked to move. Edie looked different—wan, subdued—and for a moment Harriet wondered if she was mistaken but no, it was Edie all right: she was just wearing an old pair of eyeglasses that Harriet wasn’t used to, with mannish black frames that were too heavy for her face and made her look pale.

Dr. Vance saw Harriet, and waved: with both arms, as if he were waving from across a crowded stadium. Harriet was reluctant to approach. She had the idea she might be in real trouble, deep trouble—but then Edie saw her too and smiled: and somehow (the glasses, maybe?) it was the old Edie, prehistoric, the Edie of the heart-shaped box, who had whistled and tossed baseballs to Robin under haunted Kodachrome skies.

“Hottentot,” she called.

Dr. Vance stood by with composed benevolence as Harriet—bursting with love at the dear old pet name, seldom used—hurried to her across the graveled clearing; as Edie bobbed down (swift, soldierly) and pecked her on the cheek.

“Yes, maam! Mighty glad to see Grandma!” boomed Dr. Vance, rolling his eyes up, rocking on his heels. He spoke with exorbitant warmth, but also as if he had his mind on other matters.

“Harriet,” said Edie, “are these all your things?” and Harriet saw, on the gravel by Edie’s feet, her suitcase and her knapsack and her tennis racket.

After a slight, disoriented pause—during which her possessions on the ground did not register—Harriet said: “You’ve got new glasses.”

“Old glasses. The car is new.” Edie nodded at the new automobile parked beside Dr. Vance’s. “If you’ve got something else back at the cabin you’d better run along and get it.”

“Where’s your car?”

“Never mind. Hurry along.”

Harriet—not one to look a gift horse in the mouth—scurried away. She was perplexed by rescue from this unlikely quarter; more so because she had been prepared to throw herself on the ground at Edie’s feet and beg and scream to be taken home.

Apart from some art projects she didn’t want (a grubby potholder, a decoupage pencil-box, not yet dry) the only things Harriet had to pick up were her shower sandals and her towels. Someone had swiped one of her towels to go swimming with, so she grabbed the other and ran back to Dr. Vance’s cabin.

Dr. Vance was loading the trunk of the new car for Edie—who, Harriet noticed for the first time, was moving a little stiffly.

Maybe it’s Ida, thought Harriet, suddenly. Maybe Ida decided not to quit. Or maybe she decided she had to see me one last time before she left. But Harriet knew that neither of these things was really the truth.

Edie was eyeing her suspiciously. “I thought you had two towels.”

“No, maam.” She noticed a trace of some dark, caked matter at the base of Edie’s nostrils: snuff? Chester took snuff.

Before she could climb in the car, Dr. Vance came around and—stepping sideways between Harriet and the passenger door—leaned down and gave Harriet his hand to shake.

“God has His own plan, Harriet.” He said it to her as if telling her a little secret. “Does that mean we’ll always like it? No. Does that mean we’ll always understand it? No. Does that mean that we should wail and complain about it? No indeed!”

Harriet—burning with embarrassment—stared into Dr. Vance’s hard gray eyes. In Nursie’s discussion group after “Your Developing Body” there had been lots of talk about God’s Plan, about how all the tubes and hormones and degrading excretions in the filmstrips were God’s Plan for Girls.

“And why is that? Why does God try us? Why testeth He our resolve? Why must we reflect on these universal challenges?” Dr. Vance’s eyes searched her face. “What do they teach us on our Christian walk?”

Silence. Harriet was too revolted to draw her hand back. High in the pines, a blue jay shrieked.

“Part of our challenge, Harriet, is accepting that His plan is always for the best. And what does acceptance mean? We must bend to His will! We must bend to it joyously! This is the challenge that we face as Christians!”

All of a sudden Harriet—her face only inches from his—felt very afraid. With great concentration, she stared at a tiny spot of reddish stubble in the cleft of his chin, where the razor had missed.

“Let us pray,” said Dr. Vance suddenly, and squeezed her hand. “Dear Jesus,” he said, pressing thumb and forefinger into his tightly shut eyes. “What a privilege it is to stand before You this day! What a blessing to pray with You! Let us be joyful, joyful, in Your presence!”

What’s he talking about? thought Harriet, dazed. Her mosquito bites itched, but she didn’t dare scratch them. Through half-closed eyes, she stared at her feet.

“Oh Lard. Please be with Harriet and her family in the days to come. Watch over them. Keep, guide, and shepherd them. Help them understand, Lard,” said Dr. Vance—pronouncing all his consonants and syllables very distinctly—“that these sorrows and trials are a part of their Christian walk.…”

Where is Edie? thought Harriet, eyes shut. In the car? Dr. Vance’s hand was sticky and unpleasant to the touch; how embarrassing if Marcy and the girls from the cabin came by and saw her standing in the parking lot holding hands with Dr. Vance of all people.

“Oh Lard. Help them not to turn their backs on You. Help them submit. Help them walk uncomplainingly. Help them not to disobey, or be rebellient, but to accept Your ways and keep Your covenant …”

Submit to what? thought Harriet, with a nasty little shock.

“… in the name of Christ Jesus we ask it, AMEN,” said Dr. Vance, so loudly that Harriet started. She looked around. Edie was on the driver’s side of the car with her hand on the hood—although whether she’d been standing there the whole time or had eased over after the prayer moment who could say.

Nursie Vance had appeared from nowhere. She swooped down on Harriet with a smothering, bosomy hug.

“The Lord loves you!” she said, in her twinkly voice. “Just you remember that!”

She patted Harriet on the bottom and turned, beaming, to Edie, as if expecting to start up a regular old conversation. “Well, hay!” But Edie wasn’t in such a tolerant or sociable mood as she’d been when dropping Harriet off at camp. She gave Nursie a curt nod, and that was that.

They got in the car; Edie—after peering over her glasses for a moment at the unfamiliar instrument panel—put the car in gear and drove away. The Vances came and stood out in the middle of the graveled clearing and—with their arms around each other’s waists—they waved until Edie turned the corner.

The new car had air-conditioning, which made it much, much quieter. Harriet took it all in—the new radio; the power windows—and settled uneasily in her seat. In hermetically sealed chill they purred along, through the liquid leaf-shade of the gravel road, glossing springily over potholes that had jolted the Oldsmobile to its frame. Not until they reached the very end of the dark road, and turned onto the sunny highway, did Harriet dare steal a look at her grandmother.

But Edie’s attention seemed elsewhere. On they rolled. The road was wide and empty: no cars, cloudless sky, margins of rusty red dust that converged to a pinpoint at the horizon. Suddenly, Edie cleared her throat—a loud awkward AHEM.

Harriet—startled—glanced away from the window and at Edie, who said: “I’m sorry, little girl.”

For a moment, Harriet didn’t breathe. Everything was frozen: the shadows, her heart, the red hands of the dashboard clock. “What’s the matter?” she said.

But Edie didn’t look away from the road. Her face was like stone.

The air conditioner was up too high. Harriet hugged her bare arms. Mother’s dead, she thought. Or Allison. Or Dad. And in the same breath, she knew in her heart that she could handle any of those things. Aloud, she said: “What happened?”

“It’s Libby.”

————

In the hubbub following the accident, no one had stopped to consider that anything might be seriously wrong with any of the old ladies. Apart from a few cuts and bruises—and Edie’s bloody nose, which looked worse than it was—everyone was more shaken up than hurt. And the paramedics had checked them out with irritating thoroughness before permitting them to leave. “Not a scratch on this one,” said the smart-aleck ambulance attendant who had assisted Libby—all white hair, and pearls, and powder-pink dress—from the crumpled car.

Libby had seemed stunned. The worst of the collision had been on her side; but though she kept pressing the base of her neck with her fingertips—gingerly, as if to locate a pulse—she fluttered her hand and said, “Oh, don’t worry about me!” when, against the protest of the paramedics, Edie climbed out of the back of the ambulance to see about her sisters.

Everybody had a stiff neck. Edie’s neck felt as though it had been cracked like a bullwhip. Adelaide, pacing in a circle by the Oldsmobile, kept pinching her ears to see if she still had both earrings and exclaiming: “It’s a wonder we’re not dead! Edith, it’s a wonder you didn’t kill us all!”

But after everyone was checked for concussions, and broken bones (why, thought Edie, why hadn’t she insisted that those idiots take Libby’s blood pressure? She was a trained nurse; she knew about such things), in the end, the only one the paramedics wanted to carry to the hospital was Edie: which was infuriating, because Edie wasn’t hurt—nothing broken, no internal injuries and she knew it. She had permitted herself to be caught up in argument. Nothing was the matter with her but her ribs, which she had cracked on the steering wheel, and from her days as an army nurse Edie knew there was nothing in the world to do for cracked ribs except to tape them up and send the soldier on his way.

“But you’ve got a cracked rib, maam,” said the other paramedic—not the smart-aleck, but the one who had a great big head like a pumpkin.

“Yes, I’m aware of that!” Edie had practically screamed at him.

“But maam …” Intrusive hands stretching towards her. “You’d better let us take you to the hospital, maam.…”

“Why? All they’ll do is tape me up and charge me a hundred dollars! For a hundred dollars I can tape up my own ribs!”

“An emergency room visit is going to run you a whole lot more than a hundred dollars,” said the smart-aleck, leaning on the hood of Edie’s poor smashed car (the car! the car! her heart sank every time she looked at it). “The X-rays alone will run you seventy-five.”

By this time, a slight crowd had gathered: busybodies from the branch bank, mostly, giggling little gum-chewing girls with teased hair and brown lipstick. Tat—who signalled to the police car to stop by shaking her yellow pocketbook at it—climbed into the back seat of the wrecked Oldsmobile (even though the horn was blaring) and sat there with Libby for most of the business with the policemen and the other driver, which had taken forever. He was a spry and irritating little old know-it-all man named Lyle Pettit Rixey: very thin, with long, pointy shoes, and a hooked nose like a Jack-in-the-box, and a delicate way of lifting his knees high in the air when he walked. He seemed very proud of the fact that he was from Attala County; also of his name, which he took pleasure at repeating in full. He kept pointing at Edie with a querulous bony finger and saying: “that woman there.” He made it sound as if Edie was drunk or an alcoholic. “That woman run right out in front of me. That woman got no business driving an automobile.” Edie turned, loftily, and stood with her back to him as she answered the officer’s questions.

The accident was her fault; she had refused to yield; and the best that she could do was accept the blame with dignity. Her glasses were broken, and from where she stood, in the shimmering heat (“that woman sure picked herself a hot day to dart out in front of me,” complained Mr. Rixey to the ambulance attendants), Libby and Tat were little more than pink and yellow blurs in the backseat of the wrecked Oldsmobile. Edie blotted her forehead with a damp tissue. At Tribulation every Christmas, there had been dresses in four different colors laid out under the tree—pink for Libby, blue for Edie, yellow for Tat and lavender for baby Adelaide. Colored penwipers, colored ribbons and letter paper … blond china dolls identical but for their dresses, each a different pastel.…

“Did you,” said the policeman, “or did you not execute a U-turn?”

“I did not. I turned around right here in the parking lot.” From the highway, a car mirror flashed distractingly in the corner of Edie’s vision, and at the same time an inexplicable memory from childhood leapt up in her mind: Tatty’s old tin doll—dressed in draggled yellow—lying windmill-legged in the dust of Tribulation’s kitchen yard, beneath the fig trees where the chickens sometimes escaped to scratch. Edie herself had never played with dolls—never been the slightest bit interested in them—but she could see the tin doll now with a curious clarity: her body brown cloth, her nose glinting a macabre metallic silver where the paint had rubbed away. How many years had Tatty dragged that battered thing with its metal death’s head around the yard; how many years since Edie had thought of that eerie little face with the nose missing?

The policeman interrogated Edie for half an hour. With his droning voice, and his mirror sunglasses, it was slightly like being interrogated by The Fly in the Vincent Price horror movie of the same name. Edie, shading her eyes with her hand, tried to keep her mind on his questions but her eyes kept straying to the cars flashing past on the bright highway and all she could think of was Tatty’s ghastly old doll with the silver nose. What on earth had the thing been called? For the life of her, Edie couldn’t remember. Tatty hadn’t talked plain until she went to school; all Tat’s dolls had had ridiculous-sounding names, names she made up out of her head, names like Gryce and Lillium and Artemo.…

The little girls from the branch bank got bored and—inspecting their nails, twirling their hair around their fingertips—drifted back inside. Adelaide—whom Edie blamed, bitterly, for the whole business (she and her Sanka!)—appeared very put out, and stood a cool distance from the scene as if she weren’t a part of it, talking to a nosy choir friend, Mrs. Cartrett, who had pulled over to see what was going on. At some point she’d hopped in the car with Mrs. Cartrett and driven off without even telling Edie. “We’re driving to McDonald’s to get a sausage and biscuit,” she’d called out to Tat and poor Libby. McDonald’s! And—to top it all off—when the insect-faced policeman finally gave Edie permission to leave, her poor old car had of course refused to start, and she had been forced to square her shoulders and walk back into the horrible chilly branch bank, back in front of all the saucy little tellers, to ask if she could use the telephone. And all the while, Libby and Tat had sat, uncomplainingly, in the back of the Oldsmobile, in the frightful heat.

Their cab hadn’t taken long to come. From where she stood, at the manager’s desk in the front, talking on the phone to the man from the garage, Edie watched the two of them walking to the taxi through the plate-glass window: arm in arm, picking their way across the gravel in their Sunday shoes. She rapped on the glass; Tat, in the glare, turned halfway and raised an arm and all of a sudden the name of Tatty’s old doll came to Edie so suddenly that she laughed out loud. “What?” said the garage man; the manager—wall-eyed behind thick glasses—glanced up at Edie as if she were crazy but she didn’t care. Lycobus. Of course. That was the tin doll’s name. Lycobus, who was naughty, and sassed her mother; Lycobus, who invited Adelaide’s dolls to a tea party, and served them only water and radishes.

When the tow truck finally came, Edie accepted a ride home from the driver. It was the first time she’d been in a truck since World War II; the cab was high, and climbing up inside it with her cracked ribs had not been fun: but, as the Judge had been so fond of reminding his daughters, Beggars Can’t Be Choosers.

By the time she got home, it was nearly one o’clock. Edie hung up her clothes (not until she was undressing did she remember that the suitcases were still in the trunk of the Oldsmobile) and took a cool bath; sitting on the side of her bed, in her brassiere and panty-waist, she sucked in her breath and taped up her ribs as best as she could. Then she had a glass of water, and an Empirin with codeine left over from some dental work, and put on a kimono and lay down on the bed.

Much later, she’d been awakened by a telephone call. For a moment, she thought the thin little voice on the other end was the children’s mother. “Charlotte?” she barked; and then, when there was no answer: “Who is calling, please?”

“This is Allison. I’m over at Libby’s. She … she seems upset.”

“I don’t blame her,” said Edie; the pain of sitting up suddenly had caught her unawares, and she took her breath in sharply. “Now’s not the time for her to entertain company. You ought not be over there bothering her, Allison.”

“She doesn’t seem tired. She—she says she has to pickle some beets.”

“Pickling beets!” Edie snorted. “I’d be mighty upset if I had to pickle beets this afternoon.”

“But she says—”

“You run home and let Libby rest,” said Edie. She was a little groggy from her pain pill; and, for fear of being questioned about the accident (the policeman had suggested her eyes might be at fault; there had been talk of a test, a revoked license) she was anxious to cut the conversation short.

In the background, a fretful murmur.

“What’s that?”

“She’s worried. She asked me to call you. Edie, I don’t know what to do, please come over and see—”

“What on earth for?” said Edie. “Put her on.”

“She’s in the next room.” Talk, indistinguishable; then Allison’s voice returned. “She says she has to go to town, and she doesn’t know where her shoes and stockings are.”

“Tell her not to worry. The suitcases are in the trunk of the car. Has she had her nap?”

More mumbled talk, enough to test Edie’s patience.

“Hello?” she said loudly.

“She says she’s fine, Edie, but—”

(Libby always said she was fine. When Libby had scarlet fever, she said she was fine.)

“—but she won’t sit down,” said Allison; her voice seemed far away, as if she hadn’t brought the receiver properly to her mouth again. “She’s standing in the living room.…”

Though Allison continued to speak, and Edie continued to listen, the sentence had ended and another begun before Edie realized—all of a sudden—that she hadn’t understood a word.

“I’m sorry,” she said, curtly, “you’ll have to speak up,” and before she could scold Allison for mumbling there was a sudden ruckus at the front door: tap tap tap tap tap, a series of brisk little knocks. Edie re-wrapped her kimono, tied the sash tight and peered down the hall. There stood Roy Dial, grinning like an opossum with his little gray saw-teeth. He tipped her a sprightly wave.

Quickly, Edie ducked her head back into the bedroom. The vulture, she thought. I’d like to shoot him. He looked as pleased as punch. Allison was saying something else.

“Listen, I’ve got to let you go,” she said, briskly. “I’ve got company on the porch and I’m not dressed.”

“She says she has to meet a bride at the train station,” said Allison, distinctly.

After a moment, Edie—who did not like to admit she was hard of hearing, and who was used to galloping straight over conversational non sequiturs—took a deep breath (so that her ribs hurt) and said: “Tell Lib I said lie down. If she wants me to, I’ll walk over and take her blood pressure and give her a tranquilizer as soon as—”

Tap tap tap tap tap!

“As soon as I get rid of him,” she said; and then said goodbye.

She threw a shawl over her shoulders, stepped into her slippers and ventured into the hall. Through the leaded glass panel of the door, Mr. Dial—mouth open, in an exaggerated pantomime of delight—held up what looked like a fruit basket, wrapped in yellow cellophane. When he saw that she was in her robe, he gave a gesture of dismayed apology (eyebrows going up in the middle, in an inverted V) and—with extravagant lip movement, pointed at the basket and mouthed: sorry to bother you! just a little something! I’ll leave it right here …

After a moment’s indecision, Edie called—on a cheery, changed note—“Wait a minute! Be right out!” Then—her smile souring as soon as she turned her back—she hurried to her room, closed the door and plucked a housedress from her closet.

Zip up the back; dab, dab, rouge on both cheeks, puff of powder on the nose; she ran a brush through her hair—wincing at the pain in her raised arm—and gave herself a quick glance in the mirror before she opened the door and went down the hall to meet him.

“Well, I declare,” she said, stiffly, when Mr. Dial presented her with the basket.

“I hope I didn’t disturb you,” said Mr. Dial, turning his head, cozily, to look at her from the opposite eye. “Dorothy ran into Susie Cartrett at the grocery store and she told her all about the accident.… I’ve been saying for years”—he laid a hand on her arm, for emphasis—“that they needed a stop light at that intersection. Years! I phoned out at the hospital but they said you hadn’t been admitted, thank goodness.” A hand to his chest, he rolled his eyes Heavenward in gratitude.

“Well, goodness,” said Edie, mollified. “Thank you.”

“Listen, that’s the most dangerous intersection in the county! I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. It’s a shame, but somebody’s going to have to get killed out there before the Board of Supervisors sits up and takes notice. Killed.”

It was with surprise that Edie found herself softening to Mr. Dial’s manner—which was most agreeable, particularly as he seemed convinced that the accident could in no way have been her fault. And when he gestured out to the new Cadillac parked at the curb (“just a courtesy … thought you might need a loaner for a couple of days …”) she was not nearly so hostile at the sly liberty as she would have been even a few minutes before, and walked out with him, obligingly, as he went over all the features: leather seats, tape deck, power steering (“This beauty’s just been on the lot for two days, and I have to say that the minute I saw it, I thought: now here is the perfect car for Miss Edith!”). To watch his demonstrations of the automatic windows and so forth was oddly satisfying, considering that only a short while ago some folks had been so presumptuous as to suggest that Edie should not drive at all.

On he talked. Edie’s pain pill was wearing off. She tried to cut him short but Mr. Dial—pressing his advantage (for he knew, from the tow-truck driver, that the Oldsmobile was bound for the junk-yard)—began to throw out incentives: five hundred dollars knocked off the list price—and why? Palms spread: “Not out of the goodness of my heart. No maam, Miss Edith. I’ll tell you why. Because I’m a good businessman, and because Dial Chevrolet wants your business.” In the rich summer light, as he stood explaining why he would also extend the extended warranty, Edie—with a stab of pain in her breastbone—had a sharp ugly nightmare-flash of impending old age. Aching joints, blurry eyes, constant aspirin after-taste in the back of the throat. Peeling paint, leaky roofs, taps that dripped and cats that peed on the carpet and lawns that never got mowed. And time: time enough to stand in the yard for hours listening to any con artist or shyster or “helpful” stranger who drifted down the pike. How often had she driven out to Tribulation to find her father the Judge chatting in the driveway with some salesman or unscrupulous contractor, some grinning gypsy tree pruner who would later claim that the quote was per limb, not per tree; companionable Judases in Florsheim shoes offering him girlie magazines and nips of whiskey, with all kinds of ground-floor opportunities and incredible overrides in between; mineral rights, protected territories, enough no-risk investments and Chances of a Lifetime to finally relieve the poor old fellow of all he owned, including his birthplace.…

With an increasingly black and hopeless feeling, Edie listened. What was the use of fighting? She—like her father—was a stoic old pagan; though she attended church as a civic and social duty, she did not actually believe a word of what was said there. Everywhere were green graveyard smells: mown grass, lilies and turned dirt; pain pierced her ribs every time she took a breath and she could not stop thinking of the onyx and diamond brooch inherited from her mother: which she’d packed, like a stupid old woman, in an unlocked suitcase which now lay in the unlocked trunk of a wrecked car, across town. All my life, she thought, I have been robbed. Everything I ever loved has been taken from me.

And somehow Mr. Dial’s companionable presence was a strange comfort: his flushed face, the ripe smell of his aftershave and his whinnying, porpoise laugh. His fussy manner—at odds with the solid ripeness of his chest beneath the starched shirt—was queerly reassuring. I always did think he was a nice looking man, thought Edie. Roy Dial had his faults but at least he wasn’t so impertinent as to suggest that Edie wasn’t competent to drive.… “I will drive,” she had thundered at the pipsqueak eye doctor, only a week earlier, “I don’t care if I kill everybody in Mississippi.…” And while she stood listening to Mr. Dial talk about the car, laying his plump finger on her arm (just one more thing to tell her, and one more after that, and then, by the time she was thoroughly tired of him, asking: What would I have to say to make you my customer? This instant? Tell me what I have to say in order to get your business.…); while Edie, strangely powerless for once to disengage herself, stood and listened to his pitch, Libby, after becoming sick in a basin, lay down on her bed with a cool cloth on her forehead and slipped into a coma from which she was never to awake.

————

A stroke. That was what it was. When she’d suffered the first one, no one knew. Any other day, Odean would have been there—but Odean had the week off, because of the trip. When Libby finally answered the door—it had taken her a while, so long that Allison thought that maybe she was asleep—she wasn’t wearing her glasses, and her eyes were a little blurry. She looked at Allison as if she was expecting someone else.

“Are you all right?” Allison asked. She’d heard all about the wreck.

“Oh, yes,” said Libby, distractedly.

She let Allison in, and then wandered away into the back of the house like she was looking for something she’d misplaced. She seemed fine except for a splotchy bruise on her cheekbone, the color of grape jelly spread thin, and her hair not as tidy as she usually liked it.

Allison said, glancing around: “Can’t you find your newspaper?” The house was spanking clean: floors freshly mopped, everything dusted and even the sofa cushions plumped and properly placed; somehow the very tidiness of the house had kept Allison from realizing that anything might be wrong. Sickness, in her own house, had to do with disorder: with grimy curtains and gritty bedsheets; drawers left open and crumbs on the table.

After a brief search, Allison found the newspaper—folded to the crossword, with her glasses sitting on top of it—on the floor by Libby’s chair, and carried them in to the kitchen, where Libby sat at the table, smoothing the tablecloth with one hand in a tight, repetitive circle.

“Here’s your puzzle,” said Allison. The kitchen was uncomfortably bright. Despite the sun pouring through the curtains, the overhead lights were on for some reason, as if it were a dark winter afternoon and not the middle of summer. “Do you want me to get you a pencil?”

“No, I can’t work that foolish thing,” Libby said fretfully, pushing the paper aside, “the letters keep sliding off the page.… What I need to do is go ahead and get started on my beets.”

“Beets?”

“Unless I start now they won’t be ready in time. The little bride’s coming into town on the Number 4.…”

“What bride?” said Allison, after a slight pause. She’d never heard of the Number 4, whatever that was. Everything was bright and unreal. Ida Rhew had left only an hour before—just like any other Friday except that she wasn’t coming back on Monday or ever again. And she’d taken nothing but the red plastic glass she drank out of: in the hallway, on the way out, she had refused the carefully wrapped cuttings and the box of presents, which she said was too heavy to carry. “I aint need all of that!” she said, cheerily, turning to look Allison straight in the eye; and her tone was that of someone offered a button or a piece of licked candy by a toddler. “What you think I need all that nonsense for?”

Allison—stunned—fought not to cry. “Ida, I love you,” she said.

“Well,” said Ida, thoughtfully, “I love you too.”

It was terrible; it was too terrible to be happening. And yet there they stood by the front door. A sharp lump of grief rose in Allison’s throat to see how meticulously Ida folded the green check lying face up on the hall table—twenty dollars and no/100s—making sure that both edges were lined up and perfectly even before she creased it with a zip of thumb and forefinger. Then she unsnapped her little black purse and put it in.

“I can’t live any more on twenty dollars a week,” she said. Her voice was quiet and natural, yet all wrong at the same time. How could they possibly be standing in the hall like this, how could this moment be real? “I love yalls, but that’s the way it is. I’m getting old.” She touched Allison’s cheek. “Yall be good, now. Tell Little Ug I love her.” Ug—for Ugly—was what Ida called Harriet when she misbehaved. Then the door closed, and she was gone.

“I expect,” said Libby—and Allison, with slight alarm, noticed that Libby was looking around the kitchen floor in a jerky way, as if she saw a moth fluttering by her feet—“she won’t be able to find them when she gets there.”

“Excuse me?” said Allison.

“Beets. Pickled beets. Oh I wish somebody would help me,” said Libby, with a plaintive, half-comic roll of her eyes.

“Do you need me to do something for you?”

“Where’s Edith?” said Libby, and her voice was strangely clipped, and crisp. “She’ll do something for me.”

Allison sat down at the kitchen table, and tried to get her attention. “Do you have to make the beets today?” she said. “Lib?”

“All I know is what they told me.”

Allison nodded, and sat for a moment in the too-bright kitchen wondering how to proceed. Sometimes Libby came home from Missionary Society, or Circle, with strange and very specific demands: for green stamps, or old glasses frames, or Campbell’s soup labels (which the Baptist home in Honduras redeemed for cash); for Popsicle sticks or old Lux detergent bottles (for crafts at the Church Bazaar).

“Tell me who to call,” she said at last. “I’ll call and tell them that you were in an accident this morning. Somebody else can bring the beets.”

Abruptly, Libby said: “Edith’ll do something for me.” She stood and walked back into the next room.

“Do you want me to call her?” said Allison, peering after her. “Libby?” She had never heard Libby speak quite so brusquely.

“Edith will straighten it all out,” said Libby, in a weak, peevish voice that was quite unlike herself.

And Allison went to the telephone. But she was still reeling from Ida’s departure and what she had not been able to put into words to Edie was how altered Libby seemed, how confused, how strangely collapsed in her expression. The shame-faced way she kept picking at the side of her dress. Allison, stretching the cord as far as it would go, craned to look in the next room as she spoke, stammering in her consternation. The white, wispy edges of Libby’s hair had seemed to burn red—hair so thin that Allison could see Libby’s rather large ears through it.

Edie interrupted Allison before she was finished talking. “You run home and let Libby rest,” she said.

“Wait,” said Allison, and then called into the next room, “Libby? Here’s Edie. Will you come and talk to her?”

“What’s that?” Edie was saying. “Hello?”

Sunlight pooled on the dining room table, puddles of bright sentimental gold; watery coins of light—reflected from the chandelier—shimmered on the ceiling. The whole place had seemed dazzling, lit up like a ballroom. At her edges Libby glowed hot-red, like an ember; and the afternoon sun which poured around her in a corona carried in its shadow a darkness that felt like something burning.

“She—I’m worried about her,” Allison said despairingly. “Please come over. I can’t figure out what she’s talking about.”

“Listen, I’ve got to go,” said Edie. “I’ve got company at the door, and I’m not dressed.”

And then she had hung up. Allison stood by the telephone a moment longer, trying to gather her thoughts, and then hurried into the next room to see about Libby, who turned to her with a staring, fixed expression.

“We had a pair of ponies,” she said. “Little bays.”

“I’m going to call the doctor.”

“You will not,” said Libby—so firmly that Allison buckled immediately to her adult tone of authority. “You will do no such thing.”

“You’re sick.” Allison started to cry.

“No, I’m fine, I’m fine. It’s just that they ought to have come and got me by now,” said Libby. “Where are they? It’s getting on in the afternoon.” And she put her hand in Allison’s—her little dry, papery hand—and looked at her as if she were expecting to be taken somewhere.

————

The odor of lily and tuberose, overpowering in the hot funeral parlor, made Harriet’s stomach flutter queasily whenever the fan revolved and blew a draft of it in her direction. In her best Sunday dress—the white dress with daisies—she sat dim-eyed on a scroll-backed settee. The carvings poked her between the shoulderbones; her dress was too tight in the bodice—which only increased the tightness in her chest and the suffocating stuffiness of the air, the sensation of breathing an outer-space atmosphere not oxygen, but some empty gas. She had eaten no supper or breakfast; for much of the night, she had lain awake with her face pressed in the pillow and cried; and when—head throbbing—she opened her eyes late the next morning to her own bedroom, she lay quietly for several lightheaded moments, marveling at the familiar objects (the curtains, the leaf-reflections in the dresser mirror, even the same pile of overdue library books on the floor). Everything was as she had left it, the day she went away to camp—and then it fell on her like a heavy stone that Ida was gone, and Libby was dead, and everything was terrible and wrong.

Edie—dressed in black, with a high collar of pearls; how commanding she looked, by the pedestal with the guest book!—stood by the door. She was saying the exact same thing to every person who came into the room. “The casket’s in the back room,” she said, by way of greeting, to a red-faced man in musty brown who clasped her hand; and then—over his shoulder, to skinny Mrs. Fawcett, who had tipped up decorously behind to wait her turn—“The casket’s in the back room. The body’s not on view, I’m afraid, but it wasn’t my decision.”

For a moment Mrs. Fawcett looked confused; then she, too, took Edie’s hand. She looked like she was about to cry. “I was so sorry to hear,” she said. “We all loved Miss Cleve down at the library. It was the saddest thing this morning when I came in and saw the books I’d put aside for her.”

Mrs. Fawcett! thought Harriet, with a despairing rush of affection. In the crowd of dark suits, she was a comforting spot of color in her print summer dress and her red canvas espadrilles; she looked like she’d come straight from work.

Edie patted her hand. “Well, she was crazy about you all down at the library, too,” she said; and Harriet was sickened by her hard, cordial tone.

Adelaide and Tat, by the settee opposite Harriet’s, were chatting with a pair of stout older ladies who looked like sisters. They were talking about the flowers in the funeral chapel, which—through negligence on the part of the funeral home—had been allowed to wilt overnight. At this, the stout ladies cried aloud with dismay.

“Looks like the maids or something would have watered them!” exclaimed the larger and jollier of the two: apple-cheeked, rotund, with curly white hair like Mrs. Santa.

“Oh,” said Adelaide coolly, with a toss of her chin, “they couldn’t take the trouble to do that,” and Harriet was pierced by an unbearable stab of hatred—for Addie, for Edie, for all the old ladies—at their brisk expertise in the protocol of sorrow.

Right beside Harriet stood another blithe group of chatting ladies. Harriet didn’t know any of them except Mrs. Wilder Whitfield, the church organist. A moment before they had been laughing out loud as if they were at a card party, but now they had put their heads together and settled in to talking in hushed voices. “Olivia Vanderpool,” murmured a bland, smooth-faced woman, “well, Olivia lingered for years. At the end she was seventy-five pounds and couldn’t take solid food.”

“Poor Olivia. She was never the same after that second fall.”

“They say bone cancer is the worst.”

“Absolutely. All I can say is that it’s a blessing little Miss Cleve slipped away so quickly. Since she didn’t have anybody.”

Didn’t have anybody? thought Harriet. Libby? Mrs. Whitfield noticed Harriet glaring at her, and smiled; but Harriet turned her face away and stared at the carpet with red, brimming eyes. She’d cried so much since the ride home from camp that she felt numb, nauseated: unable to swallow. The night before, when she finally fell asleep, she’d dreamed about insects: a furious black swarm pouring out of an oven in someone’s house.

“Who’s that child belong to?” the smooth-faced woman asked Mrs. Whitfield, in a stage whisper.

“Ah,” said Mrs. Whitfield; and her voice dropped. In the dimness, light from the hurricane lanterns splashed and winked through Harriet’s tears; everything a haze now, all melting. Part of her—cold, furious—stood apart and mocked herself for crying as the candle-flames dissolved and leapt up in wicked prisms.

The funeral home—on Main Street, near the Baptist church—was in a tall Victorian house that bristled with turrets and spiky iron crest-work. How many times had Harriet ridden her bicycle by, wondering what went on up in those turrets, behind the cupolas and hooded windows? Occasionally—at night, after a death—a mysterious light wavered in the highest tower behind the stained glass, a light which made her think of an article about mummies she’d seen in an old National Geographic. Embalmer-priests labored long into the night, read the caption beneath the picture (Karnak after dark, a spooky light burning) to prepare their Pharaohs for the long voyage into the underworld. Whenever the tower light burned, Harriet felt a chill down the backbone, pedalled a little faster towards home, or—in early winter darks, on the way home from choir practice—pulled her coat close about her and nestled down in the back seat of Edie’s car:

Ding dong the castle bell

sang the girls, jumping rope on the church lawn after choir,

Farewell to my mother

Lay me in the boneyard

Beside my oldest brother …

Whatever nocturnal rites took place upstairs—whatever slashing and draining and stuffing of loved ones—the downstairs was sunk in a sedative Victorian creepiness. In the parlors and reception rooms, the proportions were grand and shadowy; the carpet thick and rusty; the furniture (spool-turned chairs, obsolete love-seats) dingy and stiff. A velvet rope barred the bottom of the staircase: red carpet, retiring gradually into horror-film darkness.

The mortician was a cordial little man named Mr. Makepeace with long arms and a long thin delicate nose and a leg that dragged from polio. He was cheerful and talkative, well-liked despite his job. Across the room, he limped from group to conversational group, a deformed dignitary, shaking hands, always smiling, always welcomed: people stepping to the side, ushering him decorously into conversations. His distinctive silhouette, the angle of the dragged leg and his habit (every so often) of seizing his thigh with both hands and wrenching it forward when his bad leg got stuck: all this made Harriet think of a picture she’d seen in one of Hely’s horror comics, of the hunched manor-house servant wrenching his leg—forcibly, with both hands—from the skeletal grip of a fiend reaching up to seize it from below.

All morning Edie had been talking about “what a good job” Mr. Makepeace had done. She’d wanted to go ahead and have an open-coffin funeral even though Libby had repeated urgently all her life that she didn’t want her body viewed after she was dead. In life, Edie had scoffed at these fears; in death, she’d disregarded Libby’s wishes and chosen both coffin and clothing with an eye to display: because the out-of-town relatives would expect it, because it was the custom, the thing to do. But this morning, Adelaide and Tatty had raised such a hysterical fuss in the back room of the funeral home that finally Edie had snapped “Oh, for Heaven’s sake” and told Mr. Makepeace to shut the lid.

Beneath the strong perfume of the lilies, Harriet noticed a different smell. It was a chemical smell, like mothballs, but more sickly: embalming fluid? It did not do to think about such things. It was better not to think at all. Libby had never explained to Harriet why she was so opposed to open-casket funerals, but Harriet had overheard Tatty telling someone that back when they were girls, “sometimes these country undertakers did a very poor job. Back before electric refrigeration. Our mother died in the summer, you know.”

Edie’s voice rose clear for a moment, in her place by the guest book, above the other voices: “Well those people didn’t know Daddy then. He never bothered with any such.”

White gloves. Discreet murmurs, like a DAR meeting. The very air—musty, choking—stuck in Harriet’s lungs. Tatty—arms folded, shaking her head—was talking to a tiny little bald man that Harriet didn’t know; and despite the fact that she was dark under the eyes, and without lipstick, her manner was oddly businesslike and cold. “No,” she was saying, “no, it was old Mr. Holt le Fevre gave Daddy that nickname back when they were boys. Mr. Holt was walking down the street with his nurse-maid when he broke free and jumped on Daddy and Daddy fought back, of course, and Mr. Holt—he was three times Daddy’s size—broke down crying. ‘Why, you’re just an old bully!’ ”

“I often heard my father call the Judge that. Bully.”

“Well, it wasn’t a nickname that suited Daddy, really. He wasn’t a large man. Though he did put on weight in those last years. With the phlebitis, and his ankles swollen, he couldn’t get around like he once had.”

Harriet bit the inside of her cheek.

“When Mr. Holt was out of his mind,” Tat said, “there at the last, Violet told me that every now and then he’d clear up and ask: ‘I wonder where old Bully is? I haven’t seen old Bully for a while.’ Of course Daddy had been dead for years. There was one afternoon, he kept on so about it, fretting about Daddy and wondering why he hadn’t been by in so long that finally Violet told him: ‘Bully stopped by, Holt, and he wanted to see you. But you were asleep.’ ”

“Bless his heart,” said the bald man, who was looking over Tat’s shoulder at a couple coming into the room.

Harriet sat very, very still. Libby! she felt like screaming, screaming the way she screamed aloud for Libby even now sometimes, when she woke in the dark from a nightmare. Libby, whose eyes watered at the doctor’s office; Libby afraid of bees!

Her eyes met Allison’s—red, brimming with misery. Harriet clamped her lips shut and dug her fingernails into her palms and glared at the carpet, holding her breath with great concentration.

Five days—five days before she died—Libby had been in the hospital. A little while before the end, it had even seemed as if she might wake: mumbling in her sleep, turning the phantom pages of a book, before her words became too incoherent to understand and she slipped down into a white fog of drugs and paralysis. Her signs are failing, said the nurse who’d come in to check her that final morning, while Edie was sleeping on a cot beside her bed. There was just enough time to call Adelaide and Tat to the hospital—and then, at a little before eight, with all three of her sisters gathered around the bed, her breaths got slower and slower and “then,” said Tat, with a wry little smile, “they just stopped.” They’d had to cut her rings off, her hands were so swollen … Libby’s little hands, so papery and delicate! beloved little speckled hands, hands that folded paper boats and set them to float on the dish-basin! swollen like grapefruits, that was the phrase, the awful phrase, that Edie had repeated more than once in the past days. Swollen like grapefruits. Had to call the jewelry store to cut the rings off her fingers.…

Why didn’t you call me? said Harriet—staggered, dumbfounded—when at last she was able to speak. Her voice—in the air-conditioned chill of Edie’s new car—had squeaked up high and inappropriate beneath the black avalanche which had crushed her nearly senseless at the words Libby’s Dead.

Well, said Edie philosophically, I figured, why ruin your good time before I had to.

“Poor little girls,” said a familiar voice—Tat’s—up above them.

Allison—her face in her hands—began to sob. Harriet clenched her teeth. She’s the only one sadder than me, she thought, the only other really sad person in this room.

“Don’t cry.” Tat’s school-teacherly hand rested for a moment on Allison’s shoulder. “Libby wouldn’t want you to.”

She sounded upset—a little, noted Harriet coldly, in the small hard part of her which stood back, and watched, untouched by grief. But not upset enough. Why, thought Harriet, blind and sore and dazed from weeping, why did they leave me at that stinking camp while Libby was in the bed dying?

Edie, in the car, had apologized—sort of. We thought she was going to be all right, she’d said, at first; and then I thought you’d rather remember her the way she was and finally I wasn’t thinking.

“Girls?” Tat said. “Do you remember our cousins Delle and Lucinda from Memphis?”

Two slumpy, old-lady figures stepped forward: one tall and tan, the other round and black, with a jewelled black-velvet purse.

“I declare!” said the tall, tan one. She stood like a man, in her large, flat shoes and her hands in the pockets of her khaki shirt-waist dress.

“Bless their hearts,” murmured the little dark fat one, dabbing at her eyes (which were rimmed in black, like a silent movie star’s) with a pink tissue.

Harriet stared at them and thought about the pool at the country club: the blue light, how absolutely soundless was the world when she slipped underwater on a deep breath. You can be there now, she told herself, you can be there if you think hard enough.

“Harriet, may I borrow you for a minute?” Adelaide—who was looking very smart in her funeral black with the white collar—grasped her hand and pulled her up.

“Only if you promise to bring her right back!” said the little round lady, wagging a heavily be-ringed finger.

You can leave here. In your mind. Just go away. What was it Peter Pan said to Wendy? “Just close your eyes and think lovely thoughts.”

“Oh!” In the center of the room, Adelaide stopped dead, closed her eyes. People swept by them. Music from an invisible organ (“Nearer My God to Thee”—nothing very thrilling, but Harriet could never tell what the old ladies might find exciting) played ponderously, not far off.

“Tuberoses!” Adelaide exhaled; and the line of her nose, in profile, was so like Libby’s that Harriet’s heart squeezed disagreeably tight. “Smell that!” She caught Harriet’s hand and tugged her over to a large flower arrangement in a china urn.

The organ music was fake. In an alcove behind the pier table, Harriet spied a reel-to-reel tape recorder ticking away behind a velvet drapery.

“My favorite flower!” Adelaide urged her forward. “See, the tiny ones. Smell them, honey!”

Harriet’s stomach fluttered. The fragrance, in the overheated room, was extravagant and deathly sweet.

“Aren’t they heavenly?” Adelaide was saying. “I had these in my wedding bouquet.…”

Something flickered in front of Harriet’s eyes and everything got black around the edges. The next thing she knew, the lights were whirling and big fingers—a man’s—had grasped her elbow.

“I don’t know about fainting, but they sure do give me a headache in a closed room,” someone was saying.

“Let her have some air,” said the stranger, who was holding her up: an old man, unusually tall, with white hair and bushy black eyebrows. Despite the heat, he was wearing a V-necked sweater vest over his shirt and tie.

Out of nowhere, Edie swooped down—all in black, like the Wicked Witch—and into Harriet’s face. Chill green eyes sized her up coldly for an instant or two. Then she stood up (up and up and up) and said: “Take her out to the car.”

“I’ll take her,” said Adelaide. She stepped around and took Harriet’s left arm, as the old man (who was very old, in his eighties or maybe even his nineties) took her right, and, together, they led Harriet out of doors, into the blinding sunlight: very slowly, more at the old man’s pace than Harriet’s, woozy though she felt.

“Harriet,” said Adelaide, stagily, and squeezed her hand, “I bet you don’t know who this is! This is Mr. J. Rhodes Sumner that had a place just down the road from where I grew up!”

“Chippokes,” said Mr. Sumner, inflating himself grandly.

“Certainly, Chippokes. Right down the road from Tribulation. I know you’ve heard us all talk about Mr. Sumner, Harriet, that went to Egypt with the Foreign Service?”

“I knew your aunt Addie when she was just a little baby girl.”

Adelaide laughed, flirtatiously. “Not that little. Harriet, I thought you’d like to talk to Mr. Sumner because you’re so interested in King Tut and all.”

“I wasn’t in Cairo long,” said Mr. Sumner. “Only during the war. Everybody and his brother was in Cairo then.” He shuffled up to the open passenger window of a long black Cadillac limousine—the funeral-home limo—and stooped a little to speak to the driver. “Will you look after this young lady here? She’s going to lie down in the back seat for a few minutes.”

The driver—whose face was as white as Harriet’s, though he had a gigantic rust-red Afro—started, and switched off the radio. “Wha?” he said, glancing from side to side and not knowing where to look first—at the tottery old white man leaning in his window or at Harriet, climbing into the back. “She aint feeling well?”

“Tell you what!” said Mr. Sumner, stooping down to peer into the dark interior after Harriet. “It looks like this thing might have a bar in it!”

The driver seemed to shake himself and perk up. “No sir, boss, that’s my other car!” he said, in a jokey, indulgent, artificially friendly tone.

Mr. Sumner, appreciatively, slapped the car’s roof as he laughed along with the driver. “All right!” he said. His hands were trembling; though he seemed sharp enough he was one of the oldest and frailest people Harriet had ever seen up and walking around. “All right! You’re doing all right for yourself, aint you?”

“Can’t complain.”

“Glad to hear it. Now girl,” he said to Harriet, “what do you require? Would you like a Coca-Cola?”

“Oh, John,” she heard Adelaide murmur. “She doesn’t need it.”

John! Harriet stared straight ahead.

“I just want you to know that I loved your aunt Libby better than anything in the world,” she heard Mr. Sumner say. His voice was old and quavery and very Southern. “I would have asked that girl to marry me if I’d thought she’d have me!”

Tears welled infuriatingly in Harriet’s eyes. She pressed her lips tight and tried not to cry. The inside of the car was suffocating.

Mr. Sumner said: “After yo’ great-granddaddy died I did ask Libby to come on and marry me. Old as we both were then.” He chuckled. “Know what she said?” When he couldn’t catch Harriet’s eye, he tapped lightly on the car door. “Hmn? Know what she said, honey? She reckoned she might be able to do it if she didn’t have to get on an airplane. Ha ha ha! Just to give you an idea, young lady, I was working down in Venezuela at the time.”

Behind, Adelaide said something. The old man said under his breath: “Darn if she aint Edith all over again!”

Adelaide laughed coquettishly—and at this, Harriet’s shoulders began to heave, of their own accord, and the sobs burst forth unwilling.

“Ah!” cried Mr. Sumner, with genuine distress; his shadow—in the car window—fell across her again. “Bless your little heart!”

“No, no. No,” said Adelaide firmly, leading him away. “Leave her alone. She’ll be fine, John.”

The car door still stood open. Harriet’s sobs were loud and repugnant in the silence. Up front, the limousine driver observed her silently in the rear-view mirror, over the top of a drugstore paperback (astrology wheel on the cover) entitled Your Love Signs. Presently he inquired: “Yo mama die?”

Harriet shook her head. In the mirror, the driver raised an eyebrow. “I say, yo mama die?”

“No.”

“Well, then.” He punched in the cigarette lighter. “You aint got nothing to cry about.”

The cigarette lighter clicked out, and the driver lit his cigarette and blew a long breath of smoke out the open window. “You don’t know what sadness is,” he said. “Till that day.” Then he opened the glove compartment and handed her a few tissues across the seat.

“Who died, then?” he asked. “Yo daddy?”

“My aunt,” Harriet managed to say.

“Yo wha?”

“My aunt.”

“Oh! Yo auntee!” Silence. “You live with her?”

After waiting patiently for some moments the driver shrugged and turned back to the front, where he sat quietly with his elbow out the open window, smoking his cigarette. Every so often he looked down at his book, which he held open beside his right thigh with one hand.

“When you born?” he asked Harriet after a while. “What month?”

“December,” said Harriet, just as he’d started to ask her a second time.

“December?” He glanced over the seat at her; his face was doubtful. “You a Sagitaria?”

“Capricorn.”

“Capricorn!” His laugh was rather unpleasant and insinuating. “You a little goat, then. Ha ha ha!”

Across the street, at the Baptist church the bells chimed noon; their icy, mechanical peal brought back one of Harriet’s earliest memories: Libby (fall afternoon, vivid sky, red and yellow leaves in the gutter) stooping beside Harriet in her red parka, her hands around Harriet’s waist. “Listen!” And, together, they had listened in the cold, bright air: a minor note—which rang out unchanged a decade later, chilly and sad as a note struck on a child’s toy piano—a note that even in summertime sounded like bare tree branches, and skies in winter, and lost things.

“You mind if I put on the radio?” said the driver. When Harriet did not reply, for crying, he switched it on, anyway.

“You got a boyfrien?” he inquired.

Out on the street, a car honked. “Yo,” called the limo driver, flashing a palm at it—and Harriet, electrified, sat up rigid as Danny Ratliff’s eyes struck her own and flared with recognition; she saw her shock mirrored on his face. The next instant he was gone and she was staring after the indecently cocked rear of the Trans Am.

“Say. I say,” repeated the driver—and, with a start, Harriet realized that he was leaning over the seat looking at her. “You got a boyfrien?”

Harriet tried to look after the Trans Am, without appearing to—and saw it turn left, a few blocks ahead, toward the train station and the old freight yards. Across the street the church bell—on the last dying note of its carol—struck the hour with sudden violence: dong dong dong dong dong.…

“You stuck up,” said the driver. His voice was teasing and coquettish. “Aint you?”

All of a sudden it occurred to Harriet that he might turn around and come back. She glanced up at the front steps of the funeral home. There were several people milling about—a group of old men, smoking cigarettes; Adelaide and Mr. Sumner, standing off to the side, Mr. Sumner bent over her —solicitously was he lighting a cigarette for her? Addie hadn’t smoked in years. But there she was, arms crossed, throwing her head back like a stranger, blowing out a plume of smoke.

“Boys don’t like no stuck-up acting girl,” the driver was saying.

Harriet got out of the car—the door was still open—and walked up the steps of the funeral home, fast.

————

A despairing glassine shiver ran down Danny’s neck as he sped past the funeral home. Airy methamphetamine clarity gliddered over him in nine hundred directions simultaneously. Hours he’d looked for the girl, looking everywhere, combing the town, cruising the residential streets, loop after endless crawling loop. And now, just as he’d made up his mind to forget about Farish’s order and stop looking: here she was.

With Catfish, no less: that was the hell of it. Of course, you never could tell exactly where Catfish might pop up, since his uncle was one of the richest men in town, white or black, presiding over a sizable business empire which included grave-digging, tree-pruning, house-painting, stump-grinding, roof contracting, numbers running, car and small-appliance repair, and half a dozen other businesses. You never knew where Catfish might pop up: in Niggertown, collecting his uncle’s rents; on a ladder at the courthouse, washing windows; behind the wheel of a taxicab or a hearse.

But explain this: this twenty-car pile-up of freaked-out reality. Because it was a little too much of a coincidence to see the girl (of all people) sitting there with Catfish in the back of a de Bienville funeral limousine. Catfish knew there was a very large shipment of product waiting to go out, and he was just a little too casually curious about where Danny and Farish were keeping it. Yes, he’d been a little too inquisitive, in his easy-going talkative way, had twice made a point of “dropping by” the trailer, nosing up unannounced in his Gran Torino, shadowy behind the tinted windows. He’d spent an unusually long time in the bathroom, knocking around, running the taps full-blast; he’d stood up a little too quick when Danny came outside and caught him looking underneath the Trans Am. Flat tire, he’d said. Thought you had a flat tire, man. But the tire was fine and they both knew it.

No, Catfish and the girl were the least of his problems—he thought, with a hopeless feeling of inevitability, as he bumped down the gravel road to the water tower; seemed like he was bumping down it all the time, in his bed, in his dreams, twenty-five times a day hitting this exact same pothole. No, it wasn’t just the drugs, all this feeling of being watched. The break-in at Eugene’s, and the attack upon Gum, had them all glancing over their shoulders constantly, and jumping at the slightest sound, but the biggest worry now was Farish, who was overheated to the boiling point.

With Gum in the hospital, there had been no reason for Farish even to pretend to go to bed any more. Instead he sat up all night, every night, and he made Danny sit up with him: pacing, plotting, with the curtains drawn against the sunrise, chopping drugs on the mirror and talking himself hoarse. And now that Gum was home again (stoic, incurious, shuffling sleepy-eyed past the doorway on her way to the toilet) her presence in the house didn’t break the pattern, but increased Farish’s anxiety to a very nearly unbearable pitch. A loaded .38 appeared on the coffee table, beside the mirror and the razor blades. Parties—dangerous parties—were out to get him. Their grandmother’s safety was at risk. And yes, Danny might shake his head at certain of Farish’s theories, but who knew? Dolphus Reese (persona non grata since the cobra incident) often bragged of his connections with organized crime. And organized crime, who handled the distribution end of the drug business, had been in bed with the CIA ever since the Kennedy assassination.

“It aint me,” said Farish, pinching his nose and sitting back, “whew, it aint me I’m worried about, it’s poor little Gum in there. What kind of motherfuckers are we dealing with? I don’t give a shit about my own life. Hell, I’ve been chased barefoot through the jungle, I hid in a mud-ass rice paddy for a solid week breathing through a bamboo pole. There isn’t shit they can do to me. Do you hear?” said Farish, pointing the blade of his clasp knife at the test pattern on the television. “There isn’t shit you can do to me.”

Danny crossed his legs to keep his knee from jittering and said nothing. Farish’s ever-more frequent discussion of his war record disturbed him, since Farish had spent most of the Vietnam years in the state asylum at Whitfield. Usually, Farish saved his Nam stories for the pool hall. Danny had thought it was bullshit. Only recently had Farish revealed to him that the government shook certain prisoners and mental patients out of their beds at night—rapists, nuts, expendable folk—and sent them on top-secret military operations they weren’t expected to come back from. Black helicopters in the prison’s cotton fields at night, the guard towers empty, a mighty wind gusting through dry stalks. Men in balaclavas, toting AK-47s. “And tell you what,” said Farish, glancing over his shoulder before he spat into the can he carried around with him. “They wasn’t all speaking English.”

What had worried Danny was that the meth was still on the property (though Farish hid and re-hid it compulsively, several times a day). According to Farish, he had to “sit on it a while” before he could move it, but moving it (Danny knew) was the real problem, now that Dolphus was out of the picture. Catfish had offered to hook them up with someone, some cousin in South Louisiana, but that was before Farish had witnessed the snooping-under-the-car episode and charged outside with the knife and threatened to cut Catfish’s head off.

And Catfish—wisely—hadn’t come around since then, hadn’t even called on the telephone, but unfortunately Farish’s suspicions did not end here. He was watching Danny too, and he wanted Danny to know it. Sometimes he made sly insinuations, or got all crafty and confidential, pretending to let Danny in on nonexistent secrets; other times he sat back in his chair like he’d figured something out and—with a great big smile on his face—said, “You son of a bitch. You son of a bitch.” And sometimes he just jumped up with no warning and started screaming, charging Danny with all kinds of imaginary lies and betrayals. The only way for Danny to keep Farish from going really nuts and beating the shit out of him was to remain calm at all times, no matter what Farish said or did; patiently, he endured Farish’s accusations (which came unpredictably and explosively, at bewildering intervals): answering slowly and with care, all politeness, nothing fancy, no sudden movements, the psychological equivalent of exiting his vehicle with his hands above his head.

Then, one morning before sunrise, just as the birds were starting to sing, Farish had leapt to his feet. Raving, muttering, blowing his nose repeatedly into a bloody handkerchief, he’d produced a knapsack and demanded to be driven into town. Once there, he ordered Danny to drop him off in the middle of town and then drive back home and wait for his phone call.

But Danny (pissed off, finally, after all the abuse, the groundless accusations) had not done this. Instead, he’d driven around the corner, parked the car in the empty parking lot at the Presbyterian church and—on foot, at a cautious distance—followed Farish, stumping angrily down the sidewalk with his army knapsack.

He’d hidden the drugs in the old water tower behind the train tracks. Danny was fairly sure of this because—after losing Farish, in the overgrown wilderness around the switching yards—he’d caught sight of him away in the distance on the tower ladder, high in the air, climbing laboriously, his knapsack in his teeth, a portly silhouette against the preposterously rosy dawn sky.

He’d turned right around, walked back to his car and driven straight home: outwardly calm, but his mind all abuzz. That’s where it was hidden, in the tower, and there it still sat: five thousand dollars’ worth of methamphetamine, ten thousand when stepped on. Farish’s money, not his. He’d see a few hundred dollars—whatever Farish decided to give him—whenever it got sold. But a few hundred bucks wasn’t enough to move to Shreveport, or Baton Rouge, not enough to get himself an apartment and a girlfriend and set himself up in the long-distance truck driving business. Heavy metal on the eight-track, no more country music once he got away from this hillbilly town, not ever. Big chrome truck (smoked windows, air-conditioned cab) screaming down the Interstate, west. Away from Gum. Away from Curtis, with the sad teenage pimples that were starting to spring up on his face. Away from the faded school picture of himself that hung over the television in Gum’s trailer: skinny, furtive-looking, with long dark bangs.

Danny parked the car, lit a cigarette, and sat. The tank itself, some forty-five feet off the ground, was a wooden barrel with a peaked cap, atop spindly metal legs. A rickety utility ladder led to the top of the tank, where a trap-door opened onto a reservoir of water.

Night and day, the image of the knapsack stayed with Danny, like a Christmas present on a high shelf he wasn’t supposed to climb up and look at. Whenever he got in his car, it tugged at him with a magnetic fascination. Twice already he’d driven alone to the tank, just to sit and look up at it and daydream. A fortune. His getaway.

If it was his, which it wasn’t. And he was more than a little worried about climbing up to get it, for fear that Farish had sawn through a rung of the ladder or rigged the trap door with a spring gun or otherwise booby-trapped the tower—Farish, who had taught Danny how to construct a pipe bomb; Farish, whose laboratory was surrounded with home-made punji traps fashioned from boards and rusty nail, and laced about with trip wires concealed in the weeds; Farish, who had recently ordered, from an advertisement in the back of Soldier of Fortune, a kit for constructing spring-loaded ballistic knives. “Trip this sweetheart and—whing!” he said, leaping up exhilarated from his work on the cluttered floor while Danny—appalled—read a sentence on the back of the cardboard box that said Disables Attackers at a Range of up to Thirty Five Feet.

Who knew how he’d rigged the tower? If it was rigged at all, it was (knowing Farish) rigged to maim not kill, but Danny did not relish losing a finger or an eye. And yet, an insistent little whisper kept reminding him that Farish might not have rigged the tower at all. Twenty minutes earlier, while driving to the post office to mail his grandmother’s light bill, an insane burst of optimism had struck Danny, a dazzling vision of the carefree life awaiting him in South Louisiana and he’d turned on Main Street and driven to the switching yards with the intention of climbing straight up the tower, fishing out the bag, hiding it in the trunk—in the spare tire—and driving right out of town without looking back.

But now he was here, he was reluctant to get out of the car. Nervy little silver glints—like wire—glinted in the weeds at the tower’s foot. Hands trembling from the crank, Danny lit a cigarette and stared up at the water tower. Having a finger or a toe blown off would be pleasant compared to what Farish would do if he had even the slightest clue what Danny was thinking.

And you could read a whole lot into the fact that Farish had hidden the drugs in a water tank of all places: a deliberate slap in Danny’s face. Farish knew how afraid Danny was of water—ever since their father had tried to teach him to swim when he was four or five, by chunking him off a pier into a lake. But instead of swimming—as Farish and Mike and his other brothers had done, when the trick was tried on them—he sank. He remembered it all very clearly, the terror of sinking, and then the terror of choking and spitting up the gritty brown water as his father (furious at having to jump in the lake fully clothed) screamed at him; and when Danny came away from that worn-out pier it was without much desire to swim in deep water ever again.

Farish, perversely, had also ignored the practical dangers of storing crystal in such a nasty damp place. Danny had been in the lab with Farish one rainy day in March when the stuff refused to crystallize because of the humidity. No matter how they fooled with it, it stuck together and caked on the mirror under their fingertips in a sticky, solid patty—useless.

Danny—feeling defeated—had a little bump to steady his nerves, and then threw his cigarette out the window and started the car. Once he was out on the street again, he forgot his real errand (his grandmother’s bill to mail) and took another spin by the funeral home. But though Catfish was still sitting in the limo, the girl wasn’t, and there were too many people milling around on the front steps.

Maybe I’ll circle the block again, he thought.

Alexandria: flat and desolate, a circuit of repeating street signs, a giant train set. The sense of unreality was what got you after a while. Airless streets, colorless skies. Buildings empty, only pasteboard and sham. And if you drive long enough, he thought, you always end up right back where you started.

————

Grace Fountain, rather self-consciously, came up the front steps and in the front door of Edie’s house. She followed the voices and the festive tinkle of glass through a hallway narrowed by massive glass-front bookcases to a crowded parlor. A fan whirred. The room was packed with people: men with jackets off, ladies with pink faces. On the lace tablecloth stood a bowl of punch, and plates of beaten biscuits and ham; silver compotes of peanuts and candied almonds; a stack of red paper napkins (tacky, noted Mrs. Fountain) with Edie’s monogram in gold.

Mrs. Fountain, clutching her purse, stood in the doorway and waited to be acknowledged. As houses went, Edie’s house (a bungalow, really) was smaller than her own, but Mrs. Fountain came from country people—“good Christians,” as she liked to point out, but hill folk all the same—and she was intimidated by the punch bowl, by the gold silk draperies and the big plantation dining table—which, even with a leaf out, sat twelve, at least—and by the overbearing portrait of Judge Cleve’s father which dwarfed the tiny mantel. Around the perimeters of the room stood at taut attention—as if at a dancing school—twenty-four lyre-back dining chairs with petit-point seats; and, if the room was a bit small, and a bit low in the ceiling, to accommodate so much large dark furniture, Mrs. Fountain felt daunted by it all the same.

Edith—with a white cocktail apron over her black dress—spotted Mrs. Fountain, laid down her tray of biscuits and came over. “Why Grace. Thank you for stopping by.” She wore heavy black eyeglasses—men’s glasses, like those that Mrs. Fountain’s deceased husband, Porter, used to wear; not very flattering, thought Mrs. Fountain, for a lady; she was also drinking, from a kitchen tumbler wrapped at the bottom with a damp Christmas napkin, what appeared to be whiskey with ice.

Mrs. Fountain—unable to restrain herself—remarked: “Looks like you’re celebrating, having all this big party over here after the funeral.”

“Well, you can’t just lay down and die,” snapped Edie. “Go over and get yourself some hors d’oeuvres while they’re hot, why don’t you.”

Mrs. Fountain, thrown into confusion, stood very still and allowed her gaze to wander unfocused over distant objects. At last she replied, vaguely: “Thank you,” and walked stiffly to the buffet table.

Edie put her cold glass to her temple. Before this day, Edie had been tipsy less than half a dozen times in her life—and all of those times before she was thirty, and in vastly more cheerful circumstances.

“Edith, dear, can I help you with anything?” A woman from the Baptist church—short, round in the face, a good-natured little fluster in her manner like Winnie the Pooh—and, for the life of her, Edith couldn’t recall her name.

“No, thank you!” she said, patting the lady on the back as she moved through the crowd. The pain in her ribs was breathtaking, but in a strange way she was grateful of it because it helped her concentrate—upon the guests, and the guest book, and the clean glasses; upon the hot hors d’oeuvres, and the replenishment of the cracker tray, and the regular addition of fresh ginger ale to the punch bowl; and these worries in turn distracted her from Libby’s death, which had not yet sunk in. In the past few days—a hectic grotesque blur of doctors, flowers, morticians, papers to be signed and people arriving from out of town—she had not shed a tear; she had devoted herself to the get-together after the funeral (the silver to be polished, the punch cups to be hauled down jingling from the attic, and washed) partly for the sake of the out-of-town guests, some of whom hadn’t seen one another in years. Naturally, no matter how sad the occasion, everyone wanted a chance to catch up; and Edie was grateful for a reason to keep moving, and smiling, and re-filling the compotes of candied almonds. The night before, she had tied her hair in a white rag and hurried around with dust-pan and furniture polish and carpet sweeper: fluffing cushions, cleaning mirrors, moving furniture and shaking rugs and scrubbing floors until after midnight. She arranged the flowers; she re-arranged the plates in her china cabinet. Then she had gone into her spotless kitchen and run a big sink of soapy water and—hands trembling from fatigue—washed punch cup after dusty, delicate, punch cup: a hundred punch cups in all; and when, at three in the morning, she finally climbed into bed, she had slept the sleep of the blessed.

Libby’s little pink-nosed cat, Blossom—the newest addition to the household—had retreated in terror to Edie’s bedroom, where she was crouching under the bed. On top of bookcase and china cabinet perched Edie’s own cats, all five of them, Dot and Salambo, Rhamses and Hannibal and Slim: sitting well apart, switching their tails and glaring down at the proceedings with witchy yellow eyes. Generally, Edie enjoyed guests no more than the cats did, but this day she was grateful for the multitudes: a distraction from her own family, whose behavior was unsatisfactory, more irritant than comfort. She was tired of them all—Addie especially, swanning around with horrible old Mr. Sumner—Mr. Sumner the smooth talker, the flirt, Mr. Sumner whom their father the Judge had despised. And there she was, touching his sleeve and batting her eyes at him, as she sipped punch she had not helped to make from cups she had not helped to wash; Addie, who had not come out to sit with Libby a single afternoon while she was in the hospital because she was afraid of missing her nap. She was tired of Charlotte, too, who had not come to the hospital either, because she was too busy lying in the bed with whatever imaginary vapors plagued her; she was tired of Tatty—who had come to the hospital, plenty, but only to deliver unwelcome scenarios of how Edith might have avoided the car accident, and reacted better to Allison’s incoherent phone call; she was tired of the children, and their extravagant weeping at funeral parlor and gravesite. Out back on the porch they still sat, carrying on just as they had done over the dead cat: no difference, thought Edie bitterly, no difference in the world. Equally distasteful were the crocodile tears of Cousin Delle, who hadn’t visited Libby in years. “It’s like losing Mother again,” Tatty had said; but Libby had been both mother and sister to Edie. More than this: she was the only person in the world, male or female, living or dead, whose opinion had ever mattered to Edie one jot.

Upon two of these lyre-back dining chairs—old friends in disaster, crowding around the walls of this little room—their mother’s casket had been laid, in Tribulation’s murky downstairs parlor more than sixty years ago. A circuit preacher—Church of God, not even Baptist—had read from the Bible: a psalm, something to do with gold and onyx, except he had read onyx as “oinks.” A family joke thereafter: “oinks.” Poor teen-aged Libby, wan and thin in an old black tea dress of their mother’s pinned at the hem and bosom; her china-pale face (naturally without color, as blonde girls were in those days before suntans and rouge) drained by sleeplessness and grief to a sick, dry chalk. What Edie remembered best was how her own hand, in Libby’s, felt moist and hot; how she’d stared the whole time at the preacher’s feet; though he’d attempted to catch Edie’s eye she was too shy to look him in the face and over half a century later she still saw the cracks in the leather of his lace-up shoes, the rusty slash of sunlight falling across the cuffs of his black trousers.

The death of her father—the Judge—had been one of those passings that everyone called A Blessing: and that funeral oddly jolly, with lots of old red-faced “compatriots” (as the Judge and his friends called one another, all his fishing pals and Bar Association cronies) standing with their backs to the fireplace in Tribulation’s downstairs parlor, drinking whiskey and swapping stories about “Old Bully” in his youth and boyhood. “Old Bully,” that was their nickname for him. And scarcely six months later, little Robin—which she could not bear to think of, even now, that tiny coffin, scarcely five feet long; how had she ever got through that day? Shot full of Compazine … a grief so strong that it hit her like nausea, like food poisoning … vomiting up black tea and boiled custard.…

She glanced up from her fog, and was badly unnerved to see a small Robin-like shape in tennis shoes and cut-off jeans creeping down her hallway: the Hull boy, she realized after a stunned moment or two, Harriet’s friend. Who in the world had let him in? Edie slipped into the hallway and stole up behind him. When she grabbed his shoulder, he jumped and screamed—a small, wheezing, terrified scream—and cowered from her as a mouse from an owl.

“Can I help you?”

“Harriet—I was—”

“I’m not Harriet. Harriet’s my grand-daughter,” said Edie, and crossed her arms and watched him with the sportive relish at his discomfort which had made Hely despise her.

Hely tried again. “I—I—”

“Go on, spit it out.”

“Is she here?”

“Yes she’s here. Now run along home.” She grabbed his shoulders and turned him, manually, towards the door.

The boy shrugged free. “Is she going back to camp?”

“This isn’t play-time,” snapped Edie. The boy’s mother—a flirtatious little sass since childhood—had not bothered to show up for Libby’s funeral, had not sent flowers or even called. “Run tell your mother not to let you bother folks when there’s been a death in the house. Now scat!” she cried, as he still stood gaping at her.

She stood watching at the door as he went down the steps and—taking his time about it—mooched around the corner and out of sight. Then she went to the kitchen, retrieved the whiskey bottle from the cabinet under the sink and freshened her toddy, and walked back to the living room to check on her guests. The crowd was thinning. Charlotte (who was very rumpled, and damp-looking, and pink in the face, as if from strenuous exertion) stood at her post by the punch bowl smiling, with a dazed expression, at pug-faced Mrs. Chaffin from the florist’s, who chattered to her companionably between sips of punch. “Here’s my advice,” she was saying—or shouting, for Mrs. Chaffin like many deaf people tended to raise her own voice instead of asking other people to raise theirs. “Fill the nest. It’s terrible to lose a child, but I see a lot of death in my business, and the best thing for it is to get busy and have a few more little ones.”

Edie noted a large run in the back of her daughter’s stocking. Being in charge of the punch bowl was not a very demanding task—Harriet or Allison could have done it, and Edie would have assigned either of them the job had she not felt it inappropriate for Charlotte to stand around the reception staring tragically into space. “But I don’t know what to do,” she’d said, in a frightened little squeak, when Edie had marched her to the punch bowl and slapped the ladle in her hand.

“Fill their cups and give them more if they want it.”

In dismay—as if the ladle were a monkey wrench and the punch bowl a complicated piece of machinery—Charlotte glanced at her mother. Several ladies from the choir—smiling hesitantly—lingered politely by the cups and saucers.

Edie snatched the ladle from Charlotte, dipped it, filled a cup and set it on the tablecloth, then handed the ladle back to Charlotte. Down at the end of the table, little Mrs. Teagarten (all in green, like a small, spry tree frog with her wide mouth and large, liquid eyes) turned theatrically with her freckled hand to her breast. “Gracious!” she cried. “Is that for me?”

“Certainly!” called Edie in her brightest stage voice as the ladies—now beaming—began to migrate in their direction.

Charlotte touched her mother’s sleeve, urgently. “But what should I say to them?”

“Isn’t this refreshing?” said Mrs. Teagarten, loudly. “Do I taste ginger ale?”

“I don’t reckon you have to say anything,” Edie said quietly to Charlotte, and then, in full voice, to the assembled company: “Yes, it’s just a plain little non-alcoholic punch, nothing special, just what we have at Christmas. Mary Grace! Katherine! Won’t you have something to drink?”

“Oh, Edith …” In pressed the choir ladies. “Doesn’t this look lovely.… I don’t know how you find the time.…”

“Edith’s such a capable hostess, she just throws it all together at a moment’s notice.” This, from Cousin Lucinda, who had just strode up, hands in the pockets of her skirt.

“Oh, it’s easy for Edith,” Adelaide was heard to say in a thin voice, “she’s got a freezer.”

Edie, ignoring the slight, had made the necessary introductions and slipped away, leaving Charlotte to the punch bowl. All Charlotte needed was to be told what to do, and she was fine, so long as there wasn’t independent thought or decision of any sort. Robin’s death had really been a double loss, for she’d lost Charlotte, too—her busy bright daughter, altered so tragically; ruined, really. Certainly one never got over such a blow, but it had been more than ten years. People pulled themselves together somehow, moved along. Ruefully, Edie thought back to Charlotte’s girlhood, when Charlotte had announced she wanted to be a fashion buyer for a large department store.

Mrs. Chaffin placed her punch cup in the saucer, which was balanced in the palm of her left hand. “You know,” she was saying to Charlotte, “poinsettias can be lovely at a Christmas funeral. The church can be so dark that time of year.”

Edie stood with her arms across her chest and watched them. As soon as she found the right moment, she meant to have a little word with Mrs. Chaffin herself. Though Dix was unable—on such short notice, so Charlotte had said—to drive down from Nashville for the funeral, the arrangement of mock-orange and Iceberg roses he’d sent (too decorative, too tasteful, feminine somehow) had caught Edie’s attention. Certainly it was more sophisticated than Mrs. Chaffin’s usual arrangements. Then, at the funeral home, she’d walked into a room where Mrs. Hatfield Keene was giving Mrs. Chaffin a hand with the flowers, only to hear Mrs. Keene say—stiffly, as if in reply to an inappropriate confidence: “Well, she might have been Dixon’s secretary.”

Adjusting a spray of gladiolus, Mrs. Chaffin sniffed, and cocked her head shrewdly to one side. “Well. I answered the telephone, and took the order myself,” she said—stepping back to observe her handiwork—“and she sure didn’t sound like a secretary to me.”

————

Hely did not go home, but merely turned the corner and circled around to the side gate of Edie’s yard, where he found Harriet sitting in Edie’s back yard glider swing. Without preamble he marched up and said: “Hey, when’d you get home?”

He had expected his presence to cheer her immediately, and when it didn’t he was annoyed. “Did you get my letter?” he said.

“I got it,” said Harriet. She had eaten herself half-sick on candied almonds from the buffet, and their taste lingered disagreeably in her mouth. “You shouldn’t have sent it.”

Hely sat down in the swing beside her. “I was freaked out. I—”

With a curt nod, Harriet indicated Edie’s porch, twenty feet away, where four or five adults with punch cups stood behind the dim screen, chatting.

Hely took a deep breath. In a quieter voice, he said: “It’s been scary here. He drives all over town. Real slow. Like he’s looking for us. I’ve been in the car with my mother, and there he is, parked by the underpass like he’s staking it out.”

The two of them, though they were sitting side by side, were looking straight ahead, at the grown-ups on the porch, and not at each other. Harriet said: “You didn’t go back up there to get the wagon, did you?”

“No!” said Hely, shocked. “Do you think I’m nuts? For a while, he was there every day. Lately he’s been going down to the freight yards, by the railroad tracks.”

“Why?”

“How should I know? A couple of days ago I got bored and went down to the warehouse, to hit some tennis balls. Then I heard a car, and it’s lucky I hid, because it was him. I’ve never been so scared. He parked his car and he sat for a while. Then he got up and walked around. Maybe he followed me, I don’t know.”

Harriet rubbed her eyes and said: “I saw him driving that way a little while ago. Today.”

“Towards the train tracks?”

“Maybe. I wondered where he was going.”

“I’m just glad he didn’t see me,” said Hely. “When he got out of his car I nearly had a heart attack. I was hiding in the bushes for about an hour.”

“We should go over on a Special Op and see what he’s doing down there.”

She had thought the phrase special op would be irresistible to Hely, and she was surprised by how firmly and swiftly he said: “Not me. I’m not going down there again. You don’t understand—”

His voice had risen sharply. A grown-up on the porch turned a bland face in their direction. Harriet nudged him in the ribs.

He looked at her, aggrieved. “But you don’t understand,” he said, in a quieter voice. “You had to see it. He would have killed me if he saw me, you could tell by the way he was looking around.” Hely imitated the expression: face distorted, eyes roving wildly over the ground.

“Looking for what?”

“I don’t know. I mean it, I’m not messing with him any more, Harriet, and you’d better not, either. If him or any of his brothers figure out it’s us that threw that snake, we’re dead. Didn’t you read that thing from the newspaper I sent you?”

“I didn’t get the chance.”

“Well, it was his grandma,” said Hely austerely. “She nearly died.”

Edie’s garden gate creaked open. Suddenly Harriet leaped up. “Odean!” she cried. But the little black lady—in straw hat, and belted cotton dress—cut her eyes at Harriet without turning her head and did not reply. Her lips were compressed, her face rigid. Slowly, she shuffled to the back porch and up the stairs, and rapped on the door.

“Miz Edith here?” she said, hand to brow, peering through the screen.

After a moment’s hesitation Harriet—stunned, cheeks burning from the snub—sat back down in the swing. Though Odean was old and grumpy, and Harriet’s relationship with her had never been very good, no one had been closer to Libby; the two of them were like an old married couple—not only in their disagreements (mostly about Libby’s cat, which Odean despised) but also in their stoic, companionable affection for one another—and Harriet’s heart had risen violently at the very sight of her.

She had not thought of Odean since the accident. Odean had been with Libby since they were both young women, out at Tribulation. Where would she go now, what would she do? Odean was a rickety old lady, in poor health; and (as Edie often complained) not much use around the house any more.

Confusion on the screen porch. “There,” said somebody inside, moving to make room, and Tat stepped sideways to the front. “Odean!” she said. “You know me, don’t you? Edith’s sister?”

“Why aint nobody told me about Miss Libby?”

“Oh, dear … Oh my. Odean.” Glance backwards, at the porch: perplexed, ashamed. “I’m so sorry. Why don’t you come inside?”

“Mae Helen, who works for Ms. McLemore, done come and told me. Nobody come and got me. And yall already put her into the ground.”

“Oh, Odean! We didn’t think you had a telephone.…”

In the silence that followed, a chickadee whistled: four clear, bouncy, sociable notes.

“Yalls could have come and got me.” Odean’s voice cracked. Her coppery face was immobile. “At my house. I lives out at Pine Hill, you know it. Yalls could have gone to that trouble.…”

“Odean.… Oh, my,” said Tat, helplessly. She took a deep breath; she looked about. “Please, won’t you come in and sit down a minute?”

“Nome,” said Odean, stiffly. “I thank you.”

“Odean, I’m so sorry. We didn’t think …”

Odean dashed away a tear. “I work for Miss Lib fifty-five years and nobody aint even told me she’s in the hospital.”

Tat closed her eyes for an instant. “Odean.” There was a dreadful silence. “Oh, this is horrible. How can you forgive us?”

“This whole week I’m thinking yalls up in Sorth Carolina and I’s suppose to come back to work on Monday. And here she is, laying in the ground.”

“Please.” Tat laid a hand on Odean’s arm. “Wait here while I run get Edith. Will you wait here, just a moment?”

She flustered inside. Conversation—not very clear—resumed on the porch. Odean, expressionless, turned and stared into the middle distance. Someone—a man—said, in a stage whisper: “I believe she wants a little money.”

Blood rose hot to Harriet’s face. Odean—dull-faced, unblinking—stood where she was, without moving. Amongst all the large white people in their Sunday finery, she looked very small and drab: a lone wren in a flock of starlings. Hely had got up and was standing behind the swing observing the scene with frank interest.

Harriet didn’t know what to do. She felt as if she should go over and stand with Odean—it was what Libby would want her to do—but Odean didn’t seem very friendly or welcoming; in fact, there was something forbidding in her manner that frightened Harriet. Suddenly, quite without warning, there was movement on the porch and Allison burst through the door into Odean’s arms, so that the old lady—wild-eyed at the abrupt onslaught—had to catch the porch rail to keep from falling over backwards.

Allison sobbed, with an intensity frightening even to Harriet. Odean stared over Allison’s shoulder without returning or appearing to welcome the hug.

Edie came through, and out onto the steps. “Allison, get back in the house,” she said; and—grabbing Allison’s shoulder, turning her around: “Now!”

Allison—with a sharp cry—wrenched away and ran across the yard: past the glider swing, past Hely and Harriet, into Edie’s toolshed. There was a tinny crash, as of a rake toppling off the wall at the slammed door.

Hely said, flatly, as he swivelled his head to stare: “Man, your sister’s nuts.”

From the porch Edie’s voice—clear, carrying—resonated with an air of public address: formal though it was, emotion trembled behind it and also something of emergency. “Odean! Thank you for coming! Won’t you step inside for a minute?”

“Nome, I don’t want to bother nobody.”

“Don’t be ridiculous! We’re mighty glad to see you!”

Hely kicked Harriet in the foot. “Say,” he said, and nodded at the toolshed. “What’s the matter with her?”

“Bless your heart!” Edie scolded Odean—who still stood motionless. “Enough of this! You come inside right this minute!”

Harriet could not speak. From the decrepit toolshed: a single weird, dry sob, as if of a choked creature. Harriet’s face constricted: not with disgust, or even embarrassment, but with some foreign, frightening emotion which made Hely step away from her as if she had an infectious disease.

“Uh,” he said, cruelly, looking over her head—clouds, an airplane trailing across the sky—“I think I have to go now.”

He waited for her to say something, and when she didn’t, he sauntered away—not his usual scurrying gait, but self-consciously, swinging his arms.

The gate snapped shut. Harriet stared furiously at the ground. The voices on the porch had risen sharply, and, with a dull pain, Harriet became aware of what they were talking about: Libby’s will. “Where it is?” Odean was saying.

“Don’t worry, that’ll all be taken care of soon enough,” said Edie, taking Odean’s arm as if to guide her inside. “The will’s in her safe-deposit box. On Monday morning I’ll go with the lawyer—”

“I aint trust n’an lawyer,” Odean said fiercely. “Miss Lib made me a promise. She told me, she say, Odean, if anything happen, look there in my cedar chest. There’s an envelope in there for you. You just go on and do it and don’t ast nobody.”

“Odean, we haven’t touched any of her things. On Monday—”

“The Lord knows what went on,” said Odean haughtily. “He knows it, and I know it. Yes, maam, I surely do know what Miss Libby told me.”

“You know Mr. Billy Wentworth, don’t you?” Edie’s voice jocular, as if speaking to a child, but with a hoarseness that edged on something terrifying. “Don’t tell me that you don’t trust Mr. Billy, Odean! That’s in practice with his son-in-law down there on the square?”

“Alls I want is what’s coming to me.”

The garden glider was rusted. Moss swelled velvety between the cracked bricks. Harriet, with a kind of desperate, clenching effort, fixed the whole of her attention upon a battered conch shell lying at the base of a garden urn.

Edie said: “Odean, I’m not disputing that. You’ll get what’s legally yours. As soon as—”

“I don’t know about any legal. Alls I know is what’s right.”

The conch was chalky with age, weathered to a texture like crumbly plaster; its apex had broken off; at the inner lip, it sank into a pearly flush, the delicate silvery-pink of Edie’s old Maiden’s Blush roses. Before Harriet was born, the whole family had vacationed on the Gulf every year; after Robin died, they never went back. Jars of tiny gray bivalves collected on those old trips sat on high shelves in the aunts’ closets, dusty and sad. “They lose their magic when they’ve been out of the water a while,” Libby said: and she’d run the bathroom sink full of water, poured the shells in and pulled over a step-stool for Harriet to stand on (she’d been tiny, around three, and how gigantic and white the sink had seemed!). And how surprised she had been to see that uniform gray washed bright and slick and magical, broken into a thousand tinkling colors: empurpled here, soaked there to mussel-black, fanned into ribs and spiraling into delicate polychrome whorls: silver, marble-blue, coral and pearly green and rose! How cold and clear was the water: her own hands, cut off at the wrist, icy-pink and tender! “Smell!” said Libby, breathing deep. “That’s what the ocean smells like!” And Harriet put her face close to the water and smelled the stiff tang of an ocean she had never seen; the salt smell that Jim Hawkins spoke of in Treasure Island. Crash of the surf; scream of strange birds and the white sails of the Hispaniola—like the white pages of a book—billowing against cloudless hot skies.

Death—they all said—was a happy shore. In the old seaside photographs, her family was young again, and Robin stood among them: boats and white handkerchiefs, sea-birds lifting into light. It was a dream where everybody was saved.

But it was a dream of life past, not life to come. Life present: rusty magnolia leaves, lichen-crusted flowerpots, the hum of bees steady in the hot afternoon and the faceless murmurs of the funeral guests. Mud and slimy grass, under the cracked garden brick she’d kicked aside. Harriet studied the ugly spot on the ground with great attention, as if it were the one true thing in the world—which, in a way, it was.