The Little Friend

CHAPTER

1

——

The Dead Cat

Twelve years after Robin’s death, no one knew any more about how he had ended up hanged from a tree in his own yard than they had on the day it happened.

People in the town still discussed the death. Usually they referred to it as “the accident,” though the facts (as discussed at bridge luncheons, at the barber’s, in bait shacks and doctors’ waiting rooms and in the main dining room of the Country Club) tended to suggest otherwise. Certainly it was difficult to imagine a nine-year-old managing to hang himself through mischance or bad luck. Everyone knew the details, which were the source of much speculation and debate. Robin had been hanged by a type of fiber cable—not common—which electricians sometimes used, and nobody had any idea where it came from or how Robin got hold of it. It was thick, obstinate stuff, and the investigator from Memphis had told the town sheriff (now retired) that in his opinion a little boy like Robin couldn’t have tied the knots by himself. The cable was fastened to the tree in a slipshod, amateurish fashion, but whether this implied inexperience or haste on the killer’s part, no one knew. And the marks on the body (so said Robin’s pediatrician, who had spoken to the medical examiner from the state, who in turn had examined the county coroner’s report) suggested that Robin had died not of a broken neck, but strangulation. Some people believed he’d strangled where he hung; others argued that he’d been strangled on the ground, and strung up in the tree as an afterthought.

In the mind of the town, and of Robin’s family, there was little question that Robin had met foul play of some sort. Exactly what sort, or by whom, left everyone at a loss. Twice, since the 1920s, women of prominent family had been murdered by jealous husbands, but these were old scandals, the parties concerned long-deceased. And every now and then a black man turned up dead in Alexandria but (as most whites were quick to point out) these killings were generally done by other Negroes, over primarily Negro concerns. A dead child was a different matter—frightening to everyone, rich and poor, black and white—and no one could think who might have done such a thing, or why.

Around the neighborhood there was talk of a Mysterious Prowler, and years after Robin’s death people still claimed to see him. He was, by all accounts, a giant of a man, but after this the descriptions diverged. Sometimes he was black, sometimes white; sometimes he bore dramatic distinguishing marks such as a missing finger, a clubfoot, a livid scar across one cheek. He was said to be a rogue hired man who had strangled a Texas senator’s child and fed it to the pigs; an ex–rodeo clown, luring little children to their deaths with fancy lariat tricks; a psychopathic half-wit, wanted in eleven states, escaped from the state mental hospital at Whitfield. But though parents in Alexandria warned their children about him, and though his massive form was regularly sighted limping around the vicinity of George Street each Halloween, the Prowler remained an elusive figure. Every tramp and itinerant and window-peeper for a hundred miles had been rounded up and questioned after the little Cleve boy’s death, but the investigation had turned up nothing. And while nobody liked to think of a killer walking around free, the fear persisted. The particular fear was that he still prowled the neighborhood: watching children at play from a discreetly parked sedan.

It was the people in the town who talked about this sort of thing. Robin’s family never discussed it, ever.

What Robin’s family talked about was Robin. They told anecdotes from baby days and kindergarten and Little League, all the sweet and funny and inconsequential things anyone remembered he’d ever said or done. His old aunts recalled mountains of trivia: toys he’d had, clothes he’d worn, teachers he’d liked or hated, games he’d played, dreams he’d recounted, things he’d disliked, and wished for, and most loved. Some of this was accurate; some of it was not; a good bit of it no one had any way of knowing, but when the Cleves chose to agree on some subjective matter it became—automatically and quite irrevocably—the truth, without any of them being aware of the collective alchemy which had made it so.

The mysterious, conflicted circumstances of Robin’s death were not subject to this alchemy. Strong as the Cleves’ revisionist instincts were, there was no plot to be imposed on these fragments, no logic to be inferred, no lesson in hindsight, no moral to this story. Robin himself, or what they remembered of him, was all they had; and their exquisite delineation of his character—painstakingly ornamented over a number of years—was their greatest masterpiece. Because he had been such an engaging little stray of a boy, and because his whims and peculiarities were precisely why they had all loved him so, in their reconstructions the impulsive quickness of the living Robin came through in places almost painfully clear and then he would practically be dashing down the street on his bicycle past you, leaning forward, hair blown back, stepping hard on the pedals so the bike wobbled slightly—a fitful, capricious, breathing child. But this clarity was deceptive, lending treacherous verisimilitude to what was largely a fabular whole, for in other places the story was worn nearly transparent, radiant but oddly featureless, as the lives of saints sometimes are.

————

“How Robin would have loved this!” the aunts used to say fondly. “How Robin would have laughed!” In truth, Robin had been a giddy, fickle child—somber at odd moments, practically hysterical at others—and, in life, this unpredictability had been a great part of his charm. But his younger sisters, who had never in any proper sense known him at all, nonetheless grew up certain of their dead brother’s favorite color (red); his favorite book (The Wind in the Willows) and his favorite character in it (Mr. Toad); his favorite flavor of ice cream (chocolate) and his favorite baseball team (the Cardinals) and a thousand other things which they—being living children, and preferring chocolate ice cream one week and peach the next—were not even sure they knew about themselves. Consequently their relationship with their dead brother was of the most intimate sort, his strong, bright, immutable character shining changelessly against the vagueness and vacillation of their own characters, and the characters of people that they knew; and they grew up believing that this was due to some rare, angelic incandescence of nature on Robin’s part, and not at all to the fact that he was dead.

Robin’s younger sisters had grown up to be very different from Robin, and very different from each other.

Allison was now sixteen. A mousy little girl who bruised and sunburned easily and cried at nearly everything, she had grown up, unexpectedly, to be the pretty one: long legs, fawn-red hair, liquid, fawn-brown eyes. All her grace was in her vagueness. Her voice was soft, her manner languid, her features blurred and dreamy; and to her grandmother Edie—who prized sparkle and high color—she was something of a disappointment. Allison’s bloom was delicate and artless, like the flowering grass in June, consisting wholly of a youthful freshness that (no one knew better than Edie) was the first thing to go. She daydreamed; she sighed a lot; her walk was awkward—shuffling, with toes turned in—and so was her speech. Still she was pretty, in her shy, milk-white way, and the boys in her class had started to call her on the telephone. Edie had observed her (eyes downcast, face burning red) with the receiver caught between her shoulder and ear, pushing the toe of her oxford back and forth and stammering with humiliation.

Such a pity, Edie fretted aloud, that such a lovely girl (lovely, the way Edie said it, carrying the plain freight of weak and anemic) should hold herself so poorly. Allison should keep her hair from falling in her eyes. Allison should throw her shoulders back, stand tall and confident instead of slumping. Allison should smile, speak up, develop some interests, ask people questions about themselves if she couldn’t think of anything interesting to say. Such advice, though well meaning, was often delivered in public and so impatiently that Allison stumbled from the room in tears.

“Well, I don’t care,” Edie would say, loudly, in the silence following these performances. “Somebody needs to teach her how to act. If I didn’t stay on top of her like I do, that child wouldn’t be in the tenth grade, I can tell you that.”

It was true. Though Allison had never failed a grade, she had come perilously near it several times, especially in elementary school. Wool-gathers, noted the Deportment section of Allison’s report cards. Untidy. Slow. Does not apply self. “Well, I guess we’ll just have to try a little harder,” Charlotte would say vaguely when Allison trailed home with yet more C’s and D’s.

But though neither Allison nor her mother seemed to care about the bad grades, Edie cared, a rather alarming lot. She marched down to the school to demand conferences with the teachers; tortured Allison with reading lists and flash cards and long-division problems; marked up Allison’s book reports and science projects with red pencil even now that she was in high school.

There was no reminding Edie that Robin himself had not always been a very good student. “High spirits,” she replied tartly. “He would have settled down to work soon enough.” And this was as close as she ever came to acknowledging the real problem, for—as all the Cleves were aware—if Allison had been as lively as her brother Edie would have forgiven her all the C’s and D’s in the world.

As Robin’s death, and the years following it, had served to turn Edie somewhat sour, Charlotte had wafted into an indifference which numbed and discolored every area of life; and if she tried to take up for Allison it was in an ineffectual and half-hearted way. In this she had come to resemble her husband, Dixon, who though a decent provider financially had never shown his daughters much encouragement or concern. His carelessness was nothing personal; he was a man of many opinions, and his low opinion of girl children he expressed unashamedly and with a casual, conversational good humor. (No daughter of his, he was fond of repeating, would inherit a dime.)

Dix had never spent much time at home, and now he was hardly there at all. He was from what Edie considered a social-upstart family (his father had run a plumbing-supply house) and when he’d married Charlotte—lured by her family, her name—he’d believed she had money. The marriage had never been happy (late nights at the bank, late nights at poker, hunting and fishing and football and golf, any excuse for a weekend away) but his cheer wore particularly thin after Robin’s death. He wanted to get the mourning over with; he could not bear the silent rooms, the atmosphere of neglect, lassitude, sadness, and he turned up the television as loud as it would go and strode around the house in a continual state of frustration, clapping his hands, pulling up window shades and saying things like: “Snap out of it!” and “Let’s get back on our feet here!” and “We’re a team!” That his efforts were not appreciated astonished him. Eventually, when his remarks failed to chase the tragedy from his home, he lost all interest in it, and—after restless and ever-increasing weeks away, at his hunting camp—he impulsively accepted a high-paying bank job in a different town. This he made out to be a great and selfless sacrifice. But everyone who knew Dix knew that he hadn’t moved to Tennessee for the good of his family. Dix wanted a showy life, with Cadillacs and card parties and football games, nightclubs in New Orleans, vacations in Florida; he wanted cocktails and laughter, a wife who always had her hair fixed and the house spotless, ready to pull out the hors d’oeuvres tray at a moment’s notice.

But Dix’s family was not upbeat or showy. His wife and daughters were reclusive, eccentric, melancholy. Worse: because of what had happened, people saw them all, even Dix himself, as somehow tainted. Friends avoided them. Couples didn’t invite them places; acquaintances stopped calling. It couldn’t be helped. People didn’t like to be reminded of death or bad things. And for all these reasons, Dix had felt compelled to exchange his family for a wood-paneled office and a jazzy social life in Nashville without feeling guilty in the slightest.

————

Though Allison irritated Edie, the aunts adored her, considering tranquil and even poetic many of the qualities that Edie found so frustrating. In their opinion, Allison was not only The Pretty One but The Sweet One—patient, uncomplaining, gentle with animals and old people and children—virtues which, as far as the aunts were concerned, far outshone any amount of good grades or smart talk.

Loyally, the aunts defended her. After all that child’s been through, Tat once said fiercely to Edie. It was enough to shut Edie up, at least temporarily. For no one could forget that Allison and the baby had been the only ones out in the yard on that terrible day; and though Allison was only four, there was little doubt that she’d seen something, something most likely so horrific that it had slightly unhinged her.

Immediately after, she had been questioned rigorously by both family and police. Was somebody in the yard, a grown-up, a man, maybe? But Allison—though she had begun, inexplicably, to wet her bed, and to wake screaming in the night with ferocious terrors—refused to say yes or no. She sucked her thumb, and hugged her stuffed dog close, and would not say even her name or how old she was. Nobody—not even Libby, the gentlest and most patient of her old aunts—could coax a word from her.

Allison didn’t remember her brother, and she had never recalled anything about his death. When she was little, she had lain awake sometimes after everyone else in the house had gone to sleep, staring at the jungle of shadows on the bedroom ceiling and casting her mind back as far as she was able, but searching was useless, there was nothing to find. The sweet dailiness of her early life was always there—front porch, fish pond, kitty-cat, flower-beds, seamless, incandescent, immutable—but if she cast her mind back far enough she invariably reached a strange point where the yard was empty, the house echoing and abandoned, signs of a recent departure evident (clothes hanging on the line, the dishes from lunch not yet cleared away) but her whole family gone, vanished, she didn’t know where, and Robin’s orange cat—still a kitten then, not yet the languid, heavy-jowled tomcat he would become—gone strange, empty-eyed, wild, skittering across the lawn to dart up a tree, as frightened of her as of a stranger. She wasn’t quite herself in these memories, not when they went this far back. Though she recognized very well the physical setting in which they took place—George Street, number 363, the house she’d lived in all her life—she, Allison, was not recognizable, not even to herself: she was not a toddler nor yet a baby but only a gaze, a pair of eyes that lingered in familiar surroundings and reflected upon them without personality, or body, or age, or past, as if she was remembering things that had happened before she was born.

Allison thought about none of this consciously except in the most vague and half-formed way. When she was small, it did not occur to her to wonder what these disembodied impressions meant and it occurred to her still less now that she was older. She scarcely thought about the past at all, and in this she differed significantly from her family, who thought of little else.

No one in her family understood this. They could not have understood even had she tried to tell them. For minds like theirs, besieged constantly by recollection, for whom present and future existed solely as schemes of recurrence, such a view of the world was beyond imagining. Memory—fragile, hazy-bright, miraculous—was to them the spark of life itself, and nearly every sentence of theirs began with some appeal to it: “You remember that green-sprigged batiste, don’t you?” her mother and her aunts would insist. “That pink floribunda? Those lemon teacakes? Remember that beautiful cold Easter, when Harriet was just a little thing, when you hunted eggs in the snow and built a big snow Easter rabbit in Adelaide’s front yard?”

“Yes, yes,” Allison would lie. “I remember.” In a way, she did. She’d heard the stories so often that she knew them by heart, could repeat them if she wanted, sometimes even dash in a detail or two neglected in the retelling: how (for instance) she and Harriet had used pink blossoms fallen from the frostbitten crabapples for the snow bunny’s nose and ears. The stories were familiar much as stories from her mother’s girlhood were familiar, or stories from books. But none of them seemed connected with her in any fundamental way.

The truth was—and this was something she had never admitted to anyone—there were an awful lot of things Allison did not remember. She had no clear memories of being in kindergarten, or the first grade, or of anything at all that she could definitely place as happening before she was eight. This was a matter of great shame, and something she tried (successfully for the most part) to conceal. Her baby sister Harriet claimed to recall things that happened before she was a year old.

Though she’d been less than six months old when Robin died, Harriet said she could remember him; and Allison and the rest of the Cleves believed that this was probably the truth. Every now and then Harriet came out with some obscure but shockingly accurate bit of information—details of weather or dress, menus from birthday parties attended before she was two—that made everyone’s jaw drop.

But Allison could not remember Robin at all. This was inexcusable. She had been nearly five years old when he died. Nor could she remember the period following his death. She knew about the whole interlude, in detail—about the tears, the stuffed dog, her silences; how the Memphis detective—a big, camel-faced man with prematurely white hair named Snowy Olivet—had shown her pictures of his own daughter, named Celia, and given her Almond Joy candy bars from a wholesale box he kept in his car; how he’d shown her other pictures, too, of colored men, white men with crewcuts and heavy-lidded eyes, and how Allison had sat on Tattycorum’s blue velveteen loveseat—she had been staying with Aunt Tat then, she and the baby, too, their mother was still in bed—with the tears rolling down her face, picking the chocolate off the Almond Joy bars and refusing to say a word. She knew all this not because she remembered it but because Aunt Tat had told her about it, many times, sitting in her chair pulled up close to the gas heater when Allison went to see her after school on winter afternoons, her weak old sherry-brown eyes fixed on a point across the room and her voice fond, garrulous, reminiscent, as if she were relating a story about a third party not present.

Sharp-eyed Edie was neither as fond nor as tolerant. The stories she chose to tell Allison often had a peculiar allegorical tone.

“My mother’s sister,” Edie would begin as she was driving Allison home from piano lessons, her eyes never leaving the road and her strong, elegant falcon’s beak of a nose high in the air, “my mother’s sister knew a little boy named Randall Scofield whose family was killed in a tornado. He came home from school and what do you think he saw? His house was blown to pieces and the Negroes that worked on the place had pulled the bodies of his father and his mother and his three baby brothers out of the wreck and there they all lay, bloody as could be with not even a sheet over them, stretched out breast to breast beside each other like a xylophone. One of the brothers was missing an arm and his mother had an iron doorstop embedded in her temple. Well, do you know what happened to that little boy? He was struck dumb. And he never said another word for the next seven years. My father said he used to always carry around a stack of shirt cardboards and a grease pencil wherever he went and he had to write down every single word he said to anybody. The man who ran the dry cleaner’s in town gave him the shirt cardboards for free.”

Edie liked to tell this story. There were variations, children who had gone temporarily blind or bitten their tongues off or lost their senses when confronted with sundry horrific sights. They had a slightly accusatory note that Allison could never quite put her finger on.

Allison spent most of her time by herself. She listened to records. She made collages of pictures cut from magazines and messy candles out of melted crayons. She drew pictures of ballerinas and horses and baby mice in the margins of her geometry notebook. At lunch she sat at a table with a group of fairly popular girls, though she seldom saw them outside school. In surface ways she was one of them: she had good clothes, clear skin, lived in a big house on a nice street; and if she was not bright or vivacious, neither was there anything about her to dislike.

“You could be so popular if you wanted,” said Edie, who missed not a trick when it came to social dynamics, even on the tenth-grade scale. “The most popular girl in your class, if you felt like trying.”

Allison didn’t want to try. She didn’t want kids to be mean to her, or make fun of her, but as long as nobody bothered her she was happy. And—except for Edie—nobody did bother her much. She slept a lot. She walked to school by herself. She stopped to play with dogs she saw on the way. At night she had dreams with a yellow sky and a white thing like a sheet billowing out against it, and these distressed her greatly, but she forgot all about them as soon as she woke up.

Allison spent a lot of time with her great-aunts, on the weekends and after school. She threaded needles for them and read to them when their eyes gave out, climbed stepladders to fetch things on high dusty shelves, listened to them talk about dead schoolmates and piano recitals sixty years before. Sometimes, after school, she made candy—fudge, seafoam, divinity—for them to take to their church bazaars. She used chilled marble, a thermometer, meticulous as a chemist, following the recipe step by step, scraping the ingredients level in the measuring cup with a butter knife. The aunts—girlish themselves, rouged cheeks, curled hair, full of fun—pattered back and forth and out and through, delighted with the activity in the kitchen, calling each other by their childhood nicknames.

What a good little cook, the aunts all sang. How pretty you are. You’re an angel to come see us. What a good girl. How pretty. How sweet.

————

Harriet, the baby, was neither pretty nor sweet. Harriet was smart.

From the time she was old enough to talk, Harriet had been a slightly distressing presence in the Cleve household. Fierce on the playground, rude to company, she argued with Edie and checked out library books about Genghis Khan and gave her mother headaches. She was twelve years old and in the seventh grade. Though she was an Astudent, the teachers had never known how to handle her. Sometimes they telephoned her mother, or Edie—who, as anyone who knew anything about the Cleves was aware, was the one you wanted to talk to; she was both field marshal and autocrat, the person of greatest power in the family and the person most likely to act. But Edie herself was uncertain how to deal with Harriet. Harriet was not disobedient, exactly, or unruly, but she was haughty, and somehow managed to irritate nearly every adult with whom she came in contact.

Harriet had none of her sister’s dreamy fragility. She was sturdily built, like a small badger, with round cheeks, a sharp nose, black hair bobbed short, a thin, determined little mouth. She spoke briskly, in a reedy, high-pitched voice that for a Mississippi child was oddly clipped, so that strangers often asked where on earth she had picked up that Yankee accent. Her gaze was pale, penetrating, and not unlike Edie’s. The resemblance between her and her grandmother was pointed, and did not go unremarked; but the grandmother’s quick, fierce-eyed beauty was in the grandchild merely fierce, and a trifle unsettling. Chester, the yard man, likened them in private to hawk and baby chickenhawk.

To Chester, and to Ida Rhew, Harriet was a source of exasperation and amusement. From the time she had first learned to talk, she had tagged along behind them as they went about their work, interrogating them at every step. How much money did Ida make? Did Chester know how to say the Lord’s Prayer? Would he say it for her? She also amused them by stirring up trouble among the generally peaceful Cleves. More than once, she had been the cause of rifts very nearly grievous: telling Adelaide that neither Edie nor Tat ever kept the pillowcases she embroidered for them, but wrapped them up to give to other people; informing Libby that her dill pickles—far from being the culinary favorite she believed them—were inedible, and that the demand for them from neighbors and family was due to their strange efficacy as a herbicide. “Do you know that bald spot in the yard?” Harriet said. “Out by the back porch? Tatty threw some of your pickles there six years ago, and nothing has grown there since.” Harriet was all for the idea of bottling the pickles and selling them as weed killer. Libby would become a millionaire.

It was three or four days before Aunt Libby stopped crying over this. With Adelaide and the pillowcases it had been even worse. She, unlike Libby, enjoyed nursing a grudge; for two weeks she would not even speak to Edie and Tat, and coldly ignored the conciliatory cakes and pies they brought to her porch, leaving them out for neighborhood dogs to eat. Libby, stricken by the rift (in which she was blameless; she was the only sister loyal enough to keep and use Adelaide’s pillowcases, ugly as they were), dithered back and forth trying to make peace. She had very nearly succeeded when Harriet got Adelaide stirred up all over again by telling her that Edie never even unwrapped the presents Adelaide gave her, but only took off the old gift tag and put on a new one before sending them out again: to charity organizations, mostly, some of them Negro. The incident was so disastrous that now, years later, any reference to it still prompted cattiness and subtle accusations and Adelaide, at birthdays and Christmas, now made a point of buying her sisters something demonstrably prodigal—a bottle of Shalimar, say, or a nightgown from Goldsmith’s in Memphis—from which more often than not she forgot to remove the price tags. “I like a homemade gift myself,” she would be overheard explaining loudly: to the ladies at her bridge club, to Chester in the yard, over the heads of her humiliated sisters as they were in the very act of unwrapping the unwanted extravagance. “It means more. It shows thought. But all that matters to some people is how much money you’ve spent. They don’t think a gift is worth anything unless it comes from the store.”

“I like the things you make, Adelaide,” Harriet would always say. She did, too. Though she had no use for aprons, pillowcases, tea towels, she hoarded Adelaide’s garish linens and had drawers full of them in her room. It was not the linens but the designs she liked: Dutch girls, dancing coffee pots, snoozing Mexicans in sombrero hats. She coveted them to the point of stealing them out of other people’s cupboards, and she had been extremely irritated that Edie was sending the pillowcases off to charity (“Don’t be ridiculous, Harriet. What on earth can you want with that?”) when she wanted them herself.

“I know you like them, darling,” murmured Adelaide, her voice tremulous with self-pity, drooping to give Harriet a theatrical kiss as Tat and Edie exchanged looks behind her back. “Someday, when I’m gone, you may be glad you have those things.”

“That baby,” said Chester to Ida, “love to start a scrap.”

Edie, who did not much mind a scrap herself, found in her youngest granddaughter a solid competitor. Despite, or perhaps because of this, they enjoyed each other’s company and Harriet spent a good bit of time over at her grandmother’s house. Edie often complained of Harriet’s stubbornness and lack of manners, and grumbled about how she was always under foot, but though Harriet was exasperating Edie found her a more satisfying companion than Allison, who had very little to say. She liked having Harriet around, though she wouldn’t have admitted it, and missed her on the afternoons when she didn’t come.

Though the aunts loved Harriet, she was not as affectionate a child as her sister, and her pridefulness troubled them. She was too forthright. She did not at all understand reticence or diplomacy, and in this she resembled Edie more than Edie realized.

In vain, the aunts tried to teach her to be polite. “But don’t you understand, darling,” said Tat, “that if you don’t like fruitcake, it’s better to eat it anyway instead of hurting your hostess’s feelings?”

“But I don’t like fruitcake.”

“I know you don’t, Harriet. That’s why I used that example.”

“But fruitcake is horrible. I don’t know anybody that likes it. And if I tell her I like it she’s just going to keep on giving it to me.”

“Yes, dear, but that’s not the point. The point is, if somebody has gone to the trouble to cook you something, it’s good manners to eat it even if you don’t want it.”

“The Bible says not to lie.”

“That’s different. This is a white lie. The Bible’s talking about another kind of lie.”

“The Bible doesn’t say black or white lies. It just says lies.”

“Believe me, Harriet. It’s true, Jesus tells us not to lie, but that doesn’t mean we have to be rude to our hostess.”

“Jesus doesn’t say anything about our hostess. He says that lying is a sin. He says that the Devil is a liar and the prince of lies.”

“But Jesus says Love Thy Neighbor, doesn’t He?” said Libby, inspired, taking over for the now speechless Tat. “Doesn’t that mean your hostess? Your hostess is your neighbor, too.”

“That’s right,” said Tat gladly. “Not,” she hastened, “that anybody is trying to say your hostess necessarily lives next door to you. All Love Thy Neighbor means is that you should eat what you’re offered and be gracious about it.”

“I don’t see why loving my neighbor means telling him I love fruitcake. When I don’t.”

No one, not even Edie, had any idea how to respond to this grim pedantry. It could go on for hours. It didn’t matter if you talked until you were blue in the face. Even more infuriating was that Harriet’s arguments, preposterous as they were, usually had at bottom some more or less sound scriptural basis. Edie was unimpressed by this. Though she did charity and missionary work, and sang in the church choir, she did not actually believe that every word of the Bible was true any more than, in her heart, she actually believed some of her own favorite sayings: that, for example, everything that happened was always for the best or that, deep down, Negroes were exactly the same as white people. But the aunts—Libby, in particular—were troubled if they thought too much about some of the things Harriet said. Her sophisms were grounded undeniably in the Bible, yet flew in the face of common sense and everything that was right. “Maybe,” Libby said uneasily after Harriet had stumped off home to supper, “maybe the Lord doesn’t see a difference between a white lie and a wicked lie. Maybe they’re all wicked in His eyes.”

“Now, Libby.”

“Maybe it takes a little child to remind us of that.”

“I’d just as soon go to Hell,” snapped Edie—who had been absent during the earlier exchange—“as have to go around all the time letting everybody in town know exactly what I thought of them.”

“Edith!” cried all her sisters at once.

“Edith, you don’t mean that!”

“I do. And I don’t care to know what everybody in town thinks of me, either.”

“I can’t imagine what it is you’ve done, Edith,” said self-righteous Adelaide, “that makes you believe everyone thinks so badly of you.”

Odean, Libby’s maid—who pretended to be hard of hearing—listened to this stolidly as she was in the kitchen warming some creamed chicken and biscuits for the old lady’s supper. Not much exciting happened at Libby’s house, and the conversation was usually a little more heated on the days when Harriet visited.

Unlike Allison—whom other children accepted vaguely, without quite knowing why—Harriet was a bossy little girl, not particularly liked. The friends she did have were not lukewarm or casual, like Allison’s. They were mostly boys, mostly younger than herself, and fanatically devoted, riding their bicycles halfway across town after school to see her. She made them play Crusades, and Joan of Arc; she made them dress up in sheets and act out pageantry from the New Testament, in which she herself took the role of Jesus. The Last Supper was her favorite. Sitting all on one side of the picnic table, à la Leonardo, under the muscadine-draped pergola in Harriet’s back yard, they all waited eagerly for the moment when—after dispensing a Last Supper of Ritz crackers and grape Fanta—she would look around the table at them, fixing and holding each boy, for a matter of seconds, with her cold gaze. “And yet one of you,” she would say, with a calm that thrilled them, “one of you here tonight will betray me.”

“No! No!” they would shriek with delight—including Hely, the boy who played Judas, but then Hely was Harriet’s favorite and got to play not only Judas but all the other plum disciples: Saint John, Saint Luke, Saint Simon Peter. “Never, Lord!”

Afterwards, there was the procession to Gethsemane, which was located in the deep shade beneath the black tupelo tree in Harriet’s yard. Here Harriet, as Jesus, was forced to undergo capture by the Romans—violent capture, more boisterous than the version of it rendered in the Gospels—and this was exciting enough; but the boys mainly loved Gethsemane because it was played under the tree her brother was murdered in. The murder had happened before most of them were born but they all knew the story, had patched it together from fragments of their parents’ conversation or grotesque half-truths whispered by their older siblings in darkened bedrooms, and the tree had thrown its rich-dyed shadow across their imaginations ever since the first time their nursemaids had stooped on the corner of George Street to clasp their hands and point it out to them, with hissed cautions, when they were very small.

People wondered why the tree still stood. Everyone thought it should be cut—not just because of Robin, but because it had started to die from the top, melancholy gray bones broken and protruding above the brackish foliage, as if blasted by lightning. In the fall it turned a brilliant outraged red, and was pretty for a day or two before it abruptly dropped all its leaves and stood naked. The leaves, when they appeared again, were glossy and leathery and so dark that they were nearly black. They cast such deep shade that the grass hardly grew; besides, the tree was too big, too close to the house, if there came a strong enough wind, the tree surgeon had told Charlotte, she’d wake up one morning to find it crashed through her bedroom window (“not to mention that little boy,” he’d told his partner as he heaved himself back into his truck and slammed the door, “how can that poor woman wake up every morning of her life and look in her yard and see that thing?”). Mrs. Fountain had even offered to pay to have the tree removed, tactfully citing the danger posed to her own house. This was extraordinary, as Mrs. Fountain was so cheap she washed out her old tinfoil to roll in a ball and use again, but Charlotte only shook her head. “No, thank you, Mrs. Fountain,” she said, in a voice so vague that Mrs. Fountain wondered if she’d misunderstood.

“I tell you,” shrilled Mrs. Fountain. “I’m offering to pay for it! I’m glad to do it! It’s a danger to my house, too, and if a tornado comes and—”

“No, thank you.”

She was not looking at Mrs. Fountain—not even looking at the tree, where her dead son’s treehouse rotted forlornly in a decayed fork. She was looking across the street, past the empty lot where the ragged robin and witch grass grew tall, to where the train tracks threaded bleakly past the rusted roofs of Niggertown, far away.

“I tell you,” said Mrs. Fountain, her voice different. “I tell you, Charlotte. You think I don’t know, but I know what it’s like to lose a son. But it’s God’s will and you just have to accept it.” Encouraged by Charlotte’s silence, she continued: “Besides, he wasn’t your only child. At least you’ve got the others. Now, poor Lynsie—he was all I had. Not a day goes by when I don’t think of that morning I heard his plane was shot down. We were getting ready for Christmas, I was on a ladder in my nightgown and housecoat trying to fasten a sprig of mistletoe on to the chandelier when I heard that knock at the front. Porter, bless his heart—this was after his first heart attact, but before his second—”

Her voice broke, and she glanced at Charlotte. But Charlotte wasn’t there any more. She had turned from Mrs. Fountain and was drifting back towards the house.

That had been years ago and the tree still stood, with Robin’s old treehouse still rotting at the top of it. Mrs. Fountain, when she met Charlotte, was not so friendly now. “She don’t pay a bit of attention to either one of those girls,” she said to the ladies down at Mrs. Neely’s while she was having her hair done. “And that house is just crammed full of trash. If you look in the windows, there’s newspaper stacked almost to the ceiling.”

“I wonder,” said fox-faced Mrs. Neely, catching and holding Mrs. Fountain’s eye in the mirror as she reached for the hair spray, “if she don’t take a little drink every now and then?”

“I wouldn’t be at all surprised,” Mrs. Fountain said.

Because Mrs. Fountain often yelled at children from her porch, the children ran away and made up stories about her: that she kidnapped (and ate) little boys; that her prizewinning rose-bed was fertilized by their ground-up bones. Proximity to Mrs. Fountain’s house of horrors made the re-enactment of the arrest at Gethsemane in Harriet’s yard that much more thrilling. But though the boys succeeded sometimes in frightening each other about Mrs. Fountain, they did not have to try to frighten themselves about the tree. Something in its lineaments made them uneasy; the stifled drab of its shadow—only footsteps from the bright lawn, but immensities apart—was disquieting even if one knew nothing of its history. There was no need for them to remind themselves about what had happened because the tree reminded them itself. It had its own authority, its own darkness.

Because of Robin’s death, Allison had been teased cruelly in her early years of school (“Mommy, mommy, can I go outside and play with my brother?” “Absolutely not, you’ve dug him up three times this week!”). She’d endured the taunting in meek silence—no one knew quite how much, or for how long—until a kind teacher had finally discovered what was going on and put a stop to it.

But Harriet—perhaps because of her more ferocious nature, or possibly only because her classmates were too young to remember the murder—had escaped such persecution. The tragedy in her family reflected a spooky glamour on her which the boys found irresistible. Frequently she spoke of her dead brother, with a strange, willful obstinacy which implied not only that she had known Robin but that he was still alive. Time and again, the boys found themselves staring at the back of Harriet’s head or the side of her face. Sometimes it seemed to them as if she was Robin: a child like themselves, returned from the grave and knowing things they didn’t. In her eyes they felt the sting of her dead brother’s gaze, through the mystery of their shared blood. Actually, though none of them realized it, there was very little resemblance between Harriet and her brother, even in photographs; fast, bright, slippery as a minnow, he could not have been further from Harriet’s brooding and her lofty humorlessness, and it was fully the force of her own character that held and transfixed them, not his.

Not much irony suggested itself to the boys, no hard parallels, between the tragedy they re-enacted in the darkness beneath the black-gum tupelo and the tragedy which had taken place there twelve years before. Hely had his hands full, since as Judas Iscariot he gave Harriet up to the Romans but also (as Simon Peter) cut off a centurion’s ear in her defense. Pleased and nervous, he counted out the thirty boiled peanuts for which he would betray his Savior, and, as the other boys jostled and nudged him, moistened his lips with an extra swig of grape Fanta. In order to betray Harriet he got to kiss her on the cheek. Once—egged on by the other disciples—he had kissed her smack on the mouth. The sternness with which she’d wiped it away—a contemptuous swipe across the mouth with the back of her hand—had thrilled him more than the kiss itself.

The shrouded figures of Harriet and her disciples were an eerie presence in the neighborhood. Sometimes Ida Rhew, looking out the window over the sink, was hit by the strangeness of the little procession treading its grim way across the lawn. She did not see Hely fingering his boiled peanuts as he walked, or see his green sneakers beneath the robe, or hear the other disciples whispering resentfully about not being allowed to bring their cap pistols along to defend Jesus. The file of small, white-draped figures, sheets trailing the grass, struck her with the same curiosity and foreboding she might have felt had she been a washerwoman in Palestine, elbow-deep in a tub of dirty well water, pausing in the warm Passover twilight to wipe her brow with the back of her wrist and to stare for a moment, puzzled, at the thirteen hooded figures gliding past, up the dusty road to the walled olive grove at the top of the hill—the importance of their errand evident in their slow, grave bearing but the nature of it unimaginable: a funeral, perhaps? A sickbed, a trial, a religious celebration? Something unsettling, whatever it was; enough to turn her attention for a moment or two, though she would go back to her work with no way of knowing that the little procession was on its way to something unsettling enough to turn history.

“Why yall always want to play under that nasty old tree?” she asked Harriet when Harriet came indoors.

“Because,” said Harriet, “it’s the darkest place in the yard.”

————

She’d had, from the time she was small, a preoccupation with archaeology: with Indian mounds, ruined cities, buried things. This had begun with an interest in dinosaurs which had turned into something else. What interested Harriet, it became apparent as soon as she was old enough to articulate it, were not the dinosaurs themselves—the long-lashed brontosauruses of Saturday cartoons, who allowed themselves to be ridden, or meekly bent their necks as a playground slide for children—nor even the screaming tyrannosaurs and pterodactyls of nightmare. What interested her was that they no longer existed.

“But how do we know,” she had asked Edie—who was sick of the word dinosaur—“what they really looked like?”

“Because people found their bones.”

“But if I found your bones, Edie, I wouldn’t know what you looked like.”

Edie—busy peeling peaches—offered no reply.

“Look here, Edie. Look. It says here they only found a leg bone.” She clambered up on a stool and, with one hand, hopefully proffered the book. “And here’s a picture of the whole dinosaur.”

“Don’t you know that song, Harriet?” interrupted Libby, leaning over from the kitchen counter where she was pitting peaches. In her quavery voice, she sang: “The knee bone’s connected to the leg bone … The leg bone’s connected to the—”

“But how do they know what it looked like? How do they know it was green? They’ve made it green in the picture. Look. Look, Edie.”

“I’m looking,” said Edie sourly, though she wasn’t.

“No, you’re not!”

“I’ve seen all of it I care to.”

When Harriet got a bit older, nine or ten, the fixation switched to archaeology. In this she found a willing if addled discussion partner in her aunt Tat. Tat had taught Latin for thirty years at the local high school; in retirement, she had developed an interest in various Riddles of the Ancients, many of which, she believed, hinged on Atlantis. The Atlanteans, she explained, had built the pyramids and the monoliths of Easter Island; Atlantean wisdom accounted for trepanned skulls found in the Andes and modern electrical batteries discovered in the tombs of the Pharaohs. Her bookshelves were filled with pseudo-scholarly popular works from the 1890s which she had inherited from her educated but credulous father, a distinguished judge who had spent his final years attempting to escape from a locked bedroom in his pyjamas. His library, which he had left to his next-to-youngest daughter, Theodora—nicknamed, by him, Tattycorum, Tat for short—included such works as The Antediluvian Controversy, Other Worlds Than Ours, and Mu: Fact or Fiction?

Tat’s sisters did not encourage this line of inquiry, Adelaide and Libby thinking it un-Christian; Edie, merely foolish. “But if there was such a thing as Atlanta,” said Libby, her innocent brow furrowed, “why isn’t it mentioned in the Bible?”

“Because it wasn’t built yet,” said Edie rather cruelly. “Atlanta is the capital of Georgia. Sherman burnt it in the Civil War.”

“Oh, Edith, don’t be hateful—”

“The Atlanteans,” said Tat, “were the ancestors of the Ancient Egyptians.”

“Well, there you go. The Ancient Egyptians weren’t Christian,” said Adelaide. “They worshiped cats and dogs and that kind of thing.”

“They couldn’t have been Christian, Adelaide. Christ wasn’t born yet.”

“Maybe not, but Moses and all them at least followed the Ten Commandments. They weren’t out there worshiping cats and dogs.”

“Atlanteans,” Tat said haughtily, over the laughter of her sisters, “Atlanteans knew many things that modern scientists would be glad to get their hands on today. Daddy knew about Atlantis and he was a good Christian man and had more education than all of us here in this room put together.”

“Daddy,” Edie muttered, “Daddy used to get me out of bed in the night saying Kaiser Wilhelm was coming and to hide the silver down the well.”

“Edith!”

“Edith, that’s not right. He was sick then. After how good he was to all of us!”

“I’m not saying Daddy wasn’t a good man, Tatty. I’m just saying I was the one who had to take care of him.”

“Daddy always knew me,” said Adelaide eagerly—who, being the youngest, and, she believed, her father’s favorite, never missed an opportunity to remind her sisters of this. “He remembered me right up until the end. The day he died, he took my hand and he said, ‘Addie, honey, what have they done to me?’ I don’t know why in the world I was the only one he recognized. It was the funniest thing.”

Harriet enjoyed very much looking at Tat’s books, which included not only the Atlantis volumes but more established works such as Gibbon and Ridpath’s History as well as a number of paperbacked romances set in ancient times with colored pictures of gladiators on the covers.

“Of course, these are not historical works,” explained Tat. “They are just little light novels with historical backdrops. But they are very entertaining books, and educational, too. I used to give them to the children down at the high school to try to get them interested in Roman times. You probably couldn’t do that any more with the kind of books they all write nowadays but these are clean little novels, not the kind of trash they have now.” She ran a bony forefinger—big-knuckled with arthritis—down the row of identical spines. “H. Montgomery Storm. I think he used to write novels about the Regency period as well, under a woman’s name, but I can’t remember what it was.”

Harriet was not at all interested in the gladiator novels. They were only love stories in Roman dress, and she disliked anything which had to do with love or romance. Her favorite of Tat’s books was a large volume called Pompeii and Herculaneum: The Forgotten Cities, illustrated with color plates.

Tat was happy enough to look at this with Harriet, too. They sat on Tat’s velveteen sofa and turned the pages together, past delicate murals from ruined villas, past baker’s stalls preserved perfectly, bread and all, beneath fifteen feet of ash, past the faceless gray plaster casts of dead Romans still twisted in the same eloquent postures of anguish in which they had fallen, two thousand years ago, beneath the rain of cinders on the cobblestones.

“I don’t see why those poor people didn’t have the sense to leave earlier,” said Tat. “I guess they didn’t know what a volcano was in those days. Also, I suppose it was a little like when Hurricane Camille blew in on the Gulf Coast. There were a lot of foolish people who wouldn’t leave when the city was evacuated and sat around drinking at the Buena Vista Hotel like it was some kind of a big party. Well, let me tell you, Harriet, they were three weeks picking those bodies out of the treetops after the water went down. And not one brick from the Buena Vista left on top of another brick. You wouldn’t remember the Buena Vista, darling. They had angelfish painted on the water glasses.” She turned the page. “Look. You see this cast of the little dog that died? He’s still got a biscuit in his mouth. Somewhere I read a lovely story that somebody wrote about this very dog. In the story, the dog belonged to a little Pompeiian beggar boy that it loved, and it died trying to fetch food for him so he would have something to eat on the journey out of Pompeii. Isn’t that sad? Of course, nobody knows that for sure, but it’s probably pretty close to the truth, don’t you think?”

“Maybe the dog wanted the biscuit for itself.”

“I doubt it. You know that food was probably the last thing on the poor thing’s mind with all those people running around screaming and ashes falling everywhere.”

Though Tat shared Harriet’s interest in the buried city, from a human-interest perspective, she did not understand why Harriet’s fascination extended to even the lowliest and least dramatic aspects of ruin: broken utensils, drab pot shards, corroded hunks of undistinguished metal. Certainly she did not realize that Harriet’s obsession with fragments had to do with her family’s history.

The Cleves, like most old families in Mississippi, had once been richer than they were. As with vanished Pompeii, only traces of these riches remained, and they liked to tell, among themselves, stories of their lost fortune. Some of them were true. The Yankees had indeed stolen some of the Cleves’ jewelry and silver, though not the vast treasures the sisters sighed for; Judge Cleve had come badly out of the crash of ’29; and he had made, in his senility, some disastrous investments, most notably plunging the bulk of his savings into a crackpot scheme to develop the Car of the Future, an automobile that flew. The Judge, it was discovered by his dismayed daughters after his death, was one of the defunct company’s primary stockholders.

So the big house, which had been in the Cleve family ever since it was built, in 1809, had to be sold in a hurry to pay off the Judge’s debts. The sisters still mourned this. They had grown up there, as had the Judge himself, and the Judge’s mother and grandparents. Worse: the person they had sold it to turned right around and sold it to someone else who turned it into a retirement home and then, when the retirement home lost its license, into welfare apartments. Three years after Robin’s death, it had burned to the ground. “It survived the Civil War,” said Edie bitterly, “but the niggers still got it in the end.”

Actually, it was Judge Cleve who had destroyed the house, not “the niggers”; he had had no repairs done on it for nearly seventy years, nor had his mother for forty years before. By the time he died the floors were rotten, the foundations were soft with termites, the entire structure was on the verge of collapse but still the sisters spoke lovingly of the hand-painted wallpaper—eggshell blue with cabbage roses—which had been sent from France; the marble mantelpieces carved with seraphim and the handstrung chandelier of Bohemian crystal, the twin staircases designed especially to accommodate mixed house-parties: one for the boys, another for the girls, and a wall dividing the upper story of the house in half, so that mischievous boys were not able to steal over to the girls’ quarters in the middle of the night. They had mostly forgotten that by the time of the Judge’s death the boys’ staircase, on the north side, had seen no parties for fifty years and was so rickety as to be unusable; that the dining room had been burned nearly hollow by the senile Judge in an accident with a paraffin lamp; that the floors sagged, that the roof leaked, that the steps to the back porch had collapsed to splinters in 1947 beneath the weight of a man from the gas company who had come to read the meter; and that the famous hand-painted wallpaper was peeling from the plaster in great mildewed scallops.

The house, amusingly, had been called Tribulation. Judge Cleve’s grandfather had named it that because he claimed that the building of it had very nearly killed him. Nothing remained of it but the twin chimneys and the mossy brick walk—the bricks worked in a tricky herringbone pattern—leading from the foundation down to the front steps, where five cracked tiles on the riser, in faded Delft blue, spelled the letters CLEVE.

To Harriet, these five Dutch tiles were a more fascinating relic of a lost civilization than any dead dog with a biscuit in its mouth. To her, their fine, watery blue was the blue of wealth, of memory, of Europe, of heaven; and the Tribulation she deduced from them glowed with the phosphorescence and splendor of dream itself.

In her mind, her dead brother moved like a prince through the rooms of this lost palace. The house had been sold when she was only six weeks old, but Robin had slid down the mahogany banisters (once, Adelaide told her, nearly crashing through the glass-front china cabinet at the bottom) and played dominoes on the Persian carpet while the marble seraphim watched over him, wings unfurled, with sly, heavy-lidded eyes. He had fallen asleep at the feet of the bear his great uncle had shot and stuffed, and he had seen the arrow, tipped with faded jay feathers, which a Natchez Indian had shot at his great-great-grandfather during a dawn raid in 1812 and which had remained embedded in the parlor wall in the very spot where it had struck.

Apart from the Dutch tiles, few concrete artifacts of Tribulation remained. Most of the rugs and furniture, and all of the fixtures—the marble seraphim, the chandelier—had been carted off in crates marked Miscellaneous and sold to an antiques dealer in Greenwood who’d paid only half what they were worth. The famous arrow-shaft had crumbled in Edie’s hands when Edie attempted to pull it out of the wall on moving day and the tiny arrow-head had refused all efforts to be dug out of the plaster with a putty knife. And the stuffed bear, eaten by moths, went to the dust heap, where some Negro children—delighted—had rescued it, dragging it home by the legs through the mud.

How then to reconstruct this extinct colossus? What fossils were left, what clues had she to go on? The foundation was still there, out from town a bit, she wasn’t sure exactly where, and somehow it didn’t matter; only once, on a winter afternoon long ago, had she been taken out to see it. To a small child it gave the impression of having supported a structure far larger than a house, a city almost; she had a memory of Edie (tomboyish in khaki trousers) jumping excitedly from room to room, her breath coming out white clouds, pointing out the parlor, the dining room, the library—though all this was hazy compared with the dreadful, dreadful memory of Libby in her red car coat bursting into tears, putting out her gloved hand and allowing Edie to lead her through crunchy winter woods back to the car, Harriet trailing behind.

A scattering of lesser artifacts had been salvaged from Tribulation—linens, monogrammed dishes, a ponderous rosewood sideboard, vases, china clocks, dining room chairs, broadcast throughout her own house and the houses of her aunts: random fragments, a legbone here, a vertebra there, from which Harriet set about reconstructing the burned magnificence she had never seen. And these rescued articles beamed warmly with a serene old light all their own: the silver was heavier, the embroideries richer, the crystal more delicate and the porcelain a finer, rarer blue. But most eloquent of all were the stories passed down to her—highly decorated items which Harriet embellished even further in her resolute myth of the enchanted alcazar, the fairy chateau that never was. She possessed, to a singular and uncomfortable degree, the narrowness of vision which enabled all the Cleves to forget what they didn’t want to remember, and to exaggerate or otherwise alter what they couldn’t forget; and in restringing the skeleton of the extinct monstrosity which had been her family’s fortune, she was unaware that some of the bones had been tampered with; that others belonged to different animals entirely; that a great many of the more massive and spectacular bones were not bones at all, but plaster-of-paris forgeries. (The famous Bohemian chandelier, for instance, had not come from Bohemia at all; it was not even made of crystal; the Judge’s mother had ordered it from Montgomery Ward.) Least of all did she realize that constantly in the course of her labors she trod back and forth on certain humble, dusty fragments which, had she bothered to examine them, afforded the true—and rather disappointing—key to the entire structure. The mighty, thundering, opulent Tribulation which she had so laboriously reconstructed in her mind was not a replica of any house which had ever existed but a chimaera, a fairy tale.

Harriet spent entire days studying the old photograph album at Edie’s house (which, a far cry from Tribulation, was a two bedroom bungalow built in the 1940s). There was thin, shy Libby, hair scraped back, looking colorless and spinsterly even at eighteen: there was something of Harriet’s mother (and of Allison) about her mouth and eyes. Next, scornful Edie—nine years old, brow like a thundercloud, her expression a small replica of her father the Judge who frowned behind her. A strange, moon-faced Tat, sprawled in a wicker chair, the blurred shadow of a kitten in her lap, unrecognizable. Baby Adelaide, who would outlive three husbands, laughing at the camera. She was the prettiest of the four and there was something about her too which reminded one of Allison but something petulant was already gathering at the corners of her mouth. On the steps of the doomed house towering behind them were the Dutch tiles reading CLEVE: only just detectable, and only then if you were looking hard, but they were the one thing in the photograph which remained unchanged.

The photographs Harriet loved most were those with her brother in them. Edie had taken most of them; because they were so hard to look at, they’d been removed from the album and were kept separately, on a shelf in Edie’s closet inside a heart-shaped chocolate box. When Harriet stumbled upon them, when she was eight or so, it was an archaeological find equivalent to the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb.

Edie had no idea that Harriet had found the pictures, and that they were one of the primary reasons Harriet spent so much time at her house. Harriet, equipped with a flashlight, studied them while sitting in the back of Edie’s musty-smelling closet behind the skirts of Edie’s Sunday dresses; sometimes she slipped the box inside her Barbie travelling case and carried it out to Edie’s tool shed, where Edie—glad to have Harriet out of her hair—allowed her to play undisturbed. Several times she had carried the photographs home overnight. Once, after their mother had gone to bed, she had shown them to Allison. “Look,” she said. “That’s our brother.”

Allison, an expression of something very like fear dawning on her face, stared at the open box which Harriet had placed on her lap.

“Go ahead. Look. You’re in some of them.”

“I don’t want to,” said Allison, and jammed the lid on the box and shoved it back at Harriet.

The snapshots were in color: faded Polaroids with pinked edges, sticky and torn where they’d been pulled from the album. They were smeared with fingerprints, as if someone had handled them a lot. Some of the photographs had black catalog numbers stamped on the backs because they had been used in the police investigation, and these had the most fingerprints of all.

Harriet never tired of looking at them. The washes were too blue, unearthly; and the colors had become even stranger and more tremulous with age. The dream-lit world they provided her a glimpse of was magical, self-contained, irretrievable. There was Robin, napping with his orange kitten Weenie; clattering around on Tribulation’s grand, columned porch, sputtering with laughter, shouting at the camera; blowing bubbles with a saucer of soap and a spool. There he was, serious, in striped pyjamas; in his Cub Scout uniform—knees thrown back, pleased with himself; here he was much smaller, dressed for a kindergarten play—The Gingerbread Man—in which he had portrayed a greedy crow. The costume he’d worn was famous. Libby had spent weeks making it: a black leotard, worn with orange stockings, sewn from wrist to armpit and from armpit to top of thigh with wings of feathered black velvet. Over his nose was tied a cone of orange cardboard for a beak. It was such a beautiful costume that Robin had worn it for two Halloweens running, as had his sisters, and all these years later, Charlotte still got calls from neighborhood mothers begging to borrow it for their children.

Edie had snapped a whole roll of film the night of the play: various shots of Robin running exhilarated throughout the house, arms flapping, wings billowed behind him, a stray feather or two drifting to the vast, threadbare carpet. Black wing flung around the neck of shy Libby, the blushing seamstress. With his little friends Alex (a baker, in white coat and cap) and bad Pemberton, the Gingerbread Man himself, his small face dark with rage at the indignity of his costume. Robin again, impatient, wriggling, held still by his kneeling mother as she tried to dash a comb through his hair. The playful young woman in the picture was undeniably Harriet’s mother, but a mother she had never known: airy, charming, sparkling with life.

The pictures enchanted Harriet. More than anything, she wanted to slip out of the world she knew into their cool blue-washed clarity, where her brother was alive and the beautiful house still stood and everyone was always happy. Robin and Edie in the great, gloomy parlor, the two of them on their hands and knees playing a board game—she couldn’t tell what, some game with bright counters and a colored wheel that spun. There they were again, Robin with his back to the camera tossing Edie a fat red ball and Edie rolling her eyes comically as she dove to catch it. There he was blowing out the candles in his birthday cake—nine candles, the last birthday he would ever see—with Edie and Allison leaning over his shoulder to help him, smiling faces ablaze in the dark. Adelirium of Christmases: pine boughs and tinsel, presents spilling from beneath the tree, the sideboard twinkling with cut-glass punchbowl, with crystal dishes of candy and oranges and sugar-dusted cakes on silver platters, the fireplace seraphim garlanded with holly and everybody laughing and the chandelier blazing in the high mirrors. In the background, on the holiday table, Harriet could just make out the famous Christmas dishes: wreathed with a pattern of scarlet ribbon, jingling sleigh bells chased in gold leaf. They’d been shattered in the move—the movers had packed them badly—and nothing remained of them now but a couple of saucers and a gravy boat but there they all were in the photograph, heavenly, glorious, a complete set.

Harriet herself had been born before Christmas, in the middle of a snowstorm that was the biggest on record in Mississippi. There was a picture of this snowfall in the heart-shaped box: Tribulation’s alley of oaks bright with ice and Bounce, Adelaide’s long-dead terrier, dashing down the snow-covered walk mad with excitement, towards his mistress the photographer, caught forever in mid-bark—his tiny legs a blur, kicking a froth of snow behind him—in the moment of glorious anticipation before he reached his beloved. In the distance, the front door of Tribulation was thrown open and Robin, his timid sister Allison clinging to his waist, was waving joyously at the viewer. He was waving at Adelaide—who had snapped the picture—and at Edie, who was helping his mother out of the car; and at his baby sister Harriet, whom he had never seen before, and who was being brought home from the hospital for the first time on this snowy bright Christmas Eve.

Harriet had seen snow only twice, but all her life she knew that she had been born in it. Every Christmas Eve (smaller, sadder Christmases now, gathered around a gas heater in Libby’s stuffy little low-ceilinged house, drinking eggnog) Libby and Tat and Adelaide told the same story, the story of how they’d packed into Edie’s car and driven over to the hospital in Vicksburg to bring Harriet home in the snow.

“You were the best Christmas present we ever had,” they said. “Robin was so excited. The night before we went to get you he could hardly sleep, he kept your grandmother awake until four in the morning. And the first time he saw you, when we brought you inside, he was quiet for a minute and then he said, ‘Mother, you must have picked out the prettiest baby they had.’ ”

“Harriet was such a good baby,” said Harriet’s mother wistfully—seated by the heater, clasping her knees. Like Robin’s birthday and the anniversary of his death, Christmas was especially hard for her and everyone knew it.

“Was I good?”

“Yes, you were, darling.” It was true. Harriet had never cried or given anyone a moment of trouble before she had learned how to talk.

Harriet’s favorite picture in the heart-shaped box, which she studied by flashlight again and again, was of her and Robin and Allison in the parlor of Tribulation, beside the Christmas tree. It was the only picture, so far as she knew, of the three of them together; it was the only picture of herself which had been taken in her family’s old house. It communicated no sense whatever of the many dooms which were about to fall. The old Judge would be gone in a month, Tribulation would be lost forever and Robin would die in the spring but of course nobody had known that then; it was Christmas, there was a new baby in the house, everybody was happy and thought they would be happy forever.

In the photograph, Allison (grave in her white nightgown) stood barefoot beside Robin, who was holding baby Harriet—his expression a mixture of excitement and bewilderment, as if Harriet was a fancy toy he wasn’t quite sure how to handle. The Christmas tree sparkled beside them; peeking sweetly from the corner of the photograph were Robin’s cat Weenie and inquisitive Bounce, like the beasts come to witness the miracle in the stables. Above the scene the marble seraphim smiled. The light in the photograph was fractured, sentimental, incandescent with disaster. Even Bounce the terrier would be dead by the next Christmas.

————

After Robin’s death, the First Baptist Church started a collection for a gift in his memory—a Japanese quince, or perhaps new cushions for the church pews—but more money poured in than anyone had expected. One of the church’s six stained-glass windows—each depicting a scene from the life of Christ—had been shattered by a tree branch during a winter storm, and boarded up with plywood ever since. The pastor, who had despaired over the cost of replacing it, suggested using the money to buy a new one.

A considerable portion of the fund had come from the town’s schoolchildren. They had gone door to door, organized raffles and bake sales. Robin’s friend Pemberton Hull (who had played the Gingerbread Man to Robin’s blackbird in the kindergarten play) had given close to two hundred dollars to the memorial for his dead friend, a largesse which nine-year-old Pem claimed to have obtained by smashing his piggy bank but which he had actually stolen from his grandmother’s purse. (He had also attempted to contribute his mother’s engagement ring, ten silver teaspoons, and a Masonic tie tack whose origins no one was able to determine; it was set with diamonds and evidently worth some money.) But even without these handsome bequests, the total sum brought in by Robin’s classmates amounted to quite a lot; and it was suggested, instead of replacing the broken portrayal of the Wedding at Cana with the same scene, that something be done to honor not only Robin but the children who had worked so hard for him.

The new window—unveiled, to the gasps of the First Baptist congregation, a year and a half later—depicted a pleasant blue-eyed Jesus seated on a boulder beneath an olive tree and involved in conversation with a red-haired boy in a baseball cap who bore an unmistakable resemblance to Robin.

SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN TO COME UNTO ME

ran the inscription beneath the scene, and, engraved on a plaque beneath:

In Loving Memory of Robin Cleve Dufresnes

From the Schoolchildren of Alexandria, Mississippi

“For Theirs Shall Be the Kingdom of Heaven”

For all her life, Harriet had seen her brother ablaze in the same constellation as the archangel Gabriel, Saint John the Baptist, Joseph and Mary and of course Christ himself. The noonday sun streamed through his exalted form; and the purified outlines of his face (bobbed nose, elfin smile) shone with the same beatific clarity. It was a clarity all the more radiant for being childish, more vulnerable than John the Baptist and the others; yet in his small face too was the serene indifference of eternity, like a secret they all shared.

What exactly happened at Calvary, or in the grave? How did flesh ascend from lowliness and sorrow into this kaleidoscope of resurrection? Harriet didn’t know. But Robin knew, and the secret glowed in his transfigured face.

Christ’s own passage—aptly—was described as a Mystery, yet people were queerly uninterested in getting to the bottom of it. What exactly did the Bible mean when it said that Jesus rose from the dead? Had He returned only in spirit, an unsatisfactory spook of some sort? Apparently not, according to the Bible: Doubting Thomas had put a finger in one of the nail holes in His palm; He had been spotted, solid enough, on the road to Emmaus; He had even eaten a little snack over at one of the disciples’ houses. But if He had in fact risen from the dead in His earthly body, where was He now? And if He loved everybody as much as He claimed to, why then did anybody ever die at all?

When Harriet was about seven or eight, she had gone to the library in town and asked for some books on magic. But when she got them home, she was enraged to discover that they contained only tricks: balls disappearing from under cups, quarters dropping from people’s ears. Opposite the window which depicted Jesus and her brother was a scene of Lazarus raised from the dead. Over and over again, Harriet read the story about Lazarus in the Bible, but it refused to address even the most basic questions. What had Lazarus to say to Jesus and his sisters about his week in the grave? Did he still smell? Was he able to go back home and carry on living with his sisters, or was he frightening to the people around him and perhaps had to go off somewhere and live by himself like Frankenstein’s monster? She could not help thinking that if she, Harriet, had been there, she would have had more to say on the subject than Saint Luke did.

Perhaps it was all a story. Perhaps Jesus himself hadn’t risen from the dead, though everyone said He had; but if indeed He had rolled the stone away and stepped living from the grave why then not her brother, whom she saw every Sunday blazing by His side?

This was Harriet’s greatest obsession, and the one from which all the others sprang. For what she wanted—more than Tribulation, more than anything—was to have her brother back. Next to that, she wanted to find out who killed him.

————

On a Friday morning in May, twelve years after Robin’s murder, Harriet was sitting at Edie’s kitchen table reading the journals of Captain Scott’s last expedition to the Antarctic. The book was propped open between her elbow and a plate from which she was eating a scrambled egg and some toast. She and Allison often ate their breakfast at Edie’s house on school mornings. Ida Rhew, who did all the cooking, did not arrive at work until eight o’clock and their mother, who seldom ate much of anything anyway, had only a cigarette and occasionally a bottle of Pepsi for breakfast.

This was not a school morning, however, but a weekday morning early in the summer vacation. Edie stood at the stove with a polka-dot apron over her dress scrambling her own egg. She did not care for this business of Harriet reading at the table but it was easier to just go ahead and let her do it instead of having to correct her every five minutes.

The egg was done. She turned off the flame and went to the cupboard to fetch a plate. In doing so she was forced to step over the prone form of her other granddaughter, who lay stretched out full length on her stomach across the kitchen linoleum sobbing monotonously.

Edie, ignoring the sobs, stepped carefully back over Allison’s body and spooned the egg upon a plate. Then she circled to the kitchen table—carefully avoiding Allison as she did so—and sat down across from the oblivious Harriet and began to eat in silence. She was far too old for this sort of thing. She had been up since five o’clock, and she had had it up to here with the children.

The problem was the children’s cat, which lay on a towel in a cardboard box near Allison’s head. A week ago, it had begun to refuse its food. Then it had started to cry whenever it was picked up. They had then brought it over to Edie’s house for Edie to examine.

Edie was good with animals, and she often thought that she would have made an excellent veterinarian or even a doctor if girls had done such things in her day. She had nursed all sorts of kittens and puppies to health, raised baby birds fallen from the nest, and cleaned the wounds and set the broken bones of all manner of hurt creatures. The children knew this—not only her grandchildren, but all the children in the neighborhood—and brought to her not only their own sick pets but any pitiful little strays or wild things they happened to find.

But, fond as she was of animals, Edie was not sentimental about them. Nor, as she reminded the children, was she a miracle worker. After brisk examination of the cat—who indeed appeared listless, but had nothing obviously wrong with it—she had stood up and dusted her hands on her skirt while her granddaughters looked hopefully on.

“How old is this cat, anyway?” she asked them.

“Sixteen and a half,” said Harriet.

Edie bent down to stroke the poor thing, which was leaning against the table leg with a wild, miserable look in its eye. She was fond of the cat herself. It had been Robin’s kitty. He had found it lying on the hot sidewalk in the summertime—half dead, its eyes hardly open—and had brought it to her, gingerly, in his cupped palms. Edie had had a devil of a time saving it. A knot of maggots had eaten a hole in its side and she still remembered how meekly and uncomplainingly the little thing had lain while she washed the wound out, in a shallow basin of lukewarm water, and how pink the water was when she finished.

“He’ll be all right, won’t he, Edie?” said Allison, who was even then close to tears. The cat was her best friend. After Robin died, it had taken up with her; it followed her around, brought her little presents it had stolen or killed (dead birds; tasty bits of garbage; once—mysteriously—an unopened package of oatmeal cookies); and ever since Allison started school, it had scratched on the back door every afternoon at two-forty-five asking to be let out so that it could walk down to the corner to meet her.

Allison, in turn, lavished more affection on the cat than on any other living creature, including the members of her own family. She talked to it constantly, fed it pinches of chicken and ham from her own plate, and allowed it to sleep with its stomach draped over her throat at night.

“Probably he ate something that didn’t agree with him,” said Harriet.

“We’ll see,” Edie said.

But the following days confirmed her suspicion. There was nothing wrong with the cat. It was just old. She offered it tuna fish, and milk from an eyedropper, but the cat only closed its eyes and spat out the milk in an ugly froth between its teeth. The morning before, while the children were at school, she had come into the kitchen to find it twitching in a kind of fit, and she had wrapped it in a towel and taken it to the vet.

When the girls stopped by her house that afternoon she told them: “I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do. I took the cat to Dr. Clark this morning. He says we’ll have to put him to sleep.”

Harriet—surprisingly, for she was quite capable of flying off the handle when she felt like it—had taken the news with relative equanimity. “Poor old Weenie,” she had said, kneeling by the cat’s box. “Poor kitty.” And she laid her hand on the cat’s heaving flank. She loved the cat nearly as much as Allison did, though it paid little attention to her.

But Allison had turned pale. “What do you mean, put him to sleep?”

“I mean what I say.”

“You can’t do that. I won’t let you.”

“There’s nothing more we can do for him,” said Edie sharply. “The vet knows best.”

“I won’t let you kill him.”

“What do you want to do? Prolong the poor thing’s suffering?”

Allison, lip trembling, dropped to her knees by the cat’s box and burst into hysterical tears.

That had been yesterday afternoon at three o’clock. Since then, Allison had not moved from the cat’s side. She had eaten no supper; she had refused pillow and blanket; she had simply lain all night on the cold floor wailing and crying. Edie, for about half an hour, had sat in the kitchen with her and attempted to deliver a brisk little talk about how everything in the world died and how Allison must learn to accept this. But Allison had only cried harder; and finally Edie had given it up and gone in her bedroom and shut the door and started an Agatha Christie novel.

At last—about midnight, by Edie’s bedside clock—the crying had stopped. Now she was at it again. Edie took a sip of her tea. Harriet was deeply absorbed in Captain Scott. Across the table, Allison’s breakfast stood untouched.

“Allison,” Edie said.

Allison, shoulders shaking, did not respond.

“Allison. Get over here and eat your breakfast.” It was the third time she had said it.

“I’m not hungry,” came the muffled reply.

“Look here,” Edie snapped. “I’ve had just about enough. You’re too old to be acting this way. I want you to stop wallowing on the floor this instant and get up and eat your breakfast. Come on, now. It’s getting cold.”

This rebuke was greeted only by a howl of anguish.

“Oh, for Heaven’s sake,” said Edie, turning back to her breakfast. “Do as you please. I wonder what your teachers at school would say if they could see you rolling on the floor like a big baby.”

“Listen to this,” Harriet said suddenly. She began to read from her book in a pedantic voice:

“ ‘Titus Oates is very near the end, one feels. What he or we will do, God only knows. We discussed the matter after breakfast; he is a brave fine fellow and understands the situation, but—’ ”

“Harriet, we are none of us very interested right now in Captain Scott,” said Edie. She felt very nearly at the end of her own rope.

“All I’m saying is that Scott and his men were brave. They kept their spirits up. Even when they were caught in the storm and they knew they were all going to die.” She continued, her voice rising: “ ‘We are very near the end, but have not and will not lose our good cheer—’ ”

“Well, death is certainly a part of life,” said Edie resignedly.

“Scott’s men loved their dogs and their ponies, but it got so bad they had to shoot every single one of them. Listen to this, Allison. They had to eat them.” She flipped back a few pages and bent her head to the book again. “ ‘Poor beasts! They have done wonderfully well considering the terrible circumstances under which they worked, but yet it is hard to have to kill them so—’ ”

“Make her stop!” Allison wailed from the floor, hands clamped over her ears.

“Shut up, Harriet,” said Edie.

“But—”

“No buts. Allison,” she said sharply, “get off the floor. Crying isn’t going to help the cat.”

“I’m the only one here who loves Weenie. Nobody else ca-ha-hares.”

“Allison. Allison. One day,” said Edie, reaching for the butter knife, “your brother brought me a toad he found that had its leg cut off by the lawn mower.”

The screams from the kitchen floor which greeted this were such that Edie thought her head would split in two, but she kept on buttering her toast—which was by now stone cold—and plowed ahead: “Robin wanted me to make it better. But I couldn’t. There was nothing I could do for the poor thing but kill it. Robin didn’t understand that when creatures are suffering like that, sometimes the kindest thing to do is to put them out of their misery. He cried and cried. There was no way I could make him understand that the toad was better off dead than in such terrible pain. Of course he was much younger than you are now.”

This little soliloquy had no effect on its intended subject, but when Edie glanced up, she became aware, with some annoyance, that Harriet was staring at her with parted lips.

“How did you kill it, Edie?”

“As mercifully as I could,” said Edie crisply. She had chopped its head off with a hoe—and, moreover, had been careless enough to do it in front of Robin, for which she was sorry—but she had no intention of going into this.

“Did you step on it?”

“Nobody listens to me,” Allison burst out suddenly. “Mrs. Fountain poisoned Weenie. I know she did. She said she wanted to kill him. He used to walk over in her yard and get footprints on the windshield of her car.”

Edie sighed. They had been through this before. “I don’t like Grace Fountain any more than you do,” she said, “she’s a spiteful old bird, and she’s got her nose into everything, but you can’t convince me she poisoned that cat.”

“I know she did. I hate her.”

“It does you no good to think like this.”

“She’s right, Allison,” said Harriet abruptly. “I don’t think Mrs. Fountain poisoned Weenie.”

“What do you mean?” said Edie, turning to Harriet, suspicious of this unexpected concord of opinion.

“I mean that if she did, I think I would know about it.”

“And how would you know something like that?”

“Don’t worry, Allison. I don’t think she poisoned him. But if she did,” said Harriet, going back to her book, “she’ll be sorry.”

Edie, who had no intention of letting this statement drop, was about to pursue it when Allison burst out again, louder than ever.

“I don’t care who did it,” she sobbed, the heels of her hands dug hard in her eyes. “Why does Weenie have to die? Why did all those poor people freeze to death? Why is everything always so horrible all the time?”

Edie said: “Because that’s how the world is.”

“The world makes me sick, then.”

“Allison, stop.”

“I won’t. I’ll never stop thinking it.”

“Well, that’s a very sophomoric attitude,” said Edie. “Hating the world. The world doesn’t care.”

“I’ll hate it for the rest of my life. I’ll never stop hating it.”

“Scott and his men were very brave, Allison,” said Harriet. “Even when they were dying. Listen. ‘We are in a desperate state, feet frozen, etcetera. No fuel and a long way from food, but it would do your heart good to be in our tent, to hear our songs and cheery conversation—’ ”

Edie stood up. “That’s it,” she said. “I’m taking the cat to Dr. Clark’s. You girls stay here.” Stolidly, she began to gather up the plates, ignoring the renewed shrieks from the floor near her feet.

“No, Edie,” said Harriet, scraping back her chair. She hopped up and ran over to the cardboard box. “Poor Weenie,” she said, stroking the shivering cat. “Poor kitty. Please don’t take him now, Edie.”

The old cat’s eyes were half-shut with pain. Feebly, it thumped its tail on the side of the box.

Allison, half-choked with sobs, put her arms around it and drew its face close to her cheek. “No, Weenie,” she hiccupped. “No, no, no.”

Edie came over and, with surprising gentleness, took the cat from her. As she lifted it, gingerly, it gave a delicate and almost human cry. Its grizzled muzzle, drawn in a yellow-toothed rictus, looked like an old man’s, patient and worn with suffering.

Edie scratched it, tenderly, behind the ears. “Hand me that towel, Harriet,” she said.

Allison was trying to say something, but she was crying so hard that she couldn’t.

“Don’t, Edie,” pleaded Harriet. She, too, had begun to cry. “Please. I haven’t had a chance to say goodbye.”

Edie stooped down and got the towel herself, then straightened up again. “Say goodbye, then,” she said impatiently. “The cat’s going outside now, and he may be some time.”

————

An hour later, her eyes still red, Harriet was on Edie’s back porch scissoring a picture of a baboon from the B volume of the Compton’s Encyclopedia. After Edie’s old blue Oldsmobile had pulled out of the driveway, she too had lain on the kitchen floor by the empty box and cried as stormily as her sister. After her tears subsided, she had got up and gone in her grandmother’s bedroom and, picking a straight pin from the tomato-shaped pincushion on the bureau, had amused herself for a few minutes by scratching I HATE EDIE in tiny letters on the footboard of Edie’s bed. But this proved strangely unsatisfying and while she was huddled sniffling on the carpet by the footboard, she was struck by a more cheering idea. After she cut the baboon’s face from the encyclopedia she intended to paste it over Edie’s face in a portrait in the family album. She had attempted to interest Allison in the project but Allison, face down by the cat’s empty box, refused even to look.

The gate to Edie’s back yard screeched open and Hely Hull darted in without closing it behind him. He was eleven, a year younger than Harriet, and wore his sandy hair down to his shoulders in imitation of his older brother, Pemberton. “Harriet,” he called, thumping up the porch steps, “hey, Harriet,” but he stopped short when he heard the monotonous sobs from the kitchen. When Harriet glanced up, he saw she’d been crying, too.

“Oh, no,” he said, stricken. “They’re making you go to camp, aren’t they?”

Camp Lake de Selby was Hely’s—and Harriet’s—greatest terror. It was a Christian children’s camp they had both been forced to attend the summer before. Boys and girls (segregated on opposite sides of the lake) were compelled to spend four hours a day in Bible study and the rest of the time braiding lanyards and acting in sappy humiliating skits the counselors had written. Over on the boys’ side, they’d insisted on pronouncing Hely’s name the wrong way—not “Healy,” as was correct, but—humiliatingly—“Helly” to rhyme with “Nelly.” Worse: they’d forcibly cut his hair short at assembly, as entertainment for the other campers. And though Harriet on her end had rather enjoyed the Bible classes—mainly because they gave her a captive and easily shocked forum in which to air her unorthodox views of Scripture—she had been wholly as miserable there as Hely: up at five and lights out at eight, no time to herself and no books but the Bible, and lots of “good old-fashioned discipline” (paddling, public ridicule) to enforce these rules. At the end of the six weeks, she and Hely and the other First Baptist campers had sat staring listlessly out the windows of the church bus, silent in their green Camp Lake de Selby T-shirts, absolutely shattered.

“Tell your mother you’ll kill yourself,” said Hely breathlessly. A large group of his school friends had been packed off the day before, trudging with resigned slumps toward the bright green school bus as if it were headed not to summer camp but straight down into Hell. “I told them I’d kill myself if they made me go back. I said I’d lie down in the road and let a car run over me.”

“That’s not the problem.” Tersely, Harriet explained about the cat.

“So you’re not going to camp?”

“Not if I can help it,” said Harriet. For weeks, she had watched the mail for the registration forms; when they arrived, she tore them up and hid them in the garbage. But the danger was not yet over. Edie, who was the real menace (her absent-minded mother hadn’t even noticed that the forms were missing), had already bought Harriet a knapsack and a new pair of sneakers, and was asking to see the Supplies list.

Hely picked up the picture of the baboon and examined it. “What’s this for?”

“Oh. That.” She explained.

“Maybe another animal would be better,” suggested Hely. He disliked Edie. She was always teasing him about his hair and pretending that she thought he was a girl. “Maybe a hippopotamus. Or a pig.”

“I think this is pretty good.”

He leaned over her shoulder, eating boiled peanuts from his pocket, and watched as Harriet glued the snarling baboon face over Edie’s, so that it was artfully framed by her own hairdo. Fangs bared, it glared aggressively at the viewer as Harriet’s grandfather—in profile—beamed raptly at his simian bride. Beneath the photograph was written, in Edie’s own hand:

Edith and Hayward

Ocean Springs, Mississippi

June 11th, 1935

Together, they studied it.

“You’re right,” said Hely. “That is pretty good.”

“Yes. I thought about a hyena but this is better.”

They had just put the encyclopedia back on the shelf and replaced the album (embossed, in gilt, with Victorian curlicues) when they heard the crunch of Edie’s car turning into the gravel drive.

The screen door slammed. “Girls,” they heard her call, business as usual.

No answer.

“Girls, I decided to be a good sport and bring the cat home so you could give him a funeral, but if one of you doesn’t answer me this minute I’m turning right around and taking him back out to Dr. Clark’s.”

There was a stampede to the front room. All three children stood in the doorway, staring at her.

Edie raised an eyebrow. “Why, who’s this little miss?” she said to Hely in mock surprise. She was very fond of him—he reminded her of Robin, except for the horrible long hair—and had no idea that by what she regarded as good-natured teasing she had incurred his bitter hatred. “Can that be you, Hely? I’m afraid I didn’t recognize you beneath your golden tresses.”

Hely smirked. “We were looking at some pictures of you.”

Harriet kicked him.

“Well, that can’t have been very exciting,” Edie said. “Girls,” she said to her granddaughters, “I thought you’d want to bury the cat in your own yard so I stopped on the way back and asked Chester to dig a grave.”

“Where’s Weenie?” said Allison. Her voice was hoarse, and she had a crazy look in her eye. “Where is he? Where did you leave him?”

“With Chester. He’s wrapped up in his towel. I suggest you don’t open it, girls.”

————

“Come on,” said Hely, bumping Harriet with his shoulder. “Let’s have a look.”

He and Harriet were standing in the dark tool shed in Harriet’s yard, where Weenie’s body lay swaddled in a blue bath towel on Chester’s workbench. Allison—still crying her eyes out—was inside digging through drawers for an old sweater the cat had liked to sleep on and that she wanted to bury with him.

Harriet glanced out the toolshed’s window, which was furred with dust. At the corner of the bright summer lawn was the silhouette of Chester, stepping down hard on the edge of the spade.

“All right,” she said. “But quick. Before she gets back.”

Only later did Harriet realize that it was the first time she had ever seen or touched a dead creature. She was not expecting it to be such a shock. The cat’s flank was cold and unyielding, hard to the touch, and an ugly thrill ran through her fingertips.

Hely leaned in for a closer look. “Gross,” he said cheerfully.

Harriet stroked the orange fur. It was still orange, and as soft as ever, despite the frightening woodenness of the body beneath. His paws were stretched out rigid, as if he was bracing himself against being thrown into a tub of water, and his eyes—which even in old age and suffering had been a clear, ringing green—were clotted with a gelatinous film.

Hely bent to touch him. “Hey,” he yelped, and snatched his hand back. “Gross.”

Harriet didn’t flinch. Gingerly, she slid her hand to touch the pink spot on the cat’s side where the hair had never quite grown right, the place the maggots had eaten when he was tiny. Weenie, in life, would never let anybody touch him there; he would hiss and take a swipe at anybody who tried it, even Allison. But the cat was still, his lips drawn back from the clenched needles of his teeth. The skin was puckered, rough like brushed gloveskin, and cold cold cold.

So this was the secret, what Captain Scott and Lazarus and Robin all knew, what even the cat had come to know in its last hour: this was it, the passage to the stained-glass window. When Scott’s tent was found, eight months later, Bowers and Wilson lay with their sleeping bags closed over their heads and Scott was in an open bag with his arm thrown over Wilson. That was the Antarctic, and this a breezy green morning in May, but the form beneath her palm was as hard as ice. She ran a knuckle over Weenie’s white-stockinged forefoot. It seems a pity, Scott had written with his stiffening hand, as the white closed in softly from the white immensities, and the faint pencil letters grew fainter on the white paper, but I do not think I can write any more.

“Bet you won’t touch his eyeball,” said Hely, inching closer. “I dare you.”

Harriet scarcely heard him. This was what her mother and Edie had seen: outer dark, the terror you never came back from. Words that slid off paper into emptiness.

In the cool dim of the shed, Hely drew closer. “Are you scared?” he whispered. His hand stole to her shoulder.

“Cut it out,” said Harriet, shrugging away.

She heard the screen door slam shut, her mother calling after Allison; quickly, she tossed the towel back over the cat.

It would never wholly leave her, the vertigo of this moment; it would be with her for the rest of her life, and it would always be mingled inextricably with the dim tool-shed—shiny metal sawteeth, the smells of dust and gasoline—and three dead Englishmen beneath a cairn of snow with icicles glittering in their hair. Amnesia: ice floes, violent distances, the body turned to stone. The horror of all bodies.

“Come on,” said Hely, with a toss of his head. “Let’s get out of here.”

“I’m coming,” said Harriet. Her heart was pounding, and she felt breathless—not with the breathlessness of fear, but with something very close to rage.

————

Though Mrs. Fountain had not poisoned the cat, she was nonetheless pleased that it was dead. From the window over her sink—the observation point at which she stood for hours each day, watching the comings and goings of her neighbors—she had spied Chester digging the hole, and now, squinting through the kitchen curtain, she saw the three children gathered around it. One of them—the little girl, Harriet—held a bundle in her arms. The big girl was crying.

Mrs. Fountain pulled her pearly-framed reading glasses low on her nose, and shouldered a cardigan with jeweled buttons over her housedress—it was a warm day but she got chilled easily, she needed a wrap when she went out—and pegged along out her back door and over to the fence.

It was a fast, fresh, airy day. Low clouds raced across the sky. The grass—which needed cutting, it was a tragedy how Charlotte had let the place go—was sprinkled with violets, wild oxalis, dandelions gone to seed, and the wind rippled through it in erratic currents and eddies like wind on the sea. Wisteria tendrils undulated from the screen porch, delicate as seaweed. It hung so thick over the back of the house that you could hardly see the porch anymore; it was pretty enough when the flowers were in bloom but the rest of the time it was a shaggy mess and besides, the weight of it was liable to pull the porch down—wisteria was a parasite, it weakened the structure of a house if you let it crawl all over the place—but some people had to learn everything the hard way.

She had expected the children to greet her, and stood expectantly by the fence for some moments, but they did not acknowledge her and kept on about whatever they were doing.

“What are yall children doing over there?” she called sweetly.

They looked up, startled as deer.

“Are yall burying something?”

“No,” shouted Harriet, the little one, in a tone which Mrs. Fountain did not much like. She was a smart aleck, that one.

“Sure looks like it.”

“Well, we’re not.”

“I believe yall are burying that old orange cat.”

No reply.

Mrs. Fountain squinted over the tops of her reading glasses. Yes, the big girl was crying. She was too old for such nonsense. The little one was lowering the swaddled form into the hole.

“That’s exactly what yall are doing,” she crowed. “You can’t fool me. That cat was a nuisance. He used to walk over here every day and get his nasty footprints all over the windshield of my car.”

“Don’t pay any attention to her,” Harriet said to her sister, between her teeth. “Old bitch.”

Hely had never heard Harriet swear before. A wicked shiver of pleasure fluttered down the back of his neck. “Bitch,” he repeated, more audibly, the bad word delicious on his tongue.

“What’s that?” shrilled Mrs. Fountain. “Who said that over there?”

“Shut up,” Harriet said to Hely.

“Which one of you said that? Who’s over there with you girls?”

Harriet had dropped to her knees and, with her bare hands, was shoving the pile of dirt back into the hole, over the blue towel. “Come on, Hely,” she hissed. “Quick. Help me.”

“Who’s that over there?” squawked Mrs. Fountain. “You’d better answer me. I’m going right inside the house and call your mother.”

“Shit,” said Hely, emboldened and flushed with daring. He dropped to his knees beside Harriet and, rapidly, began to help her push the dirt in. Allison, a fist over her mouth, stood over them with tears streaming down her face.

“You children better answer me.”

“Wait,” cried Allison suddenly. “Wait.” She turned from the grave and dashed back through the grass towards the house.

Harriet and Hely paused, wrist-deep in dirt.

“What’s she doing?” whispered Hely, wiping his brow with the wrist of his muddied hand.

“I don’t know,” said Harriet, baffled.

“Is that the little Hull boy?” cried Mrs. Fountain. “You come over here. I’m going to call your mother. You come over here right now.”

“Go on and call, bitch,” muttered Hely. “She’s not at home.”

The screen door slammed, and Allison ran out, stumbling, an arm over her face, blinded by tears. “Here,” she said, and she fell to her knees beside them and tossed something into the open grave.

Hely and Harriet craned to look. It was a picture of Allison, a studio portrait taken at school the autumn before, smiling up at them from the raw dirt. She had on a pink sweater with a lace collar, and pink barrettes in her hair.

Sobbing, Allison scooped a double handful of earth and threw it in the grave, over her own smiling face. The dirt rattled as it hit the photograph. For a moment the pink of Allison’s sweater was still visible, her timid eyes still peering hopefully through a blear of soil; another black handful rattled over them and they were gone.

“Come on,” she cried impatiently, as the two younger children stared down into the hole and then at her, bewildered. “Come on, Harriet. Help me.”

“That’s it,” shrieked Mrs. Fountain. “I’m going back in the house. I’m going to go get right on the telephone with your mothers. Look. I’m going back inside now. You children are all going to be mighty sorry.”