The Little Friend

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.