The Little Friend

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”