The Little Friend Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 upclose 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 outsideschool. 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