“Tell on you for what? I didn’t!”
“You sure did. And you know what else?” Harriet quailed at her steady, bloodshot gaze. “Yall got that poor woman fired over at Mr. Claude Hull’s house. Yes you did,” she said, over Harriet’s stutters of astonishment. “Mr. Claude drove over there last night and you should have heard how he talk to that poor woman, like she’s a dog. I heard the whole thing and so did Charley T.”
“I didn’t! I—”
“Listen at you!” Ida hissed. “You ought to be ashamed. Telling Mr. Claude that woman try to set the house on fire. And what you do then, but priss yourself on home and tell your mama that I don’t feed you right.”
“I didn’t tell on her! It was Hely!”
“I aint talking about him. I’m talking about you.”
“But I told him not to tell! We were in his room, and she banged on the door and started yelling—”
“Yes, and what you do then but come home and tell on me your own self. You’s mad at me when I left yesterday, because I didn’t want to sit around after work telling stories. Don’t say you wasn’t.”
“Ida! You know how Mama gets mixed up! All I said was—”
“I’ll tell you why you did it. You’s mad and spiteful that I don’t sit around all night cooking fried chicken and telling stories when I gots to get home and do my own work. After cleaning up for you folks all day.”
Harriet went outside. The day was hot, sun-bleached, soundless. She felt as if she’d just had a tooth filled at the dentist’s, pain blooming plum-black in her rear molars, walking through the glass doors into the glare and withering heat of the parking lot. Harriet, is somebody waiting to pick you up? Yes, maam, Harriet always said to the receptionist, whether somebody was waiting or not.
From the kitchen, all was silence. The shutters of her mother’s room were closed. Was Ida fired? Somehow—incredibly—the question caused her no pain or anxiety, only the same dull puzzlement as when she bit hard on the inside of her cheek after a novocaine shot and it didn’t hurt.
I’ll pick her some tomatoes for lunch, said Harriet to herself, and—squinting against the glare—went to the side of the house, to Ida’s little vegetable garden: an unfenced plot, twelve feet square, badly in need of weeding. Ida didn’t have space for a garden where she lived. Though she made them tomato sandwiches every day, she took most of the other vegetables home with her. Almost daily, Ida offered Harriet a kindness of some sort in exchange for help in the garden—a game of checkers, a story—which Harriet always refused; she hated yard-work, could not bear the dust on her hands, or the beetles, or the heat, or the stinging hairs on the squash vines which made her legs itch.
Now her selfishness made her feel sick. Many painful thoughts clustered about, pricking at her ceaselessly. Ida had to work hard all the time … not just here, but at her own house. What did Harriet ever have to do?
Some tomatoes. She’ll like that. She picked some bell peppers too, and okra, and a fat black eggplant: the summer’s first. She piled the muddy vegetables in a small cardboard box and then set to work weeding, gritting her teeth with displeasure. Vegetable plants—save only for the vegetables—looked like overgrown weeds to her, with their sprawling habits and rough, ungainly leaves, so she left what she wasn’t sure about and only pulled the weeds she was certain of: clover and dandelion (easy) and long switches of Johnson grass, which Ida had a tricky way of folding so they made a shrill, unearthy whistle when she put them between her lips and blew a certain way.
But the blades were sharp; and it was not long before one of them had sliced a red seam like a paper cut across the base of her thumb. Harriet—sweating—reared back on her dusty heels. She had some red cloth gardening gloves, child-sized, which Ida Rhew had bought for her at the hardware store last summer, and it made her feel terrible even to think about them. Ida didn’t have much money, certainly not enough to spend on presents; even worse, Harriet disliked the garden so much that she had never worn the gloves, not once. Don’t you like them little gloves I gave you? Ida had asked her, rather sadly, one afternoon while they were sitting on the porch; when Harriet protested, she shook her head.
I do like them, I do. I wear them to play in.…
You don’t have to tell me a story, baby. I’m just sorry you don’t care anything about them.
Harriet’s face burned. The red gloves had cost three dollars—for poor Ida, nearly a day’s work. Now that she thought about it, she realized that the red gloves were the only present that Ida had ever given her. And she had lost them! How could she have been so careless? For a long time, in the winter, they had lain neglected in a galvanized tub in the toolshed, with the pruning shears and the hedge clippers and some other tools of Chester’s.…
She left her weeding, uprooted shoots scattered harumscarum across the dirt, and hurried to the toolshed. But the gloves weren’t in the galvanized tub. They weren’t in Chester’s tool-bench, either; they weren’t on the shelf with the flowerpots and fertilizer; they weren’t behind the caked tins of varnish and Spackle and house paint.
On the shelves she found badminton rackets, pruning shears and handsaw, numberless extension cords, a yellow plastic hard hat like construction workers wore; more garden tools, of every description: loppers, rose-snips, weed-fork and shrub rake and three different sizes of trowel; Chester’s own gloves. But not the gloves that Ida had given her. She could feel herself getting hysterical. Chester knows where they are, she told herself. I’ll ask him. Chester only worked on Mondays; on other days, he worked either for the county—pulling weeds and cutting grass, in the cemetery—or at odd jobs around town.
She was breathing hard, in the dusty, gasoline-smelling dimness, staring at the litter of tools on the oily floor and wondering where to look next—for she had to find the red gloves; I have to, she thought, her eyes darting over the mess, I’ll die if I’ve lost them—when Hely ran up and poked his head in the door. “Harriet!” he gasped, clinging to the door frame. “We’ve got to go get the bikes!”
“Bikes?” said Harriet, after a confused silence.
“They’re still there! My dad noticed my bike was gone and he’s going to whip me if I’ve lost it! Come on!”
Harriet tried to focus her attention on the bicycles, but all she could think of were the gloves. “I’ll go later,” she said at last.
“No! Now! I’m not going by myself!”
“Well, wait a little while, and I’ll—”
“No!” Hely wailed. “We have to go now!”
“Look, I’ve got to go in and wash my hands. Put all this junk back on the shelf for me, okay?”
Hely stared at the jumble on the floor. “All of it?”
“Do you remember some red gloves I used to have? They used to be in that bucket there.”
Hely looked at her with apprehension, like she was crazy.
“Garden gloves. Red cloth with elastic at the wrist.”
“Harriet, I’m serious. The bikes have been outside all night. They might not even be there any more.”
“If you find them, just tell me, all right?”
She ran back to the vegetable bed and tossed the weeds she’d pulled into a big, careless pile. Never mind, she told herself, I’ll clean it up later.… Then she snatched up the box of vegetables and ran back into the house.
Ida wasn’t in the kitchen. Quickly, without soap, Harriet rinsed the dirt off her hands at the sink. Then she carried the box into the living room, where she found Ida sitting in her tweed chair with her knees apart and her head in her hands.
“Ida?” Harriet said timidly.
Stiffly, Ida Rhew swung her head around. Her eyes were still red.
“I—I brought you something,” Harriet stammered. She set the cardboard box down on the floor by Ida’s feet.
Dully, Ida stared down at the vegetables. “What am I going to do?” she said, and shook her head. “Where will I go?”
“You can take them home if you want to,” said Harriet he
lpfully. She picked up the eggplant to show it to Ida.
“Your mama say I don’t do a good job. How I’m supposed to do a good job when she got newspapers and trash stacked clear up the walls?” Ida picked up the corner of her apron and wiped her eyes on it. “Alls she pays me is twenty dollars a week. And that aint right. Odean over at Miss Libby’s gets thirty-five and she aint got a mess like this nor two children to fool with, either.”
Harriet’s hands felt useless, dangling at her sides. She longed to hug Ida, to kiss her cheek, to fall in her lap and burst into tears—yet something in Ida’s voice and in the tense, unnatural way that Ida sat made her afraid to come any closer.
“Your mama say—she say yall are big now and don’t need looking after any more. You’s both in school. And after school, yall can take of yourselves.”
Their eyes met—Ida’s, red and teary; Harriet’s round and ringing with horror—and stayed together for a moment that Harriet would remember until she died. Ida looked away first.
“And she’s right,” she said, in a more resigned voice. “Allison’s in high school and you—you don’t need anybody to stay at home all day and watch out for you any more. You’s in school most of the year anyway.”
“I’ve been in school for seven years!”
“Well, that’s what she tell me.”
Harriet dashed upstairs to her mother’s room and ran in without knocking. She found her mother sitting on the side of the bed and Allison on her knees, crying with her face pressed into the bedspread. When Harriet came in, she raised her head and, with swollen eyes, gave Harriet a look so anguished that it took her aback.
“Not you, too,” said her mother. Her voice was blurred and her eyes drowsy. “Leave me alone, girls. I want to lie down for a minute.…”
“You can’t fire Ida.”
“Well, I like Ida too, girls, but she doesn’t work for free and lately it seems as if she’s dissatisfied.”
These were all things that Harriet’s father said; her voice was slow and mechanical, as if she were reciting a memorized speech.
“You can’t fire her,” repeated Harriet shrilly.
“Your father says—”
“So what? He doesn’t live here.”
“Well, girls, you’ll have to talk to her yourself. Ida agrees with me that neither of us are happy with the way things have been working out around here.”
There was a long pause.
“Why’d you tell Ida that I told on her?” Harriet said. “What’d you say?”
“We’ll talk about this later.” Charlotte swung around and lay down on the bed.
“No! Now!”
“Don’t worry, Harriet,” Charlotte said. She closed her eyes. “And don’t cry, Allison, please don’t, I can’t stand it,” she said, her voice trailing fitfully away. “It’ll all work out. I promise.…”
Screaming, spitting, scratching, biting: none of these were adequate to the rage that blazed up in Harriet. She stared down at her mother’s serene face. Peacefully her chest rose; peacefully her chest fell. Moisture glistened on her upper lip, where the coral lipstick had faded and feathered up into the tiny wrinkles; her eyelids were oily and bruised-looking, with deep hollows like thumb-prints at the inner corner.
Harriet went downstairs, leaving Allison at her mother’s bedside, smacking the banister with her hand. Ida was still in her chair and staring out the window with her cheek cupped in her palm and as Harriet stopped in the doorway and gazed at her sorrowfully Ida seemed to glow up out of her surroundings with a merciless reality. Never had she seemed quite so palpable, so fixed and robust and marvelously solid. Her chest, beneath the thin gray cotton of her faded dress, heaved powerfully with her breath. Impulsively, Harriet started over to the chair but Ida—the tears still glistening on her cheeks—turned her head and gave her a look that stopped her where she stood.
For a long time, the two of them looked at each other. The two of them had had staring contests since Harriet was small—it was a game, a test of wills, something to laugh about but this time it was no game; everything was wrong and terrible and there was no laughter when Harriet, at last, was forced to drop her eyes in shame. And in silence—for there was nothing else to do—Harriet hung her head and walked away, with the beloved sorrowful eyes burning into her back.
————
“What’s wrong?” said Hely when he saw Harriet’s dull, dazed expression. He’d been about to let her have it for taking so long, but the look on her face made him feel sure that they were both in big, big trouble: the worst trouble of their lives.
“Mother wants to fire Ida.”
“Tough,” said Hely agreeably.
Harriet looked at the ground, trying to remember how her face worked and her voice sounded when everything was okay.
“Let’s get the bikes later,” she said; and she was heartened by how casual her voice came out sounding.
“No! My dad’s going to kill me!”
“Tell him you left it over here.”
“I can’t just leave it out there. Somebody’ll steal it.… Look, you told me you would,” said Hely despairingly. “Just walk over there with me.…”
“Okay. But first you have to promise—”
“Harriet, please. I put up all this junk for you and everything.”
“Promise you’ll go back with me tonight. For the box.”
“Where you going to take it?” said Hely, brought up short. “We can’t hide it at my house.”
Harriet held up both hands: no fingers crossed.
“Fine,” said Hely, and held his hands up, too—it was their own private sign language, as binding as any spoken promise. Then he turned and broke into a fast walk, through the yard and down to the street, with Harriet right behind him.
————
Sticking close to the shrubbery and ducking behind trees, they were within forty feet or so of the frame house when Hely seized Harriet’s wrist, and pointed. On the median, a long spike of chrome glinted from beneath the unwieldy spread of the summersweet bush.
Cautiously, they advanced. The driveway was empty. Next door, at the house belonging to the dog Pancho and his mistress, was parked a white county car which Harriet recognized as Mrs. Dorrier’s. Every Tuesday, at three-forty-five, Mrs. Dorrier’s white sedan rolled slowly up to Libby’s house and out stepped Mrs. Dorrier, in her blue Health Service uniform, come to take Libby’s blood pressure: pumping the cuff tight around Libby’s little bird-boned arm, counting the seconds on her large, masculine wristwatch while Libby—who was unspeakably distressed by anything remotely to do with medicine, or illness or doctors—sat gazing at the ceiling, her eyes filling with tears behind her glasses, her hand pressed to her chest and her mouth trembling.
“Let’s do it,” Hely said, glancing over his shoulder.
Harriet nodded at the sedan. “The nurse is over there,” she whispered. “Wait till she leaves.”
They waited, behind a tree. After a couple of minutes, Hely said: “What’s taking so long?”
“Dunno,” said Harriet, who was wondering the same thing herself; Mrs. Dorrier had patients all over the county and was in and out of Libby’s in a flash, never loitering to chat or have a cup of coffee.
“I’m not waiting here all day,” Hely whispered, but then across the street the screen door opened and out stepped Mrs. Dorrier in her white cap and blue uniform. Following was the sun-baked Yankee woman, in dirty scuffs and a parrot-green housedress, with Pancho hooked over her arm. “Two dallors a pill!” she squawked. “I’m takin forteen dallors of medicine a day! I said to that boy down there at the pharmacist’s—”
“Medicine is expensive,” said Mrs. Dorrier politely, and turned to go; she was tall and thin, about fifty, with a gray streak in her black hair and very correct posture.
“I said, ‘Son, I gat emphysema! I gat gallstones! I gat arthritis! I—What’s your problem, Panch,” she said to Pancho, who had stiffened in her grasp, his gigantic ears cocked straight
out from the side of his head. Even though Harriet was hidden behind the tree, he still seemed to see her; his lemur-like eyes were fixed directly on her. He bared his teeth at her and then—with rabid ferocity—began to bark and struggle to get away.
The woman whacked him with the flat of her palm across the top of his head. “Shut your trap!”
Mrs. Dorrier laughed—slightly uncomfortable—and picked up her bag and started down the steps. “Next Tuesday then.”
“He’s all worked up,” called the woman, still wrestling with Pancho. “We had a winder-peeper last night. And the police come next door.”
“Great day!” Mrs. Dorrier paused, at the door of her sedan. “You don’t mean it!”
Pancho was still barking up a storm. As Mrs. Dorrier got in her car and slowly rolled away, the woman—standing on the sidewalk now—whacked Pancho again, then carried him inside and slammed the door.
Hely and Harriet waited, for a moment or two, breathless; and when they were sure that no cars were coming, they dashed across the street to the grassy median and dropped to their knees by the bicycles.
Harriet jerked her head at the driveway of the frame house. “Nobody’s home over there.” The stone in her chest had lifted somewhat and she felt lighter now, level and swift.
With a grunt, Hely wrenched his bicycle free.
“I need to get that snake from under there.”
The brusqueness of her voice made him feel sorry for her without understanding why. He stood his bike up. Harriet was astride her own bicycle, glaring at him.
“We’ll come back,” he said, avoiding her gaze. He hopped on and, together, they kicked off and glided down the street.
Harriet overtook him, and passed, aggressively, cutting him off at the corner. She was acting like she’d just had the shit beaten out of her, he thought, looking after her hunched low on the bike and pedalling furiously down the street, like Dennis Peet, or Tommy Scoggs, mean kids who beat up on smaller kids and got beaten up themselves by larger ones. Maybe it was because she was a girl—but when Harriet got in these mean daredevil moods, it excited him. The thought of the cobra excited him too; and though he didn’t feel comfortable explaining to Harriet—not yet—that he’d set half a dozen rattlesnakes loose in the apartment, it had just occurred to him that the frame house was empty, and might be for some time.