“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.