————
Though Mrs. Fountain had not poisoned the cat, she was nonetheless pleased that it was dead. From the window over her sink—the observation point at which she stood for hours each day, watching the comings and goings of her neighbors—she had spied Chester digging the hole, and now, squinting through the kitchen curtain, she saw the three children gathered around it. One of them—the little girl, Harriet—held a bundle in her arms. The big girl was crying.
Mrs. Fountain pulled her pearly-framed reading glasses low on her nose, and shouldered a cardigan with jeweled buttons over her housedress—it was a warm day but she got chilled easily, she needed a wrap when she went out—and pegged along out her back door and over to the fence.
It was a fast, fresh, airy day. Low clouds raced across the sky. The grass—which needed cutting, it was a tragedy how Charlotte had let the place go—was sprinkled with violets, wild oxalis, dandelions gone to seed, and the wind rippled through it in erratic currents and eddies like wind on the sea. Wisteria tendrils undulated from the screen porch, delicate as seaweed. It hung so thick over the back of the house that you could hardly see the porch anymore; it was pretty enough when the flowers were in bloom but the rest of the time it was a shaggy mess and besides, the weight of it was liable to pull the porch down—wisteria was a parasite, it weakened the structure of a house if you let it crawl all over the place—but some people had to learn everything the hard way.
She had expected the children to greet her, and stood expectantly by the fence for some moments, but they did not acknowledge her and kept on about whatever they were doing.
“What are yall children doing over there?” she called sweetly.
They looked up, startled as deer.
“Are yall burying something?”
“No,” shouted Harriet, the little one, in a tone which Mrs. Fountain did not much like. She was a smart aleck, that one.
“Sure looks like it.”
“Well, we’re not.”
“I believe yall are burying that old orange cat.”
No reply.
Mrs. Fountain squinted over the tops of her reading glasses. Yes, the big girl was crying. She was too old for such nonsense. The little one was lowering the swaddled form into the hole.
“That’s exactly what yall are doing,” she crowed. “You can’t fool me. That cat was a nuisance. He used to walk over here every day and get his nasty footprints all over the windshield of my car.”
“Don’t pay any attention to her,” Harriet said to her sister, between her teeth. “Old bitch.”
Hely had never heard Harriet swear before. A wicked shiver of pleasure fluttered down the back of his neck. “Bitch,” he repeated, more audibly, the bad word delicious on his tongue.
“What’s that?” shrilled Mrs. Fountain. “Who said that over there?”
“Shut up,” Harriet said to Hely.
“Which one of you said that? Who’s over there with you girls?”
Harriet had dropped to her knees and, with her bare hands, was shoving the pile of dirt back into the hole, over the blue towel. “Come on, Hely,” she hissed. “Quick. Help me.”
“Who’s that over there?” squawked Mrs. Fountain. “You’d better answer me. I’m going right inside the house and call your mother.”
“Shit,” said Hely, emboldened and flushed with daring. He dropped to his knees beside Harriet and, rapidly, began to help her push the dirt in. Allison, a fist over her mouth, stood over them with tears streaming down her face.
“You children better answer me.”
“Wait,” cried Allison suddenly. “Wait.” She turned from the grave and dashed back through the grass towards the house.
Harriet and Hely paused, wrist-deep in dirt.
“What’s she doing?” whispered Hely, wiping his brow with the wrist of his muddied hand.
“I don’t know,” said Harriet, baffled.
“Is that the little Hull boy?” cried Mrs. Fountain. “You come over here. I’m going to call your mother. You come over here right now.”
“Go on and call, bitch,” muttered Hely. “She’s not at home.”
The screen door slammed, and Allison ran out, stumbling, an arm over her face, blinded by tears. “Here,” she said, and she fell to her knees beside them and tossed something into the open grave.
Hely and Harriet craned to look. It was a picture of Allison, a studio portrait taken at school the autumn before, smiling up at them from the raw dirt. She had on a pink sweater with a lace collar, and pink barrettes in her hair.
Sobbing, Allison scooped a double handful of earth and threw it in the grave, over her own smiling face. The dirt rattled as it hit the photograph. For a moment the pink of Allison’s sweater was still visible, her timid eyes still peering hopefully through a blear of soil; another black handful rattled over them and they were gone.
“Come on,” she cried impatiently, as the two younger children stared down into the hole and then at her, bewildered. “Come on, Harriet. Help me.”
“That’s it,” shrieked Mrs. Fountain. “I’m going back in the house. I’m going to go get right on the telephone with your mothers. Look. I’m going back inside now. You children are all going to be mighty sorry.”
CHAPTER
2
——
The Blackbird
A few nights later, around ten o’clock, while her mother and sister were upstairs sleeping, Harriet gently turned the key in the lock of the gun cabinet. The guns were old and in bad repair, inherited by Harriet’s father from an uncle who’d collected them. Of this mysterious Uncle Clyde, Harriet knew nothing but his profession (engineering), his temperament (“sour,” said Adelaide, making a face; she had been at high school with him) and his end (plane crash, off the Florida coast). Because he had been “lost at sea” (that was the phrase that everyone used), Harriet never thought of Uncle Clyde as dead, exactly. Whenever his name was mentioned, she had a vague impression of a bearded tatterdemalion like Ben Gunn in Treasure Island, leading a lonely existence on some bleak, salty islet, his pants in rags and his wristwatch corroded from the seawater.
Carefully, with a palm on the glass so it wouldn’t rattle, Harriet worked the sticky old door of the gun cabinet. With a shiver, it popped open. On the top shelf was a case of antique pistols—tiny dueling sets, trimmed in silver and mother of pearl, freakish little Derringers scarcely four inches long. Below, ranked in chronological order and leaning to the left, stood the larger arms: Kentucky flintlocks; a grim, ten-pound Plains rifle; a rust-locked muzzle loader said to have been in the Civil War. Of the newer guns, the most impressive was a Winchester shotgun from World War I.
Harriet’s father, the owner of this collection, was a remote and unpleasant figure. People whispered about the fact that he lived in Nashville, since he and Harriet’s mother were still married to each other. Though Harriet had no idea how this arrangement had come to be (except, vaguely, that it had to do with her father’s work), it was quite unremarkable to her, since he had lived away from home as long as Harriet could remember. A check arrived every month for the household expenses; he came home for Christmas and Thanksgiving, and stopped by for several days in the fall on the way down to his hunting camp in the Delta. To Harriet, this arrangement seemed perfectly reasonable, suiting as it did the personalities of those involved: her mother, who had very little energy (staying in bed most of the day), and her father, who had too much energy, and the wrong kind. He ate fast, talked fast, and—unless he had a drink in his hand—was incapable of sitting still. In public, he was always kidding around, and people thought he was a hoot, but his unpredictable humors were not always so amusing in private, and his impulsive habit of saying the first thing that came into his head often hurt his family’s feelings.