With a flatness that she hoped would convey her contempt, Harriet read the curlicued vow aloud.
“Now, that’s an outstanding goal,” said Mr. Dial warmly. “It’s a call to prayer, but it’s a call to service, too. Here’s a young Christian who thinks about others in church and communi—Is something funny back there?”
The pallid snickerers fell silent.
Mr. Dial said, in amplified voice: “Harriet, what does this goal reveal about the person that wrote it?”
Hely tapped Harriet’s knee. To the side of his leg, he made an inconspicuous little thumbs-down gesture: loser.
“Is there a symbol?”
“Sir?” said Harriet.
“What symbol has this writer chosen to represent him- or herself?”
“An insect.”
“An insect??”
“It’s a butterfly,” said Annabel faintly, but Mr. Dial didn’t hear.
“What kind of an insect?” he demanded of Harriet.
“I’m not sure, but it looks like it’s got a stinger.”
Hely craned over to see. “Gross,” he cried, in apparently unfeigned horror, “what is that?”
“Pass it up here,” said Mr. Dial sharply.
“Who would draw something like that?” Hely said, looking around the room in alarm.
“It’s a butterfly,” said Annabel, more audibly this time.
Mr. Dial got up to reach for the paper and then very suddenly—so suddenly that everyone jumped—Curtis Ratliff made an exhilarated gobbling noise. Pointing at something on the table, he began to bounce excitedly in his seat.
“Rat my,” he gobbled. “Rat my.”
Mr. Dial stopped short. This had always been his terror, that the generally docile Curtis would someday erupt into some kind of violence or fit.
Quickly, he abandoned the podium and hurried to the front row. “Is something wrong, Curtis?” he said, bending low, his confidential tone audible over the whole classroom. “Do you need to use the toilet?”
Curtis gobbled, face scarlet. Up and down he bounced in the squealing chair—which was too small for him—so energetically that Mr. Dial winced and stepped backwards.
Curtis stabbed at the air with his finger. “Rat my,” he crowed. Unexpectedly, he lunged from his chair—Mr. Dial stumbled backward, with a small, humiliating cry—and snatched a crumpled paper off the table.
Then, very gently, he smoothed it flat and handed it to Mr. Dial. He pointed at the paper; he pointed to himself. “My,” he said, beaming.
“Oh,” said Mr. Dial. From the back of the room, he heard whispers, an impudent little snort of merriment. “That’s right, Curtis. That’s your paper.” Mr. Dial had set it aside, intentionally, from those of the other children. Though Curtis always demanded pencil and paper—and cried when he was denied them—he could neither read nor write.
“My,” Curtis said. He indicated his chest with his thumb.
“Yes,” said Mr. Dial, carefully. “That’s your goal, Curtis. That’s exactly right.”
He laid the paper back on the table. Curtis snatched the paper up again and thrust it back at him, smiling expectantly.
“Yes, thank you, Curtis,” said Mr. Dial, and pointed to his empty chair. “Oh, Curtis? You can sit down now. I’m just going to—”
“Wee.”
“Curtis. If you don’t sit down, I can’t—”
“Wee my!” Curtis shrieked. To Mr. Dial’s horror, he began to jump up and down. “Wee my! Wee my! Wee my!”
Mr. Dial—flabbergasted—glanced down at the crumpled paper which lay in his hand. There was no writing on it at all, only scribbles a baby might make.
Curtis blinked at him sweetly, and took a lumbering step closer. For a mongoloid he had very long eyelashes. “Wee,” he said.
————
“I wonder what Curtis’s goal was?” said Harriet ruminatively as she and Hely walked home together. Her patent-leather shoes clacked on the sidewalk. It had rained in the night and pungent clumps of cut grass, crushed petals blown from shrubbery, littered the damp cement.
“I mean,” said Harriet, “do you think Curtis even has a goal?”
“My goal was for Curtis to kick Mr. Dial’s ass.”
They turned down George Street, where the pecans and sweetgums were in full, dark leaf, and the bees buzzed heavily in crape myrtle, Confederate jasmine, pink floribunda roses. The fusty, drunken perfume of magnolias was as drenching as the heat itself, and rich enough to make your head ache. Harriet said nothing. Along she clicked, head down, her hands behind her back, lost in thought.
Sociably, in an effort to revive the conversation, Hely threw back his head and let out his best dolphin whinny.
O, they call him Flipper, Flipper, he sang, in a smarmy voice. Faster than light-ning.…
Harriet let out a gratifying little snort. Because of his whickering laugh, and the porpoise-like bulge of his forehead, Flipper was their nickname for Mr. Dial.
“What’d you write?” Hely asked her. He’d taken off his Sunday suit jacket, which he hated, and was snapping it around in the air. “Was it you put down that black mark?”
“Yep.”
Hely glowed. It was for cryptic and unpredictable gestures like this that he adored Harriet. You couldn’t understand why she did things like this, or even why they were cool, but they were cool. Certainly the black mark had upset Mr. Dial, especially after the Curtis debacle. He’d blinked and looked disturbed when a kid in the back held up an empty paper, blank except for the creepy little mark in the center. “Someone’s being funny,” he snapped, after an eerie skipped beat, and went on immediately to the next kid, because the black mark was creepy—why? It was just a pencil mark, but still the room had gone quiet for a strange instant as the kid held it up for everyone to see. And this was the hallmark of Harriet’s touch: she could scare the daylights out of you, and you weren’t even sure why.
He bumped her with his shoulder. “You know something funny? You should have wrote ass. Ha!” Hely was always thinking of tricks for other people to pull; he didn’t have the nerve to pull them himself. “In really tiny letters, you know, so he could barely read it.”
“The black spot is in Treasure Island,” said Harriet. “That’s what the pirates gave you when they were coming to kill you, just a blank piece of paper with a black spot on it.”
————
Once home, Harriet went into her bedroom and dug out a notebook she kept hidden beneath the underwear in her bureau drawer. Then she lay down on the other side of Allison’s twin bed where no one could see her from the doorway, though she was unlikely to be disturbed. Allison and her mother were at church. Harriet was supposed to have met them there—along with Edie and her aunts—but her mother would not notice or much care that she hadn’t shown up.
Harriet did not like Mr. Dial, but nonetheless the exercise in the Sunday school room had got her thinking. Put on the spot, she had been unable to think what her goals were—for the day, for the summer, for the rest of her life—and this disturbed her, because for some reason the question was merged and entangled in her mind with the recent unpleasantness of the dead cat in the toolshed.
Harriet liked to set herself difficult physical tests (once, she’d tried to see how long she could subsist on eighteen peanuts a day, the Confederate ration at the end of the war), but mostly these involved suffering to no practical point. The only real goal she was able to think of—and it was a poor one—was to win first prize in the library’s Summer Reading Contest. Harriet had entered it every year since she was six—and won it twice—but now that she was older and reading real novels, she didn’t stand a chance. Last year, the prize had gone to a tall skinny black girl who came two and three times a day to check out immense stacks of baby books like Dr. Seuss and Curious George and Make Way for Ducklings. Harriet had stood behind her in line, with her Ivanhoe and her Algernon Blackwood and her Myths and Legends of Japan, fuming. Even Mrs. Fawcett, the librarian, had raised an eyebrow in a way that made it perfectly plain how she felt about it.