The Little Friend полностью

“Set down, Gum,” Farish said sternly. This was a regular little routine between the two of them; it happened every meal.

With regretful glances, and a great show of reluctance, Gum limped murmuring to her chair as Farish—rattling with product, ding-dong to the eyeballs—thundered back and forth between stove and table and the refrigerator on the front porch, setting the table with great thumps and clanks. When he thrust an overloaded plate at her, she waved it weakly aside.

“You boys go on and eat first,” she said. “Eugene, won’t you take this?”

Farish glowered at Eugene—who was sitting quietly, hands folded in his lap—and plunked the plate down in front of Gum.

“Here … Eugene …” With trembling hands, she offered the plate to Eugene, who shied back, reluctant to take it.

“Gum, you aint as big as a minute,” roared Farish. “You’re going to end up back in the hospital.”

Silently, Danny pushed the hair out of his face and helped himself to a square of cornbread. He was too hot and too wired to eat and the ungodly stench from the crank lab—combined with that of stale grease and onions—was enough to make him feel he would never be hungry again.

“Yes,” said Gum, smiling wistfully at the tablecloth. “I sure do love cooking for you all.”

Danny was fairly sure that his grandmother did not love cooking for her boys quite so much as she said she did. She was a tiny, emaciated, leather-brown creature, stooped from continual cringing, so decrepit that she looked closer to a hundred than her real age—somewhere around sixty. Born to a Cajun-French father and a mother who was a full-blood Chickasaw, in a sharecropper’s shack with a dirt floor and no plumbing (privations on which she daily refreshed her grandsons), Gum had been married, at thirteen, to a fur trapper twenty-five years her senior. It was hard to imagine what she’d looked like in those days—in her hardscrabble youth there had been no money for foolishness like cameras and pictures—but Danny’s father (who had adored Gum, passionately, more as a suitor than a son) remembered her as a girl with red cheeks and shiny black hair. She’d been only fourteen when he was born; she was (he’d said) “the prettiest little coon-ass gal you ever saw.” By coon-ass he meant Cajun, but when Danny was small he’d had a vague idea that Gum was part raccoon—an animal which, with her sunken dark eyes, her sharp face and snaggled teeth and small, dark, wrinkled hands, she indeed resembled.

For Gum was tiny. She seemed to shrink every year. Now she was shriveled to little more than a hollow-cheeked cinder, her mouth as thin and ruinous as a razor. As she punctually reminded her grandsons, she’d worked hard all her life, and it was hard work (which she wasn’t ashamed of—not Gum) that had worn her down before her time.

Curtis—happily—smacked away at his supper while Farish continued to clickety-click about Gum with abrupt offers of food and service, all of which, with an air of affliction, she sadly waved aside. Farish was fiercely attached to his grandmother; her crippled and generally pitiable air never failed to move him, and she in turn flattered Farish in the same soft, meek, obsequious manner that she had flattered their dead father. And as her flattery had encouraged all that was worst in Danny’s father (nursing his self-pity, feeding his rages, pampering his pride and above all his violent streak), something in the way she fawned on Farish also encouraged his brutal side.

“Farish, I can’t eat that much,” she was murmuring (despite the fact that the moment had passed, and her grandsons all had plates of their own now). “Give this plate to Brother Eugene.”

Danny rolled his eyes and pushed back slightly from the table. His patience was badly frayed from the crank, and everything in his grandmother’s manner (her weak gesture of refusal, her tone of suffering) was calculated—sure as the multiplication table—to make Farish whip around and blow up at Eugene.

And sure enough it did. “Him?” Farish glowered down at the end of the table at Eugene, who sat gobbling his food with hunched shoulders. Eugene’s appetite was a sore point, a source of relentless strife, since he ate more than anyone in the household and contributed little to the expenses.

Curtis—mouth full—reached out a greasy paw to take the piece of chicken that his grandmother proffered with trembling hand across the table. Quick as a flash, Farish slapped it down: an ugly whack that made Curtis’s mouth drop open.

A few globules of half-chewed food fell out on the tablecloth.

“Aww … let im have it if he wants it,” Gum said, tenderly. “Here, Curtis. You want you some more to eat?”

“Curtis,” said Danny, bristling with impatience; he didn’t think he could stand to watch this unpleasant little suppertime drama unroll for the thousandth time. “Here. Take mine.” But Curtis—who didn’t understand the exact nature of this game and never would—was smiling and reaching out for the chicken leg trembling in front of his face.