Unlike Allison—whom other children accepted vaguely, without quite knowing why—Harriet was a bossy little girl, not particularly liked. The friends she did have were not lukewarm or casual, like Allison’s. They were mostly boys, mostly younger than herself, and fanatically devoted, riding their bicycles halfway across town after school to see her. She made them play Crusades, and Joan of Arc; she made them dress up in sheets and act out pageantry from the New Testament, in which she herself took the role of Jesus. The Last Supper was her favorite. Sitting all on one side of the picnic table, à la Leonardo, under the muscadine-draped pergola in Harriet’s back yard, they all waited eagerly for the moment when—after dispensing a Last Supper of Ritz crackers and grape Fanta—she would look around the table at them, fixing and holding each boy, for a matter of seconds, with her cold gaze. “And yet one of you,” she would say, with a calm that thrilled them, “one of you here tonight will betray me.”
“No! No!” they would shriek with delight—including Hely, the boy who played Judas, but then Hely was Harriet’s favorite and got to play not only Judas but all the other plum disciples: Saint John, Saint Luke, Saint Simon Peter. “Never, Lord!”
Afterwards, there was the procession to Gethsemane, which was located in the deep shade beneath the black tupelo tree in Harriet’s yard. Here Harriet, as Jesus, was forced to undergo capture by the Romans—violent capture, more boisterous than the version of it rendered in the Gospels—and this was exciting enough; but the boys mainly loved Gethsemane because it was played under the tree her brother was murdered in. The murder had happened before most of them were born but they all knew the story, had patched it together from fragments of their parents’ conversation or grotesque half-truths whispered by their older siblings in darkened bedrooms, and the tree had thrown its rich-dyed shadow across their imaginations ever since the first time their nursemaids had stooped on the corner of George Street to clasp their hands and point it out to them, with hissed cautions, when they were very small.
People wondered why the tree still stood. Everyone thought it should be cut—not just because of Robin, but because it had started to die from the top, melancholy gray bones broken and protruding above the brackish foliage, as if blasted by lightning. In the fall it turned a brilliant outraged red, and was pretty for a day or two before it abruptly dropped all its leaves and stood naked. The leaves, when they appeared again, were glossy and leathery and so dark that they were nearly black. They cast such deep shade that the grass hardly grew; besides, the tree was too big, too close to the house, if there came a strong enough wind, the tree surgeon had told Charlotte, she’d wake up one morning to find it crashed through her bedroom window (“not to mention that little boy,” he’d told his partner as he heaved himself back into his truck and slammed the door, “how can that poor woman wake up every morning of her life and look in her yard and see that thing?”). Mrs. Fountain had even offered to pay to have the tree removed, tactfully citing the danger posed to her own house. This was extraordinary, as Mrs. Fountain was so cheap she washed out her old tinfoil to roll in a ball and use again, but Charlotte only shook her head. “No, thank you, Mrs. Fountain,” she said, in a voice so vague that Mrs. Fountain wondered if she’d misunderstood.
“I tell you,” shrilled Mrs. Fountain. “I’m offering to pay for it! I’m glad to do it! It’s a danger to my house, too, and if a tornado comes and—”
“No, thank you.”
She was not looking at Mrs. Fountain—not even looking at the tree, where her dead son’s treehouse rotted forlornly in a decayed fork. She was looking across the street, past the empty lot where the ragged robin and witch grass grew tall, to where the train tracks threaded bleakly past the rusted roofs of Niggertown, far away.
“I tell you,” said Mrs. Fountain, her voice different. “I tell you, Charlotte. You think I don’t know, but I know what it’s like to lose a son. But it’s God’s will and you just have to accept it.” Encouraged by Charlotte’s silence, she continued: “Besides, he wasn’t your only child. At least you’ve got the others. Now, poor Lynsie—he was all I had. Not a day goes by when I don’t think of that morning I heard his plane was shot down. We were getting ready for Christmas, I was on a ladder in my nightgown and housecoat trying to fasten a sprig of mistletoe on to the chandelier when I heard that knock at the front. Porter, bless his heart—this was after his first heart attact, but before his second—”
Her voice broke, and she glanced at Charlotte. But Charlotte wasn’t there any more. She had turned from Mrs. Fountain and was drifting back towards the house.
That had been years ago and the tree still stood, with Robin’s old treehouse still rotting at the top of it. Mrs. Fountain, when she met Charlotte, was not so friendly now. “She don’t pay a bit of attention to either one of those girls,” she said to the ladies down at Mrs. Neely’s while she was having her hair done. “And that house is just crammed full of trash. If you look in the windows, there’s newspaper stacked almost to the ceiling.”
“I wonder,” said fox-faced Mrs. Neely, catching and holding Mrs. Fountain’s eye in the mirror as she reached for the hair spray, “if she don’t take a little drink every now and then?”
“I wouldn’t be at all surprised,” Mrs. Fountain said.
Because Mrs. Fountain often yelled at children from her porch, the children ran away and made up stories about her: that she kidnapped (and ate) little boys; that her prizewinning rose-bed was fertilized by their ground-up bones. Proximity to Mrs. Fountain’s house of horrors made the re-enactment of the arrest at Gethsemane in Harriet’s yard that much more thrilling. But though the boys succeeded sometimes in frightening each other about Mrs. Fountain, they did not have to try to frighten themselves about the tree. Something in its lineaments made them uneasy; the stifled drab of its shadow—only footsteps from the bright lawn, but immensities apart—was disquieting even if one knew nothing of its history. There was no need for them to remind themselves about what had happened because the tree reminded them itself. It had its own authority, its own darkness.
Because of Robin’s death, Allison had been teased cruelly in her early years of school (“Mommy, mommy, can I go outside and play with my brother?” “Absolutely not, you’ve dug him up three times this week!”). She’d endured the taunting in meek silence—no one knew quite how much, or for how long—until a kind teacher had finally discovered what was going on and put a stop to it.
But Harriet—perhaps because of her more ferocious nature, or possibly only because her classmates were too young to remember the murder—had escaped such persecution. The tragedy in her family reflected a spooky glamour on her which the boys found irresistible. Frequently she spoke of her dead brother, with a strange, willful obstinacy which implied not only that she had known Robin but that he was still alive. Time and again, the boys found themselves staring at the back of Harriet’s head or the side of her face. Sometimes it seemed to them as if she was Robin: a child like themselves, returned from the grave and knowing things they didn’t. In her eyes they felt the sting of her dead brother’s gaze, through the mystery of their shared blood. Actually, though none of them realized it, there was very little resemblance between Harriet and her brother, even in photographs; fast, bright, slippery as a minnow, he could not have been further from Harriet’s brooding and her lofty humorlessness, and it was fully the force of her own character that held and transfixed them, not his.
Not much irony suggested itself to the boys, no hard parallels, between the tragedy they re-enacted in the darkness beneath the black-gum tupelo and the tragedy which had taken place there twelve years before. Hely had his hands full, since as Judas Iscariot he gave Harriet up to the Romans but also (as Simon Peter) cut off a centurion’s ear in her defense. Pleased and nervous, he counted out the thirty boiled peanuts for which he would betray his Savior, and, as the other boys jostled and nudged him, moistened his lips with an extra swig of grape Fanta. In order to betray Harriet he got to kiss her on the cheek. Once—egged on by the other disciples—he had kissed her smack on the mouth. The sternness with which she’d wiped it away—a contemptuous swipe across the mouth with the back of her hand—had thrilled him more than the kiss itself.