I could hear Sparky whining and barking as I went around behind the school. Mr. Sylvester always tied him to a mulberry tree in the back, where he waited patiently for his savior to quit work. As I turned the corner, I saw he’d gotten his leash wrapped tight around the tree, entangling his back legs. Somebody whose face I couldn’t see was hunched over Sparky, talking baby talk to him and helping him get free. Untangled at last, Sparky rolled on his back and wriggled with pleasure as he got a stomach scratch from none other than Hargrove Peters. Hargrove seemed to be enjoying the experience as much as Sparky.
“Good boy,” Hargrove was saying in a soft voice I’d never heard him use before. “Wish my daddy’d let me have a cute little dog like you,” he crooned. “We could have all kinds of adventures together, couldn’t we, boy? We’d go camping and fishing. I could draw your picture and you could sleep in my bed. But Daddy says mutts are common and people would laugh at a boy who had a mongrel or rescued a dog from the pound.”
A sad look came over Hargrove’s face when he told Sparky that. But he bucked right up again when he switched to scratching Sparky behind his ears, sweet-talking him all the while. I stood dumbfounded, hardly believing my ears or eyes, trying to make sense of what I saw. Mr. Sylvester peered out the rear doors then, to see what all the noise had been about, just as Henry’s pickup pulled up behind me in the school parking lot.
I didn’t know what to think about having Harlan around again, either. At first I felt like I’d gone back in time to a place I didn’t care to revisit. But I had to give him credit. Within two weeks he’d cleaned the trailer till it shone, fixed the cabin’s windows, rechinked the logs, and replaced the rotted porch boards, and in his spare time he was overhauling the old motorbike he’d found on the cabin’s front porch. He said he’d teach me to drive it once he got it working, but I’d put him off so far, saying I’d see.
He was tinkering with it one Saturday morning when I walked up the path.
“Hey, Harlan,” I said.
He looked up from where he sat on the ground, six or eight greasy metal parts in front of him. He set down his wrench and wiped his hands on a rag. The rest of the motorcycle was leaning against the trailer. Mr. C’mere, poking along behind me, crawled underneath the trailer to sleep.
I handed Harlan a grocery bag full of sandwiches and fruit Fred had sent, and he set them inside the door. “You sure are thin,” I said.
“I know it.” He looked down at his belly that still curved in rather than out. “Drinking did that, and it won’t put back on. Them church ladies been feeding me like a pig.”
I stood there, not knowing what else to say.
“If you want me to go, I will,” he said, like it had been on his mind.
I didn’t say anything. If he’d said that on Thanksgiving, I’d have said fine, go, good riddance. But Bessie said Harlan was a stray like Mr. C, and as deserving of our kindness.
“I was wanting—” he began and stopped. He looked down at the ground like he was searching for something he’d lost.
“What?”
“I don’t know how to put it.” He studied his feet and sighed. “I ain’t got words like you do.”
“Say feelings, then.”
He thought. “I want to say I’m sorry, but I don’t know what to be sorry for. Oh heck, that’s not right.”
I waited.
He sighed and started again. “I’m sorry about your mama dying the way she did and I’m sorry I couldn’t do more for you while I was with her.”
“You did what you could,” I offered, not really meaning it.
“But it didn’t do no good!” he said, shaking his head. “That’s what I mean to say. I just want you to know how sorry I am. If I can do something now, I’ll do it, even if that something is leaving.”
He looked me straight in the eye, waiting. I couldn’t bring myself to be hard. “It was like it was,” I said, looking away.
“I know it,” he said. “But it ain’t right. For a smart kid like you, I mean. You got a good way of looking at things. I admire that.”
It pleased me a little when he said that, I don’t know why.
“So you just say the word and I’m gone. You’re doing real good and I don’t want to mess with that.”
Negative as I felt toward anything having to do with Mama, I couldn’t tell somebody that pitiful to get lost. “Harlan?”
“What?”
“Was there good in Mama?” I asked.
“You mean something good about her or something she was good at?”
“Either.”
He stood up, walked over to the trailer for his water bottle, and sat down on the middle step. He went quiet, sipping and thinking.
“That’s what I thought,” I said, turning to go to the cabin.
“Now, wait a minute, hold on,” he said, a little curtly. “I’ve killed a lot of brain cells since that time. She could be real funny, I remember; she liked to laugh. And she had a pretty voice. One night you had an earache and I remember she sang to you. She sang a long time, too. Rocked you and sang till you fell asleep.”
“I don’t remember.”
“You might not. You were bad off.”
“What did she sing?”
“Let me see now.” He hummed a little, but he wasn’t musical. “I can’t pull it up. Something pretty, though. She didn’t sing much, said it reminded her of her own mama, made her sad.”
“I don’t remember very much,” I
