Free The Little Friend by Donna Tartt

play) had given close to two hundred dollars to the memorial for his dead friend, a largesse which nine-year-old Pem claimed to have obtained by smashing his piggy bank but which he had actually stolen from his grandmother’s purse. (He had also attempted to contribute his mother’s engagement ring, ten silver teaspoons, and a Masonic tie tack whose origins no one was able to determine; it was set with diamonds and evidently worth some money.) But even without these handsome bequests, the total sum brought in by Robin’s classmates amounted to quite a lot; and it was suggested, instead of replacing the broken portrayal of the Wedding at Cana with the same scene, that something be done to honor not only Robin but the children who had worked so hard for him.
    The new window—unveiled, to the gasps of the First Baptist congregation, a year and a half later—depicted a pleasant blue-eyed Jesus seated on a boulder beneath an olive tree and involved in conversation with a red-haired boy in a baseball cap who bore an unmistakable resemblance to Robin.
    SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN TO COME UNTO ME
    ran the inscription beneath the scene, and, engraved on a plaque beneath:
    In Loving Memory of Robin Cleve Dufresnes
From the Schoolchildren of Alexandria, Mississippi
“For Theirs Shall Be the Kingdom of Heaven”
    For all her life, Harriet had seen her brother ablaze in the same constellation as the archangel Gabriel, Saint John the Baptist, Joseph and Mary and of course Christ himself. Thenoonday sun streamed through his exalted form; and the purified outlines of his face (bobbed nose, elfin smile) shone with the same beatific clarity. It was a clarity all the more radiant for being childish, more vulnerable than John the Baptist and the others; yet in his small face too was the serene indifference of eternity, like a secret they all shared.
    What exactly happened at Calvary, or in the grave? How did flesh ascend from lowliness and sorrow into this kaleidoscope of resurrection? Harriet didn’t know. But Robin knew, and the secret glowed in his transfigured face.
    Christ’s own passage—aptly—was described as a Mystery, yet people were queerly uninterested in getting to the bottom of it. What exactly did the Bible mean when it said that Jesus rose from the dead? Had He returned only in spirit, an unsatisfactory spook of some sort? Apparently not, according to the Bible: Doubting Thomas had put a finger in one of the nail holes in His palm; He had been spotted, solid enough, on the road to Emmaus; He had even eaten a little snack over at one of the disciples’ houses. But if He had in fact risen from the dead in His earthly body, where was He now? And if He loved everybody as much as He claimed to, why then did anybody ever die at all?
    When Harriet was about seven or eight, she had gone to the library in town and asked for some books on magic. But when she got them home, she was enraged to discover that they contained only tricks: balls disappearing from under cups, quarters dropping from people’s ears. Opposite the window which depicted Jesus and her brother was a scene of Lazarus raised from the dead. Over and over again, Harriet read the story about Lazarus in the Bible, but it refused to address even the most basic questions. What had Lazarus to say to Jesus and his sisters about his week in the grave? Did he still smell? Was he able to go back home and carry on living with his sisters, or was he frightening to the people around him and perhaps had to go off somewhere and live by himself like Frankenstein’s monster? She could not help thinking that if she, Harriet, had been there, she would have had more to say on the subject than Saint Luke did.
    Perhaps it was all a story. Perhaps Jesus himself hadn’trisen from the dead, though everyone said He had; but if indeed He had rolled the stone away and stepped living from the grave why then not her brother, whom she saw every Sunday blazing by His side?
    This was