“Where you girls been?” Thelma called from the kitchen.
They bumped into each other trying to push their way into the kitchen to tell Thelma about their misadventure. I slumped into one of the mismatched kitchen chairs next to Aunt Grace, who looked depressed about being the villain of the story again. I pulled the locket out of my pocket, holding the chain in the handkerchief, and spun it around a few times.
“Whatcha got there, handsome?” Thelma asked, pinching some snuff out of the can on the windowsill and tucking into her bottom lip, which looked even weirder than it sounded, since Thelma was kind of dainty and resembled Dolly Parton.
“It’s just a locket I found out by Ravenwood Plantation.”
“Ravenwood? What the devil were you doin’ out there?”
“My friend’s staying there.”
“You mean Lena Duchannes?” Aunt Mercy asked. Of course she knew, the whole town knew. This was Gatlin.
“Yes, ma’am. We’re in the same class at school.” I had their attention. “We found this locket in the garden behind the great house. We don’t know who it belonged to, but it looks really old.”
“That’s not Macon Ravenwood’s property. That’s part a Greenbrier,” Aunt Prue said, sounding sure of herself.
“Let me get a look at that,” Aunt Mercy said, taking her glasses out of the pocket of her housecoat.
I handed her the locket, still wrapped in the handkerchief. “It has an inscription.”
“I can’t read that. Grace, can you make that out?” she asked, handing the locket to Aunt Grace.
“I don’t see nothin’ at all,” Aunt Grace said, squinting hard.
“There are two sets of initials, right here,” I said, pointing to the grooves in the metal, “ECW and GKD. And if you flip that disc over, there’s a date. February 11, 1865.”
“That date seems real familiar,” Aunt Prudence said. “Mercy, what happened on that date?”
“Weren’t you married on that date, Grace?”
“1865, not 1965,” Aunt Grace corrected. Their hearing wasn’t much better than their vision. “February 11, 1865…”
“That was the year the Fed’rals almost burned Gatlin ta the ground,” Aunt Grace said. “Our great-granddaddy lost everything in that fire. Don’t you remember that story, girls? Gen’ral Sherman and the Union army marched clean through the South, burnin’ everything in their path, includin’ Gatlin. They called it the Great Burnin’. At least part a every plantation in Gatlin was destroyed, except Ravenwood. My granddaddy used ta say Abraham Ravenwood musta made a deal with the Devil that night.”
“What do you mean?”
“It was the only way that place coulda been left standin’. The Fed’rals burned every plantation along the river, one at a time, till they got ta Ravenwood. They just marched on past, like it wasn’t there at all.”
“The way Granddaddy told it, that wasn’t the only thing strange ’bout that night,” Aunt Prue said, feeding Harlon James a piece of bacon. “Abraham had a brother, lived there with him, and he just up and disappeared that night. Nobody ever saw him again.”
“That doesn’t seem that strange. Maybe he was killed by the Union soldiers, or trapped in one of those burning houses,” I said.
Aunt Grace raised an eyebrow. “Or maybe it was somethin’ else. They never did find a body.” I realized people had been talking about the Ravenwoods for generations; it didn’t start with Macon Ravenwood. I wondered what else the Sisters knew.
“What about Macon Ravenwood? What do you know about him?”
“That boy never did have a chance on account a bein’ E-legitimate.” In Gatlin, being illegitimate was like being a communist or an atheist. “His daddy, Silas, met Macon’s mamma after his first wife left him. She was a pretty girl, from New Orleans, I think. Anyhow, not long after, Macon and his brother were born. But Silas never did marry her, and then she up and left, too.”
Aunt Prue interrupted, “Grace Ann, you don’t know how ta tell a story. Silas Ravenwood was an E-centric, and as mean as the day is long. And there were strange things goin’ on at that house. The lights were on all night long, and every now and again a man in a tall black hat was seen wanderin’ ’round up there.”
“And the wolf. Tell him about the wolf.” I didn’t need them to tell me about that dog, or whatever it was. I’d seen it myself. But it couldn’t be the same animal. Dogs, even wolves, didn’t live that long.
“There was a wolf up at the house. Silas kept it like it was a pet!” Aunt Mercy shook her head.
“But those boys, they moved back and forth between Silas and their mamma, and when they were with him, Silas treated them somethin’ awful. Beat on ’em all the time and barely let ’em outta his sight. He wouldn’t even let ’em go ta school.”
“Maybe that’s why Macon Ravenwood never leaves his house,” I said.
Aunt Mercy waved her hand in the air, as if that was the silliest thing she’d ever heard. “He leaves his house. I’ve seen him a mess a times over at the DAR buildin’, right after supper time.” Sure she had.
That was the thing about the Sisters; half the time they had a firm grasp on reality, but that was only half the time. I had never heard of anyone seeing Macon Ravenwood, so I doubted he was hanging around the DAR looking at paint chips and chatting up Mrs. Lincoln.
Aunt Grace scrutinized the locket more carefully, holding it up to the light. “I can tell you one thing. This here handkerchief belonged ta Sulla Treadeau, Sulla the Prophet they called her, on account a folks said she could see the future in the cards.”
“Tarot cards?” I asked.
“What other kind a cards are there?”
“Well, there are playin’ cards, and greetin’ cards, and place cards for parties…” Aunt Mercy rambled.
“How do you know the handkerchief belonged to her?”
“Her initials are embroidered right here on the edge, and you see that there?” she asked, pointing to a tiny bird embroidered under the initials. “That there was her mark.”
“Her mark?”
“Most readers had a mark back then. They’d mark their decks ta make sure nobody switched their cards. A reader is only as good as her deck. I know that much,” Thelma said, spitting into a small urn in the corner of the room with the precision of a marksman.
Treadeau. That was Amma’s last name.
“Was she related to Amma?”
“Of course she was. She was Amma’s great-great-grandmamma.”
“What about the initials on the locket? ECW and GKD? Do you know anything about them?” It was a long shot. I couldn’t remember the last time the Sisters had ever had a moment of clarity that lasted this long.
“Are you teasin’ an old woman, Ethan Wate?”
“No ma’am.”
“ECW. Ethan Carter Wate. He was your great-great-great-uncle, or was it your great-great-great-great-uncle?”
“You’ve never been any good with arithmetic,” Aunt Prudence interrupted.
“Anyhow, he was your great-great-great-great-granddaddy Ellis’ brother.”
“Ellis Wate’s brother was named Lawson, not Ethan. That’s how I got my middle name.”
“Ellis Wate had two brothers, Ethan and Lawson. You were named for both of ’em. Ethan Lawson Wate.” I tried to picture my family tree. I had seen it enough times. And if there’s one thing a Southerner knows, it’s their family tree. There was no Ethan Carter Wate on the framed copy hanging in our dining room. I had obviously overestimated Aunt Grace’s lucidity.
I must have looked unconvinced because a second later, Aunt Prue was up and out of her chair. “I have the Wate Family Tree in my genealogy book. I keep track a the whole lineage for the Sisters a the Confed’racy.”