“And what sort of joke was that?” She was getting upset. “To leave a man’s black dress hat on the foot of my bed? It was an expensive hat. And I took it down to the dry goods store and they said nobody sold hats like that in Alexandria or anywhere they knew of closer than Memphis. And lo and behold—three days after I found that hat in my house, little Robin was dead.”
Harriet was silent, pondering this. “But what does that have to do with Robin?”
“Darling, the world is full of things we don’t understand.”
“But why a hat?” said Harriet, after a baffled pause. “And why should they leave it at your house? I don’t see the connection.”
“Here’s another story for you. When I was living out at Tribulation,” said Libby, folding her hands, “there was a very nice woman named Viola Gibbs who taught kindergarten in town. I suppose she was in her late twenties. Well. One day, Mrs. Gibbs was walking in the back door of her own house, and her husband and children all said she jumped back and started slapping the air like something was after her, and the next thing they knew, she fell over on the kitchen floor. Dead.”
“A spider probably bit her.”
“People don’t die like that from a spider bite.”
“Or she had a heart attack.”
“No, no, she was too young. She’d never been sick a day in her life, and she wasn’t allergic to bee stings, and it wasn’t an aneurism, nothing like that. She just dropped dead for no reason in the world, right there in front of her husband and children.”
“It sounds like poison. I bet her husband did it.”
“He did no such thing. But that’s not the odd part of the story, darling.” Politely Libby blinked, and waited, to make sure she had Harriet’s attention. “You see, Viola Gibbs had a twin sister. The odd part of the story is that a year earlier, a year to the day—” Libby tapped the table with her forefinger—“the twin had been climbing out of a swimming pool in Miami, Florida, when she got a horrified look on her face, that’s what people said, a horrified look. Dozens of people saw it. Then she started screaming and slapping at the air with her hands. And next thing anybody knew she fell over dead on the concrete.”
“Why?” said Harriet, after a confused pause.
“Nobody knows.”
“But I don’t understand.”
“Neither does anybody else.”
“People just don’t get attacked by something invisible.”
“Those two sisters did. Twin sisters. Exactly a year apart.”
“There was a case a lot like that in Sherlock Holmes. The Adventure of the Speckled Band.”
“Yes, I know that story, Harriet, but this is different.”
“Why? You think the Devil was after them?”
“All I’m saying is that there are an awful lot of things in the world we don’t understand, honey, and hidden connections between things that don’t seem related at all.”
“You think it was the Devil killed Robin? Or a ghost?”
“Gracious,” said Libby, reaching, flustered, for her glasses, “what’s all this going on in the back?”
There was indeed a disturbance: agitated voices, Odean’s cry of dismay. Harriet followed Libby into the kitchen to find a portly old black woman with speckled cheeks and gray corn-rows, sitting at the table and sobbing into her hands. Behind her, and clearly distraught, Odean poured buttermilk into a glass of ice cubes. “This my auntee,” she said, without looking Libby in the eye. “She upset right now. She be fine in a minute.”
“Why, what on earth’s the matter? Do we need to get the doctor?”
“Nome. She not hurt. She’s just shook up. Some white men been shooting guns at her down by the creek.”
“Shooting guns? What on earth—”
“Have you some this buttermilk,” said Odean to her aunt, whose chest was heaving mightily.
“A little glass of Madeira might do her more good,” said Libby, pattering to the back door. “I don’t keep it in the house. I’ll just run down the street to Adelaide’s.”
“Nome,” wailed the old woman. “I doesn’t drink spirits.”
“But—”
“Please, ma’am. Nome. No whiskey.”
“But Madeira isn’t whiskey. It’s just—oh, dear.” Libby turned to Odean helplessly.
“She be fine in a minute.”
“What happened?” said Libby, her hand to her throat, looking anxiously between the two women.
“I wasn’t bothering nobody.”
“But why—”
“She say,” said Odean to Libby, “that two white men climb up on the bridge and go to shooting pistols at everybody.”
“Was anybody hurt? Shall I call the police?” said Libby breathlessly.
This was met by such a shriek of dismay from Odean’s aunt that even Harriet was unnerved.
“What’s on earth’s the matter?” cried Libby, who was by now pink in the face and half-hysterical.
“Oh, please, ma’am. Nome. Please don’t call no po-lice.”
“But why in the world not?”
“Oh, Lord. I scared of the po-lice.”
“She say it was some of them Ratliff boys,” Odean said. “What just got out of prison.”
“Ratliff?” said Harriet; and despite the confusion in the kitchen, all three women turned to look at her, her voice was so loud and strange.
————
“Ida, what do you know about some people named Ratliff?” asked Harriet the next day.
“That they sorry,” said Ida, grimly wringing out a dish towel.
She slapped the discolored cloth upon the stove top. Harriet, seated in the wide sill of the open window, watched her languidly wipe away the grease freckles from the morning’s skillet of bacon and eggs, humming, nodding her head with trance-like calm. These reveries, which settled over Ida when she did repetitive work—shelling peas, beating the carpets, stirring icing for a cake—were familiar to Harriet from babyhood, and as soothing to watch as a tree sifting back and forth in the breeze; but they were also a plain signal that Ida wanted to be left alone. She could be ferocious if disturbed in such moods. Harriet had seen her snap at Charlotte and even at Edie if one of them chose the wrong moment to question her aggressively about some triviality. But other times—especially if Harriet wanted to ask her something difficult, or secret, or deep—she replied with a serene, oracular frankness, like a subject under hypnosis.
Harriet shifted a bit and pulled one knee beneath her chin. “What else do you know?” she said, toying studiously with the buckle of her sandal. “About the Ratliffs?”
“Nothing to know. You seen them your own self. That bunch of ones come sidling over in the yard the other day.”
“Here?” said Harriet, after a moment of confused silence.
“Yesm. Right over yonder.… Yesm, you sho did,” said Ida Rhew, in a low, singsong tone, almost as though she was talking to herself. “And if it was a bunch of little old goats to come over here fooling around in your mama’s yard I bet yall feel sorry for them, too.… ‘Look a here. Look how cute.’ Before long, yall get to petting and playing with them. ‘Come on over here, Mr. Goat, and eat some sugar out of my hand.’ ‘Mr. Goat, you filthy. Come on and let me give you a bath.’ ‘Poor Mr.
Goat.’ And by the time you realize,” she said, serenely, over Harriet’s startled interruption, “time you realize how mean and nasty they is, you can’t run em off with a stick. They be tearing the clothes off the line, and tramping up the flower beds, and whooping and bleating and hollering out all the night.… And what they don’t eat, they stomps it to pieces and leaves it in the mud. ‘Come on! Give us some more!’ Think they ever satisfied? No, they aint. But I tell you,” Ida said, cutting her red-rimmed eyes at Harriet, “I’d rather me a bunch of goats than a mess of little Ratliffs running around asking and wanting all the time.”