by Donna Tartt
“Last one!” said Libby. “ ‘The art of peacemaking.’ Third letter c, and i-o-n at the end.” Tap tap tap, she counted out the spaces with her pencil.
“Conciliation”?
“Yes. Oh dear … wait. This C is in the wrong place.”
Silently, they puzzled.
“Aha!” cried Libby. “Pacification!” Carefully, she printed in the letters with her blunt pencil. “All done,” she said happily, removing her glasses. “Thank you, Harriet.”
“You’re welcome,” said Harriet curtly; she could not help feeling a little grumpy that Libby was the one who had got the last word.
“I don’t know why I worry so much about these foolish puzzles, but I do think they help to keep my mind alert. Most days I only manage to get three-quarters of the way through.”
“Libby—”
“Let me guess what you’re thinking, dear. Why don’t we go see if Odean’s pie is out of the oven?”
“Libby, why won’t anybody tell me anything about when Robin died?”
Libby laid down the newspaper.
“Did anything strange happen right before?”
“Strange, darling? What in the world do you mean?”
“Anything …” Harriet struggled for words. “A clue.”
“I don’t know about any clue,” said Libby, after an oddly calm pause. “But if you want to hear about strange, one of the strangest things that ever happened to me in my life happened to me about three days before Robin died. Did you ever hear the story about that man’s hat I found in my bedroom?”
“Oh,” said Harriet, disappointed. She had heard the story about the hat on Libby’s bed all her life.
“Everybody thought I was crazy. A man’s black dress hat! Size eight! A Stetson! A nice hat, too, with no sweat on the hatband. And it just appeared there on the foot of my bed in broad daylight.”
“You mean you didn’t see it appear,” said Harriet, bored. Harriet had heard the story about the hat hundreds of times. Nobody thought it was very mysterious except Libby.
“Darling, it was two o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon—”
“Somebody came in the house and left it.”
“No, they didn’t, they couldn’t have. We would have seen or heard them. Odean and I were in the house the whole time—I’d just moved here from Tribulation, after Daddy died—and Odean had been in the bedroom to put away some clean linens not two minutes before. There wasn’t any hat there then.”
“Maybe Odean put it there.”
“Odean did not put that hat there. You go on in and ask her.”
“Well, somebody sneaked in,” Harriet said impatiently. “You and Odean just didn’t hear them.” Odean—normally uncommunicative—was as fond of telling and retelling the Mystery of the Black Hat as Libby was, and their stories were the same (though very different in style, Odean’s being far more cryptic, punctuated by lots of head-shaking and long silences).
“I’ll tell you, sweetheart,” said Libby, sitting forward alertly in her chair, “Odean was walking back and forth throughout this house, putting away clean laundry, and I was in the hall on the telephone to your grandmother, and the door to the bedroom was wide open and within my line of view—no, not a window,” she said over Harriet, “the windows were locked and the storm windows were fastened down tight. Nobody could have got in that bedroom without both Odean and me seeing them.”
“Somebody was playing a joke on you,” said Harriet. This was the consensus of Edie and the aunts; Edie had more than once provoked Libby to tears (and Odean to furious sulks) by mischievously insinuating that Libby and Odean had been nipping at the cooking sherry.
“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 minut
e.”
“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.”
“But Ida—”
“Mean! Filthy!” With a droll little grimace, Ida Rhew wrung out the dish towel. “And before too long, all yall fixing to hear is want, want, want. ‘Give me this thing.’ ‘Buy me that one.’ ”
“Those kids weren’t Ratliffs, Ida. That were here the other day.”
“Yall better watch out,” Ida Rhew said resignedly, going back to her work. “Your mother des keeps on going out there, giving out yalls clothes and toys to this one, and that one, and any one that wanders up. After while, they not even going to bother with the asking. They just going to go on and take.”
“Ida, those were Odums. Those kids in the yard.”
“Same difference. It’s not a one of em knows right from wrong. What if you was one of them little Odums—” she paused to re-fold her dish towel—“and your mother and your daddy never do a lick of work, and teach you it aint a thing in the world wrong to rob, and hate, and steal, and take anything you wanted from another? Hmmn? You wouldn’t know anything but robbing and stealing. No, sir. Wouldn’t think they was a thing wrong with it in the world.”
“But—”
“I’m not saying there’s not bad colored ones, too. It’s bad ones that’s colored, and it’s bad ones that’s white.… All I know is I aint have time to fool with any Odums, and I aint have time to fool with anybody always thinking about what they don’t got, and how they going to get it from another. No, sir. If I don’t earn it,” said Ida somberly, holding up a damp hand, “and I don’t have it, then I don’t want it. No, maam. I sho don’t. I just goes on by.”
“Ida, I don’t care about the Odums.”
“You ought not care about any of them.”
“Well I don’t one bit.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”
“What I want to know about is the Ratliffs. What can you—”
“Well, I can tell you they chunked bricks at my sister’s grand-baby while she’s walking to school in the first grade,” said Ida curtly. “How about that? Big old grown men. Chunking bricks and hollering out nigger and get back to the jungle at that poor child.”
Harriet, appalled, said nothing. Without looking up, she continued to fiddle with the strap of her sandal. The word nigger—especially from Ida—made her red in the face.
“Bricks!” Ida shook her head. “From that wing they’s building to the school back then. And I reckon they’s proud of themselves for doing it, but aint nohow it’s correct for nobody to chunk bricks at a little one. Show me in the Bible where it say chunk bricks at your neighbor. Hmn? Look all day and you aint going to find it because it aint there.”
Harriet, who was very uncomfortable, yawned to mask her confusion and distress. She and Hely attended Alexandria Academy, as did almost every white child in the county. Even Odums and Ratliffs and Scurlees practically starved themselves to death in order to keep their children out of the public schools. Certainly, families like Harriet’s (and Hely’s) would not tolerate for one moment brick-throwing at children white or black (“or purple,” as Edie was fond of piping up in any discussion about skin color). And yet there Harriet was, at the all-white school.
“Them mens call themselves preachers. Out there spitting and calling that poor baby every kind of Jigaboo and Jungle Bunny. But aint never any reason for a big one to harm a little one,” said Ida Rhew grimly. “The Bible teach it. Whoso shall offend one of these little—”
“Were they arrested?”
Ida Rhew snorted.
“Were they?”
“Sometime the police favor criminals more than the one against who they commit the crime.”
Harriet thought about this. Nothing, as far as she knew, had happened to the Ratliffs for shooting guns down at the creek. It seemed like these people could do pretty much what they wanted and get away with it.
“It’s against the law for anybody to throw bricks in public,” she said aloud.
“Don’t make a bit of difference. Police aint done a thing to the Ratliffs when they lit the Missionary Baptist Church on fire, did they, when you’s just a baby? After Dr. King come to town? Just drove right by, and chunked that whiskey bottle with a lit rag in it through the window there.”
Harriet, all her life, had heard about this church fire—and about others, in other Mississippi towns, all confused with each other in her mind—but she had never been told that the Ratliffs were responsible. You would think (said Edie) that Negroes and poor whites would not ha
te each other the way they did since they had a lot in common—mainly, being poor. But sorry white people like the Ratliffs had only Negroes to look down upon. They could not bear the idea that the Negroes were now just as good as they were, and, in many cases, far more prosperous and respectable. “A poor Negro has at least the excuse of his birth,” Edie said. “The poor white has nothing to blame for his station but his own character. Well, of course, that won’t do. That would mean having to assume some responsibility for his own laziness and sorry behavior. No, he’d much rather stomp around burning crosses and blaming the Negro for everything than go out and try to get an education or improve himself in any way.”
Ida Rhew, lost in thought, continued to polish the stove top though it no longer needed polishing. “Yesm, it sho is the truth,” she said. “Them trash killed Miss Etta Coffey sure as they’d stabbed her in the heart.” She compressed her lips for several moments as she polished, in small, tight circles, the chrome dials of the stove. “Old Miss Etta, she righteous, sometime she praying all the night. My mother, she see that light burning late there at Miss Etta’s, she make my daddy get out of bed and walk himself right over there and tap at the window and ax Miss Etta has she fell, or do she need help to get up off the floor. She holler at him no thank you, her and Jesus still got business to talk!”
“One time, Edie told me—”
“Yes, sir. Miss Etta, she dwelling at His right hand side. And my mother and my daddy, and my poor brother Cuff that die with cancer. And little old Robin, too, right up amongst them. God keep a place for all His children. He surely do.”
