The Little Friend

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.”

“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.”