“Give me that,” Weldon said, and tore the news article out of the boy’s hand. He stared hard at it, then wadded it up and threw it on the ground. “Get the fuck out of here. You go around talking about this again and I’ll kick your ass.”
“That’s right, you dumb fuck,” Lyle said, putting his new baseball cap in his back pocket and setting his book satchel down by his foot.
“That’s right, butt face,” I added, incredulous at the boldness of my own words.
“Yeah?” the boy said, but the resolve in his voice was already breaking.
“Yeah!” Weldon said, and shoved him off balance. Then he picked up a rock and chased the boy and three of his friends toward the street. Lyle and I followed, picking up dirt clods in our hands. When the boy was almost to his father’s waiting pickup truck, he turned and shot us the finger. Weldon nailed him right above the eye with the rock.
One of the brothers marched us down to Father Higgins’s office and left us there to wait for Father Higgins, whose razor strop and black-Irish, crimson-faced tirades were legendary in the school. The office smelled of the cigar butts in the wastebasket and the cracked leather in the chairs. A walnut pendulum clock ticked loudly on the wall. It was overcast outside, and we sat in the gloom and silence until four o’clock.
“I ain’t waiting anymore. Y’all coming?” Weldon said, and put one leg out the open window.
“You’ll get expelled,” I said.
“Too bad. I ain’t going to wait around just to have somebody whip me,” he said, and dropped out the window.
Five minutes later, Lyle followed him.
The sound of the clock was like a spoon knocking on a hollow wood box. When Father Higgins finally entered the room, he was wearing his horn-rimmed glasses and thumbing through a sheaf of papers attached to a clipboard. The hairline on the back of his neck was shaved neatly with a razor. At first he seemed distracted by my presence, then he flipped the sheets of paper to a particular page, almost as an afterthought, and studied it. He put an unlit cigar stub in his mouth, looked at me, then back at the page.
“You threw a rock at somebody?” he said.
“No, Father.”
“Somebody threw a rock at you?”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
“I don’t know,” I replied.
“That’s interesting. All right, since you don’t know why you’re here, how about going somewhere else?”
“I’ll take him, Father,” I heard Sister Roberta say in the doorway. She put her hand on my arm, walked me down the darkly polished corridor to the breezeway outside, then sat me down on the stone bench inside the bamboo-enclosed garden where she often said her rosary.
She sat next to me, her small white hands curved on the edges of the bench, and looked down at the goldfish pond while she talked. A crushed paper cup floated among the hyacinth leaves. “You meant well, Billy Bob, but I don’t want you to defend me anymore. It’s not the job of little people to defend adults.”
“Sister, the newspaper said—”
“It said what?”
“You were in trouble with the police. Can they put you in jail?”
She put her hand on top of mine. Her fingernails looked like tiny pink seashells. “They’re not really interested in me, Billy Bob. My brother is an alcoholic, and he killed a little boy with his car, then he ran away. But they probably won’t send my brother to prison because the child was a Negro.” Her hand was hot and damp on top of mine. Her voice clicked wetly in her throat. “He’ll be spared, not because he’s a sick man, but because it was a colored child he killed.”
When I looked at her again, her long eyelashes were bright with tears. She stood up with her face turned away from me. The sun had broken through the gray seal of clouds, and the live oak tree overhead was filled with the clattering of mockingbirds and blue jays. I felt her tiny fingernails rake gently through my hair, as though she were combing a cat.
“Oh, you poor child, you have lice eggs in your hair,” she said. Then she pressed my head against her breast, and I felt her tears strike hotly on the back of my neck.
Three days later, Sister saw the cigarette burn on Drew’s leg in the lunchroom and reported it to the social welfare agency in town. A consumptive rail of a man in a dandruff-flecked blue suit drove out to the house and questioned Mattie on the gallery, then questioned us in front of her. Drew told him she had been burned by an ember that had popped out of a trash fire in the backyard.
He raised her chin with his knuckle. His black hair was stiff with grease. “Is that what happened?” he asked.
“Yes, sir.” Drew’s face was dull, her mouth downturned at the corners. The burn was scabbed now and looked like a tightly coiled gray worm on her skin.
He smiled and took his knuckle away from her chin. “Then you shouldn’t play next to the fire,” he said.
“I would like to know who sent you out here,” Mattie said.
“That’s confidential.” He coughed on the back of his hand. His shirt cuff was frayed and for some reason looked particularly pretentious and sad on his thin wrist. “And to tell you the truth, I don’t really know. My supervisor didn’t tell me. I guess that’s how the chain of command works.” He coughed again, this time loud and hard, and I could smell the nicotine that was buried in his lungs. “But everything here looks all right. Perhaps this is much ado about nothing. Not a bad day for a drive, though.”
Weldon’s eyes were as hard as marbles, but he didn’t speak.
The man walked with Mattie to his car, and I felt like doors were slamming all around us. She put her foot on his running board and propped one arm on his car roof while she talked, so that her breasts were uplifted against her blouse and her dress made a loop between her legs.
“Let’s tell him,” Lyle said.
“Are you kidding? Look at him. He’d eat her shit with a spoon,” Weldon said.
It was right after first period the next morning that we heard about the disaster at Texas City. Somebody shouted something about it on the playground, then suddenly the whole school was abuzz with rumors. Cars on the street pulled to the curb with their radios tuned to news stations, and we could even hear the principal’s old boxwood radio blaring through the open window upstairs. A ship loaded with fertilizer had been burning in the harbor, and while people on the docks had watched firefighting boats pumping geysers of water onto the ship’s decks, the fire had dripped into the hold. The explosion filled the sky with rockets of smoke and rained an umbrella of flame down on the Monsanto chemical plant. The force of the secondary explosion was so great that it blew out windows in Houston, fifty miles away. But it wasn’t over yet. The fireball mushroomed laterally out into an adjacent oil field, and rows of storage tanks and wellheads went like strings of Chinese firecrackers. People said the water in the harbor boiled from the heat, the spars on steel derricks melting like licorice.
We heard nothing about the fate of my father either that afternoon or evening. Mattie got drunk that night and fell asleep in the living-room chair by the radio. I felt nothing about my father’s possible death, and I wondered at my own callousness. We went to school the next morning, and when we returned home in the afternoon Mattie was waiting on the gallery to tell us that a man from the Monsanto Company had telephoned and said that my father was listed as missing. Her eyes were pink with either hangover or crying, and her face was puffy and round, like a white balloon.
When we didn’t respond, she said, “Your father may be dead. Do you understand what I’m saying? That was an important man from his company who called. He would not call unless he was gravely concerned. Do you children understand what is being said to you?”
Weldon brushed at the dirt with his tennis shoe, and Lyle looked into a place about six inches in front of his eyes. Drew’s face was frightened, not because of the news about our father, but instead because of the strange whirring of wheels that we could almost hear from inside
Mattie’s head. I put my arm over her shoulders and felt her skin jump.
“He’s worked like a nigra for you, maybe lost his life for you, and you have nothing to say?” Mattie asked.
“Maybe we ought to start cleaning up our rooms. You wanted us to clean up our rooms, Mattie,” I said.
But it was a poor attempt to placate her.
“You stay outside. Don’t even come in this house,” she said.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” Lyle said.
“Then you can just do it in the dirt like a darky,” she said, and went inside the house and latched the screen behind her.
By the next afternoon, my father was still unaccounted for. Mattie had an argument on the phone with somebody, I think the man in zoot pants and two-tone shoes who had probably been her pimp at one time, because she told him he owed her money and she wouldn’t come back and work at Broussard’s Bar again until he paid her. After she hung up she breathed hard at the kitchen sink, smoking her cigarette and staring out into the yard. She snapped the cap off a bottle of Jax and drank it half empty, her throat working in one long, wet swallow, one eye cocked at me.
“Come here,” she said.
“What?”
“You tracked up the kitchen. You didn’t flush the toilet after you used it, either.”
“I did.”
“You did what?”
“I flushed the toilet.”
“Then one of the others didn’t flush it. Every one of you come out here. Now!”
“What is it, Mattie? We didn’t do anything,” I said.
“I changed my mind. Every one of you outside. All of you outside. Weldon and Lyle, you get out there right now. Where’s Drew?”
“She’s playing in the yard. What’s wrong, Mattie?” I made no attempt to hide the fear in my voice. I could see the web of blue veins in the top of her muscular chest.
Outside, the wind was blowing through the trees in the yard, flattening the purple clumps of wisteria that grew against the barn wall.
“Each of you go to the hedge and cut the switch you want me to use on you,” she said.
It was her favorite form of punishment for us. If we broke off a large switch, she hit us fewer times with it. If we came back with a thin or small switch, we would get whipped until she felt she had struck some kind of balance between size and number.
We remained motionless. Drew had been playing with her cat. She had tied a piece of twine around the cat’s neck, and she held the twine in her hand like a leash. Her knees and white socks were dusty from play.
“I told you not to tie that around the kitten’s neck again,” Mattie said.
“It doesn’t hurt anything. It’s not your cat, anyway,” Weldon said.
“Don’t sass me,” she said. “You will not sass me. None of you will sass me.”
“I ain’t cutting no switch,” Weldon said. “You’re crazy. My mama said so. You ought to be in the crazy house.”
She looked hard into Weldon’s eyes, then there was a moment of recognition in her colorless face, a flicker of fear, as though she had seen a growing meanness of spirit in Weldon that would soon become a challenge to her own. She wet her lips.
“We shall see who does what around here,” she said. She broke off a big switch from the myrtle hedge and raked it free of flowers and leaves, except for one green sprig on the tip.
I saw the look in Drew’s face, saw her drop the piece of twine from her palm as she stared up into Mattie’s shadow.
Mattie jerked her by the wrist and whipped her a half-dozen times across her bare legs. Drew twisted impotently in Mattie’s balled hand, her feet dancing with each blow. The switch raised welts on her skin as thick and red as centipedes.
Then suddenly Weldon ran with all his weight into Mattie’s back, stiff-arming her between the shoulder blades, and sent her tripping sideways over a bucket of chicken slops. She righted herself and stared at him openmouthed, the switch limp in her hand. Then her eyes grew hot and bright, and I could see the bone flex along her jaws.
Weldon burst out the back gate and ran down the dirt road between the sugarcane fields, the soles of his dirty tennis shoes powdering dust in the air.
She waited for him a long time, watching through the screen as the mauve-colored dusk gathered in the trees and the sun’s afterglow lit the clouds on the western horizon. Then she took a bottle of apricot brandy into the bathroom and sat in the tub for almost an hour, turning the hot water tap on and off until the tank was empty. When we needed to go to the bathroom, she told us to take our problem outside. Finally she emerged in the hall, wearing only her panties and bra, her hair wrapped in a towel, the dark outline of her sex plainly visible to us.
“I’m going to dress now and go into town with a gentleman friend,” she said. “Tomorrow we’re going to start a new regime around here. Believe me, there will never be a reoccurrence of what happened here today. You can pass that on to young Mr. Weldon for me.”
But she didn’t go into town. Instead, she put on her blue suit, a flower-print blouse, her nylon stockings, and walked up and down on the gallery, her cigarette poised in the air like a movie actress.
“Why not just drive your car, Mattie?” I said quietly through the screen.
“It has no gas. Besides, a gentleman caller will be passing for me anytime now,” she answered.
“Oh.”
She blew smoke at an upward angle, her face aloof and flat-sided in the shadows.
“Mattie?”
“Yes?”
“Weldon’s out back. Can he come in the house?”
“Little mice always return where the cheese is,” she said.
I hated her. I wanted something terrible to happen to her. I could feel my fingernails knifing into my palms.
She turned around, her palm supporting one elbow, her cigarette an inch from her mouth, her hair wreathed in smoke. “Do you have a reason for staring through the screen at me?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
“When you’re bigger, you’ll get to do what’s on your mind. In the meantime, don’t let your thoughts show on your face. You’re a lewd little boy.”
Her suggestion repelled me and made water well up in my eyes. I backed away from the screen, then turned and ran through the rear of the house and out into the backyard where Weldon, Lyle, and Drew sat against the barn wall, fireflies lighting in the wisteria over their heads.
No one came for Mattie that evening. She sat in the stuffed chair in her room, putting on layers of lipstick until her mouth had the crooked, bright red shape of a clown’s. She smoked a whole package of Chesterfields, constantly wiping the ashes off her dark blue skirt with a hand towel soaked in dry cleaning fluid; then she drank herself unconscious.
It was hot that night, and dry lightning leaped from the horizon to the top of the blue-black vault of sky over the Gulf. Weldon sat on the side of his bed in the dark, his shoulders hunched, his fists between his white thighs. His burr haircut looked like duck down on his head in the flicker of lightning through the window. When I was almost asleep he shook both me and Lyle awake and said, “We got to get rid of her. You know we got to do it.”
I put my pillow over my head and rolled away from him, as though I could drop away into sleep and rise in the morning into a sun-spangled and different world.
But in the false dawn I woke to both Lyle’s and Weldon’s faces close to mine. Weldon’s eyes were hollow, his breath rank with funk. The mist was heavy and wet in the pecan trees outside the window.
“She’s not gonna hurt Drew again. Are you gonna help or not?” Weldon said.
I followed them into the hallway, my heart sinking at the realization of what I was willing to participate in, my body as numb as if I had been stunned with novocaine. Mattie was sleeping in the stuffed chair, her hose rolled down over her knees, an overturned jelly glass on the rug next to the can of spot cleaner.
Weldon walked quietly across the rug, unscrewed the cap on the can, laid the can
on its side in front of Mattie’s feet, then backed away from her. The cleaning fluid spread in a dark circle around her chair, the odor as bright and sharp as a slap across the face.
Weldon slid open a box of kitchen matches and we each took one, raked it across the striker, and, with the sense that our lives at that moment had changed forever, threw them at Mattie’s feet. But the burning matches fell outside the wet area. The blood veins in my head dilated with fear, my ears hummed with a sound like the roar of the ocean in a seashell, and I jerked the box from Weldon’s hand, clutched a half-dozen matches in my fist, dragged them across the striker, and flung them right on Mattie’s feet.
The chair was enveloped in a cone of flame, and she burst out of it with her arms extended, as though she were pushing blindly through a curtain, her mouth and eyes wide with terror. We could smell her hair burning as she raced past us and crashed through the screen door out onto the gallery and into the yard. She beat at her flaming clothes and raked at her hair as though it were swarming with yellow jackets.
I stood transfixed in mortal dread at what I had done.
A Negro man walking to work came out of the mist on the road and knocked her to the ground, slapping the fire out of her dress, pinning her under his spread knees as though he were assaulting her. Smoke rose from her scorched clothes and hair as in a depiction of a damned figure on one of my holy cards.
The Negro rose to his feet and walked toward the gallery, a solitary line of blood running down his cheek where Mattie had scratched him.
“Yo’ mama ain’t hurt bad. Get some butter or some bacon grease. She gonna be all right, you gonna see. You children don’t be worried, no,” he said. His gums were purple with snuff when he smiled.
The volunteer firemen bounced across the cattle guard in an old fire truck whose obsolete hand-crank starter still dangled from under the radiator. They coated Mattie’s room with foam from a fire extinguisher and packed Mattie off in an ambulance to the charity hospital in Lafayette. Two sheriff’s deputies arrived, and before he left, one of the volunteers took them aside in the yard and talked with them, looking over his shoulder at us children, then walked over to us and said, “The fire chief gonna come out here and check it out. Y’all stay out of that bedroom.”