The mother sat on a wood chair, with her knees apart in front of the steaming caldron, her forearms covered with wet chicken feathers. Headless chickens flopped all over the grass.
“I know you been with her. They were talking at the beer joint. Like you some kind of big ladies’ man,” she said.
“I ain’t been with nobody,” he said, “except with them mosquitoes I been slapping out in that marsh.”
“You said you’d leave her alone.”
“You children go inside.”
“That gonna make your conscience right ’cause you send them kids off, you? She gonna cut your throat one day. She been in the crazy house in Mandeville. You gonna see, Verise.”
“I ain’t seen her.”
“You sonofabitch, I smell her on you,” the mother said, and swung a headless chicken by its feet and whipped a diagonal line of blood across his chest and Levi’s.
“You ain’t gonna act like that in front of my children, you,” he said, and started toward her. Then he stopped. “I said y’all get inside. This is between me and her.”
Weldon and Lyle were used to their parents’ quarrels, and they turned sullenly toward the house; but Drew stood mute and tearful under the pecan tree, her cat pressed flat against her chest.
“Come on, Drew. Come see inside. We’re gonna play with the Monopoly game,” Lyle said, and tried to pull her by the arm. But her body was rigid, her bare feet immobile in the dust.
Then Lyle saw his father’s large, square hand go up in the air, saw it come down hard against the side of the mother’s face, heard the sound of her weeping, as he tried to step into Drew’s line of vision and hold her and her cat against his body, hold the three of them tightly together outside the unrelieved sound of his mother’s weeping.
Three hours later her car went through the railing on the bridge over the Atchafalaya River. Lyle dreamed that night that an enormous brown bubble arose from the submerged wreck, and when it burst on the surface her drowned breath stuck against his face as wet and rank as gas released from a grave.
THE WOMAN CALLED MATTIE wore shorts and sleeveless blouses with sweat rings under the arms, and in the daytime she always seemed to have curlers in her hair. When she walked from room to room, she carried an ashtray with her, into which she constantly flicked her lipstick-stained Chesterfields. She had a hard, muscular body, and she didn’t close the bathroom door all the way when she bathed; once Lyle saw her kneeling in the tub, scrubbing her big shoulders and chest with a large, flat brush. The area above her head was crisscrossed with improvised clotheslines, from which dripped her wet underthings. Her eyes fastened on his, and he thought she was about to reprimand him for staring at her; but instead her hard-boned, shiny face continued to look back at him with a vacuous indifference that made him feel obscene.
If Verise was out of town on a Friday or Saturday night, she fixed the children’s supper, put on her blue suit, and sat by herself in the living room, listening to the Grand Ole Opry or the Louisiana Hayride, while she drank apricot brandy from a coffee cup. She always dropped cigarette ashes on her suit and had to spot-clean the cloth with drycleaning fluid before she drove off for the evening in her old Ford coupe. They didn’t know where she went on those Friday or Saturday nights, but a boy down the road told them that Mattie used to work in Broussard’s Bar on Railroad Avenue, an infamous area in New Iberia where the women sat on the galleries of the cribs, dipping their beer out of buckets and yelling at the railroad and oil-field workers in the street.
Then one morning when Verise was in Morgan City a man in a new silver Chevrolet sedan came out to see her. It was hot, and he parked his car partly on the grass to keep it in the shade. He wore sideburns, striped brown zoot slacks, two-tone shoes, suspenders, a pink shirt without a coat, and a fedora that shadowed his narrow face. While he talked to her he put one shoe on the car bumper and wiped the dust off it with a rag. Then their voices grew louder and he said, “You like the life. Admit it, you. He ain’t given you no wedding ring, has he? You don’t buy the cow, no, when you can milk through the fence.”
“I am currently involved with a gentleman. I do not know what you are talking about. I am not interested in anything you are talking about,” she said.
He threw the rag back inside the car and opened the car door.
“It’s always trick, trade, or travel, darlin’,” he said. “Same rules here as down on Railroad. He done made you a nigger woman for them children, Mattie.”
“Are you calling me a nigra?” she said quietly.
“No, I’m calling you crazy, just like everybody say you are. No, I take that back, me. I ain’t calling you nothing. I ain’t got to, ’cause you gonna be back. You in the life, Mattie. You be phoning me to come out here, bring you to the crib, rub your back, put some of that warm stuff in your arm again. Ain’t nobody else do that for you, huh?”
When she came back into the house she made the children take all the dishes out of the cabinets, even though they were clean, and wash them over again.
It was the following Friday that the principal at the Catholic elementary school called about a large welt on Lyle’s neck. Mattie was already dressed to go out. She didn’t bother to turn down the radio when she answered the phone, and in order to compete with Red Foley’s voice she had to almost shout into the receiver.
“Mr. Sonnier is not here,” she said. “Mr. Sonnier is away on business in Port Arthur. . . . No, ma’am, I’m not the housekeeper. I’m a friend of the family who is caring for these children . . . There’s nothing wrong with that boy that I can see. . . . Are you calling to tell me that there’s something wrong, that I’m doing something wrong? What is it that I’m doing wrong? I would like to know that. What is your name?”
Lyle stood transfixed with terror in the hall as she bent angrily into the mouthpiece and her knuckles ridged on the receiver. A storm was blowing in from the Gulf, the air smelled of ozone, and the southern horizon was black with thunderclouds that crawled with white electricity. Lyle heard the wind ripping through the trees in the yard and pecans rattling down on the gallery roof like grapeshot.
When Mattie hung up the phone the skin of her face was tight against the bone and one liquid eye was narrowed at him like someone aiming down a rifle barrel.
THAT WINTER VERISE started working regular hours, what he called “an indoor job,” at a chemical plant in Port Arthur, and the children saw him only on weekends. Mattie cooked only the evening meal and made the children responsible for the care of the house and the other two meals. Weldon started to get into trouble at school. His eighth-grade teacher, a laywoman, called and said he had thumb-tacked a girl’s dress to the desk during class, causing her to almost tear it off her body when the bell rang, and he would either pay for the dress or be suspended. Mattie hung up the phone on her, and two days later the girl’s father, a sheriff’s deputy, came out to the house and made Mattie give him four dollars on the gallery.
She came back inside, slamming the door, her face burning, grabbed Weldon by the neck of his T-shirt, and walked him into the backyard, where she made him stand for two hours on an upended apple crate until he wet his pants.
Later, after she had let him come back inside and he had changed his underwear and blue jeans, he went outside into the dark by himself, without eating supper, and sat on the butcher stump, striking kitchen matches on the side of the box and throwing them at the chickens. Before the children went to sleep he sat for a long time on the side of his bed, next to Lyle’s, in a square of moonlight with his hands balled into fists on his thighs. There were knots of muscle in the backs of his arms. Mattie had given him a burr haircut, and his head looked as hard and scalped as a baseball.
“Tomorrow’s Saturday. We’re gonna listen to the LSU-Rice game,” Lyle said.
“Some colored kids saw me from the road and laughed.”
“I don’t care what they did. You’re brave, Weldon. You’re braver than any of us.”
“I’m gonna fi
x her.”
His voice made Lyle afraid. The branches of the pecan trees were skeletal, like gnarled fingers against the moon.
“Don’t be thinking like that,” Lyle said. “It’ll just make her do worse things. She takes it out on Drew. She made her kneel in the bathroom corner because she didn’t flush the toilet.”
“Go to sleep, Lyle,” Weldon said. His eyes were wet. “She hurts us because we let her. We ax for it. You get hurt when you don’t stand up. Just like Momma did.”
Lyle heard him snuffing in the dark. Then Weldon lay down with his face turned toward the opposite wall. His head looked carved out of gray wood in the moonlight.
THREE DAYS LATER the school principal 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 the children in front of Mattie. 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.” The burn was scabbed and looked like ringworm 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. “And to tell you the truth, I don’t really know. My supervisor didn’t tell me.” He coughed again, this time loud and hard, and Lyle could smell his deep-lung nicotine odor. “But everything here looks all right.”
Weldon’s eyes were as hard as marbles, but he didn’t speak.
The man walked with Mattie to his car, and Lyle felt like doors were slamming all around them. She put her foot on the man’s running board and propped one arm on his car roof while she talked, so that her breasts were uplifted against her blouse and her knees were wide-spaced below the hem of her dress.
“Let’s tell him,” Lyle said.
“Are you kidding? Look at him. She could make him eat her shit with a spoon,” Weldon said.
It was right after first period the next morning that they heard about the disaster at Port Arthur. A ship loaded with fertilizer had been burning in the harbor, and while people on the docks had watched fire-fighting 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 chemical plant. The force of the secondary explosion was so great that it blew out windows in Beaumont, twenty miles away.
Mattie got drunk that night and fell asleep in the living room chair by the radio. When the children returned home from school the next afternoon, Mattie was waiting on the gallery to tell them that a man from the chemical company had telephoned and said that Verise was listed as missing. Her eyes were pink with either hangover or crying, her face puffy and round like a white balloon.
“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.
“He’s worked like a nigra for you, maybe lost his life for you. You have nothing to say?”
“Maybe we ought to start cleaning up our rooms. You wanted us to clean up our rooms,” Lyle said.
“You stay outside. Don’t even come in this house,” she said.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” Weldon 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.
THE NEXT AFTERNOON Verise was still unaccounted for. Mattie had an argument on the phone with somebody, perhaps the man in zoot pants and two-tone shoes; 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 Lyle.
“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,” he said.
“I changed my mind. Every one of you outside. All of you outside. Weldon, you too, you get out there right now. Where’s Drew?”
“She’s playing in the yard. What’s wrong, Mattie?” Lyle said.
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. If they broke off a large switch, she hit them fewer times with it. If they came back with a thin or small switch, they would get whipped until she felt she had struck some kind of balance between size and number.
They 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 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, and there was a moment of recognition in her colorless face, as though she had seen a growing meanness of spirit in Weldon that was the equal of her own. Then she wet her lips, crimped them together, and rubbed her hands on her thighs.
“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.
Drew looked up into Mattie’s shadow, and dropped the piece of twine from her palm.
Mattie jerked her by the wrist and whipped her a half-dozen times across her bare legs. Drew twisted impotently from Mattie’s fist, 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 open-mouthed, the switch loose in her hand. Then her eyes grew hot and bright with a painful intention, and her jawbone flexed like a roll of dimes.
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 with flame 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 the children needed to go to the bathroom, she told them to take their 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 pubic hair plainly visible.
“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 recurrence 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?” Lyle 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.
At that moment Lyle wanted something terrible to happen to her.
She turned on one high heel, 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,” he 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 him and made water well up in his eyes. He backed away from the screen, then turned and ran through the rear of the house and out into the backyard, where Weldon 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.