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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.
