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“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.
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 chopped haircut looked like feathers on his head in the flicker of lightning through the window. When Lyle was almost asleep Weldon shook him awake and said, “We got to get rid of her. You know we got to do it.”
