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Lyle put his pillow over his head and rolled away from him, as though he could drop away into sleep and rise in the morning into a sun-spangled and different world.
But in the false dawn he woke to Weldon’s face close to his. 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?” he said.
Lyle followed him into the hallway, his heart sinking at the realization of what he was willing to participate in. Mattie slept 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 white gas.
Weldon slid open a box of kitchen matches, and they each took one, raked it across the striker, and, with the sense that their lives at that moment had changed forever, threw them at Mattie’s feet. But the burning matches fell outside the wet area. Lyle jerked the box from Weldon’s hand, clutched a half dozen matches in his 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. They could smell her hair burning as she raced past them 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 was swarming with yellow jackets.
Lyle and Weldon stood transfixed in mortal dread at what they 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 a holy card.
The Negro got to his feet and walked toward the gallery, a solitary line of blood running down his black cheek where Mattie had scratched him.
“Yo’ mama ain’t hurt bad. Go get some butter or some bacon grease. It gonna be fine, you gonna see,” he said. “Don’t be shakin’ like that. Where yo’ daddy at? It gonna be just fine. You little white children ain’t got to worry about nothing.”
He smiled to assure them that everything would be all right.
“THEY PUT HER in the crazy house at Mandeville,” Lyle said, his face turned into the warm breeze off the bayou. “She died there about ten years later, I heard.”
“And you’ve felt guilt about it all this time?” I asked.
“Not really.”
“No?”
“We were kids. Nobody would help us. It was her or us. Besides, I think my sins are forgiven.”
“I don’t know what to tell you, Lyle. I just don’t believe that your father has reappeared after all these years to do y’all harm. People just don’t come back after that long for revenge.”
He sipped from his bottle and shook his head sadly.
“The son of a buck was evil. If ever Satan took a human form, it was my old man,” he said.
“Well, I’ll have a talk with Drew about the intruder. But I want to ask you something else while we’re out here.”
“Go ahead. I got no secrets.”
“If you really did get religion, was it because of something that happened in Vietnam that I don’t know about?”
The oil wells clanked up and down in the unplowed field, which was now pink in the sun’s afterglow.
“You think maybe you had something to do with it?” he asked. “Don’t give yourself too much credit, Dave.”
He snuffed dryly and touched at his nostrils with one knuckle.
“I killed a nun,” he said.
“You did what?”
“I never told you about it. I climbed down into what I thought was a spider hole, but one tunnel went off into a room that they must have used as an aid station because there were bloody field dressings all over the floor. I saw something go across the door, and I opened up. It was a nun, a white woman. There were two of them in there. The other one was huddled up against the wall, trembling all over. They must have been from the school in the ville. You remember there were some French nuns in that one ville?”
I nodded silently.
