“Rheumatic, Mr. Sonnier. It attacks the heart. I could be wrong, but I think that’s what your boy’s got. I’ll be back tomorrow.”
“How much this gonna cost?”
“It’s three dollars for the visit, but you can pay me when you’re able.”
“We never had nothing like this in our family. You sure about this?”
“No, I’m not. That’s why I’ll be back. Good night to you, sir.”
I knew he didn’t like my father, but he came to see me one afternoon a week for a month, brought me bottles of medicine, and always looked into my face with genuine concern after he listened to my heart. Then one night he and my father argued and he didn’t come back.
“What good he do, huh?” my father said. “You still sick, ain’t you? A doctor don’t make money off well people. I think maybe you got malaria, son. There ain’t nothing for that, either. It just goes away. You gonna see, you. You stay in bed, you eat cush-cush Mattie and me make for you, you drink that Hadacol vitamin tonic, you wear this dime I’m tying on you, you gonna get well and go back to school.”
He hung a perforated dime on a piece of red twine around my neck. His face was lean and unshaved, his eyes as intense as a butane flame when he looked into mine. “You blame me for your mama?” he asked.
“No, sir,” I lied.
“I didn’t mean to hit her. But she made me look bad in front of y’all. A woman can’t be doing that to a man in front of his kids.”
“Make Mattie go away, Daddy.”
“Don’t be saying that.”
“She hit Weldon with the belt. She made Drew kneel in the bathroom corner because she didn’t flush the toilet.”
“She’s just trying to be a mother, that’s all. Don’t talk no more. Go to sleep. I got to drive back to Texas City tonight. You gonna be all right.”
He closed my door and the inside of my room was absolutely black. Through the wall I heard him and Mattie talking, then the weight of their bodies creaking rhythmically on the bedsprings.
When Sister Roberta knew that I would not be back to school that semester, she began bringing my lessons to the house. She came three afternoons a week and had to walk two miles each way between the convent and our house. Each time I successfully completed a lesson she rewarded me with a holy card. Each holy card had a prayer on one side and a beautiful picture on the other, usually of angels and saints glowing with light or ethereal paintings of Mary with the Infant Jesus. On the day after my father had tied the dime around my neck, Sister Roberta had to walk past our neighbors field right after he had cut his cane and burned off the stubble, and a wet wind had streaked her black habit with ashes. As soon as she came through my bedroom door her face tightened inside her wimple, and her brown eyes, which had flecks of red in them, grew round and hot. She dropped her book bag on the foot of my bed and leaned within six inches of my face as though she were looking down at a horrid presence in the bottom of a well. The hair on her upper lip looked like pieces of silver thread.
“Who put that around your neck?” she asked.
“My father says it keeps the gris-gris away.”
“My suffering God,” she said, and went back out the door in a swirl of cloth. Then I heard her speak to Mattie: “That’s right, madam. Scissors. So I can remove that cord from his neck before he strangles to death in his sleep. Thank you kindly.”
She came back into my bedroom, pulled the twine out from my throat with one finger, and snipped it in two. “Do you believe in this nonsense, Billy Bob?” she asked.
“No, Sister.”
“That’s good. You’re a good Catholic boy, and you mustn’t believe in superstition. Do you love the church?”
“I think so.”
“Hmmmm. That doesn’t sound entirely convincing. Do you love your father?”
“I don’t know.”
“I see. Do you love your sister and your brothers?”
“Yes. Most of the time I do.”
“That’s good. Because if you love somebody, or if you love the church, like I do, then you don’t ever have to be afraid. People are only superstitious when they’re afraid. That’s an important lesson for little people to learn. Now, let’s take a look at our math test for this week.”
Over her shoulder I saw Mattie looking at us from the living room, her hair in foam rubber curlers, her face contorted as though a piece of barbed wire were twisting behind her eyes.
That winter my father started working regular hours, what he called “an indoor job,” at the Monsanto Chemical Company in Texas City, and we saw him only on weekends. Mattie cooked only the evening meal and made us 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 thumbtacked a girls 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 collar 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 we went to sleep he sat for a long time on the side of his bed, next to mine, 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 and behind his ears. Mattie had given him a burr haircut, and his head looked as hard and scalped as a baseball.
“Tomorrow’s Saturday. We’re going to listen to the LSU-Rice game,” I 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 fix her.”
His voice made me afraid. The branches of the pecan trees were skeletal, like gnarled fingers against the moon.
“Don’t be thinking like that,” I said. “It’ll just make her do worse things. She takes it out on Drew when you and Lyle aren’t here.”
“Go to sleep, Billy Bob,” he 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 Mama did.”
I heard him snuffling in the dark. Then he lay down with his face turned toward the opposite wall. His head looked carved out of gray wood in the moonlight.
I went back to school for the spring semester. Maybe because of the balmy winds off the Gulf and the heavy, fecund smell of magnolia and wisteria on the night air, I wanted to believe that a new season was beginning in my heart as well. I couldn’t control what happened at home, but the school was a safe place, one where Sister Roberta ruled her little fifth-grade world like an affectionate despot.
I was always fascinated by her hands. They were like toy hands, small as a child’s, as pink as an early rose, the nails not much bigger than pearls. She was wonderful at sketching and drawing with crayons and colored chalk. In minutes she could create a beautiful religious scene on the blackboard to fit the church’s season, but she also drew pictures for us of Easter rabbits and talking Easter eggs. Sometimes she would draw only the outline of a figure — an archangel with enormous wings, a Roman soldier about to be dazzled by a blinding light — and she would let us take turns coloring in the solid areas. She told us the secret to great classroom art was to always keep your chalk and crayons pointy.