Then we began to hear rumors about Sister Roberta, of a kind that we had never heard about any of the nuns, who all seemed to have no lives other than the ones that were immediately visible to us. She had been heard weeping in the confessional, she had left the convent for three days without permission, two detectives from Baton Rouge had questioned her in the Mother Superior’s office.
She missed a week of school and a lay teacher took her place. She returned for two weeks, then was gone again. When she came back the second time she was soft-spoken and removed, and sometimes she didn’t even bother to answer simple questions that we asked her. She would gaze out the window for long periods, as though her attention were fixed on a distant object, then a noise — a creaking desk, an eraser flung from the cloakroom — would disturb her, and her eyes would return to the room, absolutely empty of thought or meaning.
I stayed after school on a Friday to help her wash the blackboards and pound erasers.
“You don’t need to, Billy Bob. The janitor will take care of it,” she said, staring idly out the window.
“All the kids like you, Sister,” I said.
“What?” she said.
“You’re the only one who plays with us at recess. You don’t ever get mad at us, either. Not for real, anyway.”
“It’s nice of you to say that, but the other sisters are good to you, too.”
“Not like you are.”
“You shouldn’t talk to me like that, Billy Bob.” She had lost weight, and there was a solitary crease, like a line drawn by a thumbnail, in each of her cheeks.
“It’s wrong for you to be sad,” I said.
“You must run along home now. Don’t say anything more.”
I wish you were my mother, I thought I heard myself say inside my head.
“What did you say?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
“Tell me what you said.”
“I don’t think I said anything. I really don’t think I did.”
My heart was beating against my rib cage, the same way it had the day I fell unconscious in the sugarcane field.
“Billy Bob, don’t try to understand the world. It’s not ours to understand,” she said. “You must give up the things you can’t change. You mustn’t talk to me like this anymore. You —”
But I was already racing from the room, my soul painted with an unrelieved shame that knew no words.
The next week I found out the source of Sister Roberta’s grief. A strange and seedy man by the name of Mr. Trajan, who always had an American flag pin on his lapel when you saw him inside the wire cage of the grocery and package store he operated by the Negro district, had cut an article from copies of the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate and the Lafayette Daily Advertiser and mailed it to other Catholic businessmen in town. An eighth-grader who had been held back twice, once by Sister Roberta, brought it to school one day, and after the three o’clock bell Lyle, Weldon, and I heard him reading it to a group of dumbfounded boys on the playground. The words hung in the air like our first exposure to God’s name being deliberately used in vain.
Her brother had killed a child, and Sister Roberta had helped him hide in a fishing camp in West Baton Rouge Parish.
“Give me that,” Weldon said, and tore the news article out of the boy’s hand. He stared hard at it, then wadded it up and threw it on the ground. “Get the fuck out of here. You go around talking about this again and I’ll kick your ass.” “That’s right, you dumb fuck,” Lyle said, putting his new baseball cap in his back pocket and setting his book satchel down by his foot.
“That’s right, butt face,” I added, incredulous at the boldness of my own words.
“Yeah?” the boy said, but the resolve in his voice was already breaking.
“Yeah!” Weldon said, and shoved him off balance. Then he picked up a rock and chased the boy and three of his friends toward the street. Lyle and I followed, picking up dirt clods in our hands. When the boy was almost to his father’s waiting pickup truck, he turned and shot us the finger. Weldon nailed him right above the eye with the rock.
One of the brothers marched us down to Father Higgins’s office and left us there to wait for Father Higgins, whose razor strop and black-Irish, crimson-faced tirades were legendary in the school. The office smelled of the cigar butts in the wastebasket and the cracked leather in the chairs. A walnut pendulum clock ticked loudly on the wall. It was overcast outside, and we sat in the gloom and silence until four o’clock.
“I ain’t waiting anymore. Y’all coming?” Weldon said, and put one leg out the open window.
“You’ll get expelled,” I said.
“Too bad. I ain’t going to wait around just to have somebody whip me,” he said, and dropped out the window.
Five minutes later, Lyle followed him.
The sound of the clock was like a spoon knocking on a hollow wood box. When Father Higgins finally entered the room, he was wearing his horn-rimmed glasses and thumbing through a sheaf of papers attached to a clipboard. The hairline on the back of his neck was shaved neatly with a razor. At first he seemed distracted by my presence, then he flipped the sheets of paper to a particular page, almost as an afterthought, and studied it. He put an unlit cigar stub in his mouth, looked at me, then back at the page.
“You threw a rock at somebody?” he said.
“No, Father.”
“Somebody threw a rock at you?”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
“I don’t know,” I replied.
“That’s interesting. All right, since you don’t know why you’re here, how about going somewhere else?”
“I’ll take him, Father,” I heard Sister Roberta say in the doorway. She put her hand on my arm, walked me down the darkly polished corridor to the breezeway outside, then sat me down on the stone bench inside the bamboo-enclosed garden where she often said her rosary.
She sat next to me, her small white hands curved on the edges of the bench, and looked down at the goldfish pond while she talked. A crushed paper cup floated among the hyacinth leaves. “You meant well, Billy Bob, but I don’t want you to defend me anymore. It’s not the job of little people to defend adults.”
“Sister, the newspaper said—”
“It said what?”
“You were in trouble with the police. Can they put you in jail?”
She put her hand on top of mine. Her fingernails looked like tiny pink seashells. “They’re not really interested in me, Billy Bob. My brother is an alcoholic, and he killed a little boy with his car, then he ran away. But they probably won’t send my brother to prison because the child was a Negro.” Her hand was hot and damp on top of mine. Her voice clicked wetly in her throat. “He’ll be spared, not because he’s a sick man, but because it was a colored child he killed.”
When I looked at her again, her long eyelashes were bright with tears. She stood up with her face turned away from me. The sun had broken through the gray seal of clouds, and the live oak tree overhead was filled with the clattering of mockingbirds and blue jays. I felt her tiny fingernails rake gently through my hair, as though she were combing a cat.
“Oh, you poor child, you have lice eggs in your hair,” she said. Then she pressed my head against her breast, and I felt her tears strike hotly on the back of my neck.
Three days later, Sister 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 us in front of her. Drew told him she had been burned by an ember that had popped out of a trash fire in the backyard.