He raised her chin with his knuckle. His black hair was stiff with grease. “Is that what happened?” he asked.
“Yes, sir.” Drew’s face was dull, her mouth down-turned at the corners. The burn was scabbed now and looked like a tightly coiled gray worm on her skin.
He smiled and took his knuckle away from her chin. “Then you shouldn’t play next to the fire,” he said.
“I would like to know who sent you out here,” Mattie said.
“That’s confidential.” He coughed on the back of his hand. His shirt cuff was frayed and for some reason looked particularly pretentious and sad on his thin wrist. “And to tell you the truth, I don’t really know. My supervisor didn’t tell me. I guess that’s how the chain of command works.” He coughed again, this time loud and hard, and I could smell the nicotine that was buried in his lungs. “But everything here looks all right. Perhaps this is much ado about nothing. Not a bad day for a drive, though.”
Weldon’s eyes were as hard as marbles, but he didn’t speak.
The man walked with Mattie to his car, and I felt like doors were slamming all around us. She put her foot on his running board and propped one arm on his car roof while she talked, so that her breasts were uplifted against her blouse and her dress made a loop between her legs.
“Let’s tell him,” Lyle said.
“Are you kidding? Look at him. He’d eat her shit with a spoon,” Weldon said.
It was right after first period the next morning that we heard about the disaster at Texas City. Somebody shouted something about it on the playground, then suddenly the whole school was abuzz with rumors. Cars on the street pulled to the curb with their radios tuned to news stations, and we could even hear the principal’s old boxwood radio blaring through the open window upstairs. A ship loaded with fertilizer had been burning in the harbor, and while people on the docks had watched firefighting boats pumping geysers of water onto the ship’s decks, the fire had dripped into the hold. The explosion filled the sky with rockets of smoke and rained an umbrella of flame down on the Monsanto chemical plant. The force of the secondary explosion was so great that it blew out windows in Houston, fifty miles away. But it wasn’t over yet. The fireball mushroomed laterally out into an adjacent oil field, and rows of storage tanks and wellheads went like strings of Chinese firecrackers. People said the water in the harbor boiled from the heat, the spars on steel derricks melting like licorice.
We heard nothing about the fate of my father either that afternoon or evening. Mattie got drunk that night and fell asleep in the living room chair by the radio. I felt nothing about my father’s possible death, and I wondered at my own callousness. We went to school the next morning, and when we returned home in the afternoon Mattie was waiting on the gallery to tell us that a man from the Monsanto Company had telephoned and said that my father was listed as missing. Her eyes were pink with either hangover or crying, and her face was puffy and round, like a white balloon.
When we didn’t respond, she said, “Your father may be dead. Do you understand what I’m saying? That was an important man from his company who called. He would not call unless he was gravely concerned. Do you children understand what is being said to you?”
Weldon brushed at the dirt with his tennis shoe, and Lyle looked into a place about six inches in front of his eyes. Drew’s face was frightened, not because of the news about our father, but instead because of the strange whirring of wheels that we could almost hear from inside Mattie’s head. I put my arm over her shoulders and felt her skin jump.
“He’s worked like a nigra for you, maybe lost his life for you, and you have nothing to say?” Mattie asked.
“Maybe we ought to start cleaning up our rooms. You wanted us to clean up our rooms, Mattie,” I said.
But it was a poor attempt to placate her.
“You stay outside. Don’t even come in this house,” she said.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” Lyle said.
“Then you can just do it in the dirt like a darky,” she said, and went inside the house and latched the screen behind her.
By the next afternoon, my father was still unaccounted for. Mattie had an argument on the phone with somebody, I think the man in zoot pants and two-tone shoes who had probably been her pimp at one time, because she told him he owed her money and she wouldn’t come back and work at Broussard’s Bar again until he paid her. After she hung up she breathed hard at the kitchen sink, smoking her cigarette and staring out into the yard. She snapped the cap off a bottle of Jax and drank it half empty, her throat working in one long, wet swallow, one eye cocked at me.
“Come here,” she said.
“What?”
“You tracked up the kitchen. You didn’t flush the toilet after you used it, either.”
“I did.”
“You did what?”
“I flushed the toilet.”
“Then one of the others didn’t flush it. Every one of you come out here. Now!”
“What is it, Mattie? We didn’t do anything,” I said.
“I changed my mind. Every one of you outside. All of you outside. Weldon and Lyle, you get out there right now. Where’s Drew?”
“She’s playing in the yard. What’s wrong, Mattie?” I made no attempt to hide the fear in my voice. I could see the web of blue veins in the top of her muscular chest.
Outside, the wind was blowing through the trees in the yard, flattening the purple clumps of wisteria that grew against the barn wall.
“Each of you go to the hedge and cut the switch you want me to use on you,” she said.
It was her favorite form of punishment for us. If we broke off a large switch, she hit us fewer times with it. If we came back with a thin or small switch, we would get whipped until she felt she had struck some kind of balance between size and number.
We remained motionless. Drew had been playing with her cat. She had tied a piece of twine around the cat’s neck, and she held the twine in her hand like a leash. Her knees and white socks were dusty from play.
“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, then there was a moment of recognition in her colorless face, a flicker of fear, as though she had seen a growing meanness of spirit in Weldon that would soon become a challenge to her own. She wet her lips.
“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.
I saw the look in Drew’s face, saw her drop the piece of twine from her palm as she stared up into Mattie’s shadow.
Mattie jerked her by the wrist and whipped her a half-dozen times across her bare legs. Drew twisted impotently in Mattie’s balled hand, 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 limp in her hand. Then her eyes grew hot and bright, and I could see the bone flex along her jaws.
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 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 we needed to go to the bathroom, she told us to take our 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 sex plainly visible to us.