“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 reoccurrence 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?” I 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.
I hated her. I wanted something terrible to happen to her. I could feel my fingernails knifing into my palms.
She turned around, 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,” I 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 me and made water well up in my eyes. I backed away from the screen, then turned and ran through the rear of the house and out into the backyard where Weldon, Lyle, 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 clowns. 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 burr haircut looked like duck down on his head in the flicker of lightning through the window. When I was almost asleep he shook both me and Lyle awake and said, “We got to get rid of her. You know we got to do it.”
I put my pillow over my head and rolled away from him, as though I could drop away into sleep and rise in the morning into a sun-spangled and different world.
But in the false dawn I woke to both Lyles and Weldon’s faces close to mine. 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?” Weldon said.
I followed them into the hallway, my heart sinking at the realization of what I was willing to participate in, my body as numb as if I had been stunned with Novocaine. Mattie was sleeping 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 a slap across the face.
Weldon slid open a box of kitchen matches and we each took one, raked it across the striker, and, with the sense that our lives at that moment had changed forever, threw them at Mattie’s feet. But the burning matches fell outside the wet area. The blood veins in my head dilated with fear, my ears hummed with a sound like the roar of the ocean in a seashell, and I jerked the box from Weldon’s hand, clutched a half-dozen matches in my 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. We could smell her hair burning as she raced past us 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 were swarming with yellow jackets.
I stood transfixed in mortal dread at what I 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 one of my holy cards.
The Negro rose to his feet and walked toward the gallery, a solitary line of blood running down his cheek where Mattie had scratched him.
“Yo’ mama ain’t hurt bad. Get some butter or some bacon grease. She gonna be all right, you gonna see. You children don’t be worried, no,” he said. His gums were purple with snuff when he smiled.
The volunteer firemen bounced across the cattle guard in an old fire truck whose obsolete hand-crank starter still dangled from under the radiator. They coated Mattie’s room with foam from a fire extinguisher and packed Mattie off in an ambulance to the charity hospital in Lafayette. Two sheriff’s deputies arrived, and before he left, one of the volunteers took them aside in the yard and talked with them, looking over his shoulder at us children, then walked over to us and said, “The fire chief gonna come out here and check it out. Y’all stay out of that bedroom.”
His face was narrow and dark with shadow under the brim of his big rubber fireman’s hat. I felt a fist squeeze my heart.
But suddenly Sister Roberta was in the midst of everything. Someone had carried word to the school about the fire, and she’d had one of the brothers drive her out to the house. She talked with the deputies, helped us fix cereal at the kitchen table, and made telephone calls to find a place for us to stay besides the welfare shelter. Then she looked in Mattie’s bedroom door and studied the interior for what seemed a long time. When she came back in the kitchen, her eyes peeled the skin off our faces. I looked straight down into my cereal bowl.
She placed her small hand on my shoulder. I could feel her fingers tapping on the bone, as though she were processing her own thoughts. Then she said, “Well, what should we do here today? I think we should clean up first. Where’s the broom?”
Without waiting for an answer she pulled the broom out of the closet and went to work in Mattie’s room, sweeping the spilled and unstruck matches as well as the burned ones in a pile by a side door that gave onto the yard. The soot and blackened threads from the rug swirled up in a cloud around her veils and wings and smudged her starched wimple.
One of the deputies put his hand on the broomstick. “There ain’t been an investigation yet. You can’t do that till the fire chief come out and see, Sister,” he said.
“You always talked like a fool, Gaspard,” she said. “Now that you have a uniform, you talk like a bigger one. This house smells like an incinerator. Now get out of the way.” With one sweep of the broom she raked all the matches out into the yard.
We were placed in foster homes, and over the years I lost contact with Sister Roberta. But later I went to work in the oil fields, and I think perhaps I talked with my father in a nightclub outside of Morgan City. An enormous live oak tree grew through the floor and roof, and he was leaning against the bar that had been built in a circle around the tree. His face was puckered with white scar tissue, his ears burned into stubs, his right hand atrophied and frozen against his chest like a broken bird’s foot. But beyond the layers of mutilated skin I could see my father’s face, like the image in a photographic negative held up against a light.