“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
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.
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
