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. If they broke off a large switch, she hit them fewer times with it. If they came back with a thin or small switch, they would get whipped until she felt she had struck some kind of balance between size and number.
They 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 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, and there was a moment of recognition in her colorless face, as though she had seen a growing meanness of spirit in Weldon that was the equal of her own. Then she wet her lips, crimped them together, and rubbed her hands on her thighs.
'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.
Drew looked up into Mattie's shadow, and dropped the piece of twine from her palm.
Mattie jerked her by the wrist and whipped her a halfdozen times across her bare legs. Drew twisted impotently from Mattie's fist, 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 Matties 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 loose in her hand. Then her eyes grew hot and bright with a painful intention, and her jawbone flexed like a roll of dimes.
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 with flame 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 the children needed to go to the bathroom, she told them to take their 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 pubic hair plainly visible.
'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 recurrence 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?' Lyle 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.
At that moment Lyle wanted something terrible to happen to her.
She turned on one high heel, 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,' he 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 him and made water well up in his eyes. He backed away from the screen, then turned and ran through the rear of the house and out into the backyard, where Weldon 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 clown's.
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 chopped haircut looked like feathers on his head in the flicker of lightning through the window. When Lyle was almost asleep Weldon shook him awake and said, 'We got to get rid of her. You know we got to do it.'
Lyle put his pillow over his head and rolled away from him, as though he could drop away into sleep and rise in the morning into a sun-spangled and different world.
But in the false dawn he woke to Weldon's face close to his. 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?' he said.
Lyle followed him into the hallway, his heart sinking at the realization of what he was willing to participate in.
Mattie slept 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 white gas.
Weldon slid open a box of kitchen matches, and they each took one, raked it across the striker, and, with the sense that their lives at that moment had changed forever, threw them at Mattie's feet. But the burning matches fell outside the wet area. Lyle jerked the box from Weldon's, clutched a half dozen matches in his fist, dragged 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. They could smell her hair burning as she raced past them 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 was swarming with yellow jackets.
Lyle and Weldon stood transfixed in mortal dread at what they 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 a holy card.
The Negro got to his feet and walked toward the gallery, a solitary line of blood running down his black cheek where Mattie had scratched him.
'Yo' mama ain't hurt bad. Go get some butter or some bacon grease. It gonna be fine, you gonna see,' he said.
'Don't be shakin' like that. Where yo' daddy at? It gonna be just fine. You little white children ain't got to worry about nothing.'
He smiled to assure them that everything would be all right.
'They put her in the crazy house at Mandeville,' Lyle said, his face turned into the warm breeze off the bayou. 'She died there about ten years later, I heard.'
