“She said if you heard somebody else use them, you have to tell on them or you’re committing a sin, too.”
Father Melancon pinched the bridge of his nose between his eyes. I felt my face burn with my own shame and weakness.
“Who did you hear using bad words?” he said.
“I don’t want to tell, Father.”
“Do you think it’s going out of this confessional?”
“No . . . I don’t know.”
“You’ve got to have some trust in me, Claude.”
“It was Arthur Boudreau.”
“Now you listen to me. There’s nothing wrong with Arthur Boudreau. The Lord put people like Arthur here to keep the rest of us honest. Look, you’re worrying about all kinds of things that aren’t important. Sister Uberta means well but sometimes . . . well, she works too hard at it. This might be hard for you to understand now, but sometimes when people are having trouble with one part of their lives, the trouble pops up someplace else that’s perfectly innocent.”
I only became more confused, more convinced that I was caught forever inside my unexplained and unforgivable guilt.
“Claude, spring and baseball season are going to be here soon, and I want you to think about that and try to forget all this other stuff. How is your daddy?”
“He’s gone away.”
I saw his lips crimp inward, and he touched his forehead with his fingertips. It was a moment before he spoke again.
“Don’t be too hard on him,” he said. “He’ll come back one day. You’ll see. In the meantime you tell Arthur to get his fastball in shape.”
“Father, I can’t explain what I feel inside me.”
I heard him sigh deeply on the other side of the screen.
That night I sat by the big wood radio with the tiny yellow dial in our living room and listened to the Louisiana Hayride and oiled my fielder’s glove. My mother was ironing in the kitchen. She had started taking in laundry, which was something done only by Negro women at that time in New Iberia. I worked the Neatsfoot oil into my glove, then fitted a ball deep into the pocket and tied down the fingers with twine to give it shape. The voices of the country musicians on the radio and the applause of their audience seemed beamed to me from a distant place that was secure from war and the sins that pervaded the world. I fell asleep sitting in the big chair with my hand inside my fielder’s glove.
I awoke to an electric storm, a huge vortex of air swirling around our house, and a static-filled news report about waves of airplanes that were carpet-bombing the earth.
. . .
Spring didn’t come with baseball season; it arrived one day with the transfer of Rene LeBlanc from boarding school to my fifth-grade class. Her hair was auburn and curly and seemed transfused with light when she sat in her desk by the window. Her almond eyes were always full of light, too, and they looked at you in a curious, open way that made something drop inside you. Her cream-colored pleated skirt swung on her hips when she walked to the blackboard, and while she worked an arithmetic problem with the chalk, her face thoughtful under Sister Uberta’s gaze, I’d look at the smooth, white curve of her neck, the redness of her mouth, the way her curls moved with the air from the fan, the outline of her slip strap against her blouse, and in my fantasies I’d find ways to sit next to her at morning Mass or in the lunchroom or maybe to touch her moist hand during the recess softball game.
But even though she was French and Catholic, she didn’t belong to the Cajun world I came from. She lived in a huge, pillared home on Spanish Lake. It had a deep, green lawn, with water sprinklers turning on it in the sunlight, a pea-gravel drive shaded by rows of mossy oaks, and a clay tennis court and riding ring in back beyond which the blue lake winked through the cypress trees. Some of the other kids said she was a snob. But I knew better. Silently I gave her my heart.
I never thought a time would come when I could offer it to her openly, but one fine spring afternoon, when the air was heavy with the bloom of azalea and jasmine and myrtle and the wind blew through the bamboo and clumps of oaks along East Main, Arthur Boudreau and I walked home from school together and saw Rene, alone and under siege, at the bus stop.
A gang of boys who lived down by Railroad Avenue were on the opposite side of the street, flinging pecans at her. The pecans were still in their wet, moldy husks, and they thudded against her back and rump or exploded against the brick wall behind her. But her flushed, angry face had the solitary determination of a soldier’s, and she wouldn’t give an inch of ground. Her little fists were crossed in front of her like a knight-errant’s.
Arthur Boudreau was not only a terror in any kind of fight, he had a pitching arm that could make batters wince when they saw a mean glint in his eye. In fact years later, when he pitched Class-C ball in the Evangeline League, people would say he could throw a baseball through a car wash without getting it wet.
We scooped up handfuls of pecans, Arthur mounted a garbage-can lid on his arm, and we charged the enemy across the street, slamming one pecan after another into their bodies. They tried to resist but Arthur had no mercy and they knew it. He nailed one boy in the back of the neck, another flush on the ear, and drove the garbage-can lid into the leader’s face. They turned and ran down a side street toward the south side of town, one of them impotently shooting a finger and still shouting at us.
“Come around again and I’ll kick this can up your hole,” Arthur yelled after them.
Rene brushed at the green stains on her blouse. There were still circles of color in her cheeks.
“We’ll walk with you tomorrow in case those guys come back,” I said.
“I wasn’t afraid,” she said.
“Those are bad guys. One of them beat up Arthur’s little brother with a stick.”