Jesus Out to Sea

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.