Jesus Out to Sea

by James Lee Burke

  “Do you feel sick again, Billy Bob?” she asked.

  “Yes, Sister.”

  “Come here.”

  “What?”

  “I said come here.” Her hand reached out and held my forehead. Then she wiped the moisture off her palm with her fingers. “Have you been playing or running?”

  “No, Sister.”

  “Has your father taken you to a doctor?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Look at me and answer my question,” she said.

  “He don’t—he doesn’t have money right now. He says it’s because I had the flu. He boiled some honey and onions for me to eat. It made me feel better. It’s true, Sister.”

  “I need to talk to your father.”

  She saw me swallow.

  “Would he mind my calling him?” she asked.

  “He’s not home now. He works all the time.”

  “Will he be home tonight?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Who takes care of you at night when he’s not home?”

  “A lady, a friend of his.”

  “I see. Come back to the classroom with me. It’s too windy out here for you,” she said.

  “Sister, you don’t need to call, do you? I feel okay now. My father’s got a lot on his mind now. He works real hard.”

  “What’s wrong in your house, Billy Bob?”

  “Nothing. I promise, Sister.” I tried to smile. I could taste bile in my throat.

  “Don’t lie.”

  “I’m not. I promise I’m not.”

  “Yes, I can see that clearly. Come with me.”

  The rest of the recess period she and I sharpened crayons in the empty room with tiny pencil sharpeners, stringing long curlicues of colored wax into the wastebasket. She was as silent and as seemingly self-absorbed as a statue. Just before the bell rang she walked down to the convent and came back with a tube of toothpaste.

  “Your breath is bad. Go down to the lavatory and wash your mouth out with this,” she said.

  Mattie wore shorts and sleeveless blouses with sweat rings under the arms, and in the daytime she always seemed to have curlers in her hair. When she walked from room to room she carried an ashtray with her into which she constantly flicked her lipstick-stained Chesterfields. She had a hard, muscular body, and she didn’t close the bathroom door all the way when she bathed, and once I saw her kneeling in the tub, scrubbing her big shoulders and chest with a large, flat brush. The area above her head was crisscrossed with improvised clotheslines from which dripped her wet underthings. Her eyes fastened on mine; I thought she was about to reprimand me for staring at her, but instead her hard-boned, shiny face continued to look back at me with a vacuous indifference that made me feel obscene.

  If my father was out of town on a Friday or Saturday night, she fixed our supper (sometimes meat on Friday, the fear in our eyes not worthy of her recognition), put on her blue suit, and sat by herself in the living room, listening to the Grand Ole Opry or the Louisiana Hayride, while she drank apricot brandy from a coffee cup. She always dropped cigarette ashes on her suit and had to spot-clean the cloth with dry cleaning fluid before she drove off for the evening in her old Ford coupe. I don’t know where she went on those Friday or Saturday nights, but a boy down the road told me that Mattie used to work in Broussard’s Bar on Railroad Avenue, an infamous area in New Iberia where the women sat on the galleries of the cribs, dipping their beer out of buckets and yelling at the railroad and oilfield workers in the street.

  Then one morning when my father was in Morgan City, a man in a new silver Chevrolet sedan came out to see her. It was hot, and he parked his car partly on our grass to keep it in the shade. He wore sideburns, striped brown zoot slacks, two-tone shoes, suspenders, a pink shirt without a coat, and a fedora that shadowed his narrow face. While he talked to her, he put one shoe on the car bumper and wiped the dust off it with a rag. Then their voices grew louder and he said, “You like the life. Admit it, you. He ain’t given you no wedding ring, has he? You don’t buy the cow, no, when you can milk through the fence.”

  “I am currently involved with a gentleman. I do not know what you are talking about. I am not interested in anything you are talking about,” she said.

  He threw the rag back inside the car and opened the car door. “It’s always trick, trade, or travel, darlin’,” he said. “Same rules here as down on Railroad. He done made you a nigger woman for them children, Mattie.”

  “Are you calling me a nigra?” she said quietly.

  “No, I’m calling you crazy, just like everybody say you are. No, I take that back, me. I ain’t calling you nothing. I ain’t got to, ’cause you gonna be back. You in the life, Mattie. You be phoning me to come out here, bring you to the crib, rub your back, put some of that warm stuff in your arm again. Ain’t nobody else do that for you, huh?”

  When she came back into the house, she made us take all the dishes out of the cabinets, even though they were clean, and wash them over again.

  It was the following Friday that Sister Roberta called. Mattie was already dressed to go out. She didn’t bother to turn down the radio when she answered the phone, and in order to compete with Red Foley’s voice, she had to almost shout into the receiver.

  “Mr. Sonnier is not here,” she said. “Mr. Sonnier is away on business in Texas City…No, ma’am, I’m not the housekeeper. I’m a friend of the family who is caring for these children…There’s nothing wrong with that boy that I can see…Are you calling to tell me that there’s something wrong, that I’m doing something wrong? What is it that I’m doing wrong? I would like to know that. What is your name?”

  I stood transfixed with terror in the hall as she bent angrily into the mouthpiece and her knuckles ridged on the receiver. A storm was blowing in from the Gulf, the air smelled of ozone, and the southern horizon was black with thunderclouds that pulsated with white veins of lightning. I heard the wind ripping through the trees in the yard and pecans rattling down on the gallery roof like grapeshot.

  When Mattie hung up the phone, the skin of her face was stretched as tight as a lamp shade and one liquid eye was narrowed at me like someone aiming down a rifle barrel.

  The next week, when I was cutting through the neighbor’s sugarcane field on the way home from school, my heart started to race for no reason, my spit tasted like pecans, and my face filmed with perspiration even though the wind was cool through the stalks of cane; then I saw the oaks and cypress trees along Bayou Teche tilt at an angle, and I dropped my books and fell forward in the dirt as though someone had wrapped a chain around my chest and snapped my breastbone.

  I lay with the side of my face pressed against the dirt, my mouth gasping like a fish’s, until Weldon found me and went crashing through the cane for help. A doctor came out to the house that night, examined me and gave me a shot, then talked with my father out in the hall. My father didn’t understand the doctor’s vocabulary, and he said, “What kind of fever that is?”

  “Rheumatic, Mr. Sonnier. It attacks the heart. I could be wrong, but I think that’s what your boy’s got. I’ll be back tomorrow.”

  “How much this gonna cost?”

  “It’s three dollars for the visit, but you can pay me when you’re able.”

  “We never had nothing like this in our family. You sure about this?”

  “No, I’m not. That’s why I’ll be back. Good night to you, sir.”

  I knew he didn’t like my father, but he came to see me one afternoon a week for a month, brought me bottles of medicine, and always looked into my face with genuine concern after he listened to my heart. Then one night he and my father argued and he didn’t come back.

  “What good he do, huh?” my father said. “You still sick, ain’t you? A doctor don’t make money off well people. I think maybe you got malaria, son. There ain’t nothing for that, either. It just goes away. You gonna see, you. You stay in bed, you eat cush-cush Mattie and me make for you, you drink that Hadacol vitamin tonic,
you wear this dime I’m tying on you, you gonna get well and go back to school.”

  He hung a perforated dime on a piece of red twine around my neck. His face was lean and unshaved, his eyes as intense as a butane flame when he looked into mine. “You blame me for your mama?” he asked.

  “No, sir,” I lied.

  “I didn’t mean to hit her. But she made me look bad in front of y’all. A woman can’t be doing that to a man in front of his kids.”

  “Make Mattie go away, Daddy.”

  “Don’t be saying that.”

  “She hit Weldon with the belt. She made Drew kneel in the bathroom corner because she didn’t flush the toilet.”

  “She’s just trying to be a mother, that’s all. Don’t talk no more. Go to sleep. I got to drive back to Texas City tonight. You gonna be all right.”

  He closed my door and the inside of my room was absolutely black. Through the wall I heard him and Mattie talking, then the weight of their bodies creaking rhythmically on the bedsprings.

  When Sister Roberta knew that I would not be back to school that semester, she began bringing my lessons to the house. She came three afternoons a week and had to walk two miles each way between the convent and our house. Each time I successfully completed a lesson she rewarded me with a holy card. Each holy card had a prayer on one side and a beautiful picture on the other, usually of angels and saints glowing with light or ethereal paintings of Mary with the Infant Jesus. On the day after my father had tied the dime around my neck, Sister Roberta had to walk past our neighbor’s field right after he had cut his cane and burned off the stubble, and a wet wind had streaked her black habit with ashes. As soon as she came through my bedroom door her face tightened inside her wimple, and her brown eyes, which had flecks of red in them, grew round and hot. She dropped her book bag on the foot of my bed and leaned within six inches of my face as though she were looking down at a horrid presence in the bottom of a well. The hair on her upper lip looked like pieces of silver thread.

  “Who put that around your neck?” she asked.

  “My father says it keeps the gris-gris away.”

  “My suffering God,” she said, and went back out the door in a swirl of cloth. Then I heard her speak to Mattie: “That’s right, madam. Scissors. So I can remove that cord from his neck before he strangles to death in his sleep. Thank you kindly.”

  She came back into my bedroom, pulled the twine out from my throat with one finger, and snipped it in two. “Do you believe in this nonsense, Billy Bob?” she said.

  “No, Sister.”

  “That’s good. You’re a good Catholic boy, and you mustn’t believe in superstition. Do you love the church?”

  “I think so.”

  “Hmmmm. That doesn’t sound entirely convincing. Do you love your father?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I see. Do you love your sister and your brothers?”

  “Yes. Most of the time I do.”

  “That’s good. Because if you love somebody, or if you love the church, like I do, then you don’t ever have to be afraid. People are only superstitious when they’re afraid. That’s an important lesson for little people to learn. Now, let’s take a look at our math test for this week.”

  Over her shoulder I saw Mattie looking at us from the living room, her hair in foam rubber curlers, her face contorted as though a piece of barbed wire were twisting behind her eyes.

  That winter my father started working regular hours, what he called “an indoor job,” at the Monsanto Chemical Company in Texas City, and we saw him only on weekends. Mattie cooked only the evening meal and made us responsible for the care of the house and the other two meals. Weldon started to get into trouble at school. His eighth-grade teacher, a laywoman, called and said he had thumb-tacked a girl’s dress to the desk during class, causing her to almost tear it off her body when the bell rang, and he would either pay for the dress or be suspended. Mattie hung up the phone on her, and two days later the girl’s father, a sheriff’s deputy, came out to the house and made Mattie give him four dollars on the gallery.

  She came back inside, slamming the door, her face burning, grabbed Weldon by the collar of his T-shirt, and walked him into the backyard, where she made him stand for two hours on an upended apple crate until he wet his pants.

  Later, after she had let him come back inside and he had changed his underwear and blue jeans, he went outside into the dark by himself, without eating supper, and sat on the butcher stump, striking kitchen matches on the side of the box and throwing them at the chickens. Before we went to sleep he sat for a long time on the side of his bed, next to mine, in a square of moonlight with his hands balled into fists on his thighs. There were knots of muscle in the backs of his arms and behind his ears. Mattie had given him a burr haircut, and his head looked as hard and scalped as a baseball.

  “Tomorrow’s Saturday. We’re going to listen to the LSU-Rice game,” I said.

  “Some colored kids saw me from the road and laughed.”

  “I don’t care what they did. You’re brave, Weldon. You’re braver than any of us.”

  “I’m gonna fix her.”

  His voice made me afraid. The branches of the pecan trees were skeletal, like gnarled fingers against the moon.

  “Don’t be thinking like that,” I said. “It’ll just make her do worse things. She takes it out on Drew when you and Lyle aren’t here.”

  “Go to sleep, Billy Bob,” he said. His eyes were wet. “She hurts us because we let her. We ax for it. You get hurt when you don’t stand up. Just like Momma did.”

  I heard him snuffling in the dark. Then he lay down with his face turned toward the opposite wall. His head looked carved out of gray wood in the moonlight.

  I went back to school for the spring semester. Maybe because of the balmy winds off the Gulf and the heavy, fecund smell of magnolia and wisteria on the night air, I wanted to believe that a new season was beginning in my heart as well. I couldn’t control what happened at home, but the school was a safe place, one where Sister Roberta ruled her little fifth-grade world like an affectionate despot.

  I was always fascinated by her hands. They were like toy hands, small as a child’s, as pink as an early rose, the nails not much bigger than pearls. She was wonderful at sketching and drawing with crayons and colored chalk. In minutes she could create a beautiful religious scene on the blackboard to fit the church’s season, but she also drew pictures for us of Easter rabbits and talking Easter eggs. Sometimes she would draw only the outline of a figure—an archangel with enormous wings, a Roman soldier about to be dazzled by a blinding light—and she would let us take turns coloring in the solid areas. She told us the secret to great classroom art was to always keep your chalk and crayons pointy.

  Then we began to hear rumors about Sister Roberta, of a kind that we had never heard about any of the nuns, who all seemed to have no lives other than the ones that were immediately visible to us. She had been heard weeping in the confessional, she had left the convent for three days without permission, two detectives from Baton Rouge had questioned her in the Mother Superior’s office.

  She missed a week of school and a lay teacher took her place. She returned for two weeks, then was gone again. When she came back the second time she was soft-spoken and removed, and sometimes she didn’t even bother to answer simple questions that we asked her. She would gaze out the window for long periods, as though her attention were fixed on a distant object, then a noise—a creaking desk, an eraser flung from the cloakroom—would disturb her, and her eyes would return to the room, absolutely empty of thought or meaning.

  I stayed after school on a Friday to help her wash the blackboards and pound erasers.

  “You don’t need to, Billy Bob. The janitor will take care of it,” she said, staring idly out the window.

  “All the kids like you, Sister,” I said.

  “What?” she said.

  “You’re the only one who plays with us at recess. You don’t ev
er get mad at us, either. Not for real, anyway.”

  “It’s nice of you to say that, but the other sisters are good to you, too.”

  “Not like you are.”

  “You shouldn’t talk to me like that, Billy Bob.” She had lost weight, and there was a solitary crease, like a line drawn by a thumbnail, in each of her cheeks.

  “It’s wrong for you to be sad,” I said.

  “You must run along home now. Don’t say anything more.”

  I wish you were my mother, I thought I heard myself say inside my head.

  “What did you say?” she asked.

  “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 Baton Rouge Morning Advocate and the Lafayette Daily Advertiser and mailed it to other Catholic businessmen in town. An eighth-grader who had been held back twice, once by Sister Roberta, brought it to school one day, and after the three o’clock bell Lyle, Weldon, and I heard him reading it to a group of dumbfounded boys on the playground. The words hung in the air like our first exposure to God’s name being deliberately used in vain.

  Her brother had killed a child, and Sister Roberta had helped him hide in a fishing camp in West Baton Rouge Parish.