The Convict and Other Stories Read online

  Mr. Willis’s face grew tighter and he tried to hold his gaze on Uncle Sidney’s eyes. Then his hand went woodenly to his back pocket as though he couldn’t control it.

  “I’ll pay him just to get you off my place.”

  “No, you’ll pay him because I told you to. And the next time you send thugs around my house, I’m going to catch you in town, out in public, and you’re not going to want to live around here anymore.”

  We drove out to Zack’s on the blacktop, and Uncle Sid bought two six-cartons of Lone Star and filled the cartons with cracked ice to keep the bottles cold. Then we headed for the house of the next farmer on the list, and by noon we had worked our way across the county to the town. Warning must have gotten there ahead of us, because the hardware-and-feed store was locked, a farmer who hadn’t been home earlier almost ran to his truck when he saw us, and a deputy sheriff’s car began to follow us through the streets. People stared from the high concrete sidewalks at the blackened cross in the bed of the pickup while Uncle Sidney sat casually behind the wheel with his arm in the window, his beer bottle filled with amber sunlight. At the traffic light a man in a straw hat, colorless denims, and laced boots stepped off the curb and walked over to the running board.

  “Mr. Holland, I’m a member of the Association, but I didn’t have nothing to do with this business,” he said.

  “I didn’t figure you did, Mr. Voss.”

  Mr. Voss nodded and crossed the street.

  “This is so much fun we ought to do it all over again,” Billy Haskel said.

  That afternoon Uncle Sidney told me to drive the cross down to the creek bed and dump it, but I replied that I’d like to keep it in the truck until the weekend. On Saturday evening I picked up Juanita and took her to the drive-in movie, ignoring her argument and her glances through the back window at the cross vibrating under the boomer chain. People whom I hardly knew said hello to us, and during the intermission some boys from the baseball team gathered around the truck and drank warm beer with their feet on the running boards. The truck became not only the respected center of the parking lot for every group there but an excoriated symbol of difference that ennobled the individual who was allowed to stand in the circle around it. The beer cans rattled on the gravel, the laughter rose louder, people crawled and banged around on the cab roof, and finally the manager threw us all out. That was in 1947, the year I pitched four shutouts and learned not to think about them.

  LOSSES

  for Philip Spitzer

  Strange things happened to me in the fifth grade at St. Peter’s Catholic School in 1944. One morning I woke up and felt guilty because I had thoughts about the breasts of the Negro women who worked in the lunchroom. Then I started to feel guilty about everything; an idle or innocent activity of only a few days ago now became a dark burden on my soul. I had looked at a picture of a nude statue in a book, repeated profane words I’d heard older boys use down at the filling station, noticed for the first time the single woman next door hanging her undergarments on the clothesline.

  I confessed my bad thoughts and desires to Father Melancon but it did no good. I felt the light going out of the world and I didn’t know why. My sins throbbed in my chest like welts raised by a whip. When I lay in my bed at night, with the winter rain hitting against the window glass, my fists clenched under the sheets, my mind would fill with fearful images of the war and eternal perdition, which somehow melded together in an apocalyptical vision of the world’s fiery end.

  Out on the Gulf southeast of New Iberia, Nazi submarines had torpedoed oil tankers that sailed unescorted out of the mouth of the Mississippi. Shrimpers told stories about the fires that burned on the horizon late at night and the horribly charred sailor that one skipper had pulled up in his shrimp net. I knew that the Nazis and the Japanese had killed people from New Iberia, too. When the war broke out, families hung a small flag with a blue star on a white field in the window to show they had a boy in service. As the war progressed, many of those blue stars were replaced by gold ones; sometimes the lawns of those small wood-frame houses remained uncut, the rolled newspapers moldered in the flower beds, the shades were drawn and never raised again.

  I believed that a great evil was at work in the world.

  My mother, who was a Baptist from Texas and who did not go to church, said my thoughts were foolish. She said the real devil in the world lived in a bottle of whiskey. She meant the whiskey that made my father drunk, that kept him at Broussard’s Bar down on Railroad Avenue after he got fired from the oil rig.

  I heard them late on a Saturday night. It was raining hard, lightning jumped outside the window, and our pecan tree thrashed wildly on the roof.

  “You not only fall down in your own yard, you’ve spent our money on those women. I can smell them on you,” she said.

  “I stopped at Provost’s and shot pool. I put some beers on the tab. I didn’t spend anything.”

  “Empty your pockets, then. Show me the money I’m going to use for his lunches next week.”

  “I’ll take care of it. I always have. Father Melancon knows we’ve had some bad luck.”

  “Jack, I won’t abide this. I’ll take him with me back to Beaumont.”

  “No, ma’am, you won’t.”

  “Don’t you come at me, Jack. I’ll have you put in the parish jail.”

  “You’re an evil-mouthed woman. You’re a nag and you degrade a man in front of his son.”

  “I’m picking up the phone. So help me . . . I won’t tolerate it.”

  I don’t think he hit her; he just slammed out the door into the rain and backed his truck over the wood stakes and chicken wire that bordered our Victory garden. My arms were pinched on my ears, but I could hear my mother crying while the water kettle screamed on the stove.

  . . .

  My fifth-grade teacher was Sister Uberta, who had come to us from the North that year. Her face was pretty and round inside her nun’s wimple, but it glowed as bright as paper when she was angry, and sometimes she shouted at us for no reason. Her hands were white and quick whenever she wrote on the blackboard or helped us make color-paper posters for the lunchroom walls. She seemed to have an energy that was about to burst out of her black habit. Her stories in catechism class made me swallow and grip the bottoms of my thighs.

  “If you wonder what eternity means, imagine an iron ball as big as the earth out in the middle of space,” she said. “Then once every thousand years a sparrow flies from the moon to that iron ball and brushes one wing against its surface. And by the time that bird’s feathery wing has worn away the iron ball to a burnt cinder, eternity is just beginning.”

  I couldn’t breathe. The oaks outside the window were gray and trembling in the rain. I wanted to resist her words, what they did to me, but I wasn’t strong enough. In my childish desperation I looked across the aisle at Arthur Boudreau, who was folding a paper airplane and never worried about anything.

  Arthur’s head was shaped like a lightbulb. His burr haircut was mowed so close into the scalp that it glistened like a peeled onion. He poured inkwells into fishbowls, thumbtacked girls’ dresses to the desks, put formaldehyde frogs from the science lab in people’s lunch sandwiches.

  “Claude, are you talking to Arthur?” Sister Uberta said.

  “No, Sister.”

  “You were, weren’t you?”

  “No, Sister.”

  “I want you to stay after school today.”

  At three o’clock the other children sprinted through the rain for home, and Sister Uberta made me wash the blackboards. She put away her books and papers in her desk, then sat down behind it with her hands folded in front of her. Her hands looked small and white against the black folds of her habit.

  “That’s enough,” she said. “Come up here and sit down.”

  I walked to the front of the room and did as she said. My footsteps seemed loud on the wooden floor.

  “Do you know why Arthur misbehaves, Claude?” she said.

  “I d
on’t think he’s that bad.”

  “He does bad things and then people pay attention to him. Do you want to be like that?”

  “No, Sister.”

  She paused and her large brown eyes examined my face from behind her big, steel-rimmed glasses. She made me feel funny inside. I was afraid of her, afraid of what her words about sin could do to me, but I felt a peculiar kinship with her, as though she and I understood something about loss and unhappiness that others didn’t know about.

  “You didn’t buy a scapula for Sodality Sunday,” she said.

  “My father isn’t working now.”

  “I see.” She opened the bottom drawer to her desk, where she kept her paint set, and took out a small medal on a chain. “You take this one, then. If your father buys you one later, you can give mine to someone else. That way, you pass on the favor.”

  She smiled and her face was truly beautiful. Then her mouth turned downward in a melancholy way and she said, “But, Claude, remember this: there are people we shouldn’t get close to; they’ll cause us great trouble. Arthur is one of them. He’ll hurt you.”

  A week later I was back at the confessional with another problem. The inside of the church was cool and smelled of stone and water and burning candles. I looked at Father Melancon’s silhouette through the confessional screen. He had played bush-league baseball before he became a priest, and he was still thin and athletic and wore his graying hair in a crew cut.

  “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” I began.

  He waited, the side of his face immobile.

  “Tell me what it is, Claude.” His voice was soft but I thought I heard him take a tired breath.

  “Sister Uberta says it’s a sin to use bad words.”

  “Well, that depends on—”

  “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.”

  But she wasn’t buying it. She’d let those guys throw pecans at her every afternoon before she’d ask for help. She was that kind, a real soldier.

  “I have a nickel,” I said. “We can get a twin Popsicle at Veazey’s.”

  Her face hesitated a moment, then her eyes smiled at me.

  “There’s three of us,” she said.

  “I don’t want one. My mother always fixes something for me when I come home,” I said.
/>
  “I have some money,” she said. “It’s my treat today. Look at the scratch on your arm. You can get lockjaw from that. It’s terrible. Your jaws turn to stone and they have to feed you through a tube in your nose.”

  She wet her handkerchief with her tongue and wiped at the red welt on my forearm.

  “I’m going to get some bandages at Veazey’s and some iodine and alcohol, and then you should go to the hospital later for shots,” she said. “Here, I’ll tie the handkerchief on it to keep out infection till we can wash it off. The air is full of germs.”

  The three of us walked down to the ice-cream parlor next to the drawbridge that spanned Bayou Teche. Cypress trees grew along the banks of the bayou, and on the other side of the bridge the small gray-stone hospital run by the sisters was set back deep in the shade of the oaks. Purple wisteria grew on the trellises by the adjacent convent, and I could see some of the sisters in their white habits working in their Victory garden. Rene, Arthur, and I sat on the bridge and ate ice-cream cones, with our feet hanging over the water, and watched a shrimp boat move slowly down the bayou between the corridor of trees and bamboo. I knew that long, cypress-framed ribbon of brown water eventually flowed into the salt, where I believed Nazi submariners still waited to burn and drown the good people of the world, but on that spring afternoon, with the wind blowing through the trees and ruffling the water under our feet, the red and yellow hibiscus blazing on the convent lawn, the war had ended for me like heat thunder dying emptily over the Gulf.

  Small drops of water started to dent the dust on the school playground. Through the bamboo that grew along the bayou’s banks I could see the brown current being dimpled, too. We were a group of five boys by the corner of the school building, and Arthur Boudreau had a thin, cellophane-wrapped cardboard box enclosed in his palm.

  “Hold out your hand,” he said. The other boys were grinning.

  “What for?” I said.

  “Put out your hand. What’s the matter, you afraid?” he said.

  “You put chewing gum in a guy’s hand one time.”