James Ellroy - The Best American Noir of the Century

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 asked.

“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 thumbtacked a girls 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 Mama 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 ever 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.