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 the children went to sleep he sat for a long time on the side of his bed, next to Lyle's, 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. Mattie had given him a burr haircut, and his head looked as hard and scalped as a baseball.

"Tomorrow's Saturday. We're gonna listen to the LSURice game," Lyle 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 Lyle afraid. The branches of the pecan trees were skeletal, like gnarled fingers against the moon.

"Don't be thinking like that," Lyle said. "It'll just make her do worse things. She takes it out on Drew. She made her kneel in the bathroom corner because she didn't flush the toilet."

"Go to sleep, Lyle," Weldon 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."

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

Three days later the school principal saw the cigarette burn on Drew's leg in the lunchroom and reported it to the social-welfare agency in town. A consumptive rail of a man in a dandruff-flecked blue suit drove out to the house and questioned Mattie on the gallery, then questioned the children in front of Mattie. Drew told him she had been burned by an ember that had popped out of a trash fire in the backyard.

He raised her chin with his knuckle. His black hair was stiff with grease.

"Is that what happened?" he asked.

"Yes, sir." The burn was scabbed and looked like ringworm on her skin.

He smiled and took his knuckle away from her chin.

"Then you shouldn't play next to the fire," he said.

"I would like to know who sent you out here," Mattie said.

"That's confidential." He coughed on the back of his hand. "And to tell you the truth, I don't really know. My supervisor didn't tell me." He coughed again, this time loud and hard, and Lyle could smell his deep-lung nicotine odor.

"But everything here looks all right. Weldon's eyes were as hard as marbles, but he didn't speak.

The man walked with Mattie to his car, and Lyle felt like doors were slamming all around them. She put her foot on the man's running board and propped one arm on his car roof while she talked, so that her breasts were uplifted against her blouse and her knees were wide-spaced below the hem of her dress.

"Let's tell him," Lyle said.

"Are you kidding? Look at him. She could make him eat her shit with a spoon," Weldon said.

It was right after first period the next morning that they heard about the disaster at Port Arthur. A ship loaded with fertilizer had been burning in the harbor, and while people on the docks had watched fire-fighting boats pumping geysers of water onto the ship's decks, the fire had dripped into the hold. The explosion filled the sky with rockets of smoke and rained an umbrella of flame down on the chemical plant. The force of the secondary explosion was so great that it blew out windows in Beaumont, twenty miles away.

Mattie got drunk that night and fell asleep in the living room chair by the radio. When the children returned home from school the next afternoon, Mattie was waiting on the gallery to tell them that a man from the chemical company had telephoned and said that Verise was listed as missing.

Her eyes were pink with either hangover or crying, her face puffy and round like a white balloon.

"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.

"He's worked like a nigra for you, maybe lost his life for you. You have nothing to say?"

"Maybe we ought to start cleaning up our rooms. You wanted us to clean up our rooms," Lyle said.

"You stay outside. Don't even come in this house," she said.

"I have to go to the bathroom," Weldon 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.

The next afternoon Verise was still unaccounted for. Mattie had an argument on the phone with somebody, perhaps the man in zoot pants and two-tone shoes; 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 Lyle.

"Come here," she said.

"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," he said.

"I changed my mind. Every one of you outside. All of you outside. Weldon, you too, you get out there right now. Where's Drew?"

"She's playing in the yard. What's wrong, Mattie?" Lyle said.

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. If they broke off a large switch, she hit them fewer times with it. If they came back with a thin or small switch, they would get whipped until she felt she had struck some kind of balance between size and number.

They 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 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, and there was a moment of recognition in her colorless face, as though she had seen a growing meanness of spirit in Weldon that was the equal of her own. Then she wet her lips, crimped them together, and rubbed her hands on her thighs.

"We shall see who does what around here," she said. She broke off a big switch from the myrtle hedge and raked it free of flowers and leaves except for one green sprig on the tip.

Drew looked up into Mattie's shadow, and dropped the piece of twine from her palm.

Mattie jerked her by the wrist and whipped her a halfdozen times across her bare legs. Drew twisted impotently from Mattie's fist, her feet dancing with each blow. The switch raised welts on her skin as thick and red as centipedes.

Then suddenly Weldon ran with all his weight into Matties back, stiff-arming her between the shoulder blades, and sent her tripping sideways over a bucket of chicken slops. She righted herself and stared at him open-mouthed, the switch loose in her hand. Then her eyes grew hot and bright with a painful intention, and her jawbone flexed like a roll of dimes.