Jazz Funeral

while. When she straightened up, she said, “My dad was a drunk and a sadist. He started drinking the minute he came home from work, and the minute he started drinking was the minute he started picking on people.”
    “What people? How?”
    “Oh, my mother. My little brother. Me. He did it all the usual ways. Physically. Verbally.”
    “Sexually?”
    Ti-Belle looked surprised. “I don’t really know. I don’t remember it.” She shrugged. “But hell, he did everything else.”
    Naismith said, “Miss Thiebaud, I really must advise you—”
    “Would you just shut up?”
    Skip thought: Maybe it’s a good thing there’s only me today. Maybe it’s less threatening this way.
    “What did he do?” she said.
    “He tried to kill my baby brother.”
    “I thought your brother was thirteen.”
    “Prentiss was small for his age. Anyway, I was seventeen—I practically raised him.” She smiled, and Skip wondered what she remembered. Rocking him to sleep, maybe, the smell of baby powder soft and reassuring. “He used to call me Sissy,” she said.
    “My mother was sick; always, always sick. She couldn’t take care of us, really. Couldn’t even take care of herself.” She started to cry again. “It wasn’t so bad when he beat me. I always felt every time he did it, it saved them getting hit. He never hit me with the bat.”
    “The bat?”
    “Prentiss’s baseball bat.”
    Involuntarily, Skip found herself making a face to ward off the evil. “He hit you with a baseball bat?”
    “No! He hit with my mother with a baseball bat. He hit my little brother with it. But just once.” Her eyes turned lynxlike. “He only did it once.”
    Naismith said, “Miss Thiebaud, I beg you!”
    She turned on him: “Oh, what difference does it make? Somebody had to recognize me eventually. Better now than when I really have something to give up.” But her face was sad. Obviously she felt she was giving up a lot.
    “Listen to me carefully, Miss Thiebaud. They mean it when they say ‘what you say can and will be used against you.’ If you say any more, you’re going to hear it again in court.”
    “I want to talk to Skip. Could you leave us alone for a minute?”
    “I don’t think that would be a very good idea.”
    What Ti-Belle was doing was wildly self-destructive, and yet Skip had seen it a hundred times—there was something in the human animal that wanted to confess.
    Ti-Belle said, “Skip, I can trust you, can’t I?”
    They hadn’t been on a first-name basis before. For a moment Skip had thought she’d gotten to her. But it wasn’t that. She thought Skip could be manipulated.
    “Trust me to do what?” she said.
    “I don’t know.” Ti-Belle spread her arms, looking helpless, as if she really didn’t know. “I just want to tell you something.”
    “Tell me what?”
    “I yelled at him to stop; stop hitting Prentiss. And he said, ‘who’s gonna stop me?’ I had the knife already—I was making dinner. So I just held it up, like I was going to stab him. And I said ‘Me.’ He laughed like it was the funniest thing he ever heard, and then he tried to hit me with the bat. He was coming at me.” She stopped and gathered her resources. “I lost my temper. I just lost my temper.”
    “You stabbed him?”
    “I didn’t say that.”
    “Well, if you didn’t, who did?”
    “Not my mama; you can just forget that idea. And not my little brother.”
    “Who else was there?”
    “I think I should shut up now.”
    “Ti-Belle, you’re in a lot of trouble. You lost your temper then, you did it again with Ham, and you did it today at Nick’s.”
    “I didn’t kill Ham! I swear to God I didn’t.”
    “You’ve got a real bad temper, Ti-Belle.”
    “I’m famous for my fucking temper!” She was getting mad. “I used to yell at Ham all the time. And today I got madder at Proctor than I’ve ever been at anybody in my life, except one person. He tried to destroy everything I’ve worked for. You’d be mad too, wouldn’t you?”
    “I don’t know if I would have tried to kill him.”
    “I didn’t try to kill him.”
    “Did you try to kill your dad?”
    “Of course not! I just … I don’t even remember anymore.”
    “Look, it sounds to me as if it was self-defense. Why did you leave town?”
    Her eyes filled with despair. Her mouth turned down and twisted. Her face fell in on itself. Through her tears, she said, “Mama made me.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
    Melody had hardly slept at all after