If she kept the details of her own fantasies of revenge a secret, there was one thing Bettye Jean Gardner Triplett couldn’t keep from me. Toward the end of these three and a half years that had followed since she came to get us from Uncle Archie’s house and just before she vanished again—without warning or explanation from others—I discovered that she had the astonishing ability to become almost supernaturally still. Shortly after finding her letter, I was in the living room watching TV in the evening, and she was at the dining table reading the newspaper when Freddie performed his one-man stampede to her side, ranting and raving, trying to agitate and engage her, outdoing all former tirades with language more foul and abusive than I’d ever heard.

On one level this was the most surreal atmosphere of denial, with Freddie acting the part of the ax murderer in the horror movie while Moms and I pretended to play the part of the kid watching TV and the mother reading the newspaper, a normal family at home. The more sound and fury that came from Freddie’s raging storm, the more still my mother grew.

I’d never witnessed anything like this in my life before—or since. Her stillness was fueled by a million times the energy that thundered in Freddie. That was the most still I’ve ever seen anything or anybody be in my life. A table moves more. Momma sat there motionless, eyes on her newspaper, frozen, not even turning a page, as if she had vanished deep within herself to prevent herself from responding—because she knew that if she said anything, if she turned a page, flicked an eyelash, breathed, he would hit her. Her stillness defeated his storm. To my shock, he gave up, blew his wad of rage, and turned to her like he just changed the channel on a TV set and said, “C’mon, let’s get it on!”

The ability to become still was born in me that night from watching Moms. It exists in the realm of instinct, when the choice is flight or fight. Stillness was my mother’s only defense against a predator, the way prey can avoid the attack of a killer cobra or a shark by being so still as to be invisible. And it may have been in that moment of stillness that she decided the time had come for the prey to find another way to get rid of the predator, to enact her own plan to make sure Freddie wouldn’t be coming back. It may have been then that she decided to take the necessary precautions to make sure that she had all of her children out of the house, me included, one night after Freddie had returned home drunk and passed out.

With her children out of harm’s way, she followed through on her plan to burn the house down while Freddie slept. Or that was the story I would eventually hear. How he woke up and stopped the fire, I never did learn. But I do know Freddie used her attempt to kill him to support his claim that she had violated her parole from her earlier imprisonment—which he had also instigated. And once again, his actions caused her to be sent back to prison.