In her home, Betty Matherne prays up a storm

    In the early 1940s, when Betty (Billiot) Matherne was 8 and living in Lafitte, she hadn’t yet been to school because her feet and her hands always seemed to be on fire.
    Her parents had tried everything they could to cure the chronic skin condition that seemed to ignite like clockwork every other month. When the pain got really intense and her skin started cracking and bleeding, Betty’s parents would take her to Charity Hospital, where often she was hospitalized for one or two months until the pain subsided.
    When she got home, she still had household chores to handle.
    “We all had little jobs to do,” Betty said. “The small ones would do small jobs, and as I got older, my sister and I scrubbed the floors. We had beautiful wooden floors, and we’d get on our knees and scrub. We had a cloth to wipe the floors – no mops.”
    Some days the pain was so bad that her parents had to carry her to a chair.
    “The doctor told my mom when I was 3 years old that I’d never walk better than three or four steps at a time all my life,” Betty said.
    When Betty started school at Fisher No. 1 Elementary in Lafitte, she was already behind her classmates. By a quirk of geography, she lived a little less than a mile from the school, which meant she failed to qualify for free bus transportation to school each day. Since her parents didn’t own a car, she had to walk, using loose-fitting sandals to keep her feet from being irritated.
    It was at Fisher No. 1 that Betty met the woman who would direct her feet, in many ways, for the rest of her life. Her name was Miss Tomeny, the Fisher principal, who took one look at Betty and decided she would do whatever she could to clear a path in the desert for someone who needed to make the crooked straight.
    When Betty was feeling up to it, Miss Tomeny tapped her to walk to the store and buy the hot dogs and buns for the school lunches, making her feel like a million bucks.
    “And she’d give me a hot dog for free,” Betty recalled. “That was my favorite lunch.”
    Some of her classmates grew envious of what they considered special treatment. Their envy grew a deeper shade of green when, invariably, Betty would check in for morning classes about an hour late – but never once got a tardy slip.
    They didn’t know that Betty, at age 9, would walk past the school go to the hand-pull ferry on Bayou Barataria, which she took each morning to get to Mass at St. Anthony Church.
    “This went on for about three or four months before I told my mom,” Betty said. “I was afraid to tell her because I was afraid she would tell me I couldn’t go. When I told Miss Tomeny what I wanted to do, she told me, ‘I tell you what. I’ll tell your teacher not to give you a tardy.’ The other children didn’t like that. But she told them, ‘Betty has a reason for not being in school. If you go to church, I won’t write you up either.’”
    As the years passed, Betty never recovered from her rare illness, which now has been diagnosed as Schopf-Schulz-Passarge Syndrome. There are only 36 people in the U.S. with that genetic condition, which causes the skin on the hands and feet to thicken, crack and bleed.
    “I don’t have fingerprints or footprints,” Betty said.
    Betty eventually married Charles Matherne, a Lafitte fisherman, and they had four children, eight grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren. Matherne died on their 57th wedding anniversary.
    They moved to Abita Springs in 2003 on land they had purchased 40 years earlier, and Betty sees God’s fingerprints all over the move.
    “Hurricane Katrina was two years later,” she said. “On our old house, the roof blew off, so God has blessed me in so many ways. Oh, yes, I’m not able to thank him enough for whatever he’s done for me.”
    For the last several years, Betty has been housebound and uses a wheelchair, but she still is a vital member – the prayer warrior – of St. Jane de Chantal Parish. People will call her and ask for her prayers. When her hands “work,” she fashions handmade angels to sell at parish craft sales.
    She has never complained. She prays six rosaries and watches two or three Masses a day on TV. She is secure in the hands of God.
    “I only know that God gave me the graces to be like this,” Betty said. “I couldn’t understand how he could pick someone like me to do this. I don’t find that I’m doing enough, but some of my friends said I should let people know. It might help one person.”
    She misses personally attending Mass “the most of anything in my life.” But her private prayer is her purpose. She prays for the sick, for priests and religious, for those caught up in violence here and abroad.
    She has had glimpses of heaven.
    “It’s going to be beautiful, beautiful,” she said.
    Peter Finney Jr. can be reached at [email protected].