‘It’s going to hurt, Walshe. But if you’re ever again tempted to steal from the church you’ll have something to remember!’
In a half-circle the beating moves, the boy trying to sink to the floor to escape the whistle and thud of the wire wrapping round his bare legs but held up by the arm, the boy’s screaming and the heavy breathing of the priest filling the silence of the faces watching from the long benches in frightened fascination. When he finally lets go of the arm the boy sinks in a heap on the floor, the moaning changing to an hysterical sobbing.
‘Get up and go to your place and I hope that’s the last lesson you’ll have to be ever taught.’ He puts the length of wire back in his pocket and takes out a blue cloth to wipe his forehead.
The boy cowers as he rises, arms automatically protecting his torn legs, moves in a beaten crawl to his place, plunges his face in rage and shame into the folds of his arms and continues sobbing hysterically.
‘Open your geographies and get on with your study of the Shannon,’ I say as the heads turn towards Walshe. There’s the flap of the books being opened. They find the page, stealing a quick furtive look towards the boy as they bend their heads. In the sobbing silence the clock ticks.
‘An example had to be made to nip that blackguardism in the bud.’ He turns to me at the window.
‘I suppose.’
‘How do you mean suppose?’ The eyes are dangerous.
‘I suppose it was necessary to do.’
‘It was necessary,’ he emphasizes, and after a pause, ‘What I’d like to see is religious instruction to counteract such influences after Second Mass every Sunday. Mr McMurrough always took it.’
‘It’s too far for me to come from the town to take.’
‘I can’t see any justification for you living in the town. I can’t see why you can’t live in the parish. The Miss Bambricks at the post office have mentioned to me that they’d be glad to put you up.’
The Miss Bambricks were two church-mad old maids who grew flowers for the altar and laundered the linen.
Old McMurrough, whom I had replaced and who now lay in the Sligo madhouse reciting poetry and church doctrine, had taken catechism in the church each Sunday, while the Canon waited at the gate to bear any truant who tried to escape with the main congregation back in triumph by the ear to the class in the sidechapel.
‘I am happy where I am,’ I say.
‘And there are many in the parish who think a public house in town is no lodgings for a person who has charge of youth.’
‘I conduct myself there.’
‘I’d sincerely hope so, but, if I may say so, it’s not very cooperative.’
‘I am sorry but I do not want to change,’ I answer doggedly. With bent heads the class follows each word with furtive attention, but he changes in frustration at last, ‘The Christian Brother will come after lunch today.’
‘I’ll take the other children outside, then, while he speaks to the boys. Luckily, the day is fine.’
‘They’re getting it very tough to get vocations. Even tougher still to keep those they do get. They’re betwixt and between, neither priests nor laymen,’ he volunteers but I don’t want discussion.
‘They may be lucky.’
‘The backward rural areas are their great standby. Even if they don’t stay the course they’ll get an education which they’d not get otherwise.’
‘That’s how I got mine.’
The hurt from my own mouth was not as great if it had come from his.
‘Well, it was some use, then.’
‘Yes. It was some use.’
I watch him on his way. At the door he shouts a last warning to the sniffling Walshe, ‘I hope that’ll be one lesson your life will never forget and you can count yourself lucky that there was no guards on the job.’
There’d be no repercussions from the beating except Walshe’d probably get beaten again when the news travelled home, and, in a few days, if asked who’d scored his legs, he’d answer that he fell in briars.
I watch the black suit shiny from car leather climb the last steps to the road gate, pausing once to inspect a crack in the concrete, and I turned to wipe the blackboard, afraid of my own hatred.
‘Now, I’ll see what you’ve learned about the Shannon.’
Papers rustle in the benches, there’s a quick expectant buzz. Outside, the three stone walls of the playground run down to the lake, the centre wall broken by the concrete lavatory, above it the rapid sparkle of pinpoint flashes of sunlight on the wings of the blackdust swarm of flies; and on the windowsill in a jam jar a fistful of primroses some child has gathered from the May banks. In the stream of sunlight across the blackboard the chalkdust floats, millions of white grains, breathed in and out all day, found at night in the turnups of trousers, all the aridity of this empty trade.
‘You, Murphy, tell me where the Shannon rises?’
A blank face answers in a pretence of puzzled concentration, and why should he know, his father’s fields and cattle will see him through.
‘Please, sir.’
The room is full of hands.
‘Tell Murphy where the Shannon rises, Handley.’ A policeman’s son who’ll have to put his trust in his average wits.
‘Shannon Pot, sir, in the Cuilceach Mountains.’
‘Can you tell the class now, Murphy, where it rises?’
‘Shannon Pot, sir, in the Cuilceach Mountains.’ A look of triumph shows on his well-fed face as he haltingly repeats it.
‘Where does it flow, Mary?’
‘Southwards into Lough Allen close to the town of Drumshambo,’ the quick answer comes.
‘What factory have they there?’
‘Breffni Blossom jams.’
‘Anybody’s father send apples there?’
Three hands.
‘Prior? Tell about the sending of the apples.’
‘We pick them, sir. Put them in a heap, same as potatoes, but on the ground we cover them with straw.’
‘Why do you cover them with straw?’
‘Frost, sir.’
A low knock comes on the door that leads to the infant classroom, and my one assistant, Mrs Maguire, appears. She is near retirement: the slack flesh fills the ample spaces of the loose black dress, but the face in contrast is curiously hard, as if all the years of wrestling with children had hardened it into an intransigent assurance.
‘When Mrs Maguire says something Mrs Maguire means what she says.’ The third-person reference punctuates everything she says. Now a look of anxious concern shows in the unblinking eyes.
‘What happened with the Canon?’
‘He thrashed Walshe for breaking into one of the poorboxes.’
I didn’t want her to stay, though I too had often used the glow of fabricated concern to hurry or escape the slow minutes of the school day.
‘Terrible. Awful.’ She echoes a dull safety, hers and mine.
‘We’ll talk about it at lunch, then.’
‘The world, the world,’ she ponders as she withdraws to her own room.
I look at the clock, the crawl of the minutes, never the happiness of imagining it two o’clock and looking up and finding it half past three.
‘Will you be an absorbed teacher? Will your work be like a game? Or will you be a clockwatcher?’ Jordan, the Professor of Education, asked, more years ago than I care to remember, after a lecture. It was his custom to select one student to walk with him through the corridor, gleaming with wax and the white marble busts of saints and philosophers on their pedestals along the walls.
‘I hope I’ll be absorbed, sir.’
‘I hope so too for your sake. I can imagine few worse hells than a teacher who is a clockwatcher, driven to distraction by the children, while the day hangs about him like lead.’