‘I wonder if I could take young Horan from his lessons for a few minutes, sir. It’s the ringworm.’
‘Luke, see Miss Martin in the porch.’ The boy goes quietly out to the porch, already charmingly stolid in the acceptance of his power, Luke, magical fifth in a line of male children unbroken by girls; and while he wailed under the water of his baptism at the stone font in Cootehall church a worm was placed in his hand — either the priest didn’t see or was content to ignore it — but the Horans rejoiced, their fifth infant boy would grow up with the power of healing ringworm.
On Tuesdays and on Fridays, days of the sorrowful mysteries, he touched the sores thrice in the name of the Father and Son and Holy Ghost, power of magic and religion killing the slow worm patiently circling.
‘Did you wash your hands, Luke?’
‘Yes, sir. I used the soap.’
‘Show them to me.’
‘All right. You can get on with your work.’
The last to come before lunch was the tinker, with pony and cart, the brass shining on the harness, to clean out the lavatory, and as I give him the key we make polite professional remarks about the flies and heat.
‘Ah, but not to worry, sir, I’ll bury it deep.’ He touches his cap.
Soon, soon, they’ll come and flush him and me into the twentieth century, whatever the good that will do, and I grow ashamed of the violence of the thought, and, as if to atone, over lunch, give Mrs Maguire a quiet account of the beating young Walshe received for rifling the poorbox.
After lunch he comes, dressed all in black, with a black briefcase, the half-collar of the Christian Brother on the throat instead of the priest’s full collar, a big white-haired man, who seemed more made to follow ploughing horses than to stand in classrooms. The large hand lifts the briefcase on the table.
‘My name is Brother Mahon and Canon Reilly kindly gave me permission to speak to the senior boys about a vocation to the Irish Christian Brothers.’ I wonder if he knows that I too had been once as he is now, if he looks at me as a rotten apple in the barrel; but if he does he says nothing, all glory to the power of the Lie or Silence that makes people easy in the void, all on our arses except the helping hand they give us on our way.
‘I told Canon Reilly I’d take the other children out to the playground while you spoke.’
‘Lucky to have such a fine manager as the Canon, takes a great interest in schools.’
‘Couldn’t ask for a better manager,’ I answer. The brick supports the brick above it. I’m a rogue and you’re another. ‘I’ll just take them outside now.’
‘All except the boys of the sixth class take your English book and follow me outside,’ and again, because I feel watched, the voice is not my own, a ventriloquist’s dummy that might at any minute fall apart.
The Brother motions the scattered boys closer to the table, ‘It’ll only be just a man to man chat,’ as I take the others out, to sit against the white wall of the school in the sun, facing the lake, where the tinker is putting the green sods back above the buried shit, the flies thick above the cart and grazing pony.
Through the open window the low voice drifts out into the silence of the children against the wall in the sun, and I smile as I listen. If one could only wait long enough everything would be repeated. I wonder who’ll rise to the gleaming spoon and find the sharpened hooks as I did once.
‘I want you to imagine a very different lake shore to your own little lake below your school.
‘Hot sands.’ His words drift out. ‘Palm trees, glittering sea, tired after fishing all the night and washing their nets. A tall dark man comes through the palms down to the water.
‘We have laboured all the night and have taken nothing, the fishermen answer. The two boats were so full of fish that they began to sink. They fall on their knees on the sand, and the tall man, for it was Jesus, lifted them up and said to them follow me. From henceforth you will catch men.
‘In this schoolroom two thousand years later I bring you the same message. Follow me and catch men. Follow me into the Irish Christian Brothers, where as teachers you will lead the little children He so loved to Christ.
‘For death comes as a thief in the night, the longest life is but a day, and when you go before the Judgement Seat can you without trembling say to Jesus I refused the call even the tired fishermen answered, and what if He refuses you as you refused Him?’
He sends them out into the porch, and brings them back one by one to interview them alone, while the tinker hands me back the key. ‘I’ve buried it deep, sir. There’ll be no flies,’ and the rise and fall of voices comes from Mrs Maguire’s infant prison house, Eena, meena, mina moo, capall, asal agus bo.
Name, age, your father’s farm? he asks, and more to silence my own memory than the low chatter of the children I force, ‘Come on now, get on with your reading,’ but after they grow silent, to covertly read my real mood, the chatter grows loud again.
‘You have listened to all that I’ve said?’ I’d been asked once too.
‘Yes, Brother,’ I’d answered.
‘Do you think you could spend your life as a Christian Brother?’
‘I’m not sure, Brother.’
‘Do you think your parents would have any objection?’
‘I don’t know, Brother.’
‘What do you say we go and have a little talk with them after I’ve seen the rest of the boys?’
It was finished then, my mother’s face had lighted when he drove me home. ‘It’d be an honour to have a Christian Brother in the family.’ ‘He’ll get a free education too, the best there is’; and that August I was in the train with the single ticket, fear of the unknown rooms and people. My brother inherited the bare acres in my place, and married, and with the same strength as she had driven me away he put her in a back room with the old furniture of her marriage while his new wife reigned amid the new furniture of the best rooms. Now each summer I take her to her usual small hotel at the sea, and I walk by her side on the sand saying, ‘Yes and yes and yes’ to her complaints about my brother and his wife, until she tires herself into relief and changes, ‘Do you think should I go to the baths after lunch?’ ‘Go to the baths, it’ll do your arthritis good.’
‘I think I’ll go, then.’
I want to ask her why she wanted the acres for my brother, why she pushed me away, but I don’t ask. I walk by her side on the sand and echo her life with ‘Yes and yes and yes,’ for it is all a wheel.
A light tap comes on the classroom window, a gesture of spread hands that he is finished, and I take the children in. Two of the boys have been set apart, with their school-bags.
‘I’m driving John and Jim to their houses. We’ll talk over everything with their parents.’
‘I hope it’ll be all right.’
‘We’ll see that everything is made clear. Thank you for your help.’
After the shaking of hands I turn to the board but I do not want to teach.
‘Open your English books and copy page forty-one in your best handwriting.’
I stand at the window while the nibs scrape. Certainly nothing I’ve ever done resembles so closely the shape of my life as my leaving of the Holy Brothers. Having neither the resolution to stay on nor the courage to leave, the year before Final Vows I took to bed and refused to get up.
‘The doctor says you’re in perfect health. That there’s nothing the matter with you,’ old Cogger, the boss, had tried to reason. ‘So why can’t you get up when we are even shortstaffed in the school?’
‘I can’t get up.’
‘What’s wrong with you that you can’t get up?’
‘Nothing.’
‘If you don’t get up I have no option but to report you to General Headquarters.’