Bear and His Daughter Read Online Free PDF Page A

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    In its second variation, violence was attendant upon the scholars’ education and correction and was meted out from above by the brothers. Sometimes it was spontaneous and consisted of a clip, with or without a knuckle filling, to the head of a boy skylarking or talking in ranks. Idling in class, insufficiently complete answers to a teacher’s question, or simply wrong ones, might also bring such an expression of displeasure. On one occasion, an unhappy arithmetic teacher lined up his entire third-grade class and slapped each scholar twice, hard across the face. Someone’s slip of the tongue had provoked general unseemly laughter. The teacher; sardonically Mackay later believed, ordered his scholars to offer their humiliations to the Holy Ghost. The corporal punishment Mackay most dreaded was that administered formally, by the prefect of the primary school, with a worn razor strop. The smallest children and those in their first weeks at St. Michael’s were not subject to such rigors, lax deportment in them being seen as the fruit of natural depravity. But for scholars aged six and over, the words “You will stand by my room … tonight!” uttered theatrically in the French-Canadian inflections of Brother Francis, prefect of the grammar school, were an occasion of stark, sick-making terror.
    Finally, among the forms of violence, there were the weekly “smokers,” in which a scholar found himself confronting both the authority of the institute and the mob spirit of his fellows. In the smokers, boys six and over were obliged to put on boxing gloves and flail away at each other for three two-minute rounds—time enough, Mackay discovered, to get beaten thoroughly. For years Mackay dreaded Thursday evenings and the smokers. In the middle of his second year; matched against a talented boy from West Virginia, he lost much of the hearing in one ear and years later discovered that his eardrum had been broken and his inner ear injured. Eventually he learned the requisite lessons. He learned to keep his head and to use his own anger. He learned to take blows, to take courage from someone else’s show of pain and to use another’s fear to his own advantage.
    The necessity of accommodating the realities of conflict caused Mackay much inward confusion. He recalled and idealized his mother’s gentleness like a lost kingdom, but pining about it would not do. Homesick brooding made him teary and vulnerable, which was a dangerous way to be. Struggle was the law. During his first years at St. Michael’s, World War II was in progress. The war and the patriotic effort to fight it were presented at St. Michael’s as having a sacred character. The war was an occasion of suffering and death, states that were well regarded there. Death was particularly sublime, the highest form of existence and a condition to be acquired as soon as responsibility permitted. The virtuous dead were the Church triumphant.
    Mackay understood the weakness of his position. He felt that he required help from higher powers, but the higher powers seemed firmly on the side of Brother Francis, their earthly representative. Mackay’s religious allegiances shifted with his daily fortunes. One day he would find himself in transports of love for his Father in Heaven, who was after all the only one he knew, and he would pray that God’s will be done on earth. At other times he would desire nothing so much as the defeat and ruin of the United States, on the theory that even the conquering Japanese were bound to be an improvement on the Pauline Brothers. On such days he would address his prayers to Satan, Hitler and Stalin. It would seem at these times that the right side was not for him. Even today he seems to carry a strain of destructive skepticism in his nature, together with a strange credulity.
    In the course of his time at St. Michael’s, Mackay was able to laugh off much of the brothers’ absent-minded battery. He joined a school gang, fought for and