Bear and His Daughter Read Online Free PDF

held a middling status in the primate democracy. He became a friend of one of the gang’s principals, a red-headed boy named Christopher Kiernan, who excelled at the smokers. Mackay himself came to enjoy the smokers and even won a few. The statutory evening punishments he would never forgive or forget.

    In the hours before lights out, there were always a few boys aged between six and nine standing in a line outside the cubicle in which the brother prefect slept. Besides serving as the House of Pain, the brother prefect’s room was a place of great mystery, the only adult residence with which many of the scholars were familiar. Those who visited it most frequently would have been hard put to describe it, distracted as they were by their own fear and shame. Mackay remembers the white curtain, like a hospital screen, across the door and the smell of the brother prefect’s pipe tobacco.
    After the evening prayer and the bustle of innocent scholars retiring, the standers-by were left in semidarkness with the beating of their own hearts. Very occasionally, on the eve of holidays or simply at a whim, Brother Francis would commute the sentences of the condemned and send them scattering joyfully to bed. This remote possibility added a dimension of suspense to the nightly drama and enabled the children to experience the edifying sensation of vain hopes disappointed.
    Ten minutes to a quarter of an hour after the lights had gone out, the prefect would emerge from behind his curtain and eye the quivering scholars like a high priest inspecting the offerings. He would then make a withering remark at their expense; one of his favorites was to address them as “mother’s little darlings,” a characterization hardly appropriate, since they were in fact orphans about to be beaten. Mackay always felt it directed at him in particular.
    Then Brother Francis would return inside and consult his dreaded little black book and call the scholars in one by one. Punishment was administered in silence. It was expected to be endured with patience and to be, as the phrase went, “offered up.” It was often pointed out at St. Michael’s that Our Lord himself had cooperated with the authorities who put him to death, meekly obeying their commands in order that the sacrifice be accomplished. And the ceremonial nature of these punishments, the waiting in reverent silence and order; as though for a sacrament, the intensity of feeling undergone by the punished, all conspired to give an atmosphere of perverse religiosity to the business.
    Pushing the curtain aside, a guilty scholar would enter the tiny room. Looming hugely overhead was the black-clad figure of Brother Francis. The razor strop was behind his back and he would hold it there until the victim extended a small left hand, palm upward. Three times the strop would descend, and after each blow the scholar; if he wanted to get it all over with, was required to offer his hand for the next. Mackay says he can remember the pain even today. After the left hand, it was time for three on the right.
    The worst of it, Mackay says, was the absence of mercy. Once the punishment began, no amount of crying or pleading would stay the prefect’s hand. Each blow followed upon the last, inexorably, like the will of God. It was the will of God. Brother Francis, implacable as a shark or a hurricane, carried out what was ordained on high. If a scholar withheld a trespassing hand, Brother Francis would wait until it was extended. He seemed to have nothing but time, like things themselves. Only in refusing to cry could a boy preserve a remnant of personal dignity. Mackay always tried to hold out. Once he made it through the second blow on the right hand before dissolving. It did not escape Mackay’s notice that, in the end, everyone cried.
    Duly punished, St. Michael’s children would fly weeping toward their pillows, their burning hands tucked under their armpits, scuttling barefoot over the wooden floor like skinny