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the day of Robert’s arrival, he could read without the teacher’s help, which seemed to gall the man in black. Whether called Robert, or Rob, or Bobby, he felt the daily condemnation of the Rev. Robinson’s beady eyes.
    The curriculum was simple: reading, writing, arithmetic, and Protestantism. The Rev. Robinson expressed no reverence for anyone or anything except God, Oliver Cromwell, and William of Orange. His holy trinity. At God’s command, and with God’s help (he told the boys, his voice quivering, his clogged nostrils flaring), Cromwell drove the treasonous, idol-worshipping, priest-ridden Catholics beyond the Pale of Settlement; they learned no lessons and rose again, and in 1690, William of Orange arrived on our blessed shores to defeat the same Catholics at the glorious Battle of the Boyne. There were still Catholics among us, he intoned, hidden, secret, the spies of Satan, and it is God’s demand that we convert them to the freedoms and liberties of Protestantism by any means necessary. Robert’s further instruction in theology was of a similar lofty order.
    “How can you tell a Catholic from a Protestant?” the Rev. Robinson asked one day.
    “By his rotted teeth,” someone said.
    And someone else shouted, “By the smell, eejit.”
    “Here, here,” the Rev. Robinson commanded. “Don’t call a fellow Protestant an idiot.”
    Robert had never heard any of this at home, and so he said nothing. He saved his religious fervor for Bible class. He could talk about Moses and Abraham and Isaac. And about Aaron’s rod, which was a shepherd’s staff, and how Aaron could turn it into a snake, or use it to change water into blood, or to bring down upon his enemies great clouds of lice or fleas or hornets or flies. To Robert, that was another amazing tale. He knew about Joshua and his army, blowing their godly rams’ horns at the battle of Jericho. He knew about Daniel in the lion’s den, and Gideon’s fierce army and the wicked Jezebel (although he didn’t quite understand what was meant by “wicked”), and how Delilah cut off Samson’s hair while he slept, robbing him of his strength. The Rev. Robinson read the line that said “Let my people go,” and told his flock that it was the cry of every honest, God-fearing Protestant when confronted by Catholic riches, Catholic corruptions, Catholic vice, and Catholic power. This bored Robert. He wanted to hear more about donkeys that talked, and rocks that gave water, and chariots of fire; he wanted more about all the thrilling murders in the Bible, and the great men who had many wives. A vein in the Rev. Robinson’s temple pulsed with fury as he roared about the Whore of Babylon, who lived in Rome and called himself the Pope, but he didn’t answer Robert’s question about what a whore was (the older boys giggled or whooped at the question, which allowed the Rev. Robinson to avoid the answer and direct his fury at their knowing laughter). The Rev. Robinson insisted on discussing, in order, each of the Ten Commandments. Young Robert Carson wanted to know if it was true that Joseph lived to be one hundred and ten.
    He did make some friends. Billy Painter. Sam Longley. Harry Martinson. Boys like those from town, but better dressed, with faces shiny and scrubbed, bursting with mischief. As time passed and one term gave way to another, and then eased into a summer, and then another winter, Robert discovered that he was good at some things in school and poor at others. He had good penmanship (with a reed pen dipped in an inkwell), and that same talent could be used for drawing. He would draw their house and the hearth and the forge, and pictures of Bran and his friends at school. He never drew his parents. His right hand did what he wanted it to do, and when he was bored he could also use his left. The works of his left hand seemed to come from a different boy: the writing blunter, the drawing bolder. The Rev. Robinson always smacked him with the Punisher when