Swords and Crowns and Rings Read Free Page B

last of the steamed pudding. The Mother Superior cut him bread and butter, made tea. Wordlessly, she poured it out, and fetched him the sugar. At the end of the meal, the desperate man rose.
    â€˜Where’s the axe and the woodheap?’ he said.
    That was how he started, or, as the town wits said, got into the habit. It was said Father McTigue gave the Mother Superior, Sister Bonaventure, a tongue-lashing, but she stood firm. The convent needed a handyman for the gardening and the firing, to fit new washers and clean out the cesspit. Mr MacNunn could board at the home of any one of a number of respectable hard-up widows.
    As time went on, the Nun and Father McTigue became friendly in a guarded way, and even had sparring matches: the Nun, because of his game leg, standing on a handkerchief like Young Griffo the old featherweight champion, and dodging with the whippy speed of a snake every blow the priest aimed at him. Once or twice Father McTigue landed a stinger, and the Nun was not slow in returning the compliment, so that Father McTigue said Mass for a week or two with a lop-sided jaw or a nose like God’s wrath.
    Still, all in all, they got on well, and when Father McTigue went to his reward the Nun was one of the pallbearers, and got drunk afterwards and belted up two fellows in the pub who’d said the wrong thing.
    The Nun wasn’t a religious man. He thought the whole caper was a racket. Yet, when he heard of the hasty carrying-off of Walter Hanna, he said, ‘Praise be to God’, having caught the expression from the Sisters. Then, in an inexplicable state of excitement, he prematurely chopped off the heads of the three young ducks he’d been fattening for the nuns’ Easter Sunday dinner, thinking all the time of the comfortable woman Mrs Hanna, her hearty wailing laugh that had been so often cut off short as she suddenly recollected whose wife she was. A woman to laugh a lot and cry a lot: the Nun had a spookily dislocated vision of her putting her frizzy dark head on his shoulder and dropping tears all over his neck. He felt half-melted at the thought.
    But Mrs Hanna was still in a sense living with her husband. The sorrows and disappointments of her life with him were still sharp within her; the memory of his inertia and apathy still aroused sadness but not sympathy or forgiveness. He permeated the house like the slowly fading smell of his pipe.
    Throughout this dreary twilight of her bereavement the Nun sometimes made an almost mysterious appearance, mending the fence, pruning the fruit-trees and, as he had promised, building a treehouse in the fig-tree outside Jackie’s window. The little boy moved all his treasures there. He could scuttle out of his window and along a branch in an instant. As well as playhouse, it was his refuge from threatened punishment.
    For by the time he went to school Jackie Hanna was a perfect devil. Mrs Hanna’s years of work to make the child believe that he was as good as anyone else and better than most had succeeded eminently. He was as outgoing and mad-headed as a young dog, and because of his great strength and agility always leader of his peers. At six the bulging of his forehead was more noticeable, his belly protruded a little, a certain massivity began to show in his short legs. But his hair was like black feathers, his eyes astonishingly beautiful when he lifted them to the world that moved above him.
    Children his own age accepted him for what he was. Older ones, embarrassed by his difference from themselves, sometimes teased and mocked him, particularly his rolling dwarf’s walk. He was quick to retaliate, seizing his tormentor around the body, digging his head into the belly, oblivious of blows and punches, and steadily squeezing. After the teachers had rescued three or four wheezing, hysterical children from his grip there was no more teasing.
    Jackie had a fatherly kindness towards his chief playmate, Cushie Moy from the big house