The Tightrope Walkers Read Free

Fagan.”
    “There is no need to include me in your answer. Who made you, Dominic Hall?”
    “God made me.”
    “Good boy. And why did God make you, Holly Stroud?”
    “God made me to know Him, love Him and serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in the next.”
    “Good girl. See how simple it is, children? We will learn a little every day until mistakes are made by none of us, until we can answer the most difficult questions deep inside the book. For we wish to have no blemishes on our souls, do we, children?”
    “No, Miss Fagan.”
    “We wish to go to Heaven, don’t we, children?”
    “Yes, Miss Fagan.”
    “And we wish to please Miss O’Kane, don’t we?”
    “Yes, Miss Fagan.”
    “Yes, indeed. Now, put away your catechisms and we will make some words and pictures. Would you like that?”
    “Yes, Miss Fagan.”
    And she’d take a stick of chalk and reach up to the blackboard and start to write. Her fingers were slender. Her movements were deft. She curved the marks and angled them, and spoke the letters as she wrote, then spoke the words the letters made, then left a space and went on to the next word and the next until she dotted a stop, then spoke the words again to let us hear the meaning and the beauty of it all. And then we copied what she’d done, to make the shapes and sense and sentences for ourselves.
    The grass is green
.
    The sky is blue
.
    The yellow sun is in the sky
.
    “No need to rush,” she’d say. “Stay on the line. Remember your finger spaces. That’s good, that’s so lovely, children.”
    She’d gently tap the shoulders of some of us and whisper that yes, we had it right. She’d lean down to the slow ones, sometimes take their hand in hers, guide their uncertain clumsy fingers into the right actions, the right marks.
    “Yes,” she’d murmur. “Well done. Practice makes perfect. Remember that.”
    She never lost her temper. Her classroom was benign. We sat on hard steel-and-timber benches bolted to steel-and-timber desks. There was a crucifix high up on the wall behind Miss Fagan’s desk, and the alphabet, and numbers from one to a hundred, and a painting of poor Saint Lawrence being roasted on a fire. Through the high windows, we saw the scudding northeastern sky, occasional songbirds flying past, tight flocks of rushing pigeons, and far away, for those of us who knew how and where to look, the tiny almost-invisible dots of distant larks.
    Miss Fagan had us for our first three years.
    I loved to be in there. I loved to copy the letters and make the shapes, to hear the sounds and rhythms, to see the visions that the words made in my brain.
The ship sails. The bird flies
. To write with chalk on slate. To be among the group allowed to write with dip pens, to dip the pen into my own little pot of blue ink, to write into neatly lined red exercise books, to copy prayers and hymns and Bible stories from the board, to dry the ink with bright white blotting paper.
Infant Jesus, meek and mild, look on me, a little child. In the middle of the night He came to them, walking upon the sea, and told them, Do not be afraid
. I loved the books we read.
Here is Janet. Here is John
.
    And to write, to be allowed to write words of my own, sentences of my own, tales of my own.
Once there was a boy carled Dominic, who warked acros the waystland to have an advencher
. I loved to learn that
waystland
must turn to
wasteland
, to learn the power of a comma and a full stop, to love the patterns made on paper by strings of sentences, blocks of paragraphs. There were many who couldn’t do this. I sat for some time beside a boy called Norman Dobson. I was mystified by the way his words were scrawls across the page, no spaces between them, how they made no sense at all, how punctuation was random, meaningless, how he bent breathing wetly over his work as if in great pain. I would try to help him.
    “Remember finger spaces, Norman,” I’d whisper. “Stay on the lines.”
    He’d