The Convict and Other Stories

I don’t think he hit her; he just slammed out the door into the rain and backed his truck over the wood stakes and chicken wire that bordered our Victory garden. My arms were pinched on my ears, but I could hear my mother crying while the water kettle screamed on the stove.

. . .

My fifth-grade teacher was Sister Uberta, who had come to us from the North that year. Her face was pretty and round inside her nun’s wimple, but it glowed as bright as paper when she was angry, and sometimes she shouted at us for no reason. Her hands were white and quick whenever she wrote on the blackboard or helped us make color-paper posters for the lunchroom walls. She seemed to have an energy that was about to burst out of her black habit. Her stories in catechism class made me swallow and grip the bottoms of my thighs.

“If you wonder what eternity means, imagine an iron ball as big as the earth out in the middle of space,” she said. “Then once every thousand years a sparrow flies from the moon to that iron ball and brushes one wing against its surface. And by the time that bird’s feathery wing has worn away the iron ball to a burnt cinder, eternity is just beginning.”

I couldn’t breathe. The oaks outside the window were gray and trembling in the rain. I wanted to resist her words, what they did to me, but I wasn’t strong enough. In my childish desperation I looked across the aisle at Arthur Boudreau, who was folding a paper airplane and never worried about anything.

Arthur’s head was shaped like a lightbulb. His burr haircut was mowed so close into the scalp that it glistened like a peeled onion. He poured inkwells into fishbowls, thumbtacked girls’ dresses to the desks, put formaldehyde frogs from the science lab in people’s lunch sandwiches.

“Claude, are you talking to Arthur?” Sister Uberta said.

“No, Sister.”

“You were, weren’t you?”

“No, Sister.”

“I want you to stay after school today.”

At three o’clock the other children sprinted through the rain for home, and Sister Uberta made me wash the blackboards. She put away her books and papers in her desk, then sat down behind it with her hands folded in front of her. Her hands looked small and white against the black folds of her habit.

“That’s enough,” she said. “Come up here and sit down.”

I walked to the front of the room and did as she said. My footsteps seemed loud on the wooden floor.

“Do you know why Arthur misbehaves, Claude?” she said.

“I d

on’t think he’s that bad.”

“He does bad things and then people pay attention to him. Do you want to be like that?”

“No, Sister.”

She paused and her large brown eyes examined my face from behind her big, steel-rimmed glasses. She made me feel funny inside. I was afraid of her, afraid of what her words about sin could do to me, but I felt a peculiar kinship with her, as though she and I understood something about loss and unhappiness that others didn’t know about.

“You didn’t buy a scapula for Sodality Sunday,” she said.

“My father isn’t working now.”

“I see.” She opened the bottom drawer to her desk, where she kept her paint set, and took out a small medal on a chain. “You take this one, then. If your father buys you one later, you can give mine to someone else. That way, you pass on the favor.”

She smiled and her face was truly beautiful. Then her mouth turned downward in a melancholy way and she said, “But, Claude, remember this: there are people we shouldn’t get close to; they’ll cause us great trouble. Arthur is one of them. He’ll hurt you.”

A week later I was back at the confessional with another problem. The inside of the church was cool and smelled of stone and water and burning candles. I looked at Father Melancon’s silhouette through the confessional screen. He had played bush-league baseball before he became a priest, and he was still thin and athletic and wore his graying hair in a crew cut.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” I began.

He waited, the side of his face immobile.

“Tell me what it is, Claude.” His voice was soft but I thought I heard him take a tired breath.

“Sister Uberta says it’s a sin to use bad words.”

“Well, that depends on—”