The Convict and Other Stories

It was raining hard when we came back into the classroom from the playground. The raindrops tinked against the ginning blades of the window fan while Sister Uberta diagrammed a compound sentence on the blackboard. Then we realized we were listening to another sound, too—a rhythmic thumping like a soft fist on the window glass.

Sister Uberta paused uncertainly with the chalk in her hand and looked at the window. Then her eyes sharpened, the blood drained from her face, and her jaws became ridged with bone.

Arthur Boudreau had filled the condom with water, knotted a string around one end, and suspended it from the third story so that it hung even with the window and swung back and forth against the glass in the wind. It looked like an obscene, bulbous nose pressed against the rain-streaked pane.

Some of the kids didn’t know what it was; others giggled, scraped their feet under the desks in delight, tried to hide their gleeful faces on the desktops. I watched Sister Uberta fearfully. Her face was bright and hard, her angry eyes tangled in thought, then she opened her desk drawer, removed a pair of scissors, lifted the window with more strength than I thought she could have, and in a quick motion snipped the string and sent the condom plummeting into the rain.

She brought the window down with one hand and the room became absolutely still. There was not a sound for a full minute. I could not bear to look at her. I studied my hands, my untied shoelaces, Arthur Boudreau’s leg extended casually out into the aisle. A solitary drop of perspiration ran out of my hair and splashed on the desktop. I swallowed, raised my head, and saw that she was looking directly at me.

“That’s what you had out on the playground, wasn’t it?” she said.

“No, Sister,” I said desperately.

“Don’t you compound what you’ve done by lying.”

“It was just a box. It wasn’t mine.” I felt naked before her words. Everyone in the class was looking at me. My face was hot, and through my shimmering eyes I could see Rene LeBlanc watching me.

“Somebody else put you up to it, but you did it, didn’t you?” she said.

“I didn’t. I swear it, Sister.”

“Don’t you swear, Claude. I saw you on the playground.”

“You didn’t see it right, Sister. It wasn’t me. I promise.”

“You took the box from Arthur, and then you made everybody laugh by bragging about what you were going to do.”

“I didn’t know what was in it. I gave it—”

“You ran around the corner with it when you saw me watching.”

I looked over at Rene LeBlanc. Her face was stunned and confused. I felt as though I were drowning while other people watched, that I was hideous and perverse in her eyes and in the eyes of every decent person on the earth.

“Look at me,” Sister Uberta said. “You weren’t in this by yourself. Arthur put you up to it, and he’s going to wait for me in Father Melancon’s office at three o’clock, but you’re going to stay here in this room and tell me the truth.”

“I have to help my daddy at the filling station,” Arthur said.

“Not today you don’t,” Sister Uberta said.

Until the bell rang I kept my eyes fixed on the desktop and listened to the beating of my own heart and felt the sweat run down my sides. I couldn’t look up again at Rene LeBlanc. My moment to exonerate myself had passed in failure, the class was listening to Sister talk about the Norman Conquest, and I was left alone with my bitter cup of gall, my fear-ridden, heart-thudding wait in Gethsemane. The three o’clock bell made my whole body jerk in the desk.

The other kids got their raincoats and umbrellas from the cloakroom and bolted for home. Then Sister sent Arthur to Father Melancon’s office to wait for her. I looked once at his face, praying against my own want of courage that he would admit his guilt and extricate me from my ordeal. But Arthur, even though he was ethical in his mischievous way, was not one to do anything in a predictable fashion. Sister Uberta and I were alone in the humid stillness of the classroom.

“You’ve committed a serious act, Claude,” she said. “Do you still refuse to own up to it?”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“All right, fine,” she said. “Then you write that on this piece of paper. You write down that I didn’t see you with something on the playground, that you don’t know anything about what happened this afternoon.”

“I hate you.” The words were like the snap of a rubber band in my head. I couldn’t believe I had said them.

“What did you say?”

My face was burning, and my head was spinning so badly that I had to grip the desktop as though I were falling.

“Stand up, Claude,” she said.

I rose to my feet. The backs of my legs were quivering. Her face was white and her eyeballs were clicking back and forth furiously.