The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [2]
Patrick’s meant a number of things to Studs. It meant school, and school was a jailhouse that might just as well have had barred windows. It meant the long, wide, chalk-smelling room of the seventh- and eighth-grade boys, with its forty or fifty squirming kids. It meant the second floor of the tan brick, undistinguished parish building on Sixty-first Street that had swallowed so much of Studs’ life for the past eight years. It meant the black-garbed Sisters of Providence, with their rattling beads, their swishing strides, and the funny-looking wooden clappers they used, which made a dry snapping sound and which hurt like anything when a guy got hit over the head with one. It meant Sister Carmel, who used to teach fourth grade, but was dead now; and who used to hit everybody the edge of a ruler because she knew they all called her the bearded lady. It meant Studs, twisting in his seat, watching the sun come in the windows to show up the dust on the floor, twisting and squirming, and letting his mind fly to all kinds of places that were not like school. It meant Battleaxe Bertha talking and hearing lessons, her thin, sunken-jawed face white as a ghost, and sometimes looking like a corpse. It meant Bertha yelling in that creaky old woman’s voice of hers. It meant Bertha trying to pound lessons down your throat, when you weren’t interested in them; church history and all about the Jews and Moses, and Joseph, and Daniel in the lion’s den, and Solomon who was wiser than any man that ever lived, except Christ, and maybe the Popes, who had the Holy Ghost to back up what they said; arithmetic, and square and cube roots, and percentage that Studs had never been able to get straight in his bean; catechism lessons... the ten commandments of God, the six commandments of the church, the seven capital sins, and the seven cardinal virtues and that lesson about the sixth commandment, which didn’t tell a guy anything at all about it and only had words that he’d found in the dictionary like adultery which made him all the more curious; grammar with all its dry rules, and its sentences that had to be diagrammed and were never diagrammed right; spelling, and words like apothecary that Studs still couldn’t spell; Palmer method writing, that was supposed to make you less tired and made you more tired, and the exercises of shaking your arm before each lesson, and the round and round (a pictures of small circles) and straight and straight, (a picture of small vertical lines) and the copy book, all smeared with ink, that he had gone through, doing exercise after exercise on neat sheets of Palmer paper, so that he could get a Palmer method certificate that his old man kicked about paying for because he thought it was graft; history lessons from the dull red history book, but they wouldn’t have been so bad if America had had more wars and if a guy could talk and think about the battles without having to memorize their dates, and the dates of when presidents were elected, and when Fulton invented the steamboat, and Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin or whatever in hell he did invent. School meant Bertha, and Bertha should have been put away long ago, where she could kneel down and pray herself to death, because she was old and crabby and always hauling off on somebody; it was a miracle that a person as old as Bertha could sock as hard or holler as loud as she could; even Sister Bernadette Marie, who was the superior and taught the seventh- and eighth-grade girls in the next room, sometimes had to come in and ask Bertha to make less noise, because she couldn’t teach with all that racket going on; but telling Bertha not to shout was like telling a bull that it had no right to see red. And smart guys, like Jim Clayburn, who did his homework every night, couldn’t learn much from her. And school meant Dan and Bill Donoghue and Tubby and all the guys in his bunch, and you couldn’t find a better gang of guys to pal with this side of Hell. And it meant going to mass in the barn-like church on the first floor, every morning in Lent, and to stations of the cross