The Thorn Birds (4 page)

That was just nine years after he had been transported from England. He was yet a young man, but he looked sixty. By the time the first officially sanctioned settlers arrived in New Zealand in 1840, he had hewn lands for himself in the rich Canterbury district of the South Island, “married” a Maori woman and sired a brood of thirteen handsome half-Polynesian children. And by 1860 the Armstrongs were colonial aristocrats, sent their male offspring to exclusive schools back in England, and amply proved by their cunning and acquisitiveness that they were indeed true descendants of a remarkable, formidable man. Roderick’s grandson James had fathered Fiona in 1880, the only daughter among a total of fifteen children.

If Fee missed the more austere Protestant rites of her childhood, she never said so. She tolerated Paddy’s religious convictions and attended Mass with him, saw to it that her children worshipped an exclusively Catholic God. But because she had never converted, the little touches were missing, like grace before meals and prayers before bed, an everyday holiness.

Aside from that one trip into Wahine eighteen months before, Meggie had never been farther from home than the barn and smithy in the hollow. On the morning of her first day at school she was so excited she vomited her breakfast, and had to be bundled back into her bedroom to be washed and changed. Off came the lovely new costume of navy blue with a big white sailor collar, on went her horrid brown wincey which buttoned high around her little neck and always felt as if it were choking her.

“And for heaven’s sake, Meggie, next time you feel sick,
tell
me! Don’t just sit there until it’s too late and I’ve got a mess to clean up as well as everything else! Now you’re going to have to hurry, because if you’re late for the bell Sister Agatha is sure to cane you. Behave yourself, and mind your brothers.”

Bob, Jack, Hughie and Stu were hopping up and down by the front gate when Fee finally pushed Meggie out the door, her luncheon jam sandwiches in an old satchel.

“Come on, Meggie, we’ll be late!” Bob shouted, moving off down the road.

Meggie followed the dwindling forms of her brothers at a run.

It was a little after seven o’clock in the morning, and the gentle sun had been up several hours; the dew had dried off the grass except where there was deep shade. The Wahine road was a wheel-rutted earthen track, two ribbons of dark red separated by a wide band of bright green grass. White calla lilies and orange nasturtiums flowered profusely in the high grass to either side, where the neat wooden fences of bordering properties warned against trespassing.

Bob always walked to school along the top of the right-hand fences, balancing his leather satchel on his head instead of wearing it haversack style. The left-hand fence belonged to Jack, which permitted the three younger Clearys domain of the road itself. At the top of the long, steep hill they had to climb from the smithy hollow to where the Robertson road joined the Wahine road, they paused for a moment, panting, the five bright heads haloed against a puffily clouded sky. This was the best part, going down the hill; they linked hands and galloped on the grassy verge until it vanished in a tangle of flowers, wishing they had the time to sneak under Mr. Chapman’s fence and roll all the way down like boulders.

It was five miles from the Cleary house to Wahine, and by the time Meggie saw telegraph poles in the distance her legs were trembling and her socks were falling down. Ears tuned for the assembly bell, Bob glanced at her impatiently as she toiled along, hitching at her drawers and giving an occasional gasp of distress. Her face under the mass of hair was pink and yet curiously pallid. Sighing, Bob passed his satchel to Jack and ran his hands down the sides of his knickers.

“Come on, Meggie, I’ll piggyback you the rest of the way,” he said gruffly, glaring at his brothers in case they had the mistaken idea that he was going soft.

Meggie scrambled onto his back, heaved herself up enough to lock her legs around his waist, and pillowed her head on his skinny shoulder blissfully. Now she could view Wahine in comfort.

There was not much to see. Little more than a big village, Wahine straggled down each side of a tar-centered road. The biggest building was the local hotel, of two stories, with an awning shading the footpath from the sun and posts supporting the awning all along the gutter. The general store was the next-biggest building, also boasting a sheltering awning, and two long wooden benches under its cluttered windows for passers-by to rest upon. There was a flagpole in front of the Masonic hall; from its top a tattered Union Jack fluttered faded in the stiff breeze. As yet the town possessed no garage, horseless carriages being limited to a very few, but there was a blacksmith’s barn near the Masonic hall, with a stable behind it and a gasoline pump standing stiffly next to the horse trough. The only edifice in the entire settlement which really caught the eye was a peculiar bright-blue shop, very un-British; every other building was painted a sober brown. The public school and the Church of England stood side by side, just opposite the Sacred Heart Church and parish school.

As the Clearys hurried past the general store the Catholic bell sounded, followed by the heavier tolling of the big bell on a post in front of the public school. Bob broke into a trot, and they entered the gravel yard as some fifty children were lining up in front of a diminutive nun wielding a willowy stick taller than she was. Without having to be told, Bob steered his kin to one side away from the lines of children, and stood with his eyes fixed on the cane.

The Sacred Heart convent was two-storied, but because it stood well back from the road behind a fence, the fact was not easily apparent. The three nuns of the Order of the Sisters of Mercy who staffed it lived upstairs with a fourth nun, who acted as housekeeper and was never seen; downstairs were the three big rooms in which school was taught. A wide, shady veranda ran all the way around the rectangular building, where on rainy days the children were allowed to sit decorously during their play and lunch breaks, and where on sunny days no child was permitted to set foot. Several large fig trees shaded a part of the spacious grounds, and behind the school the land sloped away a little to a grassy circle euphemistically christened “the cricket pitch,” from the chief activity that went on in that area.

Ignoring muffled sniggers from the lined-up children, Bob and his brothers stood perfectly still while the pupils marched inside to the sound of Sister Catherine plunking “Faith of Our Fathers” on the tinny school piano. Only when the last child had disappeared did Sister Agatha break her rigid pose; heavy serge skirts swishing the gravel aside imperiously, she strode to where the Clearys waited.

Meggie gaped at her, never having seen a nun before. The sight was truly extraordinary; three dabs of person, which were Sister Agatha’s face and hands, the rest white starched wimple and bib glaring against layers of blackest black, with a massive rope of wooden rosary beads dangling from an iron ring that joined the ends of a wide leather belt around Sister Agatha’s stout middle. Sister Agatha’s skin was permanently red, from too much cleanliness and the pressure of the knifelike edges of the wimple framing the front center of her head into something too disembodied to be called a face; little hairs sprouted in tufts all over her chin, which the wimple ruthlessly squashed double. Her lips were quite invisible, compressed into a single line of concentration on the hard business of being the Bride of Christ in a colonial backwater with topsy-turvy seasons when she had taken her vows in the sweet softness of a Killarney abbey over fifty years before. Two small crimson marks were etched into the sides of her nose from the remorseless grip of her round, steel-framed spectacles, and behind them her eyes peered out suspiciously, pale-blue and bitter.

“Well, Robert Cleary, why are you late?” Sister Agatha barked in her dry, once Irish voice.

“I’m sorry, Sister,” Bob replied woodenly, his blue-green eyes still riveted on the tip of the quivering cane as it waved back and forth.

“Why are you late?” she repeated.

“I’m sorry, Sister.”

“This is the first morning of the new school year, Robert Cleary, and I would have thought that on this morning if not on others you might have made an effort to be on time.”

Meggie shivered, but plucked up her courage. “Oh, please, Sister, it was my fault!” she squeaked.

The pale-blue eyes deviated from Bob and seemed to go through and through Meggie’s very soul as she stood there gazing up in genuine innocence, not aware she was breaking the first rule of conduct in a deadly duel which went on between teachers and pupils
ad infinitum
: never volunteer information. Bob kicked her swiftly on the leg and Meggie looked at him sideways, bewildered.

“Why was it your fault?” the nun demanded in the coldest tones Meggie had ever heard.

“Well, I was sick all over the table and it went right through to my drawers, so Mum had to wash me and change my dress, and I made us all late,” Meggie explained artlessly.

Sister Agatha’s features remained expressionless, but her mouth tightened like an overwound spring, and the tip of the cane lowered itself an inch or two. “Who is
this
?” she snapped to Bob, as if the object of her inquiry were a new and particularly obnoxious species of insect.

“Please, Sister, she’s my sister Meghann.”

“Then in future you will make her understand that there are certain subjects we do not ever mention, Robert, if we are true ladies and gentlemen. On no account do we ever, ever mention by name any item of our underclothing, as children from a decent household would automatically know. Hold out your hands, all of you.”

“But, Sister, it was
my
fault!” Meggie wailed as she extended her hands palms up, for she had seen her brothers do it in pantomime at home a thousand times.

“Silence!” Sister Agatha hissed, turning on her. “It is a matter of complete indifference to me which one of you was responsible. You are all late, therefore you must all be punished. Six cuts.” She pronounced the sentence with monotonous relish.

Terrified, Meggie watched Bob’s steady hands, saw the long cane whistle down almost faster than her eyes could follow, and crack sharply against the center of his palms, where the flesh was soft and tender. A purple welt flared up immediately; the next cut came at the junction of fingers and palm, more sensitive still, and the final one across the tips of the fingers, where the brain has loaded the skin down with more sensation than anywhere else save the lips. Sister Agatha’s aim was perfect. Three more cuts followed on Bob’s other hand before she turned her attention to Jack, next in line. Bob’s face was pale but he made no outcry or movement, nor did his brothers as their turns came; even quiet and tender Stu.

As they followed the upward rise of the cane above her own hands Meggie’s eyes closed involuntarily, so she did not see the descent. But the pain was like a vast explosion, a scorching, searing invasion of her flesh right down to the bone; even as the ache spread tingling up her forearm the next cut came, and by the time it had reached her shoulder the final cut across her fingertips was screaming along the same path, all the way through to her heart. She fastened her teeth in her lower lip and bit down on it, too ashamed and too proud to cry, too angry and indignant at the injustice of it to dare open her eyes and look at Sister Agatha; the lesson was sinking in, even if the crux of it was not what Sister Agatha intended to teach.

It was lunchtime before the last of the pain died out of her hands. Meggie had passed the morning in a haze of fright and bewilderment, not understanding anything that was said or done. Pushed into a double desk in the back row of the youngest children’s classroom, she did not even notice who was sharing the desk until after a miserable lunch hour spent huddled behind Bob and Jack in a secluded corner of the playground. Only Bob’s stern command persuaded her to eat Fee’s gooseberry jam sandwiches.

When the bell rang for afternoon classes and Meggie found a place on line, her eyes finally began to clear enough to take in what was going on around her. The disgrace of the caning rankled as sharply as ever, but she held her head high and affected not to notice the nudges and whispers of the little girls near her.

Sister Agatha was standing in front with her cane; Sister Declan prowled up and down behind the lines; Sister Catherine seated herself at the piano just inside the youngest children’s classroom door and began to play “Onward, Christian Soldiers” with a heavy emphasis on two-four time. It was, properly speaking, a Protestant hymn, but the war had rendered it interdenominational. The dear children marched to it just like wee soldiers, Sister Catherine thought proudly.

Of the three nuns, Sister Declan was a replica of Sister Agatha minus fifteen years of life, where Sister Catherine was still remotely human. She was only in her thirties, Irish of course, and the bloom of her ardor had not yet entirely faded; she still found joy in teaching, still saw Christ’s imperishable Image in the little faces turned up to hers so adoringly. But she taught the oldest children, whom Sister Agatha deemed beaten enough to behave in spite of a young and soft supervisor. Sister Agatha herself took the youngest children to form minds and hearts out of infantile clay, leaving those in the middle grades to Sister Declan.

Safely hidden in the last row of desks, Meggie dared to glance sideways at the little girl sitting next to her. A gap-toothed grin met her frightened gaze, huge black eyes staring roundly out of a dark, slightly shiny face. She fascinated Meggie, used to fairness and freckles, for even Frank with his dark eyes and hair had a fair white skin; so Meggie ended in thinking her deskmate the most beautiful creature she had ever seen.

“What’s your name?” the dark beauty muttered out of the side of her mouth, chewing on the end of her pencil and spitting the frayed bits into her empty ink-well hole.

“Meggie Cleary,” she whispered back.

“You there!” came a dry, harsh voice from the front of the classroom.