Maggie's Breakfast by Gabriel Walsh

were hanging off. My mother noticed my partly exposed rear end and let out a holy scream. “Ah, for God’s sake, look at ya! You’ll
be sent away for sure if you walk around like that!”
    “The stitches came out yesterday,” I said.
    “Take them off right now!”
    I climbed out of the second-hand trousers and stood half-naked on the floor. My mother threw a dishcloth at me and went looking for a needle and thread. I wrapped the dishcloth around the lower
part of my body and spent the next ten minutes trying to identify the odour that was coming from it.
    After finding a needle and thread, my mother sat down. “Christ almighty, what’s to become of us?” she kept repeating as she tried to thread the needle. “Here, do this for
me, will ya?” She passed the needle and thread to me. I quickly threaded the needle and handed it back to her.
    The patches on my trousers were sewn back on again and within minutes my mother and I were on our way to Dublin Castle where my future might depend on how the patches on my second-hand trousers
held up.
    My mother and I walked into the big grey building where hundreds of years of Irish history had been played out and joined up with others who were in the same sad situation as I was. The corridor
we walked along seemed too imposing a place for the crime of talking back to a schoolteacher. In this same building in years past people were ordered to be hanged, executed, flogged and deported
for disobeying English law in Ireland. With Ireland now in charge of its own affairs it was, at least on some scale, duplicating what England had done to it years earlier.
    As my mother and I got closer to the room where my case was to be heard, I could hear mothers crying. Some were screaming. Their sons had been ordered to report to the police office at the far
end of the hall and be sent to a reformatory school. Fear engulfed me again. I was frightened and began to shake and cry.
    “Ah, Ma, help me. Don’t let me go. Don’t let me go, Ma. Help me. Save me, Ma. I’m afraid.” I held onto my mother’s hand so tightly I almost broke her
fingers.
    “I’m your mother and I’ll stand by you, son,” she said as we walked the last few yards toward the hearing room.
    We entered a cold room with long wooden benches in front of a table that was on a raised platform. Three men were sitting at the table.
    Before we could sit down my name was called out. “Gabriel Walsh?”
    My mother remained standing. “We’re here, sir,” she said.
    “Is he with you?” she was asked by one of the men as if he couldn’t see me.
    “Me son is here, sir,” my mother responded.
    “Step up, boy,” the man said.
    I was holding my mother’s hand so tight I couldn’t let go of it.
    “Go up, son,” she said while she tried to detach herself from me.
    I walked to the table and looked up at the three men. My mouth opened and my eyes closed and my heart raced.
    “You’re a problem at school. Are you?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “You don’t know, sir !” the man bellowed back at me. “The Brother states you don’t learn and you don’t care. And you don’t attend. Is that
true?”
    I was so frightened standing in front of the three men I didn’t know that I was alive. I was a heartbeat away from fainting on the floor in front of them.
    “I’m afraid,” I said. It was the only thing I could say. I kept repeating it. “I’m afraid. I’m afraid. I’m afraid.” I kept saying it until I was
interrupted.
    “Afraid of what?” one of the men asked me.
    I looked up at the man but I couldn’t answer him.
    My mother then came up to me and held my hand. “Tell the nice man what you’re afraid of, son,” she said.
    I was happy my mother was holding my hand but I still couldn’t answer the man’s question.
    “What are you afraid of?” the man asked me again.
    “He’s afraid to admit he kicked the Christian Brother if you ask me,” one of the three men said.
    “Isn’t that some kind of