Maggie's Breakfast by Gabriel Walsh Page B

sense and avalanche of joy of not being sent and condemned to Daingean, I felt so light I could
fly.
    After a moment or two a board member told my mother to have me leave the Christian Brothers’ School and go to the Model School, a non-religious-order school, closer to home.
    * * *
    A week later I was enrolled in a school where the teachers didn’t wear black. It was a Catholic school run by teachers who wore regular clothes and who went home to their
families when the school day ended. Compared to the Christian Brothers’ school the Model School was like a holiday home.
    Nevertheless every Friday at about eleven in the morning we’d leave the classroom and assemble outside on the street to be marched to a chapel that was not too far away. It was about a
ten-minute walk. For the first two years I was an obedient pupil and marched with my schoolmates to the church so that the local priest could hear our confessions. We marched in unison and in a
straight line – a parade of boys marching to take our souls to the laundry. For most of us it was a celebration.
    One morning close to my last few months in the school, I decided I didn’t need to confess to nothing all over again. The morning started with the usual ritual. A whistle blew and the march
began. As we marched towards the church to confess our sins we passed a big public house. The stench of Guinness and whiskey coming from the place cut through the air like a dirty bed-sheet drying
on a clothesline. This wonderful sunny morning I was feeling freer than I had felt in a very long time. As I marched by the pub I noticed that the door of the place was wide open. Without giving it
too much thought I slipped from the confessional line and walked into the pub as if I was a regular customer. Inside the pub a few men were sitting at the bar. They were talking out loud but I
couldn’t tell if they were talking to each other or to the big pints of Guinness that were in front of them.
    When the long confessional line had passed, I stepped out of the pub and walked home very slowly. Before I got to my house I decided I’d better visit the Oblates Church to get as holy as I
could before I went home. I didn’t want my mother to know I had skipped the confessional line. If she knew I had, she’d believe I was afraid to confess to some sin I had committed. Any
kind of sin on my white soul would be a one-way ticket to hell with the Devil as my landlord for eternity. If I came home looking holy after a visit to the statue of the Virgin who had her wedding
ring in her crown, my mother might not ask any questions.
    There were several statues of Our Lady outside the church but I knew the one Father Divine was in love with was the one that overlooked the churchyard, the one that now had a massive gold crown
on her head and a great big halo. She was there up on her big high pedestal over the gate, day and night, in all kinds of weather, with her eyes cast up to Heaven as if she had no interest in the
rest of us moving around down below. She didn’t move or blink or fart or want to go to the bathroom or anything like that.
    I wanted to tell the statue that my mother’s wedding ring was on her head. As I looked up at it, Father Divine’s voice was ringing in my ears. “The Holy Mother of God would
be eternally grateful if you could donate this ring to her crown, Mrs. Walsh. I know she’d look down on you and anoint you. If you do, it would be placed in her crown with other gold rings
from other women and wives in the parish. ” I tried to spot my mother’s wedding ring but I wasn’t able to. I couldn’t see any rings on the crown, only big stars all
around it. Maybe the rings the women gave were on top of it? I thought about climbing up on the statue and getting the ring back to give to my father so he could give it to my mother all over again
and she would forget that he hadn’t had a job in years and years. Our Lady knew where God was all day long and knew