At Lahane crossroads, while Brother Meagher retailed all that again, Tom had imagined the man from the island lying in one of the deeply dug ditches, and the tips of the rifles poking out through the stones of the walls. He imagined the great explosion there had been, the waiting men not moving when they heard it, intent on watching for the remaining Black and Tans to appear out of the dust and the smoke. ‘Like devils they came,’ Brother Meagher said.

Brother Meagher’s eyebrows met across his forehead. There was something the matter with his fingernails which prevented them from growing. He had dark jowls, and opaque eyes that became excited when he talked about the heroes and martyrs of the past: this was his particular subject. Addressing the class at the crossroads, he related how—generations before the time of Corny Dowley—the head of an obstreperous tenant-farmer had been stuck on to the sharpened branch of a tree on this very spot, a warning that obedience was expected. Corny Dowley would have known it, he said, and would maybe have smiled over the shadow the tree still cast as he waited in the ditch. ‘D’you see the shadow now?’ Brother Meagher continued, pointing through the sunlight at the dark outline on the road. The shadow was special, he said.

While he ate his bacon and fried bread and while his mother began the black-leading of the range, Tom reminded her of that excursion to Lahane crossroads. ‘Time enough for Meagher to be getting at you,’ she’d said at the time. Neck Daly and Deso Furphy, who’d left the convent last summer to go on to the Christian Brothers’, said that Brother Meagher chalked up the names of heroes and martyrs on the blackboard and you had to learn them off. You had to remember that the life of a martyr was cut short because he wouldn’t salute a heresy, or bend to a foreign foe. If you didn’t know that off pat you’d get the strap. You had to remember when Brother Meagher touched the name Daniel O’Connell with the tip of his cane that Daniel O’Connell was the Liberator. Neck Daly said once that Daniel O’Connell had died in his bed after drinking too much Italian whiskey. Holy Mullihan reported him and he got the strap for telling lies.

‘You’ll need to behave yourself with the Brothers, Tom,’ his mother said when he reminded her of all that now. ‘It’s not like with the nuns.’

‘Ah sure, I know it isn’t.’