Colleen McCullough: The Thorn Birds

“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.

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.