Creatures of the Earth by John McGahern

Maguire, appears. She is near retirement: the slack flesh fills the ample spaces of the loose black dress, but the face in contrast is curiously hard, as if all the years of wrestling with children had hardened it into an intransigent assurance.
    â€˜When Mrs Maguire says something Mrs Maguire means what she says.’ The third-person reference punctuates everything she says. Now a look of anxious concern shows in the unblinking eyes.
    â€˜What happened with the Canon?’
    â€˜He thrashed Walshe for breaking into one of the poorboxes.’
    I didn’t want her to stay, though I too had often used the glow of fabricated concern to hurry or escape the slow minutes of the school day.
    â€˜Terrible. Awful.’ She echoes a dull safety, hers and mine.
    â€˜We’ll talk about it at lunch, then.’
    â€˜The world, the world,’ she ponders as she withdraws to her own room.
    I look at the clock, the crawl of the minutes, never the happiness of imagining it two o’clock and looking up and finding it half past three.
    â€˜Will you be an absorbed teacher? Will your work be like a game? Or will you be a clockwatcher?’ Jordan, the Professor of Education, asked, more years ago than I care to remember, after a lecture. It was his custom to select one student to walk with him through the corridor, gleaming with wax and the white marble busts of saints and philosophers on their pedestals along the walls.
    â€˜I hope I’ll be absorbed, sir.’
    â€˜I hope so too for your sake. I can imagine few worse hells than a teacher who is a clockwatcher, driven to distraction by the children, while the day hangs about him like lead.’
    I could answer him now. I was a clockwatcher. The day hung mostly like lead, each morning a dislocation of your life in order to entice or bend the children’s opposing wills to yours, and the day a concentration on this hollow grapple. It seems to be as good as anything else and easier to stay than move.
    â€˜We’ll leave the apples for a time and go on with the Shannon.’
    The class drags on until the iron gate on the road sounds. A woman comes down the concrete steps.
    A mother coming to complain, I think, and instinctively start to marshal the reassuring clichés. ‘The child is sensitive and when it loses that sensitivity will surprise us all. To force the child now can only cause damage. You have nothing to worry about.’
    â€˜That was my trouble too at that age. I was too sensitive. I was never understood,’ she’d reply.
    â€˜Thank you for coming to see me.’
    â€˜I feel less worried now.’
    In the beginning everybody was sensitive and never understood, but hides hardened.
    This time, no mother, a Miss Martin: she lived with her brother across the empty waste of wheat-coloured sedge and stunted birch of the Gloria Bog. Her brother made toys from used matchsticks in the winter nights.
    â€˜I wonder if I could take young Horan from his lessons for a few minutes, sir. It’s the ringworm.’
    â€˜Luke, see Miss Martin in the porch.’ The boy goes quietly out to the porch, already charmingly stolid in the acceptance of his power, Luke, magical fifth in a line of male children unbroken by girls; and while he wailed under the water of his baptism at the stone font in Cootehall church a worm was placed in his hand – either the priest didn’t see or was content to ignore it – but the Horans rejoiced, their fifth infant boy would grow up with the power of healing ringworm.
    On Tuesdays and on Fridays, days of the sorrowful mysteries, he touched the sores thrice in the name of the Father and Son and Holy Ghost, power of magic and religion killing the slow worm patiently circling.
    â€˜Did you wash your hands, Luke?’
    â€˜Yes, sir. I used the soap.’
    â€˜Show them to me.’
    â€˜All right. You can get on with your work.’
    The last to come before lunch was the tinker, with