Free A Jest of God by Margaret Laurence

myself to look at it.
    No pictures. No obscene caricatures. Only – two sums completed, out of ten, and those two done incorrectly. That’s all.
    He has what we used to call a nosebleed. It won’t stop. His blood won’t stop.
    “James, put your head back. It will stop then.”
    I cannot say I’m sorry. Not in front of them all,twenty-six beings, all eyes. If I do say this, how shall I appear tomorrow? Cut down, diminished, undermined, very little left. If I do not say it, though, there’s enough gossip for a month or more, to friends and fathers and lovingly listening mothers –
you know what Miss Cameron went and did?
Did she? And to James, space venturer, first man on the moon?
    He is not crying. Maybe I knew I could rely on that. He has dug out from some obscure and unnoticed pocket a tardy handkerchief, never seen before. With it, he is mopping away the scarlet from his face, not dramatically, but very simply and practically, as though this were the only thing to be considered at the moment, to wipe the stained confusion away.
    If I could put my hands upon him, lightly, and comfort him. If I could say something. It is not for me to say or do anything. How can one retrieve anything at all? Is it always past the appointed hour?
    James – I’m sorry.
But I haven’t spoken the words aloud.
    James puts his handkerchief away. His nose has stopped bleeding. The others are looking at me. Everyone within our gates will hear before nightfall. The only thing I can do now is to bring it off as though I meant it to occur, as though I were at least half justified. If I capitulate, they will fall upon me like falcons.
    “All right, James. Get on with it. See if you can get through the next few.”
    I hear my voice, controlled. I don’t know what I could ever say to him, to make up for what I’ve done. I don’t think I could ever say anything which might make him forget.
    The day does end, of course. Am I walking home unusually slowly? I feel as though I were. Summer holidays will begin in another two weeks. This year’s children will be gone then, andgradually will turn into barely recognized faces, no connection left, only
hello
sometimes on the street. There will be new ones, and I will have to learn their names and faces, their quirks and their responses.
    I am trying to recall when I last hit a child. I cannot remember. It was not all that long ago – a year, perhaps. Yet now I cannot remember, cannot put a face and name to it, or a reason. In a year or two, will I have locked today away in some junkbox, never to be found among all the other scraps and trifles?
    When did I, the last time, and who was it, and why? I must be able to remember. Why can’t I?
    Now don’t start thinking your memory is failing, Rachel. That isn’t so. I can’t be expected to remember everything.
    Two weeks. Not very long to make a peace. Not half long enough. Probably that is all he will remember of me, that one instant, the thin wooden stick across his face. “I had a teacher once who hit me so hard my nose bled, no kidding.” And listeners – friends or lovers or his own children – will express astonishment that such acts were allowed in those barbaric old days.
    I must stop at the Regal Café and get some cigarettes. I don’t smoke much any more. It is foolhardy to take chances with one’s health, after all. But I do enjoy a cigarette after meals, and sometimes if I have a bad night, I may get up and smoke a couple – never in bed, no matter how wakeful I am. People have set fire to themselves that way.
    The café is crowded with slick leather-jacketed youngsters. Behind the counter Lee Toy stands, his centuries-old face not showing at all what he may think of these kids. He has been here ever since I was a child, and he seemed old then. Now he is dried and brittle and brown like the shell of a licheenut, and he has two younger men in partnership, nephews, perhaps. They could be sons, and I wouldn’t know. He has spent most