Free In a Glass House by Nino Ricci Page A

possibility of me beyond the narrow world of our farm.
    For reading practice Sister Mary gave me a book called
The Guiding Light
that told the story of the bible in pictures and captions. At home I’d sit with it at the kitchen table and slowly sound out the captions, its English easier for me now than the long-worded Italian of the
Lives of the Saints
I’d brought from Italy, and its stories seeming more important because they came from the bible and were in English. Scattered throughout it were colour pictures by famous painters, gloomy and strangely rendered and harsh, the beheading of John the Baptist, the blinding of Samson, the judgement of the woman who’d sinned. But I couldn’t pierce their mysteries, preferred the more rustic pictures that went with the stories, the sense they gave of a world that was magical and benign. I read the stories through and then I went back to some of them, the story of creation, with its double-paged picture of Eden, the story of Jonah, of the young Christ in the temple; and I took a special furtive pleasure at making these stories my own, at entering into them as into some secret private world.
    That pleasure seemed to draw something at first from the lunch hours I spent with Sister Mary, from the quiet closeness the empty classroom took on then, the warmth that lingered in my shoulder after she’d placed a hand there, the way her clothes rustled intimately when she leaned in beside me as if she were about to whisper to me some secret about herself. But after a few weeks students from other grades began to join us in these lunch-hour sessions – a yellow-haired Belgian girl kids teasedbecause she never talked, a boy who’d failed grade three and been expelled once for smoking, a boy from grade eight, Tony Lemieux, who was taller than Sister Mary and who’d been to reform school – till finally there were more than a dozen of us, even George from my bus route, Sister Mary moving among us all with a democratic efficiency, assigning us each our separate tasks; and I began to nurse a small resentment toward Sister Mary then, angry that I’d been grouped with people like George and the Belgian girl, that Sister Mary didn’t see how we all hated each other, hated having our strangeness multiplied and reflected back at us. Even Tony Lemieux, who was tall and broad-shouldered and whose nose was set back in his face so that his nostrils stared out like second eyes, appeared awkward and small among us, coming into class every day with the same defeated lope, as if being put in with us had stripped his infamy of its distinction; and I didn’t understand why the other teachers thought he was bad or why he’d been to reform school when he didn’t seem strong enough inside to be mean like some of the boys on the bus were, seemed merely crippled and out of place like the rest of us. Because he was too big for the grade-one desks Sister Mary had him sit up at hers while he worked; and occasionally she’d have him help her put things up on the bulletin board, standing beside him then and handing him things one by one with an odd intimacy and trust. But whenever Sister Mary was near him Tony would twist his shoulders awkwardly like an animal trying to shake off a yoke, and it seemed that Sister Mary didn’t understand how things were with him, how her attention humiliated him. She’d make me think then of my Aunt Teresa, whose energy appeared to wrap her so safely in its tight space sometimes that it held other people out like a wall, and of Father Mackinnon the school principal. FatherMackinnon came to the grade-one class about once a week to talk to us and ask us questions, smiling even when we got the answers wrong, his trim greying hair and blue eyes giving him a look of infinite compassion and wisdom. But in the schoolyard I saw how he’d laugh and joke with the same boys who picked on me on the bus, because they played on the school teams he coached, and his kindness then seemed