it hoisted high on the telephone pole and tied there with a rope
and the afternoon began to fade and it got dusky or cloudy
and there were just the silhouettes of things, the starkness of
the cage and the figure in it, the tautness of the rope, the city
ugliness, barren, of the telephone pole, all against a sky that
had begun to lose light, reigned over by old European stones
and impenetrable trees, you knew you were near something
old, chill, something you knew but didn’t know: something
God was supposed to protect you from: something on the edge
of your memory, but not your memory. When it got late in the
day or the sky darkened with clouds or oncoming rain, the
silhouettes were awful drawings of something you had seen
before: maybe in a book: somewhere: and you stood completely
17
still and watched and prayed for the wooden cage to come
down, for the figure in it to disappear, not be there, that slight
figure, for the convent to go away, to be somewhere else: and
especially for the dread boys, the crowd, to notice the coming
dark and be afraid of what they had done. We were overcome
watching: the great shadow of the convent and its thick trees,
its cold walls of stone, and the great imposition of the wooden
cage and the caged figure on the darkening sky. It was eerie
and unhappy: and one was drawn and repelled: drawn to the
convent and the cage, wanting to run inside the house.
We were all supposed to stay away from Catholics. The
convent represented their strangeness and malice: the threat of
their ghostly superstitions. A holy ghost lived there and they
drank blood and ate cookies and kneeled down. They wanted
all the children: and at night you could disappear into those
walls and no one would ever see you again. Standing outside
the great stone thing, even in broad daylight, even with traffic
all around, because one side of the convent was right on a very
big street at a very big intersection, a child was frightened of
the unscalable cold stone and the height of it. We could never
find a way in or out and the walls were too high to climb. I
wanted to see it and go into it but I was afraid even to stand
near it. Once another girl and I stood on that street corner for
hours collecting money for a charity and if you got enough
money you got to go to a special dinner in a restaurant and I
just thought about the traffic, how regular it was, and the sun,
how bright it was, the people walking on the street, how they
looked and dressed, because behind me was the penetrating
silence of those stone walls and I was cold and afraid. I could
feel it behind my back and I could feel the cold stones there
and I could feel the giant height of the wall and I could feel the
reaching coolness of the shadows from the great trees. Then a
car stopped to give us money after we had been there for hours
