I did not say and I would not say!

It was a Holy Year and a good and secure time at home,
with all of us saying the Rosary, and hoping that it was true,
that, "the family that pray together, stay together".
And in our house, as in every other house, the prayer ran:
"Enraptured by the splendour of your heavenly beauty,
and impelled by the anxieties of the world...."
Secure, that is, until putting my hand deep into my mothers pocket,
I retrieved, not just her rosary, but banknotes rolled in an elastic band.

It was Saturday, and the mysteries were Glorious!
And like good Catholics we knelt hggledy-piggledy around the room
while our father, in keeping with ancient tradition,
mumbled the prayers.
And we got up higgledy-piggledy from our weary knees,
to do the things that needed doing, for Sunday Mass.

And having done those things, and having dutifully said, "good night," 
we went to bed, secure from the anxieties of the world,
as we ceased to exist in sleep, as I ceased to exist,
until a distant and wearing voice kept asking:
"Who delivered the Telegraph?"
"Did you see the boy who delivered it?"
before being hauled from my bed and downstairs, where,
in my confused state I knew, that an awesome moment had arrived.
It was not just my father, but he had a curved cane in his hand.

Crying I told him that I did not steal the money.
And still crying, that I hadn't meant to keep it. So it was easy.
All I had to do was say, why the money was in my pocket.
But I did not say and I would not say!
So the cane came down without mercy
until the pain was searing through my body
and I was singing and dancing my innocence to heaven.
until reminded, that all I had to do was say,
why the money was in my pocket!
But I did not say, and I would not say!
So again, the cane came down without mercy, blow after blow,
until writhing and razed to the ground, 
and rolling under the table,
I turned my face to the wall.

How I got to bed, or how I consoled myself,
or where my mother was, "heaven only knows."
But what I know was the look on her face, when,
days later sitting by the fire, and noticing the marks of the beating,
still visible on my legs, she said:
"I didn't realise it was that bad."
But no words passed between us.
Because I did not say, and I would not say,
what she must have known.
That I did not say, and I would not say - for her.

__________
© Cormac McCloskey

I have remembered the opening lines of the prayer quoted in the first stanza, from childhood. Though in the original draft, I used the word compelled rather than "impelled". The prayer was first read by Pope Pius XII in the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in November 1950. A Holy Year. So I would have been eight at the time of this incident.

My mother had returned earlier that day from a rare visit to my father's family. Sent to recover her Rosary from her coat pocket, and finding the money, I naively thought she had forgotten about it. So I took it, intending to give it to her later. But by the time the prayers were said, I had forgotten all about it. Almost certainly there were money problems, which was why she had gone to visit my father's family; and possibly at his bidding. In the circumstances, (my father was a binge drinker with a propensity to be violent when drunk), a sad fact of life was that there were things in the normal course of events that she would not have wanted him to know, and which we, as children were aware of. Additional money, as distinct from the "house keeping" that he doled out each week, was one of them. And I would not have understood, that in this instance, this was money that he knew about.

The Rosary is a devotional exercise made up of fifteen mysteries. They are split into three groups of five reflections on the life of Christ and wider Catholic belief. As mysteries they come under the heading of: Joyful. Sorrowful, and Glorious. And each of them are assigned to particular days of the week. Each of the mysteries are made up of five decades, a sequence of prayers that accompany each of the themes. As the poem makes reference to the Glorious mysteries, the themes are: The Resurrection (of Christ). The Ascension (Of Christ into Heaven), Pentecost (when the Holy Spirit descended on the Apostles in the upper room in Jerusalem). The Assumption of the Virgin Mary into Heaven). And, The Coronation (of the Virgin Mary in heaven), which is a devotional rather than a literal concept).

This poem was amended on 17th February 2011 / 2nd July 2011