for soup Protestant soup any soup and I cover my face with the pillow
hoping they wont come and stand around the bed clawing at me and
howling for bits of the chocolate bar my mother brought last week.
No,she didnt bring it.She had to send it in because I cant have any
more visitors. Sister Rita tells me a visit to the Fever Hospital is a priv-
ilege and after my bad behavior with Patricia Madigan and that poem I
cant have the privilege anymore. She says Ill be going home in a few
weeks and my job is to concentrate on getting better and learn to walk
again after being in bed for six weeks and I can get out of bed tomor-
row after breakfast. I dont know why she says I have to learn how to
walk when Ive been walking since I was a baby but when the nurse
stands me by the side of the bed I fall to the floor and the nurse laughs,
See, youre a baby again.
I practice walking from bed to bed back and forth back and forth.
I dont want to be a baby. I dont want to be in this empty ward with
no Patricia and no highwayman and no red-lipped landlords daughter.
I dont want the ghosts of children with green mouths pointing bony
fingers at me and clamoring for bits of my chocolate bar.
Seamus says a man in his pub knew all the verses of the highway-
man poem and it has a very sad end.Would I like him to say it because
he never learned how to read and he had to carry the poem in his head?
He stands in the middle of the ward leaning on his mop and recites,
Tlot-tlot, in the frosty silence! Tlot-tlot in the echoing night!
Nearer he came and nearer! Her face was like a light!
Her eyes grew wide for a moment, she drew one last deep breath,
Then her finger moved in the moonlight,
Her musket shattered the moonlight,
Shattered her breast in the moonlight and warned himwith her death.
He hears the shot and escapes but when he learns at dawn how Bess
died he goes into a rage and returns for revenge only to be shot down
by the redcoats.
Blood-red were his spurs in the golden noon; wine-red was his velvet coat,
When they shot him down on the highway,
Down like a dog on the highway,
And he lay in his blood on the highway, with a bunch of lace at his throat.
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