want your kind in this post office, people that cant keep their hands off
the ham and sherry, so hand in your telegram pouch and bicycle for
your days are done in this post office.
But I need the job. I have to save and go to America.
America. Sad day when America lets in the likes of you.
I hobble through the streets of Limerick. Id like to go back and
throw a brick through Mr. Harringtons window. No. Respect for the
dead. Ill go across the Sarsfield Bridge and out the riverbank where I
can lie down somewhere in the bushes. I dont know how I can go
home and tell my mother I lost my job. Have to go home. Have to tell
her. Cant stay out the riverbank all night. Shed be frantic.
Mam begs the post office to take me back.They say no.They never
heard the likes. Telegram boy mauling corpse. Telegram boy fleeing
scene with ham and sherry. He will never set foot in the post office
again. No.
She gets a letter from the parish priest.Take the boy back, says the
parish priest. Oh, yes, Father, indeed, says the post office. Theyll let
me stay till my sixteenth birthday, not a minute longer. Besides, says
Mrs. OConnell, when you think of what the English did to us for
eight hundred years that man had no right to complain over a little
ham and sherry. Compare a little ham and sherry to the Great Famine
and where are you? If my poor husband was alive and I told him what
you did hed say you struck a blow, Frank McCourt, struck a blow.
Every Saturday morning I swear Ill go to confession and tell the priest
of my impure acts at home, on lonely boreens around Limerick with
cows and sheep gawking, on the heights of Carrigogunnell with the
world looking up.
Ill tell him about Theresa Carmody and how I sent her to hell, and
that will be the end of me, driven from the Church.
Theresa is a torment to me. Every time I deliver a telegram to her
street, every time I pass the graveyard I feel the sin growing in me like
an abscess and if I dont go to confession soon Ill be nothing but an
abscess riding around on a bicycle with people pointing and telling each
other, There he is, theres Frankie McCourt, the dirty thing that sent
Theresa Carmody to hell.
I look at people going to Communion on Sundays, everyone in a
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