6

The man to avoid, as far as strappings went, was Mr. Coldwell. Mr. Coldwell strapped from an angle, so that the tongue curled around your hand and rebounded hard on the wrist. Usually he strapped a boy until he cried; then he’d say, “I’d hoped you’d take it like a man.” Next came Mr. Feeney. Mr. Feeney took three steps backward with the strap resting lightly on his shoulder, charged, and struck. Mr. MacPherson, however, did not even know how to hold the strap properly. So when he led Duddy Kravitz into the Medical Room that afternoon, breaking with a practice of twenty years, the actual blows were feeble, and it was Duddy who emerged triumphant, racing outside to greet his classmates.

“Hey, look! Look, jerkos! Ten on each. Mac strapped me. Mac, of all people.”

Mr. MacPherson strapped fifteen boys that week, and his method improved with practice. But the rowdiness in class, and his own drinking, increased in proportion to the strappings. He began to sit around the house alone. He seldom went out any more. And then one night, a couple of weeks after he had returned to school, Mr. MacPherson sat down before his dead fireplace and broke open a new bottle of whisky. He sat there for hours, cherishing old and unlikely memories and trying to feel something more than a sense of liberation because Jenny, whom he had once loved truly, was dead. Half the bottle was finished before all of Mr. MacPherson’s troubles crystallized into the hard, leering shape of Duddy Kravitz. Mr. MacPherson chuckled. Staggering into the hall, pulling the light cord so hard that it broke off in his hand, he rocked to and fro over the telephone. It did not take him long, considering his state, to find Kravitz’s number, and he dialed it with care. The telephone must have rung and rung about fifteen times before somebody answered it.

“Hullo,” a voice said gruffly.

Mr. MacPherson didn’t reply.

“Hullo. Hullo! Who is that anyway? Hullo.”

It wasn’t Kravitz. He would have recognized Kravitz’s voice. The room began to sway around Mr. MacPherson.

“Who’s speaking?” the voice commanded.

“Mr. MacPhers —”

Mr. MacPherson slammed the receiver back on the hook and stumbled into the living room, knocking over a lamp on his way. The first thing he saw there was the history test papers. He ripped them apart, flung them into the fireplace, and lit them. Exhausted, he collapsed into his armchair to watch them burn.