The Dead School by Patrick McCabe Page A

he was afraid she would go hysterical. ‘It’s all right, Mammy! It’s all right!’ he cried
and hugged her.
    Raphael was frightened. He didn’t know what to do. Only for Uncle Joe he wouldn’t have known what to do. The night he came he looked at him and frowning under his big soft hat said,
‘You know, Raphael. You know, don’t you? You’re going to have to be strong. Strong for her.’
    Raphael wasn’t one hundred per cent sure what he meant but he had a vague idea. He nodded. ‘Because there will be times – and if you’re not strong – there’ll
be nobody else there for her . . . do you know what I’m saying, son?’
    Raphael said, ‘Yes.’ Uncle Joe meant that if he didn’t stay strong and keep a close watch on her something terrible might happen.
    ‘You’ll do that won’t you, Raphael?’ went on Uncle Joe. ‘You’ll do that for her – and the memory of your dead father?’
    Raphael felt a surge of pride as he stiffened and replied, ‘Yes, Uncle Joe – I will! I promise!’
    ‘For eight hundred years the likes of that animal that shot your father to death have been trying to break us. They haven’t managed it yet and they never will. Not while we have
young cubs like you coming up – am I right, Raphael?’
    ‘Yes,’ replied Raphael and tried not to think of his father’s mouth with the blood pouring out of it, and his terror-stricken eyes.
    Then Uncle Joe put his arm around him and said, ‘Come on, son. It’s time we went to see the horses. I have the trap waiting outside.’
    If there was one thing Raphael loved more than anything else in the world it was going to Uncle Joe’s stables to see the horses. And if there was anything better than that it was helping
to brush them and comb them and run his hands along their lovely polished flanks. He was the happiest boy in the world as he sat beside his Uncle Joe with his mother in the back of the trap smiling
for the first time since the death as Uncle Joe’s pipe sent out a great big cloud of sweet-smelling smoke and he flicked the whip and said, ‘Your father was a hero, son. You
didn’t know that. No one knew it. But he was. He died for Ireland. He’s at one now with all the loyal patriots asleep in the ground.’
    Tears came into Raphael’s eyes when he heard that. Tears of pride, tears of sorrow, tears of joy.
    All that day he spent in the stables with the horses, looking into their guileless glassy eyes and stroking their noble, shining necks. He was so at one with them he didn’t even realize he
was talking to himself. He was saying, ‘I’m going to make you proud of me, Mother. I’ll make you the proudest mother in the whole of Ireland!’
    Which were the very words he uttered the following day as he left for school except that it was different this time because the smile that had been on his mother’s face all the way to
Uncle Joe’s farm in the pony and trap was gone now and the way she was looking at him wasn’t the way he was used to it, wasn’t the way you would expect a mother to look at a son,
more like the look you would give someone you had never seen before in your life.

God Save Ireland
    When Raphael heard the sound of laughter he was ecstatic and was standing in the kitchen before he realized there was no laughter at all. In the chimney corner armchair reposed
a huge shadow. With blank eyes it considered him. By the window sitting at the spinning wheel, yet another. With a shadow-head that turned and whispered, ‘Raphael!’ It wasn’t a
bad voice. The voice meant him no harm. He knew that. But it made no difference. It was the voice of Nothing and it made tears come to his eyes. He wanted to ask, ‘Why have shapes cut out of
the dark come to steal my home?’ More than anything he wanted to ask that question. But now there was no one to ask. You were afraid to ask your mammy because she might cry and more than
anything you did not want that to happen. So you just lay there in the