Page 80
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
After Mass Papa Joe's real sacrament appears to be the school itself, and his fierce presence continues in the way he keeps grownups in their seats, scorns their little lies, and carries a private spiritual intensity back down from the altar.
Church ritual matters here, but the deeper devotion is to formation, discipline, and the children who can reach him through the school. He keeps humiliating respectable adults just enough to show that his allegiance is elsewhere.
Lawnegan's sermon-promise descends like judgment - 'the whole of my spirit is going to descend upon you, no matter how closed your mouths shall distant be' - the congregation seen as 'unsaintly lambs feathering away with the wool they have shorn from you', bending heads 'coveningly away from me'. The narrator names the paradox that 'For him their was no truth, and yet he could say ... my children absolutely never tell a lie', locating his gift in 'his ability to shatter time'. The page's central claim is that 'The real sacrament ... was his school', bestowed on 'all the children that could reach him'. His authority is enforced comically - yelling 'where do you think you're going' at early-leavers until they 'return to their seats like good little grownups' - then dissolves into a lonely image of him on 'broken shoes', fearing 'the candle in his hand'. Scan-backed spellings ('sermans', 'devine', 'wimper', 'deficating') are preserved.