CANES

6 7 R C A N E S E R I C M c H E N R Y We should entrust them only to the old. A cane suggests authority or sport to anyone who doesn’t need support. A prefect who discovers he can hold one by the shaft, or even upside-down, will feel the verb vibrating in the noun. A prefect is a boy. However deft his mouth becomes at publicly explaining the rector’s protocol for public caning, his hand is more accustomed to the heft and balance of a cricket bat, and trembles to grip a cane like what it half-resembles. A prefect may impulsively suspend your sentence after six or seven blows when he hears titters from the first few rows, re-grip the cane by its unhandled end, wait for the tremor traveling through the room to clench into attention, and resume. A lifetime of reliving this may leave you oversatisfied with your own fitness to judge events you did and didn’t witness and unreceptive when you first receive a crabbed apology for an unnamed ‘‘sad incident of which I’m still ashamed.’’ Push up your reading glasses and allow bemusement to resolve, first into rage at the translucent, single-sided page, 6 8 Y the fantasy that there must be, somehow, fraternity in your respective traumas, his near-demotion, your blood-sti√ pyjamas, then into a desire to disabuse, then into wondering about that word, then into bed, where you may rest assured that any cane you dream you can refuse, re-grip, or even raise, because your hand is steady and you need no help to stand. You’ll wake up feeling generous and glib and answer him at length without rereading his letter, and you’ll leave no letter bleeding, applying steady pressure to the nib, producing, but not pausing to admire, the measured strokes such sentences require. ...