Slattery imposes a harsh penance after Davy's first confession

Slattery imposes a harsh penance after Davy McGeown’s first confession, turning a preparation for a childhood religious ceremony into an encounter with fear and public humiliation. Recalled through Cushla Lavery’s perspective, the episode brings together Slattery’s threat of severity, Davy’s prolonged punishment, Tommy McGeown’s protest, and Cushla’s belated effort to reassure and comfort the child.

Preparation and the threat of severity

Before the children made their First Confession, Cushla had tried to reassure them that they were too young to have serious sins. She suggested that they could tell Slattery about ordinary childhood misdemeanours, such as quarrelling with siblings, answering their mothers back, or forgetting their prayers. Her advice treated the sacrament as something the children could get through by naming small, familiar faults.

Slattery countered that reassurance with a grave account of original sin, Adam and Eve, temptation, remorse, guilt, and sorrow. He announced that the children would confess on Saturday and promised them no leniency. He also made the length of their penance a visible measure: people, he said, would know how sinful each child was by how long that child knelt in the pew. The threat joined spiritual judgment to a physical, public ordeal, making the duration of the punishment legible to the people around them.

As he spoke, Slattery handed out pictures of Padre Pio and described the wounds on the priest’s hands as resembling the wounds of Christ. When he passed a picture to Davy, he bent to whisper something in the boy’s ear. Cushla hurried across the floor, but by the time she reached Davy, Slattery was walking away, smoothing his pockets. The content of the whisper is not disclosed; its effect remains part of the scene’s uncertainty rather than an explanation the narrative supplies.

Davy’s confession and prolonged penance

The following day, the children filed one at a time before Slattery’s grim profile. Davy went first. Unlike the others, who came and went, he remained kneeling in the pew for what Cushla experienced as an interminable penance. The difference in treatment made Slattery’s earlier warning concrete: Davy’s punishment became a spectacle of duration, while the other children’s confessions proceeded around him.

Cushla considered appealing to Bradley, who stood near the entrance to the crying chapel. She said nothing. Her hesitation was tied to an earlier consequence of speaking up: she remembered the revenge Bradley had taken on the McGeowns after her insolence. The scene therefore places her concern for Davy against her awareness that intervention might bring further harm to his family. Her silence does not indicate that she accepts the punishment; it shows how the threat of retaliation constrains what she feels able to do.

Tommy’s protest and Cushla’s reassurance

Tommy eventually strode up the aisle and pulled Davy from his knees, placing a hand between the boy’s shoulder blades as he marched him toward the door. Slattery had left the confessional and joined Bradley. Tommy stopped in front of them and challenged them, saying he did not know what point they were trying to make but that it was not right. His protest names the injustice directly, where Cushla has been unable to confront the men herself.

Outside, Tommy lit a cigarette and started walking, with Davy beside him. Cushla ran after them. When he heard her footsteps, Davy turned and rushed toward her. He told her he had not done anything really bad and reported that Slattery had called him a bad boy. Cushla answered that he was not a bad boy and put her hand on his head. The contrast is stark: Slattery’s judgment has reached the child as a verdict on his character, while Cushla tries to separate the boy from the accusation.

Tommy then called Davy away, dragging him from Cushla as she pleaded with them to wait. She went to her car and found a bag from the religious shop in the glove compartment; she had planned to bring it to the house later. She gave it to Davy, who opened it slowly and showed its contents to Tommy, as though the gift needed his approval. At the later Communion, Davy would produce the missal and rosary beads Cushla had given him, objects of affection that now seemed to her capable of feeling like a threat. Her gift cannot undo what happened, and her attempt to help remains caught between care and the family’s need to scrutinise what she offers.

Consequences at the Communion

When Cushla later sees Davy in his sky-blue Communion suit, she understands how difficult it will be to repair matters. He hovers by the holy-water font rather than coming to her; Tommy’s stare is apparent, and Cushla does not meet it. The previous day’s punishment has thus altered the atmosphere around a ceremony meant to mark the children’s religious passage: gifts, gestures, and even Cushla’s concern are now shadowed by distrust and the possibility of further injury.

The confession also clarifies the limits of Cushla’s influence. She had prepared the children against Slattery’s severity, but her advice could not protect Davy once he was alone with him. She considered appealing to Bradley and held back; Tommy acted instead, and Cushla could offer reassurance only after Davy had been removed from the pew. In the sequence from warning, to prolonged kneeling, to the boy’s report and her hand on his head, religious authority’s abstract language of sin becomes an immediate question of who gets to define a child as bad—and who can risk challenging that judgment.