Fit Month for Dying (23 page)

Not wanting to interfere with this operation, we go around to the back door, where we bump into Paddy and Frank. They are dragging out the Christmas tree, ornaments and all. Frank holds the storm door wide open so the tree can be pulled through. In the gale force winds, the silver tinsel icicles go streaking across the frozen meadow like shooting stars on a clear night.

“Hoooly Lord dyin',” he shouts as he stands wide-legged on the new porch steps, bracing himself against the wind. “Grab hold of the railing, Paddy me son, or the divil ever ye'll be seen again. Ye'll be going around and around in space like that Russian satellite that got lost — Spudnuk, or whatever in the hell 'twas called.”

There is more commotion inside the house. Neighbours are coming and going. The kitchen table is already laden with donated food. Danny is rearranging the parlour, bringing in chairs from the kitchen to support the casket. Rose is rearranging the refrigerator to accommodate the perishable foods, and Bridey is rearranging the pictures and knick-knacks on the parlour tables to make room for the flowers and candles. Clearly, everything is well in hand.

It is after midnight before the crowd withers down to only Paddy Flynn, Danny, Greg and me. Greg announces he is going to bed. He says he will douse the candles in the wake room on his way upstairs and close the parlour door until morning. Danny announces that the Black Horse is making him wish for a feed of capelin. “You wouldn't happen to have any at your place, would you Paddy?”

“Yes, b'y. Tons of them, b'y,” Paddy says. “Youngsters won't touch the things. Just me and Bridey. I'll go over and bring back a few handfuls to roast.”

He starts to get up out of his chair to go get the capelin when I veto the plan. “Maybe we shouldn't roast them here. The smell.” I'm thinking that the windows are frozen shut, so the smell of roasted capelin will still be in the house in the morning.

“Yer right, girl,” Paddy agrees. “I forgot about that. People'll think the stench is coming from the corpse.” He turns to Danny. “Tell you what. I'll roast them at my place. I'll phone when they're ready. Come on over.”

As soon as we have the kitchen to ourselves, Danny and I settle back, side by side in the wing-backed velour chairs that had to be moved out of the parlour in order to make room in there for the straight-backed kitchen chairs. I make a cup of tea and Danny opens another Black Horse. We talk quietly, mostly about Philomena — the goodness of her, the orneriness of her, and the ways in which her life touched ours.

“She blamed me for Brendan's death,” I say, surprised at myself for admitting what I had never voiced before. “It put a wedge between us. She never came right out and said so, but I knew she felt that any caring mother would have known her son was being molested.”

“Nonsense! Bloody nonsense!” Danny says, with more indignation than the moment calls for. “There is no way you could have known that! No way in God's earthly world. And she should have been the last one to lay that on your shoulders.”

“Well, you know how much she loved Brendan,” I say. “And if it had been one of her sons, she would have known. Every time she looked at me, I saw that message in her eyes.”

Danny leans back in his chair, closes his eyes. He is silent for so long I think he is napping. He then straightens up and sits the bottle of beer he has been clasping in his hands on the counter beside him. He sits it down as if it weighs a ton. He carefully wipes his mouth with the heel of his hand and then wipes his hands clean, brushing one over the other. He looks at me as if he is going to say something, then changes his mind. He looks away. He picks up the beer bottle and then puts it back down without drinking from it.

“She...I'm not sure...,” he begins, weighing the pros and cons of going further. He doesn't turn my way but keeps staring across the kitchen and out through the window at the snowbanks that, under the night sky, are more blue than white. He says in a tone edged with anger, “She was bloody well wrong. She wouldn't have known. She would've had no more idea that something was going on than you did. Not a whit more notion.” He stares into my eyes, daring me to contradict him.

On Philomena's behalf I do just that. “You know what a mother hen she was, much more ferocious than most mothers.”

He reaches for the bottle of beer again and picks it up. Once more he does not drink from it. “Take it from me, Tess,” he says, wagging the bottle in my direction, “she would've had no more idea what was going on than the man in the moon. And if she was standing before me right this minute instead of in there, I'd blow her out of the water by telling her how wrong she was on this one. I'd set her back on her heels.”

An uneasy feeling passes over me, an anxiety I can do without. “I'm going to make another pot of tea.” I push back my heavy chair in the hope that, by going to the stove, I can move the conversation away from Philomena “I feel like a fresh cup. How about you? Ready to give up the beer?”

Danny reaches across his chair and lays a restraining hand on my arm. “Don't move!” he commands. “Sit back down. I've got to say this right now. Maybe it's not the right time. But I don't give a shit anymore.” He thumps the bottle of beer on the table as if he is calling a meeting to order. “Same thing happened to me,” he says. “Like Brendan. When I was his age.”

“You took Hubert's gun?”

“Hell no! I was sexually abused.”

I slump back into my chair and begin drowning in the same sick sensations that had flooded my body the evening George O'Connell told us about Brendan's molestation. I want to scold Danny. I want to say, Don't joke about this. It's no time to joke. But I don't have the breath for scolding. Besides, I know Danny isn't joking. “Who? When? A priest?” I finally manage to ask.

He reaches over the table and picks up the package of cigarettes he had tossed there earlier. He plucks one out and jabs it between his lips. He tries to light it, but his hands are shaking so much he can't strike the match. He fumbles the cigarette back into the package and throws it on the counter.

“Hell, no, girl. Not a priest. A blood of a bitch bastard in Dad's church. That's who did it to me. A custodian for the church. Looked after the furnace and the grounds. Whitney, his name was.”

“Oh my God!” I say, not knowing what else to say. I remain sitting in my chair, unable to make my body reach out to touch Danny, although the moment calls for some sign of compassion other than words. With his eyes averted, focusing on the window, he lays bare the secret he has kept for almost a quarter of a century.

“You're the first person to be hearing this. No, the second, I s'pose. If you count Dad. Told him in a half-assed sort of way. I said I had heard Whitney was friggin' with some boys. He said I shouldn't believe everything I was told and not to say anything about it to Mom because it would stick in her craw forever and she'd never let him hear the end of it. She'd never let me come to church with him again.” He reaches for his cigarettes once more, and this time he can steady his hands enough to light one. He exhales a mouthful of smoke. “Blood of a bitch,” he says, more to himself than to me. “After all these years I'd still like to kill that bastard.”

“What happened to him? I hope he was caught. I hope he's still in jail. And I hope...” I say all of these hopes, although I truly don't know what I am hoping has happened to him. I just want it to be something terrible enough to rival the torture in Danny's eyes.

“Jail! Hell no! Not on your life! I was too shitless to tell. So were all the others.” He shrugs. “I s'pose there were others. I always hoped there were. Well, not hoped, exactly. You know what I mean. Just never wanted to think I was the only one. Dad used to send me over to the church to help out on Saturdays. Put out the new bulletins. I was supposed to help Whitney move the pews so he could clean under them. That kind of shit. Dad said Greg was always helping out at Mom's church so I should help out at his.”

“And Mr. Hube didn't think you were telling the truth?” I ask, confounded that Hubert would have let something so terrible go unstopped.

“No. Imagine that! He didn't believe his own son.” He gives me one of his Danny-style grins.

“Well, you know, in fairness to Dad, I was always a bit of a codder, always quick with the joke. Always quick to exaggerate things for a bit of fun. So this day I said to him, I said, ‘Dad, that fellow Whitney likes to paw young boys, and I don't want to be around him.' Dad gave me a little skite up the side of my head with the flat of his hand. ‘Get along with ye, b'y,' he said, ‘yer only tryin' to get out of work. And don't go coddin' about something as serious as that. You could steal the man's good name. And fer the love of God, don't go talking like that to yer mother. She'll believe you when she should know better.'”

Once he starts the telling, he doesn't seem to want to stop it. He wants to rid himself of all of the details. “I was twelve that first time I told Dad. We had it out again when I was seventeen. We had been arguing about something else — can't remember what it was, nothing serious — and I threw it up to him that he didn't do anything to help me when Whitney was buggering me.”

He pauses, shakes his head, recalling the shocked look on his father's face at the use of the vulgar term. “My sonny b'y, he almost had a kitten when I said that. Especially when I used that word. And he tried to defend himself, saying he had no idea. But I wouldn't let him off the hook. I said he knew all right. He just didn't want the Catholics to know — especially Mom — that a puking blood of a bitch like Buggering Whitney was as twisted as a corkscrew, and he was sitting up in a front pew on Sundays.”

He stops talking long enough to take a deep drag on his cigarette. He lets the smoke out slowly, watches it as it travels across the room towards the window. By now all signs of the come day, go day, happy-go-lucky Danny have vanished. “Nothing could ever be the same after that. I left home the next day. I was always talking about leaving, so that part didn't come as any surprise, I s'pose. We never brought it up again. Never mentioned it, no matter how many times I came home.”

“How long did it go on?” My mind rushes to calculate the years of torture. “From the time you were twelve until you were seventeen?”

“How long?” He skirts the question, as if to add up the years would be too painful. “I finally outfoxed the blood of a bitch. I took a chance he was doing the same thing to the other boys, bribing them to go into the furnace room with him, so I told him that the bunch of us had gotten together and swapped stories and the jig was up. He would never bugger another one of us. There was strength in numbers.

“My sonny boy, he turned as white as the driven snow when I said that, so I knew I was on the right track. So then I really let him have it. I told him that if he touched any one of us again, we were going to gang up on him and ram a mop handle up his arse so far he would be able to mop the floors and paint the walls at the same time. Or we might even skewer him through the arse on a picket fence.”

He pauses, takes another long drag on his cigarette and sends the smoke out of his mouth in rings. These, too, he watches as they trail away. When he speaks again, it is as if he is talking to himself. “Left me alone after that. I hope he left the others alone, too. But that's what haunts me. Maybe he didn't.”

He savagely crushes his cigarette in the overfilled ashtray, taking a long time to mangle the butt. His shoulders are slumped. “I should have done more. I should have told Dad in such a way that he would have had no doubt about what was going on. Just hinting about what was happening to me wasn't good enough. If I had told him outright he wouldn't have been able to toss away the barefaced truth, even if it did give Mom more ammunition for trying to get me to go to her church.

“But he should have believed me anyway, shouldn't he?” He doesn't need my answer, and he doesn't wait for it. “I shouldn't have had to carry this bloody beach rock around my neck for all these years. It weighted down my whole life. Every time I'd meet a woman I'd say to myself, Do you really want to tell this woman what happened to you? And the answer would always be no, because I would be afraid she'd think I was — you know — that maybe I had asked for it. So I'd make up some excuse to break up with her. And all because of that sanctimonious blood of a bitch.”

By the time he is finished with the telling, my fury is so thick and so intense that when I speak, I stutter. “Damn him...I'd like to...we've got to...” I raise myself from my chair, ready to fight then and there. Like Greg on the night George O'Connell came to our house, I want to pummel Whitney to within an inch of his life. I recall that Philomena said God would rear up on His hind legs over Brendan's abuse. If I were God, I would now be rearing up on my hind legs.

“Greg was right all along,” I say, “but I never believed him. He said love and brownies wouldn't be enough to cure Brendan. This thing has stayed with you all this time. It has hounded you ever since.”

I begin to pace the kitchen floor, uttering threats. “We've got to do something! Someone has to put a stop to this! We've got to expose him!”

“What do you mean? Expose him?” Danny says. “I don't want that stuff dredged up now. I only told you because I didn't want you to carry around the blame for Brendan's abuse.”