The Brothers' Lot (13 page)

“Brother Boland! What on earth do you think you are doing? Who are these people?”

“The, the, the elder Brothers, from the attic, Head Brother,” stammered Boland.

“And what, might I ask, are they doing wandering about the monastery?”

“I was showing them.”

“Showing them what?”

“Showing them the sabotage.”

“Sabotage? Sabotage? What are you talking about? Have you completely lost your mind, Brother Boland?”

“They saw it! I showed them! I showed them the burntout bulbs. I showed them Venerable Saorseach O’Rahilly looking afraid on the stairs. I was going to show them the periodic table. I told them about the slates falling off the roof and the fear in the bell tower! I wanted them to hear the weeping in the walls. I told them! The young ones wouldn’t listen!”

“You did, did you?” roared Brother Loughlin. “God give me strength! Fear in the bell tower? Weeping in the walls? What sort of raving is this? What do you think you are doing, disturbing these revered senior Brothers with your unhinged fantasies? Have you no respect for them or is it that you yourself have already slipped over the edge? Is that it? Are you ready for the top floor already? Eh?”

Brother Boland cowered and shook his head in denial. He was not gone yet. He was not ready to be banished to the world of bedsores, chamber pots, and yesterday’s cold food. Not that. Not so soon.

“Well then, go get some help and get these Brothers back to their cells, and no more of this nonsense!” shouted Brother Loughlin, and barged through the knot of old wrecks and up the stairs to his cell to oil his leather.

Brother Boland shook and quaked and then tried to help Brother Galvin back into his bath chair.

“Take yer hands off me, ye Black and Tan bastard!” shrieked Galvin.

Brother Kennedy scrawled his signature all over Farrelly’s lines and moved on. He was peering suspiciously at Doyle’s lines when McDonagh and Bradshaw came in from the yard. He turned to the door and sneered at them: “Learnt your lesson, have you?”

“Yes, Brother,” they muttered, their teeth chattering with the cold.

“Good! Then I expect you will both be more than happy to show me your lines that I set you yesterday.”

McDonagh and Bradshaw moved to their desks and pulled out their copybooks.

“Bring them up here!” called Brother Kennedy, and bustled back up to the top of the class.

Bradshaw and McDonagh shuffled toward him with their copybooks. A tense silence fell over the class.

“So, my little meneen, feeling proud of yourselves, are you?”

The two boys stood there shivering and said nothing. Wet patches were beginning to show through their pants from their sodden underwear.

“Stand still when I’m talking to you!”

The silence in the class thickened.

“Hold up your copybooks!”

They held out their books in their shivering hands.

“Hold still! How do you expect me to correct this if you can’t hold it still?”

McDonagh managed to steady his hands and Brother Kennedy flicked over the pages in his copybook. Bradshaw’s copybook continued to twitch and jump in his shivering hands. Brother Kennedy’s leather flashed through the air and slapped loudly down on Bradshaw’s open copybook.

“Keep it still, damn you!”

Bradshaw looked up at the Brother. “I-I-I-I c-c-c-c-can’t!”

“Can’t or won’t? Out to the line!”

Bradshaw walked to the line and leaned with relief against the warm radiator.

“Stand away from the wall, Mr. Bradshaw!” shouted Brother Kennedy, then turned back to McDonagh and flicked through the rest of his lines.

“What is this?” he asked in a low, suspicious voice, and pointed at McDonagh’s copybook.

“Ehm, a jam stain, Brother.”

“A jam stain? A jam stain? How dare you ask me to correct this sloppy mess! Do you think I’m going to wade through the filthy leavings of your tea to correct your work? Do you?”

“No, Brother,” McDonagh mumbled.

“Then do it again! And cleanly! Out to the line!”

McDonagh moved over to the line and stood there unsure if he wanted to curl up somewhere and cry or just launch himself at Brother Kennedy and kick him in the bollocks until he blacked out.

Brother Kennedy walked back to Doyle’s desk and picked up his copybook again. He flicked over the pages and then held the copy in front of Doyle’s face: “Where are the rest of them? There are pages missing!”

“Me little brother must’ve tore them out,” explained Doyle matter-of-factly.

“Out to the line!”

“I left me copybook on the bus.”

“Out to the line!”

“There was a power cut and me mother couldn’t find the candles.”

“Out to the line!”

Stealthily the message transmitted itself around the class. They were going for a blackout, as it was known when the whole class deliberately got themselves put out to the line. The boys carefully put away their copybooks and sat waiting for Brother Kennedy to approach.

Finbar noticed this and thought quickly. This was unfair. He had got the translation right and he still had to do the lines. He wasn’t going to get a beating for not doing lines that he
had
done even though he shouldn’t have had to do them in the first place, so there! He left his copybook sitting open on the desk in front of him and folded his arms.

“The cat ate it.”

“Out to the line!”

“Me sister filled me pen with invisible ink and threw me pencil in the fire.”

“Out to the line!”

“Me da took it to work by mistake.”

“Out to the line!”

“I got the shit kicked out of me in the jakes of a pub.”

By this stage Brother Kennedy was barely even listening.

“I wasn’t in yesterday.”

“Well, you’re in today! Out to the line! And take that”—
whap!
—“for answering back!”

Finbar felt his palms sweat as Brother Kennedy progressed through the class. Everyone was getting sent out to the line. This was awful. Why should he stand up for Bradshaw and McDonagh like this? Would they stand up for him?

“Me house burnt down last night.”

“Out to the line!”

“Me ma took me pen to bingo.”

Brother Kennedy was more than halfway through the class and gathering speed. Soon he would be in sight of Finbar and then it would be too late for him to hide his copybook.

“The boys from the flats stole me bag.”

“Out to the line!”

Brother Kennedy continued, dismissing ever more ridiculous excuses. It was getting very crowded in the corner and a perversely festive mood was starting to course through the boys. Smalley Mullen leaned over and gently closed Finbar’s copybook and laid it on the floor. He looked levelly at Finbar and his face said it all. Unfair or not, this was something he could not stand out against on his own.

“I sprained me wrist.”

“Out!”

“Me ma had a new baby last night.”

“Out!”

“I did it in me science copy by mistake.”

“Out!”

Finbar looked up at Brother Kennedy’s interrogative face. “Me brother ran away to London and took me bag,” he found himself saying.

“Out to the line!”

“And don’t”—
whap!
—“you”—
whap!
—“ever”—
whap! whap!
— “answer”—
whap!
—“me”—
whap!
—“back”—
whap!
—“again”—
whap!
—“you”—
whap!
—“little”—
whap!
—“gurrier”—
whap! whap! whap!

Thirteen! That was a lot to get into one sentence. Brother Kennedy was really out of control. You could see the veins pounding purple against the bright red of his bald skull. McDonagh was the last to be leathered and for some reason had decided to push the Brother just a little farther. All he had said was, “I don’t know, Brother.” Of course it did not help that the question had been: “Have you ever done your homework, McDonagh?” But McDonagh had an amazing talent for filling the most routine utterance with such a blend of willful stupidity and insolence as could push the most even-tempered teacher over the edge. A firebrand like Brother Kennedy presented no challenge at all.

“Now sit down, ye insolent little pup!” yelled the Brother.

McDonagh walked stiffly back to his desk, and in the yard below Brother Boland rang the bell for break. The boys ran for the door and left a purple-faced Brother Kennedy leaning against his desk trying desperately to catch his breath.

A ripple of excitement ran through the whole yard as the
bee-baw bee-baw
of the ambulance dopplered its way closer. Mr. Pollock met the ambulance at the gate and then cleared a path for it through the gray swarming of boys.

After what seemed like an age, the ambulance men emerged bearing Brother Kennedy on a stretcher. An unnatural groan of disappointment resulted when the boys saw that Brother Kennedy’s face was not covered by the red blanket but by an oxygen mask. He was not dead yet.

“The good Lord must be waiting for Hell to get a bit hotter before he lets that one in,” drawled Spud Murphy quietly from his vantage point at the staff room window.

Behind him Mr. Laverty chuckled with appreciation: “That’s a good one all right. I like that.”

Spud nodded neutrally at Laverty and went back to his chair. He had not yet made up his mind about the seemingly disdainful Laverty.

15

T
he third Thursday of November dawned as a feeble thinning of the darkness. It was already half past nine yet still dark enough that the streetlights were lit. For the last hundred years the Brothers had celebrated Venerable Saorseach O’Rahilly Day on this day, deemed by scholars to be the fourth Thursday after the first full moon following his death.

Not being prone to wanton acts of frivolity, the idea of giving the boys a day off school in observance of this special occasion had never even entered the Brothers’ heads. This being a centenary, it promised more celebration than usual.

Dermot McDermott’s janitorial ill humor was of epic proportions for this Feast of Venerable Saorseach O’Rahilly. Since a quarter past six that morning he had been in the oratory under the supervision of Brother Boland. He was ready to strangle the man.

McDermott had to take the small terra-cotta statues of Venerable Saorseach O’Rahilly down from their niches in the walls of the oratory and transport them to the hall. The fact that there were five hundred of the little bastards was not a problem in itself. What was a problem, however, was Brother Boland’s immovable insistence that they be brought down to the floor of the oratory one at a time.

Brother Loughlin had specifically picked Boland for the Venerable Saorseach preparations to quell his stupid sabotage paranoia. Brother Boland had indeed become so engrossed in every little detail that he stopped noticing the so-called shudderings inside the school. Even the seemingly unfixable school clock had ceased to worry him.

Leg sore, hot, and dying for a smoke, McDermott stepped off the ladder and placed the last eight-inch-tall statue with the little army that had formed on the floor.

“Right then, that’s the last of them,” he said firmly, and began to load them into the velvet compartments of the custom-built crates. Each identical statue showed Venerable Saorseach O’Rahilly as a young man peering skyward while being moved by the spirit of the Holy Ghost. To McDermott they looked like figurines of a very drunk young man staring at the moon. “I’m going to move this lot over to the hall,” he stated in a tone that left little room for contradiction.

“Be very careful!” implored Brother Boland.

“Just not good enough! It’s inexcusable, that’s what it is! A disgrace! A total disgrace!” Brother Loughlin snarled, and stomped back up to the corner of the West Circular Road for the tenth time. He looked up the main road. Still no sign of them. “A bloody disgrace, that’s what it is!”

He pulled a cigarette from the top pocket of his cassock and leaned into the wall of the school to light up out of the biting wind. He took a drag and glanced up to see Father Flynn bustling up the West Circular Road toward him.
Late
as usual
, thought Brother Loughlin.

“God save you, Brother Loughlin, but you’re a hardier man than I. A bit cold for taking the air, I’d say,” called Father Flynn amicably.

“Good morning, Father,” replied Brother Loughlin, not without taking a conspicuous glance at his watch.

“Sorry I’m a little late. We had a visit from the city manager this morning.”

“You have building trouble in the chapel?”

“Oh no, no, no, just a social visit. Dropped in for breakfast. We went to school together at Southwell.”

Brother Loughlin flinched at the mention of the Jesuit school. It always rankled him to think that the Jesuits were in the business of producing the bosses who would lord it over the drones he was in charge of turning out. It was not the inequality of the boys’ fates that disturbed him. It was more about knowing that he would never have any link with that golden club of power and privilege. He bitterly consoled himself with the thought that Flynn had not made it into the Jesuits and was a mere diocesan priest.

“I see,” he said flatly.

“So what has you out here in the cold?” asked Father Flynn.

“Waiting for the damn laundry van! They were supposed to be here at eight! The Brothers are waiting to get changed for the pageant and those eejits have our new underwear for the year and our gala cassocks off God knows where. Today of all days!”

“That’d be the Jezebel Laundry then?”

There was an undertone in Father Flynn’s voice that Brother Loughlin did not entirely like.“Yes. The Brotherhood feels it is important to support such laudable institutions,” he answered pompously. “Of course, we might get better service from a more businesslike laundry, but then who would take care of those poor fallen women?”

Father Flynn nodded noncommittally. He had heard the stories about the Jezebel Laundries and was not sure they were the noble institution they were made out to be. Stories of beatings and terrible punishments. Stories of family feuds that ended up in girls being put away in the laundries for no good reason. It was rumored that the Bishop of Orris and Bargey had a young girl sent to a laundry because she refused his attentions and now he visited her weekly as her “personal confessor.” Father Flynn had even brought it up with the parish priest but had been told that such rumors were the malicious gossip of atheists and socialists and if he wanted to join their ranks it would be on his own head. Since that admonition he had kept his own counsel on the subject.