The Brothers' Lot (26 page)

“Rough morning, Mr. Murphy?” asked Tom Stack, the barman, glancing up from his copy of the
Daily Horse & Hound.

“Yeah. You could say that.”

“I’m sure those young fellahs down there can be a bit much betimes.”

Spud smiled ruefully at the naïve notion that the boys were the problem but said nothing.

“So what’ll you have?” asked Stack without missing a beat.

“A large bottle and maybe one of them ham sandwiches.”

“No bother,” said Stack, and placed the morning paper on the counter beside the teacher.

Spud glanced at it but could not seem to get beyond the headlines. His mind was a roiling tempest of anger and disgust. Jesus H. Christ! What had become of them at all? It was enough trying to teach and keep yourself out of the loony bin without this new madness.

He could still not fully believe it. Suffering shite! He had spent the last class handing out tally sticks to the boys and explaining how they worked: any boy who was seen sinning would have a notch carved in his stick, and at the end of the day would receive one belt of the strap for each notch. These were things from bad times when children were forced to learn English and got a notch every time they spoke Irish. But for Irish people to use them on one another was vile and sickening in a deep, disturbing way.

The street door opened and Mr. Laverty stood uncertainly in the doorway before sitting down at a small round table. He had not seen Spud.

“For fuck sake, don’t sit over there like some blushing debutante, come over here and have a drink,” called Spud.

Laverty crossed the bar hesitantly and sat down on the stool next to his fellow teacher.

“Bet you’re glad you did the extra course in Tally Stick Administration at university,” remarked Spud.

“Oh yeah. Very handy.”

They nodded together, both painfully aware of their hollow attempts to dilute the whole thing with sarcasm.

Stack placed the large bottle and sandwich on the bar and took the money Spud had left out.

“You can get my friend here a large bottle out of that too, Tom.”

“Thanks,” mumbled Laverty.

“No problem. Fucked if I can find a good reason not to drink this lunchtime.”

“They’ve really gone over the edge this time.”

“They have. And they’re getting more vicious too.”

“I get this sick feeling in my stomach every day when I walk in to the place. It’s like I’m a schoolboy myself again. It’s fucking awful.”

“I’m just hoping they’ll run out of steam on this one and it’ll go away.”

“But the miracle …”

“Miracle, my arse! Ceiling fell on Boland. They’ve been dying for a miracle for years. There was a water stain on the gym ceiling four years ago. They claimed it looked like Saint Patrick.”

Stack returned with Laverty’s drink. “D’youse want raffle tickets?” he asked.

“What for?”

“To raise money for the pilgrimage to Knock. First prize a twenty-pound voucher for Hennessey’s on Crimea Street.”

“Eh, no. Not today, thanks,” answered Spud coldly.

“Fair enough. Another day maybe.”

“Don’t hold your breath,” said Spud.

Stack retired to the other end of the bar and his
Horse & Hound.
Spud glanced at his watch. They had three-quarters of an hour before they had to go back to that madhouse. In unison he and Laverty poured the porter carefully into their glasses.

“Tally sticks! Have they no clue at all? They have their glue if they think I’m going to waste me lunchtime patrolling for sinners and notching tally sticks,” declared Spud as he watched his porter settle.

“I’ll drink to that! Sláinte!” replied Laverty.

Together they drained their glasses.

“Same again?” called Stack from the other end of the bar.

Mouths still full of porter, Spud and Laverty nodded enthusiastically.

“You, boy! Spotty boy with the buckteeth. Come here.”

The spotty-faced boy in question moved away from his friends and warily approached Brother Cox.

“What were you laughing at?”

“Nothing, Brother.”

“Do you usually laugh at nothing?”

“No, Brother.”

“Then what were you laughing at?”

“Something he said,” replied the boy, shrugging in the general direction of his friends.

“So you were laughing at something?”

“Yes, Brother.”

“So you lied to me.
Thou shalt not bear false witness.
” Brother Cox grabbed the tally stick that hung around the boy’s neck and clipped a notch out of it with his toenail clippers. “And one for whatever you were laughing at,” he added, making a second notch. “Now, behave yourself!

“You, boy! You with the limp! Where’s your tally stick?” Cox moved across the yard with surprising speed in search of more retribution. He had been hoping to slip out to the Limping Gunman or one of the shady pubs on the docks for a quick one at lunchtime. Now that tally stick duty had ruined his plans, someone was going to pay.

In the small shed Mr. Hourican was busy checking for sins of thought, deed, or omission, committed alone or with others, and on the far side of the yard stood Brother Walsh with what looked like a small pair of binoculars.

“Come on, let’s go down to Hutton’s. They’re on the warpath here,” said Scully.

Scully, McDonagh, and Lynch got up off the windowsill they had been sitting on and started toward the gate. Finbar, who had just come downstairs with his bag of sandwiches, moved to sit on the vacated sill.

“You coming or what?” asked McDonagh.

“Oh yeah, right,” said Finbar, surprised.

“What’s in your sandwiches?” asked Scully.

“Meat paste.”

“Jaysus! Hate that!” said McDonagh.

“Giz one,” said Lynch unconditionally.

Finbar opened the bag and handed Lynch a sandwich. He watched in wonder as Lynch crammed the whole thing into his mouth and seemed to swallow without chewing.

At the gate Larry Skelly stopped them and checked for tally sticks. “Ye’ll be searched coming back,” he needlessly informed them.

“Fuck sake! It’s like fucking Colditz,” muttered Scully as they walked up the lane to Werburgh Street.

Lynch grabbed a passing first year, pulled out his pen-knife, and in a flash left a neat little notch on the unfortunate boy’s tally stick.

“Ye big bastard!” shouted the boy, running away and straight into Larry Skelly who gave him another notch for swearing. Scully and the others hurried round the corner out of sight before the boy could point them out.

They stopped in their tracks about twenty yards from Fanny Hutton’s and stared in disbelief. Mr. Pollock was standing outside it marshalling boys into an orderly line.

“For fuck sake! They’re gone mad—” Scully stopped abruptly when Finbar elbowed him in the ribs.

“Moody!” whispered Finbar urgently, indicating with a move of his eyes the sinister figure of Brother Moody on the other side of the street walking back toward the school.

“IRA shop!” said Scully decisively, and picked up the pace.

They passed by Hutton’s and gaped in at the lack of mayhem as if it were something sacrilegious and unnatural, an affront to their collective sense of right.

At the IRA shop they found Brother Tobin presiding over the same sickening lack of chaos.

“Ah, bollix! Mary’s then,” said Lynch.

They crossed the West Circular Road and headed down Stanhope Gardens. Mary’s fish-and-chip shop sat uneasily between the burnt-out shell of the bookies and the boarded-up Dundalk Dairy. Brother Mulligan stood at the door admitting boys in twos and threes, eliminating the usual life-threatening crush that was the main challenge and attraction of buying chips at Mary’s. Certainly no one went there for the quality of the food. Disgustedly they got on the back of the line and waited their turn to go in.

Like sharks to blood on the sea, Mr. Pollock and Brother Moody were drawn toward Brother Cox where he was haranguing a group of four second years who had been trying to get their penny ball off the roof of the small shed.

“Who told you you could get up on that roof?” bellowed Brother Cox.

Before the boys had any chance to muster up an answer, he repeated the question even louder. He was stalling while he racked his brains to find a way to make thinking about climbing on the shed into a sin.

“What this? What’s this then?” snapped Mr. Pollock, drawing up behind Cox.

“About to climb up on the shed,” Cox informed him.

“They were now, were they?” dissembled Mr. Pollock. He too found difficulty pinpointing the actual sinful content of this transgression.

Within seconds Brother Moody sidled up beside Pollock. Moody could smell a kindred spirit, even through the fug of occasional matrimonial congress that surrounded the lay teacher in Brother Moody’s moral smellscape. He was glad of this new development, as patrolling Hutton’s Lane had lost its allure once the boys realized what he was like. That was always the problem: once they knew you were out to get them, they started behaving and then you had to try harder to find reasons to punish them.

“I can’t see that boy’s tally stick!” exclaimed Brother Moody, pointing at one of the smaller boys through the space between Pollock and Cox.

“Indeed and you can’t!” concurred Brother Cox, sensing that here might be a whole new tack. “Where’s your tally stick, boy?”

The poor boy who found himself on the wrong end of Brother Moody’s accusing finger searched around inside the back of his sweater where the exertions of kicking football had sent his tally stick.

“Come on, boy, we don’t have all day!” snapped Pollock. “It’s supposed to be visible at all times,” sneered the Iago-Within of Brother Moody.

“True for you. Sure that’s probably a sin in itself, hiding your tally stick like that,” observed Cox hopefully.

Finally the boy retrieved his stick and brought it out of his pullover.

“Let me see that!” demanded Brother Cox, grabbing it and almost toppling the unfortunate boy.

“Look at that! Not a mark on it!” cried Brother Cox, now formulating something resembling a plan in his head. “Explain yourself, boy!”

“I, I, I didn’t do any sins, Brother.”

“Didn’t sin? Do you mean to tell us that you are without sin? Do you mean to imply that you are Christlike? Is that what you mean? Who made you?” barked Brother Moody.

“God made me. But I didn’t do any sins. That’s why there’s no marks on me stick.”

“I didn’t COMMIT any sins. There ARE no marks on MY stick.” Mr. Pollock wondered momentarily if bad grammar and diction could be interpreted as bearing false witness. “Out with your sticks the rest of you!”

One by one the shed climbers held up their unmarked tally sticks.

“So you’re all as pure as the driven snow then?” Pollock raised himself up on his toes and back down as he spoke.

Gradually the very unmarkedness of the sticks began to worry the boys. The sands were shifting under their feet. They could feel the quagmire of adult logic ripple and swell under them.

“Not a sin among ye, eh?” sneered Brother Moody.

“Comparing yerselves to Our Lord then, are ye?” spluttered Brother Cox.

The boys nodded uncertainly, then shook their heads slowly.
Yes
and
no
had turned into equally wrong answers no matter what the question was.

“Think ye’re perfect then, do ye?” added Brother Moody.

Again the boys shook their heads, then nodded, then shook their heads again. They were lost.

“I’d say we have some prideful sinners on our hands here, wouldn’t you, Brothers?” said Mr. Pollock.

“One of the Seven Deadly Sins, that,” chimed Brother Cox.

Moments later Spud Murphy and Mr. Laverty, and a few yards behind them Scully and the others on their way back from their dispiriting trip to Mary’s, turned into the yard to witness Pollock, Cox, and Moody thrashing the group of second years.

“Such bastards! They turn my stomach,” Scully and the others heard Spud mutter to Laverty as they passed the ugly scene.

The two teachers walked despondently to the staff room while Larry Skelly half-heartedly searched the boys for instruments of destruction and checked they were wearing their tally sticks.

Once past Skelly the boys skirted the beating scene lest they get sucked into it.

“I’ll be back in a sec,” said Scully suddenly. He handed his chips to Finbar and darted into the school.

Sucking at the pieces of stewed apple stuck between his teeth, Brother Boland bustled along the corridor from his cell.

At the main entrance he reached into the cubbyhole behind the door. His hand grasped at unexpected emptiness and he pulled the door back to let some light in. What touch had told him, the paltry light in the hallway now confirmed: the handbell was not there.

His handbell stolen! The nerve of it! Was nothing sacred? Not a second too late had they introduced the tally sticks. Boland bustled into the yard and danced furiously in front of Finbar, Lynch, and McDonagh, who happened to be standing near the door.

“Get to your classes! Don’t you know the time? Get up to your classes!”

“But Brother, the bell …” protested Finbar.

Boland felt his blood boil and a powerful urge to throttle the boy surged up within him. Instead he turned on his heel and ran through the downstairs lab and into the monastery. “Bell? I’ll give them bell!” he screeched as he ran.

“I told ye. He’s completely off his head,” said Finbar.

In the musty custard-nuanced postprandial gloom of the monastery stairwell, Brother Boland grabbed the bell rope. “I’ll put an end to your lunchtime of acting the blackguard and sinning all over my miracle!”

He pulled on the rope sharply and it was only when he heard the muted hurt inside the bell’s peal did he realize what he had done. Powerless to stop what he had started, Boland dropped the bellrope as if burned, clasped his hands over his ears, and held his breath. He could not bear to listen to the wrongness inside the bell’s tones. Gradually its peals grew weaker and further apart and the Brother could breathe again. He listened to the dying echoes and sensed them penetrate the walls, the glass of the windows, every crevice and crack of the building.