Fit Month for Dying (15 page)

“No!” Brendan shrieks. “Don't go over there! Don't get into a fight with him.”

Greg's loosely covered fury almost surfaces again. “Who said anything about going over there? I'm cooled down now. I'm not going to do anything foolish. I'm not going to give him any reason to sue me.” He spitefully tacks on, “If there's any suing to be done, I'll be the one to do it.”

Less than an hour later, Greg leaves to go to George O'Connell's house, and Brendan and I sit silently at the kitchen table, neither of us meeting the other's eyes, neither of us knowing what to say. Brendan makes no attempt to touch the bedtime snack of brownies and milk I put out for him. However, he is the one who finally breaks the silence.

“It won't get out, will it?”

“I don't see why it should.” I answer him too quickly because I'm not at all certain of what is going to happen when Greg and George get their heads together. “I think Dad and Mr. O'Connell will take it to the archbishop, and the archbishop certainly won't want it splattered across the Evening Telegram.”

“Okay. That's good.” Relieved enough to reach for a brownie, he settles back in his chair.

“When did these parties take place?” I ask, driven to want details but cowering from them even before they are supplied.

“Different times.”

“For instance.”

“The weekend we went camping.”

Although queasiness overwhelms me, I continue to mine for specifics. “And?”

“The time we had the bottle drive. We went back to the rectory afterwards. His housekeeper was away. And when we went to the jamboree on Witless Bay Line.”

I swallow back a wave of nausea. It doesn't take much memory scraping to make me realize I had been the one who had insisted on his going to that jamboree. “Is that why you didn't want to go?”

He takes a swallow of milk. With thumb and finger he pushes brownie crumbs into a huddle on the table. He answers without taking his eyes from the crumbs. “Yeah. But you made me go, remember? You said it would do me the world of good.”

Each question, each answer makes me agonizingly aware that I have contributed to the scourging of my own son. I have aided and abetted his tormentor. Didn't I bake cookies for sales to raise money for the trips out of town? Drive Brendan to and from these outings? Insist that he go when he balked, when he gave lame reasons for not wanting to take part?

“I want to go to bed now,” Brendan says suddenly, sensing my horror and self-disgust, “I don't want to talk anymore.”

After he leaves the kitchen I remain at the table, mercilessly flogging myself for helping Tom Haley snare my son into sexual abuse. I ask myself questions I don't want answered. Why had I been so slack? Why had I been so inattentive? Why had I given my time to seal overpopulation, cod underpopulation, the lack of work in the Cove and all those other crises with such passion that I neglected to notice trouble brewing for my child? A mother should have felt a jab of anxiety. A needle prick of distrust. A thimbleful of suspicion. A good mother surely would have.

Nausea overtakes me, and I rush to the bathroom to empty my stomach. Sister Rita's voice reaches me there as I squat on the tile floor, my head hanging over the toilet bowl. I am seven years old, and she is teaching a lesson on the Agony in the Garden. “Children,” she is asking, “have you any idea how much pain your heart would have to endure in order to sweat blood?” Along with the others, I shake my head, not having the faintest notion of how much pain a body would have to endure before it would be manifested externally in the form of sweated blood. I only know it must be a staggering amount.

When she looks up and down the five rows of wooden desks and sees not even one head nodding, she flicks her waist-length black veil over her shoulders as she does when she is making an infallible statement. “Of course you don't. Only the Saviour knows, the Saviour Who suffered so much pain that it is called the Agony in the Garden. Thank God, none of you will ever know that much pain. None of you will ever come close to enduring that much pain, knowing that much agony.”

I push myself away from the toilet and look at the palms of my hands, certain I will see blood. But they are stain free.

Greg returns from George O'Connell's house shortly before nine. If he looked beaten and broken before he left, those words don't even begin to describe his appearance when he returns. His face is chalk-grey, and he slouches in his clothes, much like Danny, only Greg's slouch is from defeat.

We sit at the kitchen table and talk quietly so as not to let Brendan hear us. We know he is awake because he has made several trips to the bathroom even in the short while since Greg came home. This hollowed-out carcass of the man he was a few hours earlier tells me he learned more details about the abuse from George, that Christopher opened up to his father on the way home. I share with him that Brendan confided the times and places to me.

“We tried phoning Haley,” he informs me. “We got talking and got so fired up we couldn't wait for the archbishop to do something. But we had no luck, got his housekeeper. She lied, I could tell by the hesitant way she spoke. Said he wasn't home. He must have told her not to let George or me through.”

“But how would he know why you were calling?”

“He knew. Sure as I'm sitting here, he knew. And he knew because Willie Farrell told him.”

On the way home George had stopped at a corner store so Christopher could pick up a carton of milk. Willie Farrell happened to be in the store at the time, and he had sidled up to Christopher and said, “I saw you and your father going into Brendan Slade's house. You better not have told them anything, or you'll get your face beat in.” Greg and George surmised that Willie had warned Father Tom.

“Probably for the best,” I say, for the lack of something better. “Neither you nor George are in a fit state to go near the rectory tonight. And besides, you promised Brendan you wouldn't.”

“You're probably right. Like I said, we had no intention of going over there. But as we got to talking, it stuck in our craws that he was having a peaceful evening while we were in such a mess. We just wanted him to have to suffer through the night, knowing the jig was up. I never knew I had so much anger in me. Dad used to say you never know a man until you've spent a summer in a fishing dory with him. Now I'd change that to ‘you never know a man until someone has hurt his child.'” Once more, he clenches and unclenches his fists. “I still want to tear him apart with my bare hands. I want to hear the sound of my fists connecting with his face. And George feels the same way. But I should know better. Violence isn't the answer. That's why I finally convinced George to let the law take its course.”

“Law?” I fairly screech. “What do you mean, let the law take its course? You're not involving the law! I won't let you! We promised Brendan...”

“I never promised I wouldn't involve the law. I said I'd do whatever had to be done.” But he knows he is splitting hairs because his eyes look almost as sad as Danny's. “Tess, dear, we can't just shuffle this off as if it never happened. It wouldn't be right.” Seeing me recoil, he entreats, “We have to, Tess! When we couldn't get hold of Haley, George and I did some serious talking. And we can't put this solely in the hands of the archbishop. Just shipping Haley off somewhere else isn't the answer. The crime against the boys needs to be validated for their sakes. And there's other people's sons...”

“No!” I scream, forgetting to keep quiet. “I don't care about other people's children. Just Brendan.”

“Can't you see, Tess, if we go to the palace and they send Haley up to that treatment place in Ontario — that place where they send all the scoundrel priests and the high-class drunks and perverts — he'll get the quick fix, and in a year he'll be back in some parish working his perversion on other altar boys.”

“Toronto!” I say, my mind rapidly forming defences. “Yes, I remember now, that's where they sent Father O'Riley to dry out, someplace in Toronto. It worked for him. He doesn't touch the stuff anymore.”

“It might work for boozers,” Greg concedes, “but not for sex perverts. I've seen too many of them in the courtroom.”

His indignation and outrage and agitation escalate, and he gets up and paces the floor. His voice, however, remains as controlled as if he were in the courtroom. As he walks back and forth between the stove and the table, outlining for my benefit why treatment isn't an option, he could have been performing before a jury.

“Are you aware that well-heeled perverts — the priests and the doctors and the professors, not your dirty old men — usually get away with their crimes by saying they're going for treatment. They get a little counselling here, a little pep talk there and bingo! They see the light. Go through an epiphany or something. All cured. As right as rain. Next thing you know they're back in the courtroom for having ruined another child or two or four or fifteen.” He turns to me, leaving a last thought with the jury. “I can't have the destruction of other children on my conscience, Tess. I just can't. And I don't see how you can either.”

“Easy. Because I can't have the destruction of my son on my conscience.”

Greg's eyes turn bright with anger. He straightens up, full of fight. Uncharacteristically, he pounds his fist on the table and shouts, “Don't you dare insinuate that I don't care about Brendan! Don't you dare!” He hesitates only momentarily before saying what he knows will bury an axe in my heart. “And bear in mind that if it wasn't for you he wouldn't be in this mess in the first place. You wanted him in that damn association, not me. You thought you had found another Dennis Walsh. Mr. Perfect Priest. You thought if Brendan hung around Haley, he'd turn out to be just like Dennis Walsh.”

Now I am the one who staggers back. Now I am the one who yelps.

Instantly contrite, Greg reaches out to touch me. I flinch. He sees the flinch.

“I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.” He dives his hands deep into his pockets and begins pacing the floor again, mumbling, “God Almighty, what's getting into me, I'm so tormented I'm losing my sanity.”

He comes and stands in front of me, his eyes pleading. “I didn't mean that. I shouldn't have said that. We've got to keep our wits. We've got to stay focused. We can't waste our energy tearing each other apart.”

“I'm not tearing you apart. You're the one who's doing the tearing apart.”

“I know, I know. I had no right.” He takes several deep breaths. “Tess,” he says, pulling out a kitchen chair so that he is sitting opposite me, “you're such an innocent about this. You keep thinking it will all pass away. That it's just a little blip in Brendan's life. A hug and a kiss and a brownie and everything is made better. But that's not the reality of it. I've seen too much of this muck in the courtroom.

“It never goes away for the victims. You've got to understand that. Never! Never! Never! I see the same youngsters ten years later downtown, no longer youngsters, making their way to the taverns, the heart and soul reamed out of them by some son of a bitch like this Father Pervert. They're going nowhere. They're lost souls, the lot of them. Some of them can't keep on dealing with the pain; they just throw themselves over a wharf. Others take the slow way out with drugs and booze. I've seen it all.”

He leans in close to me and asks a question that my brain would never be able to form into a thought nor my voice put into words.

“What if we can't salvage Brendan? What if you find out that love and brownies aren't enough. What if...”

The sentence hangs in the air, the words too terrible to utter.

“What I don't understand, though,” he says, “is why he never confided in us. If he didn't want the situation to continue, why didn't he come to me?”

I snap to Brendan's defence. “I can't believe you said that. You're hinting that he might have wanted to be involved in that mess. He was trapped, Greg, trapped. Can't you see that? He's deathly afraid of Willie Farrell. And, like Christopher said, if they were to tell anyone, they would get so many other people in trouble. They didn't know which way to turn.”

At that very instant both of us hear the floor above us creak. Startled, we look towards the ceiling. Awareness dawns on Greg first. He moans, “Oh God! Oh God! Oh God! He's been in our room listening. I've got to explain.”

He rushes upstairs. I follow closely behind. Brendan is back in his room. Through his closed door we can hear his muffled sobbing. We go in and crouch beside his bed, our arms enclosing his hunched body.

He pulls his face out from under the bedclothes. Between sobs he says, “I heard you fighting. You're ashamed of me. I knew you would be. That's why I wouldn't tell.”

“No, Sport. No, Sport. I'm not ashamed of you. I wish I could take back what I said. It's just that I don't understand how this could have gone on as long as it did.”

“I should have lied,” Brendan sobs. “I should have said I wasn't in on it. Then you wouldn't be fighting.”

“No, you did the right thing to tell the truth. And Mom and I aren't fighting. We're just arguing, more like explaining.”