Authors: Kevin Holohan
Before either of them felt compelled to break the awkward silence that was growing, it was shattered by the metallic retching and hawking of the Jezebel Laundry van turning into Greater Little Werburgh Street, North.
“About bloody time!” Brother Loughlin shouted after it. He brushed past Father Flynn and hurried his bulk down to the yard to berate the laundry men.
“They’re here! They’re here!” cried Brother Tobin as he ran toward the bathhouse, or “balnearium” as Brother Loughlin insisted on calling it. The Brothers stood around the swimming pool—sized ice bath in their bathing cassocks, teeth chattering.
“Right Brothers, time to mortify the flesh that is our cross to bear!” cried Brother Loughlin as he entered. The Widower Frawley followed behind him with his arms full of new cassocks, underwear, and sandals. He set to hanging them in each Brother’s cubicle. Loughlin checked the buttons on his bathing cassock and leapt into the pool. One by one the Brothers followed him into the pool with degrees of enthusiasm ranging from the gleefully masochistic to the condemned man.
Once all were in the pool, Brother Loughlin led a decade of the rosary for the intentions of the Brotherhood and the prompt beatification of Saorseach O’Rahilly, and then one by one the Brothers moved in front of him where he submerged their heads in the traditional symbolic rebaptism of Venerable Saorseach O’Rahilly Day.
“Venerable Saorseach O’Rahilly, bend me to your will,” intoned Brother Loughlin as he dunked each one in turn before finally dunking himself.
The rebaptism completed, the Brothers went to their cubicles, removed their bathing cassocks, and dried off.
Brother Loughlin cleared his throat ceremoniously: “Venerable Saorseach O’Rahilly, shield me from the temptations of the flesh and all that is fleeting, corrupting, and tawdry in this life!”
With that, all the Brothers pulled on their brand-new tweed underpants and stepped out of their cubicles.
“Venerable Saorseach O’Rahilly, guard my heart from the lures that might distract me from the path of duty.”
The Brothers donned their tweed undershirts which, like the underpants, were artfully designed for maximum discomfort and mortification of the flesh. Years of experience had perfected the nuns’ design, and with wear they would become increasingly uncomfortable, bulking at the seams and growing ever itchier.
“Venerable Saorseach O’Rahilly, place my feet on the righteous path and keep them there, step after step in yours.”
The Brothers put on the tweed socks with a lot of falling over and near disaster when Brother Cox, somewhat worse for wear from the naggin of gin he’d smuggled in the night before, bumped into Brother Tobin who almost fell head-first into the pool.
“Now, armored against the evils of the world, we don the sandals and outer garment that will proclaim to all our unswerving dedication to Venerable Saorseach O’Rahilly and the Brotherhood of Godly Coercion.”
The black gala cassocks and birettas with their bright red trim and the new sandals completed the ritual. The Brothers marched out of the bathhouse scrubbed raw and ready to take the world by the scruff of the neck and teach it some manners.
Mr. Pollock sat at his desk and consulted the roll book. “Now then. In honor of the day that is in it, we will dispense with lessons as usual and instead prepare for the forthcoming celebrations by reacquainting ourselves with the life of Venerable Saorseach O’Rahilly, the esteemed founder of the Brothers of Godly Coercion.” He blessed himself reverently as he uttered the honored name.
“Mr. Sullivan, you will begin.”
Mr. Pollock opened the slim hardback of
The Life of Venerable Saorseach O’Rahilly
by Marcus Madden, B.A., and held it out.
Finbar walked to the top of the class and took the book from the teacher. He did not look up. This was one of those very vulnerable situations where anyone with an aptitude for pulling faces would be out to make him laugh. He could already feel the others willing him to look up. He focused on the page and read slowly and expressionlessly the words he had heard so many times before.
“
Venerable Saorseach O’Rahilly was born at Dunbally in 1811, the
first of two sons to Cathal and Brigid O’Rahilly. Cathal was a well-respected and successful grain merchant.
“
The young Saorseach was educated at home by his mother, an unusually pious woman given to ecstatic visions. Despite her piousness, the evils of laudanum often tempted her, and whenever she gave in to these
cravings, she would be plunged into bouts of anguished penance and self-
mortification. On one occasion Cathal had to call the Bishop of Dervish and Ossory to the house to restrain her for fear she would cause herself fatal harm with a horsewhip. These instances made a strong impression on the young Saorseach.”
Finbar could barely keep himself awake as he read. Like all the boys, he had heard this story at least once a year since his first year of school in Cork. In primary school it had sometimes been accompanied by drawing and coloring scenes from O’Rahilly’s life. Now there was no such levity. The whole thing induced in the boys a torporific waking coma, a viscous thickening of time that sapped all energy and light from them and their immediate surroundings.
“Mr. McDonagh, you will continue,” crackled Mr. Pollock’s voice through the leaden air.
McDonagh snapped out of his reverie and fumbled with the bottom of his sweater before standing up. He had to pull it down over the very evident erection prompted by daydreaming about Assumpta Cumberland who worked in the corner shop.
“Stand up straight and don’t slouch like an apeman, McDonagh,” sneered the teacher.
McDonagh reddened and straightened up. Mercifully his tumescence subsided as he took the book from Finbar and turned around to face the class. Assumpta Cumberland and her formidable breasts were replaced by the less stimulating minutiae of the life of Venerable Saorseach O’Rahilly.
“Saorseach’s father Cathal was often away from home conducting his business in the distant thriving towns of Dunmoice and Rathaughram. When Saorseach was eighteen, his younger brother Bartholomew, perhaps deprived of his father’s attentions, ran away to sea. Brigid O’Rahilly went into a precipitous decline after this and spent much of her time roaming the gardens of the O’Rahilly demesne in search of the
leprechauns whom she believed had taken her son. On these wanderings she carried with her a bag of gold sovereigns with which to ransom Bartholomew if she should come across the little people. Ultimately this would prove to be her undoing.”
On and on it droned: Brigid having her head staved in by persons unknown and her bag of sovereigns stolen from her; the widowed Cathal first taking to the drink and then to ascetic religiousness; his conviction that the famine was a punishment from God on the locals who had killed his wife and his bloody-minded insistence on continuing to export grain to England while those around him wasted away; Saorseach’s apprenticeship to a merchant in Dublin; his slide into dissolution and his eventual reformation. All of it washed over the boys like so much mind-numbing sludge. When finally it ended there was a huge sense of relief that even the decade of the rosary for the prompt beatification of Venerable Saorseach O’Rahilly could not entirely dampen.
“Aren’t they lovely though, but?”
“What?”
“The statues. They’re lovely, you know?”
Dermot McDermott looked carefully at Ray McRae. He’d had a lot of apprentice janitors in his time and thought he’d seen everything, but this enthusiastic, wild-eyed, cheery outlook was a new one on him. He examined McRae’s face but could find no trace of guile or sarcasm.
“Just get on with it,” McDermott snapped, and disappeared out through the fire exit.
While his boss calmed himself with a smoke in the laneway, Ray McRae removed the statuettes of Venerable Saorseach O’Rahilly from their packing cases and placed one on each chair in the hall. He worked quickly and carefully and whistled happily to himself.
Soon he heard the fire exit open and close again. Without looking up he called out to McDermott: “They’re like little works of art, you know what I mean? All the same, but each one a little bit different. Like this one. Looks a little sadder than the others. Even a little depressed. I knew a sculptor one time. Very depressed fellah. Did his sculptures, had a couple of pints in the local of an evening, but never really talked to anyone, you know what I mean? Next thing you know, he ups and cuts his throat with a safety razor. Funny, isn’t it, that they call them safety razors and them such dangerous things?”
McRae fell silent and McDermott let out a sigh of relief. He was a man of few words himself and talkative people made him uncomfortable. He walked to the back of the hall and lifted another crate of statuettes. Swiftly he moved along the row of chairs and placed a statuette gently on each one.
“Ciúnas! Silence!”
When the desired silence fell on the hall, Brother Loughlin stepped to the front of the stage, looking, if anything, fatter than usual in his gala cassock; the red trim on the collar, cuffs, and hem lending him the appearance of a gigantic hot coal ready to burst into flames at any moment.
“Brother Boland will now demonstrate the correct and only way to handle the figures of Venerable Saorseach O’Rahilly. You will keep these with you at every moment from now until the end of the day when they will be returned to the oratory. Any damage or breakage will result in a hiding you will never forget and automatic transfer to an industrial school. These are holy statues. Is that clear?”
The boys nodded dumbly and Brother Boland stepped forward with his statuette. The base of it rested on the flat palm of his left hand and he held it reverently but firmly with his right hand clasped around the figure’s chest.
“When we are in procession,” Brother Loughlin resumed, “you will hold the figure above your head with both hands. The figure will at no moment be allowed to rest on the ground. You may hold the statue in one hand only, and I repeat only, when required to do so by a Brother or teacher who finds it necessary to use the strap on you. Right. Now walk slowly to your seats and CAREFULLY pick up the figure. They are all the same so it does not matter which one you get.”
There was not exactly a stampede to get the best of the Venerable Saorseachs but there was a certain amount of competition for the chairs near the back of the hall. This was the impetuous rush of amateurs. Anyone so eager to be at the back was going to be picked off and moved up front where they could better be watched. Scully, Lynch, and McDonagh expertly restrained themselves and found themselves seats three rows from the back.
Lynch picked up his statue in the approved manner and set to whispering things of a very threatening and mostly anatomically impossible nature to it.
Brother Cox, who was going to narrate the pageant, took his place at the lectern, stage right. Over his gala cassock he wore a costume that was somewhere between Henry VIII and an Edwardian pimp. What it was supposed to evoke, other than mockery, was hard to tell.
“Before we begin, I would like to welcome Mr. Diarmaid DePaor of the Department of Education, who is our special guest here this morning,” Cox began.
Mr. DePaor stood up and awkwardly acknowledged the forced applause, squeezed from the boys by glowers and hissed warnings.
When DePaor sat down again Brother Cox took a deep portentous breath and continued: “
Venerable Saorseach O’Rahilly was born in Dunbally in 1811, the first of two sons to Cathal and Brigid O’Rahilly
…”
For the next hour and a half the boys would have to sit through the story they had already heard that day, this time being badly and reluctantly acted out in front of them. All round the hall right hands tightened around the chests of the terra-cotta figurines. To the accompaniment of this simulated strangulation, the pageant flapped its leaden wings on the first stage of its long flight toward lunchtime.
Finbar sat quietly two rows in front of Scully and the others and tried desperately to stay awake.
The cast for the Venerable Saorseach O’Rahilly pageant was mostly made up of conscripts. For three weeks they had been kept back after school for rehearsal. Among the most misguided pieces of press-ganged casting was Smalley Mullen in the role of Saorseach O’Rahilly’s father, Cathal.
As did everyone, Smalley laboriously read his lines from pieces of cardboard that Brother Boland held up in the wings, but it was the boy’s high-pitched voice that really topped it.
“Do not dare contradict me, boy! You will be taking over this business when I am gone so you must learn to shoulder the burden of responsibility!” he squeaked at Kelly, a gargantuan third year playing Saorseach, who towered over him.
“I want to be my own man! I want to see the world!” boomed Kelly, and stormed offstage and straight into the scenery for the forthcoming parish production of
An Bealach Solais
, or
The Way of Light
, a patriotic and devotional operetta in Irish composed by Michael Costigan, a local musician and patriot.
The high point of the life of Saorseach, if you really had to choose one, was the temptation scene. Consumed by despair and drink, the young dissolute Saorseach wandered the streets of Dublin to be assailed by drunken prostitutes. Had it been a less well-known scene the Brothers would gladly have cut it completely, but it was pivotal and had been cited often in the beatification process so it could not be left out.
The harlots, three third years dressed in Mrs. McCurtin’s old kitchen clothes, would not have tempted even the most starved lothario.
“Get away from me, ye fallen women! Do not flaunt your shamelessness in my presence! Tempt me not with your sin!” bellowed Kelly, and flounced offstage, this time tripping and breaking the nose of Turlough Halpin, who was the only enthusiastic volunteer in the whole production and was playing the Pope.
Up and down the aisles the Brothers and lay teachers patrolled ceaselessly. No irreverence would be tolerated on this uplifting day.
The pageant ground on and on, and it was with a feeling of deep despair that Finbar opened his eyes to see that they were still only coming up to the stick fight scene. He watched lazily as the clandestine hurling match O’Rahilly had attended in Cahirdorras degenerated into a stick fight disputing a late foul that then amplified out to include some atavistic local land disputes.