Authors: Kevin Holohan
Just when the boys were ready to get up and go, Pollock announced: “We will now pause in silence and pay our respects to our dear departed Brother in Christ.”
He moved toward the back of the room. Craftily he pulled up his jacket sleeve: ten-fifteen. If he could drag this out for a few more minutes he could avoid that awful too-short-to-actually-teach-anything-too-long-to-just-kill-time period back in the classroom.
“I will be outside on the landing, I wish to have a word with Brother Cox. Let there be no carry-on or you will know all about it.”
He stepped out onto the empty landing, leaving the oratory door ajar behind him. Brother Cox was nowhere to be seen. Fifteen little squeaks of his brothel-creepers took him out onto the fire escape overlooking the empty cloistered the garden. He lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply, rejoicing in the brisk early-spring air and the mournful calling of crows in the nearby trees.
Scully lay on the floor and peered through the crack in the door. “Gone for a smoke,” he whispered to the others.
This was not exactly the ideal set-up for mischief. What could you get up to in an oratory with a dead body lying out in state? That was what Finbar thought, anyway. Lynch, however, would not have agreed. Mischief might not have been the exact word in Lynch’s head, but like every other time he had been left unsupervised something cloudy was humming in his head. Solemnly he approached the coffin. He stood at its head and joined his hands in front of himself in prayerful attitude. The low buzz of conversation that had begun just after Mr. Pollock’s departure dwindled and died into silence.
“And pray tell us what you might be doing, Mr. Lynch, sor? It is not often we see your hands joined except to wield a crowbar.” Finbar couldn’t help it. The impression of Pollock just spilled out of him in a nervous overflow. A couple of boys laughed and Finbar felt a tiny satisfying glow inside.
Lynch turned and Finbar caught the tiniest hint of an approving smile in his look. The boys fell silent again. Then Lynch turned, bowed his head reverently, and began to speak: “Kennedy, ye aul dead bastard, ye’re dead aren’t ye?”
The silence darkened a little. How far would Lynch go with this?
“And we’re here to give ye a big sendoff. So …” Lynch reached out and took Brother Kennedy’s right hand from where it laid over his left one on his chest. He shook hands with the corpse. “Couldn’t happen to a nicer vicious aul fucker,” he said cheerfully.
There was a collective sigh of relief as Lynch moved to sit down. Most of them really just wanted this over with. They had put him in the box and that was more than enough to deal with.
Brian Egan stood up suddenly, as if compelled by some invisible force. He walked slowly and deliberately up the aisle. Lynch stared at him questioningly as they passed each other. Egan ignored him and walked on. He stopped beside the head of the coffin and stood uncertainly. He seemed to be collecting his thoughts from somewhere deep inside himself.
“Well, have a nice time in Hell, ye fucker! How about a smoke before ye go? Can’t do ye any harm now, cos ye’re DEAD!”
Egan reached into his pocket and withdrew a crumpled cigarette. The silence was now thick with disbelief and colored bright red around its edges with something unnameable. Egan took the cigarette and forced it between the dead man’s lips.
“Want a light?” he asked, and moved Brother Kennedy’s head roughly in a grotesque parody of an enthusiastic nod. “Well ye can’t have one, ye slimy bastard!” Egan whipped the cigarette from the cold lips and put it back in his pocket. He hawked deep in his throat and drew up a big mouthful of phlegm. The silence colored to a fiery red.
“Sketch!” hissed Scully from the door where he was keeping watch. In a flash Egan was back in place in his pew. He leaned down and spat loudly on the carpet.
When Mr. Pollock entered, he noticed the silence but failed to detect any of its coloring. He took it to be the usual silence concealing prior moments of messing and telling jokes. He walked to the coffin and again blessed himself. One quick “Hail Holy Queen” directed to the Irish-speaking Blessed Virgin Mary, and then it was done. Mr. Pollock walked to the door, opened it theatrically just as the bell for small break rang, and congratulated himself on his perfect timing.
B
rendan Kennedy sat in the late-night gloom of Brother Loughlin’s office and impatiently tapped his good tweed cap on his arthritic left knee. He was tired after his bus and train journey from Knockpaltry-on-Fergus. He had never been east of the River Shannon in his life and though he would have been quite happy to keep it that way, he felt he owed it to his only brother to attend his funeral despite the fact that they had not spoken in over forty years.
The office door opened and Brother Loughlin entered, his face now even more solicitous than when he had met Brendan at Kingsbridge Station.
“We’re ready now,” he said softly.
Brendan Kennedy glanced at his watch and shook his head in disbelief. There was something really unnatural and unwholesome about conducting a funeral in the middle of the night. He followed Brother Loughlin across the dark yard, up the monastery stairs, and into the oratory.
The Brothers were already in their pews sucking on the mouthfuls of ashes prescribed by tradition. These were the last ashes from the pyre of the late Brother Bell’s possessions, so it was fortunate that they would now get to replenish their supply. It had over the years become a belief of the Brother General Superior that it was a good practice for the Brothers to savor some ashes at the passing of a confrere as both a tribute and a memento mori. The Brothers did their best to ignore the scaffolding and the gaping hole in the ceiling that loomed above them in the candlelight, an ugly beacon of mockery and menace.
Brother Loughlin motioned Brendan Kennedy to a straight-backed chair in the center aisle. The latter sat down and peered about him in the surrounding gloom. The only light came from the four tall candles at the corners of his brother’s coffin where it still rested on the trolley. Barely discernible against the altar railings stood the plain lid of the coffin, the light reflecting dully off the lead plaque that bore the name and dates of Brother Matthew Kennedy.
Brendan looked around at the Brothers, their faces drawn and empty-looking in the dim light. These were his brother Matthew’s companions. These were the empty souls with whom he had shared his last sixty years.
Loughlin walked to the front of the oratory, took his place at the head of the coffin, and drew his rosary beads from his pocket. Immediately the oratory was filled with the reciprocal clacking and rattling of the Brothers’ beads.
Brendan opened the time-softened leather pouch that contained his First Communion beads and draped them from his hands in a prayerful fashion. He focused on the candle flame nearest him and drifted into the murmur around him. He shivered suddenly and Brother Loughlin’s hand on his shoulder brought him back to the here and now of Matthew’s funeral.
“If you would like to take your leave of, ahem …” stumbled Loughlin.
Brendan stood up and moved to the side of the coffin. He blessed himself and stared down at the inert features of his dead brother. He was shocked by how much yet how little his brother’s face had changed. It looked like the face of the sixteen-year-old boy he had known with the lines of sixty years carved onto it by some amateur hand. He racked his brains for something to say or think or some last thought to impart to his brother, but nothing came, just a hazy sense of regret for a life thwarted and wasted. He blessed himself again and sat down heavily.
Brother Loughlin moved silently to the side of the coffin, tapped Brother Kennedy’s cold forehead three times with the small liturgical lead hammer, and then took the candles from the holders and passed them out: one to Brother Mulligan, one to Brother Boland, and one to Brendan Kennedy. Taking the last one himself, he led the way out of the oratory down the stairs to the garden.
“This is the weirdest job I’ve ever had. I didn’t know it was part of janitoring. This is a right pain in the arse,” grumbled McRae.
“Shut up and help,” hissed Dermot McDermott as they waited on the landing above the oratory for the last of the Brothers to move down the stairs. “Come on now.”
McDermott led the way to the oratory and began maneuvering the trolley toward the door. “Open the fire escape door for me,” he said.
“The two of us are going to get that down the stairs? You must be joking!” protested McRae.
“No. No. We just leave it at the top of the fire escape. The Brothers will take it down to the garden. It’s part of their thing. That’s what I was told and that’s all I know.”
“Creepy, that’s what it is, this lugging dead bodies around in the middle of the night.”
“Just get the door for me, can’t you!”
McRae held the door open while McDermott positioned the coffin trolley on the metal landing of the fire escape and stepped back in, closing the heavy door softly.
* * *
Brendan Kennedy stared blankly at Brother Loughlin, unable to believe what he had just heard. “Come again?” he said icily.
“… To defray some of the funeral costs. I hate to ask, but you know we are not a wealthy congregation. Of course, you also get this.” Brother Loughlin held out the small liturgical lead hammer.
Brendan Kennedy’s face paled with rage: “Get away with you and take that creepy thing away from me! The funeral was all paid for up front when Matthew joined! Well do I remember my poor sainted father, God be good to him, lamenting that he had to fork out eighteen shillings for a shroud and a box for his perfectly healthy sixteen-year-old son. Don’t come the poor mouth with me, Loughlin! It was all paid for fair and square and well you know it!”
Leaving a stunned Brother Loughlin standing on the platform, Brendan Kennedy climbed into the three a.m. mail train and took a seat on the far side where he wouldn’t have to look at the man. After witnessing his only brother being perfunctorily buried in an unmarked grave in the monastery garden at midnight while his cassock, sandals, and personal possessions were ritually burned, Brendan had had quite enough of the Order of the Brothers of Godly Coercion.
Had he the courage to acknowledge it, he would probably have admitted that he was plagued by guilt and by a sense of the tragedy of Matthew’s end: his only brother buried a stranger to him and the only other mourners a shower of moribund relics who seemed to almost envy the relief of the grave. It wasn’t his fault, there was only enough farm for one of them and his parents had decided Matthew was the brighter one and should go to the Brothers. Brendan recoiled from thought, took out the
Farmer’s Sentinel,
and plunged himself into “Bovine TB: the Curse of Progress?” The doors slammed, the porter blew his whistle, and the train shuddered and creaked out from under the dark canopy of Kingsbridge Station to begin its long haul through the night to Limerick Junction.
T
he morning after the funeral, Brother Loughlin could still taste the ashes in his mouth. He slammed the phone back into its cradle with tight-lipped fury. As if he didn’t have enough to do with things breaking all the time and only that incompetent janitor and his fool apprentice to fix them! This was the last straw! He had been fobbed off by Cardinal Russell’s personal secretary’s assistant, then by some nameless drone at the office of the Bishop of Spokes and Duggery, then by the personal secretary of Father Sheehan, Mulvey’s boss, and finally, to add insult to injury, by Mulvey’s damn insolent housekeeper. The woman even had the audacity to tell him to stop telephoning all the time, that it was doing his cause no good at all. It was
his
school! It was
his
miracle! They should be falling over themselves to talk to him!
“I’ll show them I mean business,” he bellowed. “I’ll show them I know how to manage a miracle site! Mrs. Broderick! Take a letter!”
“Come in!” called out Mr. Pollock before there was even a knock. The door opened and in strode Anthony, the large-lugged first year who seemed to have become the messenger boy for the whole school. “What is it, Mr. Antney, sor?” he asked, ever ready to mock the boy’s accent.
“It’s a note from de Head Brudder, sir.”
“And who is the Head Brother?”
“Brudder Loughlin.”
“That is right, sor.”
Mr. Pollock imperiously took the letter from Anthony and read through it before pursing his lips approvingly.
“You boys! Attention. This is a letter from Brother Loughlin, so listen and listen carefully:
All boys and all teachers are hereby informed that, in view of the increased importance of the school as a site of a miracle now under investigation by the Diocesan Investigator’s office, there will be no toleration of sinning—mortal, venial, or otherwise—within the school boundaries. All manner of sin by word, deed, or thought, whether committed alone or with others, will be mercilessly punished while we keep the site of this miraculous occurrence pure and free of stain. Tally sticks will be issued to all boys to keep count of their sins. Beating and confession will be administered after school each day. Every step will be taken to keep all boys in a perpetual state of Grace.
—Brother Loughlin, Principal
Copies to Bishop of Spokes and Duggery, Father Thomas Sheehan, S.J., Father Martin Mulvey, S.J.
Mr. Pollock glowered at the boys meaningfully and returned the note to Anthony without looking at him.
Tally sticks.
The words echoed coldly in each boy’s guts. They knew about them but always figured they were something from dark times long ago. Brother Loughlin well understood this. There was no real extra efficiency in using tally sticks, but they were potent symbols. The humiliation of wearing them and their associations of repression were powerful tools against the boys.
T
he air of the Limping Gunman was rife with the ammoniacal smell of cleaning as Spud Murphy sat heavily at the end of the bar and pinched the bridge of his nose. The consumptive regulars at the other end of the bar ignored him completely. He was only an amateur drinker as far as they were concerned.