Authors: Kevin Holohan
“You will do no such thing, young man! You’ll have something to eat and then Finbar’s father will take you home,” commanded Mrs. Sullivan, and steered Scully into the parlor and onto the other armchair.
“Sheila, do you need anything?”
The young woman met Mrs. Sullivan’s eyes for a moment and then shook her head: “I’m grand, thanks.”
“Finbar, get your friend something to drink. There’s some of that orange squash in the fridge.”
“His name is Francis, Ma. Francis Scully.”
Finbar went into the kitchen and opened the tall cup-board to get some glasses. From the parlor he heard Spud Murphy’s voice but could not make out the words. Then he heard his father laugh nervously: “I’m bloody glad! I wouldn’t let him go back to that kip of a school even if it hadn’t fallen down. Finbar, come in here! You have to meet your niece. She’s awake now. And bring a bottle of stout in from the shed for Mr. Murphy! And see if there are any biscuits in the tin for your friend Francis here.”
Finbar glanced at his reflection in the scullery window.
“Fin, I hid the biscuits behind the tea caddy,” called Declan’s voice from the parlor.
Finbar smiled at his reflection and felt a comforting sense of crowdedness seep through him as the tiny chuckling of the baby and the warm murmur of voices from the parlor wafted over him like the soft mizzle of a summer shower.
O
ne lone crow sat in the dead tree that stood over the gatehouse of Drumgloom Industrial School. It seemed to be waiting and listening for something. Its tiny black eyes darted in the direction of the Victorian hulk of Drumgloom itself. The bird stretched its wings, cawed harshly at the dying light of the day, and opened its beak wide.
All fall! All fall!
it seemed to cry.
“Sooner or later we will find the culprit,” declaimed Brother Benedict MacAeongus, Principal of Drumgloom, as he strode toward the grand staircase of the erstwhile mental asylum. “Make no mistake about that. You know who you are. You can make it easier on yourself and own up now and take the chance to be a man about it, or we can punish you all until we find who it was. It is no skin off my nose. I can stay here all night if I have to!”
All along one side of the stairs and along the corridors knelt boys dressed only in their underpants. Their arms were outstretched parallel to the floor and in each hand they held ball bearings the size of large apples.
With his leather MacAeongus tapped one of the boys at the elbow: “Arms straight! This is your personal cross!”
He passed on up the stairs and along the corridor to the dormitories of the youngest boys, some of them little older than seven.
“Stop quivering, boy!”
Before MacAeongus had a chance to further berate the child, there was the sound he had been waiting for, the heavy clunk of a ball bearing dropped on the bare floorboards.
“Just what do you think you’re at, you disobedient little cur?” he shouted as he hurried in the direction of the offending noise.
In his haste he brushed against another boy’s out-stretched arm, causing the ball bearing to roll out of his upturned palm.
“You clumsy little bastard!” screeched MacAeongus, and hit the boy a stinging blow on the ear with his leather.
Near the head of the stairs MacAeongus saw a hand reaching into the middle of the corridor to lift its fallen ball bearing. He picked up his pace and arrived just in time to place his foot on the boy’s hand.
“Maher! The cripple from Werburgh Street who says he was sent here for no reason! I might have known! Well, boy, is that an admission of guilt for the hall window or did you just drop the ball?”
“I just dropped the ball, Brother. Me arm was—”
“I’ll tell you what your arm was, me bucko! Lazy, that’s what it was. Banjaxed legs and lazy arms, you’re hopeless! Good for nothing! Do you think these floors are here for you to destroy them dropping ball bearings on them? Is that what you think? Is it?”
“No, Brother.”
“Well then, why did you drop the ball, eh, eh? I’ll tell you why. Because you’re a disobedient, useless little cur!”
MacAeongus picked Maher up by the arm and marched him to the stairs, swiping with his leather at the backs of his thighs below the brace straps.
“I’ll learn you to go dropping ball bearings on our good floors!” spat MacAeongus.
Trying to shield his legs, Maher dropped the other ball bearing he was holding. MacAeongus stood on it, slipped, and flailed for the banister to right himself. With a rending screech the banister gave way and MacAeongus fell to the polished parquet floor of the main hall twenty feet below.
The boys got up from their knees and rushed to see what was happening. MacAeongus was lying dazed on the floor. A hush of indecision hovered over the boys, only to be dispelled by a loud splintering as the ceiling above the prone figure of MacAeongus unburdened itself of the spiked chandelier that it had unwillingly supported for so long. In a few moments the awful weight was gone and the central spike severed MacAeongus’s carotid artery and buried itself deep in the parquet floor.
Small tremors shuddered out from Drumgloom, through the ready earth, and added to the after-hum of Werburgh Street’s collapse. They found many willing resonances. The long-suffering cracked ceiling of Saint Agnes of Birr Home for the Wanton seized the vibrations of this new call to action and collapsed with a relieved sigh on top of visiting confessor Father Cafferty’s furtive groping of one of the girls. The girl escaped without a scratch. The loose staircase of the Poor Sisters of the Threadbare Cowl Boarding School for Foundlings hummed to the pulsations and pitched itself into the vestibule, causing irreparable damage to two load-bearing walls and the immediate decease of Sister Assumpta, who had just returned from caning one of the new girls. The gable wall of the Brothers of the Venerable Lacerations Home for the Unhinged threw itself into the vegetable garden, leaving the roof to hover uneasily before it too unmoored itself. Obdurate Heart Convent tossed all caution to the wind and shook itself to the ground while the nuns were on the playing fields hosing the girls down with vinegar. Saint Rathlin’s Reformatory burst a gaspipe, took a deep breath, and struck a match. In the Jezebel Laundry outside Dullow, Sister Delia, furiously searching the washing room for Sheila Barry, was scalded and then crushed by a falling vat of dirty underclothes just before the roof caved in.
Day after day, for the next three weeks, the country rumbled as one institution after another gave in to the effects of years of corrosive viciousness. Damage was extensive, fatalities and injuries among staff widespread, but not one child was so much as scratched.
W
here’s that Head Brother, whatsisname, ehm, Loughlin? He needs to sign me docket.” Matt waved the paperwork that was now fully in order with today’s date on it and accounted for the sixty radiators and eight hundred feet of pipe filling the three trucks he was waiting to lead back to the depot.
Mr. Pollock and the knot of Brothers behind him tried to move away.
“One of yiz needs to sign,” insisted Matt.
“Brother Loughlin is deceased,” said Pollock coldly as he scrawled a signature across the docket.
“Ah, the Head Brother is a Dead Brother. That’s a shame, I suppose, but I have to say he didn’t look too well last time we saw him. Blood pressure, I would have said. Looked like a man with a short temper. Good luck now. Enjoy the rest of yer day,” said Matt, swinging himself up into the cab of the truck.
The Brannigan Brothers scrap metal trucks hauled themselves up the street. Once they were clear, the siren bawled out its three-minute warning and the police moved everyone to the top of Werburgh Street away from the school.
The crowd around the Brothers fell suddenly silent and parted to reveal Maher making good headway on crutches followed by his docker father. Even the police flanking Pollock stood back fearfully as Mr. Maher placed his formidable bulk right in front of Pollock.
“You, you vicious little fucker! I could rip your poxy head off with my bare hands, but I won’t. Some other fucker just like you will be sitting on a judge’s bench waiting to ruin my life. You should have known better! These fucked-up Brothers maybe have some excuse cos half of them were fucked up themselves and never lived anywhere but in some shithole school or orphanage or seminary, but you should know better! You live in the real world. But I bet you don’t even remember being a kid.
“What I have to say to you is this: May the rest of your life be a barren, painful waste. May you die roaring, alone and far from the sight of your God and your fellow man, and may your name be forgotten as soon as you are cold in the box.”
With that, Mr. Maher turned and gently shepherded his son back through the crowd. Ashen-faced, Pollock stared after them and looked like he would have preferred if Maher had ripped his head off.
The siren bawled its long final warning. The crane bearing
Brannigan Brothers Demolition
revved its engine and the air filled with sweet diesel fumes. Men shouted from under their hard hats. The crane swung. The wrecking ball broke through a high window of the condemned school with a dull thump. From the top of the street at the main road there came a wild shrieking cheer.
“Callous, ungrateful little bastards!” muttered Brother Tobin, shaking his nicotine-tinted head sadly.
Brother Mulligan quivered and flinched beside him. Brother Tobin tightened his supporting grip on Mulligan’s forearm. Mulligan’s slight frame seemed barely able to support the lolling of his shorn head. Beside them Mr. Pollock and Brother Cox stood in grim silence.
More glass crunched and more masonry caved in like so much damp sand. So soon. So quickly the top floor of the school began to look like something unfinished and ailing, its identity wrenched from it.
“No, no, no, no,” gibbered Brother Mulligan feebly. His home since the age of fourteen, almost sixty-five years, buckled and crumbled with each slow, methodical assault of the wrecking ball. Each swing of the crane drove him deeper into his frailty.
“We should go, Brother. There’s no sense staying to watch this,” said Tobin softly.
“They took it away from me! They destroyed my world!” rasped Mulligan.
Tobin led Mulligan up the street toward the West Circular Road where the barricades had blocked off the traffic onto Greater Little Werburgh Street, North. A loud booing broke out among the crowd of boys behind the barricade and Tobin slowed his steps. He stopped about twenty yards from the barricade and waited, Mulligan quaking and shuddering beside him. A half-eaten apple sailed through the air from the back of the crowd and splattered on the street near Tobin’s feet.
The crowd of jeering bodies parted and three policemen came forward. There was a short silence while the booing tried to decide how to react to this new development. One of the policemen escorted Tobin and Mulligan to a nearby car where the Brother Superior General was waiting to take them to the Saorseach O’Rahilly Hospice for Unhinged Brothers. The other two policemen walked toward Pollock and Cox. A slow dawning of understanding spread through the crowd of boys and the silence burst into a new bloom of jeering, whistling, and cheering. They were taking them away! They were going to lock the bastards up!
A dull, gut-trembling rumble drowned out the cheering as the wall of the school fell in on itself, taking the two narrower side walls with it. Brannigan Brothers did good work. The cheering redoubled to greet the cloud of dust that belched out of the erstwhile four-story block.
Brother Cox lowered his head as the police put him in the backseat of the squad car. He closed his eyes tightly and hummed one long, hoarse note to try to drown out the banging on the roof of the vehicle as the boys made their gleeful and malevolent farewells. Mr. Pollock slid into the backseat beside him just as a rotten tomato exploded stingingly against the side of his face.
“How did you like that, sor?” called a familiar voice.
Pollock wiped the mess from his face and glared at the faces that crowded in around the police car. Smalley Mullen stood there staring defiantly at him with another tomato at the ready.
“Imeacht gan teacht ort, sor! May you go and never return, ye louse!” grinned Smalley. Before Pollock could pull the door closed, the boy mashed the second tomato into the teacher’s face, then walked away.
The crowd moved forward to read the notice that one of the Brannigan Brothers men hung on the railings:
We, Fionn and Patrick Sweeney, hereby make known our intention to build on this site (Lot # 867-3D/9A, Folio 4287 of the Register of Freeholds) a storage and warehouse facility in compliance with City Ordinances 44-J, 22-B5, and 221-F. Approval of Planning Permission granted—docket 112-4K-12-28. Plans will be available for viewing at 18 Danegild Street between the hours of 10:00 and 10:55 on weekdays or by appointment. Construction will begin on August 18 at 9 a.m. sharp.
As my personal experience was only a glimpse of the tip of the iceberg, for the larger cultural context that informed this fiction I am indebted to the extraordinary
Suffer the Little Children: The Inside Story of Ireland’s Industrial Schools
by Mary Raftery and Eoin O’Sullivan, and to
Church and State in Modern Ireland, 1923–79
by J.H. Whyte. Whenever my energy waned, I needed only the briefest look at the findings of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, available online at
http://www.childabusecommission.ie/
.
I thank my brothers Peter and John for their irreverence and stories, my dear friends Paul McDermott and Brian Brady whose company and resilient humor made the actual process of secondary education bearable and who encouraged the writing of this story. I thank Tom Cayler, the late Beverly Jensen, Jenifer Levin, Tim Ledwith, Paul Power, and Frank Spain, who have generously read and offered suggestions on parts and versions of this over the years.
Thanks to Claudio Berghenti, Paddy Breathnach, Randy Finch, Henry Dunn, Bethany Fiore, Jason Fogelson, Ruth Gallagher, Ed Kadysewski, Merle Lefkoff, Karin McCully, John McDermott, Peter McDermott, Kieran McEvoy, Liz Morrissey, Éanna Ó Lochlainn, Rob Walpole, and Feargal Whelan for their seemingly inexhaustible support, advice, and goodwill, and to Joseph O’Connor for his years of unflagging guidance, help, and encouragement.
At Akashic I thank Johanna Ingalls, Ibrahim Ahmad, Zach Pace, and of course Johnny Temple for his courtesy, editorial care, thoroughness, and risk-taking.
Underlying and yet above all, special thanks to my mother and late father who stood up for us, and to my beloved wife and most painstaking reader Lisa Diamond and our son Leo without whose patience, support, and love this book would never have come to completion.