The Brothers' Lot (12 page)

“Time’s a very quare thing all the same,” mused Lar.

“Like as the waves hasten toward the pebbled shore, so do our moments hasten to their end,” intoned Con.

“Ah, the bard. Ye can’t beat the bard.”

“Indeed and you can’t, Lar. Though there are some of Wyatt’s lyrics I’m quite partial to. They have a Petrarchan quality to them. Very sophisticated for their time.”

“I can’t say as I’ve ever had much time for Wyatt.”

“Will you two just shut up!” barked Matt.

The second hand inched toward ten.

“Eight, seven, six, five, four …” counted Lar and Con softly together. The clock struck nine o’clock and the bell pealed out.

“There ye are now!” smiled Matt. But his fleeting triumph was cut short by the unexpected slowing, stuttering, and stopping of the bell.

Brother Loughlin glowered at Matt and then at the clock. It was still running but he could see that the second hand was slowing down. Moments later it jerked slightly and then came to rest.

“What the … ?” Matt climbed back up and inspected the clock. “This is completely destroyed. Brand-new clock. Nothing wrong with the wires and there’s nothing wrong with the bell. And now the whole thing is seized up. I don’t know what’s wrong with this at all. I’ll have to take it back to the workshop and have one of the clock lads look it over. That’s all I can do. Don’t hook ANYTHING up to those wires.”

“Horologists, they’re called,” noted Lar.

Matt hastily wrote the docket, shoved it into Brother Loughlin’s unwilling hand, grabbed his tools, and walked back toward the truck.

“What about this?” called Brother Loughlin, holding up the first stricken clock.

“Ah no, afraid we don’t do disposal,” answered Con. “Good day to you now, Brother.”

“Stay out of harm’s way now, Brother.”

Lar and Con stood side by side, smiled, and tipped their caps to Brother Loughlin before turning to follow Matt.

“Brother Boland! Brother Boland! Have McDermott get rid of that old clock immediately! You will still be ringing the handbell for classes!” Brother Loughlin shouted, then strode off to his office.

Brian Egan stood in front of Mr. Pollock, hopelessly trying to compose a Gaelic explanation of his lateness for two interminable, excruciating minutes before the teacher relented and told him to sit down.

Everyone looked but no one could make eye contact with Egan. He simply stared vacantly ahead.

Scully watched carefully. Something about Egan was making him uncomfortable: something menacingly missing about the boy stood over him, judge and jury, reminding him that he had set Egan up.

“Yeauw, Ego, how’s it going?” whispered Scully at the first opportunity.

Egan did not move. No acknowledgment. This was not the same Egan who only a few days ago would have jumped with excitement at being spoken to by any of Scully’s gang. Something had shifted here but Scully could not be sure what.

“Mr. McDonagh, Mr. Bradshaw, go to Brother Loughlin’s office. As for the rest of you, listen carefully and you might learn something for a change. In the old days, the monks of Ireland would sit alone in stone huts and compose hundreds of staves of flawless mellifluous verse in their heads that they would then recite from memory. In honor of this great tradition you will now open your books at page one hundred and thirteen and learn by heart the first four verses of ‘Caoineadh Art Uí Laoghaire.’”

Bradshaw and McDonagh shuffled out and the rest paged through their poetry books.

Mr. Pollock sat at the high desk and cleaned his fountain pen while the boys made half-hearted attempts to learn the verses. It did not help in the least that they had never before clapped eyes on said verses and they might as well have been trying to memorize a gangrene remedy in Old Norse. By the time Mr. Pollock had successfully overhauled his fountain pen, Brother Boland’s bell rang and there was no time to examine the memorizing.

“Write out the first four verses five times for your homework and I will examine you on them tomorrow.”

Brother Loughlin pushed up the window and leaned his elbows on the outside sill. He cradled his hands against the wind, lit a cigarette, and looked down on the yard below with satisfaction. He listened behind him to the echoey dripping of leaky cisterns and the odd hissing of the trough-like urinal. From up here on the third floor he had a perfect view of the yard below. He farted loudly into the copious folds of his cassock and chuckled contentedly to himself.

Before he had even begun to leather them, he’d reduced them to the edge of tears. He knew these hard chaws. All you had to do with most of them was start in on how little their parents loved them and how they would be better off if there was another decent war where they could be of some use and die in the trenches. That would usually get the waterworks going. It was about pinpointing their vulnerable spots, and they all had them, even the hardest of the little bastards.

He watched the yard below patiently. As soon as he saw them appear round the corner straining under the weight of Mr. Laverty’s little bubble car, he reached down and took the copper megaphone from the floor. He leaned as far out the window as his girth allowed.

“All boys! All boys! This is Brother Loughlin! You will all take note of what is occurring in the yard below. All boys will form orderly viewing lines at the windows. Let this be an example to all of you who might consider blackguarding, and remember: my arm is long, my vengeance is total, and I will act when the time is meet!”

His voice echoed around the yard and heads began to appear at the windows. He smiled to himself and lit another cigarette off his first and drank in the spectacle below.

Slater, McDonagh, and Bradshaw struggled into the middle of the yard with Laverty’s tiny three-wheeler and set it down. Wearing only their underpants, they shivered against the cold wind and walked gingerly on the concrete. McDonagh was the first one to notice all the faces at the windows. He cowered and shrank against the side of the car. The others followed his glance and saw the serried faces, some laughing, some blank, some sneering. Bradshaw attempted to pass it off as if he didn’t care and Slater looked down at his gray-white underpants and pressed his knees together.

“Get the buckets, Mr. Bradshaw! And no dawdling!” bellowed Brother Loughlin.

Bradshaw ran toward the monastery and emerged carrying two metal buckets of water. Reluctantly the boys took the cloths from the buckets and painfully began to wash Laverty’s car.

“Pay special attention to the windows and the door handle!” shouted Brother Loughlin.

Bradshaw felt the cold of the water bite into the leathered throbbing in his hands. Slater splashed some of the freezing water on his feet and tried hard not to flinch. McDonagh wrung as much of the water as he could out of his cloth and wiped the back of the car.

“More water, Mr. McDonagh, or I’ll make you do it again!”

After fifteen minutes the car was clean and the boys soaked, cold, and humiliated.

“You may now recite at the top of your voices a heartfelt Act of Contrition, return the car to its place, and then go back to your classes!” cried Brother Loughlin triumphantly. “Let this be an example to the rest of you! Back to your studies!”

“I confess to Almighty God and to you, my brothers and sisters …” shouted McDonagh, Slater, and Bradshaw as they struggled out of the yard with the car, their hands barely able to keep hold of it. The faces gradually moved away from the windows. Brother Loughlin watched the boys stumble, shiver, and lurch and took heart. He could still do it. He could still take young boys and make them look small to themselves and their peers. He could still break the little bastards.

From the third year class where he was teaching, Laverty caught sight of Brother Loughlin’s smug, self-satisfied face just before it disappeared back into the toilet in a cloud of cigarette smoke. He turned to see the stony faces of the class he now had to try to teach.

Before he knew it, he had opened his mouth and blurted out: “The bastard never asked me! This wasn’t my idea!” The boys stared back at him in stunned admiration.

Brother Boland was in the refectory polishing his handbell when he felt it. It was like a sudden increase in atmospheric pressure. He fearfully laid the bell back on the table and set his polishing cloth over it. He closed his eyes and tuned his other senses to the frequency of the building. “It’s getting worse!” he blurted out.

“What are you doing? Frightened the life out of me!” exclaimed Brother Cox as he spluttered tea all over himself.

“Have you lost your mind, Brother Boland?” asked Brother Walsh.

Brother Boland moved around the room feeling the walls and testing the windows as he spoke: “It’s there! More present. It’s tightening!”

“Will you calm down or I’ll have to get Brother Loughlin. This is no way to behave,” cautioned Brother Walsh.

“You’d want to watch these outbursts, Brother Boland. You know Brother Loughlin already thinks you might be a candidate for the attic,” added Brother Cox.

Brother Boland stood rigidly and stared from Cox to Walsh. “Useless! Nothing but abuse!” he snapped, before rushing out and slamming the door behind him.

“Awake! Awake! Alarum! Éistigí! Éistigí! Alea iacta est! The time is upon us! There is a hosting!”

Brother Boland darted like some frantic butterfly along the top corridor of the monastery. This was where the moribund retired Brothers lived. It was a fearful place and Brother Boland could not even remember who lived up here. The elder Brothers were mostly bedridden or mad, and were not allowed to come to the refectory or to attend mass. They received communion every morning from Father Flynn who came after he celebrated mass for the other Brothers in the oratory. He and Widower Frawley, who brought them their food and changed their chamber pots, were the only ones who ever had regular contact with them.

The air of the place terrified Brother Boland. It smelt of slow death. It was where they put the Brothers who were too far gone to do odd jobs like he did but were not yet dead enough to bury. Brother Boland dreaded ever coming up here, yet the insolent indifference of the younger Brothers had left him no alternative than to stir the ancients.

“Alarum! Alarum!” he shouted as he skittered along the corridor pounding on the cell doors. He reached the dead end of the corridor and leaned exhaustedly against the wall to catch his breath.

From behind the doors arose a doleful moaning.

“Right then, sit down all of you. I hope you have learnt something from that,” barked Brother Kennedy, and started to take his Latin books out of his satchel.

He glanced down at the roll book. “Mr. Egan, you will clean the blackboard.”

“He’s outside talking to Mr. Murphy.”

“He is, is he? Mr. Whitehall then.”

Whitehall, who had based his whole school career thus far on never being noticed, went bright red and then green in the face. He walked wraithlike to the top of the class and clumsily cleaned the board.

“Take out your lines!”

Brother Kennedy started to work his way round the class inspecting the lines of Caesar’s
Gallic Wars
he had set them. He cast his expert eye over each copybook, quickly counting the repetitions, looking for indications of pens being tied together, variances in handwriting that might indicate someone else’s work, failure to follow the prescribed color scheme for alternate words, or any other infraction that should merit a beating. Before moving on he scrawled his name across every page. He was wise to the practice of passing lines across the class to those who had not done them.

“Come on, boy! Get it out!”

He stood over Ferrara menacingly while the boy rummaged in his bag.

“Well, boy?”

“I can’t find—”

Brother Kennedy grabbed him by the ear: “Out to the line!” He moved on down the row of desks, picked up Farrelly’s copy, and scrutinized it. He could see that there was nothing wrong with it but he enjoyed seeing the little pup sweat.

Brother Loughlin tripped up the stairs with all the lightness that extreme self-satisfaction could possibly lend to his sinister bulk. Making the little brats wash the car had been a brainwave. After his leather had had such a strenuous morning, he’d decided to give it a good rub of the mink oil he kept in his cell.

“Easy! Easy! You’ll kill me!”

“Who took me sandals?”

“The young lad here says there’s trouble!”

“I’ll trouble you!”

“Remember The Siege of Augh Na Breeeeeeeeeeeeee!”

What in God’s name … ?
wondered Brother Loughlin, but got no further before his thoughts were driven out by a crashing and bumping and then the appearance of some ancient figure in a bath chair bouncing down the stairs at him. In a bright green flash of pain, he found himself back at the bottom of the staircase with his left arm wedged between the spokes of one of the chair’s wheels.

“What in the name of God is this?” shouted Brother Loughlin at the supine shape that lay motionless in the hallway after being flung from its chair.

Brother Loughlin wrested his arm out of the spokes and with great effort rose to his feet. The hem of his cassock was torn but otherwise he seemed to have escaped unscathed.

“It was young McGovern! I saw him. Deliberately let go of me chair!” murmured the shape on the ground.

“What are you talking about? What happened to you?”

The figure turned its face toward Brother Loughlin and gave him the full benefit of its ancientness. Brother Loughlin staggered back as though shoved by some spectral arm. A cadaverous skull loosely draped in a yellow parchment of skin stared at him with its one bloodshot eye. The toothless mouth opened slowly with no result other than the stretching of tiny lines of spittle between lips that seemed to be the only threads of life holding the head together.

“Who are you?” Brother Loughlin asked from the back of his suddenly dry throat.

“Brother Galvin. I think. And who the feck are you?”

Before Brother Loughlin could gather his wits, he heard a noise behind him on the stairs. He turned around to see Boland in front of a ragtag of more ancient wrecks.