The Brothers' Lot (17 page)

“And don’t let me catch you idling or I’ll be taking a knife to that fine hair of yours too!” she called after the figure of Sheila Barry as it disappeared through the door to the courtyard.

Sister Delia left the lye room and moved along the corridor past the scapular-making room. She made a mental note to herself that they needed to order more leather thongs from the boys’ reformatory in Dromlane.

“Ah, go ask me arse, ye twisted old bitch,” muttered Sheila as the door closed behind her. For a few brief seconds the cold of the courtyard came as a relief after the heat of the lye room. Sheila stood and relished the fleeting sensation of being neither too cold nor too hot. But the moment quickly passed and she felt the wind biting into her wet chapped hands. She held the kettle close, her arms barely meeting around its huge belly, and hurried to the pump in the opposite corner of the courtyard.

Sheila dropped the kettle at the foot of the pump and lined it up under the spigot, then blew on her hands and rubbed them together. She grabbed the cold handle of the pump, pulled it up, pushed it down, and it spat reluctantly into the kettle. Again she cranked the stiff handle and coaxed another paltry splutter.

“What you need, little Miss 82, is a nice ice bath to chill the cravings of your weak, corrupted flesh!” she whispered, mimicking Sister Delia for her own amusement.

The pump spat and sprayed her feet with icy water. “Fuck it!” she hissed. The water soaked through the thin canvas shoes the nuns had given her. “Probably sold me boots too, the fucking dried-up bitches.”

Sheila cranked the pump viciously as she remembered how Sister Delia had set on her from the very first day. She had been crying all the way from Cork in the bus after they had taken her little girl from her and told her to pack her things and leave the Sisters of Forbearance Fallen Mother and Child Home. No explanation. No news of her family and not a word from Declan. The nuns told her Declan had been sent away to the army and that the Sullivans had left Cork for good.

“The devil put an itch in yer knickers, did he? Well, we’ll soon knock that out of ye!” was the first thing Sister Delia had said to her. Sheila had never heard a nun speak like that before. When her breast milk had seeped through her dress, Sister Delia stood her up in front of the whole refectory and pointed it out: “Were you not a filthy slut, that milk would be to feed your infant. But instead it is a reminder of harlotry. Take that dress off!”

And she had made her do it. Sheila took off her dress and stood there shivering in her graying underwear while Sister Delia circled, pointing at the milk stains on her bodice and shouting about lust and sin and all the time slapping at the girl’s arms and legs with her big brown belt.

“Eighty-two! Hurry up! Don’t make me come over there or you’ll be sorry!” Sister Delia’s voice now echoed around the courtyard. She was standing there in the doorway of the lye room.

Fucking dried-up old fucking bitch! May she die roaring!
Sheila thought to herself and started again with the pump.

19

T
he stairs creaked deep into the surrounding silence as Brother Boland made his way to the oratory. As was his custom, he would go alone to the dark oratory and recite a decade of the rosary for the repose of his mother’s soul. Not that Brother Boland had any idea who his mother was, but it made her feel real to him. For the week since the centenary he had been saying an extra decade for Venerable Saorseach O’Rahilly.

Alone in the oratory he whispered the prayers through his trembling lips. He knew that the Virgin Mary would be able to make out what he was saying. Lost in the prayerful lip smack and clatter of his dentures, he did not hear the straining that softly, casually played and stretched itself in the rafters above him.

“Haymery fur gray lorbeweeiu dib, dib, dib …”

Slowly Brother Boland became aware of something approaching out of the distance behind his words. It was like an onrush down a long tunnel. There was a gathering, clenching tension that was suddenly all around him.

A soft cloud of sawdust and plaster flakes tickled his scalp just moments before the enormous light fixture fell from the ceiling and crashed heavily two pews behind where he was sitting.

“Dib, dib, dib, Mother of dib, dib, dib, God!”

Brother Boland dived for cover under the pew. There he cowered and listened to the soft crackle of plaster falling like snowflakes on the pews and floor around him. He looked at the gaping hole in the ceiling that the chandelier had left and then peered accusingly at the chandelier itself where it sprawled across two pews like some grotesque wrought-iron spider.

In the aftershock silence Brother Boland waited. Nothing more, it seemed, was going to happen. He untangled himself, got out from under the pew, and stood up stiffly. Just as he was having another look around the oratory, there was a tired wheezing sound and parts of the ceiling and the back wall came thundering down, showering him with wood, plaster, and a couple dozen Venerable Saorseach O’Rahilly miniatures.

Brother Boland fell to the floor and curled his arms over his head. Over his long life of misfortunes and clumsy accidents, this had become a vital reflex.

In the darkness of his mind, the Brother prayed to Venerable Saorseach O’Rahilly. The general gist of his prayer was:
I know the hymn says bend me to Your will but I hope me being killed by a falling ceiling is not part of Your will and that You help me survive this.

In seeming answer to his prayers the noise stopped. Brother Boland opened his eyes slowly and tentatively for fear that any sudden movement would cause further destruction. On the floor around him lay fragments of plaster, pieces of electrical wiring, hunks of rotten wooden beams, and, scattered among the detritus, pieces of Venerable Saorseach O’Rahilly. Brother Boland stared in horror at the tragically disfigured effigies of the Brothers’ founder. A wave of awe and terror rolled up from his stomach and pressed against the base of his throat. He looked sadly from one shard of O’Rahilly to the next as if commiserating with each of them.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw something glisten.

He lurched toward it and stared aghast. On the floor in front of him was the severed trunk of one of the O’Rahilly miniatures. It was like all the others except that this one was bleeding copiously where it had been broken. Brother Boland looked heavenward in awe and glimpsed a few more flakes of paint drifting down from the ceiling. As they floated and turned, he saw them transform into perfect miniature communion hosts. A lightning flash of spiritual revelation engulfed him and before he knew what was happening he was standing at the head of the stairs, clutching the shattered figurine, his voice echoing shrilly through the quietness of the monastery: “It’s a miracle! It’s a miracle! It’s a miracle! The second miracle of Venerable Saorseach O’Rahilly!”

From the common room below he could hear the muted sounds of the ten o’clock news on the radio. Its quotidian normality clashed horribly with the laden silence oozing out of the oratory. Gathering up the hem of his cassock in his empty left hand, he propelled himself down the stairs with a clattering of slippers on the polished steps.

“It’s a miracle! It’s a miracle! It’s a miracle!”

20

F
ather Martin Mulvey, S.J., paused in his reading and closed his eyes. The Adagietto of Mahler’s Fifth gripped him and he surrendered himself to its slow, tragic swelling. It brought to his mind’s eye the paintings of El Greco he had seen when he traveled to Toledo after his ordination almost thirty years before. The strings soared and glided and he felt his eyes strain upward in their sockets as they followed the music. Behind the rich fabric of sound emerged a distant, insistent discordance, at first barely there, but once noticed, more evident and disruptive with each passing second.

“Bloody phone!” huffed Father Mulvey, and stood up suddenly.
The Maltese Falcon
fell out of his lap onto the floor as he hurried out to the hall.

“2402,” he said gruffly into the receiver. “Ah yes, good evening, Father Sheehan,” he continued, his voice gliding into a more respectful lilt.

He listened intently and his face darkened, not with fear but with the soot of determination accrued from the almost forgotten flame of passion that now flared up anew within him. This was what he had been waiting for all his life. This was it. This had to be it.

After twenty years of being dragged out to the middle of nowhere in the small hours of the morning to look at two-headed calves; afternoons drinking stewed tea while he listened to old women tell him how they had lost their keys only to find them in their sleeve or handbag after praying to Saint Anthony; numerous tortuous examinations and cross-examinations of eye witnesses to apparitions who would turn out to have been on a poteen binge for the best part of a week before the supposed apparition, this finally sounded like a real chance. No more sitting in drafty country churches waiting for statues to weep. No more perfunctory investigations of supposed Immaculate Conceptions before mother and child were bundled off to the nearest Jezebel Laundry and Herod’s Orphanage respectively. This was the one. This was the one that would pluck him out of obscurity and take him to Rome to form part of the beatification process of Venerable Saorseach O’Rahilly. Father Mulvey did not hold the Brothers of Godly Coercion in great esteem but a miracle was a miracle, no matter where it came from.

“I’ll be over there in a flash, Father,” he told Sheehan, and dashed upstairs to get his boots. He bounded down the stairs and flailed around in the hallstand drawer looking for his bicycle clips. Despairing of finding them, he tucked his pants into his socks as best he could and ran out the front door, cramming his hat onto his head as he went.

“Father Mulvey, S.J., Diocesan Investigator,” announced Mulvey portentously as he held open his wallet with his identification.

“Ah, Father, wasn’t it very good of you to come all the way over here on this cold night now,” said Brother Loughlin as he ushered Mulvey into his office.

“When the Bishop calls Father Sheehan and I get the call, there’s no time to waste.”

“Sit down, won’t you, Father.”

“You know what, Brother, to be honest, I think I’d like to get right to work. If I could see the scene of the, uhm, happening and the, uhm, subject or witness?”

“Of course, Father, how silly of me to be thinking you’d be having time for a ball of malt.”

Father Mulvey arched his eyebrows. “Maybe later,” he said without conviction, noting both the obvious relish with which Brother Loughlin talked of the ball of malt and the gold total abstinence Pioneer pin that glinted prominently in his lapel.

Brother Loughlin stood awkwardly for a few moments. He did not at all like the way this Jesuit had refused to have a drink with him, as if it somehow put Mulvey at a moral advantage.

“Shall we go then, Brother? It was, after all, you who called me in. It is not my miracle,” said Father Mulvey sternly.

“Very well,” replied Brother Loughlin, and held the door of the office open with overstated ceremony and politeness. Father Mulvey ignored this display of childishness.

“The more time that elapses between the happening and the investigation, the more the subject’s impressions are likely to fade. You wouldn’t want that to happen, would you now, Brother?”

Loughlin took this mix of hint and threat and used it to power up his legs. He waddled down the corridor at top speed in front of Father Mulvey.

Inside the door of the monastery they were met by a knot of Brothers who all set upon the investigator like a pack of starving dogs.

“How long do you think it will take, Father?”

“Have you told the Holy Father yet?”

“Don’t be stupid, it’s already after bedtime in Rome!”

“Is the Bishop here?”

“Don’t call me stupid!”

“I have more miracles I can show you! Do you remember I wrote to you about the time Venerable Saorseach gave me the name of that horse when I didn’t have enough money for me sister’s birthday present?”

“Will we be able to get Saorseach miraculous medals when he’s made Blessed?”

“Have you ever seen a statue bleed before?”

“Brothers! Please leave Father Mulvey in peace to conduct his work,” shouted Brother Loughlin above the din. “You will know anything that happens as soon as we do. Now stay down here out of the way.”

He opened a path through the babbling Brothers and ushered Father Mulvey through.

“It’s just up the stairs on your left, Father,” Brother Loughlin explained, then turned on the Brothers in a menacing undertone: “That is the last time you uncultured goms are going to disgrace me in front of someone like that! Do you hear?”

The oratory smelt like a long-abandoned house. The mix of damp plaster and rotten wood tickled the back of Father Mulvey’s throat. He stood on the threshold and surveyed the scene carefully.

“It was just over here that …” started Brother Loughlin as he stepped into the room before feeling Father Mulvey’s restraining arm across his chest.

“Please, Brother, do me a favor, don’t go in there. I don’t want anything disturbed,” rapped Mulvey.

Brother Loughlin stood still, surprised as much by the authority in the priest’s voice as by the unexpected strength of his wiry arm.

“Let’s just keep the scene as intact as we can, okay?” Father Mulvey pulled on his surgical gloves and moved carefully into the oratory. From his raincoat pocket he withdrew his bicycle lamp and shone it up into the hole in the ceiling. Even with all the lights in the oratory except the fallen one still working, this remarkable bicycle lamp threw great illumination on the joists and wires exposed by the collapse. Brother Loughlin wondered whether such lamps were special issue to all Jesuits or just to Diocesan Investigators.

“Looks like a nice clean job,” observed Father Mulvey.

“What do you mean by
clean job
? Are you insinuating that someone did this deliberately?” spluttered Brother Loughlin.

“No, no. That’s a term we use in the trade for a scene that doesn’t show any outside tampering. What I think you have here, Brother, is a pretty genuine ceiling collapse. Bona fide. That’s always good. It gets hard to pin anything on the Lord if there are hammers and crowbars lying around the scene.