At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill [158]
“It was Christmas Day, Brother when I—” He was crying. “It was on Christmas Day, Brother,” he cried.
“Tears there are of our doing and all that is mortal moves the heart.”
“Whose heart?”
Brother Polycarp lifted a finger from the handle of his umbrella and pointed it upward, indicating beyond the tented canvas. “She’s there, Jim.”
“I pray to Her,” Jim said. “But She doesn’t hear. Will you pray to Her for me, Brother Polycarp?”
“She hears you well enough. All of us She hears. Our every cry moves Her heart to breaking.” It was true. She heard them all. “Think of Her pain, Jim, to hear our woes told and retold. It is the pain of a mother for her child that is sickening.”
“I am sick, Brother,” said Jim.
“You have a fever,” said Brother Polycarp mundanely.
“I think I most probably do.”
“But they’re gone, the others. Gone, or dead, or fast asleep. She alone remains, seeing and hearing and suffering our pain. Think of the anguish She must suffer, Jim, abandoned and powerless to help. Is it any wonder it rains so? She was made to be our intercessor, Jim, but there’s none remains with whom to intercede.”
It was true. It did rain so.
“She is the vessel of life with no water in it,” the brother said. “The bottle without the whiskey.”
The ball landed in Jim’s hands and he was running with it, running with all his legs, and his ten hearts thumped and his three heads swam. In a moment of brilliant lucidity he knew why he never had trusted Brother Polycarp. When other brothers had put their hands between his legs he had never really minded. Only Brother Polycarp had put his hand round his neck. The ambiguity of that gesture had involved him in it, where the groping had left him untouched.
In lovely toil he neared the lofty goal. Try, they called. But he had tried and failed. A whistle blew. Fellows were cheering.
He stood astride the chalk line while the angled rain him keenly struck. His lank hair glued to his forehead. His forehead was burning. He shivered, but he felt the shivers as an elsewhere. A brother, looking curiously small and thin without his soutane on, dug his heel in the turf. He blew his whistle again and pointed at the kerf he had made in the ground. How grey was everything. The sheeting rain was frosted glass through which he viewed the world. He made out the dual spires of St. Joseph’s, a solid rain where all else fell. So light he felt and dizzy. Waves washed over him. He heard the calls of gulls. Insufferably hot.
His hand came out of the rain. He felt the crawl of it round his neck. At last it yanked and the chain came free. It seemed to shine before him, the dangling thing, like half a sun.
“Brother, Brother! It’s Mack, Brother! He’s fallen!”
He woke briefly in a darkened room whose strange furniture was crooked and mournful. Then a tall sheeny figure came in and pulled the curtains and the sash window, and all the crooked mournfulness flew out. He heard his father say, “Is that the modern way?” and he felt the breeze from the window, before his eyes closed in sleep again.
The next time he woke, his father was at the washstand. His braces hung down, his shoulders moved inside his vest. Jim could see his face in the mirror, comically white, and he watched fascinated the grins and grimaces he made, becoming and unbecoming himself. The room smelt of pomade. He was in his father’s bed. They must have brought him here to be out of the way. His father’s mouth formed a dark oval.
“Ho ho ho! Is that an eye I see? Is that two eyes I see?”
“Hello, Da,” said Jim.
“Ho ho ho!” said his father again. He was at the door calling to Aunt Sawney and dully he heard Aunt Sawney shishing him back and that the boy wasn’t out of it yet. His father came over to the bed, patting his leg in excitement. He made an