The Brothers' Lot - Kevin Holohan [112]
“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