The Brothers' Lot - Kevin Holohan [31]
“And?” asked Kennedy with a razor edge in his voice. “You will translate the first sentence as far as transissent.”
McDonagh peered at the board. Stalling desperately, he pointed at the top line: “Is that comprures?”
“Where, boy?”
“The fourth word, Brother.”
“No, that is complures.”
“Ah, right,” mused McDonagh.
“Well? We don’t have all day.”
McDonagh peered at the board and the letters danced incomprehensibly in front of him. He thought hard and pointed at some words as if breaking down the phrase into the most translatable units. “Hibernian days came complaining—”
“Out to the line, you clown!” barked Brother Kennedy.
McDonagh put the most hurt expression imaginable on his face and walked, head down, out to the line.
“Mr., ehm, let me see, Mr. Lynch then.”
Lynch stared at the blackboard as if it had just fallen flaming from the sky. “As the god of the Hibernians—”
“Out to the line, you ignorant guttersnipe!”
Lynch strode eagerly out to the line and stood at attention beside McDonagh.
“Mr., ehm, Sullivan.”
Finbar stood up. He knew this; this was easy. He could still picture it on the page with the engraving of those mountains and Declan’s stupid attempts at translation written in the margins. He knew the moment he stood up he was not going to put himself in the way of a beating just to keep company with McDonagh and Lynch. He could see already that Brother Kennedy was heading for bright purple boiling point. The rest of them already had him labeled as a sap, and getting himself leathered in PE hadn’t done him any good.
“When several days had elapsed in winter quarters,” he said slowly and confidently, then sat down.
Without comment Brother Kennedy scribbled the translation below the text. “Copy!” he shouted.
The boys copied down the translation. For all they knew, complures meant winter, but they at least had a translation.
“Continue, Mr., ehm, Ferrara.”
Ferrara stood up and scratched his head.
“Come on, boy! The language of your forefathers,” sneered Brother Kennedy.
Ferrara scratched his head more vigorously and began to blink repeatedly.
“Iussisset? What is it, Mr. Ferrara? It’s like trying to get blood out of a turnip!”
“Jesus said?” hazarded Ferrara.
“God grant me strength! Out to the line, you uneducated balooba!” Brother Kennedy’s face was bright red and beads of sweat were beginning to twinkle on his scalp.
By the time Brother Kennedy got to ex ea parte vici, almost half of the class were out on the line and he himself was approaching apoplectic. Scully had saved himself by having actually recognized a couple of words, Mullen had taken Finbar’s whispered prompt, and Bradshaw, who had repeated his Inter Cert three times, knew the translation by heart and took a good guess at which bit he should regurgitate.
When Brother Kennedy called on O’Connor, the boy stood up, looked at the board, and walked straight out to the line with a hopeless shrug of his shoulders.
The boredom of standing on the line was starting to take its toll on Lynch. “Go on, Macker, faint. Go on!” he whispered.
“Nah, it’s too early,” answered McDonagh.
Just in time, Brother Boland’s bell rang out the end of class and morning break.
“You will all write out that passage ten times for punishment!” shouted Kennedy, and he leathered each boy once on his way out the door.
Finbar fled down the stairs with the throng. He reached the yard and watched all the boys break into little groups like spilled mercury. He moved to the edge of the small yard and looked across the big yard and noticed the seething cluster of bodies beside the grotto of Our Lady of Indefinite Duration.
In the granite wall beside the grotto there was a hatch two feet tall and three feet wide. It was so high off the ground that the smaller boys had to stand on their tiptoes just to get their eyes at the level of the countertop. Larger boys took hold of one the metal bars that ran horizontally across the opening.