The Brothers' Lot - Kevin Holohan [47]
Finbar sat quietly two rows in front of Scully and the others and tried desperately to stay awake.
The cast for the Venerable Saorseach O’Rahilly pageant was mostly made up of conscripts. For three weeks they had been kept back after school for rehearsal. Among the most misguided pieces of press-ganged casting was Smalley Mullen in the role of Saorseach O’Rahilly’s father, Cathal.
As did everyone, Smalley laboriously read his lines from pieces of cardboard that Brother Boland held up in the wings, but it was the boy’s high-pitched voice that really topped it.
“Do not dare contradict me, boy! You will be taking over this business when I am gone so you must learn to shoulder the burden of responsibility!” he squeaked at Kelly, a gargantuan third year playing Saorseach, who towered over him.
“I want to be my own man! I want to see the world!” boomed Kelly, and stormed offstage and straight into the scenery for the forthcoming parish production of An Bealach Solais, or The Way of Light, a patriotic and devotional operetta in Irish composed by Michael Costigan, a local musician and patriot.
The high point of the life of Saorseach, if you really had to choose one, was the temptation scene. Consumed by despair and drink, the young dissolute Saorseach wandered the streets of Dublin to be assailed by drunken prostitutes. Had it been a less well-known scene the Brothers would gladly have cut it completely, but it was pivotal and had been cited often in the beatification process so it could not be left out.
The harlots, three third years dressed in Mrs. McCurtin’s old kitchen clothes, would not have tempted even the most starved lothario.
“Get away from me, ye fallen women! Do not flaunt your shamelessness in my presence! Tempt me not with your sin!” bellowed Kelly, and flounced offstage, this time tripping and breaking the nose of Turlough Halpin, who was the only enthusiastic volunteer in the whole production and was playing the Pope.
Up and down the aisles the Brothers and lay teachers patrolled ceaselessly. No irreverence would be tolerated on this uplifting day.
The pageant ground on and on, and it was with a feeling of deep despair that Finbar opened his eyes to see that they were still only coming up to the stick fight scene. He watched lazily as the clandestine hurling match O’Rahilly had attended in Cahirdorras degenerated into a stick fight disputing a late foul that then amplified out to include some atavistic local land disputes.
In his drunken state (much played down in the Brothers’ rendition), O’Rahilly wandered straight into the melee to be dealt a haymaker of a blow to the head.
The stick fight abated and the locals, not recognizing the unconscious O’Rahilly, left him for dead and headed off to the local public house to continue their disputations in a more sociable manner.
O’Rahilly lay there poleaxed while Brother Cox led the choir of first years whose balls had not yet dropped through a castrato chorus supposed to invoke imminent divine revelation. After the shrieking faded, nothing happened. When what might have been a pregnant pause clearly became an unbearable delay, Brother Cox hissed “Get up out of that, Kelly!” loud enough that it carried through the enforced silence of the hall.
Kelly melodramatically rose to his feet and stumbled around holding his head. From the wings came the squeaking of small wheels as Brother Tobin, implausibly dressed as God in a white sheet, was wheeled out on one of Mrs. McCurtin’s tea trolleys.
“Saorseach, you must mend your ways! You have strayed from the path of righteousness!”
Saorseach fell on his knees before his precariously balanced God.
“What must I do, oh Lord? Show me the way.”
“You must abjure your drunkenness and vice and dedicate yourself to steering the young boys of Ireland onto the path of goodness,