The Brothers' Lot - Kevin Holohan [67]
“Yeah, that was gas,” said Finbar
“Come here, did you hear what happened to Maher after they took him away?” asked Lynch suddenly.
“Attracta Maher told Imelda the law came to the house with a priest and a court order and told Mrs. Maher he was sent to Drumgloom for attacking that priest at the O’Rahilly mass,” said Scully. “Imelda is me sister,” he explained to Finbar.
“She’s a beaut!” beamed McDonagh.
“Shut up! She wouldn’t touch you with a barge pole,” said Scully.
“Maher never touched that priest!” said Finbar.
“That’s what you say. You’re not Father Fury and Brother Loughlin, are you? It’s what those fuckers say that counts,” muttered Scully.
“Drumgloom. Fuck!” said Lynch quietly. “They’ll eat him alive.”
“What’s Drumgloom?” asked Finbar.
“Industrial school in Navan. The worst. Like a reformatory only worse,” McDonagh informed him. “Some young fellah from Drimnagh hung himself there the year before last. Anto Rourke, who was in first year with us, got five years there for mitching off school. The Brothers there are real bastards. Much worse than these fuckers here. Most of them get transferred there out of schools like this for being too vicious. If Kennedy wasn’t still so sick, he’d probably be there by now.”
“Jaysus!” Finbar did not know Drumgloom but the words industrial school chilled him to the marrow. Boys in Cork had been sent away to the Oblates of the Impervious Heart of Herod for years just for throwing muckballs at the railway bridge.
“Yeah,” concurred McDonagh in a momentary slide into seriousness.
A cold silence descended on the boys and through it came the distant sound of the bell announcing the end of small break.
“Deadly! Latin next. Free class,” declared McDonagh gleefully.
“Gift!” added Lynch, his mind already racing with new ideas of what to do with the hinge he had removed from the lid of his desk.
“Yayyyy!” cheered McDonagh when Brother Mulligan shuffled in and closed the door. So far the coverage for Brother Kennedy while he recuperated from his heart attack had been numerous talks on the evils of drink from Father Flynn; Brother Loughlin repeatedly setting them bits of long division to do while he smoked and farted out in the corridor and periodically came in to leather someone at random; and endless classes of Larry Skelly telling them they should all become bread-van drivers and letting them do their homework while he read the horse-racing page of the Morning Herald. This promised to be another easy doss.
A free class with Brother Mulligan was always a bit of a giggle. First, he made everyone copy down the old Gaelic alphabet from the blackboard. The delicate curves of the Gaelic scribe were never designed to be reproduced using two-penny nib pens that dug and bit the coarse paper like rakes on wet grass. That invariably led to the amusing spectacle of Brother Mulligan correcting the copies and trying to hurt people with his leathering.
When the calligraphic tutoring had run its course, Brother Mulligan would perform his favorite party trick. He would pick up a piece of chalk in his shaky hand, hold it over the blackboard for a few seconds while he tensed and braced himself, and then, with a superhuman effort, he would channel all his shakes and quivers into one sudden flourish and leave behind on the blackboard a perfect circle. This ability genuinely impressed the boys, though there were rumors abroad that being able to draw a perfect freehand circle like that was a sign of complete madness.
Once the entertainment was over, Brother Mulligan would launch into what he saw as the vital lesson for survival in an ever-changing and puzzling world, one that could never be repeated too often: “What are the three things we must always be on the watch for if we are to keep clear of Protestants? How do we spot them?”
The boys had been through this dozens of times but none of them