The Brothers' Lot - Kevin Holohan [84]
Brendan looked around at the Brothers, their faces drawn and empty-looking in the dim light. These were his brother Matthew’s companions. These were the empty souls with whom he had shared his last sixty years.
Loughlin walked to the front of the oratory, took his place at the head of the coffin, and drew his rosary beads from his pocket. Immediately the oratory was filled with the reciprocal clacking and rattling of the Brothers’ beads.
Brendan opened the time-softened leather pouch that contained his First Communion beads and draped them from his hands in a prayerful fashion. He focused on the candle flame nearest him and drifted into the murmur around him. He shivered suddenly and Brother Loughlin’s hand on his shoulder brought him back to the here and now of Matthew’s funeral.
“If you would like to take your leave of, ahem …” stumbled Loughlin.
Brendan stood up and moved to the side of the coffin. He blessed himself and stared down at the inert features of his dead brother. He was shocked by how much yet how little his brother’s face had changed. It looked like the face of the sixteen-year-old boy he had known with the lines of sixty years carved onto it by some amateur hand. He racked his brains for something to say or think or some last thought to impart to his brother, but nothing came, just a hazy sense of regret for a life thwarted and wasted. He blessed himself again and sat down heavily.
Brother Loughlin moved silently to the side of the coffin, tapped Brother Kennedy’s cold forehead three times with the small liturgical lead hammer, and then took the candles from the holders and passed them out: one to Brother Mulligan, one to Brother Boland, and one to Brendan Kennedy. Taking the last one himself, he led the way out of the oratory down the stairs to the garden.
“This is the weirdest job I’ve ever had. I didn’t know it was part of janitoring. This is a right pain in the arse,” grumbled McRae.
“Shut up and help,” hissed Dermot McDermott as they waited on the landing above the oratory for the last of the Brothers to move down the stairs. “Come on now.”
McDermott led the way to the oratory and began maneuvering the trolley toward the door. “Open the fire escape door for me,” he said.
“The two of us are going to get that down the stairs? You must be joking!” protested McRae.
“No. No. We just leave it at the top of the fire escape. The Brothers will take it down to the garden. It’s part of their thing. That’s what I was told and that’s all I know.”
“Creepy, that’s what it is, this lugging dead bodies around in the middle of the night.”
“Just get the door for me, can’t you!”
McRae held the door open while McDermott positioned the coffin trolley on the metal landing of the fire escape and stepped back in, closing the heavy door softly.
* * *
Brendan Kennedy stared blankly at Brother Loughlin, unable to believe what he had just heard. “Come again?” he said icily.
“… To defray some of the funeral costs. I hate to ask, but you know we are not a wealthy congregation. Of course, you also get this.” Brother Loughlin held out the small liturgical lead hammer.
Brendan Kennedy’s face paled with rage: “Get away with you and take that creepy thing away from me! The funeral was all paid for up front when Matthew joined! Well do I remember my poor sainted father, God be good to him, lamenting that he had to fork out eighteen shillings for a shroud and a box for his perfectly healthy sixteen-year-old son. Don’t come the poor mouth with me, Loughlin! It was all paid for fair and square and well you know it!”
Leaving a stunned Brother Loughlin standing on the platform, Brendan Kennedy climbed into the three a.m. mail train and took a seat on the far side where he wouldn’t have to look at the man. After witnessing his only brother being perfunctorily buried in an unmarked grave in the monastery garden at midnight while his cassock, sandals, and personal possessions were ritually burned, Brendan had had quite enough of the Order of the Brothers of Godly Coercion.
Had he the courage