After what seemed a long time pushing the doorbell and with a growing impatience on the part of Mr. Regan, the door at last creaked open like in some horror movie. I was not too far off the mark as a very strange looking man opened the door. He looked about six feet tall with his top false teeth dropping slightly. Left over dinner feces stained the breast of his uniform and he was completely dressed in black, save for the white dog collar around his neck. A giant cross hung from beads that dangled from his leather waistband, and alongside that was a thick leather strap tucked in its folds. He looked about forty, balding, with a manic look in his eyes and he spoke with a stutter. His bottom row of teeth were dark yellow, stewed over the years by the pipe still smoking in his hand. His name was Brother Gaynor. It sounded paternal and as paternal as this man would get for there was little that gave it away to tell you that you were standing in front of a madman.
As Michael and I looked up at him, we both had a sinking feeling. He led the three of us inside the building, which was in no discernible way unlike the nun's reception area that we had just come from. He left us in the dining room of the Christian Brothers. As Mr.
Regan left our company, Michael and I waited and wondered, staying in the moment with the flow of events as most children do. We even had the presence of mind to scoff a few sweets along with a few biscuits that were decorating the supper table in front of us. The head Brother of the reformatory arrived, Brother Egan. He was a short, fat, fiftyish, little man with ruddy cheeks and a jovial way about him. It turned out that there was not enough room in the dormitories for us which was already housing two hundred plus boys, so that night he led us down to the school infirmary hoping to find a bed alongside the sick boys who were laid up there. Egan knocked on the entrance door, and then not waiting for an answer, left us alone for several long minutes while he went off into the night with Gaynor Suddenly, a fat, buxom woman stood before us. In the moonlight, to Michael and me, this middle-aged woman with a fishnet over her head and with a broom in her hand held like a weapon was the wicked witch herself. We froze in terror.
"What are you doing here?" She bellowed at her seven and eight year old imagined rapists, and hard men. Michael and I huddled together and held hands, locked in shock.
"Up against the wall," she boomed, as she prodded us with her pretend rifle. Left there in silence, both of us faced concrete.
Long moments ticked by until Brother Egan arrived, and as the sight of captor and captives greeted him, he fell about laughing. Our jailer looked at him with some irritation.
When the confusion was finally cleared up, Brother Egan left us in her good hands as she became human again when she told us her name was Miss Benson. She looked what she was, carrying huge breasts with a don't mess with me face and eyes that meant only one thing, 'do and you're dead.' There was no hidden warmth in her, but no terror either, and carried forearms that won our respect. The message here was, "like me, but walk lightly." I liked her. Her demeanor had quickly changed, now that it was clear we were not intruders set to make off with her goods or her virtue, she set about making beds in this mini hospital. Two beds were already occupied when Miss Benson pushed two more beside them. Then fussing over us, she encouraged us into bed and we quickly fell asleep as a long day closed behind us. Uncertainty was now an old and constant companion and with it's nature and effect on us we had learned to tolerate and accept it. Because of that we rested well.
The next morning she woke the four of us and then busied herself putting down a roaring fire in the fireplace that lay at the end of the room. She ran a bath in a room next to us and promptly shooed Michael and me, one after another, into it while wearing, it must be said, a slightly sadistic smile. The room was freezing and Miss Benson seemed to get some amusement at our small, shivering bodies. It was with some relief when we got back to our beds and that great fire. She served us breakfast and left comics on our beds.
Things were looking up fast for Michael was even starting to relax and he was enjoying some children's books as well. The other two boys soon woke, but they didn't say much. One of them was really sick as a rasping cough cursed him from a small narrow chest and he looked like he would not weather the wheezing and groans that beat up his body. His name was Gerry Hunt. Over the next few days we would come to know him well and his mate.
This other boy looked healthier than we were and I thought he was putting on a show.
He always seemed to be hatching a plan about something or nothing. If he was sick, he was too hyper to show it. We knew him only by his nickname, "Yosemite Sam" or Sammy, after the character in the Bugs Bunny cartoons. Like his namesake, it would turn out, he couldn't help crossing a line when dared or provoked, even if the other side of the line was an open pit.
While Gerry recovered slowly, Michael and I played endlessly with Sammy, who never seemed to tire. As a fortnight played out in this infirmary, it once again started to seem like home to Michael and me. We were not even aware of what lay outside its walls, nor were we allowed out of the building. Now and again, I would see a boy running past and even catch a few looking through the windows as if spectators at a zoo. Curiosity killed my anxiety, for out there somewhere I could hear many children playing in the distance and I longed to join them.
As it turns out, my longing may have been misplaced.
Miss Benson was enjoying our company. But at week's end in the dark of an evening, we were removed from our new friends and the glow of the warm fire by Brother Gaynor. He marched us off into the night and led us into a first floor modern-looking building nearby. It was in stark contrast to the gray, colorless, and Victorian buildings that surrounded it. This is where the dormitories were, each christened with a Saint's name. All four of them were sectioned off according to the ages of the boys. A further one lay up a small flight of stairs where the very young children, aged five to nine years old lived. Each section had a monitor or head boy. Ours was a fifteen year old boy named Pat Lynch.
Monitors would be expected to have a responsible head. This meant keeping the peace when lights were out, and making sure that there was no horseplay or other nocturnal goings on. When Michael and I arrived, there was only the floor left to sleep on for the place was so overcrowded that there were no beds left. Pat fetched a few blankets and sheets to cover two mothballs of straw masquerading as mattresses. As the lights were turned out, I stayed awake into the small hours of the night and was perhaps the only witness here, except Michael, whom I did not think slept much either, to the moon that shone brightly through the nearby window. Fast moving clouds were driven by strong winds flitting the shadows around me and all just seemed to encourage and echo a deep inner distress. I started crying again.
Pat whispered loudly, "stop crying," I couldn't, and the crying soon trailed off to become a whimper, so at least my tears weren't disturbing anyone else's rest.
After a long while I became still again as an image of myself sitting on a horse on a fast-moving carousel and many faces looking at me started to swirl around my head. As the carousel went faster and faster the faces became a blur and soon I was asleep. Michael did not utter a word from the moment we had arrived in St. Dominics, but he kept his eyes fixed on the ceiling while I was going through my crying bit. I don't know if he ever went to sleep that night, but I never cried again in this place for something that night had shifted within me as another piece of innocence passed on unnoticed.
As far as who St. Dominic was, there was a certain irony in the fact that he was the patron saint of the falsely accused and juvenile delinquents. Someone up there in heaven definitely liked us, while someone down here was trying to tell us something.
The next morning, the alarm clock was a Christian Brother barking orders at my face.
Everybody was roused from their beds and all had to attend religious service this morning at 7:30 a.m., and every morning before and after. I was exhausted and found myself jostling for place in a church, but strangely I didn't feel out of place or alone. The Mass was spoken in Latin, even in English, its meaning would have been the same. Gobbledegook!! Amen.
My eyes barely stayed open but I kept my wits about me and felt that I could get along with all these new faces. The priest who came to perform the daily ritual of church service was a dour looking thing who strutted around in an aloof manner smug in his territory. A power felt by an insecure shepherd only secure with his sheep and it was a wonder that we didn't respond to each prayer by him with the cry of "baaaa baaaa." His name was Fr. Spellman. In terms of rank in this institution, the priest was a sergeant to the brothers being privates. His stripes were a larger dog collar, other than that they looked similar. He peered at us children from a distance as if we were a subspecies and he treated the brothers with only a trifle more deference. He looked in his sixties with a head of gray hair that was well-groomed; his dress was a military style pressed suit and carried himself in shiny black shoes. When he did the sermon, he spoke in slow measured tones, the delivery of which was intended to give the appearance that his words were set in some ancient and unmovable stone text. The brothers had a certain respect for him, but I thought him a joke, a fool, and a bore. After religious service, we were rewarded with breakfast, or a gourmet gauntlet to test your everyday survival skills at 8 a.m.
It turned out that Brother Gaynor was also the school cook. Poor old Gaynor, I would come to know him as a nut case that couldn't boil a kettle, let alone an egg. The great vats of oatmeal that were served up by him were full of alien pods that belched and pouted as if about to give birth to some extra-terrestrial life forms. For bread, it came secondhand from charitable homes for the brothers were on a permanent drive to make more money and were not buying any. It was served out of big wooden tea chests and contained a mixture of green mold bread and dough so hard that it could have been used to build walls. Sometimes the bread had dead flies lying in their final resting place with their deposited eggs. Meals were like a lucky dip raffle with a prize nobody would want. One time, some charitable soul spent a tedious time embedding tiny shards of glass into a large heel slice of bread that was mixed in with the rest, and I was the one who pulled it out. Hungry with bleary eyes and biting hard on a glass sandwich, my gums and lips split open on impact sending blood in all directions over them. It hardly raised an eyebrow. To wash it all down came the tea that was so bitter and strong that it would have poisoned cockroaches, killed weeds, and tarred roads. This was only the beginning of the day, and if breakfast was a challenge, the dinner would often prove to be an even bigger one. The food was there just to keep us alive. The only animals that did benefit from his cooking were the pigs from the prison's farm struggling with a weight problem. Then came school, that is if you were still in this world after each morning's breakfast offerings.
My first teacher in the school was a welcome relief and a layman, Mr. Hartigan. I was only in his class for a few weeks for the summer holidays were almost here and I did not get to know him real well. He looked very old and suffered from constantly shaking hands, but he had an easy manner to him even if he was a bit distant. Being in his class was a doddle for he was just marking time before retirement only days away.
Ten o'clock short break; lunch one hour; three thirty, finish school, must get physical for ninety minutes; school study for another sixty minutes; six o' clock supper; and then recreation time.
For the first couple of weeks among the lads, Michael and I, were pretty much invisible, but at recreation time one evening in the prison yard where they had all gathered to watch a football game, we got to know everybody. The match was in full swing and I was looking on from the sidelines with everybody else and carried my own football given to me by the nuns, that was now tucked firmly under my arm. A penalty was awarded during the game and as the boy stepped forward to take it, he ran towards the ball with bad intentions and aimed for it with even worse ones. The ball resounded with a great thud followed quickly by a sickening groan and it simply died. The air could have been cut with a knife as players and audience alike looked on helpless at the now crumpled and mortally wounded ball. The penalty taker picked it up, felt around the leather stitching looking for signs of life, and after his brief post mortem he looked up and around at his fellow players. He then shook his head in sad resignation confirming its death. Nobody yet moved, lingering on in scant hope of a miracle, but all the mouth-to-mouth and chest compressions in the world would not revive this assault victim. I was not noticed as I slowly made my way through the crowd, walked up to the penalty taker, and held my ball up to him. All eyes were on me as he gently accepted my gift and threw the old ball away with a derisory toss. Then a great roar went up from the crowd and the game was on again. The ball was returned to me at the end of the game, but my baptism was complete. I was now accepted as one of them, and by extension, Michael as well.
By nine o'clock, each evening, it was wash and clean behind your ears, brush and mind your mouth, change for bed, and lights' out by nine thirty p.m. A daily schedule that rarely changed in all the years that I was there and as each day passed it soon became old routine.
In little time as children do, Michael and I started to move in different circles and would find different friends. As I hung out with other boys and spent less time with him, it was becoming difficult, and sometimes even to myself, to see us as brothers. Physical differences were becoming more pronounced too, Michael continued to grow into a graceful natural athlete while I was still short and chubby. He would always be picked for that special game, and I would always be picked because of that special sympathy.
At night time, when the lights were turned out and everybody was supposed to be asleep, a night watchman, Mr. Dalton, would do the rounds of the dormitories. His main job was to rouse boys that wet their beds from their sleep, and then frog march them to the toilet while he would look on to make sure that they urinated something. Other duties included whacking boys across the heads after they would cry out in the night for their Mom or for just crying.
Mr. Dalton was a decrepit old drunk who always kept a half bottle of something in his pocket and a secret so terrible that I would not find about it for over three decades. A permanent smell of stale drink came from his breath mixed with all the other odors from his clothes sweetened by a pipe, cigarettes, chewed tobacco, fresh alcohol and a rare bath.
This left only one rotten tooth remaining in his mouth in defiance of the constant assault of drugs thrown at it. A solitary lonely figure that must have sent letters to himself for the want of company for I feel sure that no one else did. Unless it was a demand for money. He was indifferent to his own fate and that of us, and he carried an old injury that left him with a severe limp, a handicap that forced him to drag his foot along with each step. I would always hear him before I ever saw him, like the ghost of Jacob in A Christmas Carol. He would remain a constant in the night for the next couple of years along with his not too original nickname, Stiff Leg.
If he had a generic epitaph on his headstone when he passed away a decade later, it would have been a lie. That epitaph should have been written by one of his victims who he raped and sodomized many times before his eighth birthday. He marched this boy up and down silent corridors roaring "left right, left right" into his ears as the blood ran down his legs. That boy would turn out to be, "Yosemite Sam." who held this secret for thirty years, hinted at only by his restless emotions and explosive violence.
During the day, you could see that the walls of this reformatory stood at least twenty foot high, crowned by steel wire, manned by stoic faced guards armed with wooden clubs and whips partnered with pit bull dogs the size of small horses and all invisible to the naked eye. It was built only by imagination but I knew it was real. Most didn't try to escape, but keeping with a tradition, another inmate crossed the invisible line one weekend and walked out of the main gate that was always unopened, his nickname was Sausage.
As the rumor mill did the rounds, we all believed that he had escaped to England and to a boy, we were all happy for him as he started to enter boy lore legend, an urban myth starring one of us. But after about ten days our hero had fallen, hauled back to reality by the Black Maria van that pulled into the yard one evening. Out stepped Sausage in handcuffs flanked by two police officers, to be received by two Brothers, Logue and Sweeney. A rope replaced the handcuffs and his hands were tied behind his back. The yard was full of boys hypnotized by the scene before them as the police van sped away, leaving Sausage to be pulled along like some wild animal to a building where the classrooms were.
As a depressed air swept the yard, I was feeling a little courageous, creeping up to the window where Sausage lay at the mercy of his captors and soon-to-be torturers inside.
Peering over the sill, I could see him with his hands still behind his back that were now tied to a heavy wooden desk. Then Logue and Sweeney rolled up their sleeves and set on him like dogs on a rabbit dishing out a workmanlike beating. They beat him to a pulp. Before they had finished I ran back to the yard to a collective look of relief by the boys that I didn't get caught. After a good fifteen minutes Sausage staggered out of the building into friendlier company. While receiving sympathy and comfort from us, he stood bloodied and beaten. I had a slice of bread in my pocket to be keep for a later treat and offered it to him instead. He hadn't eaten in a while, a long while, and he ate it too fast. The recent days of cold, hunger, and now beatings, made him retch violently and he threw up. That day changed me and filled me with loathing and fear of our jailers, and for now, there was nothing I could do. I tried to stay out of trouble and gave these two roving sadists a wide berth as best I could. At least their stay here would turn out to be a very short one.
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