“The question,” I said, “is who the hell are you?”
“Michael Ashbury.”
He didn’t look like an Ashbury, that was for sure. I grabbed his collar again, blew a puff of smoke into his face, then shoved him toward the Coliseum. Jon was already leading his Christian down the Appian Way, and I was falling behind.
Mosquitoes filled the air. I almost breathed one in. The Bog churned them out like a factory. There were three flashlights among thirty seminarians. The others were still in hiding or pursuit, and we couldn’t wait any longer. Rosary was only fifteen minutes away.
Connor had a Christian down on his knees. It was Dean, a member of our own class. A couple of other guys lit candles and placed them in a half circle behind him.
Physically Dean was completely average; intellectually he was right off the scale. The results of an IQ test he had taken the year before were so impressive that colleges and universities were already calling the monks from as far away as England. The actual score was a tightly held secret.
Dean was one of those guys who could be cool one minute, moody and withdrawn the next. We tried letting him hang out with us for a while the previous year, but he didn’t have much to say. He was too wrapped up in his own thing, so we let him slip back into obscurity. Now, in the flashlight beam, Dean folded his arms and rolled his eyes.
Connor Atkins was also intelligent, but he shone as the natural athlete of our class. He filled out faster and better than the rest of us. There was an eternal energy about Connor—the way he moved in bold, fluid gestures. He seemed anxious at rest, fully realized in motion. Because of his stutter, he felt more articulate using the language of his body.
Rolling up the sleeve of his T-shirt, Connor made an impressive muscle. Even in the candlelight we could see the glint in his blue eyes and the green vein on his hard right biceps.
“I’m shaking,” Dean said, putting his hands on his hips.
“Say ‘Hail Caesar’ or j-j-join the s-saints,” Connor ordered.
“Hmm. How ‘bout ‘Fuck you’ instead?”
Everyone gasped. Connor smiled, turned as if he was going to let it go, then pushed Dean onto his ass and into the candles. The Romans went wild.
“G-g-get in 1-line,” Connor commanded.
Dean got in line with the four other Christians, then I pushed mine down on the shoulder until he was kneeling in the candles. Standing in front of him, I cracked my knuckles and said, “I don’t want this to get ugly.”
The kid instantly burst into tears. He sat in the dirt and covered his face as Eric arrived on the scene. “Bill! What did you do to him?” Eric pushed people aside to get at me. “You’re not supposed to hurt anybody.”
Eric Dumont had an overly developed sense of right and wrong. He was the most religious kid I had ever met—forever trying to recruit people into the Knights of Mary or some other holy society. He wasn’t really effeminate, but he had the long, slender hands of a woman and was always meticulously groomed. Eric’s hair was his favourite feature. It never yielded to gravity or wind. Dishwater-brown, it was always parted in the middle and flipped back over his ears, Bee Gees-style, and lacquered in place with mousse and hair spray which, along with all hair products, were illegal at Saint John the Divine. He forgave himself this transgression. Sometimes to mask an acne rash growing in that slick, shiny area of his forehead, he’d comb half his bangs down and zap them in place with an extra dose of hair spray that made him look even more ridiculous. We had always been friends, Eric and I, but sometimes I wondered how it all had happened in the first place.
“I didn’t do anything!” I said. “I didn’t even lay a finger on him.”
Eric was right. The first day of class and I had humiliated this kid in front of half the school. The other half would know before their heads hit their pillows. I apologized, then reached out my hand. He took it. I pulled him up and tried to force a smile, but it was much too late.
“It’s just a game,” I said. “I didn’t—”
“Line ‘em up.” Connor took control, and Michael Ashbury fell in with the other Christians. One of the Romans looked at his watch and announced it was ten minutes to rosary. We formed the gauntlet.
Each Christian was given the final chance to say “Hail Caesar.” One of the freshmen caved in and was set free to live in shame. The others were then pushed one by one between two rows of Romans who slapped and shoved, cursed and cuffed the Christians as they passed through. Most put their heads down and ran, receiving little real damage. Eric walked in a slow, dramatic procession, head held high, letting each of us get two or three shots in before he reached the end.
When it came to my Christian, I looked away. I wanted him to have a chance to say his “Hail Caesar” without making it worse than I already had. But Michael Ashbury took a deep breath, let out a weird little laugh, and charged through the Romans. I gave him a cuff on the back of the head, but not too hard. Just enough to let him know I wasn’t babying him.
An almost life-size crucifix loomed over the altar in the student chapel. It was abstract, in the style of the 1960s. Carved from white marble, it looked as much like a mummy or a cocoon as a replica of our Lord in agony. In the back corner of the chapel a more normal statue of the Blessed Virgin stepping on a serpent kept watch over us from behind. A solitary kneeler was parked directly in front of Our Lady’s feet. Eric often said his rosary there. On three of the four walls were the Stations of the Cross below a row of small square windows. The windows were up high and made of coloured, textured glass like the kind found in washrooms and other places where people shouldn’t look in.
There, on its knees under the fluorescent lights, the student body mumbled through never-ending prayers. Each one served to remind me I was straying farther from a state of grace. The Finger of God, it seemed, was pointed directly at me, and I cursed all parents who had christened their daughters Mary.
“Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus... “
Mary O’Brien was a local girl whose family came to Mass every Sunday morning. She had spent her entire life below the cliff in Ennis, the bell tower and Mount Saint John her inescapable points of reference. Toward the end of the previous year we started going on walks together. I made her laugh; she gave me impure thoughts. This sort of “fraternization” had to be kept away from school grounds. The monks couldn’t have us “strolling up and down the drive with every girl in town.” I guess they had more faith in our ability to be desired by local representatives of the opposite sex than we did.
The Sunday before the end of the spring term Mary and I had stolen away to the path behind the Bog. We ended up on the bench in front of the secluded statue of Our Lady of the Lake, a place created for quiet, holy meditation. She sat smiling on the bench in the dappled maple light. My hand wasn’t exactly up her blouse, but I could see how it might have looked that way from a distance. We were making out, I admit, but Brother Thomas wasn’t interested in hearing my defence.
“Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.”
The rosary was made up of three groups of five Mysteries each. The second group, the Sorrowful Mysteries, included events in the Lord’s journey through the streets of Jerusalem on His way to crucifixion. We took turns reading the brief descriptions out of the prayer book about how Saint Veronica wiped the face of Jesus or how Simon of Cyrene shouldered the cross for a few steps. You were supposed to dedicate each Mystery to some pressing international concern: the conversion of the Soviet Union, the relief