Pack Up Your Troubles

‘What have you done?’ she asked her son that evening.

‘Me? Nothing,’ Kevin said. ‘Why?’

‘The headmaster wants to see me and whatever it is, it’s about you.’

But Kevin couldn’t enlighten her and Maeve saw no expression of guilt on his face as he said, ‘I don’t know, Mammy.’

Despite that, Maeve was sure Kevin was lying. She was sure Mr Monahan would tell Maeve about his misbehaviour in the classroom, his pranks in the playground, or his lack of progress in his studies. As she sat in the headmaster’s stuffy little room, two days later, she was totally unprepared for what he did say.

‘Remove him from the Communion classes?’ she repeated. ‘But why? I know he’s not been here long, but he’d been doing the classes at St Catherine’s in Birmingham since January. He knows most of the catechism. We test him on it in the evenings.’

The headmaster coughed nervously. He hated saying what he had to say and Maeve could see he did. She’d sensed his sympathy for her and Kevin too, but knew it would be Father O’Brien’s doing. She saw it as clearly as if he were standing before her pontificating. He’d say the sins of the fathers are visited on the children as the Good Book said, even to the third and fourth generation. He’d remind Mr Monahan where his duty lay, and that wasn’t welcoming to the Communion rails for the first time the son of a wife who’d upped and left her husband. He’d be sure Mr Monahan could explain that adequately to Maeve Hogan. That was, of course, if he wanted to keep his job.

Mr Monahan faced Mrs Hogan and coughed nervously. ‘Mrs Hogan, it’s more to do with influence in the home. Father O’Brien thinks that Kevin might not be picking up the right example. Maybe it would be better to wait for a year or so, when his future is more settled.’

Maeve felt her face burning with embarrassment at the same time as furious anger filled her being. She stared at the middle-aged man before her and knew he was just Father O’Brien’s lackey. ‘Do I have a choice in this?’ she asked in clipped precise tones. ‘Or has Father O’Brien already decided and his decision is final?’

‘I . . . I could ask him for you,’ the headmaster said.

‘Don’t worry,’ Maeve said. ‘I’ll ask him myself.’

She swung out of the headmaster’s office, her blue eyes smouldering and her cheeks red, and out into the church, where she found Father O’Brien in one of the pews reading his Office – the prayer book priests had to read every day. Even in her rage, she noted thankfully that the church was deserted. Early Mass was over, and no one was doing the flowers for the altar, or cleaning the place. The priest turned at her arrival and laid the book down in the pew beside him, and Maeve glared at him across the expanse of the church as she strode angrily towards him.

‘How low can you sink?’ she demanded.

The priest’s brown eyes looked puzzled, but his mouth had a sardonic smile playing around it as he said, ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘You know full well what I’m talking about. I’ve just come from the school.’

‘Oh, I see,’ Father O’Brien said.

‘What right had you to take out your spite against my son? It’s me you’re angry with, not him.’

‘I assure you, I did not take the decision over spite against anyone,’ Father O’Brien said. ‘I am not angry with you either, more disappointed. You were always headstrong, Maeve, even as a wee girl, but I never expected you to do anything like this.’

Maeve ignored the things the priest said about her. In her opinion she was here to discuss just one issue. ‘Mr Monahan said Kevin is to be removed from the First Communion class and it was at your suggestion.’

‘He is correct.’

‘What right have you?’

‘I have all manner of rights, Maeve,’ the priest said. ‘But what right had you to uproot your children from their home and their father and bring them over here to Ireland, and once here, you refuse to either discuss it or consider returning? You are damaging your children.’

‘I am not,’ Maeve protested. ‘I’m their mother and I’m doing what I think is best for them.’

‘Ah, yes. I’m glad we’ve got to that point,’ the priest said. ‘Where is their father in all this?’

‘Their father is—’

‘Does he have no rights?’

‘No. No, he bloody well doesn’t,’ Maeve cried. Her rage had reached boiling point and she could see sparks in front of her eyes. ‘He has thrown them away. Do you know, you arrogant sod, that the bastard you want me to return to has killed, by his own brutality, a child I had carried for six months and one of the reasons I left this time was to protect the one I’m carrying now?’

‘I know that is what you would like people to believe,’ the priest said.

‘What the hell do you mean?’

‘I mean, your husband told Father Trelawney all about it. It appeared to be a tragic accident,’ the priest said. ‘Your husband admits he pushed you. He was administering punishment to young Kevin for not coming in when he was called, and what father wouldn’t? He said you were like a wild animal, screaming and trying to rake his face with your nails and kick his legs. He pushed you and you fell against the fireguard. Next minute, you were on the floor groaning.’

Maeve stared at him open-mouthed. That wasn’t how it was, but it was what the priest believed and from what he said, Father Trelawney did too. Whatever she said now, they wouldn’t believe her.

Father O’Brien went on, ‘And you must understand, I have no desire to punish your children, either of them, but the consequences of your actions will have to have far-reaching effects on your family – all of your family.’

It was uttered like a threat and Maeve shivered. She was filled with loathing for the plump self-satisfied priest with eyes full of condemnation and the pinched-in nostrils and hard cruel mouth. She wanted to put her hands over her head and scream in frustration, and her voice indeed rose in a scream as she cried out, ‘You sadistic bastard, you’re bloody well enjoying all this.’

The door of the church swung closed with a dull thud and the two combatants turned. Cissie O’Brien was the priest’s sister. She looked after his house for him and had come to tell him his dinner was nearly ready. She glared at Maeve malevolently and Maeve knew she thought her circumstances of arriving at her mother’s house with two children and no husband was very suspicious. Maeve had played into her hands for she knew she’d have heard clearly the abuse and swearwords she’d hurled at the priest even before she’d opened the door because Maeve’s voice had bordered on hysterical.

Maeve looked at the older woman’s eyes glittering with malicious dislike and knew she’d blown it. The rumours about them all had begun when she started the children at school and now she knew what she screamed at the priest would be all over the neighbourhood in twenty-four hours. Everyone would know that she hadn’t brought the children for a wee holiday because they’d been ill at all, but that she’d actually left her husband. Cissie O’Brien would say her brother, the priest, had taken her to task about it, which after all was his job, and what a reaction he got. Maeve knew Cissie O’Brien would let people know what type of woman Maeve Hogan was and would take pleasure in doing it.

SEVEN (#ulink_2cc9f556-9175-5504-b529-42184d8778e4)

The following day, Kevin came home from school in tears. He’d held them in all day at school and most of the way home, but when he turned in the lane home, he broke down.

‘Miss Kerrigan says I’m not to go into instruction for Holy Communion any more,’ he explained between sobs to his mother. ‘She says maybe I’ll take it next year instead, but Declan and Martin are my age and taking it in July. Now everyone laughs at me in the playground and says I’m dumb and don’t know my catechism, but I do.’

Maeve held her small angry son and could find no words to comfort him. At Mass the following Sunday, the Brannigans were all snubbed by friends and neighbours they’d known for years. Added to that, the brothers at Colin’s school had made a few snide remarks about his family, and the lads had jeered at him a bit, and Nuala claimed she was almost ignored in the school yard.

Rosemarie said the bakery was busier than ever, but people didn’t buy much, they just wanted to stand in groups and talk loudly, so that she would hear, about the Brannigan family they said had always thought themselves better than anyone else. Her future mother-in-law, a cow of the first order anyway, had expressed doubts about her Greg getting mixed up with such a family after the eldest of them had just upped and left her husband in that shocking way, and had Greg heard what she’d said to the priest?

Maeve felt sick. She had brought all this on her family.

‘Never mind, child,’ Thomas told his daughter. ‘They’re ignorant. It’ll blow over.’

But for Kevin and Grace, it didn’t blow over. Grace said nothing about the girls who’d once been her friends, who now refused to play with her and who stood with others in clusters and taunted her, but she became quieter than ever.

Kevin, on the other hand, could not hide his skirmishes – like the time he came home with his knuckles skinned and a split lip, nor the time he had a bloody nose and a torn shirt, nor the marks of the cane across his hand.

‘What did you get the cane for?’ Maeve asked him.

‘Fighting.’

‘What’s the matter with you?’ she cried. ‘All this fighting. You never used to fight.’

Kevin looked at the floor and said nothing.

‘Well? What did you fight about?’

Kevin shrugged and Maeve had the urge to shake him till his teeth rattled. ‘Kevin?’ she said threateningly.