Sucking Sherbert Lemons

by Michael Carson

  “Grant that the scales of sin and unbelief may fall from Brother Michael’s eyes before it is too late! Grant that Brother Ninian has been able to keep his chastity. . .” Then he added, “Grant Brother de Porres a happy visit to St Finbar’s.”

  That day at lunch Joachim noticed that Brother Henry’s chair was empty. Novvy said nothing, either because he had not noticed, or because he knew the reason.

  Knowing looks were exchanged during wash-up.

  “He must have gone too far,” stated Brother Egbert.

  “How do you mean?” asked Joachim.

  “One too many shows of extravagant piety, I would say. You know what Novvy thinks about that sort of thing. It wouldn’t surprise me if he’d been sent away.”

  “Yes, but... “ But Joachim did not complete the sentence. He had been going to point out to Egbert that Egbert was not very far behind Henry with regard to conspicuous displays of piety. He caught himself just in time. The matter was still unresolved when the novices met in their room to see what Novvy had in store for them in the afternoon. Games of any sort would be out of the question because the snow was now lying deep, and heavy cobalt clouds hung low all round. Joachim was hoping for library reading, as he had decided to find out about Martin de Porres in The Lives of the Saints and flesh out his knowledge of the black Brother’s namesake.

  Then Novvy came in looking severe. “I had been going to start you off on calligraphy today, Brothers, but Brother Henry is nowhere to be found. He has not been seen since this morning when he went out to do his manual work. Does anyone know where he is?”

  None of the novices put their hands up. Brother Henry had been assigned to tidy up the barns and was alone in his work.

  “I see,” sighed Novvy. “Well, knowing Brother Henry, he’s probably to be found rolling in the snow somewhere, the better to mortify his flesh.” The novices laughed, but Novvy frowned them to silence. “However, the weather is not too good at all. Just in case something has happened to Brother Henry I’m getting all of you to go out and search for him. You will go in groups of two. I will assign areas for you to search.”

  Ninian gave Joachim a dig in the back, a sign that he wanted to be his companion in the search. Together they went up to Novvy and were assigned to look through the orchards and all the old greenhouses. These lay on the far side of the artificial lake, to the east of St Finbar’s. Joachim had not been there since the day he had been received into the Order. Then the plums were in full fruit. He had gone there in his new habit and, indulging an old habit, gorged.

  Now he hardly recognised the orchards. The trees still stretched in long straight lines, but the endless pattern of branches and twigs were like scribblings in black crayon on the sky. Looking through the avenues of trees made him go giddy if he looked too hard.

  “We’d better take it a row at a time and walk up and down till we’ve finished,” said Ninian.

  “He won’t be here. Nobody ever comes here. And didn’t you notice, there were no tracks in the snow?” sighed Joachim, cold and dispirited.

  “Maybe Henry doesn’t make footprints these days, Brother.”

  “Don’t be silly, Ninian. Everyone makes footprints,” replied Joachim, giving Ninian a punch on the arm.

  Ninian rubbed the place. “Wenceslas didn’t.”

  “Wenceslas did! Don’t you know anything? ‘Heat was in the very sod that the saint had printed.’ That proves it.”

  “Have your own way. Anyway, we’d better search thoroughly so we can say he’s definitely not here. But –” And Ninian stopped, looking suddenly anxious. “You don’t think anything terrible has happened to Henry, do you?”

  “No. Do you?”

  “No. At least I...”

  They turned and walked down the next row of trees. “Go on, what were you going to say?” asked Joachim.

  “Nothing, Brother.”

  Joachim shrugged.

  They walked on in silence for a few minutes while Joachim thought about what Brother Michael had said that morning. He desperately wanted to know if it was true but did not know how to ask.

  Then Ninian, just for a lark, tripped Joachim up as they were walking. Joachim fell down in the snow as Ninian skipped away laughing.

  Joachim caught up with Ninian and asked him, “Do you ever go to the rubbish dump?”

  “Well I...”

  “Do you?”

  Ninian looked sheepish.

  “Do you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  Ninian shook his head and started running off down the line of trees. Joachim ran after him, caught up and at once got Ninian into a head lock.

  “Let me go, you!” shouted Ninian.

  Joachim started to walk down the line of trees with Ninian’s head caught under his arm.

  “With her head tucked underneath her arm, She walks the Bloody Tower. With her head tucked underneath her armAt the midnight hour,” sang Joachim.

  “You bugger!” shouted the head.

  Joachim stopped but did not release Ninian. “You go to the rubbish dump with Brother Michael, don’t you!” he shouted.

  “No!”

  Joachim started to run with Ninian struggling, his head still pinioned.

  “Let me go!”

  “Tell me and I’ll let you go.”

  “All right, but let me go!”

  Released, Ninian stood panting and untidy before Joachim. He took a long time to say anything.

  “I’m waiting.”

  “All right. I have been to the rubbish dump with Brother Michael. That’s what you wanted to know, isn’t it?”

  “What did you do?”

  “Why do you want to know? It’s none of your business!”

  “It is my business!” shot back Joachim. “Your eternal salvation is my business! You’re my best friend, Ninian. I am my brother’s keeper. You know that as well as I do.”

  Ninian, somewhat mollified, replied, “Well nothing much happened, honestly. He fiddled about a bit.”

  “And you let him?”

  “Yes.”

  Joachim looked up at the clouds, which seemed to be gathering ever-tighter above them to listen to the proceedings. Snow had started to fall again. Unless a wind got up to blow away those clouds it would be a deep fall.

  “Did you confess it?” Joachim asked.

  “No, why should I?”

  “Because it’s a serious sin, that’s why. You are thick sometimes, Ninian. You really are.”

  “Nothing happened! He only pinched my bum. That’s not serious. Not like what you used to do in that garage.”

  Joachim pouted. “I thought that subject was closed. That happened a long time ago, Ninian, before I embarked on the Religious Life.”

  “Yes, but it happened. I’ve never done anything like that.”

  “Look, we’re supposed to be looking for Brother Henry,” said Joachim, changing the subject.

  But Ninian was not ready for the change. “There’s no harm in Brother Michael. He just likes to talk and fiddle a bit. There’s no harm in it.”

  Joachim sighed deeply. “I will say this once and then we shall drop this whole distasteful subject: in six months’ time you and I will stand in front of the Superior General and before God and we shall make four vows: Poverty, Chastity, Obedience, Free Missionary Work For Youth. On that day we must be ready to take those vows, for they are vows which cannot be broken. I want you there with me on that day with your soul as white as snow. Is that clear?”

  Joachim turned to walk down the next line of trees. Ninian followed and pulled faces at the back of Joachim’s head.

  “Yes, Brother,” he said.

  Eventually the two novices finished searching through the orchard. They had turned their search towards the lines of wrecked greenhouses nearby when the
bell of St Finbar’s tolled.

  “They must have found Henry!” shouted Ninian.

  Together but in silence they made their way back to St Finbar’s in the gathering gloom. The tolling of the bell seemed to reverberate in the darkening clouds above their heads.

  Every Brother at St Finbar’s was in the chapel. Hardly a place remained. They were all seated and Joachim and Ninian cut the palpable silence as they made their way, crimson with embarrassment, to their places near the front. Henry’s pew was empty. No one seemed to be doing anything. There were no books being read, no public prayers being said. Everyone simply sat and watched the altar.

  Joachim could not pray. He stared at the sanctuary lamp, the flame floating on a glass of golden oil. The flame flickered. The flames in every sanctuary lamp everywhere flickered like that. A nun had once told him that the flickering was the way the flame used to say over and over again, “Jesus is here. Jesus is here.” The flicker in the flame was a sign of its fear before the Godhead, imprisoned in its locked gold box. A flame would never rise arrogantly erect in such a place. It knew its place and so should he.

  That day the flame lulled him into reverie. He forgot where he was and instead dreamed his way back to early days at the convent school. The nuns seemed to have loved him. They made a fuss of him. Sister Anne, the dinner nun, had always given him extra chips. He could see her striding across the playground carrying huge pans of food from the kitchens to the gym room and smiling at everyone, but especially at him.

  Sister Anne had never taught him, yet of all the nuns he remembered her best. She was small and fat and had round, thick-lensed glasses. He would pass her on her knees polishing the wooden floors. She would look up and smile and say what a wonderful boy he was and make an island of her duster for him to hop across the polish so as not to mark the floor with his pumps.

  Joachim heard the door of the chapel opening and someone taking his place in one of the stalls at the back.

  “The novices will return to their rooms and read in silence. The other Brothers will continue with their work. All for Jesus!”

  “Now and Forever!” replied the assembled Brothers.

  Joachim sat hunched over a book about St Martin de Porres, unable to concentrate on what he was reading. The novices had been left unsupervised, but nobody had so much as looked around. Everyone seemed intent on their books. This was unusual enough but it struck Joachim as peculiar in the extreme in the light of the questions which he desperately wanted to ask.

  Time passed and Joachim looked up from the haze of print before him and then looked around him. His look was met by others who then looked away. He tried again a few minutes later and saw that a silent restlessness had gripped the novices. He wanted to ask what had happened to Henry but could not summon up the courage. Then Ninian whispered, “Well, what’s happened to Henry?”

  Brother Ralph looked round nervously. “Don’t you know?” he asked.

  “No, we don’t,” said Joachim.

  But Brother Ralph had turned round again and was pretending to be engrossed in his book.

  “Tell us!” insisted Ninian.

  Brother Bosco turned round and stuttered, “Brother Henry cut off his thingy with a scythe.”

  There was a long silence. Then Joachim, his voice high-pitched after some years in a lower register, asked, “How do you mean?”

  But reply came there none. Bosco’s stuttered sentence hung on the air, then buzzed around Joachim’s ear like a fly. “Brother Henry cut off his thingy with a scythe.” He had not needed to ask what that meant. He knew what that meant and he knew why Henry had done it, though he still could not really believe that he had done it. He looked around at the other novices but they were all concentrating on their books. He looked down at his own. “St Rose of Lima, the patron saint of South America, said to Martin de Porres one day: ‘We shall build of this continent, this New World, a flower garden for the praise and glory of the Lord’.” He read the sentence again and then again but could make no sense of it. If Henry had cut off his thingy with a scythe he knew why. “If thy right hand scandalise thee cut it off and cast it from thee. For it is better for one member to die than that the whole body be consumed in the everlasting fire.” How often he had thought of those words as he had held his own recalcitrant member out in front of him! These were the words of Jesus, yet nobody took them literally. He had often wondered why not. Other precepts were taken terribly literally, why not that one, then? It must fall into the category of the one about a man asking you for your coat, and you giving him your shirt as well. Nobody ever did that either. The tramps who came to the back door of St Finbar’s were given soup and bread but they never took Brother Cuthbert’s habit away or the rug from the hallway. Perhaps it was because they never asked.

  But if Henry had really cut off his thingy, and surely he had not, then why? Henry did not seem to be prey to the lewd temptations that had afflicted him.

  “... Blessed Martin, ever the humble servant of the Lord, said to the wolf: ‘Be gone! Thou must know that thou workest out thy lusts in the Lord’s flower garden. I bid thee be gone!’” Joachim too had a flower garden. Brother Michael came to tempt him there. Could it be that Brother Henry had been tempted by Brother Michael?

  “Brother Bosco, where did this happen?” Joachim asked the bowed head nearby.

  Bosco turned round: “B ... by the rubbish dump,” he replied.

  Novvy came in at that moment. He looked smaller, tighter, than Joachim remembered. His mouth was fixed in a downpulled semicircle of gloom. His shoulders were hunched, as if tied round with elastic bands that cramped his torso, cut off the circulation and turned his head and neck florid.

  He had seen Brother Bosco speaking but did not remark on it. He sat down heavily in his chair and looked out over the novices.

  “Well, Brothers, I’ve been in touch with the hospital. It seems that Brother Henry will be all right. He will never be the same, but he will be all right.”

  There were no expressions of relief, just that ear-splitting silence, for which, Joachim felt, this day would be remembered.

  “Because it was Brother Egbert and Brother Bosco who found him at the rubbish dump, there is no point in my attempting to conceal from you the dreadfulness of what has happened. I am shocked. I never thought that any of the novices would be so woefully foolish, ignorant and... “ Novvy stumbled for words but none would come. He stood up and strode to the window, looking out at the dark and the falling snow. The novices followed him with their eyes. Joachim could see the group reflected in the glass of the windows as Novvy spoke to them, his back still to them.

  “... Never thought such ... such wrong-headedness could creep into St Finbar’s. God knows, I knew that Brother Henry had a tendency towards extremism, an extremism you well know I tried to bring to his attention. But to ... to mutilate himself in this manner betokens a type of madness and a failure to understand our Faith. Brothers, it could well turn out that we may not see Brother Henry again. I tell you that now so that, should it happen, you will be prepared for it.”

  Novvy turned from the window and walked slowly back to his chair. He now made no attempt to hide the tears that were rolling down his cheeks. Joachim was shocked by what had been said and completely defeated by the sight of Novvy’s tears. He began to weep too. Yet as he wept he felt he knew something which Novvy did not know. Novvy probably reasoned that Henry had done what he had done because of a problem with self-abuse or impure thoughts. Joachim felt he knew better.

  But the tears dried up and anxiety gripped him when Novvy next spoke.

  “The Provincial has ordered a full enquiry into what happened today and I must warn you that some of you may well be asked to give evidence.”

  That night Joachim wet the bed.

  One morning a week later Novvy told Joachim to be especially diligent in the cleaning of the Brothers’ Feast Day Par
lour because the enquiry into Brother Henry’s ‘accident’ was to begin there that day.

  Joachim removed all the chairs from the room and commenced brushing and rebrushing the floor prior to applying another layer of polish. He dusted everywhere, applied the polish generously, then used a heavy polisher to remove it and bring up the shine. He had borrowed the polisher from Brother Cuthbert and it lifted his spirits a little to see how he was able to obtain a deep shine on the floor by swinging the heavy polisher along the length of it. He tried walking on the shine and found that miraculously he did not leave footprints on it.

  But curing the floor of its polish build-up problem gave him little consolation that day. He felt sure he would be called to give testimony by the enquiry. Brother Michael had been nowhere to be seen in the last week. He had waited for him down by the snow-covered flower garden but he had not put in an appearance. He was sure that Brother Michael would be in trouble and would know it.

  As he was dusting the window ledges and gazing from the window at the grey, frozen snow outside, Novvy came in with a water pitcher, glasses and notepads. He went up to the table, placed three chairs on one side of the table and one on the other. Then he put glasses and notepads in front of the three chairs.

  “Will you get me a cushion from the chapel for this chair, Brother? Father O’Callaghan gets uncomfortable on wooden chairs.”

  “Yes, Brother.” And he fetched one of the embroidered cushions from the back stalls in the chapel, thinking that he was well and truly doomed if Father O’Callaghan was on the enquiry. For he had told Father O’Callaghan everything and he had told him not always under the protection of the confessional. He was sure to be in trouble.

  The novices filed into morning classes and Novvy told them that he would not be teaching them that day.

  “By way of a nice change, Brother de Porres has consented to come and speak to you about the Missions in Africa. I hope you will be attentive. Who knows, some of you may be called to give service out there one of these days.”

  With that he left the room and Joachim knew that the three behind the table would be Novvy, the Provincial and Father O’Callaghan. He saw himself sitting alone while the august trio fired searching questions at him. What would he say? How would he survive it? His stomach was knotted with anxiety. His bowels rumbled.