Whispered Rhetoric | Jerry Long

I still see him to this day, even though he’s dead a number of years now. I remember reading about his death in the Echo : run-of-the-mill ‘parish priest dies’ sort of job; ‘he’ll be missed by all who were graced with his presence . He touched so many lives with the word of God.’ … Yet I felt no sense of freedom.No relaxation. Nothing. Still foetal. Still hushed.The bastard has a grip on me to this day, from beyond the grave. His cold hand clawing away at the earth, eroding his finger nails in pious solemnity, as he slithers up the leg of my pants and rests heavily in my gut.The summer before I was sent to school, I was told by everyone in my immediate family that I was privileged, or lucky, or some such variant of the sentiment. Getting an education of such depth was, in those days, a rarity, or at least that’s how it was seen.‘Nothing around you but fields and fields. No girls to steer you off track. Plus the fresh air will do you good’, my mother used say. ‘A good religious education… and I suppose a bit of G.A.A wouldn’t go astray. You’d like that, Mikey? Wouldn’t you? Of course you would.’Since I had the luxury of not knowing him then, I can only imagine that he spent the summer reading over the forty one files of the incoming students: the bodiless names, ages, and addresses, soon to be replaced with vivacious, full bodied young fellas in the height of their pubescent glory.  The thrill. Suspense. Their faith… He must have been tormented.They’d already been sorted into classes; sleeping arrangements had been laid out to a T. He was meticulous in his ways. He’d have had everything planned out at least a month before the first misfortune stepped out onto the concrete courtyard on the cold September morning and made their way inside, leaving the majority of their lives in the back of the car that dropped them off, and taking the little they still had left and placing it ever so piously into his cold, ruthless hands.  They were his before he even met them. Come to think of it, I was his before I was even born; after all, it had always been my mother’s intention for her sons to go to school there.He had that power… he was untouchable.I’m tempted at this stage to say a few words about myself; after all, as many a girl would note in my hooring days, it is my forte. But I can’t bring myself to do it. It seems like yesterday that I was that loud-mouth, toe-rag of a young fella. Completely unimpeded. Sometimes when I lie next to my wife at night, I wonder if that young fella’d be disappointed with how things ended up. He wasn’t me, though. He was never restricted (mind you that was his greatest downfall). He never had a difficulty voicing what he wanted to say. He never felt the cold touch of callous skin rolling up his body as he slept at night. He never felt the hands: one around his throat, the other cuffing his mouth, drowning out his cries. He never felt the spit of air course into his ear in a short, sharp ‘sshh’. The hushes that still cause a middle aged man to be reduced to sobbing into his pillow at night as his wife sleeps soundly next to him. But I can’t tell that story. I’m still hushed.Going to such a prestigious school in those days was a privilege—so much so that pupils came from as far off as Sligo or Wicklow to attend. You could spot them a mile away, fresh out of bally-wherever. Boggers. Not a clue. Poor bastards. If I could spot ‘em, imagine what was going through his mind, the first time his cold, grey eyes settled on them through the shiny lenses of his glasses.His glasses, they were the first thing I ever saw of him. Emerging from the darkness like two lamping lights. And I stood there gazing into ‘em. Hare-like. Paralyzed.The nose followed. It was Jewish in size and the glasses sat easily upon it. It was enflamed and bloodshot with whiskers peeping out from the bean shaped nostrils, gasping for air, from the pits of piety and devoutness.  He did well, however, not to speak through it. No, his tone was far more shrill and visceral. A jarring tenor that shot straight to the spine, and palpitated the heart: it wasn’t just  oral to aural. Christ no, when he spoke to you, he held you there, frozen to the spot. You were helpless.‘Stop!’ That was it. The first time; and I was his.A slim, sharp bark. In the years that followed I’ve been bollocked, beasted and roared at many times. Usually by red-faced Corporals. I can still see their intimidating faces, masters in the craft of breaking men. Hurling orders as Gaeilge across the dimly lit square, through a haze of hail and rain. Standing there, under a yellow light in the barracks, puffing at fags and snarling at you stood to attention. But those corporeal Corporals with their booming voices never had the same effect on me as that wispy, flimsy old bastard and his thin knife-like voice.‘Stop!’He emerged from a classroom off the corridor that I was walking down. The glasses, the nose, the pulp of rosy skin, his face.  Black except for his face and collar. There he was.Fr. Cooley.‘Where exactly are you going, boy?’His voice tingled my kidneys and the small of my back. I stood there, fucked from day one.And as I lie in bed at night, the silent house engulfs me. It gives rise to a vacuum that I fill with thoughts of him. To this day I still see him: nose, glasses, smile. His sounds resonating in every noise I hear. I still feel the hand, rat like skimping up my leg underneath the eiderdown.And that haunting hush spat into my ear still silences me.