by Mark Critch
Roman Catholic priests had been accused of molesting children. Father Jim Hickey had been a larger-than-life figure in his community. He’d staged a massive youth rally for Prince Charles and Lady Diana when they visited Newfoundland in 1983. A year later, he introduced the Pope to leaders of other denominations at a service at Quidi Vidi Lake. And while he was hobnobbing with Popes and princes, he was getting young boys drunk and raping them. Hickey would invite boys to the rectory and give them cigarettes and alcohol. He’d let them use the money he left lying there to buy whatever they wanted. He’d let them drive his Cadillac even though they were too young to drive. Nothing in life comes without a price, however, and these boys would be paying that price for the rest of their lives.
Father Hickey would sodomize them and force them to engage in oral sex. When boys tried to say no, he’d threaten them. Sometimes he’d scare the younger ones by saying that if they didn’t do what they were told the old priest who’d died in the next room would come and get them in their sleep. The boys would draw lots to see who would have to sleep with him.
Hickey, and other priests like him, had been molesting children for years. As the boys grew to adulthood, some complained to the police, others to the Archbishop. Neither the Church nor the police did anything about it, leaving Hickey and his friends free to prey on dozens more. He was finally arrested in 1988, pleading guilty to twenty charges of gross indecency and sexual assault. But Hickey was just the tip of the iceberg.
In 1989, the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary reopened a 1975 investigation into allegations of child abuse at the Mount Cashel Boys’ Home in St. John’s. The orphanage was run by the Irish Christian Brothers. My parents would take me downtown each Christmas to enjoy the Mount Cashel Raffle. The Brothers and the boys would raffle off prizes in a Water Street storefront. The big prize was a live turkey that lived in the shop window. It was always named after a VOCM radio personality. A day of Christmas shopping in St. John’s was never complete without stopping in at the Mount Cashel Raffle. But there would be no raffle that Christmas.
For decades, the orphanage had been hell on earth for many of the young men who lived there. Sexual and physical abuse had been rampant, and although police officers, the Archbishop, and even some of the local media suspected it, they didn’t act. Such was the power of the Catholic Church in Newfoundland at the time.
Night after night I sat and watched the news with my parents as unspeakable horrors were reported. Mom and Dad took me aside and tried to ask me the question that was on every Catholic parent’s mind at the time.
“Mark, DidYou…Mark,DidAnyOneEver…YouKnow. DidAnyOfThemPriestsEver…HaveAGoAtYa?”
No. They hadn’t. They didn’t go after people like me. I had two parents who cared for me. I had a father who was very well known in town. Like all predators, they looked for the weaker targets. They wanted victims who’d be too quiet to speak out. They wanted boys whom no one would believe if they ever dared to say something like that about a priest, let alone a priest who’d been seen by the entire province on television with the Pope and Lady Di. Wolves prey on the weakest sheep. That’s only natural. But these sheep were in the flock of the Holy Church. The wolves turned out to be in the service of the Good Shepherd that the Bible promised would protect them. Who do you turn to when your whole world is turned upside down?
At school, on the playground, we dealt with things the way children do. We laughed it off, pretending it didn’t bother us. Father Hickey jokes were everywhere. They helped us deal with it. Making the priests into clowns took some of the edge off, but there was no denying that things had changed forever.
We’d been taught all our lives that there was no greater authority than the priest. He was God’s representative on earth. When a priest came into the room you stood taller. You spoke more clearly. You tried to become a better person. Now we saw irrefutable proof that not only were they no better than us, in many cases they were far worse than anything we could imagine. I didn’t blame the Church for what the priests had done. I didn’t blame God for sending pedophiles to ruin the lives of those young boys. What Father Hickey had done was the fault of Father Hickey. But what I did blame the Church for was the decision at the highest levels to give him free rein to continue to do it. They’d made boys like me kneel in a box to confess my every sin while going to great lengths to cover up the sins of the man hearing those confessions.
The nuns went into full damage control mode, but there was no counteracting the scenes playing out on our television screens every night. “None of that happened here, boys and girls,” they repeated. “Whatever did or did not happen did not touch the walls of St. Teresa’s.” After all, they said, it was just “a few bad apples.” Some adults wondered aloud if perhaps the boys had seduced the priests and not the other way around. Yes, what young boy doesn’t dream of being sodomized by a fifty-year-old priest? Some others said that the type of boys who lived at the orphanage “would say anything” to get out of trouble. And, of course, some said the whole thing was simply “the work of the devil” and that Satan himself had possessed the poor priests.
That kind of talk almost made me angrier than I’d been when I first heard the news. I wanted to believe in all the things I’d been taught. The world I’d been brought up in had been taken from me. I couldn’t believe anything they said anymore, and I felt the loss. It hurt.
The provincial government established a Royal Commission to investigate the scandal, and each night testimony from the Hughes Inquiry would beam into silent homes. I remember watching one night, the majority of what was said flying well over my head, when a familiar face took the stand. It was our teacher. She’d worked at Mount Cashel and had been called to appear in front of the inquiry. She had done nothing wrong. In fact, she’d tried to speak up about what was going on around her, and as a result she’d been shuffled out. “Whatever did or did not happen” had touched the walls of St. Teresa’s after all.
The next day, any kids who’d missed seeing the inquiry had been told all about it long before our teacher entered the classroom. We all sat quietly as she took her seat. The silence pressed down upon the room. Everyone let out a sigh of relief when a voice from the back said, “Saw you on TV last night, miss.”
And then she said something wonderful. She said the first comforting words that any adult had said to me since the whole thing started. “I know this must all be very hard on you, and if any of you have any questions about what you saw last night or anything at all, I’d be happy to answer them.”
At first no one said a word, but then a hand shot up, then another, and another until nearly every child in the room was bursting with questions they’d been afraid to ask of an adult. She answered each one in a thoughtful way that made us feel we not only had a right to ask, but a fair reason to be angry.
Fox did not ask any questions. The Phantom Pooper never struck again.
12
LATE BLOOMER
GRADE NINE WAS AS far as you could go at St. Teresa’s. My last year of junior high gave me a new appreciation for the playground. To the kids being dropped off for their first day of kindergarten, I was something to be both feared and admired. Ninth graders were at the top of the food chain. We were bigger. We were stronger. We had no match—save for the kids below us who happened to be a year or two older, but by now even they accepted us. Danger could come only from beyond the border of the parking lot guardrail.
The playground had no more “play” to offer us. We were too old for tag. We were too mature to jump rope. Our free time was spent in constant displays of indifference. We were basically high school kids now, so we acted the way we thought high school kids acted. We focused so much on looking cool that we made ourselves miserable.
For instance, there was nothing worse than to be seen in a winter coat or boots. It didn’t matter how bad the weather was. Sleet and snow could be pelting you straight in the face, held up sideways by the type of
eastern gale that would make the fiercest fisherman tuck his chin into his windward shoulder and make his peace with the Lord. Frozen hail could leave your cheeks looking as though they’d been shredded by a cheese grater, and still you’d refuse to wear the perfectly sensible parka with a thick hood that you yourself had picked out at Sears.
You’d choose to lose a toe to frostbite before you’d ever pull on the toasty warm, rubber-bottomed, waterproof snow boots that sat dry as a bone at home. No, a ninth grader’s winter wardrobe consisted of nothing more than a Members Only windbreaker, or, for extreme weather conditions, an acid-wash jean jacket, completely soaked through. Your waterlogged feet would get so frozen in your Bullet sneaker boots that you could hear your toes squish as the pockets of snow and ice, trapped inside your high-tops as you pushed through knee-high snow drifts, slowly melted indoors. A ninth grader wasn’t happy unless he was miserable.
One November lunch period we were in our usual spot, leaning with our backs against the red bricks of the front of the school. There were five of us: Kevin, Gary, Lee, a new kid named John, and me. Our hands, blue with cold, were jammed into our front pockets as we chewed gum to hide our chattering teeth from the snowsuited youngsters happily playing all around us. We surveyed our dominion, rolling our eyes as the squeals of children, too young to know how nerdy their joy was, filled the air.
Through the visible cloud of my own breath I saw a strange figure approaching my kingdom, black fringes swaying from the arms of his leather jacket. This was no St. Teresa’s student. He was easily in high school, or older, and his presence meant we were prey once more. He walked with purpose even while his slack-jawed expression exposed a sincere curiosity about his surroundings, as if he’d never seen a playground full of children before. His legs buckled sporadically as he swayed forward, seemingly unable to control his own trajectory. He moved with the speed of a rock flicked from a slingshot but with the precision of an autumn leaf on a windy day. And the wind was undoubtedly blowing our way.
“Here comes trouble,” I said, motioning in his direction with my elbow. I would have pointed, but the cold air had long since taken any movement from my stubby purple fingers.
The interloper locked onto our location and propelled himself toward us on windmill legs. He skidded to a stop and, fringes swaying, rubbed a strand of snot from his nose. He tried to settle his gaze on Gary, but his eyes weren’t having it. He squinted, leaned in close, and then suddenly his eyes widened and his head fell back as if he were trying to get his sea legs on a boat that only he could see.
“In the mood for a friendly fight?” he asked. “No grudges,” he added in a way that implied this went without saying. I’d never had a friendly fight. Like all boys I liked a good play fight from time to time, but even they usually got a little too serious and would then most certainly end with a grudge. I couldn’t imagine a fight with “no grudges” any more than I could imagine being an adult and wandering onto a playground trying to pick one.
“He must be after sniffing paint or something,” John whispered in my ear. I shot him a look that said “Please don’t disparage the aggressive adult within earshot of the aggressive adult.” Gary couldn’t bring himself to meet his wannabe sparring partner’s eyes. He stared down at the frost-covered pavement and shook his head, flinching in anticipation of the smack that was sure to come. We all winced, feeling the phantom pain of the imminent blow.
The trespasser shrugged and shuffled over to Kevin, the next boy in line. Kevin turned to his right to look at Lee, hoping that if he started up a conversation the grown-up with the stability of a giant inflatable used-car-lot noodle man would see he was otherwise engaged and leave him alone. In modern times Kevin would have looked down at his smartphone, but this was 1988 and Lee was all he had. Except that Lee had already employed the same tactic. He was facing toward John, who was looking directly at me.
The stranger leaned into Kevin’s eye line, threatening to fall over in the process. “Do you want to have a friendly fight?” He remembered to add “No grudges,” as if it was the grudge part that had everyone worried.
Kevin managed to get out an “Um, no,” impressing us all and confounding the strange man. I looked around for the teacher on duty. Mrs. Brenton, oblivious to our plight, was over on the other side of the playground watching the grade threes play tag. We were old enough not to need supervision—unless, of course, someone old enough to know better was trying to fight us.
The man took Kevin’s rejection in good spirits and happily shuffled down to the next victim. It was at this moment that I realized I was last in line. The trespasser would keep moving down until he found a boy who would fight him and, failing that, he’d fight me, his last option. I began to panic. Should I run for it while he was focused on Lee? No. That would be setting John up for a beating, and besides, running would only draw attention to myself. Moreover, my legs felt as if their bones had been replaced with Jell-O that hadn’t quite set and I was having difficulty standing.
By now the Grim Reaper had reached the boy next to me and the offer of a friendly, grudgeless fight came yet again. I braced myself. John, too, had figured out how this was likely to go down. “Nope,” he said, looking directly at the determined pugilist with a wide smile. Bad move. There must have been something in that smile to set the guy off, because he looked at me for a brief moment before turning his attention back to John.
“Too bad,” the stranger said matter-of-factly. He grabbed John’s forelock in his right hand and pulled his head clear down to the pavement. Then he wound up and sent my friend’s skull smacking against the school with a crack like an ice sheet breaking. John folded under himself like a lawn chair. His body slumped to the frozen ground, a line of crimson blood almost imperceptible against the red brick of the building. For the first time in a month I could feel my toes as the sight of blood pouring out of John’s head made me suddenly aware of my own blood pumping through my veins.
Something stirred inside our assailant as well and he seemed to sober up a little, his senses fighting against whatever fire smouldered within. He turned, staggering his way off the parking lot, bouncing off kids like a pinball headed for a tilt. “Mark!” Alerted by the children shrieking all around her, our teacher had turned to see one of her students lying on the ground with his head split open and an adult fleeing the scene. “Mark!” she shouted. “Go get him!”
Me? Go get the man who’d just randomly split open a boy’s skull like it was a piggy bank? What was I supposed to say? “Excuse me, sir, would you mind coming back to have a word with the teacher? She was just wondering if she could ask you about the boy you just broke.”
The man looked over his shoulder at me and then continued on toward the pond across the street. Mrs. Brenton gestured for me to follow him. Fearing the teacher almost as much as the stoned child abuser, I shuffled as far as the yellow guardrail. We’d been told a million times over the years not to leave school grounds, so I halted at its bent metallic edge, the barrier of our scholastic universe, and watched him. He paused briefly, nodded at me, and then disappeared around the pond.
“Sorry, miss,” I said on my return. “He went off school grounds.” She darted a frustrated look at me, which I accepted, much preferring it to spending weeks in traction. I never saw the stranger again. John recovered, but despite the man’s best intentions, I bet he holds a grudge to this day. The entire episode was a harsh reminder of life outside our little biosphere. Soon we’d all be off school grounds and would have to fend for ourselves.
* * *
—
We were moving from childhood to young adulthood, but I didn’t yet know where I was going or, more to the point, where I even wanted to go. That is, until a new nun named Sister Furey came into my life. “Sister Furey?” I thought. “Great. Sounds like a name a female wrestler would have.”
Sister Furey, like Sister Elizabeth before her, showed up at our classroom doorway one day with a proposal. “You’re going to be in a school
play,” she said. It was less a proposal than a demand, but it was as close to the former as a student ever got from a nun. Even so, I tried to wiggle out of it.
“But, Sister,” I said, “I can’t be in a school play. I have to get the bus.”
“It’s okay,” she countered. “I’ll drive you.”
“But, Sister,” I tried a second time as if my life depended on it, which it did, “I can’t be in a school play. The other boys will kill me.”
“Just take the script home and read it and think about it. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. All I’m asking is that you give it a chance.” That made me feel as if I had some control in my life. Then she added, “In the meantime, let me just measure you for the costume.”
I took the play and began to leaf through it on the bus ride home. The Empty Room was the Nativity story from the point of view of the innkeeper who turned away Joseph and Mary on the first Christmas Eve. It was The Greatest Story Ever Told from the point of view of the least interesting character. This wasn’t the story of Joseph, the man who, as if on the pilot episode of the Maury Show, is told that he’s “not the father.” Nor was it the story of Mary, who had to convince her husband that not only is he not the father, but that the baby’s real dad would never be paying any child support, that he wouldn’t be around because technically he was everywhere, and that he wasn’t a deadbeat but an everlasting lifebeat.
So I’d have to be in a play, and a very bad play at that. I got home and tossed the script into a corner of the kitchen, intending to never look at it again.