A BOY IN THE FOREST
By Edna O'Brien
27 January 2002
The Kinderschreck. That’s what the German man called him when he stole the gun and was caught and had to be banished. Before that he was Michan, after a saint, and then Mich, his mother’s pet, and after that, when he went to the place, he was Boy, and then Child, when Father Damien had him helping with the flowers and the cruets in the sacristy, and then later still he was K, short for O’Kane, when his hoodlum times began.
He was ten when he took the gun. He took it so as not to feel afraid. It was his first feel of a gun, his first whiff of power. It felt heavy. When he stood it up, it was taller than himself. He did not know if he would have the guts to fire it. His hands shook when he loaded it, yet he loaded it with a knowledge he did not know he had. Then he cuddled it and gave it a name, he called it Rod. I didn’t mean to kill anyone, only to frighten one man. He wanted to say that, but he was not able to say it, because they were beating him and shouting at him and dragging him off. There was his father, a guard, the sergeant, and Joe Mangan, the bad man who threw the shovel at him and blamed him for cycling over his wet concrete and destroying it. It was not Mich that cycled over it, it was Joe Mangan’s own son Paud, but they blamed him. No matter what was done wrong, they blamed him, and there was no one to stand up for him, because his mother was gone. They said she was dead, but she wasn’t; they buried her alive, suffocated her. They brought him up flights of stone stairs and into a cold room to show her lying on a slab with no color in her cheeks and no breath. It was snowing outside. It was the snow that made her white and made the world white. She was not dead. They only told him that so as to trick him, because he was her pet. They were jealous, they were. He stole out of his father’s house at night and went across the fields to the grave at the edge of the lake and talked to her, and she talked back. He scraped the earth away and made a hole where she could hear. She promised to come back and save him when she was less tired. His plan was that he would run away, away from his father and everyone else, and live in the forest and eat nuts and berries, and in the winter go from house to house to beg for food. He would give himself a secret name, Coillte, the name of the forest.
The first time he spent a night in the woods he was dead scared and dead excited. There were spots before his eyes and shimmers, different colors. He got on his hands and knees and broke sticks, building a sentence around the secret babbly words: “God hates me, Father hates me, I am hated.” That night he saw things no one else saw, not Joe Mangan’s sons, not anybody’s sons, only him. He climbed into a tree and hid. A fox, a she-fox, let out a sound that scared him. It was like a woman having her throat slit, only worse. The vixen was calling for her mate. She was in a bad way, and so were the pheasants that were letting out cluck-cluck sounds to warn each other of the danger. He heard a badger barking and he ducked well into the branches because he knew a man who had been bit by a badger and the man said it was worse than any dog bite. A princess floated by, flying. She was wearing a long white coat and had very long hair down to her ankles. She was carrying slippers. His mother was still in the house, his father attacking her with a poker. She shouted at him to run out, to run off to the woods, and she stayed behind to take the blows. He’d got one blow. At the side of his mouth there was blood that had run down from his ear, and he put a fob of a pine branch on it to stop it. The thing was to keep awake, no matter what. There were noises and there was silence. The louder the silence, the scarier the noise to come. A cock pheasant was warning all other pheasants of an imminent attack. There was a full moon and it was walking across the sky, and in places the light spilt onto the ground, where there were no trees. That was called a glade. He knew that from school.
When his mother came he was fast asleep. Mich Mich Mich. He wouldn’t let on that he heard her and wouldn’t let on when he came awake. She lifted him down and tweaked his nose and said, “Sleepyhead, sleepyhead.” One of her front teeth was gone and she didn’t look nearly as nice. He put his finger into the hole and felt the damp of the blood and tasted it and it was warm. His mother and he were not two people, only one.
“I saw a beautiful lady.”
“Go on.”
“She was on her way to her wedding.”
“How do you know?”
“She had silver slippers.”
His mother carried him back home through the scrub, and the moon was a lamp to show the way. She said he was a brave boy to stay all alone in the forest and not scream like that silly vixen. She said he was a true son of the forest. Next day he wrote that in the front of his copybook at school: I am a true son of the forest.
***
His father and the guard and the sergeant and his sister Aileen and Joe Mangan and Mrs. Joe Mangan are all in the court, and the judge is sitting at a big brown desk, higher up. The sergeant is telling the judge the terrible thing the wicked boy has done. The German man is on the other side, nodding. His sister Aileen is beside him, holding his hand. His nose is streaming and his eyes, and he has no hankie. The sergeant is describing how the boy stole a bicycle from the doctor’s shed, then rode it on purpose over the wet cement that Joe Mangan had just put down, and then rode and got the groceries for his sister and left them on the windowsill and ran off. The sergeant got very wound up when he came to the bit about the boy breaking into the German man’s house, finding the shotgun and the belt of cartridges, and then creeping back toward his own house, hiding in a ditch at the end of the garden and waiting for the opportunity to shoot. The sergeant told how he himself and the boy’s father were behind the very door that had been shot at and were lucky to still be alive. There was more and more about the boy’s aggressive behavior from a young age, from the innocence of stealing apples to the non-innocence, the evil, the knowing evil of stealing a gun. The boy was listening to it all, but he was not allowed to speak. He had not cycled over wet cement, Joe Mangan’s son Paud did that, but he got the blame, and they called him dirty names at the time and told him they would carry him off to the Shannon and drown him, and he’d never be found. He ran to his own house to tell his sister, but she wouldn’t let him in because she had a friend of hers over and she was ashamed of him. When he asked for a glass of orange, she poured it and put it out on the windowsill and told him to drink it there. That was when he ran away, because no one wanted him.
When the judge gave the sentence, his voice very low and his face very red, the boy didn’t understand it. A detention center. What did that mean? The sergeant thanked the judge and they trooped out. His sister told him outside the court that he was going to be going away to St. Malachy’s and it was lucky that there was a vacancy and it was a very nice place. It had a swimming pool, just like a holiday camp. He would be let home at Christmas and he could write letters, so he mustn’t cry. “I didn’t mean to kill anyone, only to frighten one man,” he said. She told him to shush it or they’d murder him for thinking such a thing, and anyhow they had to hurry home to start washing and ironing and packing his things. She borrowed a suitcase from Mrs. Joe Mangan.
When they arrived at St. Malachy’s he clung to his granny’s knee. The car drove past iron gates into a yard with big high walls. The sergeant sat in front and he in the back, refusing to get out, because the place was not a holiday camp but a big dark creepy castle. His granny kept telling him to be a good boy and do as the guard said and walk in there like a man. The sergeant passed him over to Brother Finbar, and Brother Finbar took him in and shut the door and bolted it. Brother Finbar had a long brown robe and a strand of rosary beads that swung like rope. They walked fast, with Brother Finbar telling him they would put manners into him. He was brought to a cloakroom to be fitted with clothes. He and Brother Finbar fought over his jumper, the one his mother had knit for him when she was sick in the hospital. It was purple and red, with navy cuffs and a multicolored tassel at the end of a zip. It smelled of his mother, and when he wore it he could feel her soft hands and her kiss. He would not part with it. He would not raise his arms to have it pulled off. Brother Finbar dragged and dragged, then found a loose thread in the waistband and started ripping it. He could see the colors breaking up, navy blue and purple and red; it was like his mother was being ripped up, and the threads were in wormy coils on the flagged floor. He was fitted with short pants, a jacket three times too big for him, and nailed boots. “You will wear our clothing whilst here,” Brother Finbar kept repeating. Whilst here. Whilst here. Whilst here.
***
Out in the yard there were boys cuffing and roughing each other. He stood apart, with a group studying him, making a ring around him. Where’s he from? Ask him. Ask ’im. Down the country. Where’s that? Where’s down the country? Ha. Ha. Ha. A bogger. Has he got a cigarette? Hey, Rambo, got a fag? He doesn’t smoke. Eejit. Bogger. Give him a hook. Test his mettle. Show your mettle, bogger. Clinging to his mammy’s knee.
By the time the bell went, they had him down on the ground, kicking him, until a boy called Bertie pulled them off. The tea was in mugs and the thick slices of bread were streaked with lard. Brother Finbar stood at the head of the table as if he were an iron figure with iron rosary beads and an iron beard.
“Eat your tea, boy.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“The boot is on the other foot now. There’s no guns here to scare people.”
For two weeks he was assessed, to find which wing he should be kept in. The woman that assessed him sat him at a table and asked him questions, asked him if he had three wishes what they would be. He said he wanted to go home. Other boys told him to scupper the notion. In the end it was decided he should go to the Castle. It had very stiff rules and a cabbagy smell. The first evening he was shaking and he couldn’t swallow. A young brother called Anthony took pity on him.
“I have stomach cramps,” he told the young brother.
“Drink a drop of hot tea, ’twill help you,” the brother said. He was a nice brother and one side of his face was a raw red and he said that was called a strawberry face. He took different pieces of cutlery to draw a map of the country, and then he put the sugar bowl down to show where he came from, a scenic place with mountains and a famous lake. He missed it. He said he was very young when he joined the order, but they were a family of fourteen and with his face and everything there were no other chances for him.
“How long will I be here?”
“Years.”
Then Brother Anthony said he had something for him. The boy thought it was a slice of cake, but it wasn’t. It was a prayer that Brother Anthony had copied and that he read out: “Jesus said to them, ’When you make the two one and when you make the inner as the outer and the outer as the inner, you shall enter the Kingdom.’ “
“A child and his mother are one.”
“Ah, yes . . . but that’s secular and I am talking of being with God.”
“Will I not be going home for Christmas?”
“It’s not for me to say. Who’s at home?”
“My sister and my pet fox . . . I didn’t get to say goodbye to it.”
“No use crying over these things.”
The rain was sliding down the window and plopping onto the flat roof.
***
He tried. He tried to keep awake so as not to wet the bed, but he always fell asleep and he always wet the bed, and he wakened to the smell of ugly wet and Brother Jude putting his hand in under the blanket and dragging him out by his mickey. You dirty thing, you dirty thing, you. Brother Jude brought him to a room off the dormitory. The strap was kept in a refrigerator there so it would stay cold and hard. It was leather, with studs down both sides of it. He was beaten on both cheeks of his bottom and on his legs and on his arms, but not on his face. He was punched on his face. When he got back to the dormitory, boys came around his bed to know what had happened, asking if Jude did any bit of fly-fishing or fiddled with his yoke. Lazlo led the interrogation. Lazlo was the leader and they were all afraid of him because he was a schizophrenic. Schizophrenic meant that he heard voices and he would attack any boy if the voices told him to. Lazlo said that Jude was a wiggledy-wiggledy wanker. Lazlo trained boys to be tough. He took them into the lavatory and made cuts on their wrists with a flick knife so they’d get used to the pain. The flick knife had a wooden handle with a picture of a Labrador on it.
In the morning he got another beating, from the prefect, on account of the plastic sheet being wet and smelly. That beating was with the back of a lavatory brush. At Christmas his granny would come for him and he would never have to come back. In the letters to his granny he had to say that he was a good boy and learning his lessons and getting a star for his subjects. The brothers made them say that. He would not tell her about the beatings when she came to fetch him in the car, he would tell her at night, when she tucked him up in bed.
***
A psychiatrist saw him twice a week and asked him what he was afraid of. He said that he was afraid his grandmother would die, because he had dreamt it. He had dreamt that his mother would die, and she did. He didn’t say that he was afraid of Brother Jude or Lazlo, because that would get him into a big mess. He was given the same three pretend wishes. He wished that his mother hadn’t died and that he could go home and that he would never use a gun again. Other times he wouldn’t talk at all. Out in the fields he and other boys worked digging potatoes or pitting potatoes, and he ate them raw to show how tough he was.
One morning, it was a priest who rang the bell for breakfast. Father Damien. Boys said that Brother Jude had gone crackers, had gone into the fields and stripped himself naked and run off. His brown habit was found in the field and his beads and his sandals.
Father Damien was home from Africa and had a tan from all the sunshine. He was not cross over the wet bed and called him child—“What is it, child, what is it, child?” Father Damien gave him a toffee. It was a white toffee with ground nuts in it. Lazlo and the other boys made fun of him. “Lick arse” they called him, for playing up to the priest.
Father Damien told him one day that he was a lucky boy, he was going to be allowed to help in the sacristy. He would fill the glass cruets with wine and with water and get the vases ready for the flowers. They were the first flowers he had smelled in months. They were white with bits of yellow, the color of egg yolk, and they grew wild. At home they were called bog lilies.
One evening after Benediction they were in the sacristy and Father Damien was wearing a white garment, like a gown, with big pockets in it. “Put your hand in my pocket, child.” There was a sweet in the pocket. Father Damien told him to keep his hand there until he was told not to. He felt the swellings, his own and the father’s, and his cheeks got very red and he was hot and damp between his legs and Father Damien clung to him until he was finished. Then he said, “Good child, good child,” and warned him not to tell.
Davey was his new friend. Davey was older, but not like Lazlo. Davey was fourteen, nearly fifteen. He ran the disco. They had discos one Saturday a month, and Davey danced with the best-looking girls, “motts” he called them, and he steered them down to the back of the hall, where it was dark. The girls were delinquents like them, they came in a bus from a convent ten miles away, and two nuns stood up on the platform next to the record-player to keep an eye on what went on. They couldn’t see into the back of the hall where Davey and the big boys were lifting up girls’ jumpers and blouses. Mich danced with the small girls who knew the steps better than he did. Davey went in for the slow dancing and said he went through the girls like butter. “This is me new mott,” he’d say of whatever girl he was dancing with. Once Davey had kissed a girl, it was on to the next, because the more girls a lad had the greater his status, Davey said. “Status” was a new word. The other thing Davey said was to drop a girl like a hotcake once she showed interest, got clingy. Hotcakes and hot crumpets were two different things, all part of a girl’s pussy.
***
The night of the Halloween dance Mich got his first drink, cider. A lot of the boys were dead drunk and gassing outside in the yard. Two boys broke into a factory not far from the school and siphoned cider from vats into lemonade bottles. It tasted of apples. Davey called him aside; he had a plan and it was thus: Every Saturday there were games on the grounds, hurley and football and handball, priests and brothers and boys, all running in all directions, pandemonium. Young Mich would go into the chapel the next Saturday and open the back door that led out onto a field and down to the river.
He wouldn’t be playing hurley that particular day because he would have a nosebleed. Davey would pay a rough jackeen with a cigarette to give Mich a few punches, dead easy. Davey said that they would probably find a boat or a canoe down by the river, and they would drift for miles until they came to the city. Then they could be stowaways on a ship or go into town, whichever. He seemed to favor the town on account of having mates there. He said it was brilliant crashing a car, either doing it alone or with a crowd; it gave a great buzz. Best of all was doing it with girls, because they lost their marbles on account of having such a big fright.
That day, Mich left the games field with a handkerchief to his nose and went into the chapel. No one paid any attention to him. He unbolted the back door and then hid in the confessional box until Davey came. Once out the door, they ran helter-skelter, down the fields to the river and along the river and over gates and fences and across fields, all the time hoping there’d be a boat moored at the next bend or the next, but there wasn’t. He was proud of how fast he ran in the nailed boots. By the time it was dark they had come to an estate with a whole lot of houses and ponies in a paddock. There was a bonfire with kids around it. Davey said that they’d best chat up the kids. They were smoking and having a singsong. They were enjoying themselves, and then a boy said, “Jesus. Look.” A car was coming into the field, the headlights full on. It was the white van from the Castle. The head brother and two other brothers and Lazlo and a boy jumped out. Mich ran to the river and jumped in, clothes and all, and he could feel the current pulling him along and he was happy because he was going to drown and he would never be going back to the Castle again. The boy that caught him was Lazlo, who held him under the water until he nearly drowned, then brought him up and shook the water off him. Then he put him down again and held him, and Mich was smothering and his head and his brain were all water, and Lazlo wouldn’t let him up until he nearly died. “Lick arse, lick arse.”
***
He was put in solitary and had to write down how bad he was. He had to write it hundreds of times. Christmas would be soon, but he would not be going home. He didn’t cry much anymore. He stoppered the tears up, like putting a cork in a bottle. It got that it was just as bad waiting for the beatings as suffering them. He never knew when they were coming for him. He was due a hundred lashes. He cried only when it came to Christmas, because he was not let home. Most of the boys were allowed to go, even Lazlo. His sister sent him a card with silver salt on it and he licked it and it tasted gritty. She said the family hoped he was well and that they missed him. They had been told about his running away and his aggressive behavior, and they were all praying that he would turn over a new leaf. She put kisses at the end. He cried at Midnight Mass because of the singing on tape. It was like hearing his mother singing in the kitchen long ago. Father Damien called him aside after Mass and asked him what he would like for Christmas. He said he would like a guitar. Father Damien gave him a teeny box of chocolates and a holy picture. He ate the chocolates on a garden seat and wondered if it would snow. The plants were all lying down, as if someone had beaten them and they had no strength to get up.
He was put to work with some other boys in the potato fields after school. Lazlo was in charge. When they’d finished, they told him that they had some business with him, and they went to the opposite end of the field, away from the school, where there was an old plow with a car cushion on it. They said they knew what he’d done with Father Damien and they were going to cut it off. He screamed and held on to it and begged, and Lazlo said, “O.K., O.K., off with a caution.” They put him face down on the cushion and pulled his overalls off and they took turns. He could hardly walk back because he was so sore. And he was bleeding.
He dreamt about running away, because if he dreamt it, it would happen. Himself and another boy were sent to the top gate every other morning to collect the milk. One morning, the other boy was sick, so he went down alone. The routine was always the same: the driver took the full crates out of the truck and loaded the empty ones, and set off for the next stop. When Mich was found in the next big town, the driver said, “Holy heck.” Mich insisted to the driver that he’d been kept prisoner at the Castle, and that his grandmother and himself had made a pact that he would run away when the opportunity came up. The driver didn’t believe him, but he knew the bastards they were, so he let him go. Mich ran toward home, but he was not going home.
***
Three nights later, soaked and scared, he was back in his village and knocking on the door of a man he knew. The man was astonished, but he let him in and they dried him and gave him hot cocoa, and the boy slept in a room with two of their sons, who were afraid of him. He knew they were afraid, because when one went to the toilet the other went as well, so as not to be alone with him. The man had gone to the guards, because there was a warrant out for him to be sent back to the place he ran away from. He got a reprieve for seven days. Then he got sick, and the doctor came, and he was going to be allowed fourteen days’ reprieve in all. He helped the man bring in the cows and do odd jobs in the fields.
One evening, the man was milking the cows and he stood beside him in the cow house and told him the things that happened to him in the place, and the man asked him several times if it was true. “God’s honor,” he said, and the man hugged him and stopped milking and the dribbles of milk went all over the floor. The man said he would talk to his wife and that they would take it up with the authorities. They had their dinner in the evening and the woman ladled out meat and vegetables into soup plates. They had apple cake or jelly after. Then the man opened the door and his pet rabbits came out of their hutch and into the kitchen. The favorite, Dustin, climbed onto the man’s shoulder and nibbled at his ears. The others perched on the tiled curb around the fire. Everyone laughed. Mich laughed, too. This was home, a dinner, apple cake, a calendar on the wall, and a record put on for the rabbits to waltz to. In bed, the sons tried to get him to talk about the Castle, but he wouldn’t. He knew things that they didn’t know. Then one night he boasted about getting a blade and slitting his wrist and being in the ambulance, and the twenty stitches he had. He told them how he bit the stitches and spat the thread out. He told them he was a head case and that Lazlo and the gang were scared to death of him. They knew he had been sent away for trying to shoot his father and the sergeant, everyone knew it. There was a hole in the panel of the door for proof.
One day after planting cabbages the man sat him down on a wooden seat in the front garden to have a talk with him. He thought it was about going back, but it wasn’t. The man asked him if he would like to be part of their family, one of them, a son. He said he didn’t know.
The man said it would take time, that he would have to go through all the correct channels, but he felt confident of the outcome. Mich’s father had given the permission and his sister had gone away to live with her granny. The man asked him if he’d like a different name and he said he would, he would like to be called Coillte, the name of the forest.
It was about a month later that he began to hate the rabbits and the attention they got, the fussing over them, the click-cluck and the oats put down on the kitchen floor for their supper. He hated other things, too—the sons, pretending he was their brother when he wasn’t. He knew the movement of the rabbits, the time of evening they came out and frisked around the field and nibbled at grass, the same time as when the crows cawed. He went out to the field a while earlier and took some oats in a bit of cardboard and funnelled them out in little heaps. Several rabbits came to him, but there was one in particular that he decided he would like to kill. A namby-pamby. A weakling. He struck the shovel down on the nape of its furry neck and it fell sideways like a glove. Next morning the dog brought the carcass and flung it on the step. No one said anything.
It was only after he killed the kittens that there was trouble. There were six kittens in all, cleaved together in their sleep, so it was easy except for the squeal that came out of them and the blood. But one of the sons saw him and ran into the house yelling and the mother came out and blessed herself and asked him why in the name of God the boy had done such a wicked thing. He said it wasn’t him that did it, it was someone else, a boy that came on a motorbike and then tore off.
The father broke the news to him in the dining room that night. There was the father and him and a big jug of artificial flowers. The father held up the documents about the adoption and said it would have to wait. Mich would have to go away for a while, because his head was all scrambled up. He got on the floor and clung to the man’s trousers, but the man said it was out of his hands now, it was in the hands of the state and the social workers and the people experienced in these matters.
They drove to another place, where the local doctor had made arrangements for him to go. A secretary took down the particulars and signed him in. The man told him to shake hands with her and say thank you, and he did.
“We’ve been trying to get him to eat for days, but he wouldn’t . . . He’s very weak,” the man said.
“We can’t have that,” she said, and went off to see what she could raid from the kitchen.
While she was gone, a head doctor with a red puffy face came and looked in, and the man handed him a sealed letter.
“Hang on, hang on . . . we might have a problem here,” the doctor said, and went off to make a phone call. He came back and said that they couldn’t keep the boy, but that there was a place for young offenders about twenty miles away and he would be placed there.
“Can you make an exception?” the man asked him.
“I can’t—he’s underage. Someone got their knickers in a twist,” he kept saying.
“So what do we do?” the man’s wife pleaded.
“St. Sebastian’s . . . that’s the place for young offenders, and it’s not far. The only snag is his father will have to meet you there to sign the admission forms.”
“His father won’t,” the man said.
“I’ll go and phone him and make sure that he does. He’ll be there to meet ye. I’ll tell him exactly where it is.” He went off to telephone his father and came back telling them to drive nice and slow but to keep an eye out for a big white notice board that said “St. Sebastian’s,” two miles this side of the town.
They drove—the man, his wife, and himself—without saying much, and when the town lights winked, the man started asking the way. One person said, “Straight on,” and the next person said, “You’ve passed it.” The man had to get out and make a phone call. The woman asked him was he cold, and he said no. Then she asked was he sorry for the thing he’d done wrong, and he said yes. Yes.
At St. Sebastian’s, two nurses saw him. One took his pulse and another put a stethoscope on his heart because he was shaking and twitching. Then one of them asked him why he had killed the kittens. He said, “I forget.” The other asked him why he had run away from the Castle. He said he hated it. The nurse said hate was not a good emotion, especially in a growing boy.
His father had not arrived, so they sat in the outer hall and waited and waited, but he never came. Two more phone calls were made, and then a nurse and a doctor came out and had a piece of paper that was a dossier on him. The man and the woman stood with them, and he was standing nearby, next to a big green plant, and he could hear what they were saying. The doctor was telling the woman that it was not advisable to have him around other children.
“Why not? . . . Why not?” she kept asking. He held up the dossier again and showed it to the husband and the husband said “Jesus” and said he would rather not show it to his wife. The doctor insisted. He held up the piece of paper for the woman to see, and when she saw it she gasped, then read it out loud: “This boy could kill.”
The man and his wife shook their heads at each other, and then the man came across to him and said that there was no room at the inn and that they would be taking him back to the Castle.
“Don’t send me back, don’t send me back.” He got down on his knees and shouted it to strangers sitting in armchairs. It was visiting Sunday. A woman came forward with a biscuit and he refused it and shouted louder, louder, “Don’t send me back there! . . . I’ll do away with myself!”
He said it to himself when they drove through the night in the rain. He thought if he said it often enough his prayer would be answered, but it was not. They drove along dark country roads, where there were hardly any cars, and now and then they came on a dead fox or a dead cat, outstretched, its fur and its guts strewn there, a pitifulness to it, as if there was something that cat or that fox badly needed to say.
Published in the print edition of the February 4, 2002, issue, with the headline “A BOY IN THE FOREST.”
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