There were only three ways out of the home for the home babies. Some were adopted as infants, usually to wealthy Catholic Americans, usually without the consent or knowledge of the babies’ mothers. The rest were sent to industrial schools after the age of ten, and the industrial schools were almost identical to the home except that they were run by the Christian Brothers, not the nuns, and there were a lot more beatings. The third option was the unmarked grave at the back of the garden, behind the perfectly tilled rows of cabbage and lettuce, behind the greenhouse, behind the septic tank that treated the home’s waste after it was flushed away.
Nobody wanted to go to the bottom of the garden. If a ball rolled past the cabbages, it was never recovered. The bravest, oldest children dared each other to run down there at dusk, to touch the back wall of the home’s land, to feel under their feet the earth that was turned over once every few weeks when a fresh tiny body was buried.
There were no headstones, no names, no markers. Most of the time, the mothers were never even told.
William Rys didn’t remember his mother. He didn’t even know what she was called. She was gone before he’d learned to speak.
William didn’t miss what he’d never had, but he held closely to the one thing his mother had ever given him. His name: William Patrick Rys.
* * *
—
There are things in life you hold, and there are things that hold you. William’s name was his power, his strength, the secret he wrapped around himself like the warm woolen coats the town kids had. The ones that weren’t handed down from ten other older orphans. The ones that didn’t have holes in the armpits, too-short sleeves. The ones that hadn’t faded to a homogeneous brown gray from decades of washing.
He knew Home Baby was not his name. His name was William Patrick Rys. There was great power in a name like that. He held it like a fist.
The things that held him were passed on by the nuns and had their grip tightened by the Christian Brothers when he left the home in Donegal town at the age of eleven to live in St. Brendan’s Industrial School in Killybegs.
In the industrial school, there were no town kids with their fancy black coats, their new shoes, their penny sweets and magazines. In the industrial schools, there were only boys like him. Bastards and thieves, vagrants and orphans. All they had were fists and spit, cocked heads and cheek.
William found that, strangely, the boys in the school fought more seldom than the children in the home. He soon realized that this was because the home babies were neglected, while the boys in the industrial schools were never for a moment left alone.
William had grown up with the strict and disciplinarian nuns, but never had he known so many rules as this.
Everything moved fast in the school. If you were last to make your bed in the morning, you were clouted about the ears. If you had the misfortune to wet your bed, you could expect a beating. If you were last out of the classroom at break time, you’d get a wallop on the back. If you were last to the latrines, you’d get a kick in the ass. If you were last to finish your school work, you’d get a ruler across the knuckles. The smacks and slaps became a metronome by which to measure your days. Sleep, food, smacks, class, chores, slaps.
William missed the nuns. The ones who’d shush them, knit in silence. The ones who hummed hymns. The ones who’d shout that they were dim. The ones who’d tell them about the sins of their mothers.
The brothers called their mothers sluts and whores, but this was hardly news to most of the boys. The brothers who shushed and shouted weren’t the ones to look out for. The ones who smacked and slapped, who hit with rulers or leather straps, those weren’t the ones to look out for either.
The ones to look out for were the ones with tempers. Like Brother Jack, who beat a boy unconscious for sniffing all through class because he had a cold and no handkerchief. Like Brother Francis, who broke a boy’s arm for laughing at the crumbs in his beard one morning. Like Brother Carl, who gave a boy a black eye for doodling a cartoon picture of him farting.
But knowing whom to look out for didn’t mean you wouldn’t get hurt. In William’s six years at the school, the local doctor was only called once, and that was when Daniel O’Callaghan fell from the second-floor stairwell running away from Brother Jack’s beating and cracked his head on the bottom step. He died in the hospital three days later. The police never came.
Knowing whom to look out for didn’t mean you could avoid a nighttime beating, after you knew you’d angered a brother that morning and had hoped he’d let it go, until he swooped into the dormitory, black cloak billowing like some kind of demon bird, woke you up, and threw you into the nearest wall.
Knowing whom to look out for didn’t mean you could keep a brother from forbidding you to go to the bathroom during football training, didn’t mean you could help pissing yourself where you stood and getting caned for the smell on your trousers. It didn’t mean you could avoid following the summons of a brother into his office, where he stood with his robes all askew, didn’t mean you could run when he brought you inside and shut the door. Didn’t mean you could move your eyes from the statue of Mother Mary the Blessed Virgin hanging above the brother’s door, halo all shiny and golden, blue dress like a summer sky, arms outstretched.
These were the things that William held. His name, and the angels and saints. The Blessed Virgin on her pedestal, St. Brigid celebrated in woven rushes, St. Agnes the virgin martyr, Mary Magdalene, who renounced a life of sin to serve at the right hand of the Lord. All these glorious women, pure and virtuous, arms outstretched to save him.
* * *
—
When he left school at seventeen, William walked out of St. Brendan’s with the clothes on his back and he hitchhiked all the way to Dublin. He arrived on O’Connell Street with no idea where he would spend the night. He looked up at the statue of Daniel O’Connell (whoever he was; William’s history was patchier than Brother Francis’s temper) and was awestruck by the giant bronze angels supporting the base of the statue of the man.
There were four of them, all stern and stunning, with long, straight noses, crowns of laurels in their metal hair, and huge wings like those of great black birds, taller than William twice over.
William wanted to curl up on the cold laps of these giant winged women and fall asleep. Instead, he followed the stony gaze of the bullet-wounded angel holding a snake, away from O’Connell Bridge, walking past the shops and offices across the busy road, down side streets and along alleyways until he found himself in front of a St. Brigid’s cross. Below it was the door of a bakery. Inside was a small iron statue of the Virgin Mary, the same color as the angels on O’Connell Street.
Also inside was a little girl with her mother, folding down the pastry edges of a row of apple pies.
* * *