supplicium post mortem

© 2009 Casey Morgan

St. Cecelia’s School
Candlemas

It was quarter past midnight and Father Donne stepped off the fifth floor elevator to take a tour of the dormitories. He had made it his routine to walk the dormitories after the faculty had gone to sleep. He had made it his routine, also, to circulate towards the end of study hall while the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades were preparing for bed. He had decided the Matrons could attend to the little boys for the moment. He had been at St. Cecelia’s ten days, and that had been long enough to discern where the most urgent problems lay, and it was not in grades three, four, or five. That the younger boys required attention, vigorous attention, Father Donne had no doubt, but he felt disinclined to tackle them until he had the older set in hand.

Father Donne’s predecessor had left precipitously. There had been some kind of a health crisis, and everyone prayed that he might recover fully – by next term even. Father Donne had been called in as an urgent personal favor to supervise the school pro tem, but what had been sold to him as manning a fort had quickly revealed itself to be setting a house in order, perhaps even rebuilding wings of it from the ground up.

It had been many years since Father Donne had set foot in a school, another lifetime, a lifetime which had included marriage, and children of his own. His sons and daughter were long grown and lived in different time zones. His wife existed somewhere other than a different time zone; she had gone on ahead, as he liked to phrase it. The Abbot at Lundsford had discouraged euphemism, but now that he was no longer under the Abbot’s authority – now that he was free, in fact, in the wicked world – he could speak of things as he liked. Twenty-nine years in the community at Lundsford had left its mark, however, and Father Donne found he had little patience for anything but the bald truth. And the truth was that his predecessor had left the school disturbed.

He had sorted out a certain surface insubordination amongst the older boys by tackling lateness to breakfast. He quickly surmised that the current system of demerits meant little to seventh and eighth graders bent on mucking about after lights-out and dragging themselves downstairs semi-catatonic, making it to choir practice by the skins of their teeth. They feared Dr. Walters, the choirmaster, enough to obey him, but his reign did not extend beyond the choir room. They had feared WIK, as they called Father Donne’s predecessor, William Ives Kenton, but now that he was gone, they had lost their bearings. WIK (which they pronounced to rhyme with stick) had reigned with a combination of terror and indulgence, a regime which had bound the boys to him but instilled in them nothing – at least as far as Father Donne could tell. Life under WIK had revolved around WIK, his moods, his pleasures, his rages, his favorites. Some boys had adored him and fiercely resented Father Donne for taking his place. Those boys could be dealt with, and Donne had begun the dealing by instituting early morning runs for breakfast defaulters. He dragged the miscreants out of bed himself, chucking glasses of ice water on them if necessary, and accompanied them on a brisk run  in the dark of a January morning. He enjoyed setting pace for twelve and thirteen year olds with his sixty-five-year-old frame, but when he repented of his pride, he acknowledged that they would have no trouble outrunning him if they were not so thoroughly cold, disoriented, and sleep deprived.

The elevator doors whispered shut behind him, and he saw no light bleeding from under the bedroom doors. Only the orange glow of exit signs lit the carpeted hallway. He padded by each room to be sure, and then climbed the stairs to the sixth floor, which he was pleasantly surprised to find silent as well. He began to hope that the seventh and eighth grade boys – all fifteen of them – might make it to breakfast on time the next morning.

Who said punishment didn’t work? Father Donne had no time for fashionable notions of discipline (lack of discipline, more like, he thought). He saw no reason to abandon the merit and demerit system at the school, but boys, he knew, often required more concrete motivation. Four days of six a.m. sub-zero jogging had convinced the most jaded teenagers that they preferred to stay in their own rooms with the lights out at night rather than sit up and watch illegally downloaded movies on one another’s laptops. In his day, dormitory irregularities had been handled matter-of-factly with a few sharp taps of the dorm cane, or when he was the age of the third and fourth grades, with the brisk application of the slipper. Such methods were not, he gleaned, in favor today. He frequently despaired of the world and what had become of it while he was in the cloister, but he knew despair to be an evil he could ill-afford to indulge.

The air vents hummed around him as he mounted the stairs to the domain of the eighth grade. His senior prefect, Felix Marvell, was on-side. Although Father Donne was not yet confident of the depth of Felix’s trust in him, Felix could be relied upon to keep rudimentary order, at least amongst the little boys. He was fairly confident that Felix surfed the internet after lights-out, but since he turned up well-groomed to breakfast every morning, Father Donne chose to turn a blind eye to what might be going on behind Felix’s darkened door.

A surge of pride rushed through him as he turned down the left-hand hall and observed five silent, lightless doors; his five thorniest morning runners were asleep, all of them, before one o’clock – a first! All, on careful perusal, was right at St. Cecelia’s, for once. He could board the elevator and ascend to his rooms, drink his milk, and put on his ‘Short Brahms’ playlist as he fell asleep. For one blessed night since the wretched year began – thirty-two trying days ago – for one night, he could retire with a glimmer of having done his duty, of having succeeded, of rest.

He punched the elevator button and squinted as the light from within poured into the dim corridor. He stepped inside its slightly pungent atmosphere (he prayed the building did not have a serious mold problem, but he feared it might) and waited for the doors to close. Just as they rumbled together, his ears received most unwelcome news – a thump, from without. The backs of his eyes protested piteously as his thumb pressed the open button. Why, they clamored, must the ears admit such noises? Why could they not simply consider it part of the building’s respiration, unexpected, but no reason for a detour from milk, Brahms, and bed. Probably, the backs of his eyes suggested, the sound issued from the vents, or even the elevator itself!

Father Donne’s slippers, however, had already stepped off the cool linoleum of the elevator and onto the silent seventh-floor carpet. They carried him towards the source of the thump, not left, in the direction of his five morning runners, but right, towards Mr. Herbert’s apartment and the two rooms that lay tucked beyond it: that of Felix Marvell – silent, dark – and that of his brother, Theodore.

Father Donne’s left hand opened the door. His eyes squinted at the glaring overhead light, which flickered, and the two lamps which burned with energy-efficient bulbs. Theodore Marvell froze, his arms wrapped around his dresser’s top drawer, which he was attempting, unsuccessfully, to force back into place.

Father Donne took in the room, which looked as though an obsessive-compulsive had ransacked it. Every item of Theo’s clothing appeared to have emerged from storage and now lay, scrupulously, across the bed, desk, and floor – socks had been set individually one beside the other, as if for a museum display; briefs similarly spread upon the duvet; polo shirts, Sunday shirts, school fleece, mufti fleece, uniform trousers, weekend cargo pants – Father Donne grew exhausted surveying the inventory.

“What in Heaven’s name is going on, Theodore?” Theo stood rigid, deer-in-headlights, cubed. “Put that down,” Donne said, indicating the bureau drawer. Theo attempted to obey, but merely dropped the drawer with another loud report, bashing his toe in the process.

“Ow, sir!”

Father Donne took the drawer from the boy, fit it back on its tracking, and rolled it shut. Theo collapsed on the edge of the bed, clutching his toe, his eyes reddening with suppressed tears. Father Donne put one hand on the dresser, the other on his hip, and furrowed his brow at the boy.

“Do you have any idea what time it is?”

Theo winced. “I-I know, sir. I’m sorry, but I just had to…” he gestured to the trunk-sale-worthy bedroom. “You know?”

“You had to…conduct an emergency fumigation of your clothing due to a midnight infestation of vermin?”

“No, sir,” Theo replied with a tone that suggested he might possess a sense of humor. “I…I had so much homework, sir. My math took over two hours, because, well, you know how Mr. Herbert gives me extra things to do?” Father Donne had heard something of the kind. The Marvell boys were the best students in the school, and Theo was supposedly dipping his toe into pre-calculus. “Well,” Theo continued, “then we had a paper to write for Miss Summers, and it took a really, really long time, and we had a translation for Mr. Farrell, and for Ms. Germaine we–”

“Theodore,” Father Donne interrupted, dizzied by the recitation, “what does any of this have to do with the hour, or the state of your room?”

“It’s only that I had to work late, sir, or I wouldn’t get it all done.”

“Theodore!”

“But I finished, sir! Finally. And I’ll turn out the light soon, sir, in just a few minutes.”

“You are trying my patience. Severely.”

“I don’t mean to, sir. I just have to finish these things.” He indicated his clothing. “It won’t take long now.”

Father Donne was hoping he wouldn’t have to ask, or say, the obvious, but his hope expired as Theo stood up and began folding his briefs with the aid of a piece of cardboard.

“That will do, Marvell,” Father Donne said, pulling out a voice from his own schooldays, but Theo continued to fold. Father Donne snatched the cardboard form from his hands. “You can finish that in the morning, during break.”

“It’ll only take a few more minutes, sir. I won’t be able to sleep if it’s not done.”

“If what’s not done?!” Father Donne could feel himself losing his temper.

“If my drawers aren’t organized. I can’t possibly sleep with this mess.”

Father Donne drew a deep breath. This boy, he knew, was not jesting with him. This was no wind-up, no sarcastic joke. Theodore Marvell, the bright star of the choir, perhaps the brightest star of the school, stood before him strung-out, obsessed, insomniac, and divorced from his rational self. As well-behaved and well-intentioned as he was, this boy had just revealed himself as an urgent case, one that required handling at once more delicate and more firm than the recalcitrant morning runners, or the rambunctious third grade. Father Donne tightened the cord on his dressing gown and reached for Theo’s shoulder.

“Theodore,” he said, “come with me.”

copyright 2009 Casey Morgan