Gentle Murderer by Dorothy Salisbury Davis Page B

school. I don’t see as they’re so much worse off.”
    Father Duffy smiled. “Father McGohey’s altar boys,” he said, “they interest me, Miss Hanrahan.”
    “Were you in the army?”
    “Yes. But I wasn’t quite as fond of it as Father McGohey apparently was.”
    “Oh, there’s many of your opinion.” She leaned forward confidentially. “For them as likes a parade, it was all right. But for them as likes to pray to themselves, it was a terrible distraction.”
    “Father McGohey was of the old school,” he said, putting “together the best story he could of it. “He liked efficiency, he liked sportsmanship, but, like most military men, he liked a winner.”
    “Oh, you’ve got him down to a T.”
    “Did he fix up a gymnasium for the boys?”
    “He did. And he led them in calisthenics himself. A great place this for gymnastics, with them going out from it to do the work of grown men.”
    “I suppose he had boxing,” the priest suggested.
    “There was some of that till the mothers wanted a stop to it. The men were all for him, of course. But the women—some took it and some didn’t. Finally somebody got word to the bishop and there was a letter from him though it never came out and I shouldn’t be telling it of the dead. But after that there was no more fighting that he refereed them in. You know, I’ll say this, there was never so much going on around here since Father McGohey passed on, and it’s kind of nice thinking about it.”
    “Would you happen to remember any of the boys involved, Miss Hanrahan, maybe a little fellow who happened to get badly beaten?”
    “That’s twenty-five years ago and there was a few of them got bloodied up. Do you know the boy’s name, Father?”
    If I knew his name … the priest thought. “The name escapes me, Miss Hanrahan. But he probably wasn’t as big as the rest of the boys. It was about the time of his first Communion, and he got a prayerbook for the occasion. It might even have been around the time of the bishop’s letter. He lost the prayerbook because he was fighting. Then later, his mother wanted him to be a priest …”
    “Wanted him to be!” Miss Hanrahan interrupted. “She sent him away to be one. Mary Brandon. I can see her as clear as if she was sitting there where you are this minute.”
    Which, Father Duffy realized, was clearer than he could see Miss Hanrahan for that instant. It could be all wrong, of course, but he prayed that it was not.
    “Mary Brandon. God knows what ever became of the poor woman. She had but the one son and a man for a husband I wouldn’t wish on the devil for company in hell. Father, I know of nothing filthier in this world than a drunken man when he’s filthy. That was Big Tim Brandon. There wasn’t a clean word came out of his mouth when he was drunk, nor a kind one when he was sober. He worked in the railroad yards in them days. And every time he got paid he headed out into the hills and filled up on the bootleg stuff. It was prohibition then. And Mary was as gentle a soul as you ever met. She did beautiful sewing. It was her kept the boy and herself alive. I’m sure he never gave her a cent. He wrote to her folks in Ireland, you know, when she was a slip of a girl, and she came over a greenhorn and married him. I’ll say this for Mary, there was never a word of complaint on her lips. And the things they say he used to do to her. I wouldn’t repeat them to a priest.”
    “The boy,” Father Duffy said. “What became of him?”
    “Well, the time you were thinking about, him getting beat up? God knows, the both of them were beat up by the father often enough and never a word, but when Father McGohey took the prayerbook away from little Tim—Big Tim and Little Tim we called them—when he took the prayerbook, Mary came up here and gave him a tongue-lashing to do him the rest of his days, priest or no priest It was my notion afterwards that Mary herself went to the bishop but I never let on. What’s the