As he entered the kitchen, his mother’s brusque greeting handed him a ready-made alibi: “What kind of child am I raising that goes and plays football in a new suit? Now look at it. Sure, I’ll never get the stains out. What did ya do, roll in the mud? Go up and change and don’t you ever let me see you do that again!”
“I’m sorry, Mammie,” Billy replied. “It won’t happen again.” Then he made himself scarce before she took too close a look.
That turned out to be the entire post-mortem from his mother. Farm life had no time for extended interrogations or belaboring the obvious. There was work to be done and “more where that came from”—Mary Donovan’s favorite saying. Cows, pigs, lambs, chickens, and turkeys all had their own insistent agendas, which they proclaimed loudly—all day long. A boy moping home late from Mass was just one more irritant among an unrelenting barrage.
Somehow Donovan soldiered through the days and weeks after the rape without drawing attention. But for him, everything had changed—even the sound of the border collies. Their routine barking suddenly sounded mournful, ominous to him. People changed, too—looking at him differently, with suspicion and coldness. His teacher, Miss O’Brien, seemed more stern, calling on him at odd times as though trying to embarrass him in front of the whole class, which was not at all like her; he’d always been her favorite before that.
The following Sunday, when McKenzie was due to say Mass, Billy suddenly took ill—he actually vomited in terror at the prospect of seeing his molester face-to-face—right before leaving the farmhouse. His mother took it in stride: “Billy, for heaven’s sake, I told you to eat more slowly. You’re bound to make yourself sick the way you gobble your food. Let that be a lesson to you.”
In school, Billy went from being a feisty, energetic leader to a pale, lethargic loner. First, his pals—including Mylie Doran, Jimmy Doyle and Pete Fleming—abandoned him; just drifted away. The older boys began picking on him, and then Mylie and the former pals, seeing an opportunity for sport, joined the parade. After school, “messin’ with Billy D.” became a favorite pastime, a sport all could play without fear of reprisal.
Most days found him fleeing the schoolyard, bloodied from punches or having his heels stepped on till they were raw —a favorite bullying tactic of his major nemesis, Brendan Crowley, a bullnecked, red-headed fourteen-year-old who’d failed the fifth grade two years in a row. It now seemed that Billy was fair game for every jackal eager to prove he was not at the bottom of the pecking order.
Finally, on a cloudless June afternoon, the last day of his fifth grade, feeling desperate and utterly alone, Billy decided to deny his tormentors further sport.
He ran away from school for the fifth day in row, sick of being taunted and slapped around by Crowley and his gang, all laughing and jeering. After the pack became bored of shoving him from one to the other, someone stuffed a rotten egg down his back and had crushed the shell to assure that Billy D. would stink to high heaven, knowing he’d have a hard time explaining the stench to his mother.
Billy ran off as the hyenas convulsed in the laneway by the school where they’d been waiting in ambush, just 20 yards from the chapel vestry, where it all began just over a year before.
Billy took a shortcut home that day, avoiding the roadway. Crossing Tommy Dixon’s farm, Billy collapsed under a giant oak in the middle of the field and wailed out loud, relieved at the solitude and the open space. He thought of ways to end his life—starve the hyenas and jackals of their prey. “Maybe I’ll hang myself from a tree like this; stand on a bucket, then kick it away.” He’d read about this in some comic book. “I suppose I could always drown myself in the Barrow; fill my pockets with stones, like Jimmy Doyle when he filled a bag with stones to drown that litter of mongrels.” Even without stones, he thought he’d drown quickly, having never learned to swim. “Or maybe I’ll just run into Jack Fenlon’s paddock and wave my red hankerchief at their huge Angus bull—everyone knows it makes ‘em mad.”
Still sobbing through these suicidal images, he never noticed Tommy Dixon walking across from the back gate until he heard a soothing male voice say: “Now, now…what is it that could make a young lad so gloomy on such a gift of a summer day? Sure, it wouldn’t be dem hooligans back there in Killgarson school, would it?”
Overwhelmed at the sound of a kind voice, Billy poured out everything that was going on at school, avoiding any mention of Father McKenzie. “And I can’t go back there anymore. I’d rather kill meself, I swear ta God, Mr. Dixon. I’m never going back there, and I know me mother will make me. But I can’t take it any more…I just can’t.” With that, he’d dissolved into tears, sobbing against the oak, pushing the tears away with the back of his pale, thin fists.
“Now listen ta me, young Donovan,” Dixon began. “I tink you’re goin’ at dis exactly da wrong way. If anywan needs killin,’ it’s not you. Too strong a word anyways. But I tink ya just need ta be able ta stand up for yerself, teach dem boyos a lesson they won’t forget. Are ya interested in some ideas along dese lines?”
Billy had smiled for the first time in months, it seemed.
“Yes, Mr. Dixon. But sure, Crowley and his pals are all bigger an’ stronger than I’ll ever be?”
“That’s what I mean about yer going at this de wrong way,” Dixon said calmly. “Did ya ever hear de sayin,’ ‘It’s not the size of de dog in the fight, but de size of the fight in de dog’?
“No, Mr. Dixon,” Billy said, suddenly feeling better. “But I know it’s true. Our little fox terrier, Nell, can whip dogs twice her size—she’s that fierce.”
Driving the Astra through the Tipperary morning, Donovan savored the memory of what one summer of practice, driven by a rich brew of fear and loathing, could do.
Leaning against that giant oak in Dixon’s meadow on that rare June afternoon, Tommy Dixon made an amazing revelation. It turned out that he’d become a kick boxing amateur champion after he emigrated to New York in his youth. “Listen here, young Donovan, I can teach you a few things that will put that smirk on the other side of dem hooligans’ faces.” He said this with an intensity that lifted Billy’s crushed spirit. “See, those ten years I was in the States, I made me livin’ as a carpenter, but took up kick boxin’ on the side. Sure, it was a pure accident, how it happened.” Billy hadn’t said a word, incredulous that someone Tommy Dixon—a big, strong man and a champion fighter—was finally in his corner.
(to be continued next Friday)