Look After Your Brother Ch 2
Archiving these in easy-to-find format in my personal journal.
They moved house after the thing with Mr. Harris, and the boys never went back to school. They didn’t have to go far. In a neighborhood so closely knit, nobody would talk to the police or the truant officer about two good Irish boys whose mother had better plans for them. Their ma taught them everything that really mattered, anyways. They learned physics and chemistry in the instructions to construct pipe-bombs, and anatomy discussing the field-dressing of gunshot wounds. They learned every language their mother spoke, and would go for days and weeks without saying a word of English. They read everything they could get their hands on. Piles of books grew in the corners of their room, bought when there was barely enough money for food.
There were never any boyfriends in their ma's life. She was a married woman, not a widow, for all that she had to raise the boys alone.
She took them to mass every Sunday, and almost every Wednesday night.
A man came one night. A friend, Ma said. He took the firearm that had shot Mr. Harris and left another one to become "Da's gun."
Connor confessed one Sunday, to the killing of Mr. Harris, but he didn’t know if the priest believed him. He was forgiven though, and not a bit else mattered. He wondered sometimes if Ma confessed to it too, but he never asked. That was between her and God.
When he was older, he thought about her, and wondered if she took him with her that night so that his life would have a change then too; so that he and Murphy would be changed together.
Growing up, he knew they were different, just not how. The joy of God's love filled them in a way he didn’t see in their peers. It strengthened them, supported them. Together they healed from what had happened to them. If Murph became a little more impulsive, and Connor a little more contemplative, they were still happy and outgoing young men. They had a charm about them that was almost fae. To know them was to love them, and yet there was something between them that was withheld from the outside world. To them, in their twin-ness, everything was the outside world.
They were fourteen at a friend of their mother's apartment the first time Connor heard it put into words. Murph was changing a light fixture for the widow O'Donnal, Connor went to bug Ma for a cigarette. The women were in the kitchen with their smokes and tea and dinner on the stove for later, and he heard them talking before he turned the corner.
"Have they discovered girls yet?" Something in the old lady's voice was teasing, and he froze, waiting to see if his mother was being mocked.
She chuckled instead, her voice rough from chain-smoking the afternoon away. "They've God and they've each other. I pity the woman that tries to come inta tha' mix, God's truth I do."
Connor cleared his throat and stepped around the corner. Ma looked up at him, green eyes dancing, and he could see that she had known he was there all along. "Got a smoke for us? Murph's almost done with th' light."
Ma passed him two cigarettes, despite Mrs. O'Donnal's scolding look. Connor grinned and lit them both. Without a word he walked over to the breaker box and flipped a switch, smirking as Murph swore and fell off the stool in the other room.
"Wha'? It's only a one-ten circuit," he asked when he got a glare for his troubles, then ducked and ran out before Ma could find something to throw at him.
He forgot about giving his brother a wee shock before the week was out. His mother's words lingered in his mind for a long time after that.
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