The Long Run Read online

  “Poor little birds,” I say. “Always hungry.”

  “Trouble sleepin’?”

  “I’m really worried, Blackie. About getting caught.”

  He wrinkles his brow and taps his gold tooth. “Cut the sleep-talk.” That’s what Blackie says when he thinks someone is speaking without thinking. “Nobody’s gettin’ caught. Believe it.”

  “I want to, Blackie, but . . .”

  “No buts. Believe.”

  Soft footsteps startle us. They come from the other side of the dorm. Oberstein’s still shadow looks like a Buddha statue. That’s what Brother McMurtry calls him, the little Buddha. He’s really chubby.

  “We’re over here,” I whisper. “Feeding the pigeons.”

  Blackie stretches as we listen to Oberstein’s footsteps padding across the dorm. It’s still dark, but by the flickering night-light in the big window we can see the reflection of the long row of wooden lockers down the middle of the dorm. On top of the lockers Rags, our favorite brother, has left a stack of comic books.

  “What time is it?” Oberstein asks, squinting through thick round eyeglasses that magnify his eyes.

  “Five.”

  “It’s cold.” Oberstein pulls his flannelette pajamas tighter. Like every pair of drawstring PJs, his are washed out.

  “I can’t sleep,” he says. “I’m worried. What if they find out the wine’s missing? What if . . . What if they find it?”

  “Buried in the woods up in Major’s Path?” Blackie smirks.

  “We should stick with the bakery. I don’t think we should steal old Flynn’s altar wine anymore.”

  “That’s a lotta shit you’re gettin’ on with. Nobody’s gettin’ caught. You want outta the Dare Klub, maybe? You want out?”

  “No. But what if we get caught? What if someone squeals? What if . . .”

  “What if . . . What if . . .” Blackie growls, his beady eyes darting from me to Oberstein as he speaks. “Nobody’s gettin’ caught. If we do, I’ll take the rap. I’m in charge. So, cut the sleep-talk. Nobody’s gettin’ in trouble ’cept me.”

  The night watchman’s clock chain jingles in the washroom, so we race to our bunks. When Spook finishes his walkabout, I lie there peacefully, thinking about my older sister, Clare, until the tears come. I think about her every night. She’s at St. Martha’s, the girl’s orphanage, which is run by the nuns. The boys’ orphanage, where I am, was built in 1888, seventy-two years ago. It’s run by the Irish Christian Brothers. There are hundreds of boys here, from age four to seventeen. That’s when you have to leave, when you’re seventeen. Most of the boys are orphans, but some are half-orphans. No boys come here for school or anything. There’s just the orphans and half-orphans.

  St. Martha’s was opened around the same time. It’s run by the Sisters of Mary. They’re nuns from Ireland and Newfoundland. Clare visits me every now and then, when the nuns let her. Once I had the spells so bad the brothers had to go get her to come and talk to me. I felt like I was wandering through an old abandoned house that was half falling down. It was a terrible feeling, and I couldn’t shake it. I had the spells really bad when I first came here. Clare was a big help. She told me I was feeling like I was because of Mom and Dad’s death and that if I prayed really hard for them—even to them—the spells would go away. Not much changed when I prayed for them. But things got a bit better when I prayed to them.

  Clare told me the last time I saw her that she and some of the senior girls at St. Martha’s might come to work at the Mount Kildare Bakery on weekends. Mount Kildare is famous for its bread and hardtack, which are little rough oval-shaped cakes baked without salt. The brothers sell the bread and biscuits around the city to make money for clothes and food for the boys. Bread and biscuits and the famous Mount Kildare Raffle are how the brothers raise money to run the place. I sure hope it’s true that Clare is coming to work at the bakery. That way I’ll get to see her more. I really miss her a lot. She’s the nicest person in the world. Lying alone in my bed thinking of her makes me feel as lonesome as a gull on a rock.

  I finish my feast and stretch awhile and enjoy my nightly entertainment, the scratching in the Rat Locker, Bradbury’s distant snoring, Fitzpatrick talking in his sleep, usually about girls, and O’Connor’s periodic rocking. Then I listen to the stillness again, and drink it in for awhile before slipping into a deep sleep.

  The youngest boy in our dorm is Oberstein and he’s always the first to wake. Most mornings he’s up before the buzzer. Sometimes he’ll wake one of us and chat about one of his discoveries. He’s always reading and always making discoveries. But this morning he’s not first up. He’s in the infirmary. He has the spells. Like Blackie, who’s the oldest boy in our group, Oberstein is proud he’s from the United States. He’s from Washington. Home of our president, Oberstein beams each time he’s asked what part of the States he’s from. Everyone loves to hear him speak. He has the most beautiful accent. And he has a beautiful singing voice. His father was an American soldier stationed at Fort Pepperrell, half a mile down the road.

  There are five American bases throughout Newfoundland. Rags says we can thank FDR, his favorite president, for Fort Pepperrell and all the jobs it created. He made a deal with Prime Minister Churchill, destroyers for land for ninety-nine years.

  Oberstein’s mother is from St. John’s. When his father went back to the States with her they had two boys before he was killed in an accident.

  “It was a terrible accident,” Oberstein once told me. But he won’t say anything else about it. “My mother asked the brothers to keep me until she has enough money to come and get me and take care of me.” But it’s been two years and she hasn’t come. “I want to be just like my dad who was one hundred percent Jewish,” he says. “If my Dad was alive, there’s no doubt about it, that’s how I’d be raised,” he says. He doesn’t let the brothers know that he’s learning everything he can about being Jewish. He’s afraid they’ll stop him. He says he might be a rabbi when he grows up. His mother’s not Jewish. She’s Catholic. Oberstein carries a photograph of her and his little brother, Jack, everywhere he goes. He looks a lot like her. She’s round as a barrel and has the same silky blond hair. Oberstein says he’s got her genes.

  He’s an amazing guy, Oberstein is. He’s smart as a bee. And he knows lots of wonderful songs, like “Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho,” which we get him to sing for us when we’re sitting around bored. Or he’ll wake us up singing it before the brother on duty gets us up for morning chapel. He says his father taught him tons of Jewish songs before he died. He’s only a little guy, but he has this deep, booming voice. You’d never think a little guy like that could have such a deep voice. It’s really funny. We all howl with laughter whenever he sings “And the walls came tumbling down.” His voice echoes like the walls are really tumbling. And he sings other songs too, like “Amazing Grace,” which the brothers get him to sing in chapel. And “The Streets of Laredo.” Cross lends him his black cowboy hat, and Oberstein puts it on and goes down on one knee and booms, “As I walked out in the streets of Laredo. As I walked out in Laredo one day.” And immediately a crowd gathers. They come from everywhere, because his beautiful voice can be heard all over the Mount. Even some of the brothers come to hear him. We could be out in the yard playing or way down in the soccer field, and when he starts singing we drop everything and come running the second we hear “As I walked out in the streets of Laredo.” We all freeze and stare at him, bug-eyed every time, until the song is over. He has a huge throat and neck, like a tree trunk. Blackie says that’s because he needs a big house for his big voice.

  And he’s a great storyteller too. He tells us all kinds of stories, mostly from the Bible: Abraham trying to kill his son, Isaac, Samson and Delilah, Moses and the burning bush, Jonah and the whale, David using his slingshot to kill the giant, Goliath, Ezekiel and the fiery chariot. Sometimes at night, after the brother on duty is gone, we crowd around Oberstein’s bunk and listen to a story. He can keep y
ou interested for a long time, from beginning to end. Halloween is just around the corner. That’s when he’s at his best. He can tell some pretty spooky stories. He really scares the little ones. He’s really tiny and chubby, and has a moon face, and his hair falls over his round glasses like silk. His hair is shiny like my sister, Clare’s, but hers isn’t silky, it’s as thick as rope, hangs almost to her shoulders, and has a perfect part down the middle.

  In class, Rags always calls Oberstein the chubby cherub. “Well, I guess we’ll have to check with the chubby cherub for that answer,” he says whenever the class is stuck on something. Rags is so kind. Instead of strapping us for cursing, like the other brothers, he tells us to try and say words like “pistil” or “shuttlecock.” That really cracks everyone up.

  Rags is a string bean with a ghostly face dotted with pimples. Clare says he has what’s called a lazy eye. He has the most amazing eyes, tiny liquid brown eyes that are extremely close together. And you can always see more of the white of his right eye than his left. He wears square rimless glasses, which are always perched low on his nose. “Rags is the only guy I know can look himself in the eye,” Oberstein once joked. And he has the pointiest Adam’s apple you’ve ever seen. Your eyes go straight to it every time you see him. He told the little ones it’s called your Adam’s apple because Adam ate the forbidden apple in the Garden of Eden and it got stuck in his throat. He’s always sliding his hand through his salt-and-pepper brush cut and rhyming a nickname for one of the little ones: “How’s little Randy the candy today?”

  Oberstein always has a good answer to every question. He’s only twelve and really shouldn’t be in our group, the grade eights and nines, but Oberstein’s so smart he skipped two grades. He’s the best reader in the Mount, and he’s an amazing speller. He wins every spelling bee. He can spell words that aren’t even in the dictionary. And he beats some of the brothers at chess. He’s quite amazing at everything; everything, that is, except sports. He hates sports, and he hates the cold weather. Sometimes in winter, when it’s so cold your cheeks sting and we’re all told to go outside and play in the yard until supper, Oberstein finds a comfortable spot in the shadows of the massive stone buildings and sandwiches himself there and stands out of the wind stamping his feet and clapping his mitts together. We pass him by, playing caught in the bumper or frozen tag and he just smiles and waves and stays put like a Newfoundland pony—solemn and beautiful and dumb. When we all go inside, Oberstein has the rosiest cheeks. You wouldn’t believe it if you saw them. It’s as if someone took a paintbrush and painted him up to play Santa Claus. Such rosy cheeks, he almost looks like a girl.

  He’s been at the Mount for two years, and he’s still homesick. Not a month goes by without Oberstein getting the spells. But it always seems to be the worst at the beginning of the school year. That’s when he first came here. Every boy at the Mount gets the spells one time or another. But it’s usually only once in a while for most of us. With Oberstein, it’s once a month. Twelve months in a year, twelve spells for poor Oberstein. Anyone else with the spells usually wanders off by himself and cries for a few hours and then he’s okay. But not Oberstein. It really hits him harder than anyone else. Bug Bradbury says it’s because Oberstein’s like a girl, he’s extra sensitive.

  One Saturday, taking a shortcut through the chapel, I heard his voice in the choir loft. I stopped dead in my tracks, thinking it was Brother Walsh and some of the senior boys come to wax the floors. The wax machines hum everywhere Saturday mornings, even in the corridors after we wash the floors on hands and knees with scrubbing brushes and Spic ’n’ Span. I ducked into one of the pews and slunk to the kicked-up kneelers. The pews always smell of Sunlight soap, and the air is always thick with a mixture of floor wax and candle wax. The chapel is the brightest room in the Mount, light shining through the stained glass windows by day and streaming from a thousand candles by night. During Christmas and Easter, the chapel is on fire with light.

  When I was sure it wasn’t Brother Walsh, I thought it was the old geezer brother, JD Wright. He usually prays in a high voice, half wheezing, half crying. Brother JD is the oldest brother in the Mount. He looks like he’s about a hundred years old. Oberstein says he found out from Rags that JD was once in a bad car accident. He’s got a lot wrong with him. He forgets a lot. He never remembers names. If JD asks Bug his name, Bug says Boris Karloff or Jesse James or Errol Flynn. A different name every time. Murphy’s not as brave. He always says Audie Murphy because of the movie To Hell and Back, which we saw a while ago. Anyway, old JD pats them on the head and says run along now Audie or Jesse or Boris.

  When he’s out of bed, which is rare, he limps around like a spider on two aluminum canes. He has bad eyes and wears heavy, thick glasses. Once in a while he works in the canteen, and when you hand him your canteen card he holds it up so close to his eyes you’d think he was looking through it or trying to find a watermark. His eyes are really weak. And he has a mop of thin gray hair that bounces with each step he takes. And there are always rings under his eyes. He looks really odd when he’s spidering around the place. Like something out of a cartoon.

  He’s bedridden most of the time, and we’re always praying for him. Once, Brother McMurtry asked us to say a special novena for him. Rags said he was at death’s door. Monsignor Flynn had to give him extreme unction. Extreme unction is pretty serious. It’s given only to the dying. Oberstein calls him the terminal man. But he’s been okay lately. In the chapel during rosary or Benediction or Mass you can hear this high wheezing sighing, followed by a few words of the Hail Mary. Or, out of the blue, old JD starts shouting at the devil: “You get the hell outta here . . . Get . . . Now . . . Go . . . Go on . . . Get the hell outta here . . . Get.”

  I thought it might’ve been old JD, and I froze in my tracks. You weren’t allowed to cut through the chapel. Anyone caught was a goner. But it wasn’t Brother JD. It was Oberstein. He was crying and talking at the same time. I thought he was praying to the Virgin Mary at first, but then I realized that it was his mother. I stood beside the big statue of St. Raphael and looked up at him, his head buried in his crossed arms on the choir loft railing. He was talking to his mother, who lives in Washington. He looked up and the tears dripped down his cheeks. I thought of a wounded sparrow I’d seen once, trying to get a few crumbs from its angry brothers.

  “You told me you’d come in two months, and I believed you. And you haven’t. You haven’t come. And it’s been two years.” And he’d sob, his chubby little body bouncing up and down, like a dory on the ocean.

  “And who’s lookin’ after your hands? You know how bad they get. They never break into a rash when I do the dishes. When my hands are in the soapy water. My hands aren’t allergic. But who’s there now to do it? Little Jack can’t. He’s too small, and he doesn’t understand. I hope you wear gloves when you put your hands into that soapy water, but I know you don’t.” More sobbing.

  I knew exactly what was going on. What he was talking to her about. One weekend when he had a bad case of the spells, I found him alone in the yard by the handball court. He cried and cried that he was worried about his mother. “Her hands always break out in a rash,” he said. After his father died, he said he was the only one to look after her hands, to put special cream on them when they got red and sore. “She’s supposed to wear rubber gloves,” he said, “but she never does. She hates rubber gloves. She says it makes her hands worse when she wears them.” He was crying, he said, because he wasn’t there to wash the dishes every time for her so her hands wouldn’t get sore. And he was crying for little Jack, who couldn’t look after her and who didn’t have a father or a big brother to look after him.

  He’s so homesick, and Thanksgiving always makes the spells worse because he always gets a letter from home. That’s why he’s in the infirmary. For the past week Oberstein has been really excited. His mother has written to him from Washington telling him she has saved up enough money to pay for the fare to come to Newfoundland to se
e him. Every few months Oberstein gets a letter from his mother, and every time it’s the same. She’s already packing her suitcase, and she should arrive any day now. Oberstein doesn’t sleep. He doesn’t eat. He loses so much weight he doesn’t even look chubby. He gives away his baloney and mustard potatoes, which he loves. Even his Jell-O, his favorite, he gives to Murphy or Bug. He carries the two sheets of creased and wrinkled stationery with him everywhere around the Mount. Each night he sleeps with the letter. Everyone has read it. Every boy and every brother. He’s cornered me more than once, asking me to read the part where it says she’ll be bringing little Jack. The envelope is dirty from the many finger marks. And the stamp of the White House with the red USA beneath it is marked with spots of grease and food. Eventually, what’s happened in the past, happens again. Oberstein gets sick, develops a temperature and is sent to the infirmary.

  He’s received lots of letters, and he has not seen his mother once since she left him at the Mount two years ago. Oberstein gets more upset each time she doesn’t come. And his stay in the infirmary gets longer with each letter. This time he was sure that she would come with little Jack and they would fly back to Washington where she lives in an apartment with a kitchen, a living room, a bathroom, and two bedrooms.

  Oberstein has cornered every boy in our dorm and discussed all his plans with each one time and again. How he and little Jack will share the big bedroom and his mother will have the small one. Where he will go to school. How he will take little Jack to see the Yankees when they come to play the Senators. How he will teach him to score the games. How they will all arrive home just in time for the World Series. We all listen and nod and agree with everything he says.

  “Will you get to see Mickey Mantle, Oberstein?” Blackie says. “Will you see Yogi Berra?”