Twenty-nine small hearts pounded in tiny chests. One heart remained calm — the one beating in the diminutive frame of the boy called John Rossi.
“It is,” offered the lad helpfully, “quite an impressive adventure.”
The response brought the desired reaction — the priest rocked back on his heels in affronted disbelief. Numerous small mouths gasped in astonishment.
“Adventure? How dare you speak of adventure! How dare you read this... this...” he sneered with disgust at Knight Templar and equal revulsion at the well-endowed jeopardized ingenue whose feminine charms seemed about to spill out over the binding, “... trash!”
Father Brennan angrily hurled the book across the room. It sailed in a flailing arc over Bartolo’s head and smacked into the wall. The spine snapped and pages exploded in a flurry of falling pulp. Like a broken-winged bird, Knight Templar’s greatest crusade lay lifeless on the ground.
Little Agnes jumped in her seat. Somewhere in the back of the room, a child began to cry. Brennan whirled and glared.
“Stop that this instant!”
He turned his attention back to the impertinent boy.
“Now that we have removed your distraction, perhaps you will recall that we were discussing Simon Magus of Sumeria,” Brennan spit out each word as if an insult. “Now tell us, John Rossi, how did Peter respond to the magician Simon Magus?”
The youth looked Brennan directly in the eye.
“My name is not John Rossi, has never been John Rossi, and never will be John Rossi.”
The child in back continued softly sobbing.
Brennan slammed his hands down on the boy’s desk and hissed into his high-spirited charge’s face.
“You and every other bastard lucky enough to be here... children of sin, spawn of the damned... are all named for saints — saints who were disciplined, saints who were chaste.”
The boy’s eyes were unflinching chips of iced lapis, never wavering from the priest’s heated glare.
“You were named for John Baptist Rossi,” spat Brennan, “a Capuchin priest who gave away his possessions... a man who had nothing, like you!”
The back row sobbing increased in volume. Brennan turned sharply and demanded silence. In that brief moment the boy who refused to be called John Rossi adroitly lifted a cruciform stickpin from the distracted priest’s hem and quickly palmed it.
Brennan’s attention was back on him in a heartbeat.
“Now, John Rossi who has nothing,” sneered the triumphant headmaster, “what lesson have you learned today?”
The boy cast a casual glance at the scattered remnants of Knight Templar.
“Hardbound books are a wiser investment?”
The room erupted in gales of laughter, and Brennan exploded in anger.
“My cane!” yelled Brennan, grabbing the witty boy by the scruff of his neck and pulling him from his seat. “Someone get my cane!”
Brennan scrunched his fingers harder into the boy’s neck and shook him as he had done the paperback book.
The remaining youths sat frozen in fear as Brennan’s red-rimmed eyes scorched across the rows of blanched faces.
“Bartolo,” Brennan snapped impatiently, “fetch me my cane, now!”
Reluctant and torn, the boy squirmed and stared pleadingly at his classmate. The captive child managed an accepting glance, and Bartolo hastily did as he was told.
He scrambled from his seat, left the classroom, and hurried down the hall to the headmaster’s private office.
Brennan’s stiff bamboo rod rested on the bookcase behind a cluttered, heavy oak desk. Bartolo reached up and grabbed the cane, spun on his heels, and raced out of the office.
Panting and breathless, the unhappy errand boy delivered the stiff bamboo rod. Brennan snatched it and thrashed it several times in the air. Bartolo, trembling, returned to his seat.
“Perhaps, John Rossi, you would prefer being bastinadoed,” growled the unrelenting headmaster, and the students gasped. They knew the pain and terror of the bastinado — tiny feet beaten bloody with stiff bamboo.
Even Brennan knew he could not bastinado the boy with any degree of justification, but a good caning was well within his rights.
The terrified child in the back of the room was now wailing like a banshee. Agnes’s face flushed, and tears rolled slowly down her cheeks.
“For God’s sake, stop that childish crying!” yelled Brennan. “He’s the one about to get a whipping, not you.”
To escape the irritation of incessant sobbing. Father Brennan yanked his captive out into the corridor.
“Stand straight!”
The boy complied.
The class gathered to watch through a stained-glass window as Father Brennan swung back the cane and whipped the boy’s backside. With each stinging slap of the cane, Brennan demanded the boy admit to the name John Rossi. Each demand was met by silence more confrontal than verbal rebellion.
No cry came from the boy because he was digging the stolen stickpin into the palm of his hand. The self-inflicted pain negated that administered by Father Brennan.
Twenty lashes later, with aching wrist and exhausted arm, the weary priest lowered the switch to his side.
“Really, Father Brennan,” spoke the boy evenly, as if asking a pertinent theological question, “do you honestly believe I deserve such painful punishment?”
The priest instinctively raised the cane for another strike, paused, and seemed to give the question serious consideration before bringing the stinging switch down harder than ever. The child dug the pin in deeper, and warm blood seeped through his clenched fist.
“The name is Templar,” whispered the boy defiantly to himself, “Simon Templar.”
The headmaster, more frustrated than defeated, tossed the cane aside in anger.
“I’m not done with you yet,” he snarled. “There are other ways of convincing you. Go to your bed and don’t come down until you hear the lunch bell!”
Experienced in the art of manipulation and humiliation, Brennan decided to utilize the most effective way of controlling a child’s behavior — peer pressure.
That noon, when all hundred male residents of St. Ignatius were gathered in the dining hall for lunch, an empty plate was placed before each boy. John Rossi had, as instructed, joined the others at the sound of the bell. He sat next to Bartolo at a long wooden table.
The prepared food was displayed before them in an alcove cleared especially for the occasion, padlocked behind a wall of steel mesh.
Brennan stood between the first row of boys and the object of their desire.
“No meal will be served to any lad until he” — Brennan pointed to John Rossi — “acknowledges his namesake. Not one of you will be fed until he says his name, John Rossi, loud and clear.”
Two hundred eyes turned to the skinny boy in hungry anticipation. The food at St. Ignatius was nothing to write home about, but these boys had no other home.
The youngster remained silent.
“C’mon. Just say it and get it over with,” whispered Bartolo.
“I’ll see him in hell first,” the boy insisted pleasantly under his breath.
Despite the glare of his classmates and fellow prisoners, he remained mum. True to himself, he would not allow Brennan to define his identity; true to his word, Brennan left all plates empty at lunch and again at supper.
By lights-out that evening, ninety-nine boys harbored understandable resentment toward their smallest compatriot. Whatever admiration they felt for his bravery was outweighed by the hollow sensation in their bellies. If they could not eat, they could at least derive pleasure from pummeling the cause of their discomfort.