Chapter 29
The Spero School had four dormitories: two large, each containing ten beds, in one building; and two smaller dorms, totalling twelve beds, in a smaller building connected to the first by a tin-roofed corridor added during renovations.
But the school never reached full capacity due to staffing issues: Spero’s principal and founder, Dante Santopietro, adhered to a student-teacher ratio that maintained a minimum level of supervision while not overly depleting funds.
(It had been touch-and-go for Spero during the first two years, until student numbers firmed up, which Santopietro had never forgotten.)
In addition to the dormitories, a room containing two beds was located at the end of the classroom building, close to Santopietro’s cottage.
During the pandemic, it was used to house students required to quarantine, but had remained unoccupied since.
At present, just eighteen students were in residence at Spero: fourteen in the larger dormitories, and two boys each in the smaller rooms. The latter were older students deemed to have earned the privilege of not having to share space with their younger peers, who were noisier, and like Anthony Marshall, frequently more distressed.
Some—again, like Anthony Marshall—were also prone to bedwetting, which was one of the great sins at Spero.
While all the beds had rubber mattress protectors, an accident at night still resulted in damp sheets.
Apart from the humiliation of having to strip the bed, wipe down the protector, and remake the bed with fresh linen, all under the eyes of one’s fellow students, punishments included being deprived of treats for a second offense (everyone got one pass), which meant no soda, no ice cream, no TV for three days, and no phone for three days.
Further breaches would result in the deprivation of privileges being extended to a week or more, with cleaning duties added, and nobody wanted to clean bathrooms used by eighteen teenage boys.
The school had a resident janitor and groundsman named Tim Sadlier who didn’t like cleaning those bathrooms either, and was content for the task to devolve to one of the kids who had probably previously left pee on the bathroom floor as well as in his own bed, just as Sadlier was happy to supervise trash collection, paint stripping, and the planting or picking of vegetables while he snuck a smoke and read a fantasy novel, or caught up with TV shows on his iPad.
Sadlier had learned early on to arrive at Spero prepared, even if it was prepared to do nothing.
Sadlier was not an unkind individual. He felt sorry for many of the kids dumped at the school, because “dumped” was the operative word in many cases.
He was less sorry for a handful, since it couldn’t be argued that the worst of them were anything other than sonsofbitches, and Spero was just a taste of what they could expect in later life, when they’d like as not end up in prison.
The nicer kids he’d supply with candy, or even a cigarette if he was in the right mood; the bad ones, he tried to steer clear of, as much out of what he feared he might do to them as of what they might do to him.
Sadlier was a big, gentle man, but on more than one occasion he’d been tempted to educate a student the old-fashioned way about the importance of showing respect to one’s elders.
Yet even on the lousiest days, Sadlier could rely on being able to go home each evening and forget the school existed, which was more than any of the students could do.
Lately, Sadlier was happier than ever that he didn’t have to spend nights at Spero, and he had been pretty darned happy about it already.
Since the death of Scott Theriault, Spero was different.
Sadlier had liked Scott, who was among the better kids encountered in his decade at the school, maybe even the best of them.
What happened to him was a damn shame, and in common with the peace of God, passed all understanding.
Whatever Scott’s reasons for striking out north, they’d resulted in his death, and it had cast a shadow over Spero that wouldn’t lift.
Wrongnesses manifested after the sun went down: doors standing open that should have been closed, because Sadlier had locked them himself; the contents of closets thrown into disorder; faucets left running so that sinks overflowed; and most disturbing of all, holes ripped—clawed—in the seed bags he kept in his toolshed, which was Sadlier’s personal fiefdom and to which only he had the key.
The natural response from staff was to blame the students, but none of them would admit to any wrongdoing, not even under the threat of collective punishment.
For a week, all students were confined to the dormitories, with the teacher on overnight duty required to sleep in a spare room instead of in one of the on-site cabins; and still there were incidents, including the smearing of honey on the main kitchen stove and five panes of glass broken in the greenhouse.
Had any better employment alternatives presented themselves, Sadlier might have handed in his notice immediately, but jobs were scarce in The Plains and Spero represented steady money.
For the present, Spero it was and Spero it would remain.
But as the fall days grew shorter, and night settled in earlier and earlier, Sadlier realized he had begun to fear the coming of winter, and Spero.