Constance was pursuing the instinct that tells humans distance and newness will be the basis of a redeemed self. It was a long journey for her, involving two flights by commercial jet and a third in a small charter aircraft, which delivered her to a gravelly bush airstrip. There, a man named Sam O’Loughlin was waiting for her in his truck. He was the white official chosen by the community to serve as a buffer between the government and miners on the one hand, and on the other the Indigenous people of the concrete school and scatter of tin-roofed houses, clinic, and administration buildings at Nullaga. O’Loughlin was the same age as Sister Constance, yet seemed even more wearied than she was. She wondered, when he collected her in his four-wheel drive, whether she would find Sister Joan in the same strung-out condition.
The people at Nullaga represented a number of clans displaced from further north, where bauxite had been found in the early 1970s by police. They had been evicted in the days when terra nullius was the legal doctrine, the belief that native peoples lacked title in, and thus ownership over, any part of the earth.
O’Loughlin told her that he and the Aboriginal Council of Nullaga had had to deal with further mining proposals on land that was considered ancestral, and for which they had made a claim in the Supreme Court of Queensland, with the aim that the people might, this time, have a say in whether to permit the mining. Yet on the issue itself the Council was divided, skin group by skin group: those less personally invested in a particular site favored the jobs that might come, and the new element in the whole equation, mining royalties. In any case, O’Loughlin seemed to consider that the action in the Supreme Court on behalf of the group was both a necessity and doomed.
Though sturdy of soul, O’Loughlin was also dispirited from dealing with police, the Aboriginal males who smuggled alcohol into the community, and a multitude of other postcolonial struggles aimed at what seemed, on O’Loughlin’s part, and on the part of the Aboriginal leaders themselves, a perpetually defeated striving for justice and dignity. He had decided to leave, he confessed to Sister Constance, and had applied for a city job with an environmental agency.
“Your colleague, Sister Joan, is a woman who believes in examples,” he told Constance. “She aims to make a difference simply by being here, changing things by acceptance. I wish I was like that. I don’t have the patience. But I think that every night she actually thanks God for letting her live here.”
Constance liked and trusted Sister Joan at once, this woman who wore a plain blue skirt, a blouse with a cross and the emblem of the Order, and a veil over her gray hair. She and Joan shared a concrete house in the middle of the settlement, beside the school of two cement-brick classrooms.
“These are dispirited but noble people,” Joan told her cheerily. “They’ve lost their land twice—when we whites first came, and then they lost their reservation, and now that minerals have been found here, they might be moved on again, and they know it.”
Sisters Joan and Constance worked to teach the Aboriginal children as far as sixth grade. Those who went on to high school were flown to Cairns and lived there in a hostel. Some of the younger men worked in other towns and at far-off mine sites, so it was in its way an unnatural township—troublemakers stayed here, said Joan, and sometimes they or whites would smuggle in booze against the ordinance of the Council, as O’Loughlin had wearily explained. Then there were beatings of women, and worse—attacks on underaged girls.
The settlement store, run by a white man called Bert, was expensive, with heavily sugared goods and canned products brought in—diabetes food, said Sister Joan. There was a cop, young Constable Goodman, very amiable, muscular, but, thank God, not a bully. It was when cops came in force that there was bullying, said Joan. The community seemed to trust, or at least tolerate, Goodman, she explained. He was perhaps two years younger than Constance, a block of a man, with a light-brown fuzz on his arms visible beneath his uniform. He was like Sister Joan—one who seemed made for this place. There was no doubt he had wisdom and forbearance that exceeded his education. He was wise by instinct, and that was a gift.
At the school Constance began to teach classes far below her qualifications. She found that Joan did more than teach—she had beef brought in fresh from a neighboring station and served it as a stew to the students, together with a balance of frozen vegetables. She told Constance she had tried to grow her own vegetables but termites and small marsupials and bush rats always ate them.
Absenteeism was, naturally enough, high at the school, but the regime of the simple teaching of language and mathematics, and the making of the stew and the boiling of vegetables were solace to Constance’s exhausted soul. It hankered for such straightforward tasks. The two nuns ate what the students ate, but their diet was varied by fish caught from the beach, often by the truants, who brought their catch as an offering of expiation.
After school, Constance would walk with Sister Joan around the settlement’s wooden houses. The women loved Joan and were frank with her. They quickly uttered sentences such as, “Betsy got beat up last night by that no-hoper Tiger. Had to git Goodman to talk to him and tell him silly bugger and kick your arse!”
The women did not usually call on Constable Goodman, however; they tried to settle things in their own ways.
Joan spoke to the men, too, young and old—and often old was anything over forty-five years. Some of them bore the signs of damage from an early career as ferocious drinkers, others suffered from glaucoma, others from diabetes.
If Constance had been aware that she possessed a heart, she would have grieved for these people. But she felt she was a ghost in the school and the township. She knew that the nearest clinic was thirty miles away, and O’Loughlin drove people there, and so did Goodman if it was on his way. The administration of emergency medications—antibiotics and painkillers—was up to Sister Joan or her.
One day Constable Goodman told Constance that the next Saturday he was taking some relatives of a man named Douglas—that was his European name, anyhow—from Nullaga to visit Douglas, who chose to live with his wife and kids in his own outstation. The truck would be pretty full, Goodman said, but she was welcome to come and see the countryside.
For reasons Constance could not define, she did not want to go. Perhaps one was that she didn’t feel she had taken sufficient root in Nullaga. But Joan urged her, saying it would be good for her and was part of her education. In making that argument Joan showed that she thought Constance was fully present in the settlement and would make a life there, as Joan herself had done.
Constance refused to sit beside Goodman in the four-wheel drive, letting one of the old aunties take that seat. She sat in the back, in the midst of Douglas’s relatives, and they jolted through the spear grass and coastal scrub. The noise these people made was all the greater because they were showing off something to her—who they were. By now she had some sentences of the language, called Guugu Yimithirr, and they asked her what she knew and were ecstatic when she uttered her words, whether they were right or not. These were the people, Joan had told her, whom James Cook had met in 1770 at the Endeavour River after his ship was hulled. These were the people from whose language came the English word for a particular marsupial. Kangaroo.
Douglas was reserved but welcoming. His habitation, an elegantly constructed lean-to, lay at the foot of a ridge in which the entire range of umber and deep yellow rocks were exhibited. His wife was profoundly black and limpid-eyed, and there was just her and him there—the kids were learning white-fella stuff in Cairns, he told them. He had a kerosene refrigerator and a telephone that hung on a pole and ran off solar panels. He was a man of past, present, and future.
The relatives sat about on a rug in front of the lean-to and spoke in their language—part guttural, with some sounds like birdcalls—her ignorance about which Constance had never felt more acutely than at this moment. The host, his wife, and his relatives drank tea from enamel mugs. A stranger at th
e feast, she did, too.
She needed to urinate. She meant to disappear unobtrusively into the bush, but Douglas’s wife rose and intercepted her and said shyly that she’d show her where to go. She led her off through the scrub to a screen of hessian beyond which lay a latrine that, Constance thought, the military might have been proud of.
“We put the hessian up for you, Sister,” the wife said in her silken murmur, and left Constance alone. When Constance was done and had wiped her hands on an antiseptic cloth from a sachet, she returned to the campfire in front of Douglas’s habitation. On the open fire a stew was bubbling—goanna, a delicacy for the relatives because most of the big lizards around the reserve had been killed, and they were legendary meat, lean and succulent.
She passed Goodman, who was sitting on the ground on the outskirts of the group, chewing a yellow stalk of grass. He got to his feet. “What do you think of Douglas, Sister?” he asked.
“He seems to have made a good life for himself,” she said.
“Know what, he’s a good fellow. But he’s a feather-foot. Tribal executioner. No one will ever blab on him, of course. I reckon six murders. Well, we call them murders. He wouldn’t.”
Of all the astonishing things she had heard up here in the great cape, this was the most startling. She knew there was a code of law beneath the fragile mesh of the white law that Goodman was meant to cast over Nullaga and its hinterland. In this law, the law of the millennia, there were penalties, Joan had explained, and they were inflicted without malice. Sometimes it was merely punishment by exacting a quotient of blood, spearing the legs of the perpetrator. But sometimes it was death. If you committed a violation of the blood laws, your punishment could be death.
In his bush cop’s khaki uniform and from within his light pelt of down, Goodman grinned at her philosophically. This situation was one he knew he must live with. This acceptance was like Joan’s, and the thought came to Constance: wouldn’t it be pleasant to live with an open, tolerant, plain man like this? What a relief from all the serpentine things people did. She felt a futile attraction for him. Nothing, she knew with certainty, would come of it. He was a ghost, or she was. Certainly, he was constructed for another woman, and for unimaginable children who would adore him.
It was early dark before Goodman got them back to Nullaga. All the way home in the truck, as Constance listened to yawns and conversations, she felt extraneous not only in culture but in terms of the services she could render anyone in this vehicle.
When she returned to the nuns’ house, Joan was in a nightdress, ready to go to bed. She asked a few questions about the journey, which Constance tried to answer. Then Constance said, “I want to go back to my birth name. Sarah. Do you mind?”
“Why would I mind? I’ve done the same.”
“I’ve left it a little late, but you can call me Sarah.”
“Sarah it shall be. Pass the word around. And how’s that rascal Douglas?”
Joan’s eyes were vivified by all she knew of Douglas as well as by all she didn’t.
“Goodman says he’s a murderer.”
“He’s not a murderer, Sarah. He’s an executioner.”
Joan had said good night, turned her back, and was making for her bedroom when Sarah said, “I’ve something to tell you. I must talk to you.”
Joan could hear the intonation and said, “I’ll make tea.”
When they sat down, Sarah told Joan all the news of her life straight out. Even Spignelli. Spignelli was the least of it.
“Let me say,” said Joan at the end, “you came here like a ghost and you have been that way since. This is not a criticism. But it did make me wonder, what damage was done to you, you poor kid?”
28
* * *
Docherty Speaks with Sarah Fagan
July 1996
IN HIS room—a congenial room with foliage beyond the window—Docherty called the number the cabdriver Sarah had given him. She quickly answered, in a neutral voice. He said, “It’s Frank Docherty. Are you free to talk?”
“I’m driving a passenger,” she said briskly. “I’ll call you back in twenty minutes.”
She was good to her word.
“Well, how’s the monastic life?” she asked as soon as he said hello.
“Fair enough,” he told her. “I haven’t seen a lot of the others—one decent old German guy, though. No killing of fatted calves, but no hostility either.”
She was immediately interested. “Why would there be hostility?”
“Years back I got the Order involved in some trouble with the late cardinal. Nothing too scandalous.”
She was silent.
He said. “I’ve got to an age when it’s a relief to be a man of little distinction. To be myself in my own corner—I actually like it. Peculiar, eh?”
“Did you notice that we’re exchanging pleasantries?” she asked.
“Yes,” he admitted. “I don’t quite know what to do with them.”
“It’s because you did me a great favor.”
“What favor is that?”
“You believed me.”
“I had no reason not to.”
“I almost hoped you wouldn’t, though. In its way anger’s a comfort. Like you, being in a corner. I admit I’m a bit addicted to anger.”
Docherty inhaled at length and told her then, “It happens, absolutely coincidentally, that I’ve received information about the monsignor that corroborates your story.”
“I thought you said it didn’t need corroboration,” she said, bridling.
“No, it didn’t need corroboration as far as I was concerned. But it happens that I’ve found out the monsignor has also been accused of assaulting a boy. At least, Shannon is named and accused in a young man’s suicide note, the son of an acquaintance of mine. I’m telling you this in confidence.”
“A boy?” Sarah asked incredulously. “Girls weren’t enough for the monster?”
“The switch isn’t entirely unknown. Someone might have found out about his passion for girls. He might have altered his preference . . . accordingly.”
He listened to silence for a while.
“And this boy killed himself?”
“Yes. An overdose.”
“That’s too big a tribute to the mongrel,” she decided. Then, “What was the boy’s name? Between you and me.”
“Between you and me: Stephen. That’s all I can say.”
“Poor little bastard!”
“Indeed,” said Docherty. “But, look, my position in this whole business is weakened, I think, on balance, by the fact I was once expelled from this archdiocese. Not for moral reasons. I disagreed with the cardinal’s politics. Do you believe me? If you don’t, we don’t have a basis for proceeding.”
“No children?” she asked.
“No children.”
“A lover? Male or female.”
He had to assess this.
“No,” he was able to say eventually, and then to fill her in on the activities that had put him in bad odor.
“The point is that people could use that past conflict to discredit me in this matter and write it all off to bile. Still, I had at least to clip Monsignor Shannon’s wings by talking to Cardinal Condon about the boy. And I feel I must tell him I’ve met a second victim. Of course, I won’t mention you by name, or the fact that you were a nun.”
“I knew you’d end up involving me in something like this,” she told him. Her voice was weary, not reproving.
“I didn’t know I would,” said Docherty. “I saw this young man’s suicide note just after meeting you. So I must tell His Eminence that I’ve received other testimony—yours. Just to put him on guard against anything Shannon might try in future.”
Sarah protested, “Even if you don’t give them my name, it’s still more visibility than I want. Next you’ll
be telling me to go to the police.”
“Well,” said Docherty, “you should consider it. I may find on inquiry that I am obligated as a citizen to report Stephen’s suicide letter to the authorities, even though they do have a copy. Look, one of the worst things about being abused is that the perpetrator not only befouls the victim’s life but gives him or her the task of trying to save other victims. I need to assure the cardinal archbishop I have corroboration. No names. But confirmation.”
She thought awhile about this proposition. Then she said, “Yes. But I’m scared it will come to names sooner or later. And I’ll humiliate myself in front of some committee or the police, and nothing will happen. And no one will be saved.”
“I think they will be in this case,” Docherty assured her. “I’m asking you on slim grounds to trust me. On the day I first talked to you, you were angered because Monsignor Shannon was giving his evidence in the Devitt case and it seemed unjust to you—for all the obvious reasons. The Church will have to investigate him, limit him in some way, or else they risk a humiliation on the witness stand or before the forum of public opinion.”
“Some forum!” said Sarah. She sighed. Her mood had changed—it was more rancorous. “I never thought I’d say this, but you go ahead. And after that, don’t ever contact me again. I’ll contact you if I want.”
“You don’t want to be contacted to verify the accusation? Look, I have to be able to contact you to give you that option after I’ve spoken to the cardinal—”
“No! And by the way, damn you, Father Docherty.” He heard her laugh deeply and privately. “I wish I’d never met you.”
“You’re not going to do anything self-destructive, are you?”
“Self-destructive,” she said, mocking him. “That’s a thought. But I think I’m too scared for that. And then Shannon would have won. I imagine him going on breathing blandly. Like a monster. Through gills!”
“Have you an appointment with that psychologist? The name I gave you?”