“You ready, Father? Can you go in and talk with the boy?”
The alternative to such an intervention did not need to be stated—it was apparent to Darragh in the tensely held weaponry all around. Even the Australians with their heavy .303s, their corporal—an older man, perhaps a veteran of an earlier war—now holding a delicate Owen gun, seemed to Darragh to be set only for the poles of resolution: the deserter's surrender or his death. This is what the caressing of weapons, the wearing of uniforms, the shrieking of women brought out in men—a glinting grim intent.
Fratelli left Darragh's side to let him think for a second, went to the women and told them reasonably to hush now, that they weren't helping anything. Then he returned. “Okay, Father?”
“Yes.”
“Come on then,” he said, leading Darragh towards the besieged structure. Near the door he held Darragh back a second.
“Gervaise!” he called. “Private Aspillon! You're in some big trouble in there. We've got MPs all around you, they've even come in from the other street. White troops, Gervaise, and you're technically a deserter. I don't need to instruct you on your choices, do I?”
A voice Darragh had heard only in recorded songs, the voice of black America, emerged from the shed, deeply layered with Southern and what Darragh thought of, from the little he knew from films, as Creole tones. Darragh likewise knew of New Orleans, as rendered down to him by motion pictures, as a place where Mexico and the West Indies, Africa, France, and America all abutted.
The voice said: “I'm no deserter, sir. Don't go putting that label on me. I'm just late back, that's all.”
The “just” went on endlessly, enhanced with diphthongs and the history of enslavement and underrewarded labor.
The corporal seemed suddenly angry on Fratelli's patient behalf. “Tell that to the boys on Bataan!” he yelled, and spat and shook his head.
“Now we know you're a Catholic, Gervaise,” called Fratelli. “I respect that. I've got a priest here. He wants you to come out.”
Fratelli turned to Darragh. “Tell him to come out, will you, Father?”
Darragh was tongue-tied.
“His name's Private Aspillon,” Fratelli prompted.
Darragh found his voice. “Private Aspillon, I'm Father Darragh from St. Margaret's. You should come out and surrender to these men, and I'll be here to see you're well treated.”
“God bless you, Father,” came the resonant voice. “But you don't know military police. You look, you'll see batons on their sides. Exactly for black heads. My poor suffering black head. You can't tell me, either, they don't have guns. And you don't know about their watch houses and their compounds. You don't want to know either.”
The slight on the Corps of Military Police seemed to arouse Fratelli's men to some cursing and spitting. Only the Australians, either wise or indifferent, weren't heard from.
“You're trying all our patience, Gervaise,” called Fratelli jovially.
“Father,” cried the deserter, “you come in here and I'll walk out with you. You stick to me and I know no harm will come.”
Darragh turned, full of decision, to Fratelli. “All right. I'll go in there.”
Fratelli nodded and called to his men, informing them that the priest was going to talk to Private Aspillon. Oddly, as it seemed for a second to Darragh, he did not use a name. Just “the priest.” Darragh went forward to the brown-painted door, sunk on its hinges and half jammed in muddy soil. He was not afraid, but delighted despite himself. Real work, he thought. Real, classic, and remediable sin—desertion, lechery, the potential cruelty of batons and firearms. In the midst of all the factors he was the mediator. And already enchanted by Gervaise's tiered voice. There seemed to be a palpable soul behind it. “I would you were either hot or cold, but because you are lukewarm I will spit thee forth from my mouth. . . .” Gervaise had not been lukewarm. “I go to call not the just, but sinners.” Gervaise fitted the bill.
Darragh now stepped forward into the half-darkness of Gervaise's refuge. A fat guineafowl descended querulously from a bag of seed and went out into the yard through the door Darragh had left ajar. Many bags of bran and pollen and a wheelbarrow blocked Darragh's immediate path. A Model T Ford sat on bricks in further dimness, its rump to Darragh, and beyond its front fender Gervaise stood up. He was tall, with blue-black skin.
“That's you, Father,” he said.
“Of course.”
“You sounded like a priest,” said Gervaise, flatteringly. “You'd got a lamb in your voice.”
“I . . . don't understand, Gervaise,” said Darragh, though he understood precisely.
“There was the lamb in your voice, not the tiger,” said Gervaise. “The tigers are out there, and I'll get thrown to them.”
“Not by me. The man in charge—he wants you safe. And surely, you have to go back.”
“I like the way you guys say that. ‘Surely.' ” He did his failed best to reproduce the Australian accent. “My girl Rosemary says it that way. I like that. It's better than our way. You've got a lot of things that are better than our way.”
Darragh had negotiated the bags of pollen, but some five or six yards still lay between him and the absconder.
“We ought to go out now, Gervaise.”
“I want to confess, first.”
“Why not after we've gone out?”
“No, I want to confess first. In here I'm a sinner. Once I step out I'm Jesus Christ on the cross.”
“I wouldn't say you'd lived like Jesus,” said Darragh.
“Every man who suffers on earth is joined to the suffering of Jesus Christ,” said Gervaise Aspillon, his eyes blazing. And such a proposition could not be faulted theologically.
“I should tell them,” said Darragh, and he turned and went to the door.
“He's coming out in a moment,” called Darragh through the aperture to the earnest besieging line. “He wants to talk for a moment first.” Darragh did not mention confession. He did not want to subject it to the derision which he suspected lay submerged in the MPs, other than Fratelli.
“A few minutes, Father,” called Fratelli. “Don't let him hold you up. He'll be persuasive.”
Darragh advanced to the front fender of the Ford.
“Hello, Gervaise,” he murmured from his new closeness. He and Gervaise shook hands. The black deserter's hand was huge and knobby with calluses. Darragh took his purple stole out of his pocket, showed it to the black man, then kissed its golden cross and placed it round his neck. “Let's begin.”
Gervaise advanced and stood towering above him with head bent.
Darragh uttered the opening words of the rite, “The Lord be in thy heart and on thy lips . . .” as Private Aspillon crossed himself and murmured in his sweetly dolorous voice, “Bless me Father for I have sinned. It is . . . oh . . . maybe ten months since my last confession. I have been guilty of sins of the flesh—it is not my girl's fault. She is generosity itself. I have been guilty of pride.”
In the circumstances, Darragh knew he was permitted not to inquire much into this broad and heartfelt statement of guilt.
“I,” Gervaise continued, “have been guilty of the greatest folly in that I saw in this woman a life, and I coveted it. Whereas the dumbest man born would have told me it was not a life I could live, not even on the Western Line in Sydney with a white wife. Stupidity offends the Lord, and for His sake, I am heartily sorry. For all these sins of pride and of the flesh I am contrite.”
It struck Darragh that this man had a straightforward but thorough understanding of the theology of penance. He had touched all the crucial components of contrition. Except one. “And you disobeyed lawful authority,” Darragh suggested.
“Father,” said Gervaise, “for some men authority”—he pronounced it something like orthorty—“is a kind mother, and they love her. For others, an ax! I find the army hard, Father, and it's hard on me. Now the ax is here. Outside. Believe me, I'll be sorry enough for it. For this and all my other sin
s I am heartily sorry.”
Darragh absolved him. As soon as Gervaise had finished muttering a well-schooled Act of Contrition, he straightened. He did not need Darragh to advise him. “Out we go,” he said. The “o” of “go” once more had layers of dolor and diphthong to it. It was not the plain Australian go. It was a long journey of a vowel.
At the instant its sound wavered away, the air was cracked open by a sound so substantial it assaulted the ear and the brain twice, as shocking in echo as in its first instant assault. Then a rage of sound came, both sharp and constant crackling but also a broader, symphonic racket which absorbed all the shed's available space and seemed to Darragh to jolt the Model T on its brick pylons. Gervaise grabbed Darragh, who had placed his hands to his ears and yearned for the moist dirt of the floor, and pushed him into the lee of the Model T. Smelling of vegetables and cinnamon, the soldier's crouching body encompassed prone Frank Darragh's. It came to Darragh: they were shooting at himself and Gervaise for inscrutable reasons. Their repressed intention to use their weapons had burst out in a storm, and even beneath Gervaise's body and widespread arms, Darragh felt himself as a leaf before its force. Huddled with and oppressed so intimately by Gervaise Aspillon, Darragh felt that having started, the noise would remain continuous. Through the slits of his eyes he could nonetheless see sunlight flash everywhere and without discrimination as boards were blown loose and pulped and shattered. Darragh longed for an unlikely stoppage to the tempest and yet was astonished at how calmly he and the deserter lay, brave absolved Gervaise with his back exposed to the fire. The truth was that since the tumult possessed everything, owned every bone, took cordite deep into the nostrils, and completely filled the heart, it left no room for fear, not even a niche for an insinuating shudder of terror. Then, having laid claim to everything, it departed. The air now was hollow and thin as an eggshell, and all sound was smudged and spidery. But he did hear the wailing of women from within the house, and Fratelli distantly screaming. “What sonofabitch started that? For Christ's sake, what sonofabitch?”
A few men claimed it wasn't them. “I thought it was you, Sarge,” said the corporal.
Fratelli was angry, and displaying the harshness of command. “Don't be a dumb fuck, Corporal. One of you Aussies?”
An Australian soldier called, “We've got more bloody discipline.”
“You didn't fire at all?”
“Well we did, when you blokes started.”
Fratelli asserted, “It's that Owen gun you guys have. Goes off if you breathe on it.”
“It wasn't the bloody Owen gun,” insisted the Australian.
“This'll be sorted out,” said Fratelli darkly, but less angry now.
The voices were advancing towards Darragh and Gervaise, on their way to inspect damage. Gervaise shook himself like a dog and made a painful hawking sound as if to clear his mouth of the bitter chemical taste of gunfire, and his head of the recent fury. He made eye contact with stunned Darragh and grinned.
“See, Father, even priests get shot at if they mix with black men.”
The shed was skeletal now, Darragh saw, and gave the deserter no shelter at all. Soldiers in white helmets entered through its fragmented doorway and through new holes in its walls. One of them possessed the commanding solidity which marked him as Fratelli.
Darragh, watching him over Gervaise's shoulder, was distressed and surprised by his power, his double-edged capacity both to shatter this tottering building and now advance to reclaim its human contents. Gervaise stood up, like a man greeting an acquaintance.
“Come out from there, Gervaise, you motherfucker. Show us your hands.”
The corporal driver ran up and angrily felt all over Gervaise's body. “I never had a weapon, Sergeant.”
Fratelli shook his head. “Let poor Father Darragh out of there.” Gervaise moved aside, and Darragh advanced on feet he couldn't yet feel.
“I'm sorry about this, Father, and I'm sorry about the profane talk. It was the Owen gun went off, as they always do. Your guy.” He nodded to the outer world of the yard, where apparently the Australians held their post and tried to pacify the women, who could be heard weeping in shock. “I do hope you're okay, are you?” The apology did not seem to match the storm of peril in which he and Gervaise had been put. Fratelli leaned close and said, “Next time, maybe we shouldn't delay for the sake of the seven sacraments, Father.”
Darragh's fury rose up his throat. “We'll have as many sacraments as I judge.”
“Sorry,” said Fratelli. “Of course. But when you keep jumpy guys waiting . . .” One of his men was shackling Private Aspillon's wrists.
“Where does he go?”
“The compound for now.”
“I'll go with him.”
“I'm sorry, you can't do that, Father. Maybe you can visit him there later.”
“Where later?”
“The compound at Ingleburn.”
They had marched Gervaise out. He called something forlorn to the women on the steps, but Fratelli had given the Australian provosts the task of pushing them indoors so that they could not touch or caress the prisoner. Gervaise was a sinner, yet this act of prevention seemed to Darragh, his head still full of thunder and echoes, to be harshest of all.
One of the Australian soldiers had gone to the trouble to make tea in the kitchen which belonged to those women Darragh had not met and somehow knew he would not be permitted to meet. Sitting on a tree stump amongst the privet bushes, Darragh drank a cup hungrily, as Fratelli frowned over him like a brother. Then on the way back to the car, Fratelli somberly asked Darragh whether he wanted something medicinal for the shock of it all, and somehow Darragh felt a returning warmth towards this striking young man.
“You went through it,” Fratelli murmured. “You certainly went through it, Father.” He confused Darragh further by saying, “Now you know the size of things.”
XIII
With his head still full of the reverberations of the morning's fusillade, Darragh went across to the school that afternoon, to the comfort of children. He watched them emerge, and wondered whether some of them, despite their unseamed complexions and the transparencies of their souls, occupied some undefined furnace equivalent to the one he and Gervaise had shared. He was solaced by the sight of waiting mothers in the laneway between church and school. Mrs. Heggarty was not there. Anthony Heggarty would be part of the convoy of Homebush-bound, mile-walking children conducted by other young mothers Darragh recognized but could not put a name to. He saw the boy run crookedly to his appropriate group and stand saying nothing, head down, earnest. Darragh felt a clot of anguish inside his rib cage, and was tempted to weep. He wanted to tell the boy, “Don't be so willing.” The world used such willingness profligately. The world despised it as a mute, uncomplaining resource. And after all, it detracted from alertness when there could be large steel vehicles driven by white-helmeted corporals. Anthony must slot himself in amongst the mean intentions of the world and get safely to his mother's kitchen.
It struck Darragh then, a happy revelation. The Americans have chaplains. There must be a telephone number, there must be a chaplains' office. If he telephoned the cathedral, they would probably have the number. He could alert an American priest to the fact that Gervaise was an enlightened soul. He went across the tarred playground, making for the presbytery telephone above which the monsignor had pinned a typed list of crucial numbers, including that of the chancellery at the cathedral. As he entered the hallway and passed the painting of St. Jerome which had so fascinated Fratelli, Monsignor Carolan, back a few hours early from his excursion, wearing a black cardigan over a singlet, black pants, and carpet slippers, appeared at the door of his study.
“Frank, come in, come in,” he said, gesturing one-handedly, a man with a lesson to impart. Darragh went into the study, with its big desk tidily maintained, its photograph of an Irishman, Archbishop Kelly of Sydney, a prelate recently gone to God. The monsignor's library was displayed on a shelf behind th
e desk, characteristic priest's fare. The theological texts the monsignor had had since seminary days, solemn cloth encasing solemn Latin. The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas, multivolumed, red-spined. This great work of Christian theology had the sort of presence on the shelf that keystone works of civilization always exude—as if they can improve a person's life and mind purely through their mute presence. Beside devotional works such as The Priest at His Prie-dieu, there was the poetry of Francis Thompson, the saintly alcoholic, and various works of G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, the great modern Catholic writers. These books stood for the fact that maligners spoke falsely when they said the Church crushed the creative spirit.
The hardcovers were stored for reverence on the more visible shelves but gave way lower down to detective stories and Zane Grey's western novels, which lacked the automatic power of St. Thomas Aquinas, and thus actually needed to be read.
The monsignor lit a cigarette and offered one to Darragh, but Frank Darragh did not smoke, chiefly on the aesthetic grounds that it made most men ashy and sloppy, that the residue showed up too easily on black serge. The monsignor, of course, was an exception. He did all these things impeccably.
“Frank,” he said once his cigarette was alight and drawn on, “you are a good fellow. But you're beginning to annoy me. You do erratic things. Things contrary to all the wise counsels which govern the behavior of young priests. This thing I've just heard about from Father Tuomey at Lidcombe. What were you doing there? Playing heroics in another parish. He's really cranky about it, let me tell you.”
Darragh explained that he had called Father Tuomey's housekeeper, and both priests were out. Urgent with the truth of the proposition, Darragh said, “There was no time to wait or for slowing things down. They fully intended to shoot the man if necessary.”