The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow

by Thea Astley

  Then he was alone in the afternoon classroom where spiders had spun dangling scales played out in the oblique sun of five o’clock, where the room jangled with Czerny exercises and Clementi sonatinas, where his damnation was complete and as perfect as a Bach prelude.

  He raised the lid on the piano, staring at its mute keys, then he sat down and struck two notes. Their undamped harmonics buzzed like flies.

  Thirty now. Father Donellan tell him thirty. He tell about war in Europe, in Pacific, and he organise them on Doebin go help out on farms on the coast where the men sent away.

  Don’t want to leave Jeannie. Got three kids now and she have to do all that work. Mumma dead and dadda too old to help much. Some of the men join army. Don’t like that idea. But say okay, I cut cane all right. And then three of them, Willie Omba, Hector Fourmile and him, they go over mainland in mission launch and Father take them up to big cane farm north of Townsville.

  Them people Italian. Look little bit like them, like Willie, like Hector. But the lady she smile, eh, and show them rooms in shed and Father say, You be good chaps, now, and work hard. And Hector say, When we ever do anythin else, Father? and they all laugh then and the lady she make Father tea up on the verandah and she give them theirs to take back to shed.

  It real hard work, all day slashin that cane, jumpin away from snakes. Early up all right and work work work till sundown.

  Father come sometime see how they doin. He say, How are you, Manny? Hector? Willie?

  Okay, they tell him. But they want to go back Doebin, see their folks.

  You will, he tell them. Just as soon as cutting’s finished. Take you back myself, he say. Maybe you come back planting time.

  He forget that year but the next he take them and when they see their wives an kids everythin all right.

  They got pay too, more than they ever got on Doebin workin for the gubbamin. That make Jeannie happy. Then he remember mumma say, Happy don’t last.

  HE LIKED TO THINK HE CREATED A THREAD

  He liked to think he created a thread, a unifying factor in all those lives he touched.

  A chant-line.

  On the other hand…

  ‘Och, Father O’Flynn, you’ve a wonderful way wid ye, all the young childer are wild for to play wid ye, all the old sinners…’ et cetera, et ceter-rah!

  He was lovable, kind, caring, generous with his time.

  ‘They’re truly nature’s ladies and gentlemen,’ he often said, speaking of the island’s blacks. ‘Day by day I grow more fond of them.’ And he meant it.

  Yet Father Donellan had no trouble with conscience when it came to seeing those missionary rival proselytes on their way, despite their own good nature, gentleness and caring. When he arrived on Doebin on his second visit a year later, he found the boarding house empty and no replacement for that efficient Mrs Curthoys. Disaster left its stain, its ghosts. He borrowed blankets and pillow and some cans of food and emerged, not quite guiltily, from the larder to find lanterns waving in the dark along the beach and moving steadily up through the scrub as welcome.

  He couldn’t believe they remembered him from his visit there the year before when he had offered that first Mass, a Mass of portent sketched in blood, a presage of catastrophe. But Moses Thursday rushed forward, his face cracked into a grin, the lamp swinging from dark to light to dark.

  ‘You hungry?’ Moses asked. ‘You get tucker long our camp, eh? My missus she cook bush pigeon.’

  Donellan walked away from the empty boarding house to Moses’ grass hut on the back road, urged on by giggling and singing islanders.

  ‘You be quick,’ Moses urged. ‘Curfew at nine. Still the same, eh?’ He liked his own humour. ‘My missus she make curfew too.’

  The priest marvelled at the human need for order in this world of leaves.

  All those years, he thought, of spiritual persuasion in the far west, walking miles when the train broke down or paddling through mud in an early Wet, borrowing a cow cocky’s truck and celebrating Mass on the buckboard, the wafer no less consecrated for being blessed in cathedrals of air. In the recesses of his mind lay the soft rains and greens of Ireland, the damp-stained walls of his seminary, the valley mists and hill folds. He would ring down this curtain to blot out the saltpans, the reds and ochres and gaunt scrub of his then landscape, and whistle as he trudged or clambered on goods trains or hitched rides in delivery vans, hoping for a welcome at distant stations where at last he could murmur, ‘Introibo ad altare dei,’ in the comfort of a settler’s living-room.

  Fortitude kept the flesh in order.

  Years of it.

  And now the move east had brought him again to Doebin for a second, more permanent, time, for tucker at Moses Thursday’s, courtesy requiring him to doss down there in a lean-to out the back.

  No one had mentioned Uncle Boss. There was a new man now, a humourless disciplinarian, a public servant with a narrow face and narrower views who enforced segregation and ran the island like a barracks. There were more bells, more prohibitions.

  ‘Don’t you think,’ Father Donellan asked cautiously that first week, ‘that we,’ he was careful to say ‘we’, ‘might treat all the people here as if they were…well…people?’

  The new director leaned back in his office chair against a brochure view of coral waters and stared. He found churchmen pests, especially this Irishman with his egalitarian notions.

  ‘What do you mean exactly?’

  It was hopeless. Father Donellan gave a shrug, rose, and went away into the morning.

  It was dark blue heat, tide-threat nuzzling the islands and the beaches under black air. ‘Go-ah!’ Moses Thursday said in language. And suddenly the priest’s alpaca was spotted with rain, large drops whacking on palm and coral dust. Father Donellan fought his umbrella open. ‘Big Wet,’ Moses said, guiding the priest out on the road to the prison. ‘He jus start, eh?’ He smiled with pleasure and nudged the other man’s elbow, point on point, bone-touch. Donellan didn’t mind. ‘You got permit, brother?’

  ‘Got everything,’ Donellan said. He patted his pocket. ‘Even got cigarettes for your cousin.’

  Moses giggled. The rain burst above them like a tap and they began running along the sandy track to come to a gasping stop outside the island gaol where one of the black boys, crazily armed, stopped them to examine the permit.

  ‘You won’t like this, eh?’ Moses said confidently, walking ahead down the narrow passageway between the cells.

  Donellan could hardly bear to look. The floors were moving with cockroaches that gorged on the smeared grey blankets of the prisoners. Dark, ill-ventilated like the detention rooms in the boys’ barracks, the cells stank of shit and despair.

  ‘Here’s Willie.’ Moses peered through cyclone mesh.

  Willie Omba and the priest stared at each other, one man chained by the system, the other by his collar. Outside there was a world of rain and sea-pound. Donellan wanted to plunge into its freshness, seek baptism. He saw Willie’s eyes glint in the half-dark. ‘How long?’ he asked.

  ‘Two months yet.’

  Moses Thursday interrupted indignantly. ‘He got six months for cheekin the boss.’

  ‘I should have got twelve yesterday,’ Donellan said, trying to make a joke, to show fraternity, partisanship. Teeth flashed in the gloom.

  ‘Fella next door, he got twenty-one days bein caught after curfew,’ Willie said.

  ‘Why was that?’

  ‘Him courtin his girl. They want get married, eh. Like me. Same thing.’

  ‘And can’t they?’

  ‘Not without boss say yes. Give paper sayin yes. Like you gotta get me, Father.’

  There was violence apart from the weather, even standing still in this fetid corridor. Outside, axes of wind and water chopped at landscape. That was less than this violence to the heart. Floggings mattered little beside the permitted lash of thwarting, the grinding of spirit that was practised daily in this visual paradise.

  Under the Act almost eve
ry form of patronage became assault.

  ‘I’ll ask. I shall declare the banns. Would you like that, Willie?’

  Willie Omba’s face came close to the wire mesh and he frowned.

  ‘You still gotta get that piece of paper, bro. Still get.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Donellan said, worrying. ‘I’ll get it.’

  Waiting.

  Days moved slowly. The priest on U-millie left unexpectedly, and while the lazaret waited for a replacement Donellan went there twice a week in an outboard piloted by Jardine who dropped him off and returned in the afternoon to pick him up. Donellan said Mass, heard confessions and visited the sick in the lazaret. There was only a handful of patients now for the new director had plans to close the hospital and move everyone to Doebin.

  ‘Don’t know what you buggers get out of it,’ Jardine said.

  ‘Don’t you?’ Donellan couldn’t help feeling fastidious. ‘And what do you get out of being here?’

  ‘I’m wife dodging,’ the boatman said. ‘No woman in her right mind would want to come to this arse of a place.’

  ‘You’ve been dodging a long time, then.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  In the evenings Donellan and the teacher, Pop Wesley, played chess for hours, listening to the spaces between the rain squalls. His days were consumed with the care of his flock. He visited the invalid hostel where some of the lepers transferred from U-millie rotted quietly along with the coughing skeletons with TB. He spoke to Willie Omba’s sweetheart, her head shaved for being caught in the long grass with Willie, her dress a bulging sack. She wouldn’t raise her head before him.

  ‘Bless you, Essie,’ he said, and he put out a hand to pat her flinching shoulder. ‘Don’t worry now. There’s no shame. The shame is with the gubbamin, you understand? It’s not your shame at all.’

  She shook her shaven skull while tears rolled.

  ‘The shame belongs gubbamin,’ he insisted. ‘I’ve asked. I’ve got your piece of paper, see?’ He waved in front of her the form the director had reluctantly signed. She put out one finger to touch the paper but wouldn’t look up.

  He trudged his way back to the priest-house through a fluid scaffolding of rain holding earth to heaven. His umbrella was buffeted by fists of wind as he slushed through the last half-mile, head lowered before curious settlement houses whose louvres were a-gape for air in this water world.

  How, he marvelled, could everything be so beautiful and so ugly, so simple and so complicated? He loosened his collar and decided his only release would be to become stuffed with the substance of good works that, like this rain, would dissolve to allow replenishment and the calm that was the cup of cold water given in His name.

  Donellan stood dripping in the doorway of his tiny sitting-room and found Wesley on his verandah working happily through the pages of a month-old newspaper with as fervent a dedication as he might give to the office.

  What were the words they exchanged? Did they matter? Even as he stripped off his sodden and peculiarly cheap-smelling garments in the shower-room and began towelling his body dry, even then he couldn’t remember. There was something he wanted to say to his visitor, some quick-wit words of cheer. He came back to the sitting-room dry, changed, comfortable, and there was a cup of tea and sandwich waiting for him.

  ‘Well, now,’ he said to Wesley—and gave his shoulder a friendly slap as he passed—‘you do understand what it’s all about, don’t you?’

  Minor victories. The director grudgingly allowed a fortnight’s remission of Willie Omba’s sentence and Father Donellan married him to Essie in a packed church, the largest congregation he had had since his arrival. Flowers. Singing. Smiles.

  After the ceremony, unable not to notice the proud swelling of Essie’s waistline under the cotton wedding dress, he whispered as she wrote her name slowly in the register, ‘I blessed the baby too.’

  Doebin was to be his home for the next seven years.

  During all that time Father Donellan never yielded in trying to plough democracy into autocratic ground. His successes were minimal. After that he was moved back to the mainland with the outbreak of war, to cope with parish wives of interned Italians, women left alone to run cane farms and rear kids. He organised workers from Doebin to help on the farms, where harassed wives swore the blacks worked harder than whites.

  Father Donellan’s bishop fretted about all these social changes. Most of all he was appalled by the obvious competence of women who coped alone.

  ‘The trend is worrying,’ the bishop said at an area conference of parish priests. ‘Women,’ he added, the two syllables conveying a certain bitterness, ‘are driving cars, working in factories, dressing like men. And now, when they leave the kitchen, they must, of course, expect to face the real world and all that that implies.’

  ‘You mean,’ Father Donellan suggested rather impertinently, ‘how will we get them back?’

  ‘I don’t follow you. Get them back where?’

  ‘Into the kitchen.’

  The bishop tutted and looked away. He had enough trouble finding a housekeeper. He decided to ignore this humblest of his workers. He found the demands of the teaching sisters in his empire of parishes sufficiently irritating, but was forced to tolerate them. They did the humdrummery none of his lieutenants could or would easily endure. He stared past Father Donellan’s amused face while he spoke of Aboriginal labourers on Italian cane farms. He spoke graciously but distantly. He thanked Father Donellan for organising the mission launch Avila to bring the young men across from Doebin. He thanked him for driving the workers along the coast to the Fiorellis, Gambinos, Petrocinas. Father Donellan refrained from telling him that overwrought housewives wept with gratitude.

  Several hundred Italian men had been rounded up after the fall of Singapore and shipped to Brisbane in closed trains. The bishop, in a political quandary over this summary treatment (for many of them were his parishioners), did a Pontius Pilate and kept his mouth closed. As discreetly as he could, fearing government rage, Donellan visited farms, gave communion and conducted sessions of the rosary. ‘It’s the Masons,’ the Italians muttered, seeking a scapegoat for this disruption to their lives. ‘It’s the communists,’ the clergy said, who could only see red.

  Signora Pergolesi’s twelve-year-old son was furtively moved to a boarding school west of Townsville where he was bullied and ostracised for three years. There was no room at the Catholic establishment in the Taws but by string-pulling Father Donellan had him enrolled with Doctor Parsons a month after Normie Cooktown, whose half-caste skin placed him in the same category as Giovanni Pergolesi.

  Ecumenical before it was fashionable. Diversity.

  So there were pastoral visits to the green farms of disgraced Italians, to country schools of a different persuasion, as the diehards said, who had taken in evacuees, and, best of all, long tea-drinking sessions with now-befriended Misses Weber and Starck, still surviving with their Bible classes in a humpy outside the Taws.

  Chaos, Donellan murmured guiltily and happily. Chaos gave a sudden zest to life. There were makeshift classes run in presbyteries and Country Women’s Association halls, in schools of arts, in warehouses and shearing sheds. His world became a replica of his early evangelism but now he had a car, grudgingly supplied by the bishop and topped up with gas every week or so by generous American GIs.

  Then a Japanese bomb split a palm tree in Townsville apart.

  A pre-disaster bravado nourished those townsfolk who elected to remain despite government pressure to evacuate the north. The notion of abandoning the state to the enemy sickened them. The Brisbane Line, that proposed last ditch of fortification, became a dirty joke.

  On one of Donellan’s visits to Doebin to see how his successor was handling the situation, the Avila was inspected by a low-flying American helicopter. There was an onslaught of pentecostal wind. Father Donellan waved and pointed elaborately to his dog-collar, stood air-slashed in his greenish-black suit while the chopper hovered. A face l
ooked out at him, grinned and flapped a hand. Something dropped and hit the deck of the launch. ‘Jesus!’ the launchman cried. ‘What the hell!’

  Donellan picked up a carton of cigarettes from the deck and saluted thanks to the retreating helicopter. ‘I need one myself,’ he said to the launchman, breaking open a pack.

  It was more than six months since he’d been back. The sea still rimpled green around the jetty piles. The timbers creaked in the same spots. The track up to the settlement had been widened. There were more women and children. Some of the young men had enlisted but most of them had been drafted for land work. Yet still those left remembered him. A foam of names and faces.

  This was the place his heart hid, he knew. Not in that hot timber town huddled under Cootharinga with its ugly orange escarpments, twinned riverfalls of rock that looked as if a gross explosion had cleft the hill in half, the residue of earth running east to form barren foothills for the scrubbiest of trees. And below, the houses and two cathedrals, rivals for souls.

  It was all too tiring. He thought momentarily of Starck and Weber who had pointed out to him without words how everyone was headed the same way, after the same thing: the kindliness of the godhead discovered in a cup of tea and a stale biscuit offered with simplicity in a broken-down hut.

  From the island he looked across at the coast, the town, that ugly place, that jolie laide, no longer visible. Only the Great Divide that in early morning or late afternoon stretched deceptively delicate folds and pillows of grey-blue haze and violet. That lay before him; and behind, the hump of the island menacing the blue channel.

  Once this island had been his purgatory.

  *

  All through the war he returned to Doebin as relieving pastor but only for a few weeks at a time.