by Thea Astley
Back and finding it as enchantingly beautiful and as spiritually loathsome as ever. The latest director (change of face, no change in attitude) was authoritarian, racist, dogmatic. Deputy Leggat was deputy still, his weedy frame and moustache unchanged by years and a vanished wife. There were drinking bouts now to temper the weather. Handyman Jardine appeared to be in a permanent state of semi-intoxication. The dregs, Donellan told himself listening to the boatman’s handling of the native boys as they unloaded cargo onto the wharf. Then he asked himself was he any better in his crumpled priestly garb, collar grimy already from sweat, his intolerance clipped ragged to the verge of sin, Hell being the swinging blue waters of Shippers Cove.
Deputy Leggat was there to oversee.
Donellan could hear Leggat fussing and screeching on the jetty’s end, urging the boys to watch it, watch it, as they lifted a chest of drawers to the top of the rail, readying it for the waiting workers. Sun slashed at them all like a sword.
It’s valuable, Leggat was yelling, words meaningless as air. Careful! Careful! Oh God, you stupid buggers! Watch it!
The boys observed the deputy sideways, casually, avoiding eye contact, and Donellan saw Billy Cooktown give a little smile. At Leggat’s last screamed warning they raised the chest and slammed it down neatly against the railings, so that eight expensively turned knobs flew off like eggs and floated away. As the chest thudded onto the jetty planking, its frail end-boards splintering, its eight abscesses facing the sea, the runtish deputy danced on a tightrope of rage. ‘Fetch them!’ Jardine bellowed, pointing to the bobbing drawer knobs. ‘You get in there and fetch them!’
All that power play.
It was worse than ever in the settlement, he discovered later. Far worse. Since his first visit, his first Mass, so many years ago, the population had trebled, swollen by refugees from violent marriages on the fringes of white coastal towns, by half-castes dumped from everywhere, by black men with records of petty crime and drunkenness, unwanted by the army, incapable of working on the farms.
The sottishness. The rapes. The misery.
A mere half-dozen attended his first service the next day and then only with permission of the director. ‘“I will go unto the altar of God.”’
‘This place,’ he said to the public service red-face in his office the morning after, ‘is like Alcatraz. You hate them, don’t you? You hate all these people. At least Brodie was fond of the poor devils.’
Outside the world was measled with rain.
He pondered what devices could, if he were writing a fiction—which he wasn’t—incorporate the diurnal drudgery and dredge meaning from the pettinesses that tracked landscape towards some ultimate event. Would it be a dreary canto of tribulation? Was ordinary living only ever a series of minor climaxes, each poised on its own plinth of dubious history? Was it necessary to have climax upon climax in what ultimately led to the vertex, the chorus vanished, the lone soloist before the emptied orchestra pit, and the gates of the next world opening upon a panorama of—what?
Of what? He was close to loss of faith and only discovered affirmations of belief and trust in the menial offices of his day. He remembered admitting to another priest that he found organising a bed or a meal for some town black or white derelict more meaningful than the Mass.
‘But,’ his colleague had replied, nonplussed, ‘when you do that, it is the Mass. It’s simply another version.’
Ritual and brotherly love should not be inseparable.
Again and again he decided that ritual was empty without being enriched and amplified by practical application. ‘Do this in commemoration of Me’ became talismanic words.
Was that cruel and rigid collar he wore another version of the halos? The threshing floor of the Greeks? Nimbus? The light around the body? Long before Christians took over this emblem of eminence, he had read once, heathens used it to decorate representations of deities and emperors.
Nimbus. Halos. Aureole. Dog-collar.
He ran a loosening finger about his neck as he confronted the director in a late afternoon painted dark already by the sky’s own nimbus of storm and raincloud. This, too, is the Mass, he wanted to say, resolving to a series of pleas or prayers to the thick-skull opposite for betterment of conditions that now enforced segregation, rigorously observed: the privileges for whites only; the curfews; the nagging bells; the young women kept pure behind wire in their dormitories; the prisoners in the island lockup with their rags of blankets, the stench of piss and faeces.
‘The women have to be locked up at night. It’s for their own protection. You must understand this. We have had enough attacks here by drunken men.’
‘Then how do they get the liquor at all? I don’t understand. I thought this was a dry island.’
‘Boats. It’s smuggled in.’
‘Your own staff don’t supply it, I suppose. After all, you do have one or two with…’
The director could never forget the god of the public service. He straightened behind his desk, his eyes becoming stony.
‘How dare you!’ He could lash himself into a rage from ice-cold to fever-hot in seconds. ‘How dare you, sir! Don’t come here with your pious cant and presume to tell me my job. There is no one on my staff who would do such a thing. No one.’
‘Yet the white staff may drink, may they not? Naming no names,’ Father Donellan persisted, his voice at its silkiest, ‘but you employ sots, God forgive me for the word, and they aren’t black. Don’t you find it odd at all that the moral exemplars should be allowed to indulge, brutishly, from what I hear and see, what they forbid the poor wretches they control? What an example!’
‘Get out!’ the director roared. ‘Get out, you impudent Roman.’
Father Donellan took his time about getting up, edging his chair back slowly to the tempting rim of the abyss.
‘You’re wrong there. I’m not Roman. I was born in Donegal.’
The director began banging viciously at a desk-bell until a frightened young face poked round the door. ‘This man is—’ he almost choked, ‘leaving. Immediately. Take him out please.’
Donellan replaced his lumpy panama, straightened his alpaca coat and went into the side office with the clerk. ‘You couldn’t possibly be training for that job,’ he said to the lad. There was a shake of the head, a voice whispering as they went out onto the verandah. ‘I’m temporary. A casual. Everyone’s temporary here, well, except for the old hands. If they can be.’ He added the last words bitterly. ‘Who’d want to be permanent?’
‘Why are you here then? Why do you stay?’
‘Oh, I had notions, notions of service. It’s a holiday job until the war ends.’ He pulled a face. ‘I’m on school holidays. Idiot stuff, I suppose, coming here. But my father—he was here once, only for a while. Teaching. Vine. You might have heard of him, though he wasn’t here long. It’s a kind of emotional suicide, I guess. But I thought I could do something. It’s hopeless, you know.’
Donellan smiled his old perky smile and patted the bony shoulder alongside him. ‘Offer it up,’ he advised, ‘as the good sisters used to tell us. Perhaps they didn’t tell you. But it’s not bad advice. Store merit. Grace.’
‘That might work for you,’ the kid objected. He was little more than an adolescent. ‘There’s too much here to offer up.’
The weight of it all kept them both earthbound.
Donellan walked back to the priest-house set on a rise behind the little chapel and found Paddy Cullen, the curate from U-millie’s leper settlement, brewing a pot of tea. The curate had been on his tour of duty for two years, moving between the islands. Like the clerk, he was too young for this. He had returned too soon from sick leave. His hands trembled as he measured tea-leaves into the pot. A tic bounced at the corner of his mouth.
Donellan dragged a deckchair up to the door that looked out at the mainland. His heart filled with pity for Paddy Cullen as for the young clerk, for the unendingness of bodily service that the world could inflict on those who beli
eved only in the immortality of the spirit. ‘This man’s new,’ he said, meaning the director, ‘if three years means new.’
The curate came out with the tea and placed it on a table beside Donellan. He shrugged, his emptied hands now looking hopeless. ‘It was all right before. The director before him was better. And that other, the one who…’ The curate hesitated. ‘The blacks loved him. They would do anything, anything. Maybe he was a bit easy-going, I’ve heard. But life was better. This one’s a tyrant.’
‘I know, I know, Paddy. But let’s forget him for a moment. I’ve splendid news for you.’
‘What’s that then?’
‘You’re getting a break, lad. It’s official. Straight from the bishop’s mouth. More or less permanent. I’m taking over for a couple of months until they find someone older and more case-hardened, my boy. You’re off for a stretch in Brisbane, in fact. How’s that for news?’
It shocked him to see the sudden light in Father Cullen’s eyes, the glow of sacrifice doused, understandable though it was. ‘Oh God!’ the curate whispered. ‘I’ve got to confess I prayed for it.’ He picked up his cup and the cup rattled on its saucer, the saucer bucking in his hands. ‘When?’
‘Within the month,’ Father Donellan said. ‘Now, never let me hear you say, Father, that prayers aren’t answered, will you?’
He didn’t expect the shaking that followed and then the tears.
Imprisoned by water. Paddy Cullen tossed in his sweaty sleep and gabbled. Donellan could hear his mutterings through the thin walls of his room, through the rain-noisy dark, through the muffling of the mosquito net and the whine of mosquitoes. Another fortnight had gone by. The supply barge couldn’t reach the island in the high seas running from the Cape. The Avila was port-bound in Townsville.
‘But why?’ Paddy Cullen had asked earlier that evening as if listening to a bedtime story. ‘Why? Why would Brodie do it?’
A few days before, they’d been chewing over that fifteen-year-old horror. The vibrations it had left quivered in the young priest’s soul. He talked of nothing else these last days.
‘Despair,’ Father Donellan tried to suggest. ‘Who knows what it can drive a man to. I only met him the once and he seemed a good enough fellow. The natives liked him.’ ‘But his children,’ Paddy Cullen said. ‘How could he?’
He was obsessed by the permutations of guilt.
What’s done is done, Donellan wanted to say. There were other troubles brewing on Doebin. Manny Cooktown had been punched witless by the boatman. It was difficult to find the reason. Manny’s brother Billy said there had been a fight because Jardine was beating his common-law wife Betsy, Manny’s daughter. Well, hardly wife, Billy said. She only thirteen. She go there as housegirl. Clean up, eh? Cook meals. He jump her, bro. All last year, he jump her. The boss, he know. He say nothin.
Donellan had wandered down to the boatshed with some trumped up reason for calling so that he could inspect Jardine’s flattened nose and black eyes. The damage gave him an uncharitable thrill that sped his query about the possibility of a boat to take Father Cullen to town. The boatman was angry and sulking. ‘You can see the way I am,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t steer a bloody tinnie.’
‘Tell me,’ Father Donellan said, seating himself more or less comfortably on a work-bench, ‘about those Cooktown boys. Didn’t one of them shoot Captain Brodie?’
Jardine blinked and began rolling a cigarette that he placed delicately between puffed lips. ‘You’re going back a long way, aren’t you?’
‘Just curious. I’m wondering if Manny still suffers from the memory of that. If he can’t get rid of his ghosts, you know.’
‘Just a trigger-happy boong, if you want my opinion. Couldn’t keep his fuckin finger still.’
‘Ah,’ Father Donellan said, letting the vowel roll out slowly like an expelled breath. ‘But he was released, wasn’t he. He came back a year later.’ A flat statement. ‘They brought in a verdict of not guilty after all.’
‘Where’s all this getting us?’
‘Nowhere, I suppose. Nowhere. I was just wondering.’ And he hesitated. ‘I was wondering, too, where all the whites on the settlement were when all this was going on. You see…’ and he presented a face of the blandest innocence to the boatman, ‘I never really heard the full story, not coming back for a year. There was a—what do you call it now?—a conspiracy of silence from the holy of holies. From the administration section, that is. It was as if they had all been struck dumb, you understand. You do understand, don’t you?’
Jardine blew smoke directly at the priest in a tiny gesture of contempt. ‘He was acting on orders, mate. Leggat’s, if you want to know.’
‘But you just described Manny as trigger-happy.’
‘In a manner of speaking, he bloody was. They gave him the gun, see. But he could’ve shot Brodie in the leg or whatever. Didn’t have to finish the bugger.’
‘Maybe he panicked.’
‘Maybe. And what’s all this got to do with the price of apples, eh?’
‘Oh, a little. Something.’ Father Donellan eased himself off the work-bench. ‘I mustn’t hold you up.’ He walked to the door of the shed and looked out to the water and the jetty fifty yards away. ‘And where were you, Mr Jardine, while all this was happening? You were pretty close, weren’t you? You could have done something.’
‘Ah, piss off!’ the boatman said.
He was a man no longer afraid of death, poor Paddy Cullen, sent off on the Avila at the end of the wet season to some kind of recuperative retreat house in Brisbane for religious overcome by rigours.
‘Bless you,’ Donellan had said automatically to the leached figure of his colleague arched painfully over the rails of the mission launch in the same agony as the stained-glass saints in the cathedrals of his childhood. Cullen had refused to understand where he was going or why. Donellan knew. Donellan understood. Keep chipper, he had whispered. And had said again to himself ‘keep chipper’ as he hustled his rugby team of islanders into place with the scowling visage of the director filling the whole island sky.
In the spaces before sleep lately, his brothers and sisters would float across his dream world, dead now, but still alive in those last dockside snaps he had brought away with him and brought out now and again to remind himself. There was Daniel stamping into the barn in a fragrance of milk and cow dung, arrogant and disgraced because he’d got Shally Burke into trouble and there’d be a wedding he didn’t want any day. And Eris, gone, vanished overnight on the Liverpool boat because she couldn’t stand milking and packing spuds any longer, disappearing into the back streets of that foggy port to become a statistic among the streetwalkers. Ah-ah! he lamented aloud in his sleep. And Denis who’d made it and gone to Dublin to work for a lawyer and taken out articles himself and become a big man with a lousy marriage and three ungrateful kids who had given him hell. Ah-ah!
All gone now. Where was the point of it all? The slipshoddery of this brief span.
And poor Paddy Cullen who resisted torments of the body with bouts at the bottle and when that failed became a nervous jerking tic-ridden fellow plagued by guilts, furtive lusts and the closer-licking flames of a damnation in which he fervently believed.
‘It’s too hard being human,’ the curate had admitted one evening to Donellan. ‘It’s the greatest punishment of all. That first bloody bite of the apple!’
‘I know. But there’s always dignity. The dignity of endurance.’
‘Dignity! Dignity!’
Father Donellan bent over the chessboard. He’d been teaching the curate the rudiments of the game.
‘Yes.’ He moved his queen into an invincible position and then regretted doing it. Was he too small to let this sad man have some victory? ‘We have to, well, swaddle ourselves in it, use it as a protective garb.’
‘Like the director?’
‘If I were a charitable man,’ Father Donellan said slowly, ‘I could say yes. I could make excuses for him too, perhaps. But no, Paddy,
not like that. Never like that. That’s where your sense of humour comes in, me boy. Every now and then as you feel your dignitas taking over, you have to step back and have a good laugh at the sight of yourself.’
‘I can’t do it,’ Paddy Cullen said, realising checkmate and shovelling the pieces together. Then he was shamed by tears.
‘Me poor boy,’ Father Donellan said. ‘Oh me poor boy.’
And he couldn’t either. Sister Cornelius had arrived from U-millie a month before, outraged with complaint. Father Cullen was having trouble saying the Mass. The words of consecration stopped him in his tracks. He could not bring himself to pronounce hoc est enim corpus meum as his unworthiness rose and choked him. At night he was bombarded by the little fleshly sins of his penitents that swept across his mind like a swarm of bees. He had tried not listening at confession, had closed his ears to the gabbled repetitions and then was seized with guilt as to whether or not he had actually absolved. He was not fit for the words of consecration. He was not fit he was not he was…
Mass was taking up to an hour, an hour and a half, in the hot makeshift chapel on U-millie, the sick slumped or restless on the hard benches, and work to be done.
‘Father Cullen,’ Sister Cornelius had reprimanded, aware of the young man’s torment but brisk with her obligations, ‘you may have time for the luxury of scruples. I simply haven’t. I have patients to see to, a clinic to run. The people here simply don’t understand. You’ll have to pull yourself together.’
Father Cullen had looked at her hopelessly. ‘You’re right, of course. You’re right.’ And then he had gone down to the little beach and the jetty and sat there all day in the heat-blaze until he, too, was a cot case, stiff with baked skin and running a fever.
‘You must do something, Father,’ Sister Cornelius demanded and Father Donellan had said he would write to the bishop.
‘I mean now. You must do something now. It’s not that he has much to do, you know. A daily Mass. Communion. Benediction once a week. The sisters and I are busy all day. We are simply not getting the spiritual consolation we need. And more importantly, neither are the islanders.’
