A Season on Earth

by Gerald Murnane

The map in Adrian’s shed was crudely drawn. The proportions of America were all wrong. The country had been twisted out of shape to make its most beautiful landscapes no more than stages in an endless journey. But Adrian knew his map by heart. Each few inches of railway track gave access to some picturesque scene from American films or magazines. No matter where the train might stop, it brought him to familiar country.

  Nearly every night Adrian made an American journey and found himself in some pleasant part of the American outdoors. Sometimes he was content to wander there alone. But usually he went in search of American women. There were dozens to choose from. He had seen their pictures in Australian newspapers and magazines. Some of them he had even watched in films. And all of them were just as beautiful as he had imagined them.

  In the weeks before the coronation of the new Queen, Adrian and his mother made a scrapbook out of cuttings from the Argus and the Australian Women’s Weekly. On the night when the coronation was broadcast direct from London, the Sherds sat round the wireless with the scrapbook open on the kitchen table. They followed the exact route of the procession on a large map of London. When the commentator described the scene in Westminster Abbey they tried to find each of the places mentioned on a labelled diagram, although some of the Protestant terms like transept and nave confused them a little.

  When nothing much was happening in the abbey, Adrian feasted on the choicest items in the scrapbook—the coloured illustrations of the crown jewels and Her Majesty’s robes and regalia. They were the most beautiful things he had ever seen. He delighted in every sumptuous fold of the robes and every winking highlight of the jewels. Then, to appreciate their splendour still more, he compared them with other things he had once thought beautiful.

  A few years before, when he was an altar boy, he used to stare each morning at the patterns on the back of the priest’s chasuble. There was one with the shape of a lamb outlined in amber-coloured stones on a background of white. The lamb held in its upraised foreleg a silver staff with a golden scroll unfurled at the top. The whole design was topped by the disc of an enormous Host with rays beaming from it and the letters IHS across it in beads the colour of blood.

  Adrian had once asked the priest after mass whether the stones and beads on the chasuble were proper jewels. The priest had looked a little apologetic and said no, the parish wasn’t wealthy enough for that. They were (he paused) semi-precious stones. Adrian was not at all disappointed. Any sort of precious stones appealed to him.

  On coronation night Adrian studied the picture in the Argus of Her Majesty’s robe and saw that no chasuble could rival it.

  The solemn ceremony of the coronation itself was too much for Adrian to visualise with only the wireless broadcast to help him. But two days later when the Argus published its full-colour souvenir supplement, he saw the scene in the abbey in all its splendour. He compared all that magnificence with two scenes that he had once thought would never be surpassed for beauty.

  Years before, he had watched a film about the Arabian Nights. It was the first Technicolor film he had seen. Evelyn Keyes was a princess guarded by black slaves in her father’s palace. Cornel Wilde was the man who fell in love with her and tried to elope with her. At one point in the film, the slaves were carrying Evelyn Keyes through the streets of Baghdad in a sedan chair. She was inside her private compartment, concealed by thick purple and gold drapery. Cornel Wilde stopped the slaves and tried to fight them. Evelyn Keyes peeped out for a few seconds and smiled shyly at him.

  Adrian never forgot that brief glimpse of her. She was dressed in pastel-coloured satins. A white silk veil covered part of her face, but anyone could see she was breathtakingly beautiful. Her complexion was a radiant pinkish-gold, and the gorgeously coloured fabrics around her set it off to perfection.

  In one of his adventures, Mandrake the Magician (in the comic strip at the back of the Women’s Weekly) found a race of people like Ancient Romans living on the far side of the moon. When they were ready for sleep at night, the Moonlings climbed onto filmy envelopes inflated with a special light gas. All night long the handsome moon-dwellers, in long white robes, sprawled on their transparent cushions and wafted from room to room of their spacious houses.

  But the glamour of Evelyn Keyes could not match the simple beauty of the young Queen, and the Moonlings on their floating beds were not half so graceful and dignified as the lords and ladies of England in Westminster Abbey.

  For a few days after the coronation, Adrian was restless and agitated. Picking his way through the puddles in his street or carving railway sidings and points into his wooden ruler in school, he thought how little pageantry there was in his life. At night he stared at the coloured souvenir pictures and wondered how to bring the splendour of the coronation to Accrington.

  One night when he arrived with Lauren and Rita and Linda in the Bluegrass Country of Kentucky, the women started to whisper and smile together. He realised they were planning a little surprise for him.

  They told him to wait while they went behind some bushes. Lauren and Linda came back first. They wore brief twopiece bathing suits that dazzled him. The fabric was cloth-of-gold studded with semi-precious copies of all the emeralds and rubies and diamonds in the crown jewels.

  Behind them came Rita, draped in a replica of the coronation robe itself. And when the other two lifted her train he saw just enough to tell him that under the extravagant ermine-tipped robe she was stark naked.

  Some mornings when Adrian Sherd stood in the bathroom waiting for the hot water to come through the pipes and fingering the latest pimples on his face, he remembered his American journey of the previous night and wondered if he was going mad.

  Each night his adventures became a little more outrageous. On his first trips to America he had walked for hours hand in hand with film stars through scenic landscapes. He had undressed them and gone the whole way with them afterwards but always politely and considerately. But as the American countryside became more familiar he found he needed more than one woman to excite him. Instead of admiring the scenery he had begun to spend his time talking coarsely to the women and encouraging them to join in all kinds of obscene games.

  Some of these games seemed so absurd afterwards that Adrian decided only a lunatic could have invented them. He could not imagine any men or women in real life doing such things together.

  He thought of his own parents. Every night they left their bedroom door ajar to prove they had nothing to hide. And Mrs Sherd always bolted the bathroom door when she went to have a bath so that not even her husband could look in at her.

  In all the backyards around Riviera Grove there was no place where a couple could even sunbathe together unobserved. And in most of the houses there were young children running round all day. Perhaps the parents waited for the children to go to sleep and then frolicked together late at night. But from what Adrian heard of their conversations in the local bus, it seemed they had no time for fun.

  The men worked on their houses and gardens. ‘I stayed up till all hours last night trying to put up an extra cupboard in the laundry,’ a man would say.

  The women were often sick. ‘Bev’s still in hospital. Her mother’s stopping with us to mind the nippers.’

  Even their annual holidays were innocent. ‘Our in-laws lent us their caravan at Safety Beach. It’s a bit of a madhouse with the two of us and the three littlies all in bunks, but it’s worth it for their sakes.’

  Adrian divided Melbourne into three regions—slums, garden suburbs and outer suburbs. The slums were all the inner suburbs where the houses were joined together and had no front gardens. East Melbourne, Richmond, Carlton—Adrian was not at all curious about the people who lived in these slums. They were criminals or dirty and poor, and he couldn’t bear to think of their pale grubby skin naked or sticking out of bathing suits.

  The garden suburbs formed a great arc around the east and south-east of Melbourne. Swindon, where Adrian went to school, was in the heart of them, and most of th
e boys at his school lived in leafy streets. The people of the garden suburbs had full-grown trees brushing against their windows. They spread a tablecloth before every meal and poured their tomato sauce from little glass jugs. The women always wore stockings when they went shopping.

  Most of the houses and gardens in these suburbs were ideal for sexual games, but Adrian doubted if they were ever used for that purpose. The people of the garden suburbs were too dignified and serious. The men sat with suits on all day in offices or banks and brought home important papers to work on after tea. The women looked so sternly at schoolboys and schoolgirls giggling together on the Swindon Road trams that Adrian thought they would have slapped their husbands’ faces at the very mention of lewd games.

  The outer suburbs were the ones that Adrian knew best. Whenever he tried to imagine the city of Melbourne as a whole, he saw it shaped like a great star with the outer suburbs its distinctive arms. Their miles of pinkish-brown tiled roofs reached far out into the farmlands and market gardens and bush or scrub as a sign that the modern age had come to Australia.

  When Adrian read in the newspaper about a typical Melbourne family, he saw their white or cream weatherboard house in a treeless yard surrounded by fences of neatly sawn palings. From articles and cartoons in the Argus he had learned a lot about these people, but nothing to suggest they did the things he was interested in.

  The women of the outer suburbs were not beautiful (although occasionally one was described as attractive or vivacious). They wore dressing gowns all morning, and frilly aprons over their clothes for the rest of the day. They wore their hair in curlers under scarves knotted above the forehead. When they talked over their back fences it was mostly about their husbands’ stupid habits.

  The husbands still had sexual thoughts occasionally. They liked to stare at pictures of film stars or beauty contestants. But the wives apparently were sick of sex (perhaps because they had too many children or because they had run out of ideas to make it interesting). They were always snatching the pictures from their husbands’ hands. On the beach in summer a wife would bury her husband’s head in the sand or chain his feet to an umbrella to keep him from following some beautiful young woman.

  Adrian was reassured to learn that some husbands dreamed (like himself) of doing things with film stars and bathing beauties. But he would have liked to know that someone in Melbourne was actually making his dreams come true.

  The little that Adrian learned from the radio was more confusing than helpful. Sometimes he heard in a radio play a conversation like this.

  YOUNG WIFE: I saw the doctor today.

  HUSBAND (only half-listening): Oh?

  YOUNG WIFE: He told me…(a pause)…I’m going to have a baby.

  HUSBAND (amazed): What? You’re joking! It can’t be!

  Adrian had even watched a scene like this in an American film. He could only conclude that many husbands fathered their children while they were dozing off late at night, or even in their sleep. Or perhaps what they did with their wives was so dull and perfunctory that they forgot about it soon afterwards. Either way it was more evidence that the kind of sexual activity Adrian preferred was not common in real life.

  Even after watching an American film, Adrian still thought he might have been a very rare kind of sex maniac. The men and women in films seemed to want nothing more than to fall in love. They struggled against misfortunes and risked their lives only for the joy of holding each other and declaring their love. At the end of each film Adrian stared at the heroine. She closed her eyes and leaned back in a kind of swoon. All that her lover could do was to support her in his arms and kiss her tenderly. She was in no condition to play American sex games.

  Adrian read books by R. L. Stevenson, D. K. Broster, Sir Walter Scott, Charles Kingsley, Alexandre Dumas and Ion L. Idriess. But he never expected to find in literature any proof that grown men and women behaved as he and his women friends did in America. Somewhere in the Vatican was an Index of Banned Books. Some of these books might have told him what he wanted to know. But it was impossible that any of them would ever fall into his hands. And even if they did, he would probably not dare to read them, since the penalty was automatic excommunication.

  But an innocent-looking library book eventually proved to Adrian that at least some adults enjoyed the pleasures that he devised on his American journeys.

  Adrian borrowed books from a children’s library run by a women’s committee of the Liberal Party over a shop in Swindon Road. (There was no library at St Carthage’s College.) One afternoon he was looking through the books on the few shelves marked Australia.

  In a book by Ion L. Idriess Adrian found a picture of a naked man lolling on the ground against a backdrop of tropical vegetation while his eight wives (naked except for tiny skirts between their legs) waited to do his bidding. The man was Parajoulta, King of the Blue Mud Bay tribe in the Northern Territory. Although he and his wives were Aborigines, there was a look in his eye that cheered Adrian.

  The people of Accrington and the outer suburbs might have thought Adrian was crazy if they could have seen him with his women beside some beach or trout stream in America. But King Parajoulta would probably have understood. He sometimes played the very same games in the lush groves around Blue Mud Bay.

  On the first Thursday of every month Adrian’s form walked by twos from St Carthage’s College to the Swindon parish church. First Thursday was confession day for the hundreds of boys at the college. The four confessionals built into the walls of the church were not enough. Extra priests sat in comfortable chairs just inside the altar rails and heard confessions with their heads bowed and their eyes averted from the boys kneeling at their elbows.

  Adrian always chose the longest queue and knelt down to wait with his face in his hands as though he was examining his conscience.

  The examination of conscience was supposed to be a long careful search for all the sins committed since your last confession. Adrian’s Sunday Missal had a list of questions to assist the penitent in his examination. Adrian often read the questions to cheer himself up. He might have been a great sinner but at least he had never believed in fortune tellers or consulted them; gone to places of worship belonging to other denominations; sworn oaths in slight or trivial matters; talked, gazed or laughed in church; oppressed anyone; been guilty of lascivious dressing or painting.

  Adrian had no need to examine his conscience. There was only one kind of mortal sin that he committed. All he had to do before confession was to work out his total for the month. For this he had a simple formula. ‘Let x be the number of days since my last confession.

  ‘Then the total of sins (for weekends, public holidays or days of unusual excitement).’

  Yet he could never bring himself to confess this total. He could have admitted easily that he had lied twenty times or lost his temper fifty times or disobeyed his parents a hundred times. But he had never been brave enough to walk into confession and say, ‘It is one month since my last confession, Father, and I accuse myself of committing an impure action by myself sixteen times.’

  To reduce his total to a more respectable size Adrian used his knowledge of moral theology. The three conditions necessary for mortal sin were grave matter, full knowledge and full consent. In his case the matter was certainly grave. And he could hardly deny that he knew exactly what he was doing when he sinned. (Some of his American adventures lasted for nearly half an hour.) But did he always consent fully to what took place?

  Any act of consent must be performed by the Will. Sometimes just before a trip to America, Adrian caught sight of his Will. It appeared as a crusader in armour with his sword upraised—the same crusader that Adrian had seen as a child in advertisements for Hearns Bronchitis Mixture. The Will was struggling against a pack of little imps with bald grinning heads and spidery limbs. These were the Passions. (In the old advertisements the crusader had worn the word Hearns on his breast and the imps had been labelled Catarrh, Influenza, Tonsilitis, Sore Throat a
nd Cough.) The battle took place in some vague arena in the region of Adrian Sherd’s soul. The Passions were always too many and too strong for the Will, and the last thing that Adrian saw before he arrived in America was the crusader going down beneath the exultant imps.

  But the important thing was that he had gone down fighting. The Will had offered some resistance to the Passions. Adrian had not gone to America with the full consent of his Will.

  In the last moments before entering the confessional Adrian tried to estimate how many times he had seen this vision of his Will. He arrived at a figure, subtracted it from his gross total and confessed to a net total of six or seven mortal sins of impurity.

  Adrian often wondered how the other regular sinners got through their confessions. He questioned them discreetly whenever he could.

  Cornthwaite never confessed impure actions—only impure thoughts. He tried to convince Adrian that the thought was the essential part of any sin, and therefore the only part that had to be confessed and forgiven.

  Seskis had a trick of faltering in the middle of his confession as though he couldn’t find the right words to describe his sin. The priest usually took him for a first offender and treated him lightly.

  O’Mullane sometimes told the priest that his sins happened late at night when he didn’t know whether he was asleep or awake. But one priest cross-examined him and got him confused and then refused him absolution for trying to tell a lie to the Holy Ghost. O’Mullane was so scared that he gave up the sin altogether for nearly a month.

  Carolan used to confess just four sins each month, although he might have committed ten or twelve in that time. He kept a careful record of the unconfessed sins and swore he would confess every one of them before he died. He intended to wipe them out four at a time each month after he had finally given up the habit.

  A fellow named Di Nuzzo boasted one day that a certain priest in his parish never asked any questions or made any comment no matter how many sins of impurity you confessed.