A Season on Earth

by Gerald Murnane

  Rosemary Clooney grabbed the nearest bellhop boy and waltzed round the room with him while she sang ‘Tell Us Where the Good Times Are’. Each time she shouted the chorus she held him so close to her plunging neckline that her big bouncing breasts almost rubbed against his nose. The shy young man didn’t know where to look, and the crowd went wild.

  By now the men had arrived and changed into their tuxedos. The happy couples crowded into an upstairs ballroom. Dean Martin sang ‘Kiss of Fire’ and everyone started to tango. When the song reached its climax, some of the more red-blooded men even tried to kiss their partners. But the women turned their heads aside because they knew what a kiss could do.

  The crowd round the stage drew back and made way for Patti Page the Singing Rage with her version of ‘Doggie in the Window’. As she moved among the dancers, the mystery of who made the dog noises was solved at last. It was Patti herself, and she looked so fetching when she yelped that some of the men tried to fondle her like a cuddlesome puppy.

  The Weavers burst into the room singing ‘The Gandy Dancers’ Ball’. Everyone started dancing like miners or lumberjacks in an old Western saloon. But some of the women looked nervous. They knew what wild things the gandy dancers did when they were excited by dancing and pretty faces.

  When the dust had settled after the dance, Frankie Laine sang ‘Wild Goose’. A hush came over the room. Someone pulled back the velvet drapes to reveal a view of brightly lit skyscrapers. High up in the night sky, a flock of wild geese was passing over the city on their way to the Gulf of Mexico. The people listening to Frankie remembered the wide open spaces of America, far from the world of Show Business with its low-cut gowns and easy divorces. Between the big cities were rural landscapes where people were all in bed listening to the innocent music of wild geese honking in the night sky. When Frankie was finished, a few of the dancers were so moved that they walked out of their girlfriends’ lives and went back to the dear hearts and gentle people in their home towns.

  Jo Stafford grabbed the mike again and sang the first bars of ‘Jumbalaya’. The dancers leaped to their feet. The words were puzzling, but everyone knew the song was something about Louisiana and the steamy tropical swamps where people wore shorts or bathers all day. To set the right mood for the song, Jo Stafford was wearing a grass skirt and a floral brassiere.

  The tropical rhythm affected everyone. The dancing grew furious. At the end of each chorus, some of the men sang words that were rather risqué. Instead of the correct words ‘big fun’, they sang ‘big bums’. And a few of the more shameless women giggled behind their hands and waggled their own bottoms.

  As the song neared its end, more people behaved suggestively or sniggered over double entendres. They forgot about the rest of America in the darkness all round them. They couldn’t have cared less about the thousands of Catholic parents trying to shield their children from the dangers of blue songs and films. They forgot everything except the sight of Jo Stafford swishing her grass skirt higher and higher in time with the wild pagan music and the off-colour words.

  But nothing really evil happened. After a few minutes the song that had seemed to promise a lustful orgy came suddenly to an end.

  Someone pulled back the drapes again. The cold grey light of dawn was spreading over the sky. The couples clasped hands and gathered at the windows while Eddie Fisher sang ‘Turn Back the Hands of Time’.

  The men were all vaguely dissatisfied (like Adrian Sherd after he had listened to three Hit Parades on Sunday evening). All night they had heard about kisses that thrilled, kisses of fire, lips of wine, and charms they would die for. But now it was time to go home and they had done no more than dance the night away.

  While the men were stealing a goodnight kiss from their girlfriends in the lobbies of their apartment buildings or on the porches of their frame houses, some of them might have found themselves humming a different kind of music.

  It was not really hit music, although it often made the Hit Parade for a few weeks. When Adrian Sherd heard it he remembered that not everyone spent their evenings dancing in nightclubs or folding charms in their arms. It was sad, lonely music—the theme from Moulin Rouge, or The Story of Three Loves or Limelight—and it seemed to come from countries very different from America.

  When the people going home in America heard this music they wondered if there was some other kind of happiness that they had never found—and would never find as long as they spent their nights holding their loved ones dangerously near and tasting their lips.

  One Monday morning Adrian’s friends asked him what he had done over the weekend. All he could tell them was that he had listened to the Hit Parades on the wireless. Seskis and Cornthwaite laughed and said they were always too busy to sit and listen to music.

  But O’Mullane said, ‘The Hit Parade came in handy for me one night. I was lying out in my bungalow trying to think of an excuse to do it to myself and I heard this colossal song with Perry Como and a chorus of young tarts in the background. They were singing, “Play me a hurtin’ tune” over and over again. I beat time to the music while I did it. The last few lines nearly made my head drop off. I’m going to buy the record and use it again some day.’

  Every few months, on a Sunday afternoon, Mrs Sherd took her three sons to visit her sister, Miss Kathleen Bracken.

  Adrian knew his Aunt Kath would have entered a convent when she was young if one of her legs had not been shorter than the other. Adrian’s mother called her a living saint because she went to daily mass in all weathers with her big boot clumping along the footpath.

  Miss Bracken lived alone in a little single-fronted weatherboard house in Hawthorn. While his brothers ate green loquats or figs from the two trees in the backyard, Adrian admired his aunt’s front room.

  Inside the door, near the light switch, was a holy-water stoup in the shape of an angel holding a bowl against its breast. Whenever Aunt Kath walked past it she dipped her finger in the bowl and blessed herself. Adrian did the same.

  There were three altars in the room: one each for the Sacred Heart, Our Lady of Perpetual Succour and St Joseph. Each altar had a statue of coloured plaster with a fairy light burning in front of it (red for the Sacred Heart, blue for Our Lady and orange for St Joseph) and a vase of flowers. On certain feast days Aunt Kath burned a candle in front of the appropriate altar—a blessed candle obtained from the church on the feast of the Purification of Our Lady.

  On a cabinet beneath a picture of Our Lady appearing to St Bernadette Soubirous was a flask of Lourdes water. Aunt Kath sprinkled a few drops on her wrists and temples when she felt off-colour. One day when Adrian’s youngest brother ran a long splinter under his fingernail, she dipped the finger in the flask before she poked at it with a needle.

  Adrian liked to ask his aunt about little-known religious orders or puzzling rituals and ceremonies or obscure points of Catholic doctrine. It was his aunt who told him always to burn old broken rosary beads rather than throw them away (so they wouldn’t end up lying next to some dirty piece of garbage or be picked up by non-Catholics who would only make a mockery of them). She showed him leaflets about an order of nuns who dedicated their lives to converting the Jews, and another order who worked exclusively with African lepers. She knew all about the ceremony of Tenebrae, in which the lights in the church were put out one by one. And one Sunday afternoon she took Adrian and his mother to a churching for a woman who had recently had a baby.

  Whenever his aunt was talking, Adrian thought of her mind as a huge volume, like the book that the priest used at mass, with ornate red binding and pages edged with thick gilt. Silk ribbons hung out of the pages to mark the important places.

  ‘Why aren’t Catholics allowed to be cremated?’ he asked her.

  She took hold of the dangling violet (or scarlet or green) ribbon and parted the gilt edging at the section containing the answer.

  ‘At one time, certain heretics or atheists used to have themselves cremated to show that their bodies could
n’t be resurrected after death. So the Holy Father issued a decree so that no Catholic would appear to be siding with the heretics.’

  In a drawer in the front room Aunt Kath had a collection of relics of saints, each in a silk-lined box labelled CYMA or ROLEX or OMEGA. The relics were tiny chips of bone or fragments of cloth housed behind glass in silver or gilt lockets.

  When Adrian had been younger he used to enjoy visiting his aunt. But after he had begun his visits to America he felt he was polluting her house, and especially the front room. He still read her magazines (The Messenger of Our Lady, The Annals of The Sacred Heart, The Monstrance, The Far East) but he kept away from her altars and relics. He was frightened of committing a sacrilege by touching them with his hands—the same hands that only a few hours before had been dabbling in filth.

  One day when he had at least a dozen sins on his soul, his aunt showed him a new relic she had just received from Italy. She unpacked it from a box stuffed with tissue paper.

  ‘Actually there are two of them,’ she said. ‘And I want you to have one.’

  Adrian knew she prayed every morning that he would become a priest. Fortunately God saw to it that no prayers ever went to waste. His aunt’s prayers would probably be used to lead some other more worthy boy to the priesthood.

  She lifted out two tiny envelopes and held one up to the light. Adrian saw a dark patch in one corner.

  His aunt said, ‘They’re only third-class relics—I’ve told you about the different classes of relics—but they were jolly hard to come by.’

  She put one envelope in Adrian’s hand. ‘It’s from his tomb,’ she said. ‘Dust from the tomb of St Gabriel of the Sorrowing Virgin. St Gabriel had an extraordinary love for Holy Purity. He’s the ideal patron for young people to pray to today when there’s so much temptation about.’

  Adrian tried to look as though it had never occurred to him to pray to any saint for purity because it came naturally to him.

  All the way home with the relic in his pocket, Adrian wondered how much the saints in heaven knew about the sins of people on earth. Did God in his mercy keep all the holy virgins and the innocent saints like St Gabriel from knowing about the foul sins of impurity committed every day? Or was the news of each sin broadcast all over heaven as soon as it was committed? (‘News Flash: Adrian Sherd, Catholic boy of Accrington, Melbourne, Australia, abused himself at 10.55 this evening.’) There were people already in heaven who knew him. (‘Yes, he was my grandson, I’m sorry to say,’ says old Mr Bracken.) If Adrian managed to break the habit at last and get to heaven in the end, he would have to hide from his relatives.

  But then there was the General Judgement. Even if no one in heaven had heard of his sins before then, every person who had lived on earth since Adam would learn about them on Judgement Day.

  Adrian Sherd walked up to the platform between two stern angels. The crowd of spectators reached beyond the horizon in every direction. But even the farthest soul in the crowd heard his name when it was broadcast over the loudspeakers.

  Towering above the platform was a huge indicator like the scoreboard at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. Beside each of the Ten Commandments was an instrument like the speedo in a car. The crowd gasped when the digits started tumbling over to show Sherd’s score for the Sixth Commandment. The blurred numerals whirled into the hundreds. Somewhere in the crowd his Aunt Kathleen shrieked with horror. This was the boy she had wanted to be a priest, the boy she had once enrolled in the Archconfraternity of the Divine Child, the hypocrite whose filthy hands had touched the sacred dust from St Gabriel’s tomb.

  Brother Methodius told the Latin class one morning that the Romans in the great days of the Republic reached the highest level of culture and virtue that a pagan civilisation could possibly attain. Many of their greatest and wisest citizens were hardly distinguishable from Christian gentlemen.

  Adrian Sherd did not believe the brother. He knew that one people did not conquer another just to give them paved roads or a new legal system. Adrian knew what power was for. If the citizens of Melbourne had made him their dictator he would have gone straight to a mannequins’ school and ordered all the women to undress.

  The Romans were no different from himself. Among the back pages of his Latin textbook was a story entitled ‘The Rape of the Sabine Women’. (Adrian had waited all year for his Latin class to reach this story. But they progressed so slowly through the textbook that he suspected Brother Methodius of deliberately holding them back to avoid the embarrassing story.) Adrian often studied the illustration above the story and even tried to translate the Latin text on his own. Of course it was all watered down to make it suitable for schoolboys. The Roman soldiers only led the women away by their wrists. And even the Latin word rapio was translated in the vocabulary at the back of the book as ‘seize, snatch up, carry away’. But Adrian was not deceived.

  Whenever he read the story of a battle, Adrian barracked for the enemies of Rome. He had no sympathy for Roman boys of his own age. As soon as they started wearing the toga of manhood they could do whatever they liked with their father’s slaves. But the young men of Capua or Tarentum or Veii had troubles like his. When they crept out as scouts towards the suburbs of Rome they saw young Publius or Flaccus enjoying himself in his orchard or courtyard with some young woman captured from a tribe like their own. But of course their own people were not strong enough to capture slaves.

  But when the Roman legions finally invested their city, the young fellows saw every night, from the tops of their threatened walls, the goings-on in the Romans’ comfortable camp. How many of them must have abused themselves for the last time when they lay down briefly between turns on watch and then fallen in battle next morning—killed by the very fellows whose pleasures they had envied so often.

  As city after city was conquered in Italy and Gaul and Germany, everyone had the chance to own slaves. The only people who still kept up the habit of solitary sin were the slaves themselves. Some of them did it thinking of the flaxen-haired maidens they had once known on the banks of the Rhine and would never see again. Others did it peeping around the marble columns at the bare-armed Roman matrons teaching their daughters to spin and weave.

  And then came Adrian’s hero, a man sworn to destroy Rome and avenge the raped slave girls and wretched self-abusers.

  Hannibal himself came from a lustful land. (It was later to be the home of the Great St Augustine, a sex maniac in his youth, but destined to be the holy Bishop of Hippo and a worthy patron saint for boys struggling to break the habit of impurity.) But as a young man, the Carthaginian had turned his back on all the pagan delights of North Africa. He spent the rest of his life wandering round the countryside of Italy, far from the luxuries of the cities.

  It was probably a blessing that he was one-eyed. When he led his army to the gates of Rome he would have seen only dimly from his siege-towers the beauty of the women inside the walls that he would never breach. Not that anything would have tempted him to give up his ascetic way of life. It was clear from his superhuman courage and endurance that he was the absolute master of his passions.

  After the defeat of Hannibal, the Romans did what they liked all over the civilised world. The only citizens who refused to join in the orgies were the early Christians, huddled by candlelight in their catacombs deep under Rome. Sometimes they could hardly hear the priest’s words during mass for the squeals and grunts coming from overhead as a burly patrician subdued a slave girl in his triclinium, or chased her naked into the pool in his atrium. It was no wonder the Christians preached against slavery.

  Outside the Pax Romana were the primitive tribes on the Baltic coast or in the darkest Balkans who could only afford one wife each. When Latin writers described these people as barbarians or hinted at their savage practices, they were probably referring to the habit of self-abuse, which the Romans themselves would have all but forgotten.

  But the barbarians had their day at last. When the Goths and Vandals sacked Rome, the lucky
ones who got there first leaped on the stately Roman matrons and even the trembling Christian virgins with all the ferocity of men who had been shut out for centuries from the delights of the Empire. Those who were still hurrying towards Rome saw the flames rising over the Seven Hills and sinned by themselves one last time at the thought of what must have been happening in the Eternal City (and what they would soon be enjoying themselves).

  During the Dark Ages, bestial tribesmen from Central Asia roamed around Italy, grabbing the ex-slave girls and orphaned patrician girls who were still wandering bewildered beneath the cypresses on the grass-grown Appian Way. Those who missed out on the women abused themselves in front of the shameless murals and mosaics in the crumbling villas or, if they could read, over the scandalous novels and poems of the corrupt last days of the Empire.

  But as time passed, some people were sickened by the sexual excesses. Pious men and women went into the desert and lonely places to found monasteries and convents. The Christian way of life was gradually established in the lands once ruled by the Romans. And the sex maniacs, like the wolves and bears and wild boars of Europe, had to flee into the swamps of Lithuania and the glens of Albania and go back to their furtive habits of old.

  Once a month the College Chaplain, Father Lacey, strolled down from the local presbytery to talk to Adrian’s class.

  The chaplain was a tired man with white hair. The only time Adrian had gone to him in confession, Father Lacey had said sadly, ‘For the love of God, can’t you use some self-control, son?’ and then announced the penance and rested his head in his hands and closed his eyes.