by Tom Keneally
The man rose like a night porter or watchman roused by an unexpected demand or question. The fag-end dangling from his thin creased, yellowed fingers, he moved from his chair to lead Darragh on a tour of the atrocity.
There are some dreams, particularly the dreams of exhausted afternoons, in which your sense of movement seems very close to movement in the waking world. There are corridors to be traversed, and doors to be opened, and the weary pale man, leading him and opening the way, performed those services for Darragh. He opened the bedroom door and entered into a wired, room-sized meat closet where immaculate sides of lamb hung from hooks. He picked up from the floor some sharp implements which might stand in the way of Frank Darragh’s thorough inspection. On a couch by the meat closet’s window sat a bloodied handkerchief. Darragh looked at it and rage filled him. The man nudged the floor and inhaled his narrow-gutted cigarette and, forcing a joyless cloud of smoke, hissing, between his teeth. ‘We were expecting you earlier,’ he said.
If the clean-slaughtered sheep of this dream were calculated to wake Father Darragh, they did not. But they flavoured his ongoing sleep with that particularly acrid fear peculiar to dreams. Even his unconscious mind was aware of his limbs fibrillating and turning chill, the sort of coldness that comes, say, from standing too close to some edge. I come to bring you a clean sacrifice …
He was also somehow aware of the afternoon advancing, and was pleased at that, so that any new, conscious-stricken requirements of the day would need to be postponed. Sometimes, if he was about at the right hour, he went over to greet the children as they left school. But that hour of promise and innocence and blessing slipped away beneath the umber tide of his sleep. It was five past five when he woke, his body sweaty because of the ill-considered amount of clothing in which he’d fallen asleep. At seven o’clock he was to conduct the Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, singing the hymns with the congregation, raising the monstrance with the Divine Host within it to bless the faithful petitioners, each one of them with their heads bowed in predictable ways: Dear God, save my boy, stop the Japanese, make my husband kinder, aid me as the other man charms me, give me a happy death, ease my pain, assuage my doubt!
As he went to the bathroom to rinse his neck and upper body, he could hear Monsignor Carolan’s voice raised in conversation in the lounge room downstairs. Tuesday. The monsignor always had lunch with his classmate Monsignor Plunkett on Tuesdays. Monsignor Carolan had once told Darragh, ‘Plunkett knows every rich Catholic between here and Bourke, and knows how to talk to them, too.’ Darragh decided that when he had washed and changed his shirt, he would go—as a polite curate should—and pay his respects to eminent Monsignor Plunkett. So ten minutes later, in the sort of collarless shirt to which priests attached their stocks by means of a stud, he made his way down the stairs. Halfway down, it became clear to him that the monsignor believed him to be out of the house. He was speaking in that full-blast voice which powerful men develop in their middle age, and he was discussing Darragh.
‘He hears bucketloads of confessions,’ the monsignor was saying. ‘That seems to be his chief definition of what a priest does.’
‘Sounds morbid,’ suggested Plunkett. ‘I hope not, Vince.’
‘No. A happy soul. If anything innocent as a lamb. See, an only child, elderly and protective parents. The father’s dead. Poor young Frank knows nothing of the world. He also knows nothing about the eleventh commandment, the sacrament without which nothing gets done. Thou shalt raise plenteous finance. I don’t think he’ll ever be any good at that one. Parishioners tell me he visits them and asks them not to give him money.’
‘Some sort of a zealot then?’
‘No. Too earnest, that’s all. You see, everything he does flows out of his innocence. What’s going to become of him if events shake him up?’
‘What sort of events do you mean?’ asked Plunkett.
‘Well, he’s the hero of silly pious women and pale self-abusers. What’ll happen when he meets real people?’
Darragh would have hated to be caught on the stairs, listening, his face full of blood. He eased his way upwards again. Knowing it was vanity, he was nonetheless sharply affronted to hear his parish priest’s assessment of him. He had been attracted to the Church by the certainty priests could enjoy that the orders and opinions of their superiors, their parish priests and bishops, must be accommodated and accepted as God’s will. He had had no trouble with that proposition till this afternoon. Why couldn’t he just accept the monsignor’s unflattering report? He could not, and although he knew it was futile, he felt anger as well. The monsignor was pleased enough with his innocence to exploit it to have early Masses said! To have him take Benedictions, and double shifts in the confessional! Darragh would tell him too, but not yet; in robust anger, but not while this stupid state of pique was on him.
Walking in his room, he struggled through the last of Compline, and then said the next day’s Matins and Lauds, thus completing his daily duty. He was distracted throughout by rage and shame, by the question of which he should be, angry or self-questioning. His lips still enunciated the Latin in the rounded Italian style he had cultivated before his ordination. ‘Fratres: Sobrii estote, et vigilate … Brothers, be sober and keep watch, because your adversary the Devil, like a raging lion, goes about seeking whom he might devour …’ As these words fell from his tongue like unregarded pebbles dropped by a negligent hand, he rehearsed the furious speeches he would never make to the monsignor.
Even for a man who was instructed to rejoice when criticised, it was too grave a night, given what he had overheard on the stairs, given, as well, boys in make-up and 4F interlopers from the brickworks, to sit down and eat a salad with the monsignor. The living room was empty now, and Darragh went to the kitchen and found Mrs Flannery at her work, slicing the previous Sunday’s lamb from which the summer air seemed to have drawn all succulence.
‘If you’d excuse me from being at tea, Mrs Flannery,’ Darragh told her.
Mrs Flannery said, ‘But you can’t give Benediction on an empty stomach, Father.’
Darragh held up an apologetic hand. He could see its dishonesty before his face. ‘Please—I’ll make myself some toast and tea afterwards. That will do me.’
‘Go to the ice chest when you’re finished Benediction. You’ll find I’ve left you something under a beaded cover.’
Darragh foresaw greasy slabs of cold mutton, with sliced beet-root and lettuce, and a jug of condensed milk mayonnaise, the latter covered with its own little beaded doily. What sort of man despised such niceties, such marks of regard, he wondered. But in his present state, he did.
For all he could imagine doing after Benediction was to sink again into torpor, in which all questions would be for the moment suspended. He had heard of priests experiencing these phases of despair, when the tide of grace ran out, when the performance of duty seemed arid. He was concerned it had happened to him now, when he was barely three years ordained, when there was so far to go, and such great changes to be accommodated. And not over time either, but this year. This half-year.
When he got to the sacristy door at five to seven, the altar boys were standing there in the last of the light, gazing out for his arrival. They knew he was generally conscientious enough to get there early. Due to an edict of the monsignor, the boys were forbidden from lighting the charcoal for the incense until a priest was present, for fear that in their brio they would burn the church down. Now they set to work on igniting the beads of charcoal, and they looked sideways at the robing Darragh as they did so. Altar boys had an infallible nose for the mental state of a priest. This was the first time, Darragh knew, they had seen him so beset.
It was five minutes past seven before Father Darragh, phenomenally late by his own standards, followed the boy carrying the incense, and the other with the brass thurible with its small load of glowing charcoals, to the altar, and the organist began playing that resounding Benediction hymn ‘Tantum Ergo Sacramentum’. The congre
gation, the taste of their evening meals on their tongues, having rushed along Homebush Road in the certain knowledge that he always began Benediction on time, might themselves have been a little bemused by the late start. The golden cope hanging from his shoulders, Darragh ascended the altar, unlocked the tabernacle with its brass key, and extracted the large consecrated host, the body and blood of Christ, and inserted it in the great brass and golden sunspray of the monstrance. Leaving it on the altar in its place of honour, he descended the steps, a ritual recognition of the supremacy of Christ’s Eucharist. This descent had until the last few days enriched him, but now it was just taking carpeted steps and trying not to trip on his long white alb. Feeding incense into the thurible, he swung the smoking metal bulb in the direction of the sacrament, while the congregation bowed profoundly behind him. But the task of holding the chains and directing the thurible was best achieved by him with eyes raised to Christ his brother, hidden behind the banal species of a white disc of unleavened bread. ‘Help me,’ he begged fraternally.
MRS FLANNERY SEEMED as innocent of slumber as of girlishness. The concept of her rest somewhere in the presbytery, in a specific housekeeper’s room on the ground floor, defeated the imagination. She was always in full, wakeful throat when she woke Darragh at a quarter to five. Instantly awake, instantly uneasy, remembering all, he still knew exactly his program for that morning. He was to hear the confessions of the brothers, and say Mass for them in their tiny chapel a mile west from St Margaret’s. The monsignor sometimes even asked him to hear the muttered lapses of the Dominican nuns one mile east, generously offering Darragh the use of his Buick for the visits, forgetting that Darragh had not yet finished his education as a driver, and was likely to clash the Buick’s silky gears and use up too much of the petrol ration, generous as it was for ministers of religion.
He was always humbled to hear the confessions of the Christian Brothers, some of them middle-aged. Barely ten years before, he had been taught by such men. They were fellows whose vows of poverty left them with very little except the charity of the parents of the boys they taught. They lacked a car between the lot of them. If they went to the dentist or the doctor, their superior, Brother Keogh, gave them a few pence for the bus. Darragh realised that he did not have the humility to become one of them. These were monks who had none of the powers of the priesthood. They had no altar or pulpit. Whereas with a sacred thirst, he had desired the power he had—the power to bind and loose.
He pleaded with the Virgin Mother, the Mother of the Universe, to help him find meaning in shaving. To the monsignor’s amusement he used the modern kind of shaver with its detachable blade. The Ingram’s Shaving Cream jar was as rich a blue as the mantle of the Virgin. But he experienced no revival of spirit.
Walking the mile in the quiet morning, a dawn which seemed safe beyond war and the hot breath of history, his throat was full of dust-dry yearning for the right kind of cleverness, the appointed mix. The Brothers’ small chapel, when he entered it, was full of blue-grey humidity and the cold tallowy smell of candles. In the little room adjoining it, which served as sacristy there, stood a small confessional stall—a chair and a kneeler facing each other and, above and between them, a red drape which protected the face of the penitent brother from the gaze of the confessor. By virtue of his having been chosen for the task of absolving them, he encountered aspects of these brothers of the teaching orders which he had never suspected when he was a child under their tutelage. So many of them pleaded to unkindly and demeaning words, and the ones who did seemed to be the men least likely to have uttered them, and thus were those most awake to a child’s feelings.
He was surprised, not at the level of his reason, but in that part of his soul where he was still a boy, to find some older brothers, advanced in their careers, still troubled by the flesh, by disbelief in what they were doing, and in the case of one brother, by the death in the crash of a bomber of twins he had taught. It was clear to Darragh that the brother felt for these two the way a father would for his sons—that in another time and place, he believed he might have fathered two such boys. The horror of their blazing deaths had altered the maps for this good, honest, unambitious man.
Some of the older brothers suffered what he now knew to be the standard feelings of loss of faith, of having been abandoned by God. Men who had felt themselves to be intimates of Christ and His Mother had lost that familiarity. This, Darragh told them as he had been taught to tell them, was the pain which arose from the end of one form of closeness and the testing beginning of another, less obvious nearness. He knew this because he hoped it was true; a mere endurance trial, and happy revelations soon to come.
One monk confessed to being attracted to the mother of a pupil. He had received kind words from her, and they had tormented and exhilarated him.
And now, on a morning when he was least prepared for it and had thought he had already heard the chief sins of the community, there came another extraordinary confession, a further blow to that innocence of which the monsignor accused him. It was a youngish voice Darragh recognised, the voice of a contemporary, from beyond the curtain. After asking for Darragh’s blessing and announcing that his last confession had been a week previously, the brother said, ‘I do not want to become a man who makes bad confessions, or goes to communion in sin.’
‘No, my son,’ said Darragh, in a voice which fraudulently implied that he had heard everything that could possibly be confessed.
‘I had no intention of doing this, Father. I’ve struggled with it six months. I took a boy, one of our favourites, to a private place, and I touched him, and he touched me.’
Darragh had never expected to find such vipers sliding under the confessional veil. It was now he knew for certain that every strange extremity of guilt was determined to beat its way to his ear. For a time Darragh found it a test to articulate. He had no idea why a young man, a contemporary, would harbour that desire, and then honour it in practice. For it destroyed the core of his vocation; the shepherd became the wolf.
‘Father …?’ asked the young man’s voice from beyond the dense velvet curtain. He seemed to fear that the scale of his sin had incapacitated his confessor. He was nearly correct about that.
Darragh struggled forth a broken-backed question. Was there, he asked, what could be called full indecency?
‘On my part,’ confessed the young man. He sounded almost confident now he had transferred his shame and his bewilderment to Darragh. He was full of breathy resolution. ‘I’ll never do it again, Father.’
Darragh said urgently, ‘You must never do it again.’
The young man beyond the velvet seemed aghast at the whispering fury in Darragh, and shocked to muteness.
‘I tell you, you must never do it again. The child was put into your care by God. And you have done this to him! Do you think he will ever forget? Do you think you can ever restore his innocence?’
‘No, I can’t. All I can do is to try to make amends to him.’
In fact, the young brother sounded crazily confident he could do so.
‘You shouldn’t try to do anything without speaking to your superior.’
There was a silence beyond the curtain. Darragh could guess that the young brother was most fearful of being made to do that; to admit to such a crime in front of the head of his community. He had hoped that what he had done to the boy was now walled up forever in Darragh’s brain, bound never to emerge. But if a condition of being absolved was that the young man tell Brother Keogh, there would be no red-velvet secrecy. He would be required to go on retreat, a time of withdrawal and reflection at a monastery. He would be sent to another school with a cloud over his name. The most senior men in the order might be warned of him, and the chief sin of his life.
‘Has this ever happened in the past?’ asked Darragh.
‘No,’ said the stricken brother. ‘No. I have had temptations … This is …’
Darragh sat back in his chair, and could understand why the ancient m
onsignor at Manly should move slowly beneath the wake of the demons he had taken on in China.
‘You must not try to make amends in your own right. You need to speak to your superior and also to a more senior priest, a spiritual adviser. I can advise you only to pray to the Virgin Mary who is the mother of you and this boy both. And I must ask you to pledge before God that you will never do this obscene thing again.’ Mercy was slipping from Darragh. Abhorrence and severity reigned in his heart.
‘I pledge,’ said the young brother. ‘I do, Father.’
‘You must see a more senior and experienced confessor as soon as possible. And though you are absolved of this sin, you must tell him about it.’
‘I will.’
‘Urgently,’ said Darragh, with the urgency of his own abhorrence.
He gave the young man the Sorrowful Mysteries for his penance. Parents should be warned, but they could not be, not by Darragh. ‘I will pray for you,’ he told the brother after he’d spoken the formula of absolution.
The assurance sat in his mouth like a stone.
And even so, that morning, the duty of visiting Mrs Flood, and drawing off the venom of that dream of a husband exiled to awninged verandahs, remained. Back at the presbytery, he ate hard-boiled eggs—he had to drink tea on top of them to wash them down, and found the combination repellent. The reflection that for thousands of miles northwards, from the Dutch East Indies to the north of China, all hens had fallen under the requisition of the Japanese army had no effect in evoking a normal, banal sense of gratitude in him. From the living room could be heard the portentous anthem of the ‘ABC News’, and a well-modulated voice reciting—unsurprisingly after the confession he had heard—the signs of the last days of Western Christian civilisation, but particularly the earth blessed by the Southern Cross, the Land of the Holy Spirit, as a few Portuguese navigators had called it. He feared the Spirit would not stir the air of this dull, humid morning.
