An Angel In Australia

by Tom Keneally

  Aspillon wore an expression of tranquil benevolence as he waited for this private discourse between the priests to end.

  ‘I simply wanted to see the man.’

  ‘No file in your pocket?’ asked O’Rourke, winking.

  ‘No file in my pocket, I promise, Father O’Rourke.’

  ‘Okay. Just remember—for Gervaise, there’s only one way out of here. Serving his time, here or wherever.’ He looked away. ‘I’ll tell you something about wherever later.’ He raised his voice for the prisoner. ‘Gervaise, be good for Father Darragh.’

  ‘Sure, Captain,’ said Private Aspillon.

  O’Rourke left and, in steadfast silence, Private Aspillon engaged Darragh’s eye. Darragh felt for a moment like a public speaker who had suddenly lost his purpose for being on the rostrum. Aspillon said, ‘How are you now, Father? After our big shake-up the other day.’

  ‘On top of everything … well, a parishioner has died, Gervaise. I’m saddened. But how are you going?’

  ‘One word, Father, I am happy to say. Dull. Dull I like. Lots of groceries in here. Time hanging heavy, but not burying a man. I think this is all gentler treatment than one of them solid-built prisons. Once they put those stone walls up, strange things are bound to happen. But wire and wooden posts, God’s air can travel in and out. The same air other folk breathe. I’d be obliged if you’d pass that on to my friends in Lidcombe. You remember the house?’

  ‘I don’t think it’s my business to communicate with them. It’s the area of another parish priest. Are you allowed to write?’

  ‘Once a month, and this month is going to my mama.’

  ‘I’ll call the parish priest at Lidcombe, and see if he will contact your friends.’

  ‘I would be so obliged,’ said Gervaise smoothly, so that Darragh wondered: Is this a performance as others have warned me? A performance for an Australian curate who has seen Negro men only in the Saturday films of childhood?

  ‘I brought you some biscuits, but you’re not allowed them.’

  ‘That’s what you guys call cookies, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s right. Biscuits.’ With any American you were always likely to end in a discussion about idiom.

  ‘Twice-cooked,’ said Gervaise. ‘Bis–cuit. That’s what it means. Double cookies. I cherish the thought.’

  The terror which had been in Private Aspillon during the siege and arrest seemed to have moderated in him. His body looked languid and un-tautened. But even as Darragh thought this, the muscles showed below his shirtsleeves and Gervaise began weeping softly. It looked such a manly, frank grief, empty of artifice, that the idea revived in Darragh that despite all warnings from Captain O’Rourke, some special effort must be made for this noble delinquent.

  ‘Gervaise,’ said Darragh, extending a lean, white hand to rest on Gervaise’s wide shackled wrist, a lily laid on anthracite. ‘I’ll call the Lidcombe priest for you. What else can I do?’

  Gervaise Aspillon, briskly drying his tears, declared, ‘This is all my silliness.’ He gestured towards the roof of the guard hut. Then he laid both cuffed hands on the table and talked at them. ‘A man who hasn’t travelled makes great journeys. Louisiana to California. Wow! And greater journeys still. Long Beach to Sydney, Australia. Across an ocean which just manages to come to an end. And see, a man’s been through the mirror, over the equator, stewing on deck, broiled down below. And at the end, back in nice waters, the land comes up on the horizon and reaches out like the arms of God. And a man thinks, I am born anew in a different place and under a different law. It’s new and it’s grand to drink in white folks’ bars and public houses. And the girl is well-favoured and she says, “Hello Yank”, which is very funny and strange and turns a weak head. So this weak-minded nigger from Louisiana is thinking he must be good as whites here. I converse with this white woman. This girl. This cloud. This good woman with a hairdo from heaven. And no one comes up with rope or rifle to punish me. Or so it might seem to a simple man. But a fellow forgets, Father, there’s lots of Aussies don’t really like that, and there’s mean Southern boys in the MPs. Punishment is punishment pole to pole. So the light’s dawned for me. The light has dawned!’ He wiped his eye with his massive chained hand. ‘I broke laws written and not written, and I pay. Here, same as back home.’

  ‘But you’re going through a legal process, aren’t you? Captain O’Rourke says you’ll get a gaol sentence.’ For Gervaise seemed to be conjuring up a more absolute punishment than that.

  ‘That’s true,’ said Gervaise sunnily, ‘I’ll get a sentence. But it’s funny, a lot of black men who go AWOL over white women end up hanging themselves in prison. An astonishing number, you’d say.’ And he smiled, shook his head, and decided to wink at Darragh, whose stomach turned.

  ‘No, Gervaise,’ he said, full of fury against any hand raised to Private Aspillon. ‘It won’t happen. I’ll come and visit you each week. Captain O’Rourke will keep watch over you …’

  ‘Okay,’ said Gervaise without conviction. There was a frantic silence for a while. ‘But I’m out of reach here, in the stockade. The MPs know how to tell army chaplains a consoling tale. “Prison’s just too hard for them darkies,” they say. “They’re like that, you know, and it’s damn sad but can’t be helped.” Don’t tell my friends anything I’ve said, except you saw me looking pretty well.’

  ‘It’s iniquitous,’ Darragh murmured, and Private Aspillon did not reply. Again, would God permit such flaws within the legions of right to go unpunished on the battlefield?

  Gervaise said indulgently, ‘It’s kind, but you can’t keep visiting me. The army won’t permit it. And it’ll upset the chaplains corps. And there are men in the towers or in the tents now, watching us, and they say, “How did that nigger get a priest in to visit him and confabulate at length?”’

  ‘I’ll write to General MacArthur if I need to,’ Darragh promised.

  ‘His provost-general would say, “That nigger’s telling the priest this just to get him upset.” And I do string people along, all right. I like to talk, and have a gift.’

  ‘You do, Gervaise,’ Darragh assented. ‘You have a gift.’

  Every other suggestion Darragh made for Gervaise Aspillon’s rescue from unjust MPs was gently rebuffed. The black man gave the impression of being used to powerlessness, and reconciled to it after his AWOL adventure.

  ‘Can I see you again?’

  ‘Well,’ said Gervaise, ‘I’m permitted a monthly visit. But I might be somewhere else by then.’

  ‘I’ll keep track. I’ll watch.’

  ‘You know, Father, an old man I know says, “Don’t start them dogs a-barkin’ unless they’s already at it.” It’s not bad advice.’

  Two guards had re-entered the hut. Aspillon lowered his head while Darragh blessed him. The guards dragged Aspillon upright. Darragh was tempted to tell them, ‘I’ll be here to see Private Aspillon again as soon as I can get permission.’ But he did not wish to start dogs barking, and so he watched as they jostled the black man out of the hut.

  By the Buick beyond the wooden postern of the gate, the captain and his driver were fraternally smoking Lucky Strikes. As Darragh was let through the gate, O’Rourke approached him in a not unfriendly way.

  ‘How did it go, Frank?’

  ‘I’m concerned,’ said Frank. He lowered his voice. ‘He seems convinced that sooner or later he’ll be found dead.’

  The captain looked away. There were a few seconds of monsignor-like annoyance there. Darragh was bemused to find that he consistently annoyed his fellow priests these days. Something to reflect on in retreat. ‘Look,’ O’Rourke assured him, ‘prisoners say these things, Frank. If they can get an outsider in, they always say these things. They’re starved for attention, and they’re self-dramatisers.’

  ‘In my experience,’ said Darragh, ‘he’s a reliable fellow.’

  ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph!’ said Captain O’Rourke. ‘The man nearly got you killed, Frank.’

 
‘The only question’s whether there’s any truth to what he says.’

  ‘The compound’s full of exaggerators, Frank. Do me a favour and let it go. Look, this is a specialist area of work—I’m sure you’ll agree with that. And I’m qualified to do it both by rank and priesthood. Visitors only muddy the water, all due respect.’

  ‘I feel a fraternal duty to him. And a pastoral one.’

  ‘Look, get in the car, Frank,’ muttered the chaplain, colouring, ‘and I’ll take you to the station.’

  In the privacy of the back seat, Captain O’Rourke seemed to have achieved an even temper. He looked out the window at the proliferation of tents. At last he said, ‘You’re a scrupulous guy, Frank. We have ’em too. If they’re not careful, they grow up to be oddballs. Old men with twitches.’

  ‘Because I’m worried about Gervaise?’

  But the captain was sure he knew of what he spoke. ‘It isn’t that you lack virtue. It’s that you have too much of it for the world to work with. I hope you don’t mind me talking out like this.’

  ‘It isn’t pleasant,’ Darragh admitted. ‘But I don’t mind.’

  ‘You’re not responsible for that boy Aspillon. He’s in the care of the chaplains corps. If we can’t save him, he can’t be saved. Now, come out here in a month if you like, but you won’t find Aspillon. All the black troops will be gone. Don’t say I told you. It’s a military secret, but everyone round here seems to know it. And Aspillon stands for the reason why it’s happening. Your government, and our army, both—they don’t want black troops in your city, creating civil discord, attracting white women and the anger of white men. Within a week or two, every black soldier will be in farthest North Queensland. It looks like the government and the army are going to save you from yourself, Frank. And just in case you’re wondering, we chaplains too believe in the Incarnation, the Communion of Saints, Transubstantiation and all the other Mysteries of Faith. We too have the charity of Christ urging us. Don’t think you’ve got that on your own, Frank. Okay?’

  This gentle but resonating rebuke depressed Darragh and made him suspect he might be ineffectual and silly. Even so, he was not rendered utterly repentant by it. ‘Still,’ he said, ‘if you don’t mind, I’ll talk to you in a few weeks. To find out where I can write to Gervaise.’ The Reverend Captain O’Rourke looked ahead towards Liverpool Station, sighed, and said okay.

  AT ODD HOURS it would penetrate and transfix Darragh’s imagination: she was lying in the morgue. Did they treat well her body, which she had bathed for visitors and dressed in floral cloth? Who were these morgue-keepers, who were unordained for their job, who might as easily have worked in a cardboard-box factory? Her dignity had fallen into their hands, and society seemed calm about it, and waited without urgency for a coroner to have his court on her mute flesh.

  A small amount of morning print was given to explaining that police had discharged the brown-suited man, the Italian salesman, since he was unable to assist them further.

  Meantime, Kate’s son had to be made an orphan pending his father’s return. Darragh dreaded the arrival of Mr Connors, the member of the finance committee Darragh had recently slandered, the friend-of-the-parish appointed to conduct Anthony and Darragh to Killcare. Not that Darragh intended to use Mr Connors as a sounding-board, but he was the sort of man who wouldn’t hear a word against ‘the Mons’, as all the finance committee called their parish priest. Yet when Connors came to the presbytery door to fetch him, Darragh found the man’s demeanour calming. Despite the times, and two sons in the armed forces, one serving overseas, Connors was one of those people who possessed even in his eye such an unfeigned sense of the moment-by-moment mercies of life that he would suddenly sigh, not for loss of the moment but for its fullness. He was dressed like a very fortress of fatherhood, in a hound’s-tooth suit and vest, and a slightly old-fashioned upright collar of the kind Mr Regan favoured, as had Darragh’s own late father.

  The leather of his car, a 1938 Dodge, squeaked with the enviable tidiness of a man whose life was an abundant tree—one son a doctor, or more accurately an army medical officer, another a lawyer, another a young pilot. Handsome grandchildren filled out the map of his life. Only the cosmic uncertainty of future Japanese intentions interposed any sort of cloud over the happy crown of righteousness which was the Connors family.

  ‘Good morning, Father. A fine early autumn day for a drive up the coast! I hope the recent Lenten devotions don’t leave you too weak to enjoy the scenery. You young fellows sometimes take all that too seriously!’

  Settling into the front seat, Frank asked him how he had got enough petrol for the journey. Oh, said Mr Connors, he had an old school friend who was a garage owner in Burwood, a fellow member of the Knights of the Southern Cross. He didn’t use the car much anyhow. ‘It’s not a time to be far from home for too long.’

  In opinion, Mr Connors was a facsimile of Mr Regan, and to an extent of the monsignor. No question, said Mr Connors, that Mr Curtin, the Labor prime minister, had been placed in care of Australia by our Divine Lord. The Portuguese, first European discoverers of the continent, had called it Land of the Holy Spirit, and a country so named was surely not designed by God to fall to barbarians. Curtin certainly knew that and was fighting to save this holy land. He’d defied Churchill and had the Australian troops gradually coming home from the Middle East. (Not in time to save Lance Bombardier Heggarty, Darragh immediately and privately acknowledged.) And though Curtin had in his socialist youth abandoned the tenets of his faith, he was, by all that Mr Connors heard, very open, very attuned, for an ultimate return. A lonely spiritual sort of man, with the old Irish Catholic fallibility for the drink, which he seemed to have overcome recently. In the meantime, his lapse from Catholicism made him more attractive to the general population, including—even—members of the Masonic lodges. His brave plan to cooperate with the Americans—‘because Mr Churchill isn’t interested in our welfare, he thinks we’re bad stock’—was something earlier prime ministers might not have been brave enough to do for fear of someone like Churchill. ‘There are people who call themselves Australian,’ said Mr Connors, ‘who would rather save the Empire than save Australia! Honestly, Father!’ Then Mr Connors wondered if he’d gone too far and offended Darragh’s sense of charity. ‘At least that’s how it seems to me,’ he said with less certainty.

  Mr Connors turned then to the subject of his son who was learning to fly bombers in Canada. ‘I hope he comes back here to fight our war, and doesn’t stay over there in Churchill’s,’ he said. It developed that Churchill was one of Mr Connors’s bêtes noires—it was an uneasy alliance in arms between the great British statesman and the Connors family of Homebush, New South Wales, Australia. Churchill, said Mr Connors, had been responsible, when First Lord of the Admiralty in 1915, for sending the Australians to Gallipoli. ‘Look how that worked out!’ Mr Connors suggested.

  They were nearing the railway again, the region associated in Darragh’s mind with Mrs Flood and Mrs Heggarty, his lost parishioners. Here in The Crescent, Mr Connors braked in front of a low, dank-looking house of plum-coloured brick some ten doors from Mrs Heggarty’s place. Up its side laneway and through a gate came five children delighted to encounter Mr Connors’s vehicle. Two jumped on the running board and looked in at him, one on the running board by Darragh’s window, and one each on the rear and front bumper bars. It was as if they had planned this capture, so assured did they seem of their jolly, freckled possession.

  ‘Hello, Curly,’ said Mr Connors to one of the two children by his window.

  A plump, sweet-faced woman of perhaps thirty years came out of the front door, carrying a suitcase and leading Anthony Heggarty by the hand. Thalia Stevens, whom Kate Heggarty had so respected. Mr Connors and Darragh ordered her children off the running board and emerged to greet her.

  She looked with a concerned smile deep into the eyes first of one, then of the other man. ‘He’s a bit W–I–N–D–Y, poor little feller. He knows what happened
, in so far as a kid does. I’ve tried to build him up.’ She turned then to Anthony. ‘What a beautiful car!’ she told him. ‘You know I didn’t ride in a car until I was fifteen? You’re a lucky little bloke. Say good morning to Father here.’

  Anthony did it. Darragh said, ‘You can sit in the front if you like, and have the window. Or have the back seat all to yourself.’

  For a time Anthony was too reticent to say, but at last he decided he’d like to be in the front too. So he got aboard, as did Mr Connors. As Darragh thanked Thalia Stevens and went to join them, she said, ‘Just a word or two, Father.’

  He paused, and saw her sad, earnest eyes, already webbed so early in life with incipient lines. ‘Father, I’m going to miss the little fellow. I wanted to ask you, if I promised to raise him a Holy Roman, and I would promise, could you reconsider letting me have him?’

  ‘I don’t quite understand, Mrs Stevens,’ said Darragh.

  ‘Well, the nuns wouldn’t have a bar of me, seeing I’m not of the Faith like. But I would go to Mass with him, or send my eldest, if you’d let me. Look, I know it would be all jake with Kate. She always trusted me with Anthony.’

  ‘Are you telling me you would keep him?’

  ‘And raise him a good little Tyke, Father. I mean, RC.’

  ‘Do they know this up in Killcare?’

  ‘I don’t know. They came, two nuns, and inspected me over.’ She smiled with the apologetic air of a person who has failed an exam. ‘Made my brats sit up, I’ll tell you!’

  Darragh said, ‘But I didn’t know you were willing …’

  ‘Well, I mean,’ said Mrs Stevens, ‘it isn’t the Australia Hotel here or anything, and the kids are always messing up the kitchen …’