by Tom Keneally
Even in this reflection, he decided, lay all the contradictory impulses of his no doubt immature nature. There was a way, he was certain, to honour both Kate Heggarty and his priesthood. The retreat would help him reconcile them. And after the encounter of last evening, he was ready for some such revelation. He could not juggle these questions in a world where at any stage an enraged Communist might throw a punch at him, or policeman misinterpret his reasons for being abroad by darkness in The Crescent. He must reduce his grief and intentions and tendencies to a unity of the kind which shone from the pages of that great medieval Aristotelean, St Thomas Aquinas. No more acting on wild, Platonic shadows of feeling. Unity please, for everyone’s sake, dear God! And if it were achieved, he had no doubt he would more readily appease and rescue the soul of Mrs Heggarty.
The railway line swung back to the coast. Saying Compline, reciting the ‘Te lucis ante terminum’ by heart, Darragh saw the coal mines in the hillsides, the great cartwheels of apparatus which drew the coal trucks from below. The pits were reported to be the venue for a primal fight between the children of God and the children of darkness—Catholic Labor unionists, usually called the industrial groupers, and the Communists. Everyone knew the Communists considered the coal mines the cockpit for the establishment of the Communist state, and the Catholic men, who wanted merely social justice and not overthrow, were inevitably locked in political battle with them. Union ballot boxes were stolen or protected by armed factions, and pitched battles at dark of night involved bike chains and cricket stumps. This sunny autumn morning, however, the coal mines seemed to be exemplars of industry, the great cable-drawing wheels grinding above the Pacific.
The train dropped down to the town of Wollongong, where the steel mill sat right up against the blue sea. The coastal range was close here, and blue and dominant, and a little way south, as the train reached a bush siding, Darragh, his office completed, pulled his bag down off the wire rack and got out.
A Franciscan friar, brown-robed, white-cinctured, waited in his sandals by some milk cans on the siding. He seemed to be about the monsignor’s age, and nodded to Darragh as if there were nothing remarkable about a curate from Strathfield; indeed, as if he had come to the station this forenoon more for the drive itself than the opportunity to meet such a normal phenomenon as a young priest needing a retreat.
‘Father Matthew,’ he said, ‘Got everything, Father? Good.’ He escorted Darragh to a Ford truck, in the back of which sat milk cans and a bale of fodder, and told him to lift his bag into the back as well and take the front passenger seat.
The friar drove and they ground their way up verdant valleys. ‘The worst drought in Australian history has just broken,’ said Father Matthew. ‘If the Japs come, they’ll inherit an emerald coast.’
Darragh felt he quite liked this hard-fisted monk. He had the bullish neck of a country boy, a good footballer. He would have made a credible and authoritative pub-owner.
‘Your retreat master is Father Anselm,’ said the monk, Matthew. ‘He’s a really gentle old bloke. Sometimes he might seem a little simple-minded, even our students poke mullock at him a bit. But my advice is, listen to him carefully. Because the truth can be simple, can’t it?’
‘I hope so,’ said Darragh.
‘All I know is the cathedral themselves rang us, so I understand there’s some kind of shadow. But a fellow who doesn’t get in some sort of trouble … well, God loves a rebel, I like to think. I hope you have a type of renewal here. You won’t see much of me though, because I’m the bursar and I run the dairy farm.’
And his hands on the wheel could have been a dairy farmer’s hands too.
‘That woman in Sydney who was strangled,’ said Darragh.
‘Yes.’
‘She was my parishioner. I’d written her some letters.’
‘Boy!’ said Father Matthew.
But Darragh for once was not tempted to explain further, to exhort Matthew to think the best. It seemed to him Matthew tended to.
‘I just want to know when they release her body. It’ll be in the papers. My parish priest will bury her. I’d like to know when all that happens. Not knowing would throw me off kilter.’
Father Matthew inhaled noisily, pleased to be safe on a monastery farm. ‘I read the daily paper. There’s no reason I can’t let you know.’
‘And remember her soul in your Masses.’
‘I will,’ agreed Matthew.
The retreat house was also a seminary for Franciscan students, and a monastery for a number of monks. Darragh, said Father Matthew, would lead the same life as the students—silence, reflection, but on top of that a daily conference with Father Anselm. He could do a little work on the farm, if he liked, cutting the chaff, for example. The students did that sort of thing. Sometimes periods of physical labour were of benefit to the soul, said Matthew.
The red-brick monastery appeared before them among gum trees. With a central garden and a cloister, it looked like a 1940s attempt at encompassing the medieval tradition. The wattles in the garden still displayed a profusion of sensual yellow which St Francis himself, by all accounts, would have delighted in. But the lanky, shedding eucalypts spread the baked clay of the courtyard with sloughed, tattered bark and thin-bladed leaves of a type St Francis had never laid eyes on and might have taken a little time to accustom himself to.
A muscular Franciscan brother carried Darragh’s bag to his room, and told him that the students were about to recite the small hours in the chapel. Putting his soutane on, Darragh joined them, occupying one of the chairs at the back of the chapel where local laypersons who came to Mass sat during ceremonies. The students faced each other in classical monastic style, occupying stalls which ran very nearly the length of the chapel. But there were no more than fifteen of these young men, Darragh saw. They were exempt from military service even in this national crisis, but they all seemed fervent, none of them motivated by this benefit more apparent than real.
Afterwards, in the refectory, he was shown a place at the top table, where he sat in his black soutane at the end of a row of brown friars, beside Matthew and near a slim old man who concentrated fixedly and delicately on his food. Anselm, he guessed. He was to meet him at five o’clock, the official start of his retreat.
Left to himself after the monks and students walked out of the refectory, he spent five minutes in silent reflection in the chapel. The students were free to talk now and, having stripped off in their rooms, could be heard running out in football jerseys and shorts to play soccer or kick a rugby ball. Darragh took advantage of an earlier remark of Matthew’s that there were first-class walks to be had around the monastery. From the escarpment above one of the nearby gullies, he had said, you could see all the way to the Pacific.
Darragh took the way indicated by a scarring of pathway on the edge of the bush. There was an implicit promise in the tree-spaced plateau that here was the room to consider at length things he had not had the time to deal with. The business, again, of reducing things to one. The touchstone of unity could be picked up like a jewel at the base of the great Australian unity of nature. So one hoped; so one yearned. Here could be unified Gervaise, the black theologian and deserter; Sergeant Fratelli, the angel of thunder; Kate Heggarty and her son, and all else. The autumn light on the track was wonderfully strong, unconditional. With the summer flies gone, it fell on Darragh like the purest mercy. He became a mute walker; no clever prayers escaped him. After two pleasantly sweaty miles, the earth fell away. He stood on a cliff of sandstone, with forested gulfs and green streams running off towards the blatant blue of the ocean. Surely, in such absolute tones and uncompromising distances, the great truth could be seized.
He expected it even on the way back from the sublime view. Nowadays, the sun had begun to decline by four, and when he went back to the monastery and knocked on the door of Father Anselm’s study, he noticed on entering the tall shafts of the forest cast long, sharp, eastward-yearning shadows beyond the windows.
‘To begin the retreat,’ he said to Darragh, and kept silence for many seconds. ‘To begin the retreat,’ he then repeated, ‘we must say some prayers together.’ He took our his rosary beads and led Darragh in a decade of the Joyful Mysteries. The Joyful Mysteries suited Anselm, for the trace of a smile did not leave his face at any stage. ‘Glory be to the Father,’ he said when the decade was done, ‘and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost. As it was in the beginning, it is now and ever shall be, world without end, Amen.’
Darragh put his own rosary beads back in his pocket. ‘Young man,’ Anselm then said, ‘I have some advice from the cathedral that you have had a hard time. Is that so?’
‘Yes.’
Anselm said, ‘Indeed, but not as hard as that poor child.’ It was obvious he meant Kate Heggarty. ‘But you have the duty of being one of the bystanders, and to a young man that can seem hard, an experience of conflicting voices, even for a priest. You’ve come here in some confusion?’
Darragh admitted it.
‘Good,’ said Anselm. ‘God has given you an honest nature. He may have given you a vain one as well, but you would not be the only young chap that he so endowed. I was certainly similar. I did not want to be a bystander. I had the vanity, too, which said that salvation of the world was all my task. It is a terrible, scruple-ridden tendency. It is the work of fervour, but also of pride.’
‘Yes,’ Darragh assented. This old man, he thought, seemed a genuine seer.
‘Do you and I think God exists to guarantee the two of us that we won’t be failures? Think of this, my son. We were never guaranteed by Christ that we could save even ourselves. We were given hope, mind you, but no guarantee. And yet we demand success. Who are we, you and I, to demand success? We’re nobodies. Aren’t we?’
‘That’s true,’ said Darragh.
‘I say this, young fellow, not to make you more concerned, but to make you calmer. Christ did not wish you to suffer as you have chosen to suffer. He said, “Sufficient to the day is the evil thereof.” That is, we may be sure to encounter the evil of the day without searching ambitiously for it. That may be why the cathedral wanted you to come here. They saw that you had become feverish.’
‘And they’re right,’ Darragh admitted. He felt heady, as if the old monk could hold out the prospect of the oneness he wanted.
Anselm looked at Darragh with his pale, light-blue eyes, and asked, ‘Did you desire that young woman? Your parishioner? It’s not a shameful thing to admit. If we were not all capable of desire, our vows would mean nothing.’
‘I think I did, Father,’ Darragh said. ‘But I was concerned for her salvation as well.’
‘As any true admirer should be, Father Darragh.’
‘I’m also concerned for her son.’
‘Why? He’s with the good sisters I believe.’
‘A woman in Homebush was willing to take him in. But she was not Catholic.’
‘And thus perhaps an unsuitable guardian,’ the old priest suggested.
Darragh shook his head. He was not ready to yield that point yet. ‘It might be that the boy would have been a better Catholic in a household where he was happy.’
‘That’s a very secular view.’
‘I know. It’s the sort of doubt I’m often prompted to.’
‘Take all your doubts,’ said Anselm, raising both his hands and making an encompassing motion, ‘doubts of your superiors, doubts of articles of faith, and submit them at the feet of Our Blessed Mother. Her mercy is not the mercy of this world. Her compassion is not the mere compassion of neighbours. Commit the boy to her, also. And then …’ He paused and dreamed away for ten seconds, in a way that reminded Darragh of the old exorcist who had once urged him to be a merciful confessor. ‘And then,’ he resumed at length, ‘live for the moment.’
‘Ah!’ said Anselm after Darragh had blinked. ‘You are surprised to hear me say that? It’s the sort of thing young men and women terrified of the war say. It’s the cry of an unjust generation. But in another sense it’s the cry of those who are in peace. We do not own the past, with its grief and sin. The past imperfect, as the grammarians say. We do not own the future. We own only a rag of time, this moment named the present. And to the present, I know, God gives the necessary grace—to enable us to glorify that second in His name. I learned in time that if I lived in any other way than the embrace of the divine second, I would certainly be damned. I was once in battles … in battles, a man can live only in the second, and sometimes not even in the second. I learned in battles … I learned in terrible battles that it is not necessary to expand the present with false imaginings and with peevishness, and the frenzy of our lives.’
He seemed to drowse off in remembrance of things known only to him and perhaps to the late Sergeant Darragh. Then he resumed. ‘Time is like a meal—each mouthful is separate and glorious. Even the second of our death is to be lived and imbued with grace. That is why we accept … we accept what is on the plate. We accept the orders of our superiors when they defy reason. We do not give way to a fear that they might again sound unreasonable in the future. That is something to leave to the future. The limits of what we are permitted to do now—that’s what we accept. If not, then the world and its manifold voices will certainly send a young man like you insane, and distract you from your priesthood. I know this because I have already trodden the path …’
The old man swallowed. This stratagem he held out—acceptance, and the certainty of grace of the moment—was splendid, and tempted Darragh the way desire might.
But you are damaged, Darragh was tempted to say. You are shell-shocked in some way, and your spiritual plan is the spiritual plan of the shell-shocked. It is achievable within the limits of your nature and your monastic career. My nature is not docile even when I play at it!
Thus, he secretly asked himself in fear and for the first time, ‘Can I long remain a priest, and will I see the face of God?’
This question occupied the first three days of his retreat. He envied old Anselm, the peace the man had achieved. It was the triumph of one soul, a triumph suited to a monastery rather than to the rough-and-tumble of a parish. But he was not a Franciscan monk, living in reflection and devotional routine. He was a secular priest, visiting the Misses Clancy and Mrs Flood, mixing it in sick rooms with all types, walking the uncloistered street and subject to blows from Trumble. Occasionally, Darragh would feel a surge of optimism—yes, I could become that humble old man, the man who gives his seamless attention to every spoonful of time, to every obscure instant. And the reward would be, he was sure, some revelation. He would live to see the killer’s face and revel in the capture.
But the wilful complexity of his nature would recur to him at odd moments: after a spartan breakfast, on his silent afternoon hike, or in the middle of the Vespers chant in the chapel. He could not become Father Anselm. He hadn’t been chastened and simplified by the artillery barrages of the Great War. It was not simply that he was innocent in the wrong way, nor that he’d bristled with rashness. It was that he refused to delude himself that over a lifetime he could render the crass complications of his soul into that particular one thing, the joyful, smiling gratitude for the new second, already, in any case, fled.
Each morning, feeling halfway like an impostor, he said Mass at a small side chapel, assisted by two Franciscan students, one to ring the bell, one to raise the tail of his chasuble as he in turn raised the consecrated Host, the body and blood of Christ, his Friend, Saviour and God. And even at this moment he knew that his prayers were contrary to Anselm’s great tenet of composure-in-Christ. They rushed to present to God the question of how the killer of Kate Heggarty could be found, and how soon. The q
uestion still placed a massive personal weight on him, and put paid to Anselm’s great proposition that the Moment + Grace = Peace of Soul.
One morning, Father Matthew murmured to him after breakfast, ‘Body’s been released. Funeral’s today, Frank.’
There was a persistent mist that day on the great plateau above the sea. Darragh lived in its midst in fragile numbness. She who had wanted dignity had become a byword for indignity! The recitation of his breviary became a long plaint for the redemption of her soul. The blue-and-white Virgin Mother who had always been like a member of his family, a prescence of childhood and yet remoter than Mars, could not be imagined as one who would reject Kate Heggarty’s last, panicked regrets, or judge her for the confusion of her strangled mind.
So this day of the funeral continued as one hung between times and seasons, and the moments went, embraced or not, and graced or not.
The funeral was photographed by the newspapers, Darragh found out, since each day Father Matthew permitted him to take a glimpse at the monastery’s Daily Telegraph. There was a confused picture of the monsignor, large in his lacy surplice, solemn in his biretta, sprinkling the coffin on which a small scatter of flowers lay. So she was in the earth now, despite all his impatience for this revelation whose nature he could barely specify.
