Trust Me

by Lesley Pearse

  ‘John had a wheelbarrow full of cement fall on top of him,’ he said, pointing up to the dome on the roof. ‘He was badly hurt, the lime was burning his eyes, and all the Brothers did was stick him head-first into a tank of water.’

  ‘Show me where you slept,’ she said. It was hard for her to believe this peaceful and beautiful place had so much horror attached to it. There were flowerbeds, palms, well-kept lawns. Beyond the school buildings were vineyards, paddocks with cows and sheep, others planted with crops. The shady verandas in front of the dormitories and the Brothers’ rooms had all the serenity of cloisters in a monastery.

  Yet as Ross led her along them he was trembling. He spoke of bed-wetters being forced to stand there for hours wearing a sack-like dress to humiliate them, of Dawe, the Brother he mentioned most frequently, whacking them over the head with a strap to wake them in the mornings. Dulcie couldn’t imagine it ever being cold here, but Ross talked of the winters when they shivered under one blanket, of walking in bare feet on frosty ground to milk the cows, of the hunger pains they suffered continually.

  He paused outside one room, glancing fearfully at it. She caught hold of his arm and found it was stiff with terror, his hand icy cold. ‘What happened there, Ross?’ she asked gently. ‘Tell me.’

  He kind of shook himself and strode on away from the place. Dulcie ran after him, knowing in her heart his secret lay there. But he wouldn’t stop or speak to her.

  She saw a few Brothers, mostly younger than the one they’d spoken to earlier, and she guessed they had come here since Ross’s time as they showed no recognition, only faint curiosity. A young boy of about fourteen was weeding a flowerbed, he looked up and smiled as they rushed past him, and though Dulcie wanted to stop and speak to him, she had to follow Ross.

  Ross didn’t stop until he came to a huge tomb, close to the statue of Keaney. His face was purple with indignation and his eyes almost popping out of his head as he saw the inscription on it. ‘They’ve even buried the bastard here! I don’t believe it!’

  He struck the tomb with his clenched fist, skinning his knuckles, then turned to Dulcie, so agitated he was shaking. ‘Look, they gave him an MBE. Can you believe the Queen would award that to a man who beat and starved little kids! He ought to burn in hell.’

  Dulcie knew that Ross had run away from here in 1953, and as she’d seen a plaque in the grounds commemorating the day the school was officially opened in October of that year, she’d assumed Keaney died before then. On his tomb the date of his death was given as 1954, and perhaps as Ross never read newspapers, he’d never known the man had died.

  She looked up at the statue of Keaney and tears ran down her cheeks as she remembered Ross’s tales of how this big bully of a man and his friends would have drunken parties, and he would get some of the boys in to sing to them. How shameful that a bunch of grown men of the cloth and local dignitaries should eat and drink the profit made from foodstuffs grown by boys who never received anything more than watery soup, bread and porridge.

  She too felt it was disgusting that he’d been honoured by the Queen, especially as she knew the kind of trickery Keaney had used to convince the majority of Australian people he was some kind of saint.

  The whole property had been called Mount Pleasant, and the benevolent owner, a widow called Catherine Musk, gave it to the Christian Brothers with the intention that the Brothers were to use it to place needy boys and orphans on their own farms. She undoubtedly gave Keaney the responsibility for clearing the land and building a school because she believed him to have all the qualifications and heart for the formidable task.

  The Brother became a living legend known as Friend to the Orphans, for his charismatic, expansive personality had endeared him to the Australian public and he wasted no time in plucking their heart-strings to make them dip into their wallets to give generous donations for this new project. It was truly remarkable what he achieved, Dulcie could see that just by looking around her. She could well imagine why people called him a genius. But then they didn’t know that he achieved it purely through brutality and terror.

  Perhaps now Bindoon did live up to what it was intended to be, a college to train boys in agricultural work. But for those boys like Ross who came in the early days there was no real schooling, many never learned to read and write. It was like a concentration camp where the only real skill they learned was survival. Yet some hadn’t even learnt that, for she knew some boys had died here, and she suspected that most of the old boys, like Ross, were haunted by the cruelty they’d experienced at the hands of the Brothers.

  An odd sound from Ross brought her mind back from Keaney to her husband. She saw he was now sitting on the grass, his legs up tight to his chest, arms clasped round them.

  She sat down on the grass beside him and tried to comfort him, but he was as stiff as a board, as though every muscle in his body had seized up. ‘Tell me what’s wrong,’ she asked, but there was no reply, just plaintive sobs, and she realized she must get him away from here before someone came over to them.

  ‘Can you walk to the car?’ she asked, standing up and pulling at his arm. There was no response, it was as if he’d been struck deaf, dumb and blind.

  ‘I’ll go and get it and bring it here,’ she said, thinking the sight of the car might bring him round, and she ran off to get it.

  He was still in the same position when she drove back, he didn’t even turn his head to look at her.

  ‘Ross, get up and get in the car,’ she ordered him sharply, pulling at his arm again. But his hands were still locked round his knees and he appeared to be almost in a trance.

  She was scared now, very aware this was all her doing. ‘Get up, Ross, or I’ll have to get one of the Brothers,’ she said, and slapped him lightly on the shoulder. Again no response.

  ‘Brother Dawe’s coming to get you,’ she said in desperation. ‘Look, he’s coming now.’

  To her surprise it worked, he leaped to his feet, jumped into the passenger seat of the car and slid down in the seat as if trying to hide himself.

  She drove away quickly, her heart pounding with fright. Bruce had been apprehensive about this trip, he’d even suggested it might knock Ross off his rocker, but she hadn’t believed that. Now she wondered if it had – he was still crying, but he’d bent his head down on to his knees and she couldn’t see his face. She drove until she was right out of the drive and on to the road back to Perth, and only stopped again when she saw a small parking place covered with shady trees.

  Turning off the engine, she turned to him and made him sit upright. ‘It’s okay now, we’re well away from there,’ she said.

  He let her hold him tightly, leaning his head on to her shoulder, but he continued to cry.

  ‘Tell me what happened,’ she begged him, caressing his hair and winding the auburn curls around her fingers.

  It was a long while before he began to speak in a whisper, and at first it made no sense to her. There was something about making butter in the dairy. But as he began to make a turning motion with his hand, she realized he was talking through something that had happened a long time ago.

  Ross was unaware that he was now a grown man, or that he was in a car with his wife. He had slipped back to when he was twelve, his stomach ached with hunger, his arm almost dropping off with turning and turning the churn handle, but until he had made the butter he knew he couldn’t hope for any supper.

  He had a painful stone bruise on the sole of his foot, and he could barely put it down on the cold stone-flagged floor, his hands were red raw from making bricks all day. Keaney had caught him with some stolen grapes from the vineyard an hour ago, whacked him over the head with his big heavy stick, and ordered him in here to make the butter as a further punishment.

  Yet dejected as Ross felt, there was nothing particularly unusual about his situation. From as far back as he could remember he had never received any real kindness from any adult, and he didn’t expect it. He counted himself more fortunate tha
n the English boys who had arrived recently. They had turned up in smart little suits, socks, shoes, even caps and ties, and looked in horror at the Australian boys with their ragged shorts and shirts and bare feet. It made him smile to see them hopping around on the hot ground once they’d been stripped of their good clothes, and he even enjoyed their shock at discovering they wouldn’t be getting lessons, only doing building work.

  He would listen to their tales about how they’d been treated like princes coming over here on the ship, and he supposed it would be hard to bear hunger and ill treatment after that. Maybe that’s why so many of them cried in bed at night, and wet the bed.

  Ross was used to working day in, day out, first light until dusk. He was used to hot summers and he supposed he’d eventually grow used to the cold winters, though it had been something of a shock when he first got here because it had never been so cold at Clontarf. He didn’t expect wounds and injuries to be treated, he’d learnt a long time ago to live with hunger and the absence of any kind of affection from adults. He stiffened when the dairy door opened, expecting that it was Brother Keaney checking up on him, but it was Brother Dawe, known to all the boys as ‘Honk’ because of his large nose.

  ‘Put some beef into it,’ Dawe said after a moment or two of watching him turn the handle of the churn. ‘Or you’ll be here all night.’

  ‘I think it’s nearly there,’ Ross said, not daring to turn his head to look at Brother Dawe.

  There was no reply to this, and it unnerved Ross to be watched in silence. A few minutes passed with Ross trying desperately to turn the handle faster, and then in desperation he glanced round, and to his horror saw the man was standing there with his soutane unbuttoned, fondling his penis, looking right at Ross.

  Ross couldn’t run out – Dawe was standing against the closed door – he didn’t dare say anything either. So he just turned back to his churn and turned the handle even faster.

  ‘Come here and make some cream for me,’ Dawe said in a low voice.

  Ross said nothing, but his heart was pounding in terror. He heard the man step closer, and sweat began to run down Ross’s face. Dawe was so close to his back now that Ross could feel his breath warm on the back of his neck, and he tensed, knowing something terrible was going to happen.

  Dawe put his hand on to Ross’s thigh and slowly slid it up beneath the leg of his shorts. The boys at Bindoon were not issued with underpants, so it was only a second before he had his hand on Ross’s penis.

  ‘Please don’t, Brother Dawe,’ Ross whimpered, his bowels loosening with terror.

  ‘It’s your duty to obey me, you little maggot,’ Dawe said, and squeezed his penis tightly, making Ross squeal with pain. ‘One more word out of you and I’ll see you are up for a thrashing on Sunday morning.’

  On Sunday mornings Brother Keaney always called boys out for a public thrashing after church – sometimes his victims didn’t even know what they’d done wrong. Ross had already received two such beatings, which had left him hardly able to walk, and he wasn’t anxious to get a third.

  But all at once, before Ross could make any further protest, Dawe had the buttons on Ross’s shorts undone, and they fell down to his knees. Before he could even cry out, Dawe was bending him over a stool and parting his buttocks.

  Ross knew it was a sin to play with yourself, Dawe himself was always ranting about this and accusing boys of doing it. He had heard older boys talking of fucking girls too, and of queer men doing it to other men, but until that moment when he felt Dawe push his erect penis against his anus, he hadn’t really believed any of it.

  He screamed out with pain, for it felt as though he was being torn apart, but Dawe put one hand across his mouth, and with the other pressed down on his neck.

  The effect was like being strangled, and the more he tried to move, the harder Dawe’s hold became on him. But aside from the agony of being penetrated, the fear of dying from strangulation, there was also the man’s verbal abuse.

  ‘This is all you’re good for, you dirty little shit,’ he said. ‘A good shagging will sort you out. You came from the gutter and you’ll end up there too.’

  Ross was close to passing out with the pain, and the animal grunting noise Dawe was making grew louder and louder as he forced himself harder and harder into Ross. Then suddenly the grunting stopped, he was released and pushed to the floor like a pile of rubbish.

  Dawe wiped himself on a cloth which he then flung down on top of Ross. ‘Get up and get that butter made, or you will be up for the Sunday thrashing,’ he said as he strode out the door.

  Dulcie could hardly believe what she’d been hearing, and the sight of her tough husband pouring it out with tears streaming down his face like a six-year-old was too terrible for words. There had been moments when she was confused by what he said, especially at the beginning when he was speaking of his sore hands, the stone bruise on his foot and the English boys. But by the end of the story she realized why all that was important, he thought he was worth nothing in the first place, he accepted everything that was done to him as his due. Yet that brutal, criminal act had pushed him into utter darkness where there could be no hope of salvation.

  She tried to comfort him, but he kept on talking and crying and she heard how in the next few years he lived in constant fear of Dawe. He would be ordered to clean his room, and it always resulted in either forced anal or oral sex. Dulcie didn’t even know what the latter meant, but Ross told her graphically that Dawe forced him to take him in his mouth. He said that he bled from his back passage all the time, that once a part of his bowel had started to come out and Dawe pushed it back in with a stick.

  Sadder still was that Ross told her that however disgusting he found it, he tried to make himself believe the man loved him because he sometimes gave him cake, fruit, sweets or cigarettes afterwards.

  Dulcie had never been so afraid. Stephan had said if she pushed the right buttons the truth would come out, but she wished now she hadn’t. They were on a lonely road some eighty miles from Perth, and she didn’t know what she was going to do. Ross was distraught, how could she take him back to Joan’s like that?

  She had water in the car, warm now from being in the sun all day, but that was all she could offer him.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Ross,’ she said. ‘I wanted to know what happened to you there, but I never dreamed it was anything like that.’

  He gulped the water down, but a few moments later he opened the car door, leaned out and was violently sick. She knew then there was nothing for it but to drive him home to Esperance, for there was no hope of continuing their holiday.

  After all that talking and crying he went completely silent. He got out of the car, urinated and climbed into the back and lay down. Dulcie took that as a signal she had to make all the decisions, and she drove off back to Perth.

  It was five in the afternoon when she got back to Subiaco, leaving him in the car. She hastily explained that Ross was ill and she was taking him home, packed their cases and left hurriedly.

  At eleven o’clock the following night, Dulcie drove into the farmyard. Ross was still curled up in the back of the car where he had remained for the whole journey, only getting out to relieve himself a couple of times. He had refused to eat anything, drank nothing but odd sips of water, and he hadn’t spoken at all.

  John came running out of the bunkhouse at the sound of the car and the dogs barking. ‘You’re home early,’ he said. ‘Something wrong?’

  It was such a relief to know she wasn’t alone with this problem any longer and she hoped that familiar surroundings might bring Ross quickly back to normal.

  ‘Ross is ill,’ she said, nodding towards the back seat, willing John not to ask too many questions. ‘Can you help him into the house?’

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’ John asked, peering curiously into the back where Ross still lay curled up and seemingly unaware he was home.

  ‘I don’t know exactly,’ she said, putting her finger to her lips to sile
nce any further questions. ‘I’m dog-tired. I drove all through the night and today. Let’s just get him to bed for now.’

  John was marvellous. He leaned into the car, hooked Ross over his shoulder and pulled him out. Then he carried him over to the house and into the bedroom.

  ‘Shall I take his clothes off?’ he asked, looking at Ross lying on the bed staring blankly at the ceiling and back to Dulcie in bewilderment. ‘He smells a bit high!’

  ‘I expect I do too,’ she said wearily. ‘You go, I’ll see to him.’

  It was another hour before Dulcie finally got into bed beside Ross. She’d stripped off his clothes, washed him and put clean pyjamas on him, but he still had said nothing. He didn’t even seem to know her, or where he was.

  The last thing she thought before sleep overtook her was that if he didn’t come out of this, she’d be responsible.

  ‘He’s still in bed!’ Bruce exclaimed the following evening when Dulcie went over to his house briefly. She had slept right through until nine that morning, then once she saw Bruce going into his house alone, she’d slipped out to tell him what had happened. She didn’t give him any detail, only that Ross had been severely upset by going back to Bindoon, and he appeared to be in shock. She collected some eggs, milk and bread, then went straight back for she was afraid to leave Ross alone. But although he’d drunk a cup of tea later, and asked how they got home, he had lapsed back into silence since.

  ‘I don’t know what to do, Bruce,’ she said, beginning to cry. ‘He isn’t speaking, he won’t eat. He’s just lying there.’

  ‘Should I call the doctor?’ Bruce asked. ‘This is a new one on me, I’ve never known Ross to have anything wrong with him.’

  ‘Maybe he’s making up for all the time he was sick as a boy and he still had to work,’ she said. ‘We can’t call the doctor out now, it’s not as if he’s got a temperature or he’s vomiting or anything.’

  She couldn’t tell Bruce what had really caused it, it was too horrible and sickening. Throughout the long drive home her mind had churned it over and over, just like that butter Ross had been making, and she fully understood now why he couldn’t make love, and she blamed herself for forcing it out of him.