‘Well, maybe God hadn’t given them fire to cook with,’ said a quiet little voice from the back of the class. It was Dinah, a mousy little thing who had barely uttered a word since being taken from her family at the beach camp two years ago and made an inmate of the Mission.
Sister stood there stunned at the unexpected utterance, having long held the opinion that Dinah’s lack of interaction and enthusiasm were evidence of retardation and nothing to do with the fact that she simply didn’t want to be there. Meanwhile his Most Jubilant was silently rejoicing at this timely rescue and took that as his cue to leave.
‘But what about angels?’ implored Sidonia.
‘I’ll leave that for Sister to answer,’ he snorted pompously as he recalled Sister’s humiliating rejection of him when she had been on retreat six months earlier. ‘She knows all about being an angel.’
And with that he rose to his Most Impious feet and left.
The Brotherhood
Nobody ever knew quite how to take Brother Michael when he’d arrived four years previously to replace the ageing Brother Gregory. Maybe it was because he was too young, or he laughed too long at people’s jokes or his times in the chapel praying were considered by all to be indecently short. But whatever they thought, he knew he was at the bottom of the mission pecking order because he got all the shit jobs.
This particular night was no exception as he supervised the boys in the communal showers. For some unknown reason it was mission policy to stand over them as their lithe black bodies were soaped and rinsed and dried and then packed off to bed where they were locked up safe from harm in their dormitory. For some reason they weren’t considered capable of performing their ablutions privately and needed white man’s help for tasks as mundane as this. But being the considerate soul that he was, Brother Michael was only too happy to comply. It spared him the lengthy evening tirades from the other brothers who pissed and moaned about the shifty black bastards and the bitchy nuns and the crap food. And it was only of late that he realised that he actually liked this particular job that no-one else wanted because it gave him the time to interact with the boys on a more personal level.
‘Stop fooling around,’ Brother Michael called out to Shem and his younger brother Seth who had been throwing the soap at each other.
He eyed off their pert bottoms and looked away, only to see Ignatius bending over to pick up his piece of soap. Holy shit! He immediately transferred his gaze to the far wall only to see two geckoes busily fucking.
The only child of devout, elderly Catholic parents who had migrated from England after the war, the young Michael had led a sheltered life of religious devotion and filial piety. Next to God he loved his parents more than life itself. That is until they both died unexpectedly from food poisoning, throwing him, at the age of nineteen, into a depression so dark it threatened to totally consume him.
He had been spared the same fate as his parents only because of the humble chicken, something that he had never developed a taste for and refused to eat. His mother had ritually roasted a chook for lunch every Sunday since the liberation from food rationing after the War. Having been poked and prodded for plumpness at the local butcher shop, the sacrificial fowl was carried home, tenderly prepared and consumed in a celebration of the Sabbath. Unfortunately it was their celebration of the Sabbath that killed them this particular Sunday as they feasted on their salmonella-ridden chook oblivious to the gut-twisting fate that awaited them.
However the young Michael’s love of God never faltered, despite the dirty trick the Almighty had pulled on his parents. And it was only his strong faith and the kind words of their local parish priest that saved him from hitting rock bottom and becoming a school teacher.
‘Go north, young man,’ his parish priest had said. ‘They’re looking for people like you to help with God’s work in the missions.’
And north he went, only to discover that things up North weren’t quite as he had imagined they’d be.
He had never seen proper black people before, only in books. Nor had he been to the tropics, so his first impressions as he arrived at the mission sent him into shock and something akin to despair. Shock because he had never realised the powerful allure that black velvet skin held for people such as he, and despair because he knew it was going to take all the energy he had to suppress the lascivious thoughts that were already threatening to consume him. And it was the wet season when he arrived, and he was too exhausted by the heat to protest anymore so there was nothing else he could do but grudgingly resign himself to his fate.
Brother Michael had also been assigned to tending the livestock. Sadly he wasn’t terribly good at it. The mission was already down to its last eleven chooks and he was waiting on another shipment to arrive the following fortnight, which he had secretly organised and paid for. If Father Macredie knew the entire flock had been virtually decimated because of Brother Michael’s ineptitude, he’d have found himself in very deep shit indeed. Fortunately he had been pretty much left to his own devices where the livestock was concerned as none of the other brothers particularly cherished the job. So no-one was aware of how depleted the numbers had gotten. Except of course for Augustine and Methuselah, his faithful helpers, who took enormous delight in pretending they didn’t know their arse from their elbows when it came to things that oinked, clucked or mooed. Sister Jerome who supervised the kitchen had almost caught him out when she’d insisted on going to the chook yard herself looking for eggs. But Brother Michael had persisted with his story that the heat was preventing them from laying and there was nothing he could do about that.
‘Might be those dingoes,’ said Augustine helpfully as they watched the last of the feathered survivors scratching around in the dust.
His one-eyed sidekick Methuselah nodded his head in agreement.
‘But there’s no sign of where they dug into the chicken yard or any signs of a struggle,’ argued Brother Michael. ‘It’s almost like they opened the gate and walked in.’
‘Might be,’ said Augustine, ‘those dingoes are smart.’
Methuselah nodded again. Unfortunately Brother Michael failed to notice the two chicken feathers stuck with beeswax onto a sharpened wallaby bone and twisted into Augustine’s woolly hair as they scanned the yard for signs of entry by the wily dingoes. The poor bastard just couldn’t work it out.
While this was happening, Father Macredie, Sister Annunciata and Sister Benedicta were on their way to the bush camp to pay their respects. Both nuns were a bit apprehensive at the idea but considering Jerrekepai* had been an important man with nine wives, Father had insisted. It would be good for black and white relations, he said, as well as a way of picking up a few more converts.
*Crocodile
It was no surprise to anyone who came in contact with Jerrekepai, or Jesus as he had been known to his converted countrymen who lived and worked at the mission, that he was totally opposed to the mission and its cancerous spread. But luckily for Father Macredie, the old matriarch Tarrti,† who held custodianship of the land where the mission had been built, had never forgotten the fact that Jerrekepai had once passed her up in favour of marriage to the more homely and docile Jipirrti‡, and anything Jerrekepai wanted she automatically and virulently opposed.
Just to make sure that everyone was clear that the ugly mission growth was not spreading its poison onto his land, Jerrekepai had placed piles of stones where the boundary to the mission area finished and the land belonging to bush camp began. And true to his name, his bush one that is, Jerrekepai never set foot in the mission or treated the mission mob with anything less than the contempt that he believed they deserved. The same went for most of his family and the others at bush camp, who had made it their business not to speak the foreign language as well, and who happily walked around in their birthday suits or a modest covering of pandanus or bark over their genitals. All that is, except for Pinyama and Kwar
ikwaringa, wives number four and five. They had always been seduced by the goings on at the mission and, being the lazy little shits that they were, had chosen to send their sons there to be cared for by the brothers so they could have more time to sleep and flirt with other men.
Father Macredie and Jerrekepai had fallen out a number of years ago over the old bloke’s polygamy. Jerrekepai had always reasoned that if nuns were really the brides of Christ, as he had been told, and that if it was true that there were more nuns out there than were in a big mob of wallabies and they all belonged to Christ, then why was everyone making a big fuss about him only having nine of the damned things? It was like one set of rules for the mission mob and one set for the bush mob. And Father Macredie, being the reasonable man that he was, couldn’t fault Jerrekepai’s logic and not wanting to openly disagree with the doctrines of the hand that fed him, chose instead to ignore the situation in the hope that it would somehow sort itself out and go away.
But now it was with some uneasiness as they headed towards the nine wailing widows that Father realised that the death of the old man hadn’t fixed anything at all.
Both Father Macredie and the nuns had been expecting a rousing welcome from Jerrekepai’s family. Now that the poor bastards were finally free of his despotic reign they could embrace and follow the teachings of the church without fear of condemnation from the old bloke. But no-one seemed very pleased to see them at all. After standing for a few minutes without a word or anything more than a cursory glance from anyone, they sat down next to a group of people who immediately got up and moved to another spot.
Now Sister Annunciata could not abide insolence from anyone. She glared ferociously at the offending group who glared just as ferociously back before moving to another place where they didn’t have to look at her. This was too much for Sister who then got up and went over and sat down beside them again. A move she instantly regretted as the harmless-looking old lady next to her flicked her digging stick from its resting place and cracked Sister Annunciata soundly on the head. Through a haze of stars she watched the group get up yet again and move to the far side of the camp where they sat with a larger group of people who placed their weapons on the ground in front of them ready for action if need be.
There had never been any love lost between Father Macredie and the feisty Sister Annunciata, especially now as the shamefaced trio walked in silence back to the mission. Numbers of converts from the bush camp had always been low and after today’s little episode all hopes of attracting new recruits had been completely dashed. How was he supposed to do God’s work with the waiting multitude of heathens when he was given incompetent fools to work with, he asked himself, glaring at Sister Annunciata’s black habit swishing briskly in front of him. How was he supposed to do anything when the only tools he had were fools like this woman and the anally retentive Brother Neil, the boys’ music teacher who, despite Father’s most concerted efforts, had insisted on forming a mission brass band.
The idea in itself was alright, but Father Macredie knew he’d never get over the embarrassment of Brother Neil’s efforts to get instruments – or the subsequent phone calls and letters he’d received from bullied Police and Salvation Army brass bands who’d been told to hand over their surplus in the name of God or go to hell. Literally. And obviously God wasn’t listening when Father had prayed for the brass band to be a passing phase. Instead it had only intensified until it seemed every boy in the mission wanted to drum and toot and phaart themselves silly. The past year had become increasingly unbearable during the tragic time between four and five-thirty each afternoon when the sounds emerging from the music room increased in volume and tunelessness. Unfortunately his office was right across the corridor from the music room.
Father had been invited to class two days previously to listen to a piece they’d been enthusiastically working on for some time now and was shocked to learn that what sounded like thirty cats being de-sexed without anaesthetic was in fact ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’. Indeed he was still slightly deaf in one ear after sitting directly in front of Ezekiel and his tuba. The boy had insisted on blasting it in Father’s face with the full force of his lungs. There was talk of a concert later in the year, something that Father Macredie was definitely not looking forward to. But he had smiled graciously and told them to keep up the hard work before heading to the infirmary to see if Sister de Lourdes had something for his aching head.
While this was happening Brother Michael was looking forlornly at the empty pig sty and wishing he was somewhere far away. The North Pole held much appeal. Two years ago when the existing herd had been replenished with new breeding stock, Brother Michael had been entrusted with twenty-six fat healthy pigs. Now there were none. The last five, a sow and four of her babies, had disappeared some time that morning and Brother Michael knew that if he didn’t want to get sent to a worse place than this one, as Father Macredie kept threatening him, then he’d better find them.
The dainty little trotters had headed north into bushland and although Brother Michael would have liked either Augustine or Methuselah to come with him to find the escapees, neither man was anywhere to be seen. Brother Michael had asked Methuselah a number of times if he’d seen any pigs on his hunting forays but Methuselah had always told him that even though he’d seen tracks farther on where the bush met the swamp, a place they liked to go during the heat of the day to stay cool in the mud, the black bush pigs didn’t like mixing with the white mission pigs.
Brother Michael had been wandering for a few hours before he realised he was well and truly lost. He’d tried following his tracks back until he lost them too. Little did he know as he stopped to piss against a tree, that the mission was only half a kilometre away. And little did he know he was being followed by a bunch of watchful kids from bush camp who were wondering why this wurrlungwa*, as Jerrekepai had ordered them to call any of the mission mob, was wandering aimlessly about in the bush talking to himself. They soon got sick of spying on him and snuck off to play something else while Brother Michael, oblivious to both their arrival and departure, sat down in the shade of a pandanus to assess his situation. He thought about Methuselah’s comment about the black pigs and the white pigs. But how could pigs tell who was black or who was white? Surely they weren’t that clever. Then it dawned on him that Methuselah had been having him on. He was probably sitting there having a good laugh about it to Augustine right this very moment. He was going to have to do something about those two; this wasn’t the first time they’d made him feel like a fool. But no, things weren’t quite as he imagined, even though the pair did have a bit of a snigger about it. Unbeknownst to him the two were actually with their families, tucking into another couple of the chickens.
*arsehole
Suddenly he heard voices approaching, one of them sounding very much like Brother Brian. Yes, it was Brother Brian! But what was he doing wandering around the bush with Noah the gardener? Instinct told him to stay put and he moved further around the clump so as not to be seen. He peered though the serrated fronds of the pandanus to observe what they were up to. But what was this? Why was Noah dropping his pants and bending over? Holy shit!
Brother Michael followed them at a discreet distance until they arrived back at the mission, the gravity of his previous ordeal paling into insignificance. His head was spinning from what he had just witnessed. Well, that was a surprise, wasn’t it? Brother Brian, always holier than thou, certainly had a dark little secret. Brother Michael could hardly wait until he could find someone to tell. He was a shocking gossip, something he’d inherited from his father who was a legend in his own right at the Holden Car Assembly Plant where he’d worked until his untimely death. Brother Michael raced off to the garden shed to have a slug or two of altar wine to calm his nerves before looking for a receptive ear.
Brother Wayne’s ears were more than receptive as he soaked up the information like a sponge.
‘
So tell me what they did again,’ he urged, devouring, digesting and memorising every morsel of a word as Brother Michael related the events in graphic detail.
Brother Wayne hated Brother Brian with a passion and he sat revelling in the thought of the damage he could do with this bit of gossip. He had spent years on his knees – in the chapel and at his bedside – praying to God to rid him of the arrogant, bullying scourge of his life. Now God had finally delivered in the form of Brother Michael and his wagging tongue.
Brother Brian looked after the mission’s accounts and was a real arsehole. Even Father Macredie would find himself cringing under his baleful glare when he had occasion to disagree with him. He was still fuming about last Christmas when Brother Brian had refused to use mission funds to purchase a bottle of sherry for the trifle. Father had to buy the sherry himself and then watch the big slob tucking into his share of the dessert. And Brother Neil was just as bad. In fact it was difficult to work out who was the biggest bully and tight-arse out of those two.
That night Brother Wayne’s mind was going overtime as he plotted and schemed about what he was going to do. He knew his revenge on Brother Brian could not be considered a sin. The quotation from Exodus 21:23:27 in the Old Testament was evidence enough for him that the principle of proportionate punishment had been soundly endorsed by the Catholic Church – and they had kindly put it down in writing to prove it. So come tomorrow, ‘an eye for an eye’ was exactly what he planned to do.
Brother Brian had the unfortunate condition of myopia and was totally useless without his coke bottle glasses; they never left his face even when he slept because of what he’d been told by his mother when he was a kid. Supposedly when it was time to die an angel – or if you were especially good, Jesus himself – would appear and show you the way to heaven. So if he wasn’t wearing his glasses and a celestial being turned up unexpectedly, he’d hate to mistake it for Epiphany or one of the other cleaning ladies and order it to give him a head job.
Every Secret Thing Page 2